ETL 39: Josh Bernoff on Helping Business Book Authors Succeed

Transcript: Josh Bernoff and Bob Buday

Bob Buday: Hey, Josh, great to be with you. I wanted to have you on our show for many years, probably longer than you might even imagine, because I’ve been a reader of your daily newsletter, which I think is amazing.

Josh Bernoff: Thank you. Though leadership is something I think about all the time, so I’m pleased to be able to contribute some sort of insights on that.

Bob: You’ve been both a thought leader and what I call a “thought leadership professional” — meaning, people who help experts become famous for their ideas, and eventually become recognized as quote, unquote, thought leaders. And you made that switch at Forrester Research around 2009 — from thought leader on what was happening in the television and other media sectors and social media, etc, to thought leadership professional as SVP of idea development. You were a great analyst. Why did you switch from the analyst role to the thought leadership professional role at Forrester at that time?

Josh: I had the fortunate situation at Forrester to be covering the media industry during a time of enormous upheaval. For example, I made the prediction in the mid 2000s that the TV schedule would become obsolete, which was a hugely upsetting thing to many people. One guy tried to get me fired for that, but it turned out to be right.

So partly because media loves to talk about itself, I became at one point the most quoted analyst in the world, and that was fun. I got to go around and give speeches and tell the CEOs of companies like CBS or Comcast what they should do. I always wanted to write a book, so I attempted to quit [Forrester]. This happened in 2007.

I told the CEO of Forrester [George Colony], “Look, I’ve loved working here, but I want to quit and write a book.” He had the foresight to say, “Well, why don’t you write a book with us?” Actually I talked to Charlene Li, who was our analyst covering social media, about writing a book about social media, and he said, “Oh, yeah, let’s do that.”

So I switched to becoming an author. I moved my coverage to another analyst, and went into hibernation and spent a year working on that book. And that also was a way to become a thought leader because Charlene and I became very well known for social media ideas.

You can see the cover of that book “Groundswell” over my shoulder. Charlene did me the wonderful favor of quitting six months after the book was published. She started her own business, which was really successful. Everyone at Forrester who needed to talk to somebody, now they only had me. That got me to all over the world.

But eventually I realized that what I really loved was books, not just being an analyst. In the time after that, I wrote more books there, collaborated on them with other analysts, and I also edited books by other analysts, including, for example, “Outside In,” which is a fantastic book on customer experience, still very relevant today, that was written by two other people about a topic I have no expertise in. But I was sort of their shepherd.

I realized through that process that I was helping people to get their ideas out into the world. That was highly motivational for me. So when I left Forrester in 2015, that was a natural thing to do. I’ve worked on more than 50 books since then in various capacities, and just have really loved that process.

I have to admit, at the beginning of being on my own, I thought I’d become a famous expert on writing and books. Well, not so much. But I don’t miss all of the travel, and I don’t miss all of the work that’s necessary to be a thought leader. I love just writing about books and helping authors. So this is good.

I’m also older. When I was an analyst, I didn’t have all this gray hair here. It’s a thing that you can do sitting at your desk in Portland, Maine. That’s not so easy to do if you’re a thought leader and you have to give a speech in Beijing or San Francisco or Sao Paulo.

Books vs. Business Career

Bob: I also wonder if focusing on books enabled you to go much deeper on a topic than you would have had time to do when you were a Forrester analyst working on some research report on the future of the TV industry, where you might have three months or six months to do it, and then you move on to the next topic. Books are an even much more in-depth exploration of a topic.

Josh: I don’t think I agree with that. If you’re an analyst covering a topic area, you need to know everything. You need to know what all the big companies are doing. You need to know what the startups are doing. Need to know about new technology trends, regulation, how it varies internationally.

Every conversation you have with a client or a technology vendor is a chance to learn more. So you actually have an enormous amount of in-depth information. And that comes up because you go into some place like Comcast, and they say, “Well, what do you think about this?” You have to know about it. But the difference is, in a book you are compiling that into a coherent whole. It’s not just a bunch of ideas, but it is a big idea that everything stems from. And the first book I pitched was a book on the future of television that never ended up getting published. But I was still thinking of that in terms of books even then.

Bob: Well, that might be a very current topic today.

Josh: Yeah, but staying up to date is a whole lot of work. My knowledge of the television industry and streaming and all of the players is way out of date. So, no, I can’t write that book anymore.

