Self Publishing a Business Book: What I Learned

I'm Kurt Schmidt, founder of Schmidt Consulting Group, and I recently did something I never thought I'd do: I wrote a business book. The Attraction Agency: Stop Chasing, Start Attracting has been living in my head for years, and getting it out of my head and onto a page. Through the self publishing process. Taught me things about writing, about my own ideas, and about business development that I wasn't expecting to learn.

Self publishing a business book is one of those decisions that sounds straightforward until you're deep in the middle of it at 11pm wondering what the correct trim size is for a paperback. I want to share what it's really like, and why the ideas in the book matter to every B2B services firm owner reading this.

Why Do Business Owners Self Publish a Book Instead of Going Traditional?

The self publishing route puts every decision in your hands: content, timing, cover design, distribution, and marketing strategy. Traditional publishing moves far slower. Querying agents alone can take months, and the gap between a signed deal and a book on shelves is often 18 to 24 months. For a practitioner writing about something they're actively doing with clients, that timeline kills relevance.

I've seen how traditional publishing works up close, and I'm not knocking it. If you're writing for a mass audience and you want the institutional credibility that comes from a major imprint, it makes sense. But for a business owner who has a specific, defined audience. Agency owners, B2B services founders, consultants. Self publishing lets you move at the speed of your actual thinking. You don't lose a year of momentum waiting for a gatekeeping process to play out.

And honestly, the control argument is the real one for me. I'm a recovering perfectionist. Handing the content, design, and timing to someone else doesn't sit well. The book is about taking control of your business development instead of waiting for opportunities to appear. Publishing it independently was walking the talk.

The Alliance of Independent Authors has documented well how the economics of independent publishing have shifted. Royalty rates are dramatically higher for self published authors on platforms like Amazon KDP than they are under standard traditional contracts, and the speed-to-market advantage compounds that.

What Does the Self Publishing Process for a Business Book Actually Look Like?

Going independent means you own the entire production pipeline. Manuscript to finished product requires decisions about editing (developmental, copy, and proofread are three separate passes), interior formatting, cover design, ISBN registration, and distribution setup across Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and any other retail channels you want.

I didn't have a publishing house holding my hand through any of it. What I did have was a clear point of view. And a clear audience. Which made the content decisions easier than the production decisions. I knew who I was writing for. The technical side of self publishing was the part I had to learn.

A few things I'd tell anyone starting this:

• Hire a cover designer who has designed books specifically, not just a general graphic designer. Book cover conventions are specific and they exist for good reasons.
• Separate the writing phase from the editing phase completely. Trying to edit while you write is how you end up with 60,000 words that feel inconsistent because you kept second-guessing yourself mid-draft.
• Distribution is easier than it used to be. Amazon KDP handles print-on-demand globally. IngramSpark gets you into broader retail and library channels. Neither requires a warehouse or upfront print run.

The production work is real, and it takes time you won't fully anticipate. But the outcome is a finished asset you own completely, that reflects exactly what you wanted to say, positioned exactly the way you wanted to say it.

What Is the Core Idea Behind The Attraction Agency?

The central argument is this: most B2B services firms are trapped in what I call the chasing cycle. Cold emails, built lists, stacked calendars of first calls. And it doesn't work because roughly 95% of B2B buyers aren't actively seeking services like yours at any given moment. (This figure aligns with research from the B2B Institute at LinkedIn, which has studied in-market buyer populations extensively.) You're burning budget and attention on people who have no current buying intent.

The firms winning the big retainers and long-term partnerships are playing a different game entirely. Their presence is established before the RFP exists. Their content shapes how buyers think before a buying cycle even begins. Their relationships carry a level of trust that no email sequence can replicate.

That's what I mean by attraction. It's a reputation that's clear, consistent, and trustworthy enough that the right clients seek you out.

The book builds this out through a five-part relationship engine:

Positioning sits at the foundation. You have to be specific about who you serve and what problems you solve. Vagueness makes you forgettable. The firms that grow fastest are the ones with the sharpest positioning.

Planting value means showing up consistently with insights and content that makes your ideal clients' decisions a little easier. You're proving expertise. Over time, that builds trust with an audience you'd never be able to reach through one-to-one cold outreach.

