Should You Write a Business Book? Jeff Goins on Where the Money Really Comes From

Ahrefs Podcast · Tim Soulo with Jeff Goins

Short answer: write a business book if you have something to sell behind it and an idea you can't stop talking about. Don't write one to earn royalties. Most books lose money. Jeff Goins, who has worked on more than 30 books, puts the realistic payoff of a well-run business book at about $1 million a year in revenue, from a $50,000 to $100,000 investment. Almost none of that money comes from selling the book.

Goins is the bestselling author of The Art of Work and Real Artists Don't Starve, and now runs a consulting firm that helps thought leaders turn their big ideas into bestsellers. On the Ahrefs Podcast, host Tim Soulo, whom Goins coached through Soulo's own first book, asked Goins the questions every would-be author has: what a book earns, why so many fail, how to write one and who should publish it. Here's what Goins said.

How much do authors make per book?

Soulo put the per-copy number at roughly $10 to $15, depending on how much a publisher takes. Soulo's example: a friend, Eli, whose book Product-Led SEO sold more than 10,000 copies, a very respectable result for a book about SEO. At $10 to $15 a copy, that's $100,000 to $150,000. That's good money. It's still nowhere near a million.

Goins's numbers for first-time authors who do the work:

• First year: anywhere from under 10,000 copies to over 100,000.
• A fair target if you do it right: at least 10,000 copies in year one.
• The launch: aim for about 1,000 copies sold from the presale through the first month.

Then take the book on tour, an idea Soulo covers in their own book: podcasts, blog posts, keynotes. Put the idea in front of people in as many places as you can.

So where does the $1 million come from? The back end. When Goins ran an online course business, Goins put every publisher advance ($50,000 to $150,000) straight back into marketing and didn't care what the book itself earned. The books made Goins a known name in the field, and that sold the courses for most of a decade.

"The real answer is about a million dollars a year if you do it right." (Jeff Goins, 01:19)

"Doing it right" has two parts. You aren't trying to sell a million copies. And you have a business behind the book: your time, software, a program, something people can buy next. Goins said they would expect Ahrefs to make at least a million dollars from Soulo's book in its first year or so, while admitting that isn't easy to track.

That raises the obvious question. If a good book can return ten times its cost, why does almost every author lose money?

Why most books lose money: publishing is a venture capital game

Goins tells every client the same thing: whatever clients pay (Goins's fees run from tens of thousands of dollars to over $100,000 a project), they will not make it back in book sales. If that's the plan, Goins tells them to hire someone else, and quoted Seth Godin, who said long ago that books are a bad business model.

Publishers think like venture capitalists. They place bets on many authors and assume about one book in ten succeeds financially. Most books never earn back their advance. If you're paying for your own book, take the same view: this project will probably fail as a product.

So why write one at all? Goins gives two reasons that have nothing to do with royalties:

1. You can't leave the idea alone. Something in you insists on it.
2. The book makes you an expert. Write a book because you want to become an expert, not because you already are one. The research, the gaps you find, the arguments you have to pin down: these leave you knowing things you can't unknow. Soulo agreed: writing forced Soulo to codify ideas that had only ever lived in their head.

Goins's own example is Real Artists Don't Starve. It debuted on the Wall Street Journal bestseller list and "didn't sell a bunch after that." But writing it took about a hundred books' worth of reading and an interview with the fourth man to walk on the moon, who happened to be a fine artist. After a conference talk about that book, an audience member took Goins to lunch and asked where Goins had studied art history. Nowhere: Goins had just read some books.

The word author shares a root with authority. That authority is real, and a company can measure it.

What a business book does for a company

The best evidence in the conversation came from Soulo. A marketer at an enterprise company told Soulo about their CEO's book. The company handed out about 30,000 copies and tracked roughly half of them in its CRM. Two things showed up:

"The leads who got their book converted at a higher rate, and also the average contract value was higher." (Tim Soulo, 14:02)

The team set up an automation that sent the book out once a deal reached a certain stage. Then they started sending it to every lead, because there was no reason not to.

