Books by business brains range from the inspirational to the downright confessional—and they're growing ever more popular. So what makes a wealthy entrepreneur put pen to paper?

What do Gordon Ramsay, Cherie Blair, Russell Brand and Duncan Bannatyne have in common? Well, apart from healthy bank balances and success in their chosen fields, all have written books that are currently transcending their respective genres to reach a much wider audience.

It's a question of profile, of course. Titles by people we've seen on TV or read about in the press tend to have a head start when it comes to ringing up sales. And thanks to programmes such as Dragons' Den and The Apprentice, entrepreneurial Britain now has its own small but growing cast of characters who are as famous for their on-screen personas as their commercial track records. One consequence of this has been a mini boom in personality-led business books. In addition to Bannatyne's Anyone Can Do It (also the title of an earlier book by Sahar Hashemi, about her time at Coffee Republic) and his latest, Wake Up and Change Your Life, the shelves of Britain's booksellers are currently bearing the weight of titles by Dragon stars Theo Paphitis, Peter Jones and Rachel Elnaugh, while a book on leadership by Royal Mail chairman Allan Leighton has also been selling well. What's more, you'll find most of these titles at the front of the bookshop on the bestseller or recommended shelves rather than squirrelled away between media studies and law in a basement business section.

This isn't quite a new phenomenon. Books for and about the buccaneers of a previous generation—notably Sir Richard Branson (whose new book is out next month) and Dame Anita Roddick—also found a general audience, but as Paphitis observes, "There has been a massive renaissance in interest in business over the last few years," and this has boosted the book market. According to figures collated by Nielsen Bookscan, hardback business biography and autobiography sales amounted to 328,963 in 2007, compared with 274, 383 a year before. Not numbers that will disturb the sleep of JK Rowling, but a rising trend and enough units to ensure a flow of new titles.

And for those who hit paydirt, the sales figures can look very healthy indeed. Since its publication in 2006, Bannatyne's Anyone Can Do It has sold 85,000 copies in hardback and a further 72,000 in paperback. No surprise then, that publishers, agents and writers have been proactively signing up entrepreneurs, with a view to repeating that success.
Paphitis was on the receiving end of an offer. "I had no plans to write a book," he recalls, "but I was interviewed by a journalist who introduced me to an agent."

And when publisher Orion subsequently proffered an unexpectedly large advance on sales, Paphitis quickly overcame his surprise and signed on the dotted line. "I said, 'OK, you give me the money and I'll write the book for you.'"

It has to be said that you don't necessarily have to be a Dragon to find a publisher camping out at your door. Birmingham City chairman and owner of the Ann Summers and Knickerbox chains, David Gold, had given no thought to committing his life to paper but an approach from writer Bob Harris and publisher Highdown changed his mind. "They thought that as chairman of a football club, chairman of a successful group of companies and someone who could tell a genuine rags-to-riches story, I would be an interesting subject for the book," he says.

Gold stresses that he needed a lot of persuasion before he agreed to begin work on the project, not least because recounting his life story would mean revisiting incidents in his past that were painful and long buried. And that begs a question. Why does someone who has been successful in business take his or her eye off the balance sheet for months or even years in order to spend quality time with a word processor or ghost writer. It probably isn't the money. As Mindy Gibbins-Klein, who works with entrepreneurs to develop and publish books through her Book Midwife service and Ecademy Press imprint, points out: "The average business book sells about 2,000 copies and publishers think they've done well when they hit the 15,000 mark." Not the stuff that fortunes are made of.

If the author is well known and successful, and thus capable of shifting more units, it's doubtful whether the royalties will add to their existing personal fortune. Indeed, in the case of Paphitis, money earned from the book will be placed in his charitable trust, along with his earnings from television programmes, rather than feeding his personal account.

So why do it? Well, the first thing that has to be said is that having a book on the market—particularly a book that notches up healthy sales—can do wonders for both your reputation and profile. "Writing a book changed my life," says Mike Southon, co-writer of The Beermat Entrepreneur, which drew on his experience of starting, running and selling a company. To date the book has sold a credible 75,000 copies but Southon acknowledges that the real benefit had little to do with royalty cheques. "It gave me a whole new career as a public speaker and a columnist," he adds.

Indeed, career development is often a pretty powerful motivator. For instance, business mentor, serial company chairman, investor and author of The Effective Entrepreneur, John Caines, has no illusions about selling thousands of copies, but he sees the title as something that fits into his overall career plan. The advice it offers to independent owners is in sync with the advisory services that he provides for the same group. As such it is both a reputation builder and a means to deepen his relationship with new and prospective partners and clients. "I didn't write the book to make millions or even to use directly as a marketing tool to win new clients, but it is part of a jigsaw. It's helped me in my work with clients, not least because I get a lot of feedback from people who have read it."
Clearly the likes of Paphitis, Branson, Bannatyne or Jones don't need a book to ramp up their public profiles, but in terms of their personal brands, a presence on the bookshelf can do no harm. "Businesspeople who are still establishing themselves see books as a way enhancing their reputation," says Gibbins-Klein. "But in the case of well known figures, they see it as way of confirming their legacy." Perhaps equally attractive is the opportunity to present your life as you would like others to see it and also reassess it. "Writing my book gave me a lot of time for reflection," says Paphitis. "And in writing it I found out a few things that I didn't know about myself." Gold's experience was also self-revelatory. "As I began to work on the book I became increasingly excited, "he says. "It turned out to be a cathartic experience."

