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

by Rob Fitzpatrick

time labor. Once your book’s audience has been seeded, you may optionally decide to continue hustling to accelerate its growth and impact. But if you would prefer to spend your time on other activities, then you’ll be happy to hear that for properly designed nonfiction, ongoing marketing becomes an option rather than an obligation.

Emotional motivations: Beginnings — to explore, plant a flag, and build a reputation in an interesting space where the author intends to remain Closure — to capture the lessons learned from some stage of life, allowing the author to move on Impact — to spread important knowledge beyond the author’s direct reach Curiosity — to spend the time researching, wrestling with, and deeply understanding an irresistible topic Craft — they simply love the act of writing or teaching Financial goals: Freedom via royalties — reliable, passive income to escape the rat race Increased earnings via reputation — a multiplier to speaking fees, consulting rates, and general career advancement Entrepreneurship via audience-building — using the book as one piece of a larger strategy around building an audience that can be cross-sold into additional products, services, or events

Unfortunately (and understandably), publishers don’t want to blow their marketing budget on an unproven book, so they prefer to “wait and see” until it has been de-risked, which typically means that you are either already a best-selling author (reputation), already possess an adoring audience waiting to buy your stuff (platform), or have already sold at least 10,000 copies of your book (momentum).

For big, traditional publishers, these two numbers are correlated. An advance of $50k+ suggests that they take your book quite seriously and are therefore also quite likely to support it with a guaranteed marketing spend. Whereas a lower advance (especially of $10k or less, which is typical for unproven and unplatformed authors) suggests that they’re going to wait and see. Alternatively, some smaller indie publishers will compensate for lower advances by providing significantly more guaranteed marketing, which is also a fine deal.

When people say they’re “bad at writing,” this usually just means that they’re unwilling to spend sufficient time on feedback and editing. Yes, it may be slow. But being able to do something slowly is very different from being unable to do it at all.

Useful books are problem-solving products

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.

The word “problem” in “problem-solver” is being used somewhat loosely, and could include helping a reader to receive any sort of tangible outcome, such as to: 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

Make a clear promise and put it on the cover Here’s the secret to a five-star Amazon rating: be clear enough about what your book is promising that people can decide they don’t need it. It may seem counterintuitive to try to drive potential readers away. But good books receive bad reviews after making too broad of a promise and luring the wrong people into buying. 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.

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. Can you guess what that book is promising? Are you able to judge its relevance to your needs and goals? Do you know which of your friends might enjoy hearing about it? Absolutely. And as a result, it has sold 800k copies across twenty years despite competing against plenty of similar books that are arguably better. In my view, that’s the direct result of making a clearer promise on its cover.

Decide who it isn’t for A book’s promise is meaningless until paired with a certain type of reader. My first book, The Mom Test, isn’t anywhere close to the best book about sales or customer research — at least, not for everyone. But it absolutely is the best book about those topics for introverted technical entrepreneurs.

The same concept applies in all product design. Designing the world’s best TV for everyone is impossible. How could you possibly hope to figure out the right price point or feature set? Whereas designing the world’s best TV for a specific type of someone — the hearing impaired, parents of young kids, executive boardrooms — becomes instantly tractable. Nearly every author attempts to include too much stuff for too many different types of readers. But that’s a recipe for writing something mediocre for everybody and mind-blowing for nobody — every chapter that the amateur adores, the expert endures, and vice versa.

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. These crucial decisions will define your book’s scope.

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 (And we’ll soon add recommendability and longevity as the final two considerations of a strong scope.)

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?

I soon decided that if people didn’t already understand and believe in the value of Customer Development (i.e., one of the theoretical foundations that my advice was built on), then my book simply wasn’t for them. This allowed me to cut all the early theory and justification and begin with what I actually wanted to say, which was about how to do it. The revised scope sounded like this: If you’re a tech entrepreneur struggling to run useful customer interviews, this book will help you understand why the conversations are going wrong and how to run them properly.

That’s sharper. That told me who the book was for, which tone to take, what to include, and what to leave out. It allowed me to start with a bang, delivering real va...

