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

by Rob Fitzpatrick

How many pages have I produced? I don’t care. Are they any good? I don’t even think about it. All that matters is I’ve put in my time and hit it with all I’ve got. All that counts is that, for this day, for this session, I have overcome Resistance. … 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.

Tendayi Viki, a friend of mine, wrote three award-winning business books in three years alongside a full-time job and young kids, simply by waking up early enough to put two undistracted hours into his books each day.[11] Two hours is plenty, but you’ve got to carve it out, defend it, do the work, and then show up again tomorrow.

From a reader’s perspective, your book is a multi-hour journey experienced as value received over time spent. If too much time passes before arriving at the next piece of meaningful value, a reader’s engagement drops and they’ll drift away.

At least every few pages, you want your reader to be thinking, “Oh wow, I can use that.”

Confusingly, just because some piece of knowledge is necessary doesn’t mean that it is valuable — at least, not from the reader’s perspective. 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.

By arranging the content around the learner’s goals instead of the teacher’s convenience, the experience stops feeling like a drag and begins to feel easy and engaging.

Visualize the reader experience by adding word counts to your ToC

You want to know the word count per learning outcome (i.e., a specific takeaway or insight), not the word count per “topic.”

Throughout the writing process, maintain a separate “cutting room floor” document to paste and preserve all the chapters and sections that you cut from the main manuscript. It’s not wasted work; it’s part of the process, and those deleted bits will often reappear later as part of your content marketing.

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.

A paperback can start to feel a bit too thin below about 100 pages, which is somewhere around the 20,000-word mark. But rather than artificially pad out the words, it’s better to increase the pages via thoughtful layout. This makes it feel more “booky” without unnecessarily taxing the reader’s time. For example, there are shockingly few words in the category-breaking best-seller Business Model Generation by Osterwalder and Pigneur. And yet, thanks to its heavy use of helpful diagrams, illustrations, and creative typography, it feels undeniably substantial.

All the stuff we’ve talked about in this chapter begins to apply from your second draft onward. The very first draft is just about brain-dumping it onto paper. You only start thinking about the reader experience once you’re diving back in to rewrite it. But give yourself a little vacation first. A week away from the manuscript between drafts will do wonders for your perspective and sanity.

This does cost more time during the writing, but saves far more time during editing, so I consider it a win. However, if you’re prone to endless fiddling and second-guessing yourself, then you’ll do better to maintain the strict division of “write first, edit second.”

While doing these revisions, focus on the big-picture issues of structure, clarity, and reader experience. Try not to worry about every little problem with grammar, typos, and wordcraft. Spend more effort tightening the earlier sections than the later ones. A strong start can keep folks going through a weaker ending, but a strong ending can’t save a disappointing start.

Even after the third draft, the manuscript still won’t be anywhere close to perfect. That’s okay — it only needs to be coherent enough for a sufficiently motivated beta reader to muddle thro...

You’ll sometimes spend a full day painstakingly writing something that you delete the very next morning, which can feel like sliding backwards. But rest assured, it’s a healthy and natural part of the process.

Reread it. Revise it. Restructure it. Refine the reader experience. Front-load the value. Remove the chapters and sections that don’t apply to your ideal readers.

Beta readers are neither paid professionals nor kindhearted friends. 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, they can offer real insights, which come from three places: What they say in their comments (qualitative insights) Where they begin to become bored, start skimming, stop reading, and stop commenting (quantitative insights) How they apply the book’s ideas in their lives (observational insights)

terms of where it fits within the traditional process, beta reading begins after the third-ish draft, but before any sort of professional editing.

Consider what would happen if I asked for feedback on a beautiful oil painting that I’d clearly poured huge amounts of time into. You’d almost certainly just compliment it, perhaps offering some small, inconsequential suggestions to show that you’re paying attention. After all, it’s practically finished, so how could I even use your big ideas? And given the effort I’ve already invested, my ego is likely to be all tangled into it, so you’ll want to be supportive even if you don’t exactly adore what I’ve made. Whereas if I asked for thoughts on a rough, ugly sketch that took only minutes to create, you’d feel far more comfortable saying that you just don’t get it, allowing me to catch and fix its big problems.

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. 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.

