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

by Rob Fitzpatrick

The title and subtitle, however, are significantly more difficult to adjust. Ensure that either title or subtitle is descriptive enough to define who the book is for and what it will do for them.

suggests that 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. Reviews serve a powerful double-duty, encouraging people to click to see your book’s store page, as well as to buy from it.

Your store page should sell (not just describe) and you should use every available option

Speak directly to the reader’s situation and goals, explicitly listing the book’s promise and benefits to their life, using readers’ own words (from reader conversations and beta reading) where possible Include more text and detail than you think you should (at least five paragraphs, and arguably more), allowing potential purchasers to continue reading until they’ve convinced themselves 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, and then adding a paragraph of explanation/justification to each — that’s a first draft of your description and you can hone it from there

Reviews create social proof and will meaningfully improve both clickthrough and conversion rates. Furthermore, organic reviews create a powerful flywheel within Amazon’s algorithms, improving your book’s placement and priority. Your immediate goal is to get 20-40 verified reviews (for social proof) as well as a steady, organic stream of daily sales and reviews (for Amazon’s algorithm).

Selling one copy of an audiobook is far less profitable than selling one paperback or ebook. For The Mom Test, I earn approximately $17 per paperback ($30 retail price, 55% royalties after accounting for printing costs), $7 per ebook ($10 price, 70% royalties), and less than $3 per audiobook (since they’re usually bundled into an Audible subscription). But due to the popularity of audiobooks, and despite driving less than 10% of my total profits, the audiobook represents over 30% of my “readers.”

This same mentality can be used to evaluate many other nice-to-have distribution options for your book: Increased reach + increased profits VS. Time cost + financial cost + stress cost

My quick advice is to charge $20-30 for your paperback and $9.99 for your ebook. The exceptions are if you prefer to sell a digital upsell bundle via your own site/audience (in which case you can charge more for the whole bundle) or to monetize the long-term customer relationship with additional product/service upsells (in which case you can charge less for the book).

Once someone has decided to invest any amount of their time and money in a book, the difference between $2 and $10 (or $10 and $20) is negligible. If you can sell an ebook for $2, you can sell it for $10. If you can sell a paperback for $10, you can sell it for $20.

A typical pricing scheme is $10-30 for the book, $50-75 to add the digital educational bonuses, and $150-250 for the full set of tools, templates, and time-savers. This feels high for consumers, but is a no-brainer for business customers, who value each hour of time saved at hundreds of dollars.

According to authors I’ve interviewed who have used this approach, only 10-20% of customers will purchase an upsell, but that’s still enough to double the book’s overall profitability. You can’t really do this via Amazon, so it requires being able to drive meaningful amounts of traffic to your own website.

Bundles and upsells can be huge profit-boosters. Just ensure that you write something useful enough to motivate readers to want to learn more from you, and that you’ve provided them with a way to do so. As a hidden bonus, a similar set of tactics will also allow you to benefit from piracy.

Counterintuitively, recommendable books tend to benefit from piracy, since the folks who “steal” it will still end up recommending it to others who choose to pay. Plus, lots of the people who end up downloading the pirated version wouldn’t have been able to get it otherwise (commonly due to a weak local currency). In which case, you can consider “piracy” to be a part of your social impact contribution.[46]

First and foremost, I share my contact details all over the place, and especially within the book itself (e.g., I’m rob@robfitz.com or @robfitz on Twitter). Second, I respond. Not always as quickly as I would like (sorry!), but I do try to get there eventually. And lastly, I keep an occasional eye on social media for mentions of my books, jumping into the conversation when it feels appropriate. That’s it. And it has led to more opportunities than I can count.

For the past few months, whenever a reader asks a question, instead of sending an email reply, I record the answer as a public video on my YouTube channel[50] and send them a link. This requires slightly more time, but doubles as a permanent piece of content to help build my fledgling audience.

Most books require active, ongoing marketing to grow. However, a rare few are useful enough to benefit from strong word of mouth and timeless relevance, growing automatically year after year. Instead of trying to figure out how to market whatever book you happened to write, a book can be intentionally designed and refined toward maximizing word of mouth and back-catalog potential. You probably can’t write the world’s best book about a huge topic for every type of reader. Decide who you’re serving and how you’re helping them, and then write just for them. Better to be loved by someone than ignored by everyone. Test your book with real readers, even before it has been written. Use listening and teaching conversations to build reader empathy, escape the curse of knowledge, and begin verifying the desirability of your book’s promise and the effectiveness of its contents. Ensure that the book’s knowledge can cross the air gap and make an impact on your readers. Put it out there for feedback before it feels ready. Use beta readers. Fall in love with negative feedback. Iterate and improve. While doing your beta reading, rewrites, and revisions, pay attention to the reader experience, which is defined as the pacing of value received over time spent. Add word counts to a detailed, descriptive ToC to visualize and debug that reader experience. Engagement and recommendability both rely on readers rapidly extracting significant value from the text. As such, the book should be as short...