TL;DR: FINRA compliance doesn’t make writing a book impossible. It makes writing a certain kind of book impossible, and the kind it makes impossible is the kind most financial advisors shouldn’t have wanted to write anyway. The book that works for an advisor inside compliance is built around principles, planning structures, and decision-making, not around specific recommendations or performance claims. The compliance constraints produce a better book in this field than the unconstrained version would have been.
I’ve got a soft spot for this problem.
Advisors come to a book with more useful knowledge than almost any other profession, and then one compliance conversation scares them off the whole idea. That’s a waste. FINRA shuts down one kind of book, the get-rich book, and I don’t think a serious advisor should want to write that one in the first place.
If you’re a financial advisor, you’ve probably been told you can’t write a book. The conversation usually goes like this. You bring up the idea with your compliance officer. The compliance officer’s face does something specific. They start naming the FINRA rules. You leave thinking the answer is no.
The answer is more interesting than a flat no. You can’t write the book most advisors instinctively want to write, the book that says “follow my system and you’ll get rich.”
You can write the book that says “here’s how to think about your financial life, and here are the questions to ask, and here’s how planning actually works.” The first book is non-compliant in this industry.
The second book is the one that wins in this industry, and it’s also the one a compliance officer can approve.
What does FINRA prohibit in an advisor’s book?
The big ones, in plain English. Run anything you write past your compliance officer before publication, because interpreting the rules for your firm is their job. The categories themselves are stable enough to summarize.
If you’re a financial advisor, you’ve probably been told you can’t write a book.Share on X
Performance claims. You can’t claim a specific historical return without all the disclosures, time periods, and caveats that make the claim usable. Casually mentioning that your portfolio “averaged twelve percent over the last decade” is the kind of thing that ends careers. Performance claims in print are a minefield.
I’ll add a rule of my own. Once a client hires me, I write the book they want, but when a claim could get them in trouble, I tell them so and show them how to change it. In an advisor’s manuscript, a casual performance number is the first thing I’d flag.
Specific product recommendations. Recommending a specific mutual fund, stock, annuity, or insurance product in a book that goes to the general public is a problem. You don’t know each reader’s situation. The recommendation is, by definition, unsuitable for someone.
Implied promises. Anything that could be read as promising an outcome. “If you follow this plan, you’ll retire at 60.” “This approach has never lost money for a client.” Future-state claims attached to specific actions create liability.
Disparagement of named competitors. Saying that another advisor’s approach is wrong, that a specific firm gives bad advice, or that a particular platform should be avoided crosses lines. Even if you’re right.
I’d leave it out even where it’s allowed. A reader deciding whom to trust with their retirement doesn’t want to watch an advisor settle scores, and the careful readers, the ones you most want as clients, will put the book down.
Testimonials in the wrong format. Client quotes have specific rules. The rules changed in 2021 with the FINRA testimonial rule update, and they vary by what kind of advisor you are. Get the current version from your compliance officer.
Promotional content disguised as education. If the book is, in substance, a marketing document, it has to be filed and reviewed as marketing material. A book that’s primarily educational generally doesn’t. The line is real and worth getting right.
What can a financial advisor write about?
Most advisors give up here too early. The list of what’s allowed is longer than the list of what isn’t, and it covers everything the best advisors have to say.
Principles of financial planning. The general concepts. Risk tolerance, time horizon, asset allocation as a structure, the role of diversification, the math of compounding, the impact of inflation, the structure of tax-advantaged accounts. The principles that govern good planning are public domain, and explaining them well is the foundation of a serious financial book.
Decision-making structures. How to think about a decision. Should you take Social Security at 62, 67, or 70? The book doesn’t tell the reader the answer. It walks the reader through the factors that determine the answer in their specific situation. Same with debt payoff order, college funding, insurance coverage levels, and a dozen other decisions every household faces.
Common mistakes. Generic financial mistakes are safe to discuss. Not specific named-product mistakes. “Many people make the mistake of treating their 401k as savings instead of long-term investment” is fine. “Brand X variable annuity is a bad product” isn’t.
Stories about types of clients. Composite or anonymized client situations, framed as illustrative scenarios. The same composite-case technique used in medical writing. Done well, it preserves privacy and produces material more broadly useful than any single real case would have been.
Your own story. Why you got into this work. What you learned along the way. The mentor who shaped how you think. The market crash you watched a generation of investors panic through. The personal narrative section is generally safe and often the strongest part of an advisor’s book.
