There’s a pattern I’ve noticed in my DMs, inbox and sometimes in social media posting that hasn’t changed in the decade-plus I’ve been publishing books.
Someone reaches out with a question and I find myself starting to type some version of: “Actually, I wrote an entire book on that. Here’s the link.”
The responses to that fall into two camps, and neither one particularly surprises me anymore.
Camp One: The Offended
These are the people who take it personally that I’d point them toward a book on the exact subject they asked about rather than write out a custom answer just for them.
Never mind that the book exists because I’ve answered that question a hundred times. Never mind that they’d be getting a far more thorough, thought-through response than anything I could dash off in a reply.
Never mind that the Kindle version costs about the same as a cup of coffee.
Nevermind that reading my longest book would probably take them 5 hours, as opposed to all the time both of us would waste on the back and forth online.
There’s an assumption underneath the offense that’s worth naming: that you, as a content creator, are essentially a wish fairy. That you sit at your desk all day with nothing to do but craft long, personalized replies to every question that lands in your inbox or comments section.
That your time has no value, your energy is unlimited, and your job is to be perpetually available.
Camp Two: The Ideological Opponents
This one’s more specific to my situation — I’ve written on speaking in tongues and divine healing, which are not exactly controversy-free topics in Christian circles — but the dynamic shows up everywhere.
These are the people who disagree with me and, rather than engage with what I’ve actually written on the subject, want to relitigate it in a back-and-forth thread online. The book would and usually does answer their objections. But engaging with the book would mean encountering an argument they’d have to actually reckon with, rather than trading messages where they can keep pivoting.
Online debates are a trap.
They’re time-consuming, rarely productive, and almost never change anyone’s mind. I don’t do them.
Why the Book Exists in the First Place
The content in my books didn’t come from thin air. It came from years of being asked the same questions and working this stuff out in blog articles for years. From arguing the same misunderstandings. From watching people make the same avoidable mistakes.
At some point I realized that obviously there’s an audience for this material, based on the engagment the topic(s) would get, and the traffic Google would send to my site by people looking for answers to questions I was tackling. I eventually decided against constantly giving that knowledge and energy away in one-off conversations that vanished the moment the thread closed. I did something permanent with it: A blog post, a podcast episode, and eventually a book.
That one-time investment means I can now help someone in Nairobi or Oslo or rural Manitoba with the same answer I’d give someone sitting across from me — and I can do it while I’m asleep.
That’s not greed. That’s leverage in the best sense of the word.
Your Futre Self Will Thank You For This
If you’re a writer, coach, teacher, or anyone who gets asked the same questions repeatedly, you are sitting on a body of knowledge that currently lives only in your head and perhaps some places online if you’ve engaged with the subject. Every time you write a long, thoughtful reply to someone’s question, you are giving that answer once.
The alternative is to write it properly, once, in a form that can travel without you.
I’m not just talking about books. A detailed blog post, a well-structured podcast episode, a Substack like this one — all of it counts. The point is to transform your recurring answers into permanent assets.
Your inbox will keep filling. The questions will keep coming. But once you’ve published the answer, you stop starting from zero.
Yes, some people will accuse you of just greedily trying to sell books when you link them to your book. That’s fine. Let them. You’ll have helped exponentially more people through the thing you made than you ever could have through the replies you didn’t write.
Your book is already answering their questions.