Goins added three examples from their own client work:

• Grant Baldwin's The Successful Speaker grew out of Baldwin's online course on becoming a professional speaker. Baldwin later bought the rights back from the publisher and uses the book both as a lead magnet for paid ads and as a gift to people who join his program, which costs thousands of dollars.
• A photography book for a friend who leads photography retreats didn't sell especially well, but it deepened his connection with his fans.
• General Stanley McChrystal's On Character, a set of short stories from the retired four-star general's life. Since it came out, McChrystal has spoken at universities and public events on character and drawn a lot of media attention to the subject.

Notice what none of these depend on: a bestseller list. Which is useful, because that list can be bought.

Can you buy your way onto a bestseller list?

Yes. According to Goins, buying your way onto the Wall Street Journal bestseller list costs around $35,000. The New York Times list costs around $75,000 to $100,000. The method is simple: buy about 20,000 copies of your own book, clean up the list and mail the books to strangers. Soulo added that the books you see in airports are often there because someone paid for the spot.

"All that means is you get your name printed in a newspaper for a week." (Jeff Goins)

"You'll move 20,000 copies, but you probably won't move 21,000 copies because at some point somebody actually has to read the book." (Jeff Goins, 16:49)

Goins, a former nonprofit marketing director, compared it to buying leads in SEO. Leads you bought left as fast as they came, and once you started paying for them, you had to keep paying. One client wanted the title anyway, for the ego trip. Goins's answer was neutral: decide whether it's worth it to you. Goins has flirted with gray-hat tactics too, hoping a bestseller title would be the first domino. In Goins's experience, the first domino falls and that's it.

What keeps a book selling is what the paid list can't buy: people reading it and talking about it. So what makes a business book worth talking about?

What makes a business book worth reading

One big idea, many conversations

A business book can't be one idea padded to 200 pages. Goins calls The 4-Hour Workweek the gold standard because it's about many things at once: the 80/20 principle, hacking your time, traveling the world, learning languages. The part that grabs one reader isn't the part that grabs another. Goins's test for the opposite:

"If it's one idea and three chapters in people can stop reading and it doesn't matter, then you haven't really written a book. You've written an article with a bunch of fluff around it." (Jeff Goins, 21:38)

Goins sees this more and more from authors who use AI to write their books: the same point, repeated chapter after chapter. A useful counter-test is that a good book can't be summarized, and the case against writing with AI rests on the same idea: the thinking is the part you can't hand off.

From Ryan Holiday, Goins learned to think of a book "as a hundred conversations you're going to have over the next two or three years" (20:11): one-to-one, one-to-a-few and one-to-many. Every one of those conversations should be in the book. Holiday's own books do this with short chapters, each a Stoic lesson illustrated by a historical or modern example you can read and use on its own. Malcolm Gladwell said he just wants to write books people discuss at dinner parties. Books that get talked about win.

Why most business books are bad

Soulo passed on a question from Ryan, Ahrefs's head of content: why do most business books suck? Goins's answer: most are written to stroke an ego, not to change the author or the reader. Entrepreneurs see an author do something and think I could do that.

Goins has lost count of the clients who read James Clear's Atomic Habits and asked for a book like it. Goins, a friend of Clear's, watched him spend five years on that book, building the ideas on his blog first. Before that, Clear grew an earlier passive-income blog to 50,000 subscribers, decided it wasn't what he wanted to write, and deleted the whole thing. If you don't have that commitment, Goins says, what you really want is to copy some cool stories and pretty drawings.

One client told Goins he wanted to create a great piece of art. Goins asked whether he wanted a great piece of art or a book of his own: "The Pope didn't paint the Sistine Chapel, but he paid for it." Both are fair projects. You can't do both at once.

Goins's advice: write the book that's true to you, not the one you think the market wants. Even Gary Keller's The One Thing, co-written with Jay Papasan, his longtime ghostwriter, took years of field-testing the ideas with Keller Williams staff. Papasan gave Goins the best advice he knows for nonfiction: teach a class on the subject before you write the book, so you can see which ideas work. For a contrast, here's how a business author with more than a million copies sold decides which ideas are worth writing.