How Book Publishing Has Changed

Bob: You help experts write business books. Have you dissected the book publishing industry, particularly the non-fiction, and within non-fiction, the management books? If you were looking at that sector as a Forrester analyst, how would you explain what has been happening?

Josh: Probably there are trends that are most important. One is that authors are much more important in the visibility and publicity of their own books. Your job is to assemble the ideas. Your job is to get them into wonderful shape, possibly by hiring your own editor. And certainly it’s your job to promote the book, not the publisher’s job.

Concurrent with that, the publishing industry has shrunk. Just as an example, if you are an author who has not already published a bestselling book, the chances of getting a business book onto the shelves at Barnes & Noble are pretty close to zero.

And yet, you can be very successful because that’s not where people buy these kinds of books. The last time you bought a business book, did you go into Barnes & Noble and look at the business books on the shelf? It’s more like, “Oh, I just heard about this new book on AI. Okay, here it is on bookshop.org. Click, click, click. Now it’s coming to my house, or maybe I even get the ebook, and I don’t even have to wait.”

The result of the changes in publishing are that the advances from traditional publishers have been going down — unless you’re Daniel Pink, somebody who has enormous track record of success. There are [publishing] companies like Wiley that publish a lot of books, that put sort of an assembly line level of effort into those books, and then hope that some of them will succeed.

But as a result of that shift, these hybrid publishers have risen up. They’re basically people who say, “Okay, you’re an author? We’ll take care of everything for you. We’ll get the book published, we’ll get it into distribution, we’ll get it manufactured, and you’ll pay us to do that.”

I know a number of authors who have been extremely successful that way. And then you want to go a little level down you can do self-publishing. So there’s been an enormous explosion in the ability to produce these books, even as the traditional publishers have less and less resources available to help you with it.

Benefits of Hybrid Publishing

Bob: And some of the hybrid publishers books look like they could have been published by the traditional publishers.

Josh: I would say all of them do. My definition of a hybrid publisher is someone who can produce a book that is equivalent in quality to anything that you would get from a traditional publisher. If you can tell the difference, it’s not really a hybrid publisher.

It’s interesting. I participated recently in this business book ROI study. We reviewed the results from 300 authors who filled out the survey of how they produced their books, what they invested in and how they made money. While it is true that the traditionally published books were more likely to be profitable and had a higher profit margin, the hybrid published books were very close.

I think the lesson of that is that hybrid publishing is real, especially if you’re in a fast-moving space; if you want to get your book out quicker than in 12 to 15 months, you’re probably better off with a hybrid publisher.

Bob: That’s why I went to Ideapress, which is a hybrid publisher, and I published my book. They published it six months after I delivered the final manuscript. I didn’t even go to a traditional publisher, because if I had gotten a contract, it would have been a year or a year and a half before would be in their catalog.

Josh: The traditional publishers will say, “We like your book and we want to get it to come out in spring of 2027 because that’s the list that we’re filling right now.” But you are thinking, “No, I want people to know I’m an expert  now.”

So six months from now, you’re probably still going to be that expert. But just imagine somebody who’s writing a book about artificial intelligence right now and goes to Harper Collins or Harvard Business Review Press and says, “Let’s do this book.” If you get them to do a deal, you’re probably looking at coming out with this in 2026. It’s the end of 2024. What do you think AI is going to look like in 2026? Probably nothing like what you’re writing about. So that’s not really a good plan.

Bob: And some of the generative AI companies that are mentioned in the book may not be around, right?

Josh: Yeah, right.

The Four Things Every Business Book Needs

Bob: Your book, “Build a Better Business Book,” was a really good book. This is the process that business authors should use when they even think about writing a book. Your Chapter Three was about the need for great ideas and great titles.

What is your advice to a business author who came to you, and when you got to the essence of their idea, it turns out to not be new at all, even though they may have examples that support it? What if you know this idea works but it’s nothing different than what seven other authors have said over the last 10 years? What would you tell that author?

Josh: “Go away? I don’t want to deal with you?” No. But the truth is, for a business book to be successful, it needs to have four things. It needs to have an audience. The audience is not everyone. It should be like digital marketers or CEOs of retail companies or something like that. The audience needs to have a problem. You need to have a solution to the problem. That’s the idea.

But the fourth thing that’s equally important is differentiation. It’s not the same as the book that came out before. The truth is that when people come to me with these ideas, we often spend our time on that. What’s your differentiation?

