I’ve written and ghostwritten more than a hundred books. The authors who made real money from them almost never made it from copies sold.
They made it from what the book did for everything else. The ones who chased royalties chased the smallest number on the table and wondered why the table was nearly empty.
Think of the book as a business card that happens to be two hundred pages long.
Nobody expects a business card to turn a profit on its own. Its job is to get you in the room and establish who you are before you open your mouth. I tell clients up front that they’re very unlikely to earn back what the book cost them through sales, and any ghostwriter who promises otherwise is selling a fantasy. The return comes when they use the book as the foundation of their marketing.
Why is a book a marketing tool and not a product?
Stop thinking of your book as something you sell. Think of it as something that sells everything else you do. That single shift changes every decision you make about it, from how you write it to what you do once it exists.
Take the car dealership owner who publishes a book on the art of selling. Overnight he stops being the guy who sells cars and becomes the industry expert who sells cars. The book sits on display in his showroom.
Customers see it. Referrals climb. The book may only break even on sales, and it doesn’t matter, because it prints money through credibility and trust the whole time it sits there. The revenue never shows up on a royalty statement.
It shows up in the deals that close faster and the customers who arrived already convinced.
Nobody expects a business card to turn a profit on its own.
This works for any expert in any field. A financial advisor with a published book on retirement planning closes prospects faster than one without. My clients have turned their books into more consulting contracts, speaking engagements, courses and, in one case, a promotion. A client’s book raised $30 million in venture capital. That part of the work is a gift, and none of it would ever show up on a royalty statement.
Do speaking engagements pay more than book royalties?
Far more, and it’s not close. Event organizers want speakers who have published books. “Author of” is the credential that gets you on a stage, and stages pay real money in a way copies never will. The progression is clean. The book establishes your expertise. The expertise gets you booked. The bookings pay fees that dwarf anything you would have earned selling copies.
The financial advisor who published the retirement book starts getting speaking invitations. Each appearance pays a fee and expands the client base that pays her the rest of the year. Conference organizers, corporate training departments, and industry associations all prefer speakers with a published credential, because the book does their vetting for them. Your book is the ticket onto that circuit, and the circuit pays in a currency royalties can’t match.
How does a book generate consulting and client work?
Every chapter of your book shows expertise someone will pay for one-on-one.
A reader who finds real value in your structures wants them applied to his own situation. He’s already sold. He spent hours inside your thinking before he ever contacted you. The book did the convincing. The engagement is just the natural next step.
That’s the quiet power of it. A normal sales conversation starts cold, with the prospect skeptical and you proving yourself from zero. A conversation that starts after someone has read your book starts warm, because they’ve already watched you know the subject for two hundred pages. Consulting work that arrives this way closes faster and argues less. I like building books that do this, because the client finally stops having to audition for every job.
What other ways does a book earn money?
Once you see the book as an asset, the outputs multiply. It can seed a course, where the book is the introduction and the course is the paid depth. It can open licensing and rights deals. It can support a coaching offer, a mastermind, a workshop, each one an extension of the authority the book established.
Some authors build an entire business with the book at the center.
Athletes and sports figures are a growing share of my clients, and most want a memoir about what the sport taught them. That book can become the keynote, the clinic and the corporate talk, written down once and handed to every audience that books them. The book that “only” broke even on sales can turn out to be the most profitable thing they ever produced.
Stephen Covey built exactly that kind of business.
His 1989 book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, sat at the center of Covey Leadership Center, a leadership training company. When Franklin Quest agreed to merge with it in January 1997, the Deseret News reported the deal was valued at $160 million. Covey’s company had 700 employees, more than 12 million books in print, and sales of about 1.5 million books a year.
The Salt Lake Tribune later reported that the center made $19 million in profits from 1992 to 1996, and that Covey or a trust he set up was to receive $27 million in cash or stock from the deal. I think that’s the model every expert author should study. The book filled the training rooms, and the training business is what Franklin Quest wanted to own.
