How Thought Leaders Win the Publishing Game | Ken Lizotte

Why Great Thought Leaders Don’t Play the Publisher’s Game

Peter talks with publishing expert Ken Lizotte about how thought leaders can turn their ideas into books that build authority and drive business growth. Ken explains why the real value of a book isn’t in sales, but in how it opens doors to speaking, consulting, and credibility opportunities. Together, they unpack how authors can choose the right publishing path and use their books as strategic tools for influence and impact.

What’s the real ROI of a book?

That’s the question Peter Winick poses to Chief Imaginative Officer of Emerson Consulting, author of “The Expert’s Edge: Become the Go-To Authority People Turn to Every Time” and publishing expert Ken Lizotte, in this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership.

Ken has helped more than 350 thought leaders turn their ideas into published works—books, blogs, and articles that position them as authorities in their fields. He’s seen it all: the excitement of a new book idea, the confusion around agents and publishers, and the reality that the book itself isn’t the profit center—it’s the door opener.

Ken breaks down the evolving world of publishing—traditional, hybrid, and self-publishing—and reveals how authors can choose the right path based on their business goals. He and Peter cut through the myths about literary agents, unpack how the publishing game really works, and share why alignment between author and publisher is so rare (and so essential).

More importantly, Ken makes it clear that a book’s success isn’t measured in units sold—it’s in how well it builds credibility, opens doors to speaking gigs, attracts clients, and establishes long-term brand authority. Whether you’re dreaming about your first book or looking to turn ideas into influence, this conversation will show you how to treat your book as a strategic asset, not just a creative project.

Three Key Takeaways

A Book’s True ROI Isn’t in Sales—It’s in Strategy. The financial return on a nonfiction book rarely comes from copies sold. Instead, it comes from what the book enables: paid speaking gigs, consulting work, and business growth. A book is a credibility tool, not a revenue product.
Authors Must Choose the Right Publishing “Game.” Traditional publishing, hybrid, and self-publishing each serve different goals. Ken stresses that authors need to decide early whether they’re playing the publisher’s game (focused on sales volume)
or their own game (using the book as a business and thought leadership tool).
A Great Book Builds Authority, Not Just Audience. The most successful thought leaders use their books to define expertise, attract the right clients, and create long-term influence. The focus shouldn’t be on pleasing everyone—it’s about reaching the
specific audience where your ideas have the greatest impact.

If you’re fired up by Ken Lizotte’s strategies for making a book a business-building tool, then you’ll definitely want to hear Lucinda Halpern’s episode too. In it, Lucinda debunks the myths that trap many thought leaders—like thinking an agent guarantees a book deal, that publishers will handle all marketing, or that you need huge social media numbers to get published. You’ll walk away with clearer insight into publishing timelines, how to build a platform that matters, and how to make a book a lead-generation engine, not just a creative side project.

Tune in and get sharper on how to align your ideas, your reach, and your publishing strategy—all toward real growth.

Transcript

Peter Winick And welcome, welcome, welcome. This is Peter Winick. I’m the founder and CEO at Thought Leadership Leverage, and you’re joining us on a version of our podcast that we do on LinkedIn Live. So my guest today is Ken Lizotte. Ken is an old friend. He is the author of seven books, including The Speaker’s Edge, the ultimate go-to guide for locating and landing lots of speaking gigs. He has written a whole bunch of other books. We won’t get into those just yet. He’s a columnist and a blogger at the Huffington He’s the Chief Imaginative Officer and Founder of Emerson Consulting, and he’s worked with over 350 clients towards their, you know, focusing on the publication of their books and articles. He’s a certified management consultant. He’s got lots of other accolades, but I don’t want to bore you with those. Not that they’re boring necessarily, but times running out. Exactly. So Ken, welcome aboard. Thanks for coming on today.

Ken Lizotte Thank you, thank you. My first ever been alive, so it’s a maiden voyage for me.

