Write Useful Books: A modern approach to designing and refining recommendable nonfiction

by Rob Fitzpatrick

Our focus is squarely on the process and the product of nonfiction books. For advice about writing the prose itself, I recommend On Writing Well, by William Zinsser.

Writing [a book] is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

Paul Hendrickson’s wonderful biography of Ernest Hemingway: Hemingway’s Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost

Steven Pressfield’s handbook: The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles

The word “problem” in “problem-solver” is being used somewhat loosely, and could include helping a reader to receive any sort of tangible outcome, such as to: Achieve a goal or undergo a process Answer a question or understand a concept Improve a skill or develop a toolkit Resolve a fear or inspire a change Adjust their perspective or improve their life By shaping your book around this sort of clear promise and outcome, you fundamentally change its behavior in the marketplace.

Here’s the secret to a five-star Amazon rating: be clear enough about what your book is promising that people can decide they don’t need it.

The Dictator’s Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics, by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith, equips readers with a mental model for understanding why politicians make such seemingly bizarre decisions.

The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business, by Josh Kauffman,

Specificity is good. When I was learning to sail, I didn’t buy an encyclopedic tome of everything to do with boats. Instead, I bought a handful of focused problem-solvers with titles like Manoeuvring at Close Quarters Under Power (Johnson), Single-Handed Sailing (Evans), and Living on 12 Volts with Ample Power (Smead and Ishihara). These books were valuable not in spite of their specificity, but because of it.

The husband and wife author team Will and Ariel Durant even applied this tactic to their own body of work. Having spent more than fifty years researching and writing their eleven-volume magnum opus, The Story of Civilization, they distilled it all down into a quick, 100-page problem-solver called The Lessons of History.

Your book’s promise should appear in (or at least be strongly implied by) its title and/or subtitle.

When someone asks what you’re working on, attempt to describe the book in just one or two sentences. And then you need to do the hardest thing of all: to shut up and listen to them completely misinterpret and misunderstand what you’re trying to do.

A book’s promise is meaningless until paired with a certain type of reader. My first book, The Mom Test, isn’t anywhere close to the best book about sales or customer research — at least, not for everyone. But it absolutely is the best book about those topics for introverted technical entrepreneurs.

Here’s how April Dunford described her choices while designing the enormously successful Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It: Most business books are “idea books.” They don’t give you one little word about how to get it done. My book was going to be the book about how to actually do it. The publishers said, “Hmm, that doesn’t sound like it’s going to sell a lot of copies. How many people do positioning?” And I said, “Lots of people! The CEO of every startup. Marketing people. Product people. Lots of them!” And then [the publishers] would always want me to write a different book. They’d say, “Oooo, why don’t you write a book on how to position your life — then we could sell one to everybody!” But that is a book I have zero interest in writing and that’s not what I’m trying to do here. I’m trying to write the book that helps you get something done.[3]

The point is that, in order to make something valuable for somebody, you must be willing to define and defend what your book isn’t.

take a moment to reflect on who your book is really for. If you’re writing for beginners, should you worry that an expert finds it all a bit elementary? Or if writing for experts, should you worry that the beginner is confused? Probably not.

Pick the piece you’re best at, for the people you care most deeply about serving, at the moment in their journey where you can really help them, and forget about everything else. These crucial decisions will define your book’s scope. The scope of a useful book is like the executive summary of a new business. It’s an as-brief-as-possible description of what it is, who it’s for, and why they’ll pay for it: Scope = Promise + Reader profile + Who it’s not for + What it won’t cover

The Mom Test began its life with an extremely weak scope. I was aware of the book’s core value, but had diluted that useful core by trying to do too many jobs for too many different types of readers.

I didn’t fix the scope by figuring out what to add (or how to write it more beautifully), but by figuring out what to delete. The path became clear after asking one crucial question: What does my ideal reader already know and believe?

