When someone tells me they’re finally writing the book, my first question isn’t about the book. It’s about what happens in month four, once the launch posts have stopped.
The numbers behind that question got harder last year. U.S. title output reached roughly four million in 2025, up about 32 percent in a single year, and around 3.5 million of those were self-published titles with ISBNs, up nearly 39 percent on the year before. Self-published books outnumbered traditionally published ones by more than five to one.
Read that again with your own manuscript in it. Whatever you publish next year enters a market that added more than a million new titles in twelve months, and most of them are invisible to everybody except the person who wrote them.
I don’t think that’s a reason to skip writing the book. I do think it finishes off the version of the plan where you write it, publish it, post about it for a couple of weeks, and wait for something to happen. That plan was built for a smaller market and it doesn’t survive this one. The books I watch do well now belong to authors who had somewhere to put them: a speaking calendar, a client list, a newsletter with real people on it, a practice the book explains and deepens.
The clients of mine who’ve seen real return from a book almost always had an audience or a service to point it at before the manuscript was finished.
So before you budget for the writing, work out where the book lands. If you can’t name the room it walks into, the manuscript isn’t the first thing to fix. That’s an awkward thing to say to someone who’s excited about chapter one, and I’d still rather say it early than watch it play out the other way.
