What business readers most want to read

I have been a business writer for many years, and worked on many bestsellers, but as the editor-in-chief of a thought leadership firm, I needed to raise my game. So I set out to learn more about business readers. I went to the place where consumers of thought leadership express themselves fervently about what they like and what they hate. I went to the book reviews section of Amazon.com.

Here is what I learned.

Most valued by Amazon readers is credibility. All too few pieces of business writing come across to them as trustworthy. Second is explanatory power: the ability to show how the world works, in a way that wasn’t quite obvious before. Third is rhetorical skill. They want to be carried away by the craft of a writer. They want to be immersed in the story, especially since it’s a book of guidance — where the reader’s story, ultimately, is the story being told.

These qualities all ranked higher than evidence, practical value, impact on peoples’ actual lives, or inspiring visionary messages. Because Amazon book reviewers volunteer their praise and outrage, their comments are as good a proxy for business readership as we are likely to find.

Because Amazon book reviewers volunteer their praise and outrage, their comments are as good a proxy for business readership as we are likely to find.

We started in November 2021. With my colleague Wallace Mohlenbrok, and with some advice from Juliette Powell of KPI and George Roth of MIT, I developed a methodology for distilling Amazon.com reviews. I chose twenty best-sellers, deliberately selected without attention to my own preferences. Ten were the most popular books in Amazon’s business category, on November 18, a date chosen at random. The others were the most popular books by the highest-rated members of the Thinkers 50, the so-called “Academy Awards of management thinking.” Fortunately, Thinkers 50 proprietors Des Dearlove and Stuart Crainer had just released their biennial rankings in mid-November, so we had a fresh list of pundits with popular books.

Amazon doesn’t publish its book sales, the rankings shift multiple times a day, and all these lists are somewhat arbitrary. We don’t care. We aren’t interested in what business readers think of any particular book. We’re interested in what they value from their overall reading in general.

Interestingly, there was no overlap between the Thinker’s 50 authors and the Amazon best-seller authors. But there were management luminaries on both lists. The Amazon-popular books ranged from James Clear’s Atomic Habits (ranked an enviable 12 out of all Amazon books, not just business) to Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich, originally published in 1937, and still ranked 352 Amazon-wide. The Thinkers 50 books started at 410, with Adam Grant’s Think Again, and went all the way down to 199,395, for Dual Transformation by Scott Anthony et al. The number one author as ranked by the Thinkers 50, Amy Edmondson with The Fearless Organization, had an Amazon sales ranking of 10,965.

Just for perspective: a five-digit ranking among the estimated 35 million books carried by Amazon is pretty damn good, and to get there you apparently have to sell about 100 books a day. That may not seem like much, but it’s a very difficult feat. (Here’s a Publisher’s Weekly analysis.)

To keep our selection of reviews random, we took the most recent 20 reviews for each book, mixing the U.S. and international Amazon pages. This gave us a total of 400 reviews — some as short as a few words, others going on for paragraphs. Coding each review twice independently — with Wallace and myself as coders — we tracked the number of times reviewers expressed an opinion about what they valued, assigning keywords to each remark.

We sorted all these remarks according to what they indicated about likes and dislikes, ultimately identifying 59 common thoughts. For the sake of simplicity, we then grouped them into 7 broad statements of what people are looking for in business non-fiction:

1. Credibility: I want guidance I can trust. 912 comments

2. Understanding: I want an explanation of how the world works. 668 comments

3. Rhetoric: I want to be caught up in a well-crafted reading experience. 612 comments

4. Evidence: I want researched facts and real-world cases to support the conclusions. 575 comments

5. Practical value: I want tools and tips I can use in real life. 451 comments

6. Impact: I want to be challenged; I want my life or my organization changed. 411 comments

7. Significance: I want to read something important, that the world needs to hear. 339 comments.

8. Inspiration: I want a vision that makes me feel better about my goals and trajectory. 131 comments

If you’re wondering why most numbers are greater than 400, even though we only had 400 reviews: many reviews contained 2 or more remarks related to a particular grouping. For instance, a single review might say that the commenter was a fan, that the material seemed authentic, and that the author was humble. That meant three votes for “credible.”

A few examples: “It had tips,” coded as practical value. “This book changed my life,” coded as impact. “This book’s ideas could change everything,” coded as significance.

The results were not what I expected. For example, I expected leadership to be a popular theme. Reader surveys at strategy+business (where I had been editor-in-chief) and I gather at Harvard Business Review as well, often say that leadership is the most popular topic. But relatively few comments had to do with the life path of becoming a better leader. (They tend to fall under “inspiration.”) Far more prevalent were remarks like, “I couldn’t put it down” (rhetoric) or “the author knows what they’re talking about” (credibility).

I expected leadership to be a popular theme. But relatively few comments had to do with the life path of becoming a better leader.

Also, I had assumed for years that business readers seek practical guidance — tips and tools for handling problems or managing teams. But usefulness is relatively easy to find. You can even google most useful topics.

It’s much harder to use a search engine to find something with true credibility, especially if you doubt the wisdom of the crowd. There isn’t a good search term that will find you an “aha” moment.

I’ve concluded that the most valuable commodities in business literature are the hardest to find. Rare is beautiful. It’s very unusual to find a business book with truly insightful explanations of the way things work, or an immersive experience. It’s even more unusual to find an author with absolute credibility, based on a non-superficial effort to understand and live by the topic. Most business authors, to some extent, favor the odds of sales over the kind of honesty that attracts readers, but George Burns was wrong. If you fake honesty, you don’t have it made.

(Yes, I know, it might have been Groucho Marx, Jean Giraudoux, Celeste Holm, or Samuel Goldwyn. But while George Burns might not have been first to say it, he definitely published it.)

Apparently, there are many business readers who care about knowledge. They are not looking for quick answers. They know how difficult their challenges are. They don’t have time to be conned. They have limited attention to spend on other peoples’ guidance, but they can’t rely on what they already know. So if you can genuinely show you can help them, and that you are willing to do the work to bring it out, then your thought leadership will be ready to lace with SEO and cast out into the waters.