Peter Winick There we go. Yeah. I hear this internet thing is probably here to stay. So we wish you luck on that. Maybe. Um, so explain, you know, you and I have had this conversation, but explain for us in layman’s terms, what it is you do, who pays you to do what? Cause it’s a little bit confusing, but I think once you unpack it, it makes a ton of sense.

Ken Lizotte Well, not really, it shouldn’t really be confusing. My clients pay me. I, how does this sound for everybody? Great. Thanks. Okay. Thank you ladies and gentlemen. But my firm is the primary specialty is helping my clients. Get a book published if they, if they want to get a book publish. Sometimes people don’t really want to, get a book published there. It’s too overwhelming for them. In that case, we work with them on articles, and get articles, ongoing series of articles, so that they’re publishing their ideas, and in that way, they’re positioning themselves as thought leaders.

Peter Winick So that’s the whole, when you say you’re helping them get a book published, but you’re, you’re not an agent, right? You’re not a publicist. You’re not a ghost writer because people need to figure out. I think where do I put you in the spice rack?

Ken Lizotte Yeah, we’re actually my firm has got a small staff and my firm does provide all of those things. We do serve as an, as an agent the same way literate would serve, but we do it through, um, our, our fees, as opposed to the traditional agent approach, which is usually to take a percentage of royalties or an advance like that. And I learned early on when I started this business, 27 years ago, and my background had been in publishing and in writing and all. And I had been a ghostwriter at one time and I. Written articles on a regular basis and all. But when I got into this business what I really wanted to do is, was help people make their, their book or article dreams come true. And that sounds a little lofty, but it’s really true because people do. Have a sense very often that they, they’ve got an idea for a book and they, they’re, they’re biggest concern is whether or not anybody would publish it or is there any way anybody read it? Would anybody buy it? Would people laugh at it or would they not, or would it be taken seriously and all of that? And I actually, um, coordinated with my clients in the first year. Since I had known literary agents and I had own publishers. Directly myself, I thought the smart thing to do would be to work with literary agents, most of them at work and work with my clients and get paid for helping create a proposal, which is what one needs to do if they’re gonna, they’re gonna land a publishing deal and then turn it over to a literary engine and the interesting result of all of that after about six months, eight months or a year. None of the agents, these were top agents who got very excited about this or that, none of them came through with a publisher. And my client would say to me, “Ken, what’s going on with the agent? I hadn’t heard.” And guess what? I didn’t know because they wouldn’t, they wouldn’t respond to me either. If they didn’t have good news, agents don’t want to respond. So… After about like approaching a year at this, I said, you know, if this was all about failing, I can do that myself. Why do I have to delegate that? So that’s what I did. And so I took the literary agent piece and folded it into the writing and editorial where we helped create the proposal. And then as the years went on, Publicists we do offer publicist service as well promotion We do offer ghost writing but not yes, but not really Because what I learned in my own experience with those being a ghost writer and knowing ghost writers When I was younger is that it’s a very hard thing to pull off. No matter how great a writer you are it’s very hard to get into somebody else’s mind and experience and years of nuance and all of that, and really become that person. So sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. No, it’s tough.

Peter Winick So give us a sense though, you, so you’ve been at this game for quite some time, the sort of the changing landscape of publishing and what the expectations are. And then after you depress us with that, maybe enlighten us with a little bit of what a book can do for somebody from a career standpoint, from a business standpoint, getting the ideas out there standpoint.

Ken Lizotte Well, the biggest difference, but this really goes back decades, as opposed to just a few years, is that publishers do much less than they used to, I’m going to say like 30 or 40 or even 50 years ago, in terms of promoting their own books, and it’s all on the author now. So when I work with someone and we are preparing a book proposal, The most important piece of that book proposal, the most important, more important than the idea of the book, is what is the author prepared to do and what would be the author’s promotion plan.

