Why Most Experts Write the Wrong Book
When Codie Sanchez first started working on her book, she had the concept most authors would kill for. Millions of followers. A message people were desperate to hear. Real results to back it up. The early drafts leaned into something ambitious. A "big idea" book called The Three Waves, with three full chapters building the macro case for buying businesses.
It was impressive work. But when I read those chapters, I kept thinking about what Codie actually does for people. She doesn't just explain why small business acquisitions matter. She helps people do them. So I told her these three chapters can be three paragraphs in the intro. Let's build the book around what you're best at.
We compressed the thesis. Moved the tactical material up front. The book became the thing Codie herself needed when she was first learning acquisitions. A manual. Something you could pick up and follow. As she put it, "If the tagline is 'this book will change the world,' stop it. Try to change the individual, not the world."
Main Street Millionaire made $1.6 million in its first week.
Fewer than 10% of nonfiction books sell more than 1,000 copies over their lifetime. I think most of that traces back to one decision that happens too fast.
On almost every first call I take, the author opens with the same line. "So here's what I want to write about." I've heard it hundreds of times. And the instinct makes sense. You have expertise. You have stories. Of course you want to start there.
But I had a billionaire in one of our programs who didn't care about book revenue at all. He wanted legacy. And I had Geoff Woods, who was building a company around his expertise and needed the book to drive everything. Same process for both of them. Completely different books.
If either had just started writing without that clarity, they'd have produced something fine. Maybe even well-reviewed. But strategically useless. And that's the outcome I've seen more times than any other. An author finishes their book, and then nothing happens. The inbound doesn't change. The speaking invitations don't come. I've heard the same sentence so many times I could set my watch to it. "The book is good. It just didn't really do anything."
It's never a writing problem. It's always a positioning problem. The wrong book was chosen.
When Geoff came to me, we didn't start with writing. We didn't even start with outlining. We started with his business.
What's his offer? Who are his ideal clients? What should they be paying? I positioned him so he could charge between $100,000 and a million for his services. Not so he could scrape together five grand a month with a thousand-dollar offer. That positioning shaped the entire book. The table of contents. The audience. The stories he included. Everything.
Then he did something I've never seen another author do. He tested his table of contents with over 200 CEOs before writing a single chapter. Groups of 20 on Zoom calls. Conferences where he'd talk to 50 people in a day. He'd show them the structure and just watch their reactions. 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.
The AI-Driven Leader sold 100,000 copies in its first year. Eight figures in revenue from book-related opportunities. No email list when he started. No existing audience.
That outcome was determined before he wrote a word.
I worked with another author who came in wanting to cover everything he'd learned across a 25-year career. Twenty-one chapters. When I looked at his table of contents, I told him his reader scanning this won't see a journey. They'll see an inventory. We cut it in half and reoriented the whole thing around a single transformation his reader needed.
That's the shift. A strategic business book is a tool designed around where your business is headed. It filters the right people toward you and compounds in value for years. If it doesn't have a clear job, it just sits there.
The first question I ask every author is what their business looks like in five years, and what role the book should play in getting them there. Not "what could I write about?" That question will bury you. The question is "which book creates the most leverage right now?"
I've been saying this to authors for years, and it took me a while to land on the simplest version. Where books fail is they try to give information. We already have all the information. What people need is transformation. Implementation. Your job is to build something where, if a reader follows it, they become a walking case study of what you teach.
I've had authors come to me with completed manuscripts that needed to be completely reworked because the foundational positioning was wrong. It's actually easier to work with someone who shows up half-baked. When an idea is fully developed in a direction that doesn't serve the business, we have to take the whole thing apart before we can rebuild.
Once the structure is set, fixing it gets expensive fast. A developmental edit runs $10,000 to $20,000 and takes months. But that assumes the right book was chosen to begin with. If the positioning was off, no amount of editing closes the gap.
You can always edit sentences. You can move chapters around. What you can't change after the fact is what the book is for. That's a systemic problem in publishing, not a personal one. The industry doesn't help authors make this decision well because it doesn't affect retail economics.
The authors I've worked with who got the best results are the ones who spent real time on this choice before touching a draft.
The difference between a book that opens doors and a book that collects dust comes down to whether the right book was chosen before the writing started.
If you want to see what a strategically chosen book could produce for your business, estimate your book's ROI here.
And if you're ready to figure out which book your business actually needs, see if you're a fit.
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