The business book market has changed considerably over the last decade and a half.
Where major publishers once paid decent advances for first business books, that’s no longer reliably the case. The financial logic that once made a book an attractive income stream for speakers has shifted, and that shift is creating a more interesting question about what a book is actually for.
Michael Levey manages speakers and advises on the commercial infrastructure of speaking careers at the highest level. His view on what a book is actually for is specific:
“Unless you are a Seth Godin or a Simon Sinek, there isn’t vast money in writing business books,” he says. “Don’t think about it as a money-making experience. Think of it as a marketing tool that keeps the conversation going and as part of your big commercial package.”
That framing reflects something real about how books function in the speaking industry today.
A book that sells modestly can still change the story a bureau tells about you, shift the confidence a client feels in booking you, and provide something concrete to share with the decision-maker who wasn’t in the room. “It’s a great marketing tool to have and to be able to share with bookers, clients or attendees post events,” Michael says.
It does that work independently of its sales figures.
That commercial value is also amplified by what’s happening in the speaking market more broadly. It has become considerably more crowded in recent years, partly because income that once existed in books and broadcast media has migrated into the speaking fee, meaning more speakers are competing for the same stages and the same clients.
A book is one of the more effective ways of differentiating within that landscape, not by being a bestseller, but by existing: by giving bureaux something specific to reference, clients something concrete to point to, and the speaker a body of thought leadership that exists independently of any single event.
For speakers who are already published, the considerations shift somewhat.
The question Michael focuses on is not how the last book performed but what comes next. He references feedback that Penguin gave to Nick Gold: rather than writing an entirely new book on a tight cycle, consider updating chapters and sections with new thinking as it develops. “I struggle to find anyone writing a book of quality that is publishing on an annual basis,” he notes. Frequency, he observes, tends to dilute rather than build.
Alongside the question of timing sits the question of route to publication, and here Michael’s view has shifted considerably. “Six or seven years ago I’d have turned my nose up at it,” he says of self-publishing.
“Today, I take that all back. I don’t have an issue with it. But you still need to do it well. The book needs to have tangible takeaways. It needs to add value. It can’t be a half-baked attempt at writing something so you can say you’ve written a book.”
The credibility concern that once attached to self-publishing has largely gone. What matters now is the quality of the thinking.
What runs through all of this is a shift in how the book is being evaluated. The revenue stream question, will it sell, was the advance worth it, does it generate royalties, tends to close down quickly and disappointingly.
The marketing tool question, what does it open, what does it change, what does it make possible, tends to stay open considerably longer. A speaker with a clearly articulated body of thought, expressed in a form that exists permanently and travels independently, is a speaker who is easier to pitch, easier to justify and easier to remember.
That is not what royalties do. That is what a marketing tool does.
There is also something worth noting about how a book functions as a marketing tool over time, as distinct from a revenue stream that tends to perform once and plateau. A book that evolves alongside the speaker’s thinking, updated as Michael describes, keeps generating reasons for bureau conversations, client reconnections and fresh positioning in a way that a static publication does not. The marketing value compounds.
A book is not where the money is. It is where the momentum is, and treated as a marketing tool rather than a revenue stream, it tends to generate considerably more of both.