Peter Winick It’ll stay there for a minute though, because this is where ultimately in many instances, there is, and will continue to be a lack of alignment between what the objectives of the author are and what the publisher, because at the end of the day, a publisher, good, bad, or ugly, it’s number of units sold times some profit margin in excess of an advance. If one was paid, if they don’t do that, they don’t get to stay in business.

Ken Lizotte Right. Exactly. And guess what? That’s the same as what the dynamic you encounter if you do a contract with an agent, so those agents that were not returning my calls as well as my client’s calls and then my client would have back in that situation would have signed a contract directly with the literary agent that I put.

Peter Winick Yes, not with you. Right, right, right.

Ken Lizotte Well, they weren’t getting return calls. And it really was before emails was, you know, as it, as it is now, but, but so the thing is that an agent whose income is reliant on what a publisher will bring to them and what the unit sold of a book will bring them. Means that they have to act in the very same way in terms of screening out.

Peter Winick Where I was going though is for many authors, a book could be wildly successful, except if you look at book scan and go, wait, that only sold X number of units. Because for an author, wildly successful might mean you got invited to the right stages, someone hired you as an advisor or consultant, all the other things that are not a couple of bucks that you’re gonna make on a per unit basis of the book. So I think in many instances, the relationship has so much tension. Due to the lack of alignment. So therefore, you know, when you start as mostly sort of New York publishing houses, we now have, you know, a continuum of ways to get things out into the marketplace. There’s self-publishing, there’s hybrid, right, which is kind of a sharing risk on the business model standpoint. And then there’s traditional, and I would argue that, you know if I put three bucks in front of you, you could look at them and tell which is which. 15 years ago I think you might have been able to from a quality standpoint, but. Qualities are non-negotiable. So talk about maybe the selection of the right business model type of publishing relative to a particular author’s goals and objectives.

Ken Lizotte Well, there’s two games. Well, when you’re, when your contracting with a publisher, you have a publisher as opposed to a self publishing or hybrid or any of that, I mean, that’s, that to me is all self publishing, but when you sign a contract with a publisher, it’s because you are agreeing to play their game, which is that you’re going to work very hard to get as many units sold as possible. That’s where the publisher makes its money. But, but in reality, most of my clients, although they would, you know, a lot of them would love to have a best selling by best seller, everyone can feel that. But what they really want is the credibility from having a book and the, the use of a book as a marketing tool for their businesses as much as for the book. But the publisher doesn’t really want that. So you’ve got to play both games or you got to kind of opt out of the, of the publisher’s game so that you can use your book to make more money. Now I, I know that you were involved in a major research recently or survey.

Peter Winick Yes. Yes.

Ken Lizotte And I know what came out of that. And I actually participated, but I chose not to because I kind of wanted to just see what other people like you, you know, came up with in terms of the reason.

Peter Winick Yeah, well, and just to fill in folks, what we’re talking about, we published back in the fall, the largest ever comprehensive research study done at looking at the question of what is the ROI of a nonfiction book. So it was it was a partnership between my firm fault leadership leverage, Gotham ghost writing, Smith PR, and amplified press. So we wanted to answer this question, because we’re each in the space serving similar people doing different things. Well, so. What was your take on that? Other than the greatest report I’ve ever read.

Peter Winick If you’re enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe. If you’d like to help spread the word about our podcast, please leave a five-star review at ratethispodcast.com/LTL and share it with your friends. We’re available on Apple Podcasts and on all major listening apps, as well as at thoughtleadershipleverage.com/podcast.

Ken Lizotte What was that too, of course. That’s the first thing you can think of. You and this, then the others that were involved with Josh Burnoff was why, yeah. Yeah. But anyway, um, what, what it was, was it affirmed what I already knew. It confirmed it. I was kind of wondering if I’ve been missing something every now and then you want to do a reality show. So, you know, and, but it was the same thing. That’s you found that people made money people were surveyed made money by other means than sales of books you made money from speaking engagements and or consulting fees and you know training all those kinds of things those are the things the way you can say this book made me money.

