‘ I think reading a book is sometimes like… you’ve slowed things down. You’re in this present moment, working on this very particular thing. And I think we want more of that in our lives.’
What makes a business book worth reading – or publishing?
If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by the sheer volume (and, let’s be honest, variable quality) of business books on the market, you’ll appreciate Todd Sattersten’s refreshingly thoughtful approach. As the author of The 100 Best Business Books of All-Time and the upcoming 100 Best Books for Work and Life, he’s done a lot of leg work on your behalf as a reader.
And as publisher and owner of Bard Press, he’s doing his bit for quality over quantity with a startlingly original business model: Bard publishes just one book each year. Risky? Revolutionary? Realistic? All of those things.
We also talk about the increasingly blurred lines between business and self-development books, the importance of identifying real-world problems and the route to 100,000 copies. Extraordinary Business Book Club gold.
Bard Press: https://bardpress.com/
Todd on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/janefriedman/
Alison on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/the-alison-jones/
The 10-day Business Book Proposal Challenge: www.proposalchallenge.com
The Extraordinary Business Book Club on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1447064765612358/
Write it Wild 2026: https://alisonjones.lpages.co/write-it-wild/
Practical Inspiration YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@piptalking
Alison Jones: Well, this is exciting. I’m here today with Todd Sattersten, who is the publisher at and owner of Bard Press, a book publisher that works with authors to create bestselling books in business, personal development and technology. And it has a fascinating business model, which we will be talking about.
But before Bard Press, Todd served as General Manager of IT Revolution and president of business book retailer 800 CEO Read, always sad that that’s gone. He’s the co-author of The Hundred Best Business Books of all Time, and his latest book, out in October, is A Hundred Best Books for Work and Life.
Todd, I don’t think anybody is better qualified to join me in the Extraordinary Business Book Club podcast. Welcome.
Todd Sattersten: I am thrilled, absolutely thrilled, and happy to be here.
Alison Jones: We are going to geek out for a whole half hour just talking about this, but it’s going to be so great. I’m so looking forward to this. But first of all, let me congratulate you on the upcoming launch. I know it isn’t, we’re speaking in May and it isn’t until October, but I’ve seen a proof and it’s looking good.
A Hundred Best Books for Work and Life. And the obvious question is, when you say best, what do you mean by that? How do you judge the best book?
Todd Sattersten: No, I think that’s a great question. So for me, in creating a collection, like we’re trying to get down to like a hundred books, what’s something manageable that might be helpful for people? So the first thing for me is always, what are the most common problems people deal with? So let’s make sure that we put books and address problems that people are working with on a common basis.
So, that starts to narrow the category a little bit, so for us in this book, we have 25 chapters, very short chapters, and each chapter has maybe four books in it. And what we’re trying to address is like really specific topics that people could read a table of contents and go, oh yes, I’ve got that problem.
Oh, I’m…
Alison Jones: It’s like a diagnostic tool, isn’t it? I love that.
Todd Sattersten: It is, and what we tried to do is get a little bit away from the traditional publishing categories, like what you would see on a bookshelf. Because a lot of times there’s a lot of great stuff hiding in general management, in marketing. So what we want to do is get that touch more specific.
So common problems are super important to me. I would say, the second one is, I think great books redefine the problem that you’re working on,
Alison Jones: Ooh. Say that again. That’s important.
Todd Sattersten: It is, right. Great books redefine the problem because if we walk around going, oh yes, I’ve heard that. Yes, I’m working on that. I’ve got it covered. Until someone comes along and says, yes, but what if you thought about it like this instead?
Will you then even consider new solutions?
So if I redefine the problem for you on the front side, I’m probably going to give you different solutions to the problem on the backside. And so better, more interesting problem definitions are really important to me in the book.
And then the third one is just how we’ve always judged, you know, books by the design, the quality of the writing. You know, it’s a particular form of communication. So it’s more than subjective. It’s, you know, you read enough of these, you and I have read enough, and I think your listeners probably have too. In 10 pages you can know if a book is working for you. And I mean that usually as a personal thing, not,
Alison Jones: and it’s a visceral thing as well,
Todd Sattersten: It’s a visceral thing, right? Mm-hmm. And so the third piece is just, gosh, did I enjoy reading this? Do I think someone else would enjoy reading it?