Most other business books, Goins says, are written by professors translating academic ideas (Jonah Berger is one who does it well) or by bored CEOs looking for an ego trip.

That's the what. Next, the plan.

How to write a book proposal (even if you self-publish)

Goins recommends a book proposal to everyone, including authors with no plans to approach a publisher.

"What a book proposal is is basically a business plan for your book." (Jeff Goins, 28:23)

A full proposal includes:

1. A title and description.
2. Your audience: who will read it.
3. An annotated outline: for each chapter, the stories you'll tell and the argument you'll make. More than a chapter title.
4. Comparable books: the ones that would sit next to yours on a bookstore shelf.
5. A marketing plan: how you'll sell it, beyond hitting publish.
6. Sample writing: a chapter or two, about 15% to 20% of the finished book.

Goins's proposals run 50 to 100 pages. The length isn't for any one reader. At a publisher, a book is approved by a board (the publisher, marketing, editorial and often the head of the imprint), and each person reads the section that matters for their job. That explains something that frustrated Soulo: the publishers Soulo spoke to didn't seem to have read the proposal. Soulo also noticed how much of it was about marketing: the author's audience, access to podcasts and stages, and why the book would sell.

If you're self-publishing, Goins calls it a book plan. It's the same document and does the same job: it's what you go back to when you no longer know what you're doing. Give it the first 30 to 90 days of the project. The plan will change. Without one, you're flying blind.

How to write a nonfiction book: the process that gets you to a first draft

Expect to pivot once

Soulo's book started out as Marketing Is Not Math, an argument that marketing is about ideas, not numbers (the trap of quantification bias). When Soulo pitched it to marketer friends, nobody was excited. People who agreed didn't need the book, and people who disagreed wouldn't read it. Then a friend asked about the shift from traditional search to AI search, and Soulo realized the fundamentals hadn't changed. The book became about those fundamentals: the concept Soulo calls Discoverable.

Goins says this happens almost every time. One pivot that sharpens the idea usually makes a better book. Repeated pivots are a warning sign, and they tend to hit around a third of the way in:

"Anything at 30% sucks." (Jeff Goins, 39:58)

That's when authors start reading similar books and imposter syndrome kicks in. Goins's answer is to remember who the book is for. You can't write a book for a million people. You write it for a hundred, they love it and talk about it, and you print more. Goins's own books pivoted too. Real Artists Don't Starve was called The Michelangelo Factor until Ryan Holiday read an early draft and told Goins they were writing two books: another book about creativity, and a book about how not to be a starving artist, which nobody had written. "It's almost like you're saying real artists don't starve," Holiday said, and Goins wrote it down. McChrystal's book began as a set of 70 loose reflections, written as he turned 70, until the publisher's editor saw that the book was really about character.

The fix is outside feedback from a few people you trust: an editor, a reader, another author. Not many, just enough to confirm you're writing the right book.

Get every word out, then cut

Soulo's first lesson from Goins was to put as many words on the page as possible and organize later. Soulo's raw material reached about 100,000 words. When Soulo asked Claude to compare the first manuscript with the final version, it said the original was twice as long: Soulo had written two books and shipped one.

Goins's reasoning: writing produces more writing. Like lifting weights, the more you do, the more you can do.

To tell whether an idea is a book or an article, write about it. If you run out of things to say, it was an article. If you're 1,000 to 1,500 words in and feel like you're only getting started, keep going.

Front-load the good stuff

Don't spend chapters setting the stage. Many readers won't reach the payoff, so give them something worth having early. It's the same rule as a hook: the opening has to earn the next page. Soulo laid out the whole Discoverable framework in the introduction for this reason.

Keep three documents

Goins works in three documents:

• The manuscript: kept clean and copy-edited at all times.
• A scratch pad: ideas, the outline, notes.
• A cut file: material you've removed but might bring back.

Don't keep restarting

Authors often write two or three chapters, go back to the beginning and rewrite, over and over. Goins says they're fighting what Steven Pressfield calls the Resistance. That isn't writing a book. It's rewriting the start of one.

