What I Tell People Who Want to Write a Book About Lean

Twice in the past two weeks, I have talked with people who want to write a book about Lean. Both were early in the process and trying to figure out what they were signing up for. I've had a lot of these conversations over the years. I enjoy doing them and this blog post is not meant to replace future chats.

Those conversations tend to cover the same ground: whether the idea is worth a book, whether to work with a traditional publisher or publish independently, what editing and production cost, and how to market the book once it exists.

Rather than let the answers disappear into a Google Meet recording each time, I have put them here in order, from deciding whether to write the thing to selling it.

This is what has worked for me, having published books both ways. It is not the only way to do it.

I expanded this piece by having Claude role-play as an author and ask me the questions people actually have. The answers are mine.

1. Decide what the book is for

For me, the full business model for the book is not the book royalties. It is the speaking, the consulting, and the coaching that come out of the book. That one decision drives most of the others: what you charge, how fast you publish, how much you are willing to spend, and how much control you need to keep.

What makes your book different

Years ago I asked a friend who was thinking about writing one, “What would make your book different?” I still think that is the right question, but I would answer it more simply now. The fact that you are the one writing it makes it different. There will be overlap with what other people have said. Your stories are the part nobody else has. Having a good on the market can be good for your business — and you will probably feel good that you did it.

That matters more than it used to. If a reader only wants a competent explanation of what to do, they can now ask an AI tool and have it in five minutes. What they cannot get that way is what you saw, what you tried, what failed, and what you would do differently.

There is a second reason to write. The best way to learn a subject deeply is to start writing a book about something you think you already understand a little bit. I have never gotten through a manuscript without changing my mind about something and learning things along the way.

How long it takes

On timing: a year is realistic if you are willing to give it nights and weekends. I wrote the first one while working a full-time corporate job, and that fall I decided I would watch one college football game a week and that was it. My writing since then has usually taken six to nine months, with stretches where the book gets everything and stretches where it gets nothing.

Permissions to sort out first

If you have a full-time job, talk to your employer before you start. Not only about whether you are allowed to write a book, but about who would own it. Companies can and do claim intellectual property rights in what their employees write, particularly when the subject overlaps with the work. When I wrote the first edition of Lean Hospitals, I was a full-time employee at Johnson & Johnson. I got their permission and their collaboration on the case studies and on what went into the book. The royalties were paid to the company and the copyright was in their name. They paid me an employee recognition bonus that year, specifically because of the book. And that might have been more than the royalties.

Later, when I was no longer an employee and was working on the second edition, they were good about transferring the rights and the royalties to me. I thought they treated me fairly, and it worked out because the conversation happened up front rather than after the book existed.

The other conversation is about the people in your stories. You may need to disguise details or names, and even then somebody can be identifiable by their role and location, so disguising is not a guarantee. You may want to leave out stories that do not reflect well on somebody. This is one reason people write business novels. You can write something based on reality without it being so close to an individual who might object. Depending on what you are writing, you might need to talk to an attorney. That is different from writing about mistakes people have volunteered. In The Mistakes That Make Us, the stories are told by people who chose to tell them, on the record, usually on my podcast. Somebody offering their own mistake is not the same as you telling one on their behalf.

Building on what you have already published

If you have been blogging or speaking, build on it. Somebody who got some of that material for free may be glad to have an updated version in book form that they can read again or recommend to others. I do not know how every publisher reacts to previously published material, but publishers are generally positive when an author has already been writing and has an audience they can point to and quantify.

2. Choose your publishing model early

How to reach a publisher in this space

People ask how you get a publisher in the first place. In this space, Productivity Press is the main one. It is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, and they have a way to submit a book proposal, with a format you can follow. I do not think you need a literary agent. You can contact an acquisitions editor directly. Their editorial contacts page lists who covers what. Michael Sinocchi oversees the Productivity Press list, covering Lean, operational excellence, quality and Six Sigma, and supply chain, and he is a good guy. Kristine Mednansky acquires for healthcare administration and process improvement, and she was the editor on my own Lean Hospitals contract and I enjoyed working with her.

I would not spend much time pitching the big business publishers. Books like ours are not going to be stacked in major bookstores, so the main thing a large trade publisher offers is not something you are going to get. That door is also narrower than it was. McGraw Hill stopped acquiring new business titles in 2023 and canceled books that were already under contract.