Peter Winick So stay there a minute because A, that is one of the insights from the research. But what’s interesting about that is you say, okay, so you make money from selling a book by making money by selling things, not the book. So if I was in the candy business, I wanna sell the candy for a margin that drops a profit, right? So it would be number of candy bars or bags of candy or whatever. And I’m counting the days till Halloween and blah, blah,blah, blah. No, the book is quite different because you could also have a book that is commercially incredibly successful, sells a ton of copies, et cetera, et cetera, but for some reason doesn’t resonate with the market that it should have resonated to grow the business of the thought leader. That’s unusual, but that happens too. So it’s, it’s not a exact correlation necessarily of the more you sell, the more you’re exposed to the right people. It’s got to get to the right people and I think, and I’d love to get your cake on this. A lot of authors try to please everyone as opposed to getting really, really laser focused and saying, you know what? Most of the world doesn’t care who I am, what I do, what I write about, what I research about, and that’s okay. Keep it laser focused on the, on that small slice of the population where your work would have the greatest impact. So how, how would you think about that?

Ken Lizotte To me that that sounds like the sort of the normal course of business. And in some ways, a lot of times when we, we start out with a company in a service that we think is the service that would really want to promote who our target market about to be is different than what we thought it’s like, for example, before I started this business, I was in a different one Alright. Was helping people in mid-career crisis to work that out for themselves and maybe make a career change or something like that. And that was at a time, that was in the 90s, it was at time when there was a recession going on and it was also the time when all this right-sizing and downsizing and everything was going crazy. When I would be talking to somebody or at a party or something and they’d say, Whoa, what do you do? I’d say, well, I’m helping people get out of, um, you know, career crisis and this and that. And invariably the person would say to me, well gee, wow, you must be booming. And guess what? I wasn’t booming yet. Okay. Because I looked at the attendance sheets that had passed out when it went out and spoke, or I looked that who, who our clients were, what their situation was, and very, very, few of them were unemployed. People were not coming to me or to us, my partner, and then we realized that people who were coming were people who still had a job, but they could look down the road and say, I think I’ve got to make a change, but I’m going to take some time and reflect and figure it out. So I found that it was a different clientele that I had to go and I can see that that could happen with a book. But I think that the idea is that Yeah. In most cases, what I see, and I see a couple of my, my, what I call client thought leaders and that have some messages here. Todd Churches is saying that I got him a book deal with Simon Schuster Post Hill Press helped him get his book Visual Leadership and brand out there in the world. I know taught what Todd does. He’s very careful about what a lot of his energy. So, that’s him. And then another one that I see is Jen Fried, who’s, who saying that I helped, I helped Ken too. My hope is that my dream can then used to come true. Jan is also really focused on speaking engagements and to the right audience and this and that. So you’ve got to, I think what I’m saying is that it couldn’t go in another direction and maybe that’ll be okay for you. But if it’s not, then use the book as a tool for who you want to get to. … And if nothing else, people are just plain impressed when you have a book, whether they read it, whether they buy it, whether this or that, it’s a tool that really validates the fact that you’re an expert.

Peter Winick And, and, you know, the other disconnect, if you will, between what works or what is a best practice for an author and a publisher is books, no pun intended, have a long shelf life for an offer. But for a publisher, they think about them as seasonal, you know, releases, because that’s the cadence of the business, right? Like I have a spring release of a fall release, whatever, Todd, I’ll point out Todd, because he’s a mutual friend. His book is out. I think it’s two years, maybe maybe three, Todd. And he’s still getting attention from it. He’s still getting that new people reaching out and because

Ken Lizotte They’ll using it and that he’s still using the picture that I gave you to put out to everybody who’s attending had me holding this book, the experts edge that pub well published. Okay. The experts edge become the go-to authority people turn to every time. Okay. They, they actually put that title and subtitle on there, but yeah. Well, yeah. When, when, when did I publish this? When did I have this published? Late 2008. Well, Billy, he’s in it. You didn’t, you didn’t ask me whether or not the book I am holding in the photo was a recent book, you just accepted the photo, but this, but is a still an important book for a lot of people I know.