"Nine out of 10 people say they'd like to write a book someday. Most do not because they never finish their first draft." (Jeff Goins, 53:25)

A first draft is something you can edit. Until it exists, you have nothing. Goins's metaphor for the process is getting on a train. You have an outline, a weekly writing schedule and a deadline you try hard to hit, and you adjust it sensibly when you miss.

"Your only job is to not get off the damn train." (Jeff Goins, 54:25)

Self-publishing vs. traditional publishing vs. hybrid publishing

Soulo shopped the proposal to big traditional publishers first, then spoke with about a dozen hybrid publishers. Throughout, Soulo couldn't work out what a publisher would add. Goins defines the three options this way:

What a traditional publisher actually provides

• An acquiring editor who guides you through the process and the deadlines.
• A developmental editor for structure: chapter count, length, long chapters or short ones.
• Copy editing and proofreading.
• Design and printing.
• A catalog and sales team that pitch your book to Barnes & Noble, Amazon and other retailers.

What publishers mostly don't provide is marketing. Goins estimates that 70% to 90% of a typical author's sales come through Amazon. Bookstore shelf space is scarce. A Barnes & Noble store can carry something like 100,000 titles, and 70,000 to 80,000 of them are classics. Even some of Goins's bestselling books weren't stocked at the local Barnes & Noble. As Soulo learned, stores can also send unsold copies back.

When a traditional publisher is worth it

• You don't want to fund the book. Printing and publishing cost money, and as Goins told Soulo, a book will probably cost you more than it ever earns back in royalties. If a publisher will pay you and carry the risk, that's an easy trade.
• You find an editor who really gets the book, someone with a vision for it that you don't have.

When to self-publish

If you have a team, capital and real marketing skill, Goins says a publisher will probably frustrate you, because you know how to do parts of their job better than they do. Soulo's setup proves the point. Ahrefs's in-house team designed the cover and laid out the book. Soulo's assistant handled the ISBN, the printer, IngramSpark and the Amazon account. At least five people proofread it. Soulo already had an audience among Ahrefs customers and LinkedIn followers, and Ahrefs is paying for the print run. A publisher asking for up to 70% of sales had little left to offer.

Self-publishing can also be cheap. Goins says a good-looking print-on-demand paperback or hardcover with decent editing and design can be published on Amazon for a few thousand dollars.

FAQ

Is writing a book worth it?

As a direct source of income, usually not. Publishers expect about one book in ten to succeed financially. As a way to build authority, sharpen your thinking and support a business behind it, it can be worth a great deal: one company found that leads who received the CEO's book converted at a higher rate and signed larger contracts.

How much do authors make per book?

Roughly $10 to $15 per copy, according to Tim Soulo, depending on how much a publisher keeps. Traditional publishers usually keep about 70%. Self-published authors keep most of it but pay the costs.

How many books do you have to sell to make $100,000?

At $10 to $15 per copy, about 7,000 to 10,000 copies. (This is simple arithmetic from the per-copy figure above.)

Do I need a book proposal if I'm self-publishing?

You need the same document under a different name. Jeff Goins's "book plan" covers your idea, audience, annotated outline, comparable books, marketing plan and one or two sample chapters, and keeps you on track when the writing gets confusing.

How much does it cost to get on a bestseller list?

According to Goins, about $35,000 for the Wall Street Journal list and $75,000 to $100,000 for the New York Times list, by buying copies in bulk. It gets your name in the newspaper for a week. It doesn't make people read the book.

What is hybrid publishing?

You pay a publishing company to do the work a traditional publisher would do (editing, design, printing, distribution), and you keep most of the profit.

Your next step

Pick the idea you keep coming back to and write 1,500 words about it this week. If you run out of things to say, you've found an article, so publish it. If you're still going, start your book plan.

Credit

This post summarizes How to Actually Make $1M From a Business Book, an episode of the Ahrefs Podcast on the Ahrefs YouTube channel, published September 1, 2026. Host: Tim Soulo. Guest: Jeff Goins, author of The Art of Work and Real Artists Don't Starve. Quotes are lightly cleaned from the episode's captions; timestamps link to the moment in the video.