If you're thinking about writing an authority building book, and I really hope you are, and you don't want to be counting pennies or checking your book sales all the time, you actually want a book that's going to change your life, I can tell you how. Just go to sevenfigurebooks.com. I'm not trying to capture your email or anything. You can just download this PDF that's going to tell you exactly how to turn an authority building book into revenue, speaking, authority, and no exaggeration, a whole new life.

In 2023 I opened my book On Good Authority by saying AI wasn't going to replace writers.

Three years later, I still believe that. But so much that I thought about publishing in 2023 has shifted that I'm re-releasing the book—two new chapters, an updated audiobook and a free upgrade for anyone who bought the original. Because the gap between what was true then and what's true now is the whole story.

There are three main things that made me feel like a new edition was necessary.

First, AI went from a hallucinating curiosity to a tool I use all day every day—not to write books, but for design, for thinking partner work, for the personal-relationship triage I sometimes do when I'm about to send an email I shouldn't. I would argue that AI has made it so that mediocre writing has become more irrelevant, not less, since anyone can prompt their way to passable now.

Also a 2026 study finally proved what I've been saying for years: entrepreneurs with books charge 37% more than competitors without one.

But the point I want to land hardest in this version is one I couldn't fully prove in 2023 and now can: book sales matter less than they ever have. A New York Times bestselling author profiled in New York Magazine this March makes $49,000 a year, and that figure includes retreats and recording the audiobook.

A writer I follow sold 150,000 copies of her book and made $87,000 over six years after subtracting for editor, publicist and agent fees. My own New York Times bestseller didn't cover the cab fare to the launch party.

So it’s even more true now that the book isn’t the product but what makes everything else possible.

This new version also gets into AI discoverability, why your website needs to speak to robots as much as humans, why Wikipedia and Reddit and GoodReads matter more than they did three years ago, the LLM test I run on my own company every month and the niche-audience playbook my clients are using to land $20,000 speaking gigs. Which makes the new edition of On Good Authority the field guide for the season I've been running on the future of publishing.

P.S. — If you bought the 2023 edition, email assistant@annadavid.com to get the 2026 version on Anna.