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

by Rob Fitzpatrick

Books are inexpensive products. As such, investing loads of time into active, hands-on marketing is unlikely to sell enough copies per hour to return a meaningful income. The solution to this conundrum — and the whole premise of this guide — is to design something so useful that readers can’t help but recommend it. As

Product led growth

Scope = Promise + Reader profile + Who it’s not for + What it won’t cover

How to build b2b saas products

Three helpful lines of questioning to strengthen your scope: When someone decides to buy and read your book, what are they trying to achieve or accomplish with it? Why are they bothering? After finishing it, what’s different in their life, work, or worldview? That’s your book’s promise. What does your ideal reader already know and believe? If they already believe in the importance of your topic, then you can skip (or hugely reduce) the sections attempting to convince them of its worth. Or if they already know the basics, then you can skip those. Who is your book not for and what is it not doing? If you aren’t clear on who you’re leaving out, then you’ll end up writing yourself into rabbit holes, wasting time on narrow topics that only a small subset of your readers actually care about. Deciding who it isn’t for will allow you to clip those tangential branches.

The fatal flaw of ineffective books isn’t the writing. They’re generally well-written, well-edited, well-proofed, and well-styled. But they don’t work. Six months later, if you ask a reader what they’re doing differently because of the book, you’ll see that it failed to make even a drop of difference in their lives.

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

Someone once asked Somerset Maugham if he wrote on a schedule or only when struck by inspiration. “I write only when inspiration strikes,” he replied. “Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o’clock sharp.” That’s a pro.

Given the typical reading speed of 250 words per minute, cutting 10,000 words (while maintaining the value) saves 40 minutes of your reader’s time.

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. 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.

paperback can start to feel a bit too thin below about 100 pages, which is somewhere around the 20,000-word mark.

Don’t read it like it’s your precious perfect baby darling. Read it like it’s your worst enemy’s magnum opus and your job is to expose its every tragic flaw. … If you get bored reading it, so will your audience.

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. Roughly half of them won’t even open the document, and another half will submit approximately one comment before giving up. So expect to invite about four times the number of potential readers as you hope to end up with. (Finding these people is less difficult than it sounds — more on that in a moment.)

small number of your minor sentences will attract a disproportionately large amount of criticism, confusion, drama, and debate. You may want to delete those sentences.

But, if you don’t mind waiting a few months, ads can (eventually) build your seed audience all on their own. After completely botching our launch for The Workshop Survival Guide, Devin and I relied on this approach. The ads sold 25-100 copies per month at a moderate profit, returning $2-3 for every $1 spent while slowly building a seed audience. Within a few months, word of mouth had kicked in and organic sales were 10x higher than ad-driven sales. Due to our relaxed approach, the book hasn’t reached anywhere near its full potential. But given the other priorities in our lives at the time (a baby for Devin and burnout for me), it was the right choice for us.

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.

Stop trying to figure out how to “market your manuscript” and start realizing that your manuscript is the marketing.

You product/process is the marketing