Write Useful Books

A modern approach to designing and refining recommendable nonfiction

Rob Fitzpatrick

• Publisher: Useful Books Ltd
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781919621616
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Writing & Presentation Skills

The goal of book marketing is to stop needing to do it

Learn how to:

• Scope your book into the world's best solution for a certain type of reader
• Test, improve, & iterate your ToC without needing to rewrite anything
• Design a engaging reader experience that makes your book a delight to read
• Discover the hidden analytics of boredom & confusion to identify book-killing problems & make the most of beta readers
• Treat marketing as a temporary activity instead of an ongoing obligation by designing a strong recommendation loop
• Evaluate which of the four seed marketing options are best-suited for your goals, constraints, & skills
• Write a book that endures & grows for years instead of fading into swift obscurity
• Boost long-term growth by optimizing your pricing, platforms, & purchase funnel

Most books don't work

Writing a nonfiction book is a wonderful project, allowing you to preserve & share the most important things you've ever learned. Plus, a successful book will improve your reputation, your career, your earnings, & the lives of your readers.

Up until fairly recently, it was possible to receive at least some of these benefits by writing any book, regardless of its quality. But today, a million new titles are published per year and it's no longer enough to simply join the pile. Instead, you must create something that is able to stand out & succeed. And the most reliable path toward that goal - especially for an unproven author who lacks a pre-existing audience - is to write a book so startlingly useful that readers can't stop talking about it.

This guide proposes a different way of planning, writing, & refining nonfiction, drawn from the hard-won lessons of product designers & entrepreneurs. Applied properly, it leads to books that can grow organically via reader recommendations for many years, without relying on either heavy marketing or a large author platform.

The preconceptions about "writing a book" are so deeply entrenched that most authors don't even ask themselves whether a better way exists. Which is crazy, because the normal approach doesn't work! For example:

• The average NYT nonfiction bestseller loses 95% of its peak sales within a year
• 70% of traditionally published titles fail to pay out a single dollar in royalties
• Vanishingly few nonfiction books sell even 500 copies

These are not good results, but it doesn't have to be this way.

By following a more modern approach, my first two books (2013 & 2019) now do more than $150k/year in royalties (and growing). You can do it too. It's not easy, but it is reliable & repeatable. And in the normally hit-driven, feast-or-famine world of writing, there's something to be said for reliability.

What this book is not:

This is

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1. What this guide is and isn’t, how it can help you, and who I am
• 2. Designing nonfiction for long-lasting recommendability
• 3. Improve your book before you’ve written it
• Interlude
• 4. Create an engaging reader experience by giving it all away
• 5. Finding and working with beta readers
• 6. Gather better data, build a better book
• 7. Seed marketing to find your first 1,000 readers
• 8. Optimize for sales and growth
• Conclusion and thanks
• Appendix
• Notes