Trying to determine what the average author earns is like trying to nail down Jell-O. Do you want to talk about authors of fiction or nonfiction? Traditional publishing or self-publishing? Authors who have one book, multiple books, or dozens of books? Are you counting book sales only or all earnings related to their writing profession?
I’ve reported on and analyzed Authors Guild earnings studies, which require tremendous resources and effort to undertake meaningfully, and I still struggle to compare apples to apples. There’s endless variation in advances, royalties, rights payments—and careers—making it impossible to say what is normal. It’s like trying to ascertain the “normal” price of a house, a car, a vacation.
But if you’re able to survey super-specific author segments, you might be able to say something useful for authors working in that segment.
The Business Book Author ROI Study is a new and strong effort to capture what business authors earn and how they earn it. Between April and August 2024, four author service organizations—Amplify Publishing Group (a hybrid publisher), Gotham Ghostwriters, Smith Publicity, and Thought Leadership Leverage—working with author and former Forrester Research SVP Josh Bernoff, conducted a survey of business and other nonfiction authors. The survey reached about 300 authors who had published a nonfiction book.
Last week, I talked with Bernoff about the freely available report. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
The Hot Sheet: It’s clear this report has been done thoughtfully and with expertise. I especially appreciate the effort to look at a very specific sector. The Authors Guild survey—what they’re trying to do is so big, and I believe they have a difficult time getting a sufficiently representative sample to draw any conclusions from. About 300 to 350 people responded to your survey [301 respondents had one published book, the others had none]. Do you think this is a big enough sample to be meaningful for what you’re trying to achieve?
Josh Bernoff: All of the people involved in creating this are very familiar with the world of business, book authors, and publishing, so our questions were designed to get at some of the pain points and questions that those people definitely have, and that is a much more homogeneous group than authors as a whole. So it’s possible to make generalizations that don’t lump in some novelist with somebody who’s written their memoirs. The other thing is, I helped launch quantitative research at my last job at Forrester Research, so I’m very familiar with what it takes to analyze survey data and then present it. So I was very pleased that they tapped me to be the author of this. The data analysis and the results reflect that experience that I have.
We set out to do the most comprehensive survey of business authors that had ever been done. And it is hard to get people to complete the survey, especially because this survey went into a great deal of detail, and as a result, some people became frustrated before the end of it. … Even though I would love to have more responses, we certainly could tell from the responses we got that there were some very clear patterns, and I think people can count on the data as a result of that.
One of the statistics that jumped out was that 89 percent of respondents said writing a book was a good idea. This may be terrible of me to say, but it surprised me—that it was such a high number. As both of us know, writing a book takes so much time and energy, and I think some people actually come out the other end thinking, “I don’t know that it was indeed worth it.” I just hosted a panel recently where an agent said they have a hard time convincing experts in their field of the value of a book when they could make money much more quickly through a course or a newsletter. So why do you think the benefit persists?
That result actually was in line with a smaller story that I had done for my own book earlier. I wasn’t surprised by it. Most of the authors that you talk to will say things like, “You know, this was really hard. I didn’t realize how much effort it was going to be. It took much more time than I thought, and I’m really glad that I did it, because it allowed me to assemble all of my knowledge and information into one place and condense it so that anyone can get access to that.”
From a sort of naked capitalist perspective, as the report shows you, there are many ways for authors to make money. There’s a huge number of [business authors] who are making money from speaking or consulting or workshops or even partnerships that they get from publishing activities. But I think anybody who does a quality job on a book can be proud of the result, and that is why people feel that way. We had so many people in the survey who had done multiple books.
If you look at whether book sales numbers met these authors’ expectations, the survey showed not so much. However, whether a book met an author’s sales expectations didn’t necessarily serve as an indicator of the author’s financial success or return on investment for the book. The survey said 64 percent of business books show a gross profit. That result does align with what I would expect. Was that your reaction?
Yes. One of the problems with author surveys in the past is that they don’t reflect the full range of revenues that a book can generate. And we specifically asked not just about revenues but about increased revenue. So if you were giving speeches before, we tried to measure how much that activity increased afterward.
If you’re a novelist, unless you’re really popular, most of the money you’re going to get will come from book sales. As a result, you need to write a lot of books and sell a lot of books to even eke out a meager living. But if you are a business book author, and you write a book, and it reaches 1,000 people, and 100 of them call you up and say, “I have to work with you. Let’s do a $50,000 consulting contract”—that’s a pretty good deal, even if you only sold 1,000 copies.
Now, people do imagine that they will sell more than they actually sell, but you need to also understand that this is a snapshot in time. So if a book has only been out six months, we may not capture the full sales.
I’d like to touch on the ghostwriting part of the survey. This survey was sponsored in part by Gotham Ghostwriters, and you’re a ghostwriter, and the survey found that ghostwritten books are four times as profitable as others. Why do you think that is? Simply that it’s a higher quality book? And if that is the case, how would you define quality here?
Okay, the first thing, and this is just important for the whole survey, is to understand that the sponsors did not influence the results. At one point, I actually communicated with the CEO of Gotham Ghostwriters, and he said, “Look, just publish whatever the survey says. We want the truth out there,” which was reassuring. They’re not putting their thumb on the scale. It would be a stretch to say that ghostwriting causes greater revenues, because we show the correlation and not the causation. But it’s not too far off to say that people who invest in ghostwriting also invest in other ways: in the quality of the book, in PR launches, in marketing. As a result, it all sort of hangs together that these are quality books with a fair amount of effort behind them. And sure enough, that pays off. And I think that people who are interested in investing in ghostwriting should look at that and say, “Well, this is worth doing as long as I’m going to invest in all of the other things that will generate a quality book that connects with the audience I’m trying to reach.”
