Write Useful Books: A modern approach to designing and refining recommendable nonfiction
von Rob Fitzpatrick
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. When folks started asking how to preorder my new book, instead of whipping up a landing page, I decided to try this alternative opt-in technique. There is no landing page or website for the book. Just a few photos and an email address! I sent out a few tweets telling people to email me if they were interested, plus one post each on Facebook and Instagram, for a total of 358 likes, 9 shares, and 25 comments. In 24 hours, 90 people had emailed to request a pre-sale link. And more keep coming in. It’s a lightly manual process, but it also means that I get to read every email folks send. Which brings me to the two best parts.
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!”
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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."
"When folks started asking how to preorder my new book, instead of whipping up a landing page, I decided to try this alternative opt-in technique. There is no landing page or website for the book. Just a few photos and an email address! I sent out a few tweets telling people to email me if they were interested, plus one post each on Facebook and Instagram, for a total of 358 likes, 9 shares, and 25 comments. In 24 hours, 90 people had emailed to request a pre-sale link. And more keep coming in. It’s a lightly manual process, but it also means that I get to read every email folks send. Which brings me to the two best parts."
"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.)"
"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?"
"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."
"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 Both options are fine, and the choice mainly comes down to how many sets of eyes you want on the pre-launch manuscript (plus your comfort-level with technology, since the second option is more complex to set up).[21]"
"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."
- →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.
- →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]
- →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.
- →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.
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