Alison Jones: Yes, lovely. And what great criteria as well to think of as a writer. Like if somebody were judging this book, what would they think about how I’m framing the problem? What would they think about how it’s coming across, my tone of voice, the experience of reading it, how well I lead people through it, all of that stuff?
So, yes, terrific. Thank you.
And how did you go about, I mean, I’ve got this vision of you sort of sitting there with books spread all around you on the floor, you know, sort of tossing ones behind you and prioritizing others.
Todd Sattersten: Right. If we move the camera, we would see the piles as well, right.
Right. But I would say part of it is 20 years of being in the industry. I think part of it was recommendations that a lot of times I probably knew the books that I think kind of fitted into a given category. If I was thinking about goal setting, I probably knew the three books upfront and then it was kind of sourcing what might be the fourth book that would sort of solve that.
So I think a lot of it is just being next to it for as long as we have and having worked on publishing books, you spend a lot of time looking at the books that are published. So, there’s this kind of naturalness to, gosh, what would I want to share with people having gone through this so many times with working with authors on the books that we’ve published.
Alison Jones: One thing I noticed as well and it made me laugh that you started with Carol Dweck’s Mindset because there’s a sort of unwritten law of publishing business books is that you have to reference Mindset at least once. So there is that sort of sense of, you know, which books have led and shaped the conversation, which books get picked up by other books and referred to and built on.
There’s something of that in it as well, isn’t there?
Todd Sattersten: I absolutely think there is. I think that there are some cases like a great example of this is Anders Erickson and his book Peak. A lot of people know him by the 10,000 hour rule because of Malcolm Gladwell, but they haven’t actually read his work.
So for me it was really important to say, Hey, listen, you know this from this other place. You probably don’t even know the guy’s name. Gosh, go read his book because the book is really good and it gets you even closer to the idea that he’s talking about. And as a matter of fact, he would tell you, Hey, this 10,000 hour thing, I may have been a little bit misrepresented and
Alison Jones: It’s a little bit more complicated than that.
Todd Sattersten: Yes. And so that part’s really important to me. Like it’s awesome to know about Dweck, I was in a room last night talking about, believe it or not, Carol Dweck. And no one had heard of Carol Dweck. And I thought, oh my gosh, what an amazing opportunity to describe her work and why it matters. But most people have heard it in reference, gosh, go read the book because the book is amazing and you’ll be able to go even deeper.
Alison Jones: And books are amazing generally. I mean, you and I are not going to fall out about this. We know that. But I’m really increasingly interested in the longevity of the book. I mean, I’ve been in publishing, what, 32, 33 years. People have been talking about the death of the book ever since I joined. Here it still is.
And every year I think, well, we can’t take it for granted. What is it that books specifically do for us cognitively and as people?
Todd Sattersten: Yes, I think that’s a great question. And it’s more than the 20 or 30 years we’ve been in the industry. We’re working on 550 years since Gutenberg, right. And I don’t take that lightly. I mean, I think about that really, that the Codex format, the bound, like on the, depending on which culture, left or right side that it’s bound, that has held up.
I mean, I always think it took 60 years to even put page numbers. Like it took 60 years to get the page numbers as a feature in a book. Like, it took a lot of figuring out to get to the book as a format as being effective. I think that books demand our attention. I think that’s why we actually like them. They demand our attention.
In a world that is more and more and more trying to distract us, trying to fragment that attention, trying to put it into the smallest possible piece they can. You know, know whether it’s the TikTok video or it’s the one block of the quote that you want to read from the author. I think the book itself demands our attention because, like I always think about when they do studies of how people read, I’m always amazed, the conclusion I always come to with this research is that the reader’s in charge,
Alison Jones: Hmm.
Todd Sattersten: Right, versus a movie versus even a song, a speech. And, I mentioned this research because when you look at eye scans, it’s very interesting. People read two or three sentences and then they’ll go back.
They’ll often reread, and we know this kind of passively, but a lot of times we’re just not even cognizant that we’re doing it. But we are in control of the speed of the narrative. We’re in control of how much comprehension we’ve had of it, and I think we want that. We want that. Can I get as close to this as possible?
And we want, I mean, I think reading a book is sometimes like a walk in the park that you’ve slowed things down. You’re in this present moment, working on this very particular thing. And I think we want more of that in our lives. And I think that’s why books are still around.
