Books that Scale: The AI-Driven Leader by Geoff Woods
Geoff Woods had no email list. A few thousand followers on LinkedIn. No audience to speak of.
His book sold 100,000 copies in its first year and generated eight figures in revenue through book-related business opportunities.
This is the full story of how it happened.
I tell every author the same thing: your table of contents is your minimum viable book. Before you write a single word, show it to real target readers. Have them go chapter by chapter and tell you: is this a hell yes, a meh, or not relevant?
Most authors nod and skip this step. They hole up in a cave and write into a vacuum for months.
Geoff did the opposite. He took his table of contents to over 200 CEOs.
Not all one-on-one. He'd pull together a group of 20 on a Zoom, show them the table of contents, survey them, then teach it. At events where his ideal readers were concentrated, rooms full of executives, he'd talk to 50 people in a single day.
And he listened. One CEO told him: "You're talking about how to create disruptive results without disrupting your organization." Geoff wrote that down. It went into the book. Lines like that don't come from sitting at your desk. They come from paying attention to how real people respond to your ideas.
By the time he was done, he had so much conviction about the structure that the writing became easy. He'd been teaching leadership principles and coaching at a very high level for over a decade. He'd helped companies go from millions to multi-billions. He knew his material cold. But AI was a different problem. The technology was moving so fast that what was cutting-edge six months ago was already outdated. His readers were executives who'd been leading organizations for years. They didn't need another breathless AI hype book. They needed something that connected the new technology to what they already understood about leadership.
That was the real tension in building this book. How do you write something timeless about a technology that changes every quarter? Testing the table of contents with 200 executives is what told him where the line was. They didn't want a technology manual. They wanted to know how to create disruptive results without blowing up the organization they'd spent years building. Choosing the right book to write is the decision that determines everything that follows. Geoff got that right before he wrote a word.
Geoff got his full draft done in 39 days. He was pushing quick, but the speed was possible because the hard work had already been done. The structure was validated. The questions his readers needed answered were clear. He wasn't guessing. (I wrote about how the speak-your-book process works and why we built Author.Inc around it.)
The only piece of advice he didn't follow was to read the book aloud before recording the audiobook. Every other recommendation, he took and ran with.
Then he got in the booth. And that's when he finally read it aloud. While recording. He turned the audiobook director into a note taker. Mid-session he'd stop and say, that made no sense, here's how I would really say that. Make that change. They updated the print edition from those sessions.
That's a move most authors would never make. They'd treat the audiobook as a fixed performance of a finished product. Geoff treated it as one more round of editing.
Most self-published authors spend a few hundred dollars on their cover and wonder why nobody takes them seriously. Geoff paid between five and ten times what a typical self-published author would spend. He worked with the same caliber of designer who does Adam Grant's covers, Michael Lewis's covers.
The result was a book that looked indistinguishable from something a Big Five publisher would put out. Foil. High-quality paper. Everything about it signaled that Geoff was playing at the highest level.
And he kept improving it. By the time I last talked with him about it, he was on his fourth cover iteration. Every print run, he'd update the cover and the internals based on what he was learning from readers and events.
He'd show up at executive events with a physical copy, set it down on a table, and just watch. He'd see someone walk past, stop, come back, pick the book up and start flipping through it. Then he'd walk over and ask: what just went through your mind? What created that reaction? He'd interview people experiencing his book for the first time. Even after it was published.
Two CEOs picked up the book and the first word out of their mouths was "wow." Most authors stop gathering feedback once the book ships. Geoff never stopped. (If you want to understand why cover design can make or break a book, I wrote about that in detail.)
Before the book even launched, Geoff had sold 2,000 copies and made $40,000 in royalties. He did it through positioning and conversations. The right emails to the right people at the right time.
Three months after launch, he'd moved 20,000 copies. Print runs of 4,000 and 5,000 were blowing through. A partner at a major accounting firm was recommending it to clients. The top person at Reuters sent it as a holiday gift.
Then the CEO of Domino's reached out to set up a meeting. Because of a self-published book by a guy with no audience.
By the end of the first year: 100,000 copies. The total business revenue from everything the book set in motion dwarfs the copies-sold number. The book multiplier effect is somewhere around 23x. (I broke down why copies sold is the wrong metric and where the real ROI comes from.)
Geoff described it as "bear hugging a rocket ship." Someone messaged him saying the book was the number one book they were recommending to everyone. A flywheel had started spinning that he didn't have to push anymore.
Geoff made a decision after the flywheel started spinning to narrow his entire company's focus around what the book had started. He's building an executive network of AI-driven leaders because his book proved the demand was there. The book gave him a completely different business to build.
He built a mastermind group and started charging $30,000 per seat. His speaking fees jumped to $50,000 per engagement. Tony Robbins invited him to open as a keynote speaker. He'd never made $10,000 from a keynote before publishing.
I've called Geoff a gold star student, and I mean it. He took almost every piece of advice I offered and executed it to the fullest extent. But the thing that actually separated him was simpler than any tactic. He never stopped talking to his reader. Before the book, during the writing, after publication. Every single day, he was in conversation with the people he was trying to serve. And he kept improving the book based on what they told him, print run after print run.
He did it all without a publisher, without a platform, without any of the things people assume you need.
Want to see what a book could do for your business? Run the numbers. Or if you're ready to figure out which book your business needs, let's start here.
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