So the real question is not how to get a publisher. It is whether you need one, and whether you want somebody else making the up-front investment.

What a publisher actually is

A publisher is a venture capitalist. They put money into the startup that is your book, they take real risk because most business books do not sell many copies, and in exchange they take a much larger cut than you do. That trade can be worth it. It was worth it for me in 2008, when Productivity Press went looking for someone to write what became Lean Hospitals and found me before I had done anything to make it happen.

What the deal looks like

Here is what the deal looked like for me. No advance. Fifteen percent royalty, paid twice a year, in February and August, covering the half-year that ended a month or two earlier. The important detail is that the fifteen percent is on the publisher's net receipts, not on the cover price. When a retailer buys at a 55 percent discount off a $65.99 book, the publisher collects about $30 and my share is closer to $4.50 than to the $10 people assume when they hear fifteen percent. Some categories of sale, including deep discounts and sales outside the US, pay half that rate.

You also give up visibility. As an independent publisher I can log into Amazon or IngramSpark and see what sold yesterday. With a publisher you wait for a statement, and the numbers arrive months after the fact, which makes it hard to tell whether anything you did actually worked.

One clause worth reading closely in any contract you are offered: mine says that while the book is in print, I will not prepare a competing work for another publisher. Articles, teaching, and conference talks are fine. But if you expect to write more books in the same subject area, know what you are agreeing to before you sign.

What you give up: title, cover, price

What you give up is control. The title, the subtitle, the cover, the schedule, and the price all become someone else's call. Jim Womack has told me that he and his co-authors did not like the title The Machine That Changed the World, and that it came from the publisher's side (I think I'm remembering that correctly).

Pricing is where it bothers me most. Lean Hospitals is not a bigger book than The Mistakes That Make Us, but the publisher prices it at $65.99. I do not think that is even the profit-maximizing price. They are owned by a textbook publisher, which probably explains it.

What independent publishing actually means

I do the rest independently now. I avoid the term self-publishing, because I am not doing it myself, and because you can usually tell when someone actually did. Bad cover. No editing. Text jammed into the gutter because nobody widened the inside margin. Independent publishing means I am the general contractor. I hire the subs, I coordinate them, I pay for the work up front, and I own the result. The people I hire are accountable to me, which is the opposite of how it feels to be an author inside a publishing contract.

People ask whether this hurts their credibility. I do not think it does, not the way it might have when the term was vanity press and the implication was that your book was not good enough for a publisher. If you hire skilled professionals and work with them as the publisher of your own book, the cover and the interior can look as good as anything from a traditional house, or better. And I am not convinced that people buy a book because of who the publisher is.

The one thing to avoid is a hybrid publisher that wants you to pay them to be your publisher and then sit between you and Amazon forever. Paying for services is fine. Paying someone a cut forever, on their imprint, is the worst of both worlds. What you want instead is a company you pay for the work, that sets you up with direct relationships with Amazon and Ingram in your own name, and then gets out of the way until you need them again for revisions.

Setting your own prices

A higher percentage of a smaller number beats a small percentage of a big one. At $20, more people are willing to take a chance on an author they do not know. I would not go much lower, because a price that looks like a pamphlet gets treated like one. These are my numbers, not universal ones. Run yours.

Hardcover is worth running the numbers on separately. For The Mistakes That Make Us, the paperback is $20 and the hardcover is $30. My unit cost is about $5 for a paperback and about $9 for a hardcover, including shipping. The margin on a hardcover is higher, not lower, which surprises people. It also means I can offer hardcovers on a bulk order at $20, the same price as a retail paperback. The buyer gets a hardcover for what a paperback costs at retail, and I still make more per copy than I would selling a paperback through Amazon. That is the kind of thing you can only do when you control the pricing.

The ebook follows different rules, and they just changed. Amazon pays a 70 percent royalty only inside a price band, and as of July 7, 2026, that band runs from $2.99 to $12.99. It had been capped at $9.99 since 2007. Above the ceiling you drop to 35 percent, which means a $19.99 ebook can pay you less than a $12.99 one. The change is not automatic for books already on sale, so if you have a title sitting between $10 and $12.99, go into KDP and switch the royalty option by hand.