Alison Jones: I was so interested that you used the word, they demand our attention because you are right, of course. And, there’s an awful lot demanding our attention at the moment. Do you know what I mean? And I think there is something about, we originally, you know, I was digital development director. I thought eBooks would just replace books.
Actually, there’s something about the offline-ness of them allows you to reclaim your attention and as you say, sort of do at your own speed, co-create, make notes, underline, you know, there’s something about the physicality of a book as well that is good for us.
So, and we’re talking specifically about business books here and that co-creation, that what does this mean for me, that pausing to think, that making notes, that’s the sort of stuff that doesn’t go on so much in fiction, but actually the book is a great format for that, isn’t it?
Todd Sattersten: Yes. So let me, I love that you mentioned fiction right there because a good friend of mine we’ve had conversations about this between fiction and nonfiction, and particularly art, the genre of this prescriptive nonfiction. Business self-help, whatever this whole category is you want to talk about.
And her comment was, these kinds of books, you are the protagonist.
Alison Jones: Ha. What a great phrase. Yes. You are the hero.
Todd Sattersten: Yes. You are the hero. And I think when the author puts themselves down and brings the reader forward and they make them the protagonist, that is when we seal it, we feel that viscerality that you were talking about before.
And so, I think when we see ourselves as the hero of the story, of the, Hey, there’s this possibility of getting better and this is what that journey might look like. I think it just becomes as incredible and as powerful a tool as fiction can be.
Alison Jones: And that makes me think of Donald Miller and his How to Build a StoryBrand and that idea that, you know, as the author, you’re not the hero, you’re the guide. The reader is the hero. And so many people forget that, don’t they? Yes. Really powerful reminder.
I could go on talk about business books forever, but I want to talk specifically about Bard Press because you have the most fascinating business model and it slightly, sort of takes my breath away because it’s so audacious but, so effective.
So yes. How do you do things at Bard, Todd?
Todd Sattersten: Yes. So I always like to start by saying we’ve been doing this for 30 years because the next part is a little bit unbelievable, which is we only publish one book a year and people go, oh my God, one book a year. And if you talk to people in the publishing side of things, like, gosh, oh my gosh, one book a year, I’d love to just do one book a year. So. Oh, if we’d like the checklist, we could work through the checklist of the problems and the challenges of it, and we could also work for the similar checklist of the opportunities that it provides. What I would say is that the model was started by the founder of the press, Ray Bard, and he created it really for three reasons.
Reason number one is it’s better for the author. Like, we have the ability to focus solely with that author on the development of their book, on the launch of their book, and then really on the continued, building of awareness of the book after the book comes out because we work on so few books. So it’s good for the author.
It’s good for the reader because the books are actually better. Like we just literally get to spend more time with them. And I don’t think that’s always magical. It’s not like it absolutely means that the books are going to be better, but you know, our hypothesis is that extra time that we get to spend with our books and with our authors makes better books for the reader.
And I think the third one that’s just really important is, I think it just, you know, when you’re running a small business, you want to build a business that matches you and what you like doing. And Ray loved the idea of a very small team. Right now it’s three people here at Bard spending enormous amounts of time with that author to create the best possible thing.
And so it’s the love of that versus I think it’s something different if you’re doing something else. And so I think it’s the triangulation of those three things that makes it interesting and cool.
Alison Jones: You can tell you’re a business book geek because you talk in threes as well, which is..
Todd Sattersten: Yes. There to be a Trinity. There has to be some…
Alison Jones: That’s so funny.
When you choose a book, that’s got to be a huge deal for you. Yes, I’m just imagining being a fly on the wall in your editorial meetings, what does that look like?
Todd Sattersten: I think we’ve spent a lot of time on this and there’s actually 12 items on a checklist. And there needs to be a very strong yes to almost every one of those questions for us to do it. And what I would say is, and my guess is this won’t surprise you, many times, the author is actually more important than the book. In our model.
Alison Jones: Now, when you say the author, what’s that shorthand for?
Todd Sattersten: Yes. So, I’m looking for a set of things in my model when we are working with an author. So I’m looking for somebody who’s been working on a problem for 10 years,
Alison Jones: Yes.
