The book’s job was never to sell copies

Royalties are marginal. Where a book actually pays is somewhere else entirely.

From Charlie Hoehn

A founder finishes their launch week, sends me the Amazon rank, and asks the same question I’ve been asked for almost two decades: did it work?

I don’t answer it directly because the number they’re proud of, or embarrassed by, is almost never the number that matters.

The mistake underneath that question is the same one nearly every author makes. They treat the book like a product. Sell as many copies as possible and that’s how it pays off.

So they fixate on launch week, the ranking, or the royalty statement, and then the math disappoints them because it was never going to work that way. Royalties are marginal. And even when you hit a list, it’s often a technicality that doesn’t change anything about your business the following Monday.

A bestseller list is the one metric that can look like success while the book does nothing for your business.

I can say this plainly because I’ve edited four New York Times bestsellers and worked with more than 500 authors. I know exactly what it takes to get onto a bestseller list, and I still tell authors not to make it a priority.

No “fuzzy” books

Before an author I work with writes anything, I ask them: “What is the single job you want this book to do inside your business?” It might be to warm up a sales conversation, justify a higher fee, open a category of work you can’t sell into today, or bring dormant clients back.

If the answer is fuzzy, the book will be too, and no amount of copies sold will fix it. Once the job is named, three questions do the rest of the work, and I ask them in this order.

Is it the prospect across the table? The event organizer deciding whether to book you? The client you want back? Write the whole book to move that one person, because a book written for everyone moves no one.

Name the action. Then build every chapter to earn it. Anything that doesn’t move that person toward that action comes out, however clever it makes you sound.

1,000 copies with people who could hire you beats 20,000 strangers who forget you by dinner. Don’t route everyone to a retailer to chase a rank. Put the book directly in front of the people you actually want to work with, and measure it by what changed in the business. Forget about the rank. The deal that got bigger, the fee that held at the higher number, or the meeting that closed on the first call are results that pay.

Watch it work

Harrison Tash runs a consulting firm called Living Water, and he teaches business owners how to build companies that don’t depend on them personally. Like a lot of expert founders, the thing he is brilliant at teaching was the thing his own sales process leaned on him for. Every deal he closed ran through him personally, sitting across from each prospect and walking them through his background until they trusted him enough to sign.

I asked him the question. What is the one job this book has to do?

His answer was that decision-makers needed to trust his framework before he was in the room. That is a different book from one written to sell copies. It tells him who it’s for, what belongs in it, and what happens on the last page.

When Harrison’s book, Exit Without Leaving, was finished, he never treated it as something to push. He built it into how he already sells. Every proposal now goes out with a copy for each member of the client’s leadership team. The book does the trust-building that used to sit entirely on his shoulders, and it does it before the meeting instead of during it.

His contracts used to average around $50,000. They’re now landing between $75,000 and $100,000. He’ll tell you his ability to sell faster and with more trust has gone up, in his words, tenfold. He’s moved around 500 copies, entirely through relationships, with nothing that looks like a marketing campaign anywhere in his strategy.

The same pattern shows up in businesses that look nothing alike.

From left: Chris Jennings, Jason Connell, Craig Gauthier

Chris Jennings turned his book into six retreat talks right after launch in a category of work he’d never sold into before. Jason Connell pulled four unpitched podcast invitations in the first two weeks after launch. Craig Gauthier lifted his speaking fee by 50%. None of them got there by chasing a number. Each one got there by deciding what the book was for and writing it to do that one job.

Naming that one job is the first thing our process forces, before anyone records a single word, because everything downstream, the structure, the stories, the last page, is built to do it.

If you’re sitting with a book idea or a half-finished manuscript and you want this exact pressure test applied to yours, book a call with Miles.

And if you know a founder who is about to spend the next year writing the wrong book, send this to them.

Charlie HoehnCo-Founder, Author.Inc