Mine would include the year I moved out. I found an apartment and moved, bang, and then met the electric bill and the phone bill. I thought I had plenty of money until car insurance and renters insurance showed up. A second job with a commute of about 100 miles barely added anything after the higher tax on the extra income, so I quit it. I paid all the bills, barely squeaked by, and had about $40 left each month.
This is also where clients start worrying about saying too much. At every kickoff I tell them never to tell me anything they don’t want in the book, because months later I won’t remember what was private. For an advisor that rule matters twice, since whatever lands in the manuscript is also going in front of compliance.
Education about your specific approach as a category. “Fee-only fiduciary advice” as a category, with no sales pitch for your firm. The structural advantages of working with an advisor who has a fiduciary duty, as a concept. Readers self-select toward your category, then your firm if they want to work with someone in that category.
How does compliance review work for an advisor’s book?
Three rules that save advisors months of back-and-forth.
First, bring your compliance officer in before you start writing. The book that gets restructured at the manuscript stage costs you a year. One that’s structured correctly from the outline stage takes one round of review at the end. Second, write the disclosures into the book from the start. Risk disclosures, the disclaimer that the book is educational and not personalized advice, the statement that readers should consult their own advisor before making decisions. These disclosures live in the front matter and at chapter breaks where the material warrants them. Third, expect the review to take longer than you think. Most large firms have queues. Plan for the review timeline as part of the project.
Hard deadlines make this worse. Clients come to me needing a finished book by a conference or launch all the time, and a compliance queue doesn’t care about your keynote date. Put the review on the calendar before you promise anyone a copy.
Why the compliance-constrained book is better
The book you can’t write under FINRA is the book where you tell the reader what to do. What you can write is the book where you teach the reader how to think. The first book is the kind of book that sells well, briefly, in markets where credulous readers want a simple answer. It also dates fast, because specific recommendations age, and it underperforms on the metric that matters for an advisor. That’s building a relationship with the reader as a future client.
The second book is the kind of book that builds trust slowly.
The reader learns to think about their finances the way you think about your finances. By the time they finish, they don’t want a different advisor. They want you. The compliance constraint pushes you toward the book that produces this outcome, and away from the book that doesn’t.
This is one of those cases where the regulation requires what you would have wanted to do anyway, if you’d thought it through. Most advisors don’t realize this until they’ve written the book, and by then they’re grateful for the constraint that forced them to write the better version.
What an advisor’s book produces
The economics are real. The 2024 study on business book ROI from Amplify, Gotham Ghostwriters, Smith Publicity, and Thought Leadership Leverage surveyed 301 published business authors. Median ghostwritten book revenue was $92,500. Books were four times more profitable than the average self-written one. Eighty-nine percent of authors said publishing was worth it. AuthorROI.com has the full study.
For financial advisors, the indirect value is larger than the direct revenue. The book moves the trust curve. A prospect who reads your book before the first meeting arrives with most of the discovery questions already answered. The first meeting becomes a working meeting. Close rates go up. Fee resistance drops. Referrals come from clients handing your book to their adult children, the way estate-planning books work in the same way for different reasons. Speaking invitations follow. Conferences want the published author over the unpublished one. Media coverage becomes available.
None of this happens immediately. The book is a multi-year asset, the way the practice itself is. The advisors who published five years ago are reaping it now. The ones who keep meaning to write something are still meaning to. I hate watching good advisors wait. Every year spent meaning to write the book is a year a competitor with half the judgment gets handed to prospects as the expert.
What should a financial advisor check before writing a book?
- ► The book is principles-based, not recommendation-based.
- ► No performance claims about your firm or your portfolio.
- ► No specific named product recommendations.
- ► Composite or anonymized client stories, never identifiable.
- ► Disclosures written into the front matter and chapter breaks.
- ► Compliance review built into the timeline from outline stage onward.
- ► A ghostwriter who has worked with regulated industries before, not a generalist.
Get those right and the book that emerges is the strongest single asset a financial advisor can build outside their actual practice. The Book Discovery Intensive is built around figuring out which version of the book serves your specific specialty, your client base, and your firm’s compliance posture before any writing begins. Book the call if that conversation is useful to you. The full set of case studies for what this looks like across professions is at /ghostwriting-case-studies/.
The advisors who write the get-rich book get into trouble, and they’ve earned some of it. The ones who never write anything lose clients slowly to the few who wrote the careful, compliant book about how to think. I want my clients in that last group, and the rules make it easier to get there than most advisors assume.
