Robin Waite on why he gives away more books than he sells, and how a 10-second mention turned into 3,000 gifted copies and £300,000 of revenue.
Most authors treat a book as something to sell. Robin Waite treats his as something to give away, and it has brought in more clients than any marketing campaign he has ever run.
In this episode of Book the Business, host Joe Gregory (LinkedIn) sits down with business coach Robin Waite to trace two decades of entrepreneurship through three very different books. Joe published Robin's first title and helped plan his second, so the conversation covers the breakdown that ended Robin's agency, why a parable beat a how-to, the economics of printing and posting thousands of free copies, and the chain of events that turned one podcast appearance into roughly £300,000.
This article breaks down their conversation into practical steps for coaches, consultants, and freelancers who want to use a book as a genuine client-generation engine rather than a vanity project.
Robin ran a marketing agency doing web design and branding from 2004 to 2016. Heavily influenced by Daniel Priestley's Key Person of Influence, he noticed that the thought leaders he admired all had three things in common: they spoke from stages, they guested on podcasts, and almost without exception they had written a book. Publishing felt like a rite of passage.
The first draft had a different title. Robin wanted to call it "Why Websites Fail", and Joe talked him out of it on the grounds that a title like that attracts exactly one audience: people with failing websites. They landed on Online Business Startup instead.
The turning point came in a room of about 50 entrepreneurs. Robin raised his hand to ask whether a chapter or two about the business mistakes he had made might belong in the book, and an Australian voice behind him cut in with some blunt encouragement to just write it. That one chapter became ten. As Robin puts it, that was the catalyst: the moment he realised he had a body of business knowledge that could shortcut someone else's journey.
The book started opening doors almost immediately. Consulting work, speaking gigs, and podcast invitations followed, including an early appearance on Google's own partners podcast after someone there found the book.
Then 2016 arrived. Robin was between daughters, running more than 100 clients with a small team, pulling all-nighters and working weekends. He had a mental breakdown, and the only way out he could see was to close the business. He was petrified of a second child arriving and not being around for her, having already regretted taking only two weeks of paternity leave the first time.
Someone got wind that the agency was closing and offered to buy the client list and some intellectual property. Not a huge sum, but enough for what Robin calls a mini retirement, a year or so with his young family. During that year the book kept selling. It passed 20,000 copies and spent two and a half years competing for the number one spot in its category, while most books hold that badge for a day. At networking events people would ask what he did, he would say nothing, and their curiosity did the rest. They bribed him with coffee and cake to pick his brains, he never charged, and it turned out he was rather good at it.
By 2017 Robin had retrained as a coach and created the Fearless Business brand, but he had a content problem. Online Business Startup had launched his career, and yet the marketing material inside it no longer matched what he actually taught. He needed a book that aligned with the coaching.
He chose to write it as a parable because those were the business books he most enjoyed reading, the ones like Go For No, Built to Sell and The Phoenix Project that carry their lessons inside a story. He still has the original index cards from the planning session, zip-tied into a little keepsake book.
The story itself was real. Robin ran a webinar for about 80 people expecting to work with agencies, and afterwards an excitable man rang him up, said he loved it, admitted he did not fully understand it, and explained that he was not a web designer at all but a golf pro. Russ became Robin's first paid coaching client, restructured his golf lessons into packaged programmes, and adjusted his pricing. Robin told that story at speaking gigs so often that audiences kept telling him to turn it into a book. It now carries five core frameworks in only 100 pages.
Robin has published seven books in total, though one has since been delisted because the content aged, so the honest count is six, or seven if you include the Spanish edition of Take Your Shot. What matters more than the number is what he does with them.
The strategy is deliberate: gift the book, capture the lead, and let trust build from there. No free-plus-shipping gimmick. Most of Robin's marketing budget simply goes into books that he posts out. Take Your Shot's 100 pages made that viable in a way a 250-page book never could, because print and postage costs dictated the economics in those early years. He has now sent copies to more than 120 countries, and when he speaks at or sponsors an event he turns up with boxes so everyone leaves with one. You can see the full set on his books page.
Joe's view, from a career in publishing, is that the more copies you get into the right hands, the more people buy. Chasing book sales directly is a low return on effort; distribution takes care of sales as a byproduct. Robin's experience backs it up, with a modest passive income from Kindle and paperback and audiobooks on Audible outselling both combined. He has also repurposed the material, turning each chapter summary of Online Business Startup into a YouTube video, which became some of his most watched content for years.