There are a lot of ways to differentiate. In fact, I wrote a blog post called “23 ways to differentiate your book.” It could be about using new technology for this. Or it could be the first book that tells the inside story of how this applied during the launching of Facebook. Or it could be the first book that’s written by a woman of color about these management issues – or the first book written in comic book form. There are so many ways to differentiate. It’s rare that somebody comes to me and says, “Alright, I have these ideas,” and we can’t find some sort of differentiation.

Here’s an example — the book you just talked about, “Build a Better Business Book.” This is not the only book on how to write a business book. I think it’s the best, but there are lots of them out there. What was my differentiation? Two things. One was that this was going to be comprehensive. This is not just a book about writing. It’s also about marketing and dealing with publishers and coming up with ideas and how to do an index, and I mean everything.

The second thing is 24 chapters – which means 24 stories of authors talking about their actual experience. That didn’t exist [with the competing books]. There are no books with that much information about what it really felt like to be you know, Laura Gassner Otting or Dan Bricklin, or any of the people that I profile in there. So that’s the differentiation. It just goes to show that even though I’m in a crowded market, it is unique in some ways.

Bob: On the topic of my book on thought leadership, I had counted at least 50 other books on Amazon with thought leadership in the title or subtitle — or when you looked at the title/subtitle and you looked at the book, it was really about thought leadership. And think there have been a half a dozen more since I published my book almost three years ago. So I know well the crowded marketplace phenomena here, and they need to say something very different.

How Books Make Money

Bob: The business book ROI study was really interesting. Some findings surprised me. What were the two or three biggest findings that surprised you?

Josh: I worked with four organizations: Amplify, which is a hybrid publisher, Gotham Ghostwriters, Smith Publicity, an excellent book PR firm, and Thought Leadership Leverage, which does strategy for go to market for business authors.

They funded this. Through all of our contacts, we managed to get 300 business authors to fill out this survey, including about how they made money. That’s the thing that we concentrated on: How did they spend money, and how did they make money?

The big top line result is that 64% of the authors were profitable, which just means that the total amount of money generated from everything like consulting and public speaking exceeded the investments that they made in things like editing and marketing.

But looking at the whole survey, the thing that surprised me the most is the level of variability. So the last graphic in that report — and people can just download their own copy at authorroi.com for free — is a log-log chart of expenses and income.

Why a log-log chart? Because some people’s expenses were $100 and some people’s expenses were $100,000 and some people’s income was $100 and some people’s income was a million dollars.

There was definitely a correlation: The more you spend, the more likely you are to succeed. But it’s not a straight line. There are lots of books that spent a lot of money and didn’t make money, and there are lots of books that didn’t spend much money and were wildly successful. And the things that help you to succeed here include having a professional editor and investing in public relations.

These are clear trends. But there is no better example of “Your mileage may vary” than the results we got in this survey.

Bob: It was a really good study. Some of the things that stuck out for me were that you’d said book sales didn’t predict success or ROI, which I read as book sales didn’t correlate with total return on investment. So I may sell 50,000 books, but that doesn’t necessarily correlate with all the money I might generate by that book. Somebody selling 2,000 books might have a higher ROI because he or she is selling more training, consulting, speeches, etc, right?

Josh: There was an interesting pattern. It is that while the traditionally published books sold more than the hybrid published books (which sold more than the self-published books), in all three cases the amount of books that the authors thought they would sell was about twice what they actually sold.

So there’s a definite overestimate of how many books will sell. But if you want to understand how you’re going to succeed here, it’s not about whether you sell 10,000 books or 1,000 books. It’s about who are those 1,000 readers. If you’re writing a book about pricing strategy, it’s a very obscure thing. Probably not that many people are experts in pricing strategy or want to know about it. But if someone reads that book and says, “Oh, man, I got to hire that guy. He’s the expert on this,” then you end up with a $50,000 consulting gig over the course of a year. Multiply that by 10 or 20 people, and you’re doing very well.

That’s how these authors succeed, and it is not correlated to the number of books that they sell. Another interesting way to look at this is that we see these wildly successful authors, people like Malcolm Gladwell or Daniel Pink, who sell millions of books. If you’re selling millions of books, you are making multiple millions of dollars from book sales. But those people are also getting $75,000 a speech, so you can still make more money speaking, even if you’re making an insane amount of money from book sales.

