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

by Rob Fitzpatrick

A major theme of this guide is to stop writing your manuscript in secret and start exposing it to — and learning from — real readers as quickly as possible. That might feel scary, but there are ways to do it safely, and it’s worth doing. You want to find (and fix) your book’s mistakes before launch, not after.

Savvy authors have recently been choosing to self-publish their first 10,000 copies and then transition afterwards into a publishing deal. If you’re able to go this route, you’ll receive full royalties from the first 10k sales (worth approximately $55k more than the royalties you’d receive from a publisher on that number of copies sold[2]) and can then enter contract negotiations from a position of strength since your book is already de-risked.

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.

First, your early drafts are supposed to be terrible. Every first draft is a dumpster fire. That’s okay. All writing begins by being awful and only starts to shine through rewrites, beta reading, and editing. A draft is still a baby; it’s unfair to judge it by the standards of a grown-up book.

Fourth, although writing a useful book does take time, you’ll begin receiving feedback, support, and pre-orders from real readers long before the book is finished. And if you’re anything like me, nothing will keep you as motivated as knowing that you’re already helping real readers who are eagerly awaiting the next version.

Useful books are problem-solving products

Pleasure-givers (“interesting”, “fascinating”, “beautiful”) Problem-solvers (“useful”, “actionable”, “clarifying”)

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

Confusingly, nearly all of the advice you’ve ever heard about “writing a book” is actually about writing a pleasure-giver, and is at best irrelevant and often harmful when applied to a problem-solver.

Make a clear promise and put it on the cover

You can’t fully prevent bad reviews from ever happening, but you can certainly make them a rare exception by plainly stating who your book is for and what they’re going to get out of reading it.

Because it offered readers an outcome instead of just a story.

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

Still, it can sometimes be a bit tricky to find the right words to clearly and concisely describe your book’s promise. The best way I’ve found to get there is to try it out in conversation. 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.

Throughout the writing process, you’ll receive a bucketload of well-intentioned criticism, advice, and suggestions from all sorts of people. Before allowing those comments to take hold of your soul, 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.

The reason this matters is that nobody recommends the second-best solution. So you need to become the best. Not for everyone, but for someone.

Your book is under no obligation to start from the beginning, to serve everybody, or to cover everything. 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.

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

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?

Your book’s scope should also be guided by your own goals and interests as its author.

Your scope will still evolve and improve as you proceed through the process, so it doesn’t need to be perfect. But it’s worth documenting your current best guesses

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 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.

The intended knowledge somehow fails to cross the air gap from either author-to-book or from book-to-reader.

In fact, it’s so rare for a book to deliver on its promise that readers will adore you for doing just that one thing.

You can — and should — write out this sort of recommendation story for your own book idea. It puts you in the perspective of your readers when they are first seeking (or hearing about) your book and helps you better empathize with their situation, goals, and context in that moment.

Of your several potential reader profiles, does one more actively search for (or give) advice and recommendations?

A book’s organic growth will live or die based on its recommendation loop. If your current scope doesn’t lend itself to strong recommendability, then consider adjusting it until it does.

Recommendability creates a mini-monopoly and pricing power

This is why I was happy to launch The Mom Test at the relatively high price of $30 for such a short book, despite having no personal reputation or platform at the time. I figured that if people were hearing about the book via individual recommendations, then I could price it however I liked.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Fill your ToC with takeaways, not clickbait

To serve its purpose as a tool for design and feedback, it must be built from: Clear, descriptive language Detailed subsections.

You can adjust the aesthetics and style of your titles later, once the book’s structure has been tested and proven, toward the second half of beta reading. If you prefer long chapters without subsections, or if you want to use clever and punny titles, then that’s the time to make the switch. But throughout the design and writing process, treat your ToC as what it really is: a detailed blueprint of your book’s education design, learning outcomes, and takeaways.

“becoming the book” and teaching its contents to your future readers. By helping them through the process yourself, you’ll learn what they need, and in what order. You’ll figure out which examples resonate and which exercises work. All of which will end up directly improving both your ToC and your soon-to-be-written manuscript.

Hey, I remember that you were thinking about doing X a while back. Is that still on your mind? If so, I’d love to grab some time, answer any questions, and help you think through how to approach it. The reason I bring this up is that I’m starting to work on a new book about the topic, and helping you through it would be super useful for me as research. And hopefully I can be helpful in return.

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.

Third, when people ask what you’ve been up to, start mentioning the book as “your thing.” Some non-zero percentage will become animated with excitement (“Oh my gosh, you’re writing a book about that!”), and when this happens, you’ve got an easy conversation on your hands. Avoid the temptation to schedule the chat for later — you’re already talking to them, so just start learning what you want to learn.

And if nobody cares, their disinterest also means something.

For the first draft, most folks suggest just closing your eyes and getting it down.

“vomiting words onto the page.”

Don’t fix typos. Don’t rework paragraphs to be more beautiful. Just follow the ToC that you’ve already verified via reader conversations. You’ll still have a chance to make it pretty (or at least a bit less ugly) before exposing it to beta readers. The first draft is just to help you think.

If you find yourself stuck by either tone or writer’s block, try drafting the book in your email client. Put one section’s title in the subject line of a fresh email and address it to a friend who knows what’s going on. And then, in the body, simply type out the shortest possible explanation or justification of the subject line — that’s your first draft of that section. This can help escape the mental baggage of “writing a book” and get you refocused on the bit that matters: delivering useful knowledge.

If you feel more comfortable speaking than writing, record the first draft of each section (following the ToC) as audio and use an AI transcription service to inexpensively extract the text.

I like to give my best few hours to my books each day, which, for me, begins about an hour (and a pint of coffee) after waking up. I’ve learned that if I don’t do my writing first thing, then I don’t do my writing. I avoid checking any messages or alerts until after my day’s writing is done — the distraction and drama of email simply undoes me.