Why Most Business Books Do Not Work

I’ve read a lot of business books. I’ve written quite a few. And I’ll tell you something that most people in my industry won’t say out loud: the majority of them fail at their actual job. Not at selling. Some sell very well.

Not at getting good reviews, or landing their author on a conference stage, or getting a mention in an industry newsletter. Those things happen all the time.

I mean they fail to produce a demonstrable return on the time and money the author invested, whether that’s measured in clients, credibility, or conversations with the right people.

This subject is a trap, because an author who built the wrong book will blame their own expertise when the phone stays quiet, and the expertise was never the problem. I tell clients up front that they’re very unlikely to earn their money back through book sales. The return comes from using the book as the foundation of their marketing. An author who hears that early builds a different book from one who’s dreaming about royalty checks.

I’ve written enough of them to know why this happens. It’s almost always the same reason. The author built the wrong book. Joe put it in terms specific to his own field that apply just as directly to the publishing one:

Features and benefits don’t move products. Emotional connections do.

Why does an information-packed business book fail?

A business book packed with information that never creates an emotional connection with the reader’s actual situation fails for exactly the same reason a features-and-benefits sales pitch fails. Nothing happens at the end of it. As a reader, I hate business books that open with the story of how the author got here. I don’t want to know that. I want to know what’s going to work. Good copy makes the problem personal, because people don’t buy a book about a problem that only happens to everybody else.

The reader nods, closes the book, and goes back to whatever they were doing before. The author waits for the phone to ring. It mostly doesn’t.

I also hate books that open with who invented what. Nobody cares that this guy invented this and that guy invented that. Readers want the nitty-gritty. I love geology, but half of every geology book is about who discovered what, and I don’t care. Give me the mountains blowing up. So I tell authors to avoid the name game.

And Joe’s bigger position, the one that underlies everything he does:

Sales will heal the world.

The argument underneath that phrase is worth taking seriously.

Real selling, the kind that connects with what someone needs and shows them how to get it, is among the most valuable things a person can do. A business book that works the same way does the same thing. It doesn’t move information. It moves a person. Those two outcomes require completely different books.

There are two completely different kinds of business books, and the failure almost always happens when an author confuses one for the other. The first kind is written for the public. It’s designed to reach the widest possible audience, to be accessible and useful to a stranger who has never heard of the author. Writing this kind of book well is a legitimate and difficult craft. The authors who succeed at it usually have a platform already, or a publisher willing to build one, or both. Most business authors have neither.

This confusion isn’t the author’s fault, and I blame the publishing world for most of it. It treats every business book as one category and scores them all by sales rank and review count. Nobody tells the consultant writing a lead generation book that they’re playing a different game, so they chase the only scoreboard they’ve ever seen. They end up with a book tuned for a goal they never had, and that’s a waste of months of someone’s hard-won expertise.

The author writes the second kind for a purpose. It’s a lead generation tool, a credibility piece, a door-opener for the right conversation with the right person. It doesn’t need to sell a hundred thousand copies. It needs to reach two hundred of the right people and make them want to talk to the author. That’s a completely different book. It requires different decisions about what goes in. How the book addresses the reader. What the book withholds. What it asks the reader to do at the end. It also decides how close the book sits to the author’s product. I tell authors not to tie it too tightly, because they’ll probably change products within a year. The philosophy belongs at the core, and the product works as an example.

The second kind of book often sells far fewer copies than the first. It’s also worth far more to the author.

A thousand strangers who enjoyed a book are worth less than ten qualified buyers who recognized themselves in it and picked up the phone. Authors who measure the wrong book by the right book’s scoreboard, copies sold, reviews collected, conclude they failed when they aimed at the wrong target. The metric for a lead generation book is conversations started.

I’ve seen what aiming at the right target produces. Client books have brought in consulting contracts, speaking work and courses, and one helped land a promotion. None of those results would ever show up on a sales ranking, and every one of them was worth more to the author than a bestseller badge.

The mistake most business authors make is writing the second kind of book as though it were the first.