For a problem-solver to be recommended frequently enough to endure and grow, it requires four qualities, represented with the acronym DEEP:[4] Desirable — readers want what it is promising (Chapters 2 and 3) Effective — it delivers real results for the average reader (Chapters 3 and 5-6) Engaging — it’s front-loaded with value, has high value-per-page, and feels rewarding to read (Chapter 4) Polished — it is professionally written and presented (Appendix)

The recommendation loop for The Workshop Survival Guide is triggered by the stressful preparation before an important workshop or presentation. The cost of failure is high and the event’s date can’t be moved, which makes it an urgent, must-solve priority. At some point during those tense days or weeks, the soon-to-be-facilitator mentions their stress to a friend or colleague (triggering the loop) and gets pointed toward the book as the best available solution (fulfilling the loop).

I had exactly that with 'Radical Candor' and some course on soft skills.

You can probably now see why I’ve found myself recommending The War of Art so much more frequently than Hemingway’s Boat, despite loving both equally. It’s because the former (1) convincingly solves (2) a painful problem (3) for a certain type of reader (4) who often mentions it to me. At which point, how could I not recommend it? In other words, despite being broadly “about” the same topic, The War of Art has a recommendation loop, and Hemingway’s Boat doesn’t.

Which means that recommendability removes competition. This has considerable implications for marketing, pricing, and profits.

For a traditionally designed book, time is the great enemy. But for something long-lasting and useful, the passage of time is an incredible ally that will lift your book far higher than you could ever achieve on your own.

The industry term for these enduring titles is “back catalog.” They’re the books that defy the odds, remaining relevant and recommended for years. And entering the back catalog is ridiculously profitable. According to author and entrepreneur Seth Godin, back catalog books are responsible for 90% of the publishing industry’s profits while requiring only 2% of its marketing budget.[5] As such, it’s worth intentionally designing your book to get there.

Pick a promise that will remain relevant and important for 5+ years

Avoid overreliance on temporary tools, trends, and tactics that are likely to become quickly dated

In The Workshop Survival Guide, Devin and I were hugely tempted to include a tutorial on designing custom themes for slide decks — a topic that was relevant, useful, and frequently requested by beta readers. But we finally decided against it, since it would have “dated” us to the 2019 versions of slide software. (Although these sorts of additional, timely resources are a perfect fit for your website, where they act as both a marketing tool for gaining new readers, a reason for existing readers to visit and offer you their email, and/or a potential upsell. More on that in Chapters 7 and 8.)

To see why this all matters, consider The 4-Hour Workweek (2007), by Tim Ferriss, a category-breaking bestseller that soothed a painful emotional “problem” around disillusionment with the 9-to-5. The book enjoyed incredible success due to both its own strengths plus Ferriss’s incomparable skill and hustle as a marketer. And yet, rereading it now, a dozen years later, a significant percentage of its content feels — at least to me — irrelevant and dated. Of course, huge amounts of value still exist! The good stuff is just hidden between extended discussions of tools and tactics that haven’t aged quite so well. And when only a portion of the book remains relevant, the whole is diminished.

Plus, sometimes, as an author, you’ll really need to mention a particular tool or technology, and being overzealous about avoiding these references can make a book feel frustratingly abstract. Overall, the bits that date should be brief, infrequent, valuable for today’s readers, and easy for tomorrow’s to skip.

If you’re writing about a fast-changing topic like computer programming or regional tax law, then there’s no way to avoid tying yourself to today’s minutia. If that’s the case, then you can compensate by regularly releasing updated editions. That’s a bit of a chore, but it’s also a competitive advantage when done well.

To create a book that lasts and grows, the formula is simple: do the best job of solving an important problem for a reader who cares, without anchoring yourself to temporary tools, tactics, or trends. That’s partly about good scoping and partly about writing something that delivers real results to the average reader. And to accomplish that second goal, you’ll want...

The Amateur’s Mind, by Jeremy Silman.