Todd Sattersten: No less because I want them to have thoroughly thought about the problem before we start talking, I want someone who has already found a following in an audience and a set of people that they’re delivering value to. I want someone who’s had to sell something. I want someone who’s either worked in sales, marketing or has built their own business as entrepreneurship, because guess what, launching books is really hard and you’re going to get a lot of nos in that process. So have you already built kind of some of those muscles to be able to do that?
You know, I’ll give you one more. For us, we want someone who has demonstratively really showed us that they care about book culture. That they want to contribute to this canon of whatever area that they’re working in, whether it’s, you know, business development, whether it’s leadership, whether it’s marketing whether it’s coaching, like whatever the world is, they know the space already.
They’ve read the other books and they know almost coming to us, Hey, here’s where my book fits and I think there’s something unique that we’re going to say. So there’s just a few of the ideas that we think about.
Alison Jones: I love that. I’ve got this sort of vision in my head of a noisy conversation at different ends of the table. Everybody’s talking, and then suddenly the Bard author clears his throat and everybody just stops, you’re just going to have one, one thing. It’s, well, actually, the one thing is one of your books, isn’t it?
And, but it’s going to really matter. And it’s such a refreshing, a refreshingly different approach to the noisiness of content creation, social media, that kind of received wisdom that more is more.
Todd Sattersten: Agreed, yes. And it’s really hard. I think that the clarity that you just spoke about there is probably the most important item that we work on. I would say it’s 80% of the problem. If you walk into a bookstore and you look across the shelf. It’s funny how quickly you go, yes, not that, not that, not that.
But I’m not sure most people think about, why did they say not that? And most of the time it’s because they don’t know how the book’s going to help them. Like, it’s not actually clear to them from the cover. And frankly, literally from the title, subtitle, the images on the cover. The reader has to know how it is that’re going to be helped.
So that process of getting to that level of clarity that someone’s going to see it and in a second be able to go Yes, that! Yes, that’s what I need. And how sometimes even with all the work we do, sometimes we get it right and sometimes we don’t.
Alison Jones: Well, yes…
Todd Sattersten: …right, sighs the book publisher.
Alison Jones: Yes, and there’s also that famous thing, you know, if you’ve got sort of five editors sitting in a, or the marketing team or whatever, sitting in a meeting and have six opinions on a cover, can’t you? But…
Todd Sattersten: Yes, it’s true.
Alison Jones: How do you see this, well, books generally, but business books specifically, what’s your prognosis for them?
Todd Sattersten: Yes, I think that’s such a great question. I think what we’re seeing right now is that it’s getting very difficult to see the difference between what a business book is and what a self-help book is, and I think that’s something that’s very interesting to pay attention to. And classically, I would’ve said that self-help books are ones that tend to spend more time on the problem.
They probably spent 75% of the book focused on the problem and maybe that last 25% focused on, Hey, what are the solutions? Business books tend to have the exact opposite ratio. We tend to talk about the problem efficiently, effectively, try to give all the important stuff, and then give a lot of room for the solution.
And I think what we’re starting to see is like, it’s a little bit harder to tell the difference between those two books, between those ratios, between I think business books tend to focus on success, outward success, right? I’m going to get the better job. I’m going to start the business. I’m going to, there’s something outward that I want to express as a result of it.
Self-help tends to be inward. It tends to be, I’m working on something that’s like just causing me some kind of pain and suffering. There’s a relationship that’s not working for me. There’s, I’m procrastinating. So the combination of those two and how both of them are equally important to each other is making the category a little bit different.
So, and I think what we’re seeing, and we could see in the sales data is what’s being shelved in self-help is selling more now than what’s selling in business. And I think that’s something in our line of work that we need to pay attention to. Whether it’s, do our books need to be over in self-help? Maybe, maybe or something else.
Alison Jones: Because, you know, the bookshelves in a bookshop are one thing, and they have changed a lot over the last 10 years. I mean, there’s fewer of them for one thing. But actually direct sales, sales through e-learning platform, not e-learning platforms so much as you know, corporate resources, electronic platforms. And so all that’s happening as well. Business book clubs. So there’s the non-traditional roots direct to business, I think are more interesting perhaps than they’ve ever been.
