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.

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.

Paul Hendrickson’s wonderful biography of Ernest Hemingway: Hemingway’s Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost Steven Pressfield’s handbook: The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles

Pleasure-givers (“interesting”, “fascinating”, “beautiful”) Problem-solvers (“useful”, “actionable”, “clarifying”) Pleasure-givers are crafted like art or literature, as a solitary act of genius. Whereas problem-solvers ought to be designed and built like products, through a reader-centric process of testing and refinement.

Your book’s promise should appear in (or at least be strongly implied by) its title and/or subtitle. My all-time favorite nonfiction title is How to Stay Alive in the Woods, by Bradford Angier.

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. Each time you try describing it to someone, you’ll get a little bit closer. And once people are immediately getting it — without requiring you to clarify or correct anything substantial — then you’ll know you’ve found the words. Put them on your cover.

Most business books are “idea books.” They don’t give you one little word about how to get it done. My book was going to be the book about how to actually do it. The publishers said, “Hmm, that doesn’t sound like it’s going to sell a lot of copies. How many people do positioning?” And I said, “Lots of people! The CEO of every startup. Marketing people. Product people. Lots of them!”

in order to make something valuable for somebody, you must be willing to define and defend what your book isn’t.

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.

What does my ideal reader already know and believe?

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)

In the world of education, there’s a phenomenon called “pseudoteaching.” From the perspective of a classroom observer, pseudoteaching appears flawless: the lesson and its delivery are clear, simple, energetic, and coherent. But for whatever reason, students fail to actually learn.

Pseudoteaching mimics the appearance of brilliant teaching without sharing its impact. The knowledge fails to cross the air gap.

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.

Beyond creating something DEEP[6] and useful, you must obey two additional requirements for your book to enter the back catalog: 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

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. That’s partly about good scoping and partly about writing something that delivers real results to the average reader. And to accomplish that second goal, you’ll want to begin testing the book’s foundations with real people, even before it has even been written.

A guiding principle of product design is that the more iterations you can do — while in front of real users — the better the product will become. The same applies to designing a useful book. But rewriting an entire manuscript requires so much time that there’s typically an upper limit on how many iterations are possible. The solution, as silly as it sounds, is to talk to people.

The Amateur’s Mind, by Jeremy Silman.

And yet, he still missed his readers’ actual challenges until he stopped pitching his advice and started listening to their reality by having them literally narrate their own thoughts.

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?

You want insights into their life, not opinions about your idea.[7]

This over-the-top descriptiveness is enormously helpful while testing and refining the book’s structure and contents, since it allows you to visualize exactly what (and when) a reader is learning.

Regardless, I feel that informative titles are valuable enough to be worth aiming for, even at the cost of consistency. Use them when possible. And when not possible, just fall back onto being as descriptive as you are able (and adding extra subsections if needed).

Because every good comedian knows that the first version of a new joke is a guess, not a guarantee.

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. (Or for a more “professional” version, phrase it as an offer of free coaching/consulting in exchange for a follow-up call in a few weeks to hear how it ended up working for them.)

While writing The Workshop Survival Guide, Devin and I each “adopted” one aspiring facilitator, spending somewhere between twenty and forty hours with each throughout the book’s creation. This allowed us to test the book’s full process with them, see where they got stuck, and to identify the ideas that had sounded good in theory but failed in practice.

Instead of trying to convince strangers to do something they don’t want to do, spend your time finding the people who already care. And if nobody cares, their disinterest also means something.

Hey, I’m planning out a book about setting up an apartment veggie garden. I remember you once mentioned doing something like that before — would you mind talking me through what you tried and how it went? It would help me out so much and should only take about fifteen minutes. But I know everyone is super busy these days, so of course no worries if it’s not a good time.

Hiding from your readers is a slippery slope that causes a series of harmful decisions and consequences: skipping reader conversations, skipping beta reading, and launching without testimonials, reviews, or a seed audience. The more you’re scared by the idea of talking to your readers, the more important it is to deal with now.

As a way to outwit the internal critic, Hemingway quipped that you ought to “write drunk, edit sober.” My editor, Adam, describes it as, “vomiting words onto the page.” The main idea is to avoid slowing yourself down by rereading, self-judging, or fretting over what you’ve written.

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.

Readers aren’t buying your useful book for its storytelling or suspense. They are buying it as the solution to a problem or a path toward a goal. They’ll stay engaged for as long as you are regularly and consistently delivering on that promise.[12]

Once you’re aware of what’s happening, you can restructure the lesson around delivering small pieces of the real value as quickly as possible.

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. (And as it turns out, this is actually the optimal way to teach chess to kids.)

You do this by adding word counts to the titles of your sections and chapters, allowing you to see how many words (and thus how many minutes — 250 words per minute is typical) are sitting between any two pieces of value. These word counts will be removed prior to publication, but they’re invaluable while the book is in development.

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.

Your early drafts already contain plenty of value. The challenge isn’t to add more good stuff. It’s to delete all the fluff that’s delaying readers from getting to it.

You’ve got three main ways to front-load your book. We’ve touched on some of these already, but to put it all in one place: Can you delete or reduce the front-matter (foreword, intro, bio, etc.)? If your book begins with value-enablers (theory, context, foundations, etc.), can you rearrange it to insert pieces of real value far earlier? If your whole book is building up toward a grand conclusion or set of tips, can you simply start with the big reveal?

That’s when I started writing my observations in this book. I felt like a spy, giving you the report from the inside, telling you how to get in. Now listen up, and I’ll tell you everything I know.

Revise into a third draft and prepare for beta readers 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.

The best way is to read it all every day from the start, correcting as you go along, then go on from where you stopped the day before. When it gets so long that you can’t do this every day, read back two or three chapters each day; then each week read it all from the start. That’s how you make it all of one piece.[17]

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.

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) Taken together, these three types of data will guide you toward a final product that people love.

Three strong signals that your manuscript is “finished” and ready to be Polished: It feels easy to recruit new beta readers, since they want what you’re offering (Desirable) Most of them are receiving the value and reaching the end (Effective and Engaging) At least some of them are bringing their friends (the recommendation loop is running)

Don’t worry too much about readers who want to find a way to argue about every tangential point. … Just enjoy writing.[20]

The problem isn’t you. The problem is the problem.

You’ll never cure boredom by adding more words, which only dilutes the value further. Deletion is your savior.