The $100 Book: Why Book Economics Is Broken And How Authors Can Leverage Pricing To Increase The Value Of Their Intellectual Capital

Has anyone in publishing done the math?

Arrrrr! 🏴‍☠️ Welcome to a free edition of Category Pirates. Each week, we share radically different ideas to help you design new and different categories. For more: Audiobooks |Category design podcast | Books | Sign up for a Founding subscription to jam with the Pirate Eddie Bot

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Dear Friend, Subscriber, and Category Pirate,

The first $100 marketing book (that we know of) hit #1 on Amazon’s global charts after a week.

That book was Lightning Strike Marketing.

No ads. No PR blitz. No bestseller campaign.

Just a different Point of View and a middle finger to an industry that hasn’t redefined its value since the Clinton administration.

What we’re about to share with you is not only germane to writers.

It’s seminal for anyone who wants their value to be valued in a post-AI world.

(This will be a free mini-book for about a week, so everyone has a chance to read it!)

If books kept up with inflation, a $27 book in 1997 would cost $54 today.

In 1997, Jeff Bezos said the average price of a book was $27.

Today, it’s about $28.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported the price of a recreational book dropped by 1.3% from 1997 to 2025. In contrast, the Consumer Price Index is up 96%.

Book authors are smart, right?

So, why are books less expensive in 2025 vs. 1997?

It’s because sometimes smart people are so smart, they’re stupid. Including us.

Even smart people forget that everything we value, we’ve been taught to value.

Everything, even books.

Has anyone in publishing done the math? Yes!

Publishers are good at math, but in a different way.

Take HarperCollins:

• Revenue

  • 2000 = $0.95B

  • 2024 = $2.1B

  • +120% growth overall, 3.3% CAGR

• EBITDA

• 2000 = $82MM (8.6%)

• 2024 = $269MM (12.9%)

• +228% growth, 4.9% CAGR

HarperCollins’ revenue grew slightly ahead of inflation.

Their profits grew about 60% faster.

If book prices have stayed flat for three decades… how did the publisher grow revenue and margins? Not by increasing author success. They changed the strategy around who they sell to, what they sell, and how much they keep.

They pulled four big moves authors need to understand:

1. Mercenary mix shift

Audiobooks and e-books allowed HarperCollins to add incremental revenue through new formats with higher margins. Pirate Eddie built a bottom-up model to estimate gross margins with both SuperGrok and Lucy (our ChatGPT), and he estimates audiobook and e-book margins are 60-80%, while print margins are 45%.

This is a 2,500 to 3,500 basis point increase.

HarperCollins lied with the truth to authors.

They told authors that their royalty percentages are higher on digital books (25% royalties for digital vs. 10-15% royalties for print), which is the truth. What they didn’t say is that these higher royalties would be earned at lower price points (ebooks are $9.99 vs. $28 print). Authors earn $1.75 per unit on a digital book, compared to $3.15 per unit on a print book.

Authors make even less on audiobooks, at $1.58 per audiobook.

Why is Audible worse?

Because Audible destroys an author’s pricing power. A typical consumer pays $15/month for an Audible subscription for one book per month. If a consumer picks your book, you start at $15. But Audible is notorious for running $0.99 promotions on your book. If you happen to be the second author picked by a consumer, your pricing starts at $0.99. So, your weighted average effective price per book is about $8.

Then, Audible has the audacity to take 60% of revenue off the top.

Amazon’s share for a self-published hardcover or paperback is 35% if the price is above $9.99. Amazon takes 30% for a Kindle book.

And further, Audible doesn’t allow AI narrations using Elevenlabs.io. You must self-narrate, which is a torturous 3-4 day process for a normal book, or you must pay someone else to narrate your book. But the economics don’t make sense if your price drops to $0.99. You can also pay one of Amazon’s narrators, and of course, those narrators are allowed to use AI.

If they were honest about their company name, it would be Audacity—not Audible.

Anger is Pirate Christopher’s superpower, but Pirate Eddie is really pissed at Audible.