Nurturing is where most agencies lose the revenue they've already earned. Past clients are the most likely group to hire you again, and staying present after a project closes is among the highest-return activities you can do. Most firms treat a closed project like the end of a relationship. It's a mistake. client retention strategy

Teaching changes your perceived category. When you share what you know publicly. In writing, on a podcast, in a newsletter. You stop reading as a vendor trying to win business and start reading as a guide people trust before they ever talk to you.

Protecting your value is the one that makes people uncomfortable. I've seen agencies do excellent work and then discount themselves the moment a negotiation starts. Your pricing signals your credibility. Negotiating against yourself trains clients to undervalue you before the engagement even begins. pricing for agencies

What Does Chasing Clients Actually Cost a Services Firm?

The real cost of chasing is something I wanted to document in the book because it goes well beyond a low email response rate.

There's a time drain that's easy to quantify: hours burned on follow-ups that go nowhere, on calls with prospects who were browsing not buying, on proposals written for RFPs you were never going to win. I've run agencies with 50-plus people delivering hundreds of millions of dollars in projects, and I've watched smart, capable teams spend enormous energy on business development activity that produces almost nothing.

But there's an identity cost that's harder to see. When you're chasing, you start moderating your point of view. You hesitate to take strong positions because you're worried a prospect will disagree. Over time, your message softens until it sounds like every other firm in your category. And then you're competing purely on price or availability, which is a race you don't want to run.

There's a team cost, too. The wrong clients don't stay wrong fit just for you. They become scope tension, endless revision cycles, and late-night favors your team absorbs on your behalf. I've watched excellent teams start to doubt their own ability because of one bad-fit engagement that came from chasing. The skills were fine. The client was the problem, and the client never should have been in the portfolio.

In my experience working with agencies, the bad-fit client almost always has an origin story that involves urgency or desperation on the agency's side. Someone needed to close something. Someone needed to show revenue. They took a client they knew wasn't right, and the team paid for it for months.

I've lived this personally. I once pushed hard to land a must-win prospect, chased the relationship longer than I should have, and when the deal finally closed, my team didn't celebrate. They breathed a sigh of relief. But not in a good way. More like, "Thank God that's over." Within a month, the warning signs were undeniable: misaligned expectations, unclear goals, and pressure coming from every direction. Halfway through the project, a senior team member pulled me aside and said, "We both know we should not have taken this." They were right. I had dragged the team into a situation that drained all of us because I was trying to prove something rather than practicing what I preached. The cost wasn't just wasted time. It was the toll it took on people who trusted me to use better judgment.

How Does a B2B Services Firm Build an Attraction-Based Business Development System?

The shift from chasing to attracting is a rhythm. And rhythm is the operative word. The firms that build consistent inbound pipelines are the ones that show up consistently, every week, with something useful for the people they want to work with.

Here's a simple comparison of how the two approaches differ in practice:

The attraction model takes longer to produce its first result. That's the honest trade-off. If you need a client in the next two weeks, outreach is faster. But if you're building a firm you want to run for the next decade, compounding a reputation is the better investment.

I covered the mechanics of this system in depth on The Schmidt List, and the book is the thorough treatment of the whole framework.

One honest note on fit: if you're a solo consultant under five people and your entire market is a defined list of 40 target accounts, a targeted outbound sequence built on genuine research and relationship context can work well. The attraction model I describe in the book is built for firms that want to scale beyond what personal hustle can produce. If you're genuinely at the beginning and need fast pipeline, a specialist in account-based outbound will be a more immediate fit than the system I lay out.

Key Takeaways

• Self publishing a business book gives you full control over content, timing, and design. But every production decision (editing passes, cover design, distribution setup) falls entirely on you.
• The self publishing economics have shifted significantly; royalty rates and speed-to-market advantages now favor independent authors with defined niche audiences.
• Roughly 95% of B2B buyers aren't actively seeking services at any given moment, which means cold outreach campaigns are directed at people with no current buying intent.
• The five-part relationship engine. Positioning, planting value, nurturing, teaching, and protecting your value. Gives firms a repeatable system for replacing cold outreach with earned inbound attention.
• The cost of chasing goes beyond low response rates; it includes identity erosion, team burnout, and a client roster full of poor-fit engagements that drain the people doing the work.
• Attraction-based business development takes longer to produce its first result, but compounds in a way that chasing-based systems structurally cannot.

The clients you want are already out there, paying attention, trying to make sense of a noisy market. The question is whether your firm has built enough consistent presence that when they're ready to move, your name is the one that comes to mind first.