Bob: The business authors who look at the Malcolm Gladwells and the Michael Lewises and want to become multimillionaires from the sales of their books…It’s not likely.

Josh: Well, there are a few things. First of all, Malcolm Gladwell is insanely talented, and you’re not. It actually says that in my book: “You’re not Malcolm Gladwell.” If Malcolm Gladwell is reading this, I’ve only lied to one person. But people don’t buy business books to be captivated, which is what Malcolm Gladwell does. What he does is not that different from writing novels.

People read these books not to gain enormous insight, but to be entertained. But consider a person who buys a book on AI strategy – say, by Ethan Mollick, who just published a book on AI. He’s brilliant. You’re not buying this book because he’s a fascinating writer. You’re buying this book because he’s an incredible thinker, and he’s managed to put that into words. People who buy that book have lots of passages underlined and little Post-it notes because they really want to know what he has to say. That’s how business authors generate success.

Why Publishers Often Disappoint

Bob: Another thing that struck me about the Business Book ROI study was that authors who chose hybrid publishers were two times as likely to be satisfied with their publishers than the authors who published with traditional publishers, the Wileys or the Harvard Business Review Presses of the world. Why do you think that’s the case?

Josh: First of all, I want to be precise about what you just said. They’re twice as likely to be “very satisfied.” If you just look at satisfied or not satisfied — yes, the hybrid published authors are more likely to say they’re satisfied, but not by that much.

I’ve worked with many authors who had traditional publishers. Their expectations of what the publisher will do for them are often really at odds with what publishers actually do. I’m working on a book right now. It’s published by one of the very well-known traditional publishers, and the copy editing was inadequate. If you can’t get that right, come on.

And especially when it comes to promotion, people’s idea of what the publisher will do for them is completely at odds with the amount of effort that the publisher can put in, just because they’re representing so many books they don’t have that much time.

For the hybrid publishers, the fundamental fact is that you are the customer as the author. You pay them. As a result, they have to deliver or else they got a problem, and they do deliver because of that. Whereas at a traditional publisher, the author’s not the customer, the reader isn’t even the customer. The bookstore is the customer because that’s who pays the money to the traditional publisher.

With hybrid publishers, the authors are essential, and so is the printing, and so is the page layout. It’s a very different kind of attitude.

Now I want to caution people. There are a very small number of these hybrid publishers that I recommend. Ideapress, whom you worked with, is one. Amplify – they are fantastic. Page Two is another one that’s really excellent. Greenleaf is probably the biggest and most well-known.

Many self-publishing operations call themselves hybrid publishers. What they they really mean is that authors pay [them] and [they] put books out. The true hybrid publishers have a much higher level of quality. Unless you’re looking at a publisher in that relatively small group, you may not be getting the service you need.

Bob: To differentiate the self-publishers from the hybrid, would you say the self-publishers will publish anything, and the book has to be pretty good to attract a hybrid publisher?

Josh: That’s one point of differentiation. But it’s not the only one. Yes, the hybrid publishers are more selective than self-publishing operations, but less selective than traditional publishers. But another thing that’s important is that they have an editorial philosophy. So Ideapress publishes business books, books about ideas. So does Greenleaf. So does Amplify. So does Page Two. As a result, they have a commitment to that.

But one operation I worked with called Gatekeeper Press — they do a decent job but they also do romance novels. And that’s a fine business.

But I might need somebody who understands the needs of thought leaders and who publishes business books, and that means a hybrid publisher. And if you look in the survey, it’s very clear that while the hybrid published authors and the self-published authors are both generally profitable, the profits from the hybrid published books are a lot higher. The profits from the self-published books average around $7,000. That is not very much.

Benefits of Using a Developmental Editor

Bob: Another thing in the study that stood out for me was that a very small population, 18%, of authors use developmental editors — you can explain what that means in a second — and only 8% used ghostwriters. That shocked me. I know a woman who was very successful in the 1990s and 2000s — Donna Carpenter, whose company ghostwrote many of Tom Peters’ books, along with Michael Hammer’s and Jim Champy’s “Reengineering the Corporation.” She had a company called Wordswork, which turned out business bestsellers. She told me once that all the best-selling business books are ghostwritten, but your research suggests that is absolutely not true.

Josh: There are a couple of things about that. First of all, serious authors get help. So what does that mean? A developmental editor is going to look at your book and say, “Your idea is weak. We need to work on that.” Or “You’ve structured this in a way that doesn’t make sense for business book.” “We need to work on that Chapter One; it is boring, and that first chapter has to be put the fear of God into you.”