Who gives you the deadline

The other difference is the deadline. A contract gives you one, and for some people that is the only reason the book gets finished. Independent means the date is yours. My current goal is to hand the manuscript to the production company by the end of this month. If it slips to October 1, I am not violating anyone's contract. That freedom cuts both ways, so be honest with yourself about which kind of author you are.

3. Write it, then cut it

Get the structure right first

Get the structure right before you write a lot of prose. On my last book I got fairly far down one path, then threw most of it out and started again with a different structure. That was expensive. This time the structure held, even though the details of the writing were wrong the first time through, which they always are.

I write in Google Docs and give my editor live access to the file. He highlights a passage and leaves a comment: this is unclear, this is redundant, I do not know what you are saying here. That is exactly the feedback I want. Trading discrete files by email and managing versions makes me crazy.

The hard part is cutting good material

The hard part is not writing. The hard part is removing good material that does not fit the flow or does not support the point of the chapter. Sometimes it moves to another chapter. Sometimes it comes out entirely. Never hit delete. I keep a file of everything cut from the book, and a lot of it becomes blog posts and articles later, the longer director's cut of a story that appears in a tighter form in the book.

A few editing habits that help:

• Do not tell the reader what you just showed them. If the story makes it obvious that the manager bullied people, you do not need a sentence explaining that bullying is bad.
• Once you have won the jury over, stop arguing the case. One story makes the point. A second story earns its place only if it adds a wrinkle. The third one usually does not.
• Ask whether the detail puts the reader in the scene or just settles a score. I have a story about a manager who yelled at people, and I can picture him: the thick Chicago accent, the bad toupee. The accent helps. I am still not sure about the toupee. I do not use his last name either way.

How long should it be

On length: Cathy Fyock, the book coach I have worked with, is a strong advocate for shorter business books, and she is right. Thirty-five thousand words is enough to be a book rather than a pamphlet or a long article. The Mistakes That Make Us is roughly 50,000. My current manuscript is sitting around 60,000 and I should probably bring that down. Any book can be made shorter. The real question is whether it is better that way.

4. Get the right kind of editing

How to tell if the manuscript is ready

A reasonable question is how you know the manuscript is ready to hand to a paid editor. You have two cheap ways to find out. Send a sample chapter to an editor you are considering. Most will read it and give you an idea of where you stand, and you learn something about how they work before you commit. Or prompt an AI to role-play as a developmental editor and tell you the good, the bad, and the ugly. Ask it to be blunt. You are not looking for line edits at that point. You are looking for whether the argument holds and whether the structure works.

Four different jobs people call editing

People use “editor” for four different jobs, and the differences matter when you are deciding what to pay for.

A book coach helps at the front end with the idea, the structure, and the discipline to keep going, and often knows which contractors to hire later. Cathy Fyock coached me through Measures of Success and The Mistakes That Make Us.

A developmental editor works on the whole book: is the argument holding up, is this section in the right place, is this sentence saying what you think it says. I work with Tom Ehrenfeld, who has edited a lot of books in the Lean space. That is mostly a blessing. The curse is that an editor who knows your field will not notice the jargon a normal reader would trip over. On Lean Hospitals and Healthcare Kaizen I worked with an editor who did not know the material, and she was a good proxy for the reader who does not know it either.

A copy editor looks at clarity and correctness closer to the sentence level. Production companies will read the manuscript first and tell you whether it needs light, medium, or heavy copy editing, which is a useful reality check on how ready you actually are.

Proofreading comes after layout and is a different lens again: punctuation, spacing, the very fine details.

Where AI helps, and where it does not

AI has changed the last part of this more than the rest. I ran my previous two books through Claude and asked for a detailed proofread. It found things that survived human proofreading, including a typo in the header of a chart image. Early copies of The Mistakes That Make Us had a sentence missing the word “not,” which is the dangerous kind of error, because a proofreader reads what is on the page and cannot know what you meant.

Two prompting habits I would pass along. First, ask AI to help you write the prompt. Tell it you want it to read the manuscript as a developmental editor who has worked on good nonfiction business books, and ask what you should be having it look for. Second, tell it explicitly not to flatter you. The default behavior is to tell you your ideas are great. My harshest prompt asks it to act as a hostile but honest reviewer preparing to attack the book's central argument, with instructions that manufactured criticism is as useless as flattery. It comes back with sections on load-bearing assumptions the book does not defend, places where assertion exceeds the evidence, and selection effects in which cases I chose. Some of that is genuinely useful. Some of it is an exercise in humility. I have not decided yet whether to hand the harshest version to my human editor and ask if any of it is worth reacting to.