Todd Sattersten: Yes, I think that, I’m not so much… like if we went back to what’s important about our authors, I don’t tend to be someone who’s like, you need this many people on your email list and you need this many people, social media followers or whatever the case might be. But I am interested in the business that they’re running.
I am interested in the clients that they’re working with, whether that’s, you know, a wide spectrum of more of a business to consumer or if it’s a B2B style. And I think it’s that, it always has been, but I think it’s even more so that there’s even more power available to authors for them to do those direct sales.
And so, that’s a big part of our model when we work with authors is, gosh, we want to, I would say one of our hypothesis, because we could spend so much time with our authors, that we actually make them better in a lot of ways, but in particular as booksellers. Like how does this book fit into what you’re doing and showing them that there’s a really good return on investment for integrating this into your business.
And then what that
Alison Jones: the only return on investment, isn’t it
Todd Sattersten: That’s correct. I mean, yes.
Alison Jones: Given how cheap books are. But I think that’s, and also the way that, I think this is something that futureproofs the book in a sense, because what really moves the needle is experience. It’s listening to the person, it’s the training, it’s the sort of in the moment stuff, it’s talking about the stuff with other people. This is what really engages us with ideas, isn’t it? And then you take away the book and those two things together are so much more than the sum of the parts because the experience ends and the book, it can feel lonely, but when you’ve got the two together in combination, man, that’s powerful.
Todd Sattersten: And it gets back to the, I think, the point we were making earlier of, I can dip back into that book. It’s like the author’s with me now.
Alison Jones: Right. I’ve got a little bit of the author right here. It’s on the shelf. I can see it. It reminds me immediately of that concept, that commitment I made. Yes.
Todd Sattersten: And it’s like eight hours of being with them. Like if you think about kind of the length of the book, if they were going to talk to you, it’s 4, 6, 8 hours of time with them. And so that, in addition, creates greater connection between that author and that reader.
Alison Jones: Yes and also you value any time that you do spend with them more because of the book and because of that sense of them, how you say it is really a lovely synergy, yes.
Now Todd, there’s so much I want to talk to you about, and I’m running out of time and I’m hating myself for this. But I’m going to ask you, I always ask my guests for their best tip for a first time business book writer, so I’m going to limit you to to one, but you’re…
Todd Sattersten: …to one? Okay. 10,000 copies. My biggest piece of advice to authors is don’t go commercially publish a book till you know you can sell 10,000 copies. And I say that because we ran research on this, and what we found is that if you can’t sell 10,000 copies of your book in the first year that it’s out, there’s only a one in 10 chance it will ever sell more than 10,000 copies in its lifetime.
Alison Jones: That’s so good. What maybe, I mean, do you mean through the trade or do you mean through bulk deals?
Todd Sattersten: I mean, yes. So, what’s interesting though is on the other side of that 10,000, your ability to make those next benchmarks, whether it’s 25,000 or 50,000 or a hundred thousand copies, is markedly better. It’s something like to get to 25,000 copies, there’s a 40% chance you’re going to do it. To get to 50,000 copies. It’s something like 48% chance you’re going to do it.
There’s something like, you know, even to get to a hundred thousand copies, if you could pass that 10, you have a one in 10 chance of getting to a hundred thousand copies. So there’s something about that number right there. Now that doesn’t mean, I don’t want to stop people from self-publishing books or considering smaller projects that might help them build platform, but I’m just saying when you get really serious about wanting to put a book out in the world that you want to have an impact that moves way out beyond you, don’t do it till you have a clear line of sight to 10,000 copies.
Alison Jones: Well, let’s unpack that a little bit more. How does an author get that clear line of sight to 10,000 copies?
Todd Sattersten: Yes, so I think that it gets, so I’m probably going to highlight some things we’ve already talked about. Are you working on a problem that people care about? Have you identified the felt need that people are going to go gosh, I need to stop and I need to read that book. Right? And sometimes we’re just working in really, really small problem areas, like really, really specific small spaces. And that’s fine. Yes, publish the book, but do it in a particular way that reduces your risk.
But like for Bard, this won’t surprise you, we generally want to publish a book that we think in its lifetime we’ll sell a hundred thousand copies. Its lifetime. So we give ourselves a lot of time to be able to do that. But that’s the bar we set for ourselves.
And what that means is there’s only certain books that we can publish, like the problem area and the number of people that we’re helping has to be pretty large for us to have the level of consequence that we’re talking about.
