Are you really too busy to write a book?
Sarah worked sixty-hour weeks as a marketing consultant.
No time for writing, she said. Too busy with client work, proposals, invoices. Meanwhile, Jake worked the same hours in the same industry and carved out thirty minutes each morning to write. Eighteen months later, Jake’s book hit Amazon’s bestseller list in business marketing. His speaking fee jumped from twenty-five hundred to fifteen thousand per event. Fortune 500 companies started calling him directly instead of hiring agencies. For more, see how a busy expert gets a book done.
He tripled his consulting rates and built a six-month waiting list. Sarah? Still grinding at the same rates, competing on price, watching Jake get quoted in Forbes while she stays invisible.
While you claim you’re too busy to write, people just like you’re building authority that commands premium prices.Share on X
People just like you are building authority that commands premium prices while “too busy” keeps the book on the someday list. I don’t buy busy as a reason to leave a book unwritten. I think it’s the most expensive excuse a successful expert can make, because the cost is the calls that go to someone else, and nobody sends you an invoice for those.
I know comfort from the inside. I was comfortable at a retailer for 20 years. I got a paycheck. The work was challenging, and I had fun. I was needed, and sometimes I was the hero, because I was the only guy who could save things. That felt good. Change takes the courage to confront that, because people get really comfortable where they are.
What Does the Too-Busy Excuse Cost You?
Every minute you spend scrolling Instagram instead of writing is market share handed to someone else. Every evening you collapse watching Netflix instead of putting words on paper is positioning given away free.
Think you don’t have time to write? Let’s look at what your busyness is costing you. Business book authors consistently report significant increases in consulting fees after publication. If you charge $150 per hour now, even a modest bump to $200 changes your annual income by tens of thousands of dollars at twenty billable hours weekly. Book authors get invited to speak at conferences where other consultants pay to attend. Speaking fees run $5,000 to $50,000 per event. Land just two small gigs yearly and add $10,000 to your bottom line.
Journalists need expert sources for articles. They don’t call random consultants. They call published authors. One quote in Harvard Business Review beats a thousand cold emails to prospects. Higher consulting rates, speaking fees, media mentions, and leads flowing from all three add up to real money. The advice culture that treats a book as a vanity project for later is wrong. Every year it stays unwritten, an expert with less to say and a finished book gets the call instead.
How Much Time Does a Book Take Per Day?
The no-time excuse is mathematically impossible.
The average American watches several hours of television daily. That’s close to twenty hours weekly. A business book runs forty to sixty thousand words. Write five hundred words daily, about one page, and finish a fifty-thousand-word book in one hundred days.
Don’t want daily writing? Write one thousand words twice weekly. That’s two hours total. You’ll have a book in fifty weeks. Less time than you spend watching TV in three days.
“But I’m different. I work long hours. I have family. I have responsibilities.”
Stephen King wrote his first novel on a typewriter squeezed into his trailer’s laundry room, working around his day job and newborn children. Gillian Flynn wrote Gone Girl during lunch breaks at Entertainment Weekly. Andy Weir wrote The Martian chapter by chapter while working as a software engineer.
None of them had spare hours. They decided the book mattered more than something else they were already doing. And if writing it yourself isn’t going to happen, the time a ghostwritten book asks of you is mostly conversation. Every client of mine starts with an hour-long kickoff, and after that the work is interviews, where you tell me what you know and I do the writing.
Where Your “No Time” Really Goes
Let’s get specific about where your time disappears.
You check your phone dozens of times daily. Each check pulls you out of whatever you were doing. Add up those interruptions and you’ve lost more time than it would take to write a solid page of your book.
You spend significant chunks of your day consuming other people’s content on social media instead of creating your own. That time weekly is enough for two solid writing sessions that could position you as the expert instead of the spectator. You attend meetings that accomplish nothing. Respond to emails that don’t need responses. Reorganize your desk for the third time this month. But you don’t have thirty minutes to write the book that could transform your career. Every one of those habits is a choice, and the choice keeps getting made against the book. A calendar that finds room for three pointless meetings a week and none for the one project that would outlast the job is a bad joke.
While You Wait, Others Build
While you perfect your someday fantasy, people in your industry are getting dangerous. They’re turning expertise into books, books into authority, authority into premium pricing power. Marcus Sheridan ran a struggling pool company during the 2008 recession. Instead of making excuses about being too busy fighting for survival, he started writing. Blog posts about pool maintenance. Speaking at conferences. Then a book called They Ask You Answer. Today Marcus charges $25,000 for a single consulting day. His book became the marketing bible for thousands of companies. He speaks at events where people who used to be his competitors pay admission to hear him talk.
Marcus had less free time in 2008 than most people reading this have now, with a business fighting to survive. He wrote anyway, and people leave that out when they tell his story.
How does authority from a book compound?
Most people miss this about writing books: benefits compound exponentially.
Month one: You’re another consultant sending proposals.
Month six: You’re the consultant writing a book. Month twelve: You’re the published author who consults. Month eighteen: You’re the bestselling author who only takes premium clients.
Month twenty-four: You’re the industry expert who sets rates everyone else follows.
Each stage builds on the last, and none of them starts until the manuscript exists. Hard deadlines are common in my work: a birthday, a conference, a startup launch. Busy people hit those dates because the date is real and somebody put it on the calendar. I’d like to see every expert treat their book the same way, with a date that means something.
I helped a LinkedIn expert write a personal branding book. LinkedIn advice flooded the market: hundreds of books, thousands of articles, millions of posts. Everyone said it was oversaturated.
The book sold fifteen thousand copies in three days. Hit number forty-three in all Kindle sales. Built a six-figure business in a market everyone called saturated.
While other marketing experts were explaining why the market was too crowded, he was depositing royalty checks.
The Thirty-Minute Reality
You don’t need to quit your job or abandon your family to write a book. You need to get honest about your time and protective of your potential.
Thirty minutes. Not thirty perfect minutes in a pristine office with artisanal coffee and inspirational music. Thirty minutes of phone-off, email-closed, excuse-free writing. Early morning before the world wakes up. Lunch break instead of scrolling news. Evening instead of watching other people’s success stories on Netflix. Find your thirty minutes, claim it like your financial future depends on it, write like people in your industry are gaining ground every day you don’t.
They are, and the distance is shorter than it looks. The fastest book I’ve written was an 80,000-word communications book, finished in three months. A rush like that carries a higher rate, because that client becomes one of my only clients for the stretch, but it shows what happens when someone treats the book as a real project with a real end date.
“Too busy” passing for a reason is a dodge. It’s a decision to let somebody with less to say own the conversation in your field, and that decision costs more every year you keep making it. Don’t make it one more year.
Start today. Or start a conversation about ghostwriting, and let someone who writes 2,000 to 12,000 words a day do it for you while you keep running your business.
