How publishing's broken, and what to do about it.

At the end of 2024, Emily Ross and I sent #justevilenough to the printer. Three thousand copies will roll off the press in a few days. Soon after, It'll be in our hands—and those of the hundreds who've already preordered it. A month or so later, it'll be in booksellers as a hardcover, audiobook, and ebook. To make this book what we wanted it to be, we had to dig at the coalface of publishing. We learned much more than we wanted to about the industry.

I promised myself I'd share what I learned once it was done, and this is that post. I suspect you'll look at books very differently after reading it.

Just Evil Enough is about subverting entrenched systems, and there are few systems as entrenched as publishing. We're doing a number of things to challenge that system (more on that below) but the first step in subverting anything is understanding the system you're in.

Here's what I've learned

The economics of books

In 2025, there are three book formats that make money: Print, audio, and ebook.

Printed books

While there are still booksellers like Waterstones, Borders, Indigo, and independent booksellers, the 800lb Gorilla in the room is Amazon. It sets the norms—and dictates the prices—for the rest of the industry.

Here's how much money an author makes when they sell through Amazon.

• Amazon takes an astonishing 55% of the book's list price. They do quite a lot in return, including storage, invoicing, delivery logistics, and returns.
• Someone has to get the book to the Amazon warehouses. One of the biggest players here (which we're using) is Ingram. They get 40% of the remaining 45%.
• This means that 27% is left for the publisher and author.

Out of that, you've got to pay for the physical book. Ours has over 400 pages (lots of footnotes and endnotes, plus a ton of useful content and over 150 case studies.) We also care about making something that will last, and that feels like an artifact. So in a quantity of 3,000, our book costs around $10 per book to print.

• If $10 is 27% of proceeds, then if you charge anything less than $38, you lose money on every book you sell.

That doesn't include the costs of bringing the print-ready manuscript into the world. These are substantial. We went through 10 rounds of edits, extensive fact-checking, several iterations of layout with custom diagrams, the creation of an index, and project management, with the help of our publisher, Whitefox. Even the registering of an ISBN costs money.

• Every year your book is available, it sits in multiple warehouses, for which there's a warehousing fee. Currently this is around ￡450 per warehouse per year.

Here's a (very rough) chart of book costs:

0.6% of the book price is not a lot of room for error. Some people publish a book and figure, "we'll make it back in ebooks and audiobooks." It's true that most of the distribution and unit production costs go away in that case—but there are other factors that make it really hard for authors to break even.

Audiobooks

Recording and editing an audiobook costs around $10,000 (for the studio rental, someone who reads along with you, and the post-production editing to take out hisses and artifacts.) That's if you read it yourself (I did.) It takes around 2 weeks to record. You can only record 3 hours at a time before your voice starts to crack. It's mentally exhausting too, because you're second-guessing yourself as you go.

You might think an audiobook was all profit. After all, we could easily set up a store for people to buy the book and pay us some money. But the audiobook consists of a few platforms that charge onerous prices for one simple reason: Illegal copies. Without a way to control copying, nobody would buy a copy.

(This isn't cynicism; when Radiohead released In Rainbows as a pay-what-you will free download, ten times more people downloaded it via illegal torrents than they did from the band's website. There's a case study on this in the book.)

So how do you fix this?

Watermarking is one approach, but watermarking every recording for an individual buyer is costly, and almost impossible to enforce. Unlike things destined for a public forum (such as stock photos) it's economically unfeasible. Plus, culturally, people hate this. You look like an ogre for trying to enforce your right to get paid. It's not like we're going to track a download and take that person to court—and if we did, we'd get the same disdain people have for Getty Images.

The other solution, which led to the world we have today, is platform capture. By only making the audiobook available to a user logged into an app, copying becomes much harder. There are two approaches here: Store an encrypted file on a device that only a logged-in user can listen to (Audible) or stream the audio to the user on demand (Spotify, which recently purchased Findaway Voices for around $130 million.)

Pricing gets complicated quickly. There's a good writeup on audiobook pricing, which varies by platform, from Daniel J. Tortora. But the short version is that the platform gets the majority of revenues for building the app and website, listing your product, handling the transaction, and managing access.

• You can buy a book on Audible (which controls between 63% and 90% of the market) and get paid 25% of the list price—or 40%, if you agree to an exclusive contract with them. This is much, much lower than the 70% of revenues that an app developer keeps when they publish to an app store. To encourage authors to charge a pittance for their work, if you set your book price below $9.99, you get to keep 70% of royalties.
• There's a reason for this: Since Audible is a subscription service, readers get a book credit they can apply to a book. The author gets less money when a book is purchased using a credit (and the reader can exchange the book, which can cost an author a big chunk of their already slim earnings.) It's in Audible's best interest to keep book prices low so it can give a subscriber their monthly credit and still make a profit.
• Apple Books pays authors what they pay game developers—70% of the book's price.

Streaming is an entirely different game.

To understand why, you need to know that most people don't finish business books—they tend to be more aspirational, and sit on a bookshelf (hopefully ours is the exception, but I know this from Kindle data about Lean Analytics.)

