The strategic value of writing is what you discover after you’ve written.

In January 2025, I made a small, deliberate decision: I would post something on LinkedIn every day. That was the whole plan. No thesis about building a platform, no content strategy, no publication in mind. Just the discipline of writing publicly.

I started to enjoy it. By the halfway mark of the year, the daily posts had begun to accumulate into something bigger: an article every six weeks or so, longer and more considered. The writing was getting sharper. I could feel it.

The other thing that changed the shape of the year happened externally, in February. The Minister of Finance postponed the budget speech, the first time in thirty years of democracy that this had happened. Cabinet couldn’t agree on a proposed VAT increase, and the country was left waiting for three weeks for a revised budget. What the postponement revealed, more than the numbers themselves, was that we had a governance and coordination problem dressed up as a fiscal one. The country’s most important annual financial event had failed to deliver, not because the numbers were unworkable, but because the machinery around them wasn’t.

I wrote an article about it. In early May, I published “South Africa Needs a CFO More Than a Finance Minister” on LinkedIn. It was a thought experiment: what if we treated South Africa as a company, and asked what a CFO would do?

The article was widely read. I told myself I’d moved on.

I hadn’t. Two things kept the argument alive in me.

The first was that two different people, both of whom know me personally, asked me a version of the same question in the days that followed: When is the book coming? Neither had any inside knowledge. Neither had been told anything. They were just waiting. As if the series of articles and posts I’d been publishing all year had left something unfinished, and they’d noticed before I had.

The second happened a few days later, on the way home from a trip abroad. It was a long journey, two long flights, a long layover, roughly twenty-four hours door to door. That much time in transit, largely alone, is unusual. The mind wanders in ways it doesn’t in ordinary life. Somewhere on that journey, in the low hum of a long-haul cabin, I had an idea I couldn’t put down: the article isn’t finished. It needs to be a book.

I landed on Friday. Between landing and Sunday, the idea kept working on me quietly in the background. On Sunday, I opened my laptop and started writing.

I didn’t have a plan. I didn’t have a publisher. I didn’t have a thesis about what a book would do for my career, my platform, or the doors it might open. I had an itch I needed to scratch. Some people might call it a midlife crisis. I called it a book.

That is the honest starting point of The Bottom Line: A CFO’s Blueprint for South Africa’s Turnaround, which was published in February 2026. Everything I now understand about what a book is for, the doors it opens, the credibility it builds, the conversations it starts, I discovered afterwards, not before.

That’s the thing I wish more people knew.

The two roads to publishing

There are essentially two ways to publish a book in South Africa. You can go with a traditional trade publisher, one of the big houses, or you can self-publish through a hybrid publishing partner.

The traditional route has an appeal. Someone else takes on the risk. Someone else covers the printing, the distribution, the coordination. The trade-off is that you give up ownership: they take a significant share of the proceeds, you commit to selling a defined number of copies before they’ll engage seriously, and you have less control over the finished object.

I spoke to a major publisher early on. I sent them a sample of the manuscript. They came back and told me they found the writing bland, and that in any case, they’d need me to commit to a specific pre-sale volume before they’d consider it. Both were reasonable positions for them to take. Neither made me want to hand over control.

I decided to self-publish and chose Quickfox Publishing to help me. Vanessa Wilson, who runs Quickfox, is herself the author of a book on publishing, Publishing Like a Pro, which I took as a good sign. Quickfox doesn’t publish in the traditional sense. They act as a coordinating partner: they manage the printers, assign an editor and a publicist, and serve as the interface between me and the distribution warehouse. I pay for the production costs, and any profits are mine.

I understood the trade-off clearly. I was taking on the risk. If the book didn’t sell, that was on me. In exchange, I kept every meaningful decision under my own control: cover design, editing choices, positioning, timing, tone. Even the date and location of the launch at Exclusive Books was mine to pick. For a first-time author, this is not necessarily the right choice. For someone who, and I’ll admit it, is a control freak, it absolutely is.

I started working with Quickfox in June 2025, and my editor was assigned in July. The manuscript underwent extensive revisions between July and October. The publicity plan came together in the final quarter, and the book launched on 4 February 2026, with a foreword by Francois Pienaar.

What surprised me

Three things surprised me most, all of which changed how I’d advise someone contemplating writing a book.