Their disinterest is the data — it shows you what’s next to be fixed.

Your book will never feel as perfect as you’d like. There’s always something else to fiddle with or improve. So you’ll need to draw the line somewhere, and your beta readers can help you decide where’s good enough.

Alternatively, Devin and I have built a tool specifically for better beta reading called Help This Book,[19] which is designed to gather more (and better) data as well as to help you make better sense of it. I used it for this book:

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. So I ran with it by adding absurd — but useful — example conversations to nearly every chapter of the book. And although the occasional grumpy reader might disagree, these mock conversations are a big reason that the book ended up working. And they started out as an accident. I never would have known they mattered without my beta readers.

When a reader seems confused, pay attention to that precious signal. It’s easy (and tempting) to respond with an eye-roll while thinking, “C’mon, pay better attention!” But that only serves to preserve the problem.

Even if you’re technically correct and have explained it earlier, if one reader gets stuck, then others will as well, hindering your recommendation loop.

A 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.

The moment you start disregarding or rationalizing negative feedback is the moment you lose your ability to improve your 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. So you redesign it. Shift your emphasis off the personal and back toward the product. Perspective is everything! Steven Pressfield, author of the The War of Art, says: The problem isn’t you. The problem is the problem.

As such, the answer is almost always to wade into the surrounding sections with a chainsaw, aiming to slash their word counts by half or more. Engagement drops — and boredom rises — due to long slogs through low-value pages. You’ll never cure boredom by adding more words, which only dilutes the value further. Deletion is your savior.

you’re self-publishing, hiring a little bit of professional help is highly recommended. Nearly everyone should pay the few hundred dollars for a good copy editor (for sentence-level improvements) and proofreader (for typos and grammar).

Beyond the prose itself, self-publishing authors will also need to work through a laundry list of production tasks: interior layout, cover design, print on demand, and more. These tasks are somewhat tedious, but aren’t difficult.

Before organic growth is able to kick in and carry you forward, some number of happy readers must have already received massive value from your book. These early evangelists are called your seed audience (or seed readers). Once you’ve found them, you can step back and allow organic growth to take care of itself. But until then, you’re on the hook for doing manual, hands-on marketing.

A year-long launch might appear a terrible burden, but I see it in a brighter light. A useful book’s long-lasting relevance relieves the pressure of the do-or-die launch. With a broader time horizon, minor mistakes and mishaps aren’t such a big deal, and the urgency evaporates. You’ll still need to do the work, but you can do it at your own pace.

If you’re in the business of paid consulting or speaking, you can easily upsell clients by adding their logo to the cover and a custom foreword to the innards. I’ve sold five or ten thousand of these custom-branded books to a mix of corporations and universities, and they absolutely love it. Bundling books into your normal client services also offers some creative pricing/negotiating power

You can reuse the book’s content as its own marketing You can begin doing this very early, even with rough drafts and tiny excerpts

a repeatable process to reduce the time cost and emotional drain

Is it scary to post your work-in-progress? Sure. So how do you get started? By starting. Here’s the viewpoint from Jeff Gothelf, four-time

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]

One easy option is to simply screenshot some piece of the manuscript, add some highlights or commentary, and share it.

“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.

Like all things marketing, doing it once is not a magic bullet. But once you’ve overcome the friction of setting up your process and learning the ropes, it doesn’t take too much time or effort to maintain. And if you do this sort of thing consistently alongside writing your book, it’s all the marketing that you’ll ever need to do.

For many nonfiction topics, readers will be just as intrigued by your day-to-day process as your written output.

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.

Putting yourself out there won’t guarantee that you’ll get lucky. But refusing to do so most certainly guarantees that you won’t.

Get accountable by creating a content schedule

If you’d prefer to skip setting up your own site and newsletter, the clever folks at the software company Basecamp recently found a solution. 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.

These tactics won’t help a book start selling, but they will help it to sell more. The most common and impactful options include: Optimizing your Amazon purchase funnel (50%+ sales increase) Adding percentage boosts with extra platforms and products (5-20% uplift apiece) Turning piracy to your advantage by ensuring that the book acts as its own marketing Engaging with and supporting superfans and evangelists (and optionally teachers and trainers)

Most people just insta-click the first cover that looks relevant,