A business book is either a tool or a trophy.
People judge a trophy by how it looks on the shelf and a tool by what it produces: speaking invitations, consulting leads, and authority. You can build a beautiful trophy that does no work, or a plain tool that pays for itself many times over. The decisions that separate the two are almost never about prose.
They’re about who the book is for, what it does for them, and what you do with it afterward. I care about those decisions more than about any sentence I’ll write for a client. It galls me to see a well-written book sitting in a box in someone’s garage, because that box holds months of the author’s life and an investment that’s producing nothing.
What problem should your book solve?
One specific problem your ideal reader already knows they have, solved well enough that they’d hand the book to someone else with the same problem.
From the podcast
Jeri Seeley describes what the menu-driven version of service removes, on Leaders and Their Stories:
There’s nobody there to be empathetic. There’s nobody there to understand your problem. And there’s nobody there that wants to help you with your problem.A book written to a category instead of a person does the same thing, and readers can feel the menu.
The books that generate the strongest returns answer a question a defined group of people is already asking: a biotech CEO writing about fundraising strategy for first-time biotech founders, a management consultant writing about operational turnarounds for mid-market companies, a financial advisor writing about retirement planning for business owners who are their own biggest asset.
Specificity makes a book useful and findable. A book about “leadership” competes with ten thousand other leadership books. A book about leading engineering teams through acquisitions competes with almost nothing, because it speaks to a narrow audience with an urgent need.
I’ll argue with any client who wants the book to appeal to everybody. Nobody recommends a book aimed at everybody, and the author discovers that after the money’s already spent. The 2024 Business Book ROI Study found that downstream revenue from business books, speaking at a $30,000 median, consulting at $50,000, workshops at $40,000, comes from the book establishing the author as the authority on a specific topic. Broad books don’t create that positioning. Specific books do.
What makes a book succeed
Six choices that separate books that work from books that don’t
Solve one real problem
Not the book you want to read, the one your reader needs.
Front-load your best thinking
Give the strongest ideas early; don’t hoard them for chapter ten.
Don’t pad for length
Hit the point and ignore page count. Padding loses readers.
Build around stories
Stories carry advice further than advice alone ever does.
Show your real perspective
Don’t hide pricing, process, or point of view.
Plan the launch first
Know the post-publication plan before you write word one.
Why shouldn’t you write the book you want to read?
This is the most common mistake I see and the hardest to correct once writing has started.
The author writes the book they find interesting instead of the book their audience needs. A technology executive spends three chapters on the history of distributed computing when his audience, venture capitalists evaluating his startup, wants his market thesis and competitive advantage. A consultant devotes half the book to theory when her audience, mid-level managers with operational problems, wants steps they can take on Monday.
Ask what your reader needs from you and what they’ll do differently after reading, and set aside what you’d enjoy saying. Every chapter that doesn’t serve the reader’s need dilutes the book’s effectiveness as a business tool. The reader pays for a self-indulgent chapter with attention, and the author pays for it with the prospects who put the book down and never called.
Why should you front-load your best thinking?
Most readers don’t finish business books. They read the first few chapters, skim the middle, and check the conclusion. I don’t blame them, since most business books deserve that treatment. Build around it. Your most original insight, strongest structure, and most useful advice belong in the first third. If your best material is in chapter nine, most of your audience will never reach it, and those who do will have formed their opinion from the earlier chapters.
One client had an original structure for evaluating technology partnerships sitting in chapter eleven of the first draft. We moved it to chapter two. The book’s impact changed completely, because readers met the strongest material early and kept reading with trust already established.
Why not pad the manuscript to hit a page count?
A tight, useful 40,000-word book generates more authority than a 70,000-word book that repeats itself. Business readers value density. They want the highest ratio of insight to page count, so every section that exists to fill space damages the book’s reputation. I recommend writing at a ninth-grade reading level. That’s the normal recommendation, and it means just about anybody in your audience can read it. Go higher and you’ll lose a few. You’ll still lose a few at grade nine, but it’s about as low as you want to go.
The padding instinct comes from a reasonable worry that a short book won’t be taken seriously.
