The $1.5 Billion Reason to Write Your Book Now

In September 2025, Anthropic paid $1.5 billion to settle a copyright lawsuit over books it had downloaded from pirate websites to train its AI models. Roughly $3,000 per book, across about 500,000 works.

I've been in publishing for years. I've seen a lot of shifts. This one is different.

A federal judge ruled that AI companies can use legally purchased books for training. That's fair use. But pirating them is not. And when the potential damages climbed into the tens of billions, Anthropic wrote the largest copyright check in American history.

If you have expertise worth packaging into a book, it has never been more valuable to own it.

What I've Watched Happen

For most of my career, the standard advice to authors was: get a traditional publisher. They'll handle everything. You just write. What nobody mentioned was what you were giving up. Your IP. Your rights. Your timeline. Your royalties. For most nonfiction authors, that deal means making a dollar or two per book while someone else controls the thing you created.

I've watched experts with 20 years of hard-won knowledge sign deals because it felt like validation, then spend the next five years wishing they hadn't.

Self-publishing used to be the scrappy alternative with a stigma problem. That's changed. Amazon and Ingram handle distribution. AI has made writing and editing dramatically faster and cheaper. The collapse in production costs is historic. And when you self-publish, you own everything.

The first client to join our program, Geoff Woods, self-published The AI-Driven Leader with no email list and no audience. He owns every bit of it.

Why AI Changes the Calculus

AI is going to make personal brands exponentially more important. We follow people because we're invested in them as human beings. We know them, we like them, we trust them. That's why we consume their work.

AI can synthesize and remix existing knowledge. What it can't do is draw on 15 years of experience to explain why the conventional wisdom is wrong. It can't put its name on an argument and stake its reputation on being right.

I've tested this. You can run AI-generated text through detection tools and see exactly what percentage was written by a machine. When readers detect it, their retention drops in half. Not because someone told them it was AI. Because they can feel it. If writing doesn't feel human, doesn't feel conversational and accessible, people stop reading.

A book rooted in your actual experience, written in your actual voice, is the thing that still cuts through. As AI drops the cost of content to zero, that becomes the only thing with real weight behind it.

Books as Assets

I've been saying this for years, but the Anthropic settlement made it concrete: books are assets.

A LinkedIn post disappears in 48 hours. A podcast episode gets buried. A keynote exists in memory. But a book sits on a shelf, gets discovered years later, gets handed from one person to another, gets referenced in conversations you'll never be part of.

It compounds over time. It filters the right people toward you and pre-qualifies every conversation before it starts. A book is not a product you sell. It's infrastructure for your business. It generates inbound, creates speaking opportunities, closes deals you didn't know were on the table. The royalties are almost beside the point. The real return comes from what the book makes possible.

And now there's another layer. AI companies need high-quality training data. The Anthropic case proved they'll pay for it. $3,000 per book in this settlement, across half a million works. Your expertise, packaged in a format you own, has measurable worth to companies building the next generation of AI.

Right now, most experts' knowledge lives in their heads. Scattered across presentations. Locked in client conversations. Buried in recordings nobody will ever transcribe.

Geoff Woods had the same knowledge in his head before he wrote his book. Now he has an asset that sold 100,000 copies in its first year, generated eight figures in revenue, and put him in rooms with CEOs and top executives of Fortune 500s.

The Anthropic settlement just put a dollar figure on what that kind of ownership is worth.