Your book’s scope should also be guided by your own goals and interests as its author. An important moment for The Workshop Survival Guide was deciding that our ideal readers would already have a workshop to teach, and that we could therefore skip all discussion of selling tickets, negotiating with clients, building a reputation, and the rest of the “business” side of workshops. Would some readers have enjoyed those topics? Definitely. But since we weren’t excited about w...

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 rab...

DEEP books vs. ineffective problem-solvers 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)

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. Once you start measuring the student’s actual results (the outcome) instead of the teacher’s performance (the input), you’ll find that a polished and energetic delivery is worthless unless the teacher has first spent the time ensuring that the underlying lesson works.

This is why the typical approach to book creation is backwards: the misguided author begins by writing, rewriting, and editing a full manuscript, and only then starts figuring out whether readers want it and whether it works. But by that point, it’s too late to fix big issues without redoing absolutely everything.

This narrative represents a sort of “recommendation loop” that gets triggered by someone complaining about (or seeking a solution to) a high-priority “problem.” If that happens frequently enough, then the book’s growth becomes self-sustaining.

Ask yourself: Is your book’s promise Desirable enough that people will readily complain about, receive advice, give advice, and search for solutions to it? When someone encounters this problem/question/goal, is finding a solution a top priority or simply a nice-to-have? If your book could have several possible promises, does one have more “hair on fire” urgency for a certain type of reader? Of your several potential reader profiles, does one more actively search for (or give) advice and recommendations? Do any feel the pain more sharply? If so, they’ll fuel a stronger, faster recommendation loop.

But if someone has been personally told that your book is the solution to the problem currently ruining their life, how likely are they to end up buying a different book? In most cases, they won’t even think about it and will just buy yours. Which means that recommendability removes competition.

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.

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.

Listening and teaching are part of writing 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.

Done properly, these “reader conversations” will allow you to test and iterate on your book’s underlying scope and structure without worrying about its words, and without needing to rewrite anything larger than a table of contents. This massively accelerates the speed of early iterations and allows you to construct your early drafts atop rock-solid foundations.

you’ll use two main styles of reader conversations: Listening/understanding conversations — to verify and improve your scope and rekindle reader empathy Teaching/helping conversations — to refine your table of contents and iterate on the book’s underlying education design and structure In practice, these two styles of conversations tend to overlap and blur together, so you needn’t be overly strict about facilitation. For example, a “t...

Escape the curse of knowledge by listening to their life

In the context of building reader empathy, pitching will prevent deeper learning by both exposing your ego (which discourages negative feedback) as well as by suggesting that you’ve already figured out the details (which discourages big-picture feedback). You want insights into their life, not opinions about your idea.[7]

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

Note that in most cases, the sections aren’t only a vague “topic,” but actually contain the primary learning outcome or takeaway: 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.

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.

Writing is teaching, but harder. If a live session gets off track, you can notice the confusion and improvise your way through it; not so with a finished book. Which means that you need to test and solidify your educational design in advance.

If you can’t find a single person who is excited to chat about your topic, then it could mean that either: Your readers don’t care about the book’s promise (return to scoping until they do, adjusting either the reader or the promise) You don’t know — or can’t find — even a single potential reader (start dealing with that today) You don’t actually care enough about this topic or reader to fuss with testing and refining a useful book (return to scoping until you care)

The introduction will typically be the last thing you write, after understanding exactly what the book has matured into.

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.

Stop writing for an anonymous crowd; imagine yourself writing to a specific individual who you know, and who wants your help. Stop trying to sound smart. Use the same tone and language that you would use to explain something to a friend or colleague.

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.

Designing a strong reader experience means deciding exactly how to pace and where to place your book’s major insights, takeaways, tools, actions, and “a-ha” moments. It’s the difference between a page-turner and a grind and is how you nail requirement #3 of DEEP: Engagement.

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

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.

The game’s rules are an enabler of future value, not actual value, and working through them all upfront feels like a long, theoretical slog:

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.

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.

this only works if you followed the earlier advice of using descriptive titles and plenty of subsections. You want to know the word count per learning outcome (i.e., a specific takeaway or insight), not the word count per “topic.”

You’ll use the marked-up ToC to detect three major weaknesses in your reader experience: A slow start (how many words before the first major piece of value?) Long slogs (lengthy, back-to-back sections without big “a-ha” moments) Fluffy...