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Why Business Books Should Build Your Business | Lucy McCarraher
Turn expert authorship into authority and revenue
This episode looks at how business books can build authority, attract clients, and support growth when they are written for a clear audience and used as part of a broader marketing strategy.
What if your book was never meant to make money on the shelf, but to make money in the business?
In this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, Peter Winick talks with Lucy McCarraher, co-founder of Rethink Press, founder of the Business Book Awards, and author of 17 books, about what business books are really for. Lucy makes a clear case that for entrepreneurs, consultants, and experts, a book is not just a product. It is a growth tool. It builds authority. It attracts ideal clients. And it opens doors that traditional marketing cannot.
Lucy breaks down the core shift in publishing. In the old model, publishers decided which books made it to market and success was measured in copies sold. In today’s environment, that model no longer serves every expert. Lucy explains why the smartest business authors are not writing to win shelf space. They are writing to win trust, create demand, and move prospects toward deeper engagement.
The conversation goes deep into Lucy’s practical framework for business authors: person, pain, and promise. She explains why strong thought leadership begins with knowing exactly who the book is for, what problem that reader is trying to solve, and what promise the book delivers. That clarity shapes everything, from the title and subtitle to the structure, stories, and case studies inside the book.
Lucy also challenges one of the biggest mistakes experts make. Too many authors write the book they want to write instead of the book their market needs to read. She argues that the most effective business books are built around a proven methodology, real client outcomes, and stories that help the reader see themselves in the work. The goal is not to impress. The goal is to create relevance, credibility, and action.
The episode also tackles the hardest part of authorship: marketing. Lucy shares why authors need to stop obsessing over book sales and start thinking strategically about distribution. A business book, in her view, is an “undercover sales agent.” Given to the right people, at the right time, in the right way, it becomes far more valuable than a brochure, a business card, or a one-off pitch.
This is a smart conversation for any leader using thought leadership to grow a business. Lucy brings clarity to what makes a business book work, why authority comes from usefulness, and how the right book can become one of the most effective assets in your commercial strategy.
Three Key Takeaways:
- A business book should do more than sell copies. It should build authority, attract ideal clients, and support the author’s broader business goals.
- Strong books are built around a clear audience, a specific problem, and a compelling promise. That clarity makes the content more useful and more marketable.
- The real value of a book often comes from how it is used. Given to the right prospects and partners, it can be a powerful marketing and sales tool.
If this conversation got you thinking about how a book can do more than sell copies, don’t miss our episode with Erika Andersen. It takes the next step by exploring how thought leadership builds credibility, sharpens your value, and creates real business impact. Tune in to hear how strong ideas become trusted authority.
Transcript
Peter Winick And welcome, welcome, this is Peter Winick. I’m the founder and CEO at Thought Leadership Leverage and you’re joining us on the podcast today which is Leveraging Thought Leadership. Today my guest is Lucy McCarraher. She co-founded Rethink Press in 2011 with her business partner Joe Gregory. It’s a hybrid publisher and they publish business books for entrepreneurs and authors. She started working with Dent Global in 2013 and mentors lots of entrepreneurs. She founded the business book awards and oh, yes, there’s this, she’s written 17 books, so if we want to know about the world of publishing books and authorship, I thought Lucy would be someone fun to talk to. So welcome, Lucy.
Lucy McCarraher Thank you so much, Peter. Thank you for inviting me. It’s lovely to be here.
Peter Winick Wait, so give me sort of a high level, right? Just the landscape of publishing. What’s changed and what hasn’t in the last, call it, 20 years?
Lucy McCarraher In the last 20 years, well, it’s a lot has changed in the last 20 years and mainly due to technology, I suppose. I mean, before that publishers were the gatekeeper to who could have their book published, who could help their book distributed as much as anything else, because they held the key to bookshops and you really, if you were an author who decided to write and print their own book, it was virtually impossible to get your book distributed anywhere. So that gave rise to the kind of the idea that and the rather unpleasant phrase of vanity publishing because if you got somebody else to publish your book, you couldn’t actually get a contract with the publisher. It seemed like you were vain because a publisher didn’t think your work was good enough, which was in many cases deeply unfair.
Peter Winick Stay there a minute because there’s a lot there and I want to unpack some of that. So the decision that a publisher used to have to make was did it align with the publisher’s goals, not the author’s goals. And the publisher goals have not changed. How many books can we sell and we’re going to make some level of profit per unit sold, right? But for many authors, forget the vanity thing, because I think that’s, I think those days are mostly behind us. But an author could decide to write a book and say. I’m just writing it because I want to write it. I don’t care how many units it sells or actually do care how many units that sells, but I’m the VP of sales. Why should I give someone else 80 cents on the dollar? So to me, there were these, yeah, I get there was a, there was a curation piece and if you knew if something came out from random house, it was likely not junk, et cetera, et cetera. But I think it’s really about goals and objectives. And I think if you look at the two populations, the publishing community, the author community. They’re often looking for different things out of a book at a point in time. How do you feel about that?
