Dr. Laura Brown's Beyond Digestion Turned a Book on Gut Health Into a Five-Year Compounding Asset
“You don’t make money writing your book. It’s an investment into doing it. You make money based on the things that the book brings you, the opportunities that it brings you.”
Dr. Laura M. Brown is a naturopathic doctor just outside Toronto who wrote Beyond Digestion to put years of gut-health work onto the page. Five years after publishing, the book is still doing the quiet work of finding her patients, opening speaking invitations, and earning referrals from the medical doctors around her.
Why a Naturopathic Doctor Decided to Write
Naturopathic medicine was a second career for Dr. Brown, one she took up out of a love of science and a drive to solve health puzzles that landed on her own plate. The more she read her way through the field, the more one idea kept surfacing.
“I felt that it was something on my heart to put a book together and give back to the community in a way that I had taken so much from with regards to reading books.”
— Dr. Laura M. Brown, ND
The nudge had been sitting on her five-year plan since about 2017. When the Scribe conference came to Toronto in August 2019, she decided to stop putting it off, the same way she had once decided to go back to school for her naturopathic degrees. She started writing immediately after the conference, without a title or even a settled topic, and kept writing straight through 2020 as she moved her practice to a new location. Beyond Digestion published in February 2021.
Finding the Book She Was Meant to Write
One of Scribe's founders challenged her earliest idea head-on, telling her it was the wrong topic to write. She landed somewhere better because of it.
“At the end of the day, I came to the subject that was best for me to write. So I appreciated the process. It brought me to a place where I wrote the book that I was really intended to write.”
— Dr. Laura M. Brown, ND
The subject she chose was the one she was treating most: digestion, food sensitivities, and the root causes underneath them. Gut health was still early in its infancy of understanding at the time, with the microbiome only beginning to be talked about. She built the book around real patient stories, with identities removed, and worked through each topic on four levels: the physical, the emotional, the cognitive, and the spiritual.
The Editing That Made It Night and Day
Dr. Brown did the writing herself and worked with Scribe through the editing and publishing process. The layered editing is what she points to when she describes the difference between her book and a typical self-published one.
“It was technically self-published, but all the editing was done with the [Scribe] talent team. And that was an excellent process. The different layers of the editing was very formidable.”
— Dr. Laura M. Brown, ND
Truth-checking, fact support, grammar, readability, whether a reader would stick with it. Going through those passes taught her what real publishing looks like, and set her book apart from the alternative.
“The caliber of that versus the caliber of going through something like I went through with Scribe, it was night and day.”
— Dr. Laura M. Brown, ND
Five Years of Compounding: What the Book Brought Her
To market the book, Dr. Brown found a list of podcasters covering gut health across North America and went on their shows, then reshared each episode with her patients and on her own channels. One conversation reached as far as New Zealand, on the microbiome. Those links went into newsletters, patients forwarded them to friends and family, and her patient population and readership grew together.
“I’ve had numerous contacts like that with patients all over the province saying, hey, I found your book. I’ve read it. Now I need your help.”
— Dr. Laura M. Brown, ND
Some of the returns arrived without warning. At a local open house, a stranger recognized her as the author, explained that a friend had passed the book along, and mentioned they had lost 40 pounds. Readers who find the book arrive already trusting her, having spent, as she puts it, 20 hours with her for $20 before the first appointment.
The book also changed how the wider medical world sees her. She has been invited to speak, and she gets referrals from physicians who know she has done the work.
“I’ve been invited to do talks in different areas, some of the local health networks inviting me into more conventional setting to speak to the public and public health.”
— Dr. Laura M. Brown, ND
“It’s giving you the credibility in the marketplace, it’s giving you a chance to say, hey, I’m an expert in this field, I’ve done the research, I’ve brought this to the public in a very digestible way.”
— Dr. Laura M. Brown, ND
Her Advice to Anyone Sitting on a Book
Dr. Brown’s advice starts with setting the right expectations, the same ones that were set with her at the beginning: the return does not come from royalties. It comes from everything the book brings you afterward.
“It’s just another tool in the toolbox. And it’s a really awesome tool to have.”
— Dr. Laura M. Brown, ND
Begin with the end in mind, she says: know why you are writing it, who it is for, and what you want it to do. And be honest with yourself about the payoff, which is less about a bestseller list and more about the quieter satisfaction of having done it.
“I feel a good soul satisfaction that I did it. I’m very happy that I did it. And I feel that it’s helped others in a way that I had anticipated, but also in ways that I didn’t.”
— Dr. Laura M. Brown, ND
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