So [developmental editors] understand everything about books and how they work and how they’re structured. And in many cases, developmental editors are doing some of the writing. And in one book that I edited, I basically took the entire book apart and reassembled it in a different order. Every paragraph was revised. I’m not credited as an author on that book, but I certainly put in the kind of work that an author would.

Now, in other cases, the author on the cover doesn’t write the book. But you shouldn’t get the impression that the ghostwriter conceived everything. I have ghostwritten a book where almost all of the ideas came from me. But that was unusual.

With most of the books I’ve ghostwritten, I am attempting to distill the ideas from the author. They have an enormous amount of input, and you produce something, and they’re like, “No, no, no, you got this wrong. Change this around. It’s more like this.”

There’s research that has to go on. The ghostwriter may do that; the author may do that; someone working for the author may do that. So it is, again, a collaborative effort. But the developmental editor is more than a typist, but less than an author. You are a writing contributor. And that can cost $20,000. Or it can cost $100,000 or $200,000 depending on the profile of the ghostwriter and how much work they’re expected to do.

But I would guess that for Tom Peters’ books, the ideas came from Tom Peters. Even if there is a ghostwriter, that doesn’t mean that it’s not the author’s book. It just means they had someone else do a bunch of the writing.

Bob: They were good at capturing the expert’s ideas, as opposed to telling the expert what to say.

Josh: It’s interesting. So I just finished ghostwriting a book. I’m not allowed to tell you what it is, but nine-tenths of the book came from the author, and I was attempting to get my head around his ideas and then put them into print, which was an enormously rewarding activity. But I was successful because he was happy with the result.

For the remaining 10^th, I said, “You should have a chapter on AI.” He said, “I don’t know anything about AI.” And I said, “You know what? I’ll do all of the research on this, and I’ll come up with something, and we’ll talk about it.” And [that chapter] came more from me. But that doesn’t mean it’s not his book. He still had to look at that and say, “I think the ideas are more like this and less like that.” That’s not an unusual kind of collaboration.

Bob: The other thing that struck me in your survey was that you found posting articles on LinkedIn was the most popular social media promotional tool and the most effective, and that X/Twitter was not.

Josh: Now, I think you really need to say, “X sucks” as a promotional tool. The top social media tactic was posting on LinkedIn, and the second was posting on the author’s own blog.

These things are highly effective because we’re talking about business books. But before Elon Musk took over Twitter, even then it was very clear that it was very difficult to use it for book promotion because it was hard to get people to click through on things. It’s optimized for discussion. We might just say for argument, not for sharing insights. And then when Elon Musk took over, it just became a whole lot worse. Only like 33% of the people in this survey said that they used X for promotion, and half of them said it was effective, which was worse than any other tool. So yes, give up on that and spend your time on podcasts, on LinkedIn. These are the things that make a difference.

Big Takeaways About Book ROI

Bob: What are the biggest lessons from the study and from your experience — first, for the experts, who maybe are not recognized as thought leaders today but want to be. What are the biggest implications of that research for them?

Josh: The most important thing in the study is the idea that your revenue from the book will come from places other than directly from the book. It will come from speaking and consulting and workshops and courses and in some cases, sales in your organization, or even partnerships that get developed.

That doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because you put together a plan ahead of time and made sure that the book fit into that. In fact, you can see that people who had an effective revenue strategy had much higher profits than the people who didn’t. We have that result in the survey. That was in my blog yesterday, so people can look up the November 21 edition of my blog.

We asked, “What proportion of authors’ revenues came from the book — meaning advances, royalties, sale of rights and direct sales of the book — and what proportion came from other places?” If you look at all of the books, an average of 41% came from non-book sources, which is relatively low. But if you look at people who made $10,000 or made $25,000 in profit, then it’s up at 63% or 69% coming from sources other than the book.

And the interpretation of this is that the more serious you are about succeeding with the book, the more your profits are going to come from places other than directly from the book sales. And again, if you look in the study, you can see that’s correlated with hiring book publicity people, in some cases, hiring a ghostwriter. Basically, all of the investments in giving the book a professional result are what pays off. The converse of this is do a crappy job and it’s not going to succeed, right? Even if you promote it on X, it still won’t succeed.

Bob: What about the big lessons you think for thought leadership professionals – that is, the editors, the ghostwriters, the marketers whom thought leaders need to have a chance of their ideas traveling and becoming famous?

