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

by Rob Fitzpatrick

I’ll tell you a secret. When someone wants to interview me for their show, I ask them to send me some questions a week in advance. I spend hours writing down answers from different perspectives, before choosing the most interesting one. Then when we’re in a live conversation, I try to make my answers sound spontaneous. People say that your first reaction is the most honest, but I disagree. Your first reaction is usually outdated. Either it’s an answer you came up with long ago and now use instead of thinking, or it’s a knee-jerk emotional response to something in your past.[25]

In fact, if I had to choose how to benefit from a large event, I would much rather do a giveaway (to every attendee, not just one or two copies) than be their keynote speaker. To seed The Mom Test, I gave away 500 copies at one event (they covered printing costs of £2.50 per copy), 200 at a second (they paid discounted bulk prices of £10 per copy), and marketed 100 myself via content marketing (which we’ll look at next), for a total of 800 seed readers.

Once a day, after you’ve done your day’s work, find one little piece of your process that you can share. If you’re in the very early stages, share your influences and what’s inspiring you. If you’re in the middle of executing a project, write about your methods or share work-in-progress. If you’ve just completed a project, show the final product, share scraps from the cutting-room floor, or write about what you learned. Don’t say you don’t have enough time. We’re all busy, but we all get 24 hours a day. People often ask me, “How do you find the time?” And I answer, “I look for it.”[30]

Building an online presence, at its core, is a simple strategy: start writing.

Gary Vaynerchuck, founder of the content marketing powerhouse VaynerMedia, has championed a similar strategy to produce hundreds of pieces of content per day by repurposing and reusing snippets from a single piece of lengthier source material. Here’s their process:[32] Create “pillar content,” which is a larger piece of work that can be clipped, excerpted, and highlighted (such as a podcast interview, conference talk, training video, or your book’s manuscript) Repurpose it into “micro content” like articles, quotes, images, stories, remixes, rants, etc. Distribute across social media, communities, and content platforms Following Gary’s model, your manuscript is not one piece of content — it’s a thousand.

Gary has an advagency and hid talking to teens and empowering them to spam the social media as he does... it all has a different goal. Also, he admitted ordering a book by one of the ghostwriters. So why the fuck am I reading this here? Bad example, bad research, populism and pop culture.

A related option is to share the stuff you’ve deleted. While writing and editing, maintain a second “cutting room floor” document. Whenever you delete a paragraph, section, or chapter from your main manuscript, paste it into the second document. That pile of deprecated drafts and detritus is a perfect source of raw material for your content marketing.

Another option is to share the research you’re doing. If, say, you’re writing about the lessons of history, you’ll be bound to come across all sorts of interesting facts, anecdotes, and references. Share them! Even if it’s just a small link or quote, that’s fascinating stuff to the same people who will eventually want to buy your book.

Traditionally, we’ve been trained to regard the creative process as something that should be kept to ourselves. We’re supposed to toil in secrecy, keeping our ideas and our work under lock and key. But human beings are interested in other human beings and what other human beings do.

Once the book is out there, you can use its own success as a fresh excuse to talk about it, which April Dunford calls a “momentum launch.” Did you hit #1 on Amazon with your pre-order? Grab a screenshot and tell your story. Earn your first dollar in royalties? That’s a story. Get your fifth perfect review? Tell people! This works especially well for books about business/money/marketing, but can also be creatively applied to many other topics. For his second book, The Embedded Entrepreneur, Arvid Kahl began using the momentum launch even earlier, sharing feedback and insights from beta readers as a way to both promote his book and recruit even more readers. As a result, he ended up having over 500 beta readers helping him with the manuscript, and he built a happy seed audience as a side-effect.

As numerous creatives have noted over the years, the optimal career strategy is simple: Make things and tell people.

I started with just an occasional blog post. But then I realized that I’m a very lazy person, so I started my newsletter as an accountability scheme for myself, since it forced me to send something out every week. I’d write a chapter or a section of my book, post it as a blog post, send out the same thing as a newsletter, and then read it aloud — plus a little extra commentary — as a podcast episode.

Putting your early work out there is too emotionally demanding for a loose, “I’ll do it when I feel like it” sort of approach. If you wait until the “right time” arrives, you may be waiting forever. Find some way to stay accountable: use my checklist; use Arvid Kahl’s approach of public accountability; or use Austin Kleon’s simple requirement of, “Once a day, after you’ve done your day’s work, find one little piece of your process that you can share.” But do use something.

With my book The Daily Stoic, we built a 40,000 person email list by sending out one additional free meditation every single morning. This is an incredible amount of work — basically one additional book written per year — and I do it totally free. BUT — it helped the book spend five weeks on the Wall Street Journal list. And without really any other marketing, the book now sells 1,000-1,200 copies per week.[36]

With an eye toward your future goals and interests, you might also choose to invest in doing it the hard way. If you’ve always wanted to write a blog, grow a YouTube channel, become a public speaker, or master advertising, then why not use your book as an excuse to start toward that goal?

Turning piracy to your advantage by ensuring that the book acts as its own marketing

Because their promise is legible at thumbnail size and mine isn’t: Yes, a sufficiently motivated customer could figure it out by reading the subtitle text down below. But most people don’t. Most people just insta-click the first cover that looks relevant, which almost certainly isn’t mine. This also impacts your ad campaigns. One of the reasons that we advertise for The Workshop Survival Guide and not The Mom Test is that nobody can figure out what The Mom Test is about by just glancing at its thumbnail. Whereas the promise of The Workshop Survival Guide is crystal clear, even when small: You can easily update and improve your cover after launch. The title and subtitle, however, are significantly more difficult to adjust. Ensure that either title or subtitle is descriptive enough to define who the book is for and what it will do for them.

Leverage piracy by turning your book into its own marketing

If you make your book available as a PDF, it’s going to get pirated. And even if you choose not to release it in such an easy-to-share format, once it gets popular enough, someone will still scan all the pages to create a blurry bootleg version.

Legally speaking, I’d prefer if the pirated version wasn’t there, since it has some implications on copyright and IP. And I’ve attempted several times to get the site owner to remove it. But given that he seems fairly determined to ignore me (and that I don’t have a good way to track down the folks who are printing bootleg paperbacks in southeast Asia), let’s examine the implications of your entire book being “stolen” and distributed for free. Counterintuitively, recommendable books tend to benefit from piracy, since the folks who “steal” it will still end up recommending it to others who choose to pay. Plus, lots of the people who end up downloading the pirated version wouldn’t have been able to get it otherwise (commonly due to a weak local currency). In which case, you can consider “piracy” to be a part of your social impact contribution.

In general, the more revenue you receive from ongoing relationships with happy customers, the more excited you should be about book piracy. Whereas if your income comes primarily through the book royalties themselves, then you should be slightly more strategic.

In either case, I think it’s best to assume your book will eventually be pirated. At which point, the question becomes: what hooks can you put into it (without withholding value or frustrating your readers) that will allow even a “free” reader to end up helping you?