But the real proof of the business book pudding is whether or not it offers something appetising to the reader. There is always room for books written for specialists, but the big guns of the trade are setting their sights on crossover books that offer inspiration to a broad spectrum of the population. "I didn't write this just for a business audience, I'm aiming at a much wider readership than that," says Paphitis. "For instance, I wanted to reach young people—people who may still be at school and considering the future." Elnaugh is similarly ambitious. "I think my book is for everyman," she says. "There are millions of small businesses out there—including people who are self-employed—and many people who would like to start businesses. I think the lessons in my book can reach a wide market."

But what is that audience looking for? According to Southon, the mechanics of a good business book are simple. "It should be short—no longer than 50,000 words—a light read that you can finish on a plane journey between London and New York—and it should impart useful information," he says.

It's important to make a distinction here between the "how to" guides that provide practical advice on anything from filling in VAT returns to hiring sales staff and the biographical titles that are really about the taste, touch and smell of success. And perhaps ironically, while the theme of most business biographies is achievement, the interesting passages are often those that cover the subject's reaction to a commercial or personal disaster.

Indeed, Paphitis sees this as a key theme in his book. "To succeed you have to be prepared to make decisions," he says. "And when you make decisions, inevitably you will make mistakes and get some things wrong, but that shouldn't stop you. I think one of the most important things that readers can take from my book is that I made mistakes but I picked myself up and succeeded."

Perhaps bravely, this is a theme that Elnaugh picks up and runs with in Business Nightmares, a book that describes how a range of entrepreneurs and business leaders have overcome potentially terminal difficulties.

Although it is not an autobiography as such, Elnaugh has very personal reasons for committing such insights to paper. Following the highly publicised collapse of her experience company, Red Letter Days—now running under new ownership—Elnaugh has avoided starting another business, choosing instead to provide advice and mentoring for entrepreneurs. "One of the things that I've found out is that every business goes through bad patches but when you're running a company you are very isolated. I had the idea for the book when I realised that if I'd known the problems that other people had gone through and overcome, it might have given me more strength when I was coping with the problems at Red Letter Days."

And she believes the publication of the book has caught the mood of the credit-crunch era. "When I began talking to the publisher about the book, we didn't know what was on the horizon. But it has come out at a time when huge numbers of businesses are facing very tough times. What they don't need are books about how to make millions. They need very practical help to overcome their difficulties."

Still bruised by her experience with Red Letter Days (read the April profile for details), Elnaugh has been criticised for taking too personal an approach in her book, particularly where she apportions blame for the events leading up to losing the business. And like many writers, she is open to the accusation that the book provides a platform to hit back at those whom she feels treated her less than fairly. It's not an accusation that she necessarily accepts but she defends the decision to blend her own experience with the case study scenarios. "It wasn't something I intended to do," she says. "But I didn't want to write a dry book and as I wrote it, I found myself drawing more and more on my personal experience."

This is an issue facing anyone who chooses to write a book containing biographical elements. Over the lifetime of a business career there are bound to be disagreements with partners, suppliers and staff. Meanwhile, in the wider world, relationships with family and friends will also influence the course of events for good or ill. The question is, how much do you leave out and what do you include? "That was one thing I was concerned about," says Paphitis. "You have to strike the right balance. It's a biography, so you have to include some personal elements. At the same time, you have to be careful not to upset people. You're not writing a book to piss people off."

Sometimes, though, stepping on toes is inevitable. Jim Dunn's autobiography, Very Private and Public Relations, charts his journey from a deprived childhood in Scotland through to running Europe's biggest travel PR company and a chain of hotels. Described by one reviewer as "wincingly honest", Dunn's book doesn't pull any punches about his early life as a gay man in a sexually repressed Scottish community, and his success in business is just part of the story on offer. "I wanted to write a page-turner," he says. "I've read too many business books that are dry and where the author is too worried about the impression he's going to leave."

But Dunn admits that the recently published volume has already upset some friends and associates. "I have lost one friend who told me that the book was just too honest. But I didn't see the point of writing an autobiography unless it was very honest."

Gold takes a similar line. As a rags-to-riches story, his book Pure Gold was always going to cover the details of a desperately poor childhood, blighted by both poverty and illness, but he admits that he was pushed by his co-writer into some more difficult areas. "There were parts of my life that were shaming and that I didn't want to talk about. Working with the writer, I came to realise that the story would fall apart unless we covered everything." These aspects of his life ranged from theft of fruit from market stalls through to his experience of childhood sexual abuse and the fact that his father spent time in prison. As such, Pure Gold is intended to be both an inspirational business book on the time-honoured theme of overcoming adversity and a revelatory biography aimed at a mainstream audience.

Of course, the book you choose to write can be anything you want it to be: an inspirational guide for the next generation of entrepreneurs, a slum-to-sleb story, or even a marketing tool to put you on the business map. But beware, as it can be addictive. Two years after the publication of his book, Gold is updating it and correcting inaccuracies that have come to light. "I always felt that the book could be improved. It's the story of my life and it's never really finished."