Lucy McCarraher Absolutely. No, I totally agree with that. And I mean, you know, you and I are in the arena of what we’ll loosely call business books. And our definition of a business book at Rethink Press, and book magic is that it’s a book that builds the author’s business exactly as you have said. And for a traditional publisher has a has a business model that is, as you say, all about building their business, not the author business. So, and the only way they can do that is invest in the book and the production of the book, and then make their money back on sales of individual books, usually through, you know, what we call the book trade, so distribution through bookshops or online booksellers. Well, as you say, entrepreneurs, experts, business owners, coaches, consultants can make the return on the investment in their book, not just through sales of books. But through encouraging their ideal clients to come back and work with them, through giving their book to prospects, to partners, through raising their visibility by giving their book to people who have podcasts or speak or give, you know, arranging speaking opportunities, all that sort of thing. So the book is not just a product to to an expert or an entrepreneur, it is also a marketing tool. And that’s the big difference. And what happened with print-on-demand and Amazon and self-publishing is it allowed that kind of author to publish their own books and reap the benefits in different ways.
Peter Winick So stay there for a minute, because if we look at this market, everybody’s looking for the reader’s attention, right? Everybody’s looking a reader, right. If you publish a book, you would hope that someone buys it and then reads it. There are far more books being published today than there were five years ago, 10 years ago and certainly 20 years ago. Yet the last time I checked, there’s still only 24 hours in my day, right, so it’s almost by increasing the available supply you’ve kind of raised the bar, right, because when I go to buy a book today, quite frankly, I don’t care if it cost me 20 or 30 bucks, if I can pick a nugget out, or an idea out, or something that’s interesting, it’s worth every penny. If I start to read it, and it doesn’t do anything for me, I’m not going to continue to waste five more hours of time, right? You know, it s like it s the sudden pause fallacy if you walk out of a play that s really awful, you know, and I think the reality is if you’re not catching the reader, if you’re not ending them where they are. You know, and it’s, it’s niched out far more than it has before. So how do you, how do you succeed as an author? Now I’m going to ask you to put your author hat on versus your publisher hat. How do you deal with that?
Lucy McCarraher Yeah, absolutely. I mean, my author and my mentor hat as well is about understanding for those entrepreneurs and experts, understanding what kind of book they’re writing and crucially for who and not thinking, oh, I’ve got to have a huge new unique earth shattering idea that is going to, you know, take the entire world by storm and become an international bestseller. That’s not the kind of a book. I mean, of course, that’d be lovely if you did that too, but that’s not kind of book that builds your business. The book that builds your business is aimed specifically at your ideal prospect. So other people will read it, of course, beyond that particular niche. But if you talk to your ideal prospects, if you understand where they are when they’re coming, looking for you, your book and your services, and you can outline in your book, how you solve their problem or answer their question or soothe their pain, whatever it is through your book.
Peter Winick And that’s a difficult needle to thread because by definition, a book is a mass market product, right? Anybody that buys my book is going to read the same 230 pages as anybody else. But I have to make it feel bespoke. Like when you’re reading it, you need to say like, wow, Peter wrote this or Lucy wrote this specifically for me. That’s the thing that was keeping me up at night, right. And that means you really have to know your market. You have to your audience, not just demographically, but psychographically. And you also want to. Put a book at least I think I’d love to hear your thoughts in a way that doesn’t date it quickly like I always think about books is they need to be evergreen and they should have no pun intended a shelf life of five six seven years or other otherwise you’re trying to catch a wave You know, like to write a book on best practices of AI today would be silly, because by the time it was published, it would be outdated. But the principles were different. So how do you deal with that of making a book feel like, oh, my God, she wrote this just for me when I’m writing. You’re writing it for hundreds, if not thousands of parts.