About half of all authors said there were unexpected costs in publishing their book, and that was more likely for first-time authors. And your survey captured authors who published in various ways—traditional, hybrid, and self. I want to touch on the hybrid piece in particular, because this is the complaint I hear all the time from hybrid published authors—because of course they’re the ones paying for costs of publication. Why do unexpected costs persist? Do you think it’s just the nature of any business venture?
I think that publishing is a specific challenge, and that’s because people just don’t understand how it works. I’ve been involved in more than 50 book projects, so I’ve seen almost everything. And even now I see things where it’s like, Oh, well, that never happened before. For somebody who’s doing this for the first time, authors say, “What? The publisher doesn’t do the publicity?” Not anymore. Or, “What? I need to invest in research?” Yes, spend some time doing it yourself or pay somebody to help you do it. And so I think people just don’t recognize the costs.
If you’re working with a hybrid publisher, you need to get a clear description of what all of the costs are going to be up front. And the quality hybrid publishers like Amplify and Greenleaf and IdeaPress are very good at doing that. Part of the challenge is that people don’t realize printing is expensive, and you’re gonna have to pay for that. But that same logic applies to quality publicity campaigns—they are expensive. And cover designs have a cost. I think the reason you see a little bit more of this with hybrid publishers is just because you break out and itemize a lot of these things.
In the survey, authors with hybrid publishers said they were more than twice as likely to strongly agree they were satisfied with their publishers. I wonder if that is affected by the fact the survey was sent out by what I would consider to be top-shelf hybrid companies. There are many other hybrid publishers, especially those working with novelists and memoirists, that don’t necessarily deliver a satisfying experience, and they might not even be hybrids, depending on your definition of a hybrid publisher. So I’m wondering what you think about that in terms of this survey. I just want to make sure, especially for my readers, that nobody assumes they’re going to have a satisfying experience with a hybrid, given who your survey reached—business authors.
You know, it’s interesting, because as I’ve read your writing about hybrid publishers and self-publishing, there’s a definite disconnect in my brain. It’s like, whoa, she has all these authors who are really upset with their publishers. And when I work with authors who work with hybrid publishers, they tend to be very happy. What’s going on here?
Part of it is the definition. And we were very clear in our survey: Hybrid publishers are this kind of publisher, including examples. So we sort of screened out the people who just find some publishing services company. A lot of them say, “Oh, we’re a hybrid publisher.” No, you’re not. There’s nothing wrong with being a publishing services company, but don’t pretend that you’re an actual publisher.
The people who work with quality companies do generally have a positive experience, and the reason is that, unlike traditional publishers, in the case of a hybrid publisher, you the author are the customer. You’re paying the money, and these people want to have a good reputation. People like Amplify and Greenleaf and IdeaPress and Page Two, they are invested in having every author be referenceable. And if somebody is paying $10,000 or $20,000 or $30,000 for that experience, they definitely want to deliver the most positive possible experience. And it’s not a coincidence that publishers like Amplify are now growing significantly. It’s because they’re giving the authors what they need.
Okay, let’s switch to marketing. The top marketing tactics for surveyed authors were email campaigns—no surprise to me, as a lover of email—then Amazon reviews. The most popular social media tactics were posting on LinkedIn and promoting on blogs, and then—my favorite result—X was one of the worst marketing channels. The publishing community still hangs out there, even if they hate themselves for doing so on the left-leaning side of the industry. If you had done this survey five or 10 years ago, would you have gotten the same result?
My first book, the bestselling book I wrote with Charlene Li, was about social media. We predicted in 2008 that this Twitter thing might actually be successful. So I am thoughtful about this. And if you look in particular at social media, whether you’re posting on LinkedIn or you’re sending out a newsletter, these are your peeps. They’re your followers. They believe in what you have to say, so they are a lot more easily energized, even back, say, five, six years ago.
But Twitter, as it was called then, was a poor channel for getting people to click on things. It was optimized for a conversation, even argument, you might say. But there are experiments you can look at from back then where people posted the same thing on LinkedIn and Facebook and Twitter, and click-throughs on Twitter were much lower, and the continued decline in the maintenance and moderation on X certainly hasn’t helped that. Speaking personally as an author, because I wrote this social media book in 2008, I have a huge Twitter following. I had 25,000 people, and it broke my heart to see how freaking useless it is now, but I would say to any author: Money that you invest in X, from a marketing perspective, is wasted. And we have proof now.
That may be the most valuable takeaway for readers, right there! Is there anything else you want to highlight about these results in terms of earnings or profitability?
My takeaway from this—and the most important thing for business authors to recognize—is that, just from a pure transactional monetary perspective, way more of your revenue is going to come from consulting and speaking and all of the things that follow on from having published a book than from book sales. If you don’t understand that, then you’re going to be disappointed in the sales and missing an opportunity. The other thing I’d ask people to take away is that if you know ahead of time that’s the case, that changes what information you put in the book, how you structure the book, what kind of publisher you work with, and what you invest in as far as book promotion.
Thank you, Josh.
Learn more about the Business Book Author ROI study, or attend a free webinar about the results on Thursday, Oct. 24. To learn more about Josh Bernoff (and to download the book proposal that he used to land a six-figure advance from a traditional publisher), visit his website.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