Josh: I can make two almost blanket statements about every author I’ve ever worked with. The first is almost all will tell you that this was way more work than they thought it was going to be. So if you go into this thinking, “Oh yeah, I’ll just dash off a book now,” it turns out that there’s an awful lot of conceptualization time spent writing. You’re going to have to balance between the stuff you do that generates money on a day-to-day basis, and the effort that goes into the book, and then producing it and promoting it.

It’s a huge amount of effort. But this study also showed 89% of the authors said that writing a book was a good idea, and that coincides with what I found in my working with authors in general. When they get to the end of it, they say, “Wow, this was really worth doing. This distilled my thinking in a way that nothing else would. This is having an enormous impact out in the market. I’m very glad that I did this.”

Bob: So they’re saying it was more work than they thought and a bigger payoff than they thought. I bet you that number would even increase a year or two later. They’re getting in companies at high places that they never would have gotten in before.

Josh: We include a list of what we call soft benefits in the survey. An overwhelming majority of people basically say, “Yes, this enabled me to get a higher standing, improve my reputation and generate more influence for me.”

Making the Thought Leader/Ghostwriter Relationship Click

Bob:  Different topic here. What do you think the keys are to making the thought leader/ghostwriter/idea developer relationship work? If the ghostwriter is both an idea developer, which I think they need to be, what are the keys to making that relationship work? From my own experience, I’ve seen it work very well, and I’ve seen it not work very well. And I know a lot of people who have even more stories to share.

Josh:  Having now ghostwritten four books and embarking on a fifth one, I have very strong opinions about this. And the thing to understand is, from my perspective as a ghostwriter, I’m going to spend a year working with you. It’s probably going to take up half of my time and generate half of my income for the year. And, man, you don’t want that to be a terrible, horrible experience.

I’ve learned a few things. The first is that you want to go into it slowly. I start with an idea development session with the authors, and part of that is to prove to them that I’m worth working with. It’s a paid thing. I don’t do it for free. At the end of that, either of us can say, “You know, I don’t think this is going to work for us.”

It’s much better to get out of that after having spent a month on idea development than having spent a year on a book. And there is one case that was a heavy editing project. I got a little ways into it. And I didn’t agree with what this guy was saying. I said to myself, “I can’t have anything to do with this book.” I said, “Sorry, this isn’t for me.” It was for a lot of money, and I just walked away from it.

The other thing is that you want to put some important things in place. That includes understanding who was going to do the research — where’s the content going to come from, and what is the process? I’m extremely disciplined about the process when I work with authors. That means that we know we work on a detailed table of contents, and we know exactly what we’re going to do. I know who’s going to review it. When I’m going to show them a “fat outline” for the chapter, they’re going to approve that.

Then I know who’s going to edit it. The disaster comes when there’ are 11 people at the author’s company who are going to trickle in their results to you. You know, “I just keep writing bits and pieces, and we’ll glue it together.”

It cannot work that way. It’s a question of discipline. This is a project, and you have to manage it like it’s a project. And if you do it in a disciplined way where everybody knows their role, and everybody behaves like a professional, that works great. In the cases where I’ve been successful, I met with the author every one or two weeks to go over these questions in detail. That’s a lot of time for somebody to put in. But it is also why those books were successful.

Bob: I love what you’ve written about the fat outline — the very detailed outline. It’s like a map of how the ideas are going to be captured and developed. Before you start, somebody starts writing drafts of chapters. Have you ever had an author who has said, “We don’t need no outlines? I’m just going to talk. We’ll spend three hours today. That’ll be chapter one. Give me the draft after that next week. Talk three hours, that’ll be chapter two.”

Josh: I have not had authors who work that way, and I wouldn’t work that way. Now I know authors who worked that way with a ghostwriter. I’m thinking of one right now. It was a really great book. It came out great, but that author was an extremely disciplined thinker who could just dictate the book off the top of their head. That’s unusual.

Let me put it this way: If you have a bunch of chaotic thoughts and you want me to assemble that into a book — which is apparently how Donald Trump’s book, “The Art of the Deal” came about — there are ghostwriters who will do that, and that’s expensive and difficult and challenging. I just can’t work that way. So yes, there are authors like that, and there are ghostwriters who will work for them.