None of this shows up if you measure the book by its royalty line. That’s the trap. Measured as a product, most books look like a poor investment. Measured as an engine, the same book looks like the best marketing decision the author ever made, because the business benefits of authorship compound in ways copy sales never do.
Can a book earn passive income through licensing?
It can, and authors almost never plan for it.
A book is intellectual property, and intellectual property can be licensed for foreign rights, audio rights and adaptation. Bulk corporate sales add more, where a company buys thousands of copies to hand to staff or clients. All of it is money the book generates without you writing another word, and a business book that connects with the right corporate audience can sell more copies through a single bulk order than through a year of retail.
None of this is guaranteed, and I’m not going to pretend every book becomes a licensing machine.
Most don’t. The ones that do share a trait. The author built the book as an asset from the beginning, with a clear subject, a defined audience, and structures worth licensing, instead of a one-time product to push out the door. The asset mindset is what opens the door to income the product mindset never sees.
| Income stream | How the book drives it |
|---|---|
| Royalties | The smallest and least reliable money a book will ever make |
| Speaking | “Author of” gets you on a stage; organizers prefer speakers with a published book |
| Consulting and clients | Readers arrive already convinced, so engagements start warm and close faster |
| Courses | The book is the introduction; the course is the paid depth |
| Coaching, masterminds, workshops | Each extends the authority the book established |
| Licensing | Foreign, audio and adaptation rights earn without another word written |
| Bulk corporate sales | One company order for staff or clients can outsell a year of retail |
My take
Royalties are the wrong scoreboard for a book. Measure it by the speaking, the clients and the consulting it brings in, and most books start to look like a smart buy. Covey’s book filled the training rooms. Franklin Quest wanted that training company. Build your book as an asset from the first outline, with a clear subject and an audience you can name. Then point it at the work you want more of.
Why do most authors miss the real money?
Because they judge the book by its royalty checks. Those are small. The money is in the speaking, consulting and licensing the book opens up, and most authors never build any of it.
From the podcast
Michael O’Brien tells founders to raise for a horizon they can’t see, on Leaders and Their Stories:
How much do you think you need to get through the next eighteen months? And then maybe not double it, but definitely tax on there, because you have no idea what fundraising and the market are going to look like eighteen months from now.Royalties are the eighteen-month number nobody stress-tests. The revenue that arrives comes from everywhere else.
Because they learned to think like publishers. A publisher makes money on volume, so a publisher cares about units. An expert who writes a book makes money on authority, and authority pays through every channel except the one they learned to watch. Three of my clients’ books went to traditional publishers, and each took twelve to eighteen months to come out. I don’t recommend that route: the delays are long, the royalties are much lower, and you give up control of your own book.
The 2024 numbers make the point plainly. That study of 301 published business authors found 64 percent turned a gross profit once you counted the speaking, consulting, and workshops the book generated, and 18 percent of the six-month-plus authors reported a quarter million dollars or more in additional income traced to the book. Almost none of that was royalties. It was everything the book made possible, and the royalty-focused author never sees that money coming.
The book on this: Make a Living as a Self-Published Author is 302 pages on the business behind the book, the half of the job nobody warns a first-time author about.
If you want the full strategy of turning a book into a business, the publishing and marketing hub maps it out, and the companion piece on how to market the book once it exists covers the visibility half. And if you want a book built from the start to work as an engine instead of a product, that’s the work I do. Write it to sell copies and it may break even. Write it to sell everything else, and it can carry a career.
It frustrates me to see a good book written off as a failure because nobody told the author what it was for. An author who plans only for the royalty statement spends years believing the project flopped, while the speaking, consulting and client work the book could have opened never gets built. I’d much prefer every client hear what their book is for before the first interview.
Make a Living as a Self-Published Author goes deeper into the money side. I wrote it about building the business behind the books instead of waiting on royalties.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Franklin Quest and Covey to Merge, Deseret News
- 64% of business books are profitable. That’s the bottom line from our study of Business Book ROI., Bernoff.com
- Business Book ROI Study, Gotham Ghostwriters, Amplify Publishing Group, Smith Publicity, Thought Leadership Leverage