2. Backlist growth

Revenue from previously published titles in the industry rose from 45% to 60% of total sales, according to a triangulation by SuperGrok. Publishers like HarperCollins relied on their greatest hits, while new authors contributed less.

3. More authors, but less success per author

This is not because they helped more authors be successful. They did this by churning more authors.

• Unit volume went from 120MM to 135MM, or 13%

• New titles/authors went from 2,600 to 3,200 or +23%

• Units per title/author 46,000 to 42,000

This means the number of units per author decreased by 9-10%.

4. Lower advances per author

SuperGrok helped us triangulate multiple sources and indicates that back in the 2000s, book advances ranged from $20,000 to $30,000. In 2024, book advances ranged from $15,000 to $25,000. At a minimum, it is flat, just like pricing. More likely, it is a 20% decrease in author advances—especially since units per author have declined 9%.

The truth is, publishers like HarperCollins and Audible are businesses doing their math. But they created a system designed to make sure the house always wins.

It’s time for authors to start doing their own math.

(If you’ve ever wondered whether to sign with a major publisher, self-publish, or build your own Substack-powered platform, next Wednesday’s Founder’s post is for you. We’ll go deeper into the Play Bigger economics and share the dumb and devious things publishers and platforms do to authors. You’ll see Pirate Eddie’s math that explains how he thinks publishers like HarperCollins nearly always make 10x more than authors. And we’ll explain how we’re working to redesign the system with new pricing, new models, and higher author royalties.)

Said differently: Publishers are Scooter Braun.

Authors need to be like Taylor Swift and change the game.

By re-recording her songs, Taylor redefined the rules of ownership. She proved that creative work is an asset. The moment you control it, you control your future.

That’s what we’re doing next.

We’re not waiting for publishers, platforms, or “industry norms” to catch up.

We’re proving what happens when authors take their pricing, distribution, and destiny into their own hands. Our version of re-recording our masters is simple: we price our ideas at the level of their impact and design Lightning Strikes around them.

Most publishing “experts” think a $100 book is crazy.

You would think a book about Lightning Strikes would merit doing a Lightning Strike.

We published the book on Amazon in October, with plans for a strike during the holiday season. We did a few LinkedIn posts. We let our Superconsumers know it was live. But that was it. The strike was supposed to come about a month after posting it on Amazon.

Then, it took off.

A $100 marketing book, with zero paid marketing.

This led us to an a-ha: The price was the strike.

It was a declaration that thousands of authors, thinkers, and creators haven’t said out loud.

“Our ideas are worth way more than $30.”

Do we believe our ideas have more intrinsic value than $30? Of course we do.

But the point of the $100 price is to say: we believe when Lightning Strike marketing is executed the right way, at the right time, by the right Category Designers, it’s worth…

• Hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual personal income!

• Millions of equity value to your net worth!

• Billions of market cap to your companies!

• Trillions to the category economics!

Nearly everything else in the world has doubled in price since 1997 (Happy Meals, gas, college tuition). 99.999% of those things are exactly the same now as they were back then. 99.999% of those things don’t transform your life. Yet 99.999% of business people pee their pants when it comes to raising prices.

But here’s the truth from Pirate Eddie, who has studied consumers for the last three decades.

Consumers don’t get pissed if you raise prices, as long as they get more than they pay for.

Consumers, especially Superconsumers, welcome price increases when they know they are getting a legendary outcome. Consumers get irritated when you raise prices on the exact same thing. Consumers get irate when you raise prices and give them less.

For example, why did Chipotle’s stock drop 18% after its Q3 2025 earnings?

Not only because the company missed its numbers. We bet it has something to do with the fact that a Chipotle burrito bowl cost $6.50 in 2015. In 2025, the price is $11.85—nearly double.

This is a chance to share one of Pirate Eddie’s favorite Chipotle charts. Some legendary Wells Fargo analyst had a blast ‘getting the data’ to build this chart by ordering, weighing, and presumably eating 75 Chipotle burrito bowls.

