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

by Rob Fitzpatrick

creating a short, five-part email series (with each email explaining one common mistake of customer interviews), which roughly 5,000 people have now trickled through.

Instead of using a signup form and newsletter to gather interest for their new product, they asked people to simply send an email expressing interest (to a dedicated address), which eventually led to more than 150,000 inbound messages.

“email me if you want it” experiment:

getting actual emails with personalized messages from people who are excited to buy your thing is NEXT LEVEL.

Second, when it comes time to launch, I plan to actually reply to all of the emails that folks sent in.

Plus, my message will show up as a reply to an email that they sent ME, which is safely prioritized as “not spam”

However you decide to do it, find some way to (respectfully) capture emails in order to convert today’s audience into tomorrow’s customers.

supportive audience is incredibly valuable.

spending just 10-50 extra hours on optimization can easily double your overall sales and growth.

When I fixed just the first issue — the purchase funnel — for The Workshop Survival Guide, sales jumped by 50% overnight, adding more than $10k to that book’s yearly royalties.

Disclaimer: The Mom Test doesn’t follow this advice (but my other books do). That’s my mistake.

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.

You can easily update and improve your cover after launch. The title and subtitle, however, are significantly more difficult to adjust.

The reason that The Mom Test has ended up succeeding in spite of these mistakes is entirely due to word of mouth.

there’s a psychological tipping point of credibility at around 20-40 reviews, and that it’s worth going out of your way to encourage (authentic) reviews until reaching that number.

The main “fix” we made to The Workshop Survival Guide’s funnel was to rewrite a very mediocre Amazon description (that had been copy-pasted from the book’s back cover) into something that actually explained the benefits that the reader would receive.

Use visual callouts (like headers, lists, and bold text) to grab the eye and allow for skimming

If in doubt, start by picking the book’s five most compelling learning outcomes (which should be on plain display in your ToC), using those as the sub-headings for your description,

Additional product images (potentially including more than just a book cover)

The “editorial reviews” section is especially powerful, as it’s essentially a gigantic “free text” field in the middle of your product page that you can use to say anything you want.

Reviews create social proof and will meaningfully improve both clickthrough and conversion rates.