Peter Winick But most books are evergreen and principle based, right? If that, if you were pointing out a book in 2008 on, I don’t know, best software to use to automate your office, you know, I probably wouldn’t be interested in that.

Ken Lizotte Yeah, exactly. That’s true. Yeah. Yeah, so that’s most of the most of the point, I think, as far as that goes. How’s the

Peter Winick Cool! So as we start to enter the last couple of minutes here, somebody’s out there theoretically, or hopefully considering writing a book, what would you tell them to consider and what would tell them to think about before they choose to sort of dive in?

Ken Lizotte The first thing I do in a case like that, when someone comes to me like that is help them understand just what we’re talking about today. What are the two options here? What are the, I call them games. What are they two games? You’re going to play the publisher’s game or are you going to play your game and your game means that the smartest way, the most logical way to go about it is to self-publish, which I offer that service to. Like, I’m not trying to convince anybody to go this way or that way. I think they just need to know what the ups and downs are of each of these. And when you look at it logically, self-publishing makes way more sense than having, because you’ve got the control of being able to control the content, the title, the cover, this and that. You don’t get all the time to market. Yeah, or whether even whether to market the market. So, it’s very important to make that decision in the beginning. And then once you’ve made that decision, then we can go forward and we can get the book that you want to, to put out for you to find a publisher for it. And we’ll just keep the fact that I get paid for this and it’s a set fee. It’s not like I get payed month after month after months, but, and I can draw this out. The fact that I get what’s called a consulting fee for this is that I will keep going. I mean, people say, well, where’s your incentive? Sometimes I hear that. Where’s your incentives? Where’s the traditional literary agent’s incentive if they’re going to get 10% of nothing. I, it’s the same as any consultant or any service provider or whatever. I want, I hire, you hire me here. I want you to be saying to people, yeah, I know that Ken was on he got my book published. Yeah. I don’t want you, you to say, you’d be saying, well, you know, I spent a lot of money and he’s a nice guy, but nothing much happened. That’s not how it works.

Peter Winick Right. No, it’s about it’s got to be about the outcome. It’s got to be bad. The results and, you know, part of what someone is paying for is the experience part of someone is paying for is when they’re working with someone like you, they’re going to make less mistakes than they would have if they didn’t write because you could point out things that are like, well, here’s why we don’t do things that seem that that that would make sense to you to do. So cool. Any other final No pressure, but final words of wisdom that could change the directory or trajectory of someone’s life.

Ken Lizotte Just that if they have an idea for a book, whether they hire me or not, they should know that we’re in a landscape right now where it can be done. Whether option to that option, this game or that game, it can done. And people should not be you know, you still got a lot of this leftover baggage about whether a publisher would care about it or not. If you look for enough, look to enough publishers, you’re going to find a publisher no matter what your idea.

Peter Winick I think it’s a matter of if it’s the right publisher for you based on your goals, objectives and desired outcomes. So this has been great. I appreciate you, Ken. I appreciate your wisdom. You’ve been around this for a long time and had your hands in hundreds and hundreds of projects. So, I appreciate you. And thank you for sharing some time with us today.

Ken Lizotte Fun coming on what are we going to do tomorrow you and me?

Peter Winick I don’t know I haven’t thought that far ahead. Thanks Ken.

Ken Lizotte Okay. Bye. Bye everybody.

Peter Winick To learn more about Thought Leadership Leverage, please visit our website at thoughtleadershipleverage.com. To reach me directly, feel free to email me at peter at thoughtleadershipleverage.com, and please subscribe to Leveraging Thought Leadership on iTunes or your favorite podcast app to get your weekly episode automatically.