The analyst found that Chipotle’s burrito bowl weight variation had three standard deviations of variance. One standard deviation is a regular level of weird data. That’s like dressing up like a pirate on Halloween. Three standard deviations is like dressing up like a pirate by wearing a puffy shirt at a professional job interview.

In response to the analysis, the Chipotle CEO said the consumer is out of money.

(More lying with the truth.)

Are consumers having a hard time with cash flow? Yes.

Are consumers having a problem spending elsewhere? No.

• ChatGPT consumer subscriptions Jan-June 2024 = $174MM

• ChatGPT consumer subscriptions Jan-June 2025 = $1.35B (+673%)

Consumers are happy to pay for ChatGPT because it can deliver a transformational outcome.

Consumers are angry about paying twice as much for a Chipotle burrito bowl and getting half the food.

Now, back to books. Legendary business books can completely change your life, career, company, net worth, personal agency, and freedom. Yet, the price of a hardcover business book has barely budged in almost 30 years.

Authors and publishers can reframe pricing to declare more value.

It’s time to reject the commodity mindset of mass publishing.

The status quo has to go.

Authors can design new categories of Intellectual Capital that command premium economics, because they produce premium outcomes. This is a new standard for what thinking is worth in the age of AI. It reframes the value of net-new knowledge, as the cost of existing knowledge is trending toward zero.

The $100 book is a statement:

If you believe in the power of your ideas, stop discounting them.

(This is a road map for anyone stuck in the existing market trap that shows how to break out by teaching people how to value your value.)

Now, let’s dive in to how this happened:

The Great Book Pricing Freeze

The publishing industry is one of the markets where time stopped.

Walk into a bookstore today, and it feels like a museum exhibit from 1989.

• Same price tags.

• Same business model.

• Same delusion that “accessibility” is noble, while profitability is taboo.

For over three decades, book prices have stalled while every other category has evolved, inflated, and digitized beyond recognition.

The average hardcover book costs $30, and it’s often heavily discounted.

It doesn’t matter if it took a decade to write, changed the trajectory of an industry, or contains the ideas that built billion-dollar companies. $30 is the ceiling.

The irony?

The same publishers who tell authors, “Don’t raise prices, it’ll scare readers away,” have doubled their own conference fees, tripled keynote costs, and gladly sell $2,000 writing workshops that teach people how to sell $30 books.

The problem is cowardice.

An entire industry terrified of being first.

An entire category clutching to the past, because they’re terrified of the future.

(Pssst… This happens in many companies and categories. Maybe even yours.)

For decades, publishers colluded through silence. Each waiting for the others to move, afraid to tell authors the obvious truth: Books are underpriced.

So, the tell authors that volume equals validation.

They talk about “units sold” instead of outcomes created.

They worship the bestseller list like it’s a scoreboard for ideas, not a scoreboard for discounts.

Meanwhile, the world changed. Readers stopped buying books and started buying outcomes. They’ll invest $10,000 in a course, $20,000 on a coach, and $50,000 on a mastermind if they believe it will move the needle in their life or business.

But ask them to spend $100 on a book that contains the same thinking…

They balk.

The delusion is thinking the same buyer who spends hundreds of dollars a month on subscriptions and streaming services is “too price-sensitive” to pay for a premium idea.

It’s not true.

Readers aren’t cheap—they’re conditioned. They’ve been trained for thirty years to see “thinking” as a bargain bin product because teachers, authors, publishers, and thinkers agreed to sell their brilliance at cost.

By freezing price, publishing froze perception.

(This is the power of the status quo. The smartest people in the world get lulled into groupthink, even when it’s insanely against their own interests. It’s an important learning for ALL category designers: The power of the way it is and the pull of status quo accepted “truths” causes very smart people to do very dumb things. Never forget this, pirate. 🏴‍☠️)

Authors and publishers radically undervalue their value.

Like a herd of donkeys, they unconsciously colluded to shoot themselves in the revenue.