Lucy McCarraher You literally do write it for that person. You identify, I mean, we have a tool that we call the three P’s of position, and it’s very simple, but it’s very effective. So the first thing, the first P is the person, and you identify them very, very carefully. And you, you know, you go very wide and you see, you know, all the problems that your client will have your ideal prospect, but then you go very tight and you identify, you know, one single overarching problem that every single one of your prospects will have if they are likely to come back and work with you. And the second P is pain. And that is identifying where they are, what that problem is and where they’re coming to find you, to look for the solution to that pain exactly at what point they’re at. And the third P is promise. And that’s the book you write. The promise that you are offering them. And that should be reflected in your title and subtitle, in your cover design and in the content of your book. It is all about, it is talking to that person directly. So they know, they absolutely feel this book is for me, this author is for me, their business and their services are for me. And I think one of the keys to writing a book that brings people back to work with you is putting in lots of good, short, compelling case studies. Where you show, they’re not testimonials, they’re case studies that you’re giving as the author of people you have worked with, clients you’ve worked with you maybe, anonymizing them, that doesn’t matter. But where you a problem, you describe your intervention and you talk about the outcome. And you want every single prospect who reads the book to go, oh, that’s me. I want that, I see that that’s what they can do. And you know, you want them to do that two or three times.
Peter Winick Yeah, stay there a second because what you’re talking about is a great framing of a process that people need to engage with before they write the book. And far too often what I see is, because writing is somewhat of a solitary, isolated thing, people lock themselves up, write the book that they wanted to write, which is actually a silly activity, because the book that you wanna write, if it’s not a Venn diagram over against a book that people wanna read, you know? That’s not a productive use of time. So I think what you need to come up with is a hypothesis of, here’s what I think I have expertise in. Here’s what the world would like to know or what I could share and help and whatever. But then before you put pen to paper, go through a process like yours to say, who are you really writing that for? Who could benefit the most from that? What is it that you want them to do? And unlike other products, the goal of a book or not the goal, but a primary goal of the book is not to get people to buy the book. But is to get a subset of people that have bought the book to engage with you in other ways, right? Speaking, consulting, like there’s a million other things and that’s really weird, right, because if I’m in a consumer packaged goods and I sell you a lipstick, the goal is for you to enjoy the lipstick, not to say, oh, buy other things. So how do you get people to test their ideas to see if there’s market for them versus it’s just some intellectual internal FANTASY.
Lucy McCarraher Well, I think they’ve already tested their ideas by having a business. So I think you should, I think you should have your business and your methodology in place before you start writing your book. I mean, there is the odd person who has such a clear idea of what they’re going to do that they can start their business from a book, which can also be useful for most people. I would say you need to be embedded in your business. You need to have your methodology, very secure. You need to have those case studies I’m talking about. So then you are not, you don’t have to test the market because your business is your market. What you’re doing for your business is what you’re talking about in your book. You’re taking them through. I mean, for a start, you give them the benefit of your knowledge and your experience and perhaps how your industry has changed and why they need to be doing things differently from what they are, but you are taking them. Through your methodology is always a great structure for book. So, you know, first I do this, then we do this. Um, if you have, for example, an acronym or, you know, your methodology is a model that you can, you can show, then that works brilliantly as chapters in your book as a structure.
Peter Winick Yeah. So I, I love that idea. And I think that wise authors almost not only just put out their methodology, but they’ll say, Hey, here’s a matrix or a framework or whatever it is. And it’s been developed over 15 years with 500 clients, just like you. And quite frankly, if I would have shown you my first models, I’d be embarrassed to put them out now. So, you know, you’re getting the benefit of lots and lots of thought cycles. And you’re not the first one to go through this process, right? Like, if you had a medical issue and went to… A brain surgeon, because he needed a brain tumor, he probably wouldn’t open the opening conversation with, oh, and it’s my first day on the job. I’m so glad. Right? Like, like that wouldn’t work. But it’s you know, there’s and I guess where I’m going with that, that there’s a fine line between the puffery and gravitas. And far too often too many first time authors are telling you far too much about how great they are. And not about the benefit that they brought to the world through. Like you said, the testimonials and all that, because nobody wants to hear how great you are.
Lucy McCarraher No, no, absolutely. And I mean, the other kind of stories that I think authors should put in their books are stories about their own journey, their learning journey, how they became the expert in their field. But do not start your book with a whole chapter on this is my life. You know, here’s my autobiography. This is why I’m writing this book. It’s all about me, because it’s not it’s all about your reader and your prospect who’s reading the book and wants to have their problem solved. So I think it’s great to put in little anecdotes, drop them in, you know, to illustrate.
Peter Winick Stay there with the journey because one is as you’re saying that I’m thinking in my head over lots of folks that I’ve worked with over the years and the journeys are sometimes fascinating because it’s really asking the question of why would anyone listen to you and so the journey is well I used to be this and that and then I started like so where have they been oh they’ve had some interesting perspectives right they’ve been in the boardroom or they’ve been on the shop floor or they started companies and sold them so therefore you should listen to about. How to be an entrepreneur, like, because there’s lots of other people that are out there sort of pontificating and you say, okay, well, you’re talking about leadership. Who have you led or how have you lead? Or is this some abstract theoretical whatever, but you haven’t had P&L responsibility or you don’t know what it’s like when you can’t make payroll as an entrepreneur and you’ve got to scramble to get those done. So I think that’s important to A, be relatable and credible in a way that’s not obnoxious, if you will.