Worth keeping in mind: this is still inspection, and inspection does not build quality in. It is a second set of eyes that does not get tired, which is not nothing.

5. Production and two supply chains

What production costs

People ask what this costs. Working with professionals on editing, page layout, and cover design will probably run somewhere between $5,000 and $20,000, depending on how much editing your manuscript needs and who you hire. An audiobook adds maybe $5,000 more, since you are paying for studio time and editing.

I would encourage you to make that investment rather than trying to do everything yourself. People do judge a book by its cover, and they judge it by its formatting. A book that looks unprofessional tells the reader something about the content before they read a word, and that impression carries back to you and your business.

This is where a publisher has a real advantage, and it is worth saying plainly. Working through a publisher means they make those investments up front. The only thing you pay is your time and effort. They cover the editing, the layout, the cover, and the printing, and they take the risk that the book does not sell. That is what their larger cut buys. If you do not have five figures to put into a book, or you are not willing to put your own money at risk on a first title, a publisher is a legitimate answer rather than a consolation prize.

Cover design and image rights

Cover design runs from a Fiverr freelancer to a design contest on 99designs to a fully bespoke cover from a designer you know. Whatever you spend, handle the rights properly. Make sure any image is licensed for print and publication, not just personal use. Even fonts are intellectual property, so use ones that are clearly licensed or free. The odds of someone coming after you are slim. The hassle if they do is not worth the savings.

Then there is distribution, and independent publishing means running two of them in parallel.

Buy your own ISBNs

Before either of them, buy your own ISBNs. I bought mine from Bowker, which is the official agency in the US, and I recommend it. A block of ten costs far less per number than buying them one at a time, and you will use more than you expect, because paperback, hardcover, and ebook each need their own. If you take the free ISBN that Amazon offers instead, the listed publisher becomes “Independently published” and you cannot use that number at IngramSpark, so the parallel setup below stops working before you start. Your own ISBN also lets you register your own imprint name, which is what makes you the publisher rather than a guy with an Amazon account.

Amazon KDP and IngramSpark

You can do hardcovers through both Amazon KDP and IngramSpark. They cost more to print, but they are not hard to set up for the people who want one. There is a real difference between the two. Amazon does case laminate only, where the cover art is printed directly on the board with no dust jacket. It looks more like a textbook. IngramSpark will do a traditional hardcover with a dust jacket, either over a cloth-look cover or over a case laminate, which means the reader gets a second piece of artwork underneath. A hardcover is a separate edition and needs its own ISBN, which is one more reason to buy a block of them.

Amazon KDP handles the large majority of sales. Let Amazon print and distribute, and they optimize where the books get printed and whether to hold inventory. You do not have to manage inventory to keep the book available, although availability glitches can still happen. That matters, because out of stock is a good reason for someone to buy a different book.

IngramSpark is the distributor for everyone else. Other booksellers do not want to buy stock from their largest competitor, so Barnes and Noble, Target, Walmart, and other online sellers get the book through Ingram. I have also found Ingram easier to work with on bulk orders. The same split applies to ebooks: Kindle dominates, and Ingram feeds Apple Books, Google, and the rest. You can choose KDP Select, which makes the ebook Amazon-exclusive for 90 days and unlocks Kindle Unlimited and promotions such as free-book days. You can opt out before the next 90-day term.

Audiobooks

Audio is a third format and a separate decision. I paid to record in a professional studio and to have the audio edited, then distributed through ACX, which feeds Audible, Amazon, and Apple. Audio reaches people while they drive or work out, which is the same reason podcasts sell books. Do the arithmetic before you commit, because studio time and editing cost real money and audiobook sales for business titles are usually a small share of the total. If you are considering it, look closely at the royalty and exclusivity terms before you sign. Audible changed its royalty model in 2026, so check the current terms rather than relying on what an author told you a few years ago.

Release order and print on demand

I would publish the ebook, paperback, and hardcover at the same time. For my last book I did the audiobook later, which gave me a reason to relaunch and keep promoting. Book publishing and marketing is a marathon, not a sprint, for most of us who are not hitting the New York Times bestseller list. The other reason to delay the audiobook is that you want the text to be right first. Typos make it into books no matter how many people read them, and the audiobook is expected to be a faithful reading of the published text.