If McDonald’s had followed the publishing industry’s “logic”, a Big Mac would still cost $1.75—making Ronald and Mayor McCheese bankrupt.

Surely business authors would be savvier than McDonald’s on pricing, right?

Nope.

A few years ago, we did Category Science on the Top 444 best-selling business books for our book Snow Leopard. We dusted that analysis off, and here’s what we found. The X-axis is cumulative unit sales of the book, and the Y-axis is price per book.

The vast majority of the Top 444 business book prices range from $10 to $40.

There is no correlation between price and unit sales. StrengthsFinder is the big winner at $40 per book. Every other book in the $10-$40 range is all over the place.

A handful of outcome-oriented books break the $40 ceiling. These are textbooks like Basic Economics, a Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge, and Rita Mulcahy’s Course in a Book for passing the PMP exam. On unit volume, Rita’s book is in the bottom 20% of the top 444 best-selling business books. On revenue, Rita’s book is in the top 20%.

Here’s a list of authors/books Rita has outsold on revenue per the Nielsen data:

1. Peter Thiel: Zero to One

2. Jim Collins: Good to Great

3. Andrew Ross Sorkin: Too Big to Fail

4. A.G. Lafley/Roger Margin: Playing to Win

5. Benjamin Graham: The Intelligent Investor

6. Fred Reichheld: The Ultimate Question (NPS)

7. Clay Christensen: How Will You Measure Your Life

We’re sure you’d agree that there are smart and famous folks on this list.

Caveat time. Per Nielsen, books can cover 85% trade print sales in the US, which should include Amazon. But the data is not complete because it doesn’t consider book sales outside the US. It also doesn’t measure e-books or audiobooks, nor does it capture bulk/B2B sales for speeches—a big part of business book sales. We know the data is wrong, but it is consistently wrong, which allows us to do some of these comparisons.

What does this mean?

First, Rita, great job at niching down and driving towards a clear, tangible outcome! She’s proven there are Superconsumers everywhere.

Second, it means the dollar cost of the book is not correlated to the sales of the book.

Let’s stop and think about that.

Book sales are not correlated to price.

Every CEO we’ve ever talked to thinks prices affect sales. Every business book we can think of teaches that price affects sales. Lower the price, get more volume of sales. Increase the price, get less.

This axiom is wrong.

If a business book has a compelling idea that could be worth millions to you, you couldn’t care less if the book was $30 or $300.

If Al Ries wrote another marketing book that had never been published, Pirate Christopher would pay nearly any price to read it.

But if a business book has no value (or even negative value) for you, then price is also irrelevant. If Al Ries wrote a book called How to Stop Swearing, you could drop the price to $0, and Pirate Christopher would not buy or read it.

Second, it means that most business authors spend so much of their brain writing the book, they don’t even think to ask the question, “What should I price my book at?” So they let their publisher price the book like every other book.

Third, it also means that publishers and book retailers find comfort in the (donkey) herd. A business book at $100? Virtually no publisher would tell you to do that. They’d say, there’s no data that supports that pricing strategy.

They’d be both right and wrong.

Few have done it before.

But that doesn’t mean it can’t be done. 🏴‍☠️

Everything is the way it is because someone (like you) had the courage to change the way it was.

Somewhere along the way, publishing lost the plot.

The business of ideas turned into the business of discounts.

The entire category thought that devaluing ideas (books) was smart.

A $30 book is the same price as a bottle of wine, two movie tickets, or a single Uber ride home from the airport. That’s what the market thinks your thinking is worth. And it’s not because readers are cheap.

It’s because authors and publishers taught the world to undervalue thinking.

When the smartest people in the world sell their ideas for $30, they teach everyone that thinking is cheap.

We’ve been pricing books like commodities but treating them like art.

That’s why when Lightning Strike Marketing hit #1, we didn’t celebrate the accolade. We celebrated the precedent. We’re not the first to use a book to change the economics of an industry, just the first to do it in marketing.

The $100 price tag didn’t just signal a different product.

It created a new category of premium thought product.