You’ve been dealing with X recently, right? Would you mind talking me through what you did and how it went? How did you decide to do it that way? What else did you try? What did you give up on or find unhelpful? Where did you search for help or guidance? What were the most frustrating moments? How did you eventually get over them? Did you read any books or blogs about it? Why (or why not)? Which ones were helpful and which were a waste? Why? What’s still worrying or blocking you? Are you doing anything about it, or is it not that big of a deal?

Just remember that these sorts of conversations are not about pitching (or even describing) your book idea. In the context of building reader empathy, pitching will prevent deeper learning by both exposing your ego (which discourages negative feedback) as well as by suggesting that you’ve already figured out the details (which discourages big-picture feedback). You want insights into their life, not opinions about your idea.

Despite being well-organized and clean, a list of trees isn’t exactly an information-rich mind-blower. This forces me, as a reader, to page through each and every section before discovering what they’re actually about. That’s a moderately irritating speed bump

Many authors appear to resist this level of detail due to a fear of inconsistency. Some sections (and many chapters) will defy clean summarization. Regardless, I feel that informative titles are valuable enough to be worth aiming for, even at the cost of consistency. Use them when possible.

Incidentally, teaching conversations can also cure imposter syndrome. Instead of attempting to believe that your advice is worth sharing, go out and prove that it is by helping real people and seeing if it works. For example, the two facilitators that we coached in the anecdote above each saw their daily teaching fees quadruple while working with us (from around £500 to £2,000 per day), which went a long way toward convincing Devin and I that we were writing something worth the ink.

From a reader’s perspective, your book is a multi-hour journey experienced as value received over time spent. If too much time passes before arriving at the next piece of meaningful value, a reader’s engagement drops and they’ll drift away.

Confusingly, just because some piece of knowledge is necessary doesn’t mean that it is valuable — at least, not from the reader’s perspective.

Visualize the reader experience by adding word counts to your ToC With one small adjustment, your ToC will become an x-ray view of your book’s “takeaways over time,” allowing you to visualize, debug, and improve its reader experience. You do this by adding word counts to the titles of your sections and chapters, allowing you to see how many words (and thus how many minutes — 250 words per minute is typical) are sitting between any two pieces of value. These word counts will be removed prior to publication, but they’re invaluable while the book is in development.

A slow start (how many words before the first major piece of value?) Long slogs (lengthy, back-to-back sections without big “a-ha” moments) Fluffy sections (anything with high word count relative to its value)

The likelihood of your readers recommending your book is based on the amount of value they’ve received before either finishing or abandoning it. And they’re most likely to abandon at the start. So if you withhold value at the start of your book — either intentionally or accidentally — then you end up frustrating your readers and decimating your word of mouth.

A book should be as long as is necessary to convincingly deliver on its promise, but never any longer.

If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.

Alternatively, Devin and I have built a tool specifically for better beta reading called Help This Book,[19] which is designed to gather more (and better) data as well as to help you make better sense of it. I used it for this book:

The best way to detect boredom is to identify where readers are quietly giving up and abandoning the book. If readers are jumping ship in Chapter 3, for example, then it suggests that either Chapter 2 was a low-value grind (thereby exhausting them before they got to the good stuff), or that Chapter 3 is. There’s no perfect way to detect this, but you can make a fairly accurate estimation by noticing where a reader’s comments stop. Using comments as a proxy for engagement isn’t perfect data, but it’s close enough to point us in the right direction. Yes, it’s possible that the reader’s life may have just gotten crazy and that they suddenly ran out of time. But that’s a risk for your finished book as well. Distracted and busy readers are a fact of life. And if your manuscript was sufficiently valuable, they would have made the time.

glimpse how they were actually applying — or failing to apply — what we had been trying to teach

Book tours, in and of themselves, are the biggest waste of time you can possibly do. I did a couple early on just ‘cause they said I should, even though I’d heard they were a waste of time.