But the books I’ve seen generate the strongest returns are the tighter ones. A prospect who reads your book in three hours thinking “every page was valuable” becomes a client. A prospect who abandons it at page 150 because it stopped saying anything new doesn’t.
I never finished The Phoenix Project, a 432-page business novel. I skimmed it and read parts of it, and I’ve had no motivation to go back. If I’m going to invest in a 400-page book, I’ll read The Lord of the Rings or something else I’ll enjoy. When I want a leadership book, I pick up one that’s shorter and more specific.
If your book is 35,000 words and everything in it matters, that’s the right length. Don’t add a chapter on the history of your industry to reach 60,000. My contracts set an “up to” word count for exactly this reason. It caps the scope for pricing and lets the book end when the material runs out. I’d never pad a client’s manuscript to hit a number, because the reader would feel every one of those filler pages.
Why build the book around stories instead of advice?
The business books that generate authority read like case studies with principles embedded. The author tells a story about a specific situation, explains what happened and why, and lets the reader extract the principle. This works because readers remember stories and forget advice. A reader who meets “always negotiate from a position of documented value” will forget it by tomorrow. A reader who meets a story about a negotiation where documented value changed the outcome remembers the story and rebuilds the principle when they need it.
The interview-based ghostwriting process produces this naturally. When I interview clients I ask for stories. “Tell me about a time when” generates material that works in a book. “What’s your philosophy about” generates material that sounds like a keynote and reads like filler.
I build each chapter around takeaways, too. We agree on four of them before I start the chapter, I write around those four, and I make sure we reach them. Then I usually end with two or three practical things for the reader to go and do. It’s hard to learn something just by reading it. If the chapter is about elephants, go to the zoo and see an elephant.
Why not hide your pricing, process, or perspective?
Some authors hold back their best thinking, worried that giving away too much means prospects won’t need to hire them. That produces books that hint at expertise without showing it, the opposite of what builds authority. The books that generate consulting leads are the ones where the author gives away the real methodology. Readers finish thinking “this person knows what they’re doing, and I want their help implementing it.” The book proves competence. The complexity of implementation drives the prospect to hire you. I think hoarding the method is the most self-defeating instinct in business publishing. The reader who’d have hired you never learns enough to want to, and the competitor who gave everything away gets the call.
Transparency applies to the book itself too. Readers who know your perspective, process, and pricing before they contact you arrive as informed buyers instead of tire-kickers. That’s the same generosity-as-strategy behind structuring a thought leadership book.
Why plan post-publication before you write, and avoid the vanity trap?
The book is the beginning of a platform, and the six months after publication are when it either starts generating returns or settles onto a shelf. That’s exactly the stretch where too many authors lose interest. Will you send copies to prospects before meetings, pitch speaking engagements built around the book’s structure, turn chapters into articles and podcast appearances, build an email list from the readership?
Those questions should shape the book itself. If you plan to pitch speaking, the book needs a structure that translates into a keynote. If you plan to send copies to prospects, it needs to address their problems. If you plan to generate content from chapters, each chapter needs to stand alone. That’s the discipline behind putting the book to work after publication.
Which leads to the last don’t: don’t treat the book as a vanity project. If you’re publishing to say you published a book, the investment is hard to justify. Books that work as business tools generate returns because they were designed to. Books published for personal satisfaction generate personal satisfaction and not much else. Writing a book for its own sake is a legitimate reason to publish. But if you’re investing in professional ghostwriting, the book should work for your business, and that means strategic decisions about topic, audience, structure, and post-publication use.
The 2024 ROI study found ghostwritten books produced median revenue of $92,500. That number represents books written with strategic intent. A vanity project ghostwritten at the same investment won’t produce the same returns, because it wasn’t designed to. Before you start, see the mistakes that sink most books and the ghostwritten bestsellers that got it right. The ghostwriting hub covers the rest, and if you want an honest read on whether a book fits your goals, that’s the work I do.
I’d hate to see anyone put the time and money a ghostwritten book takes into a trophy. Decide who the book is for and what they’ll do after reading it before the first interview, because once the manuscript is finished it’s far too late to turn a shelf decoration into something that brings in work.