AI and Business Books

Bob: All right, that last, last couple minutes here – what are your thoughts on generative AI and its impact on business books? You’ve written about this. I’ve written a little bit about this. I don’t think my head is completely around it yet. But what do you think the impact of generative AI will be over the rest of this decade on business books, on thought leaders especially, and the ghostwriters and the development developmental editors they choose to work with? Are ghostwriters done now?

Josh: I just edited a book where the author used generative AI to create a bunch of the content. When it got to me, it was really boring because generative AI is not known for its creativity. In fact, it is the opposite of creativity. Plus, you have to watch out because it makes mistakes. It makes stuff up.

I came away from that feeling two things. One is that my job as an editor now is to make up for the deficiencies of a machine. But I also thought this is not going to replace good writers anytime soon.

I use generative AI all the time, and here’s what it’s good for. Give me a summary of the top five ideas that people are talking about in this field. Read this 17-page technical paper and summarize it for me in 300 words. Read this thing that I wrote and tell me whether there are any words that are repeated more frequently than you’d expect and that might be distracting to people.

So there’s all these tasks that authors can use generative AI to help with. But if it writes crappy books, I hope people will be able to tell the difference. It would be really embarrassing if a prominent business person —  the CEO of a large retailer or a large manufacturing organization — used generative AI to write their book. People will read it and find it’s sort of boring, and then they check it and they’ll realize, oh, this was written by AI. What does that do for the author?

It literally was the case in this book that I was editing, where I was reading a chapter and thought “I don’t think a human wrote this.” I asked the author, and he said he used generative AI to write it. I could tell, and the reader can tell, too.

Bob: I wonder if it presages an explosion of business books that have would have never hit the market before — because now authors don’t need ghostwriters, right?

Josh: I think of it as a pyramid. Right at the very top of the pyramid are the most powerful ideas that have the most success. Think of “Atomic Habits.” Okay, that’s a fantastically powerful idea, and the book has been incredibly successful. And below that there is another layer of thinkers who are very influential. Clayton Christensen was one with his book about disruption. And below that there are probably 1,000 people who would be generously considered influential thought leaders.

They give a lot of speeches. People pay attention to them. They’re on panels. They go to all these conferences. They get quoted in the newspaper. And below that are maybe 10,000 other people who are influential because [they’re] the world’s foremost expert on the use of AI in manufacturing or something like that.

And it’s always been the case that underneath that is a whole mass of undifferentiated blah, blah, blah — you know, “My memoir from my experience as a customer service representative” and every other imaginable thing. And a lot of these books sell 19 copies and they have no influence.

What you have just described to me is the possibility that  there’s going to be even another layer below that. And if you ask me if is that going to change everything, I’d say no. And this is part of the reason why Amazon is now saying they won’t publish AI-generated books.  Even Amazon is saying, “We’ll publish almost anything, but we are not interested in much that we can tell is AI written.”

I recently put this book that I ghostwrote through an AI detector. It pleased me to find out it didn’t detect AI in nearly anything, except in two passages that it said were AI. Those were places where I had quoted the output from ChatGPT. I am OK with the fact it recognized the stuff that we acknowledged came from AI. So we’re all safe for a while from generative AI. But it’s a useful tool.

Generally, if your job is a rote thing that does not require a whole lot of creativity and thought, then you’re screwed because AI is going to do your job and replace you. But what that leaves is a lot of human beings who are using their judgment to be successful. They may be in advertising, they may be in management, they may even be in accounting. But they wake up in the morning and [AI] could actually [make them] a little better. They make a difference. They are not just following some pattern that was laid out in the last 10 years in their company. Those people, especially with the help of AI to do the rote tasks, will be successful.

It’s the rest of the world that I’m concerned about, and that’s a lot of people, isn’t it?

You know, the history of technology is replacing people who do tasks that are more easily done by machines. Think about how much money does an auto worker make now? They may actually make a lot more money than they used to. There are fewer of them, and they’re actually very sophisticated, because they need to understand these highly technical situations that are used to build cars. Well, that’s probably a model for how the world evolves. If you’re hammering on metal, that’s not a sustainable career. But if you understand how machines hammer on metal, it is.

Bob: Josh, this has been great. I really appreciate your expertise and your time, and I would love to see bring you back in six months to a year, and hear more about the impact of your study and your work when that book comes out…the one that you couldn’t talk about today.

Josh: It has been great to talk to you, Bob, and let’s hope that thought leadership continues to evolve in directions that are great for everybody.