I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard someone say, “You should publish a business book....

....It’ll be great for your brand, your leads, and your overall revenue growth. Great marketing tactic, that book writing.” Makes sense.

Maybe it’s my roots in direct marketing, or maybe I’m just a natural skeptic, but a while ago I started asking, “Says who? Where’s the data? What’s the real difference that it makes? What’s the return? If I do go for it, how might I screw it up?”

No one had any data (at least that we could find), so our research team at RainToday.com went out to get it, and we just published the results in the report The Business Impact of Writing a Book. Now we know a few things with some research-based backup:

• Get a real publisher. Our folks that self-published sold on average (median) about 2,000 copies of their books, and those with real publishers sold in the 12,000 to 14,000 copies of theirs.

Why does this matter? Because the more copies of your books that you sell, you get dramatically more marketing benefit for your business. Also, our authors who used established business book publishers (Jossey Bass, McGraw Hill, Wiley, Berrett-Koehler, etc.) were by and large much more happy with the effects on their business growth.

• Marketing benefit details. Since we’re all marketers here on the MarketingProfs blog, I thought I’d share the top marketing benefits. Aside from the immediate personal satisfaction from publishing a successful book, there are numerous indirect benefits that will help you grow your business:

* Expect to market yourself. Don’t expect a publisher to do anything for you in the area of marketing the book. If you happen to write the “big winner” of the season, they’ll get behind it. Meanwhile, they likely won’t even accept your book if you don’t have a strong marketing plan and platform in your book proposal.