Publishing Wasn’t Built for Experts

When you seriously start thinking about writing a book, one of the first things you may experience is confusion. The process can feel unclear. There are many paths, many opinions, and very little clarity around which decisions actually matter and which ones don’t. You’re asked to make choices about publishing, writing, structure, timelines, design, and promotion without any real sense of how those choices affect the outcome.

At the same time, writing is challenging. Not because the ideas aren’t there, but because writing a book doesn’t happen in a vacuum. You’re trying to do it alongside running a business, leading a team, or building something that already demands most of your attention. So the whole writing and publishing process starts to feel unnecessarily demanding.

That’s usually the point where you assume the friction is coming from you. You might think you’re doing something wrong or missing some secret. But if you step back and look at the publishing system itself, the friction has much less to do with your effort and much more to do with industry incentives.

The Structural Mismatch Between the Publishing Industry and Experts

Traditional publishing was built for a time when distribution was scarce and access to bookstores was controlled by a small set of gatekeepers. Publishers assumed the financial risk of printing, warehousing, and distribution, so the model was designed to recoup that risk by owning the IP and controlling how ideas were monetized. That structure made sense when shelf space determined success.

Today, distribution is abundant, attention is fragmented, and ownership is the primary source of leverage. Yet the industry still operates on outdated incentives that prioritize publisher economics over ownership of your IP and its long-term value. To be fair, traditional publishing works well for a narrow group of authors. Those with agents, massive audiences, and a singular focus on bestseller lists can benefit from the model. 

When you look at the math of book sales, the misalignment between the industry and your goals is clear. The vast majority of books, including traditionally published ones, sell fewer than 1,000 copies over their lifetime. Only a small percentage ever become profitable, and publishers rely on these rare outlier successes to subsidize their business. In practice, traditional publishing functions similar to a venture portfolio: many bets, a few winners, and limited concern for your long-term outcomes.

This doesn’t work for what you want to accomplish in your business or career. When you traditionally publish, you trade control of your ideas for distribution and validation without fully understanding how restrictive that trade becomes later. Editorial decisions are driven by mass appeal, which may help retail sales, but it also limits how your ideas can actually serve your target reader.

This creates a fundamental mismatch. The traditional model assumes your primary goal is retail book sales. It treats your book as a product to be sold once, rather than an asset to be leveraged for years. That assumption is a detriment to you the moment your goals extend beyond copies sold and into authority, opportunity, and long-term value. 

Why Self-Publishing Produces Speed Without Quality

Self-publishing looks like the opposite of traditional publishing. You move faster. You keep the IP. You don’t need permission. On paper, it feels like freedom.

In practice, speed often comes at the expense of quality. Poor editing, amateur design, and distribution limited to Amazon are common. When you don’t work with an experienced publishing team, it shows. Since most books sell fewer than 1,000 copies, the real cost of those compromises isn’t lost sales. It’s lost leverage.

That doesn’t mean it’s impossible to successfully self-publish, but it does mean you take on multiple roles at once. You become the hiring manager assembling editors and designers. Then you’re the project manager keeping your team aligned. And once you launch the book, you’re responsible for marketing it, all while continuing to run your company.

There’s also the question of authority. When pitching podcasts, events, or media, a book released through an established publishing imprint carries more weight than a self-published title. That signal matters, especially when most books never gain traction on sales alone. This doesn’t mean you need to work with a traditional publisher, though. There are a select few professional publishers that focus on quality, while still ensuring the authors own the IP and keep all the royalties.

If structure, quality, authority, and distribution aren’t present, your book won’t produce the outcomes you’re aiming for. Speed without these elements doesn’t create advantage. It just accelerates the wrong result.

Your highest-value work is clarifying your thinking, not compensating for a broken system.

Why AI Writing Makes the Gap More Obvious

AI didn’t change the publishing industry’s incentives. It just made them easier to see.

Now that text can be produced instantly, one thing becomes undeniable: content isn’t the same as thinking. You’re already seeing AI-generated slop flood your inbox, feed, and news articles. It offers polished sentences and a confident tone, but conveys very little substance.

This has clarified a new dividing line. The gap is no longer between good writers and bad writers. It’s between people who have lived the work and those who are summarizing it. AI is excellent at recombining existing ideas. It’s terrible at judgment, nuance, and context. It can’t replace experience. And it certainly can’t create original insight.

AI also changes the economics of ownership. When ideas can be copied, paraphrased, and remixed endlessly, owning your original IP matters more than ever. Not to hoard it, but to anchor it. Your book becomes the definitive reference point where your thinking lives in full context, not as fragments scattered across platforms.

At the same time, it has never been easier to leverage your IP ownership. Your ideas can now travel farther and faster than ever before. Your book can power talks, courses, podcasts, apps, partnerships, and entirely new lines of work. The opportunity isn’t just in producing more content, but owning a codified body of ideas.

Undoubtedly, AI can be useful to harness the power of your IP. It can help test ideas and reorganize structure. But real, lasting authority comes from your actual experience that reliably delivers insights and results to a specific audience.

What a Publishing Model Built for Experts Looks Like

A model built for your career and business goals starts in a completely different place than other publishing paths.

It begins with structure. Writing an unstructured book won’t help you achieve your goals, no matter how well it’s written. Structure is what makes your book’s ROI inevitable. This is why the outcome of your book needs to be defined before you write a single sentence. 

But publishing systems don’t optimize for structure because it doesn’t directly serve retail economics. 

Structure also preserves your IP ownership. Your ideas compound when you can use them freely. Your frameworks can become talks and your book’s chapters can become courses. Your book can seed a podcast, inform client work, or anchor a long-term platform without permission or renegotiation with a traditional publisher. You can purchase books at cost, not retail prices, and use them creatively for client onboarding, partnerships, speaking engagements, or direct outreach. A publishing model should work for you, not the other way around.  

Along with structure, professional quality is non-negotiable for your book. Elite design, production, and editing are signals in a crowded market. A poorly designed or generic-looking book will hinder your work because it conveys the quality of your offer. A well-positioned book with a sharp title and professional design can be enough to move someone from on the fence to a paying customer before a single page is read. Simply knowing you wrote the book on the topic, and seeing that it was produced at a high standard, often does the heavy lifting of building trust.

Finally, authority is built into the expert’s publishing model. If your book is released through an established imprint, it carries weight when pitching podcasts, events, or media, without forcing you into the tradeoffs of traditional publishing. World-wide distribution ensures anyone can order your book anywhere on Amazon, but also bookstores and retailers can carry it as well. Instead of having a short-lived book launch, your book becomes a long-term compounding asset.

Once you see how traditional, self, and AI publishing falls short, what you actually need from your book is obvious. Your book should be a long-term asset that improves inbound, opportunities, and leverage. This is what a publishing model built for you achieves.

Before You Write a Book, Do the Math

What you need before writing a book is clarity on whether it will actually generate ROI.

This free diagnostic estimates the expected return of writing a book based on your goals, audience, and business model.

Access Book ROI Calculator.