That means a $30 price no longer reflects the value of the work.

(The status quo has got to go!)

Consider the legendary authors of The Experience Economy.

The $32 Experience Economy Pricing Paradox

Joe Pine and Jim Gilmore published The Experience Economy in 1999, introducing a new and different insight: businesses could charge more by designing experiences, rather than focusing solely on delivering goods or services.

That single insight reshaped how the world thinks about value. It changed Starbucks. It changed Disney. It changed Apple. It taught a generation of companies that customers don’t buy what you make. They buy how it makes them feel.

Now, 25 years later, Joe is still leading the charge.

While the traditional publishing model continues to price thinking like a commodity, Joe launched his Transformations Book Substack at $20 a month (or $200 a year). That’s a sevenfold price innovation. It’s his way of saying, “The Experience Economy wasn’t the end of the story. It was the beginning of the Transformation Economy.”

Instead of accepting the industry’s default price point of $32 for a lifetime of ideas, Joe is using digital publishing to practice what he’s always preached: it’s possible to design new ways to create, deliver, and monetize transformation. His readers participate in his ongoing thought process. His price signals his value.

This is an opportunity for every author.

Stop viewing a book as the final product and start designing systems that continue to create transformation.

Joe isn’t trapped by the publishing system. He’s designing his own category within it. He’s showing the rest of us what the next era of thought leadership looks like—one where the most valuable thinkers price not for access, but for outcomes.

If Joe published The Experience Economy today as a $300 book, it would still be a bargain. Because one idea in that book has generated billions in enterprise value for those who applied it. The price of the book has nothing to do with its worth.

This isn’t a creative problem. It’s a category problem.

Books are still priced as “goods” when the value lies in experiences, transformations, and outcomes.

That’s how we got a world where:

• “Exposure” replaced income

• Billion-dollar ideas are priced like paperbacks

• Thinking (the one thing AI can’t copy) is treated like it’s disposable

Until authors reclaim that value, the industry will keep mistaking mass distribution for meaning.

And the smartest minds will keep being paid like they write instruction manuals for microwaves.

Declare Your Value Or Price As A Commodity

Every industry has a moment when a Category Designer declares what everyone else has been too afraid to say:

The status quo is no longer working.

For publishing, that moment is now. The old math doesn’t work anymore. Not for authors, not for readers, and certainly not for the business of ideas.

If you don’t declare the value of your ideas, the market will discount them for you.

For years, books sat at the top of the learning hierarchy. They were the ultimate symbol of authority. They now sit beneath courses, masterminds, and AI tools trained on the very books that built those systems.

The source has become the servant.

What’s valuable now isn’t information—it’s transformation.

Joe Pine and Jim Gilmore explain this as the “Progression of Economic Value.”

Every offering evolves through five stages: commodities, goods, services, experiences, and transformations. The higher you climb, the more unique the value you deliver, and the greater your pricing power.

Applying this framework to the publishing industry, a book can be:

• A commodity: Everyone knows the experience is important. That’s a commodity. Joe’s real value is in his frameworks, which artfully and articulately explain the past and predict the future. This is why some people buy a book, skim it, and never look at it again. These books end up being given away to the library or sold in the $0.99 bin at Walmart.

• A good: For some people, the book is a badge to proudly display on a bookshelf that tells others, “I’ve read that, and I’m educated.” For others, a book is like a picture you hang on the wall that reminds you of something valuable within it. Some people just love the tactile experience of touching the covers and turning the page. So, $20-$30 is the right price for them.

• A service: Sometimes a book is a do-it-yourself and how-to guide for a service that would have cost much more. Rafi Mohammed, the pricing godfather, writes $10 million lines like “a 1% increase in price can lead to an 11% increase in operating profits.” You could hire Rafi for a lot of money. Or you can buy his book and raise your prices by 1% and watch profits fall from the sky. If hiring a sensei would have cost you 5, 6, or 7 figures, a $30 price point for a book like this is way too low.