There's actually a metric for this, called the Hawking Index. American mathematician Jordan Ellenberg used an analysis of which passages in a book were quoted to estimate how far readers made it in a text, and wrote the results in a 2014 WSJ article. Here are his estimates at that time

But 100% of the people who bought Hard Choices paid for it. Whereas streaming models pay creators for the time spent consuming their creation. This means that streaming books inevitably reduces author revenue, because a reader buys an entire book but only the parts of a stream they listen to.

• Spotify's new book model pays out the way music streaming does: The author only gets paid once 10% of the book has been read. Back in 2023 the Author's Guild said Spotify was only paying out when most of the book had been read. The company includes 15 hours of audiobook a month—enough time to listen to all of Just Evil Enough—as part of its normal paid subscription to the service.
• Initially, Findaway Books' license for streaming made it sound like Spotify could create derivative works from audiobooks. They clarified their position in the ensuing backlash.
• Findaway pays out more money for a book, but only based on what's listened to. It's not clear what that works out to, and it depends on who else is feeding at the trough for a particular title.

Given the rising popularity of audiobooks and the ubiquity of mobile devices and headphones, it's entirely reasonable for an author to start with an audiobook. You save a lot on layout and editing—though if your text is heavy on diagrams or images, it's not an option. The notion that an audiobook is an audio version of a printed book, rather than the only version of a book, is merely a convention.

And then there's ebooks.

ebooks

ebooks have the same copying problem as audiobooks. In fact, I get a few notifications a month about illegal downloadable PDFs of Lean Analytics 12 years after its release. I have Google Alerts set up for these:

If you sell an ebook exclusively through Amazon, they pay reasonably well, as long as you stay on their platform:

• You get 70% of royalties if you agree that only Amazon can sell your book. Authors who want to make a profit from their work often choose this option. We want the ideas in Just Evil Enough to be as widely read as possible, and we love the folks at O'Reilly, so we're not taking this option in order to make it available on other platforms.
• For having the temerity to sell our book elsewhere, Amazon will keep an additional 40% of our money. Yep, us simply wanting to sell through other ebook channels means we earn only 35%.
• ebooks tend to be priced at 25-35% of their hardcover versions. Business ebooks are priced around $15. We did the math (which I'll show you below.)

An ebook author makes between $5.20 and $10.50 depending on whether they're willing to sell your soul to Amazon (and limit their market to only those who have its reader on their device.)

Other ways to make money

Not every author expects to make money from the sale of their book through booksellers. Some of the other ways to monetize a book include:

Direct sales

If you sell your book to the customer, you get to eliminate most of these middlemen. Contrary to popular opinion, this is not the same as self-publishing. Authors can divert a batch of their books to themselves if their publisher will let them—it's just that their publisher doesn't usually want to, because then it can't recoup its investment in producing the book.

Even if you find a publisher willing to do this (we do—it's one of the main reasons we chose Whitefox), it's really hard. You quickly realize all of the things publishers do that you take for granted, such as logistics from printer to warehouse, and from warehouse to customer (we use ShipBob), payment systems (bank, incorporation), tax numbers for each fulfilment region, customer support, returns and disposals, etc. You probably need to set up a storefront (we use Shopify; there are options like Gumroad and some people just use Stripe or Paypal.)

It is a lot of work. More than you think, even after reading this.

Also, none of these sales count towards bestseller lists, rankings, and other forms of social proof. We've sold nearly a thousand preorders for Just Evil Enough, but none of them counts as a bookseller sale.

Buy me a beer. I have stories to tell.

Event sales

A speaker can ask an event to buy some of their books directly from the author. Since these have a much higher margin than bookseller sales, it's a way to make money back. But again, direct-from-author sales are hard.

If an author is trying to juice their sales number, they may ask the conference to buy from a bookseller instead. I know multiple conference organizers who have hundreds of unread books in storage containers, simply to help an author hit bestseller lists.

Credibility

Ever wonder why politicians release a book before they run for office? Once upon a time, writing a book was a sure path to legitimacy.

This is no longer the case, as anyone who knows how many views Haliey Welch and Moo Deng got online. Modern legitimacy comes from popularity, not publishing. But it's not just our viral-obsessed, short-attention society at work here.

Traditional publishing was once hard, and as a result, had quality filters. Publishers and agents and editors ensured that if something hit bookshelves, its author had thought about it. Now, however, ghost-writing is easy. Those politicians have help. If someone is famous, but not famous for writing, then they didn't write that book. This is only getting easier with the brainrot of AI.

Writing is not vomiting words

That's a problem for readers who want to learn, rather than simply eat summaries. Writing is more than just vomiting ideas onto pages and fixing the spelling. Writing is thinking. Emily and I have been thinking about the ideas in our book for nearly a decade. We have entire drafts we've thrown out.

Want proof? Here's the RIPE framework, an idea that combined the Double Diamond design model with the OODA Loop.

It was bad.

We threw it out.

