[A long riff on book publishing with (perhaps) wide applicability to your work as well.]
Publishing is different from writing—it’s the hard work of creating the conditions to help people get in sync, move forward, and get to where they’re headed.
The best reason to publish a non-fiction business or how-to book in 2026 is to change lives. Transformation is possible.
Transformation can happen, but only if the book ends up in the right hands for the right reasons.
Today, it’s harder than ever to pull that off. Tim Ferriss shares the numbers. We have a glut of information, but not nearly enough action. I’ve been at this for forty years, but the change this time is significant.
The number of books in this category continues to expand, but their total impact has not. At the same time, more books are being purchased by more people—the long tail is real. Publishing a book is super easy now, but publishing one that works is harder than ever.
Authors and publishers get stuck on the gap between interest and action. Too often, we don’t act until it’s too late in the process.
The author’s job in publishing begins long before pub day.
There are three pillars:
- Promotion
- Activation
- Conversation
The first one gets way too much discussion, energy, and noise. Promotion gets the word out. Promotion can easily become all-consuming, and it can also become selfish. The promotion part of the equation asks, “have you seen my new book?” Promotion is everywhere, so we come to believe that it matters.
Activation creates the tension that answers the promotion question with, “I’ll go grab a copy.”
And conversation is the unsung part of every single hit book in this genre: “I need my friends to read this.”
Successful publishing, then, looks like this: Generate awareness. Create tension that leads to engagement with the work. Deliver an idea that works better for the reader when it’s shared and discussed. Reader traction leads to the network effect. The transformations compound, and the book becomes a foundation of culture and alignment.
That’s the work of publishing. Each component matters, not just the first one.
I’d break promotion into a few components:
Permission: When you can deliver anticipated, personal, and relevant messages to the people who want to get them, you’ve earned attention, not stolen it. Letting people who read your blog or listen to your podcast know about your new book is mutually beneficial. This is a trust that’s not to be taken lightly.
Shared permission: When you appear on someone else’s podcast or in the media, you’re bringing the message of your book to people who trust the host. The paradox is that the more trusted the media channel, the more difficult it is for you to appear when it suits you.
Buzz: This is a side effect of a good story and a medium that wants to carry it. In the hyper-parallel world of social media, there are an infinite number of tiny media outlets, and when they start to vibrate at the same frequency, buzz occurs. This is 5% preparation and 95% luck.
Hustle and Hype: Burning bridges and crossing lines just because it’s important to you. Please don’t. No one ever ends up glad they did this. It might not feel like hustle to the hustler, but if the person you’re targeting with your hype feels hustled, then that’s what’s happening.
But promotion is not worth much if it doesn’t translate into people actually purchasing and reading your book. Activation overcomes inertia, fear, and inconvenience. Activation energy leads to someone not only buying a book, but reading it.
Most publishers have someone who does publicity and promotion. Most marketers think about their job in the same way. Where are the teams that focus on activation?
In two recent book launches, I worked to create awareness with a record-breaking podcast tour. Each time I appeared on more than fifty podcasts on launch day. It took months of recording sessions and the kind support of some of the best podcasters in the world to pull this off.
Together we reached millions of people in just a few days. And yet, very few of these listeners bought a book as a result of a podcast. The math might be 1,000,000 YouTube interview views equals a hundred books sold.
The common-sense math is simple: Over the last two decades, hours spent listening to podcasts, blog posts and videos about non-fiction topics is exponentially higher than it was, but sales in the category are flat or down.
Podcast appearances often solve the problem of what’s in the book (“oh, I heard it, I get it”) as opposed to creating useful and generous tension that leads to a read.
[Let me pause for a second here and clarify: If you can effectively give your idea away without writing and publishing a book, please do! Most of my blog posts reach more people than my books do, and I keep them as posts because that’s the best way to get my point across. But if it’s worth publishing a book around a set of ideas, it’s probably not easily translated into a thirty-minute podcast. Buying, reading, holding, shelving, sharing–these are opportunities the book has to amplify its impact.]
Now, consider the idea of a knock-knock book. This is a book with a secret. The world asks about it (knock knock) and the answer is, “buy the book.” This was a big part of publishing for a long time—if you want to know, you needed to read the book. But now that the answer is free, online, there’s not a lot of reason left to buy this sort of book… If all a book has is a secret, it won’t have the secret for long. TLDR.
Instead, the most resilient books in this category serve a different purpose. They’re shareable. They amplify a network. They serve as an instigator and a totem, a device that allows one reader to share insights with another, all in service of getting in sync. Books are souvenirs for some purchasers, but tools for most of us.
The step after activation is the one with the highest leverage: Conversation.
Successful books in this category don’t sell by the copy; they sell by the carton.
How will my organization, my team or my relationships improve if we all read this book? Can we talk about these ideas and put them to work together?
This is why Purple Cow and The Dip were two of my bestselling books.
When David and Brian wrote The Dip into Billions, they were using it as a shorthand. The judge was saying, “we need to talk about this nuanced idea, here’s an anchor.” The book becomes the foundation for a conversation that needed to happen.
Books that matter over time almost always fit this description: Atomic Habits, In Search of Excellence, Grit, The War of Art, The Let Them Theory, Mindset, and Big Magic… practical books that stand for something and offer a foundation for shared exploration and possibility.
You can do all the promotion and activation you want, but if your book doesn’t support conversation, it will soon fade away.
Have you seen my book? →
I’ll grab a copy →
I need my friends to read this →
My circle is using this as a tool.
Don’t tell me about your promotional strategy. Talk to me about activation and build conversation into your work from the start.
“On the one hand, information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time.” Stewart Brand, 1984.
The two ideas don’t have to fight with each other. Information isn’t enough. It’s transformation and conversation that fuel our future.