They make it broad, accessible, and general. That strips out exactly the specificity and point of view that makes the second kind work. A lead generation book that doesn’t take positions, doesn’t say anything that could be wrong, and doesn’t reveal what makes the author different from every other expert in their field isn’t going to generate leads.

It’s going to generate polite reactions and no action. I want a client’s book to make a few readers uncomfortable and a few more pick up the phone. A book that everybody nods along to and forgets by Tuesday has failed at the one thing it was built for, and I’d count that as a loss no matter how the reviews read.

The opposite mistake also happens, and it costs just as much. Some authors go so deep into the details of their methodology that the book becomes a training manual for their competitors. If a reader can finish the book and replicate the author’s process without hiring them, the author has spent their time and proprietary knowledge producing free consulting for anyone willing to pay the cover price. Joe identified this risk explicitly during our sessions and it shaped every decision we made about what goes in the book and what stays in the engagement.

Joe understood this intuitively because it’s the same problem he solves for his clients. A sales team that treats every prospect the same way, with the same pitch, converts almost nobody, because the pitch that works on one kind of buyer actively repels another. A book is no different. A book written to please everyone connects with no one, because connection requires specificity, and specificity always excludes someone. Audiences can conflict, too. It’s almost impossible to write for three of them without splitting the book into three parts or writing three books. If you have two goals, you want two books.

The authors who are afraid to exclude anyone end up reaching no one, the failure mode Joe spends his days helping sales organizations escape. Specificity includes the stumbles. When I interview a business author, I go looking for the failures and setbacks on purpose, because readers want the ups and downs and how the person recovered. A spotless success story reads like a company brochure, and nobody calls the author of a brochure to ask for help.

I once spent time studying a well-regarded business book, and its stories were short and succinct, much shorter than I would have written before I saw them. They still got the point across. Why use a lot of words for something that doesn’t need them? Each chapter starts off strong, like a piece of dead fish hitting you in the face. I think he did it better than I did, and I know that’s hard to believe. It doesn’t mince words. That makes it a useful way to write.

What question must be answered before writing?

Getting the balance right requires a clear and specific answer to one question before a word gets written: what’s this book supposed to make a reader do? Not feel. Not think. Do. A business book with a commercial purpose needs to produce an action.

That action is almost always a conversation with the author, though it takes other forms. The answer to that question shapes every decision that follows. The pitch at the end can stay light, a call to action and a bio. The whole book is the pitch, so there’s no need to go hard on it.

When Joe and I sat down to define the purpose of his book, his answer was specific.

He wanted the right clients to find the book, recognize their own situation in it, and reach out because they wanted help applying what they’d read. He’d written a previous book, Casino Sales Master, that served a different purpose for a different audience at a different stage of his business. That book did what it was built to do.

This one needed to do something different, reach the kinds of organizations where his current methodology produces the most dramatic results and give them a reason to start a conversation.

No hype. Just structure.

That answer, functional, specific, free of vanity, shaped every later decision about the book.

What goes in and what stays out. What the reader needs to feel by the end and what they’re supposed to do next. How much of the methodology to reveal and how much to hold back. A book built on a clear purpose is a completely different product than a book built on a vague one, and readers can feel the difference even when they can’t articulate it.

Purdue used my own consulting book as a course textbook four years in a row. That’s the kind of result I measure a business book by: the right readers putting it to work, year after year, long after launch week is forgotten.

Getting that balance right is most of the work of a business book, and the writing is the easier part. I’ve got no patience for the advice that tells every expert to write for everybody and hope. A business book has to prove its value in conversations with the right people, and a book that can’t start those conversations has wasted the author’s best material. Anybody can sit down and smash out a book. That isn’t what I do. The hard part is making one that works, readable and understandable and on message, without boring anybody.

Frequently Asked Questions

From the author

The Ghostwriting Advantage
A business book needs a purpose before it needs a writer. The Ghostwriting Advantage covers how to get your book written for you once you know what it is for.