Why Paid Email Newsletters are the New Business Books

A paid newsletter can give you the foundation for an expertise-based business and deliver you the audience, authority, and opportunity you crave… plus more revenue than most business books ever see.

The business book is dying. 

And yet, Amazon's virtual shelves still groan under the weight of fresh executive playbooks, leadership guides, and entrepreneurial advice. 

That’s because traditional wisdom says you need a book to act as your calling card to enter the business of expertise. 

So business books continue to be written, often crafted by ghostwriters or generated by artificial intelligence. Because writing a good book is damn hard for busy professionals.

The reason for the practical demise of business books is not that people don’t read. It’s that most people don’t read books, even when they buy them.

The average American completes just five books a year. This average has been dropping year after year for quite some time. And this is all kinds of books, not just business books.

Then you have to factor in how averages work. Some people read a ton of romance novels, while 23% of Americans haven’t read a single book in the last year. So there’s that.

And that’s why the traditional business book, with its 250-page commitment and $25 hardcover price tag, is being quietly displaced by something far more nimble: the paid email newsletter.

The Art of Stretching a Blog Post into 250 Pages

For decades now, business books have followed a predictable formula. 

Take one compelling idea, stretch it across ten chapters, pad it with every story and case study you can find, and wrap it in a cover promising business transformation. The result is often 20 pages of insight buried in 200 pages of filler.

Never mind that the vast majority of your target audience won’t buy your book simply because you’ve put it up on Amazon. You need a way to promote it. And if those who do buy your book don’t actually read it, the authority you’re seeking is diminished. 

Simply saying you’ve written a book is not the flex it once was.

Email newsletters have entirely changed this dynamic. Instead of padding and 12-month timelines between writing and publication, readers get fresh, distilled intelligence, while newsletter publishers reap outsized rewards:

• Morning Brew built a media empire by distilling complex business news into digestible chunks delivered by daily email.

• Carly Zakin and Danielle Weisberg founded the Skimm, raised $28 million in funding, and sold to Ziff Davis in 2025. Try that with a book.

• Stratechery's Ben Thompson lives large by charging $120 annually for analysis that would take traditional business publishers months to develop and distribute. 

But let’s not dwell on the big names and the outrageous money. A paid newsletter can give you the foundation for an expertise-based business and deliver you the audience, authority, and opportunity you crave… plus more revenue than most business books ever see.

In fact, if you still want to land a book deal, you’re going to need to build an audience first anyway. Publishers want to know you’ve got built-in buyers.

Once you have an audience, though, you may just conclude you don’t need that publishing gatekeeper blessing after all. Or for that matter, a book.

The Modern Economics of Attention

The traditional publishing model assumes readers have time to read books. Busy executives and entrepreneurs are supposed to carve out hours for deep reading, presumably during those mythical quiet moments between meetings and putting out fires. 

The newsletter model recognizes a different truth: decision-makers consume information in fragments, often on mobile devices, usually in stolen moments between tasks. When they do read books, they’re usually timeless perennials whose wisdom doesn’t have a “sell by” date.

This shift reflects broader changes in how we work and learn. 

The half-life of business information has diminished dramatically. And reading a book is a time commitment many simply won’t give to an unknown author unless there is an unignorable buzz around it — which takes us back to why you need to build the audience before you write the book.

Even then, a strategy or collection of insights that takes 12-18 months to arrive in book form may be perceived as obsolete before it even hits the shelves. And frankly, there’s a good chance that perception is correct.

Perhaps most importantly, newsletters solve the information-overload problem that makes traditional business books feel insufficient. 

The best newsletter writers don't just share their own thoughts. They curate the best thinking from across the internet, providing context and analysis that helps readers navigate an increasingly complex business landscape.

This curation function is becoming more valuable than original content creation. In a world where anyone can publish anything, the ability to filter the signal from noise becomes a premium service.

In short, email newsletters operate on internet time. This allows you to publish and disseminate ideas quickly, receive real-time feedback, adapt your thinking accordingly, and engage with readers directly.

Let’s explore that last item a bit more. Not only do you not own the customer relationship when you publish traditionally and/or sell through Amazon, but you also can’t engage with your readers.

Email newsletters, on the other hand, create a relationship that books cannot match. When Lenny Rachitsky sends his weekly product management insights to 500,000+ subscribers, he's not broadcasting to an anonymous audience — he's writing to individuals who chose to invite him into their inboxes.

The comment sections and reply features of newsletter platforms like Substack have turned one-way publishing into two-way conversations, which harkens back to the early days of business blogging. 

This collaborative element transforms newsletters from static content into living ecosystems with your expertise at the center, even as you establish a deeper level of intimacy with subscribers.

This intimacy breeds trust and engagement that traditional business books struggle to achieve. 

And since 99% of the time a business book is only a catalyst for your real business model, it’s easy to see that you’re going to sell more consulting, coaching, courses (and anything else your audience desires) when you have a direct connection with your prospects.

A Smart Customer Acquisition Strategy

Here's the dirty secret of business book publishing: Authors almost never make a living from book sales alone. 

The typical business book sells fewer than 10,000 copies, netting the author perhaps $10,000-20,000 after years of writing and months of promoting. 

The real money comes afterward from consulting contracts, corporate workshops, and speaking engagements. The book serves as an expensive business card, a credibility marker that opens doors to where the real revenue lives.

But there's a deeper problem with the traditional model that I briefly touched on earlier. Authors don't own the customer relationship with their readers. 

When someone buys your book on Amazon or at Barnes & Noble, the retailer owns that connection. A customer has purchased your product, but you have no way to reach them directly for future offerings. You're acquiring customers for someone else.