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

by Rob Fitzpatrick

Increase value-per-page by deleting the fluff

Deleting whole chapters is mainly about scoping (“Oh, they don’t actually need this!”). Deleting anything smaller than that is about a mix of editing and reader experience design.

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.

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?

The third approach is the most controversial. Authors often feel that by “giving it all away” too soon, readers will take the goods and run. But I haven’t found that fear to be justified.

The rest of the book is really just supplemental detail for folks who need a bit more guidance around putting it into practice. Every page is valuable for beginners, who read it cover to cover. Meanwhile, more advanced readers are able to quickly get the value and then move on, grateful that I haven’t wasted their time. This structure has done wonders for both engagement and word of mouth.

A book should be as long as is necessary to convincingly deliver on its promise, but never any longer.

From the second draft onward, I like to follow Hemingway’s approach of rereading while writing: 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]

Don’t read it like it’s your precious perfect baby darling. Read it like it’s your worst enemy’s magnum opus and your job is to expose its every tragic flaw. … If you get bored reading it, so will your audience.[18]

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)

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. (Finding these people is less difficult than it sounds — more on that in a moment.)

As such, you don’t want to try to “force” people through the whole book via guilt trips or nudges. Their disinterest is the data — it shows you what’s next to be fixed.

As we edited, rewrote, and refined it over subsequent months (adding new beta readers at each step), we could see folks progressing further and further until nearly everyone was reaching the end and receiving the book’s full value.

If you need a timeline, plan to run at least two full iterations of beta reading (which should take one to four months, depending on how quickly you can do each rewrite). But if your schedule allows for it, you’ll ideally continue iterating and improving until your beta readers have shown you that you’re finished.

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)

As a reminder: Begin by pinging friendly first contacts (including everyone who enjoyed talking to you during reader conversations) Mention the book as “your thing” whenever someone asks you what you’ve been up to Plant a flag online by adding the book to your email signature, as well as any relevant social networks, profiles, and sites

Far better to think, “A-ha, my book has a weakness; let’s see if I can fix it so nobody else gets lost in the same way.” 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!

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

The challenge with detecting boredom is that most readers are too polite to explicitly mention it. Or they won’t even notice what’s happening, blaming themselves for “not paying attention” or “feeling tired” when the problem is actually a failure of reader experience design.

The best way to detect boredom is to identify where readers are quietly giving up and abandoning the book. If readers are jumping ship in Chapter 3, for example, then it suggests that either Chapter 2 was a low-value grind (thereby exhausting them before they got to the good stuff), or that Chapter 3 is.

Yes, it’s possible that the reader’s life may have just gotten crazy and that they suddenly ran out of time. But that’s a risk for your finished book as well.

Nine times out of ten, the problem is low value-per-page in the surrounding areas.

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

This is yet another reason to invite actual beta readers instead of just pressuring your friends or hiring a professional. Friends and professionals feel obligated to finish the manuscript, which denies you the invaluable data of where they’re getting bored and wanting to give up.

After each iteration of beta reading for The Workshop Survival Guide, Devin and I would each reach out to a few of those readers with a brief follow-up email. It was always hand-written but sounded like this: Hello, huge thanks for all your amazing comments and feedback. We really appreciate it and wanted to return the favor by making ourselves available to help with any questions or problems. Have you had a chance to design or run a workshop since reading it? Did anything not work? Are you stuck on anything? We’d love to help.

People will only recommend your book if it has successfully touched their lives. “Sounded good in theory but didn’t work for me” is a death blow to an otherwise recommendable book.

You’ve got two potential approaches for selling your book before it is launched: Pre-order — they pay today and get it eventually, after it’s finished Early access — they pay now and get the current manuscript immediately, plus updates along the way and a finished copy once it’s done

Add the P to DEE by polishing, professionalizing, and publishing it

Depending on your book’s content, you may also want to organize some sensitivity readers (for inadvertent marginalization or bias), expert reviewers (for fact-checking), and a legal review (usually only needed if you’re worried about potential libel or fair use issues, or to insure the book as a business asset).