The first was the editing. I had assumed the drafting would be the mountain, that once the manuscript existed, the rest was polishing. It wasn’t. The manuscript existed to be interrogated: is this argument earning its place? Is this chapter carrying its weight? Is the phrasing here honest, or comfortable? Is this the strongest version of the point, or the first one I thought of? An editor who’s willing to be uncomfortable with you is worth more than one who tells you it’s already good. I was fortunate. And to my own surprise, I enjoyed the editing more than the writing itself. There is something specifically satisfying about a paragraph that finally holds together after you’ve pulled it apart four times. Along the way, I also learned things I hadn’t set out to learn: how to reference properly in Harvard style and how to articulate an argument more precisely than I had ever needed to.

The second was that I enjoyed the project management more than any single part of the writing. Coordinating the editor, the publicist, the printers, the distributor, the launch venue, I had assumed this would be a tedious tail-end of the work. It wasn’t. Seeing all the pieces come together, watching a real object emerge from the intangible mess of a manuscript, was the part I found most satisfying. The book became part of the project, not the project itself. That distinction turned out to matter.

The third was that the strategic value of a book is nothing like what you’d calculate in advance.

If you sat down before you started and asked, “What is the return on a year spent writing this?” you’d almost certainly conclude it wasn’t worth doing. The financial return, for most professional authors of a book of this kind, is at best cost-recovery. The time cost is enormous. The energy cost is real. The opportunity cost, what you didn’t do during that year, is high.

But the return doesn’t live on the P&L. It lives elsewhere.

What the book actually did

Since the book was published, I’ve had conversations I wouldn’t otherwise have had. I’ve been on national television (twice on Morning Live) and interviewed on Cape Talk. The CEO of one of South Africa’s leading audit firms bought a bulk order for his entire executive team. A serious business editor at a national publication began engaging with my writing. A respected actuarial MD wrote a considered review of the book on his own blog. A first-time reader wrote me an email so thoughtful I read it several times and saved it somewhere safe. A published essay appeared in a professional journal. Podcast invitations arrived. Coffee requests followed. New introductions were made.

None of that was calculable in advance. None of it followed a marketing plan. And none of it would have happened without the book existing as an artefact, as something people can hold in their hands, decide to read, form a view on, and either agree or disagree with.

That’s the strategic value that only becomes visible in retrospect. A book is not a marketing document; it’s a stake in the ground. It says: here is what I think, here is how I’ve organised my thinking, here is the shape of my argument. Anyone who wants to know whether you’re worth their time can find out, in your own words, at their own pace.

For senior professionals, this is genuinely rare. Most of us communicate in slides, board packs, memos, and posts. A book is longer-form thinking, sustained over hundreds of pages, that either holds up or it doesn’t. When it holds up, it changes the conversations you’re invited into. When it doesn’t, you would have known within the first draft.

Who should write a book?

I am asked this question often now. My honest answer is: I don’t know.

I don’t know because the reason most people ask isn’t really about publishing. It’s about permission: whether they are the sort of person who could write a book. Whether they have anything to say. Whether their voice is worth other people’s time.

I can’t answer that for anyone. What I can say is that the people who should write a book are not the ones who’ve calculated that it will be strategically valuable. They’re the ones who have something they can’t stop thinking about. Something they’ve been circling in articles, conversations, and posts for years without ever quite closing off. The book is not a career move; it’s the closing of a loop.

If you know what your book would be about (not the topic, but the specific argument), and you find yourself returning to it in your work, in your conversations, in what you notice in the news, you probably have a book in you.

If you’re wondering what to write a book about because you think you should have one, you probably don’t. Not yet.

What comes after the book

The book is not the end of the project. It’s the beginning.

The next step, already underway, is a podcast built around the ideas in The Bottom Line. Books reward one kind of reader; podcasts reach the rest. For those who don’t naturally read a 200-page book on public finance, and there are many good reasons not to, the podcast will bring the same arguments into a form that travels differently. It also lets the conversation keep evolving in a way a printed book never can. The world changes; the framework has to keep meeting it.

That’s the part I’d want any prospective author to think about before starting. A book is not the finished object. It’s the platform from which the next set of conversations begins.

What I would tell myself eighteen months ago

Two things.

The first: the book will be more successful than you think. I ordered an initial print run that I was nervous about. Most of it has now been sold or shared with people I wanted to reach. I’m about to order more, and I did not expect this.

The second: the value you’ll get from it isn’t the value you’ll count when you finish. The book you think you’re writing is not the book that ends up doing the work.

You write because you have to. What the book turns out to be for, that’s the part you discover afterwards.

If you’re contemplating one, I hope that’s useful to know.

The book is just the beginning, not the end.

 

 

Yusuf Bodiat is the author of The Bottom Line: A CFO’s Blueprint for South Africa’s Turnaround (Quickfox Publishing, February 2026) and the founder of Pragmatic Thinking, an independent strategic finance and advisory firm.