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November 13 - November 19, 2021
Upon cracking it open, I immediately began receiving value. I dog-eared each page where I had a major “a-ha moment”
At least every few pages, you want your reader to be thinking, “Oh wow, I can use that.”
Although a typical reader wouldn’t quite be able to define it, they’re highly sensitive to a good (or bad) reader experience, and you’ll see it hinted at in their reviews and recommendations.
The most common way to ruin your reader experience is to spend too long on foundational theory before getting to the bits that people actually want. This feels quite natural as an author (“Let’s get the theory out of the way”) but is grueling to readers.
The game’s rules are an enabler of future value, not actual value, and working through them all upfront feels like a long, theoretical slog:
The teacher believes that the eventual payoff will be “worth it.” Meanwhile, the kid’s Engagement is collapsing.
By arranging the content around the learner’s goals instead of the teacher’s convenience,
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)
You want to know the word count per learning outcome
Once you’ve spotted potential issues, all three problems can be resolved through a mix of rearranging, editing, and deleting.
Even if it’s only a brief section, finding some way to reduce its word count by 50 percent will double its value-per-page, and your reader will receive twice as many insights per minute of their time.
Early drafts of The Workshop Survival Guide were 120,000 words (eight hours to read).
The Mom Test went through a similar 50% haircut down to 30,000 words (two hours’ reading time).
Nonfiction authors make this mistake all the time via the inclusion of lengthy forewords, introductions, theoretical foundations, and other speed bumps that come from a place of author ego instead of reader empathy.
The third approach is the most controversial. Authors often feel that by “giving it all away” too soon, readers will take the goods and run.
The Mom Test delivers most of its big ideas in the first three chapters (about 7,500 words or thirty minutes’ reading time).
Upon reading that introduction, I knew I was holding something written by an empathetic author who was putting the reader first.[16]
If you have so much to say about a topic, why not consider breaking it into two separate titles?
For example, there are shockingly few words in the category-breaking best-seller Business Model Generation by Osterwalder and Pigneur.
Even after the third draft, the manuscript still won’t be anywhere close to perfect.
If your content divides clearly into standalone parts, you can move faster by honing only the first bit and beginning beta reading on that while you continue preparing the next piece of the manuscript.
Revisions are not copy edits; they are major surgery and they suck.
If you get bored reading it, so will your audience.[18]
Just remember that your goal at this stage is not to finish a perfect book. The immediate goal is to create something just barely coherent enough for your beta readers to begin working through.
Rather, they are actual, honest-to-god readers who want what you’re creating so badly that they’re willing to endure an early, awkward, broken manuscript just to get it.
Since beta readers are real readers,
It’s a direct connection to the people you set out to serve and is when the book finally begins to exist in the world as a standalone, value-creating product.
you’ll receive more helpful feedback by showing a less polished product.
If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.
start by fixing chapters and end by fixing paragraphs.
I aim to find a new set of 3-5 deeply engaged beta readers per iteration, which typically requires inviting 12-20 people who claim that they’d love to read it.
Early on, each batch of readers will run into a major obstacle that essentially prevents them from continuing (usually either massive confusion or boredom).
Their disinterest is the data — it shows you what’s next to be fixed.
Having graduated from the context of a first-time reader, they’ll end up commenting on tone and typos instead of the big-picture priorities like whether they want it, whether it works, and where they get bored.
the more time you’ve already spent teaching the book’s material, the less time will be required for beta reading.
Three strong signals that your manuscript is “finished” and ready to be Polished: It feels easy to recruit new beta readers, since they want what you’re offering (Desirable) Most of them are receiving the value and reaching the end (Effective and Engaging) At least some of them are bringing their friends (the recommendation loop is running)
copy/export the manuscript into a cloud-hosted tool with live commenting. Google Docs is free and works well enough for this task.
allow people to comment/suggest, but not edit, and optionally disable their ability to download or duplicate the document.
invite them individually (for tighter access controls), or simply make the manuscript public-by-def...
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unsolicited testimonials started appearing from influential people, and I simply updated the cover and promotional materials to include them.
Identifying the value can fundamentally change a book. In the early versions of The Mom Test, I had included a silly mock conversation to demonstrate how getting feedback tends to go wrong. I felt a bit sheepish about its goofiness and had only used one such example. But beta readers loved it, saying that it solidified a normally abstract concept.
these mock conversations are a big reason that the book ended up working.
I’ll accept the outrage of some small percentage of readers in exchange for being able to better serve the rest.
The moment you start disregarding or rationalizing negative feedback is the moment you lose your ability to improve your book.
The second, just a few pages later, said, “This is fluff — I don’t like fluff.” And then she left and never came back. And she was right! I lost that reader, but she helped me make a better book.
One bit of advice I give writers is to see each draft as a hypothesis or experiment: your job is to gather data to test that version of the manuscript and figure out what’s wrong with it. If it fails, it doesn’t mean that you have failed, but only that the current experiment has.
It’s you and your readers working together against the problems in the manuscript.
Attempting to “win” in a comment thread is clear evidence that you’ve started taking things a bit too personally and could use some time away.
Of course, this doesn’t force you into blindly obeying every single suggestion — especially if the feedback is coming from someone who is outside your ideal reader profile.
The most helpful feedback of all is about where readers are becoming bored.