Lucy McCarraher Yeah, exactly. And if you break up your journey into little anecdotes, so it’s not too much about you as any one time, then you are getting that you are being vulnerable, you are showing, you know, how you’ve come by your knowledge, what you’re often talking about times that you failed before you succeeded. So you’re getting people to know, like and trust you to realize that you have been on the journey that they are on now, and you’re ahead of them, So you can help them achieve what you’ve now achieved. And I think that’s a really nice way of doing it. So just dropping them in through the book, but not just making it all about you to start with.
Peter Winick Right, so I wanna segue a little bit in the last few minutes that we have. So we’ve really been talking about sort of the ideation and what makes for a good book and all that sort of stuff. And by the way, that’s the easy part. Let’s talk about the hard part, right? So what are your thoughts, ideas, what are you seeing as it relates to the marketing of a book? Because as difficult as it is to write a high quality book, marketing it is harder and harder and hard. So what thoughts do you have on that regard?
Lucy McCarraher It is absolutely. And, and, you know, lots of authors think, Oh, you know, I’ve got my book written and published. The work’s over. Now it will go out and work for me. And to some extent it will, but no, you have to really go out there and market your book to your own niche. And I would say that one of the key things you need to do is stop fixating about how many books are going to be sold because that’s not where you’re going to make your money, but give books away to the right people.
Peter Winick So stay there for a minute, because it’s so unlike any other product, right? Where you say the success of any other products, right. B2B, B2C, whatever is how many units are you selling, right, what’s the growth, what’s, the margin, et cetera. But this concept of giving it away, right if, you know, if I were to decide to open a restaurant in my local community and say, you know what I’m going to do? I’m just going to give away all the food. Yeah, I’d probably have lines out the door, right but you’re right, because the goal of the book isn’t the revenue captured from the book revenue. But giving it away deliberately, thoughtfully, strategically, right? And then I think that the giving it a way, when you think about that, we’ve developed and devised lots and lots of campaigns. It’s not just me handing it to you. That’s great. But what if we had, if I didn’t know you and there was a trusted friend that we had in the middle and the friend said, Hey, Lucy, Peter, you know, my, my colleague, Peter wrote a book and I think you’d appreciate it. Might I ask him to send one over?
Lucy McCarraher Yeah, that is a great way. That’s social proof, isn’t it social proof for you, the author that somebody else is promoting your book for you and you know, a great way of getting extra mileage out of out of getting to your market and getting to other people’s markets. I think that’s a terrific idea. All those sorts of things are incredibly helpful, I think. I mean, one of the things that we do regularly is to give online free master classes about how to write books and because that’s our, that’s what we’re selling. And we always give away the book to people who come on the master classes or the people who register for the masterclasses. So you’re growing your market. But I do think, I mean you give away, you wouldn’t charge for a marketing brochure or a business card and really a book fits into that pipeline. It is I mean, we always call your book your undercover sales agent because it has it does have a price. It does have the value. Some people will pay for it. So as a gift, it is valuable. And the format of a book is unique. I mean it is ageless, but it is also very modern. So there is, you know, nobody’s going to throw a book away. They’ll put your card in the bin. They’ll dump your your brochure. So it’s funny.
Peter Winick It’s funny that you say that, so I’m drowning in books, which is not a complaint, it’s a good thing. I’ll throw away, I get my mail and I’ll throw away catalogs and all that stuff all day every day, because it doesn’t interest me. I’m not in the market for furniture this week or whatever, but somebody sends me a book, unless it’s really crappy paperback or something like that. I feel guilty, I might not read it, I’ll skim, I’ll take a look, but putting it in the trash bin, it’s like, oh, to me that’s a sin.
Lucy McCarraher Yes, yes, yes. I mean, a book is a cultural icon, isn’t it? You have to value it. And also your book, more than anything, any other single thing, you’re a book says expert, nothing else says expert like your name on the front of an actually beautifully printed and produced book. And that is the value. And then you read it, you know, you also that allows you to raise your prices, go to classier clients, if you like, once you have proved yourself as the author of a book. You’ve done something really special. So it’s, you know, that in itself is a sales.
Peter Winick Well, this has been a lot of fun. I appreciate you sharing your wisdom and your stories and your insights with us, Lucy. I appreciate it. Thank you so much.
Lucy McCarraher Thank you for having me, Peter.
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 thoughtledershipleverage.com, and please subscribe to Leveraging Thought Leadership on iTunes or your favorite podcast app to get your weekly episode automatically.
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