• An experience: Certain business books are a joy to read. One of Pirate Eddie’s favorites is Barbarians at the Gate—the story of RJR Nabisco’s LBO, which seems boring but reads like a blockbuster movie. Or Michael Lewis’s Liar’s Poker, which makes you feel like you were at Solomon Brothers watching traders bluff each other. These are re-read regularly, so the reader gets extreme value out of a $20-30 purchase.

• A transformation: Certain books rock your world and flip your worldview. These books form the foundation of the lens through which you see the world. You don’t read these books—they read you. You turn the final page as a different person. Ries and Trout’s Positioning and The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing made Pirate Christopher who he is today. Chris Zook’s Profit From the Core grounded Pirate Eddie in the realities of building a business you’d want to own forever. Susan Cain’s Quiet, helped Pirate Eddie be comfortable telling others he has a limit on the number of words he has per day. Play Bigger makes you smarter and more courageous than you thought you could be. Superconsumers makes business simple and helps you bend time. These books are all FROTOs (from-to).

A tragedy that prevents books from moving from a “good” to a “transformation” is when authors believe they are the main character, rather than the reader. They focus on their own expertise versus the outcome the reader desperately wants.

Another tragedy is when publishers assume books are just about answering a question, instead of helping Superconsumers with a life quest they’re crazed about. They don’t consider the value of a Super’s transformational outcome.

A third tragedy is when everyone assumes readers are all the same.

• Most folks don’t read, so they don’t buy books.

• Fewer folks buy books they intend to read, but never start or finish them.

• Even fewer buy and read books to get information and never look at them again.

• Even fewer buy books for education, entertainment, or to pursue their life’s goals.

• Superconsumers buy books with the hope of becoming the person they were born to be.

When Pirate Christopher hoped to transform from a hospital orderly without a GED to the godfather of Category Design, he went to the public library to read Harvard Business Review and his favorite business books for free.

When Pirate Eddie was fearful of being fired at 23 as a fraud consultant and knew he needed to become a thought leader to have agency in his career and life, he bought and read tons of books about what great businesses looked like.

When Pirate Katrina aspired to become financially independent and run her own business, she took a job at a finance startup and read dozens of books about investing, money management, and entrepreneurship.

All three of us Pirates are book Superconsumers.

And like most book Superconsumers, we’re on lifelong quests.

For instance, Harvard Business Review’s greatest Superconsumers are folks who get a battlefield promotion or join a special project that feels like they are in over their heads. (They’re so scared, they need DUDE Wipes!) So, they spend hundreds and thousands of dollars on books, case studies, articles, and executive education. They couldn’t care less about price.

We see this at Category Pirates, where we just started our third Category Design Academy cohort. Every cohort is full of amazingly successful people who are confident enough to know they need to learn Category Design. So they pay $10,000 for it. And we are here to ensure they get 10-100x or more return on investment.

Do you think they care if a book is $20? $50? Or $100?

Not if the value far exceeds what they pay.

When you price your work like a commodity, you get treated like one. But when you price it like a category of its own, you stop competing and start creating.

The simplest way to multiply the impact of ideas is to price them in alignment with the transformation they create.

When you raise your price, you force the world to take your thinking seriously.

You signal that your work is in a different economic and cultural category.

The same person who scrolls past a $30 book will pause at a $100 one. Not because they can’t afford the cheaper option, but because they recognize the signal. The higher price reframes value. It tells them, “This is not another commodity.”

That’s what our $100 Lightning Strike Marketing book was really about: Reclaiming the value of thinking in an age where everyone’s racing to give theirs away.

The goal was to raise the signal-to-noise ratio in a marketplace that has forgotten how to tell the difference between content and insight. To redefine what it means to be an author—not a supplier of pages, but a designer of outcomes.

Now, we’re putting that belief into practice.

This Black Friday, we’re running a Lightning Strike for the publishing industry.

All of our mini-books will be priced at $9.99 (vs $7.99).

All of our big books will be priced at $100 (vs $29.99).