And so make sure you get the felt need right. I think that’s the most important thing. I think it’s the thing that people skip past the most, that they think, oh, I’ve got this figured out. I know what it is that people want. Just caution people. Don’t be like, give yourself as many ways as possible to confirm that there is a felt need out there and that people want to read it in a book.
Like that’s another thing is this the right concept to teach in a book? So there’s a couple of ideas.
Alison Jones: Yes, it’s brilliant and I think that that, it’s so easy, isn’t it, to start from what you know, you’re cursed with knowledge as an author, you know what will help people, you know, but if they don’t recognize that, if you’re not speaking the language that they’re speaking when they’re talking about the problem, yes.
Brilliant. Excellent tip. Thank you.
And this is going to be interesting. Recommend us a book. I mean, I know you’ve got several hundred of them, just it’s going to be… what book do you think everybody listening to this just should read? I bet it’s going to be a Bard Press book, isn’t it?
Todd Sattersten: I think that so usually what I say to people is, because that’s a common question, right? I say, I, I usually want to then respond to that. Well, what’s the problem you’re working on? Like, let’s get, let’s be able to get a little more specific. So in this case, what I’m going to do is I’m going to try to pick a big enough problem that I think a lot of people are working on that would, that would be worthwhile.
So I’m a huge fan of a book called Your Brain At Work by David Rock.
Alison Jones: Oh, the SCARF model is so, so it’s like a mindset, isn’t it? You’ve got to, you can’t, you can’t not use it.
Todd Sattersten: Right. And, and it’s, and it’s for those who aren’t familiar with the book, I think Rock does the best job of taking the neuroscience and applying it to the concept, the context of the workplace. And and he’s just really honest about, and what’s so fascinating about the book is that there’ll, there’ll be a chapter about a given topic.
There’s a little bit of a narrative actually in the book. There’s a little bit of a like a fable kind of woven in, which can be tricky, but it works. So we, we, we see this scene of something that something happens and usually it doesn’t turn out particularly well, and then he stops and he says, okay, here’s what’s actually going on in this, in the character’s brain.
Here’s what’s actually going on. And then he rewrites the scene with the person wi now with that knowledge of what’s actually happening neurologically to them. So whether it’s being flooded by emotion, whether it’s procrastination, whether it’s realizing that the prefrontal cortex is actually very, very small and the demands that we put on it oftentimes are too much. You know, so that, like, this is the thing that I, this is probably the biggest thing and I’ve been using it more and more lately. There’s only so much that fits, like in this little area in our forehead. You’ve got to write stuff down. You have to have lists, you have to store things in other places to give your mind more space to actually do the work that it’s really good at.
And so, I would say Your Brain at Work by David Rock I. And I, I already got a big yes from you, so I know I’m on the right
Alison Jones: Yes. yes. yes. And we were talking earlier about that overlap between business books and self-help. That’s such a great example because he uses, I mean, it’s ‘your brain at work’ and, and most of it’s about work and how to, to navigate work better and relationships at work better. But he also brings in, you know, talking to your kids and it’s all the same brain, right?
It’s all the same life. And, and…
Todd Sattersten: …as part of the reason, oh yes, sorry. It’s part of the reason that with this new version of the hundred Best, I wanted to call it work and life because I really want people to see the kinds of books that we’re talking about, like these that work just as well in the work environment as they do in all these other parts of our lives that really matter.
And so by going from. Don’t get me wrong. I love the first version of the book of, you know, when we did the hundred best business books of all time, but I love that I could draw from a much wider range of books for this new one that I think just again, helps people in a much wider range of areas. yes.
Alison Jones: It feels very post pandemic as well…
Todd Sattersten: Does, yes.
Alison Jones: I love that. And if people want to find out more about Bard Press, talk more about you, more about your books, where should they go?
Todd Sattersten: Super easy. Go to bardpress.com and you find information about our process. We have a blog, all the books that we’re publishing. Lots of great resources there.
Alison Jones: Fantastic. I do hope that we have managed to communicate something of the, the raw joy that we have around business and self-development books. I, I hope that that has been contagious, but it’s been just such a joy to talk to you, so thank you so much for your time.
Todd Sattersten: Thank you, Alison.