But it wasn't a waste of time. The framework helped us think about how people could apply tactics. Books are about the author thinking so you don't have to. We've summarized ten years of thinking into ten hours of your time. That's what you're paying for (or should be.)

But books don't really work that way any more.

The old ways have ended

One of my over-arching takeaways from the last five years is that copying is easy and safe. We created an Internet where five Billion people could—indeed, were expected to—publish. This is trashing a whole generation (go watch Bo Burnham's Eighth Grade, especially if you have kids.) And it's also ended the old model of publishing-as-proof.

Copying is publishing's lowest bar

At the risk of sounding elitist, just because everyone can publish doesn't mean they should. With few constructive things to say, and intense pressure to add to the vibe nevertheless, many people resort to copying: Piling on a meme, upvoting some outrage, posting a duet, remixing, repurposing.

Generative AI makes this even easier. Tiktok and Instagram are full of hucksters selling courses on how to get rich generating books.

(Curious how nobody wonders why, if generating books is a surefire way to make money, these people are selling courses instead. You may enjoy the amazing Dan Olson's video, Contrepreneurs. But finish reading this first. It's just polite.)

We're already seeing the cultural response to easy content generation. Authenticity, legitimacy, and originality are what counts. We value outcomes over possibilities. Immediacy and candor have replaced the carefully manicured pablum of social media.

Behind the scenes is the scene.

Confirmation bias is a business model

We make Marvel Universe movies because people know Marvel Universe movies. Publishers greenlight books by famous people. The reason is simple: Publishing is a brutal business with thin margins, and everyone's afraid of a flop. So most content creation just gives people more of what they know they already like.

(How else did Red One happen?)

The first thing an agent want to know about an author is the size of their online footprint. Their social platform will help them capture attention, get on podcasts, take the stage, cajole friends into endorsing them, and more.

The absolute best book I've read about how to promote a book when you aren't famous, and don't have a huge following to lean on, is Write Useful Books. It says that the only long-term sustainable competitive advantage of a book is recommendability.

And here I am recommending it.

So what are we going to do about it?

As I said at the outset, Just Evil Enough is about subverting systems. It's one thing to document the travails and horrors of the publishing industry, but as I often tell folks who complain a lot: Bring solutions.

Set the right price

We had to set pricing for our book across various platforms. This meant two approaches:

• Bottoms-up: If a copy costs us $10, what do we need to charge to break even? Turns out, around $37 before we (and our publisher) start to recoup the money we've spent producing the book.
• Top-down: What do popular business books charge? This varies by size (and the resulting cost to print and ship.) At 416 pages, with an average price per page of just over $0.09, that's around $37.44.

Of course, these numbers are for bestsellers. Once a book becomes popular, the publisher can do big print runs, and unit costs goes down. They've also recouped the money invested up front to produce the book. So this analysis gave us ballpark pricing; we needed to be aspirational, but reasonable. And we had to work in multiple currencies. We even managed to hide some easter eggs in our pricing.

Reframe what a book can be

One of the eleven tactics in Just Evil Enough is reframing. It's the art of changing how your target customer thinks about value. So we're reframing what books are.

Some facts that shaped our thinking:

• Price anchoring for formats: People who balk at spending $40 on a book think nothing of forking over $99 for an online event or video course.
• Shortcuts to learning: Many people buy nonfiction books aspirationally, then don't get around to reading them. Giving them a way to quickly understand the basic ideas so they can talk to others as if they've read the book is valuable.
• Purchase is enrolment: When someone buys a book through an online store we operate rather than a bookseller, we have their contact information.
• Experiences are hard to copy: Transient, one-time content is harder to copy and creates FOMO because it vanishes.
• Access is valuable: Getting directly connected to people who've spent a decade studying go-to-market strategy is worth something.
• Show how to use it: Applying a book is different from reading it. Books contain frameworks and ideas, but they're often hard to bring directly to your team.
• Be a connector: The ideas in a book are a magnet. People who are drawn to those ideas often have common interests, and can help one another. So find ways to help them connect.

So Just Evil Enough isn't a book. It's a ticket to useful content, live events, and practical material. A directly-ordered book is the artifact by which you gain access to hours of exclusive online content, a quick understanding of its concepts, connection to peers, and bonus materials to help you apply the book to your work.

Sure, we're selling on booksellers. Of course we have an audiobook and ebook. Obviously we're getting people to buy copies when they want me to speak for them. Yes, we have multiple publishers and distributors in North America and Europe, with international publishers lined up.

But that rare first edition hardcover, the thing with hand-feel and bragging rights and a crisp crackle as you open the spine?

That's not a book.

That's a login.

If you want to log in, head over to justevilenough.com and preorder a copy now. We've already run online events for North American and European audiences, covering the subversive mindset, construal level theory, and the long funnel. We might even record videos of that and put it online temporarily. We've got at least seven more sessions planned.

Help us prove that publishing doesn't have to suck.

I'm pretty sure of the facts in this post, but if you work in publishing, or have better/more current information, I'd love to hear it so I can learn more about this industry and find other ways it's broken that we can exploit.