Our books will be priced this way for the foreseeable future. If we change the price, it will likely go up! I you want to buy any of our big books or mini-books at the current prices, buy them NOW before November 28, 2025, at midnight Central Time.

Why these price points?

The mini-book pricing is driven by Amazon’s royalty sweetspot, which is $2.99 to $9.99.

A $9.99 mini-book might seem like it’s at the top end of pricing. But compared to a $20/month Category Pirates Substack subscription, which gives you access to all 200+ mini-books? Or a $350/year Founding subscription that gives you access to all mini-books, big books, and the Pirate Eddie Bot? The price encourages you to trade up.

For our big books, we’re drinking our own rum and won’t just raise the price without adding more value. We’re creating value-added items with AI to make sure the books are still a great value. So, these prices will increase over time.

The $100 Book is our public statement of intent.

We’re running Amazon ads to amplify it.

We’re also adding something we’ve never done before: we’ll open the kimono on the math behind the Lightning Strike for our Founding subscribers. You’ll see how the economics work—what happens to sales, royalties, rankings, and reputation when you stop competing on price and start designing for value. It’s both a lesson and a live experiment.

A real-time case study on the new category of premium thought products.

There are a few scenarios of how this could play out:

1. Our Amazon revenue goes down. This would be a bummer. It’s possible our Amazon sales decrease as people don’t see the value at $100. We can weather the storm because we write once and publish/monetize in many ways. And we don’t want to take money from people who aren’t driving towards outcomes.

2. Our Amazon revenue stays flat. As of now, our Lightning Strike Marketing book is performing on par with the first month royalties of our other four big books. This means while orders are down, the $100 price point offsets it. So our royalties are about the same. This suggests our Supers are buying Lightning Strike Marketing. If we deliver on results, then we trust our Supers to spread word of mouth.

3. Our Amazon revenue goes up. It’s possible that the $100 price draws attention and attracts new, curious readers. This could bring in a bunch of new folks who have never heard about Category Pirates or Category Design and want to know who these crazy people are. They see the new value with our AI scooby snacks. Some decide we’re their kind of crazy, so they buy and join the pirate ship.

4. Our portfolio revenue goes up. We launched the Lightning Strike AI Agents and masterclass at the same time as the Lightning Strike Marketing book. If you’re trying to execute a lightning strike, you could read a book and do it yourself. Or you could pay someone 5, 6, or 7+ figures to execute it. We created the $100 book and $5,000 team of AI agents and workshops to give people options. Our agent revenue is the single fastest-growing part of Category Pirates, so this scenario has already come true.

5. Everyone’s revenue goes up. Perhaps our $100 pricing and our lightning strike raise enough of a ruckus that fellow authors take notice. Maybe a few brave souls will raise their book prices to $100. A few will think $100 is too far, but they’ll launch at $50 or $60. In time, we may see a separation where price is the proxy for authors who believe they can transform their Superconsumers. Left behind are authors who know they have mediocre content that doesn’t drive outcomes, so they stick to the $20-$30 price point.

We’ll be thrilled if Scenario 5 comes true.

A combination of Scenario 2 and Scenario 4 is currently unfolding with the data. Pirate Chris Stanley is helping us move from Scenario 2 to Scenario 3. And we’d be okay with Scenario 1 because it would make for great content for Category Pirates, which has generated nearly 7-figures in lifetime revenue.

This is our declaration to every author, thinker, and creator trapped in the $30 mindset: Price your ideas at the level of their impact.

Price them to create belief.

Price them to create a new category.

Price them to create transformation.

The $100 book is the bat signal.

On Black Friday, we’re sending it loud enough for Superconsumers to hear.

Arrrrrrr,

Category Pirates 🏴‍☠️

Eddie Yoon

Christopher Lochhead

Katrina Kirsch

P.S. - Don’t want to pay $100 for a book?

You’ll still be able to unlock the entire Category Pirates archive of 200+ mini-books and audiobooks with a paid $200/year subscription. And you’ll continue to get digital copies of our current and (future!) big books with a $350 Founding subscription.