Print on demand does not mean you never hold inventory. Lead time from IngramSpark is about two weeks, so keeping some copies on hand makes sense if you sell signed copies or fill bulk orders yourself. In a pinch you can order from Amazon and have books in a couple of days. Order those at retail rather than as author copies.

Print on demand also means the book behaves like software. Typos will make it into print no matter how many people read it. When you find them, you upload a patch, and new buyers get the corrected version. The only cost is doing it twice, once in each system.

How long production takes

Production takes longer than people expect, and this is one of the clearest differences between the two models. My experience with Productivity Press was about nine months from finished manuscript to books for sale. Going independent, that cycle can be as short as two or three months. If you are trying to have books in hand for a conference or a client engagement, that difference is the whole decision.

One scheduling note. If your manuscript lands with a production company in the fall, the launch is probably not in December. The production people I have talked with generally advise waiting until January or February.

6. Marketing starts before the book exists

You will do most of it yourself

Even with a traditional publisher, you will do most of the marketing yourself. That surprises first-time authors more than anything else on this page.

Plant the seeds well before release. A newsletter or Substack, an email list, regular posting on LinkedIn, and a blog if you have the appetite for it. If you start all of that in the launch week, you are talking to nobody.

The launch work, including blurbs

Then there is the launch work itself: writing the Amazon description, setting up keywords and phrases, sending advance copies out for blurbs, writing articles and pitching them, and getting booked on podcasts. Much of this you can do yourself. A PR firm can bring structure, introductions, and a plan, and a good developmental editor can help you write an article even though marketing is not their job.

Blurbs work best when you have some connection to the person, or somebody who can make an introduction. Ask first whether they are interested rather than sending a manuscript unannounced. If they say yes, offer the whole book in a format they can search, since some people will read all of it and some will look for the parts that matter to them. Give them a month or two. A blurb request with a one-week deadline is an imposition, and people remember. If you are building relationships with this in mind, do not make it a one-way street and do not lead with the heavy ask. The people you want a blurb from are the people you should have been useful to first.

Bulk sales and custom pages

Bulk sales happen directly, through me and my website. I can invoice a company or they can pay by credit card. Sometimes it is built into a speaking contract. I try to make it a win-win, where they get books at a significant discount, and sometimes it is an alternative path when a company does not have much budget for a speaker but does have a budget for buying books.

One thing I like about being an independent publisher is that through IngramSpark I can add custom pages that are printed and bound inside the book. That might be a message from the company president or the hospital CEO about why they think the book matters. You cannot do that with a publisher's print run, and it changes what the book is when a leader hands it to a thousand people. It does not require a new ISBN or a new title setup either. It is a variant of the same book.

Do you need a book website?

You will want a place to send people. I have built separate websites for books, and I would not start there now. Buying the domain is still smart, because you want the name and it is cheap. But forward it to a page on a site that already has some SEO authority, something like markgraban.com/books/the-silence-tax. That is easier than standing up and maintaining a whole new website, and it feeds traffic to a domain that already ranks instead of starting a new one at zero. If you do want something more, tools like Claude make it easy to spin up a single landing page.

Podcasts sell books

Podcasts are worth more than they look. A PR firm made the point to me that people who listen to podcasts buy books, the way radio listeners used to. A television clip is fun and may feed your ego. It probably will not sell as many copies.

For my last book I did a lot of activity and it mostly worked, but I was winging it. This time I expect to get help building a more deliberate launch plan. That is a preference, not a rule. Some of the best books I know were launched by their authors with nothing but a list and some persistence.

If you are working on a book and want to compare notes, get in touch. I am glad to have this conversation, and once your book is out, I am usually glad to have you on the podcast to talk about it.

Resources mentioned

• Cathy Fyock, book coach, The Business Book Strategist
• Tom Ehrenfeld, developmental editor
• 1106Design, book editing and production
• Routledge and CRC Press editorial contacts, including the Productivity Press acquisitions editors
• Bowker for ISBNs in the US
• Amazon KDP and IngramSpark for print and ebook distribution
• ACX for audiobook production and distribution
• 99designs and Fiverr for cover design

Also worth reading / listening: Navigating the Evolution of Book Publishing with Michele DeFilippo

Navigating the Evolution of Book Publishing with Michele DeFilippo