Joe offers a piece of advice that sounds uncomfortable for a publishing podcast: if you are using a book as a marketing tool, assume the person requesting it will never read it, then work out how they get the value anyway.
Robin's answer is to make the arrival itself count. There is no fulfilment warehouse. He has a label printer and a stack of mailers, he personally signs every copy, adds a Fearless Business stamp, and walks it down to the post office himself. He describes it as gifted with love, and as giving rather than giving in order to get. Those small moments of delight, he argues, tell you more about a business owner than the product does.
The same thinking drove the digital edition. Postage costs have climbed steeply, so Fearless Pricing needed a digital version, but Robin refused to send out an ordinary PDF. He loaded the file into Lovable and built an interactive reading experience that remembers where you are, embeds video and podcasts, and carries QR codes to extra resources. The inspiration came from Steven Bartlett's beta-reader system, which served Robin a chapter at a time in a browser and tracked his reading before asking for feedback.
It is a habit that goes back further. Early in the move to online coaching Robin sat on a call with plain white walls and plain white shelves while someone complained that video calls would never catch on. His answer was that it depends entirely on the experience you create. Within a week the office was painted, the shelves were rebuilt from old scaffolding boards, and the sign was up.
Robin's standout moment as an author came through a long chain of coincidences. An invitation onto a panel about books at an event with 500 people led to two authors tapping him on the shoulder for help with their own title. That book, The Unfair Advantage, went on to sell across numerous countries, and its mastermind group put seven people on a monthly call through lockdown. One of them was Ali Abdaal.
Ali got hold of Take Your Shot, loved it, and mentioned it on his YouTube channel. A brief ten-second reference produced around 1,200 sales in a single day. A couple of years later Robin was invited onto Ali's podcast, took the train to London with a handful of books, and the two of them signed about 20 copies to give away to listeners.
When the episode went live six weeks later, those 20 books were gone within five minutes and the orders kept coming. Robin ended up giving away 3,000 copies, enrolled somewhere between 45 and 50 coaching clients, and did roughly £300,000 that year off the back of one interview. As Joe frames it, a book is both a door into your world and a key that unlocks other people's.
Days 1 to 30 - Fix the economics: Work out what a copy actually costs you to print and post, and be honest about whether the length is serving you. Set up proper lead capture so every gifted copy returns a name, an email and a phone number. Decide what budget you are willing to treat as marketing spend rather than lost revenue.
Days 31 to 60 - Build the experience: Add the touches that make arrival memorable, starting with signing each copy yourself. Assume the recipient will never read it, and create one alternative route to the value, a short video series or a chapter summary. Line up two or three events where you can put copies into the right hands.
Days 61 to 90 - Open the doors: Identify the rooms and groups where the people you want to reach already gather, and go and be useful in them. Offer the book to podcast hosts as a listener giveaway. Track which copies turn into conversations, and reinvest in whichever route produced them.
"Giving books away will cannibalise my sales." Robin's experience is the opposite. Copies in the right hands create the visibility that drives sales, and the money was never in the royalties anyway; it is in the clients the book introduces you to.
"I can't afford to post thousands of free books." Then design for it. Robin's second book came in at 100 pages precisely because print and postage costs shaped what was possible. A shorter, sharper book that reaches more people beats a heavier one that stays in a box.
"Nobody will read it, so what's the point?" Assume they will not, and plan accordingly. The book still signals authority, still opens rooms, and still arrives as a gift. Build a video series or summaries alongside it so the value lands either way.
The thread running through this conversation is patience. Online Business Startup took two and a half years to become a slow-burn bestseller. The Ali Abdaal appearance took three years of relationship before the invitation came. None of it looked like a campaign while it was happening.
What Robin has built instead is an asset that keeps working: a book that arrives signed and stamped, that opens doors he could not have knocked on himself, and that quietly does the job most business owners try to do with daily social posts. Today he works with coaches, consultants, freelancers and a growing number of creators, on pricing and money mindset, with one driving philosophy behind all of it: double the income with half the clients, which also means half the consultations, half the fulfilment and half the marketing effort.
If that sounds like the kind of business you would rather be running, Robin's approach to pricing is where most clients start.
Book the Business is hosted by Joe Gregory, publisher at Advantage and founder of Rethink Press. The show explores how experts, entrepreneurs and business leaders turn what they know into a book, and then use that book to build authority, create opportunities and grow a business.
Joe has overseen the publication of more than a thousand business books since 2003, which makes him unusually well placed to ask what actually happens after a book comes out.
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