If you are planning to release your first book, then you, like me, will find the experience of Semyon Kolosov useful:

How much money does a book bring?
— I receive a percentage of Alpina's sales, from 10 to 30% depending on the format. But how much the book will ultimately earn, I don't know. It all depends on sales.

Can you live on income from books?
— Let's exhale. No. It's easy to calculate that this is a pleasant bonus, not a salary. Unless it's a fiction bestseller with millions of copies, which later gets a movie adaptation. With non-fiction in the CIS, everything is much more complicated. For example: I made my first book as a self-publishing (without a publisher) and earned about $1000 from it in about 3 years. I invested about $200 and that was almost without promotion.

Then why write a book at all? And why specifically about strategy?
— Often people assume it's for personal brand. Yes, no, but yes, but no. I didn't write the book for that reason. I wanted to gather my thoughts into a single system and create material that would help people make stronger decisions. A book does slightly enhance your personal brand, but if there's no experience and results behind it, it quickly becomes clear.

Why did you decide to write a book about strategy?
— With operational management, I've always been fine. When it's clear what needs to be done, I know how to build a system, organize people, establish processes, and bring things to a result.
But even as an employee, I saw that the real difficulty begins earlier. Even before the plan appears. When you need to understand where to go, what to give up, and what to focus on.

I started reading books and realized that most answers didn't satisfy me. Strategy was often described too abstractly. Almost no one explained how to make decisions in a world that is already really changing and reassembling, and how to then translate strategy into real actions if you're going to change everything again soon. I was annoyed that I didn't know how to do it. I wanted to find answers myself. Over the next few years, I studied this topic, worked with clients, tested ideas in practice, and gradually developed my own approach.
What is the main idea of the book?
One of the main ideas of the first part of the book is that we will be embedded in the future anyway, whether we want it or not. The world will continue to change. We cannot stop the changes, but we can better understand what is happening, notice signals of the future, explore different scenarios, and make decisions that increase the likelihood of success.
That's why "Strategy Without Illusions" appeared.


Congratulations to Semyon on the release of his new book!
You can buy it here 👉 Alpina, Chitai-Gorod, Ozon, WB. Litres. Yandex.Books. Let's support the author — with reviews on digital platforms 🙏

P.S. Well, I'm off to find a publisher...

📲 MAX 👮‍♂️ VK ☺️DZEN 🙃 SETKA ✈️ TG #book #strategy #learning #publishing