April Dunford (author of the already-mentioned Obviously Awesome) approaches seed marketing differently, committing to a stretch of time instead of a number of readers. As she memorably told me: Launch is a year, not a day.[22]

For example, I manually seeded 800 readers for The Mom Test and then, over the next few years, organically sold another 50,000 copies through word of mouth. Meaning that each copy I manually marketed eventually led to another 60 copies sold (and growing). That’s a solid multiplier and is, incidentally, how to flip book marketing into a profitable equation.

Successful marketing isn’t really about marketing at all — it’s about product design, testing, refinement, and ensuring that you’re delivering real value to your readers.

My top four suggestions for seed marketing (in no particular order) are: Digital book tour via podcasts and online events (most scalable) Amazon PPC (pay-per-click) advertising (easiest but unscalable) Event giveaways and bulk sales (fastest if you have the contacts) Build a small author platform via content marketing and “writing in public” (most reliable and valuable, but time-intensive)

For most useful books, Amazon’s native book ads will hugely outperform the ads on any other platform. When someone searches on Google or Facebook, they’re looking for information or entertainment. When they search on Amazon, they’re uniquely open to the idea of paying for a book. The intent-to-purchase is unparalleled.

The ads sold 25-100 copies per month at a moderate profit, returning $2-3 for every $1 spent while slowly building a seed audience. Within a few months, word of mouth had kicked in and organic sales were 10x higher than ad-driven sales.

Interestingly, PPC (“pay per click”) ads work better for self-published authors than those who are published traditionally. This is because a self-published author receives higher royalties per copy sold, allowing them to pay higher per-click prices while still turning a safe profit.

If you’re familiar with other advertising platforms, you may be surprised to learn that you’re largely powerless to customize what appears in your Amazon ads. Your book’s cover and title/subtitle are its advertisement — you can’t just add a compelling photo or catchy tagline to make it more clickable. So if your cover is illegible and your title/subtitle mysterious, then your ads won’t work.

In fact, if I had to choose how to benefit from a large event, I would much rather do a giveaway (to every attendee, not just one or two copies) than be their keynote speaker.

To seed The Mom Test, I gave away 500 copies at one event (they covered printing costs of £2.50 per copy), 200 at a second (they paid discounted bulk prices of £10 per copy), and marketed 100 myself via content marketing (which we’ll look at next), for a total of 800 seed readers.

Additionally, the event must be able to ensure that all attendees actually receive a book, which typically means either putting them out on chairs before folks show up, including them in the gift bags, or leaving a giant pile of them (with no friction, queue, or delays) at a key junction or gathering point.

For online events, your book must be linked/included directly in an email sent to all attendees. In the best case, the event pays you directly for the appropriate number of digital licenses, optionally at a steep discount. The point here isn’t about the money, but the fact that the event will be more motivated to distribute and promote something that they’ve paid for. Less optimal, but still better than nothing, is for the event to send out a special digital purchase link in one of their attendee emails. You’ll get close to 100% penetration with a direct giveaway, and 10-20% penetration with a good email purchase link.

Once an event has decided to bear the reputational risk of giving away a book, they’ll typically also be able to find the budget to cover costs (or more).

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 since you can steeply discount one or other component while still ending up with a higher overall fee. Also, clients can sometimes pay for your books and services from two separate budgets, which helps unlock more overall discretionary funds.

Austin Kleon — whose four nonfiction books, including the wonderful Show Your Work: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered, have sold over a million copies — puts it perfectly: Once a day, after you’ve done your day’s work, find one little piece of your process that you can share. If you’re in the very early stages, share your influences and what’s inspiring you. If you’re in the middle of executing a project, write about your methods or share work-in-progress. If you’ve just completed a project, show the final product, share scraps from the cutting-room floor, or write about what you learned.