Write Useful Books
If you want your book to thrive, you need a better process.
My first two nonfiction titles have grown organically to reach more than 100k happy readers and are now generating $160k per year in royalties. All with nearly zero active marketing. This is due to how the books were built.
The process for building useful nonfiction is iterative, data-driven, and reader-centric. It's the polar opposite of the standard gamble of “plan, polish, publish, and pray.”
This guide contains everything I know about how to design, test, and refine nonfiction that is able to endure for years, get recommended, and grow on its own. Whether you're aiming for royalties, reputation, reach, or impact, this guide can help you get there.
By Rob Fitzpatrick, author of The Mom Test and The Workshop Survival Guide.

Pre-order for immediate access and more
- 📑 Instant access to the current manuscript containing 30k words of actionable guidance and advice
- 📘 A paperback copy once it's ready (shipped anywhere)
- 🙌 [Subscription only] Invitation to our nonfiction author's community for accountability, Q&A, problem-solving, and events
- 🙏 My undying gratitude for your support
*Full refund available any time within 30 days — just email rob@robfitz.com
Resources & articles
📺 April Dunford on Nailing Positioning. : Making sure customers get what you do and buy from you.
📺 Alex Hillman's Hard-Won Business Lessons Distilled Into a Pocket Guide: Writing a tiny, useful book.
📚 My favorite books about books: Seven irresistably useful & enjoyable books about writing
📝 The Bad / Good Design Pattern for nonfiction that teaches: Why so much “right advice” fails to stick and how to teach better
📺 Arvid Kahl on the business, product, and process of nonfiction: The best-selling author of Zero to Sold opens up about ideas, audience, platform, and profits
💸 Why most nonfiction fails to make money: Four royalty-wrecking blunders & how to fix them
🚀 Don’t bet your book's success on “winning the PR lottery”: How to unlock long-term organic growth by designing around a strong Recommendation Loop
The book and its contents
This guide is not a magic-bullet marketing strategy; rather, it's a modern approach to product design. It will apply to both traditionally-published and self-published works. It won't help with narrative nonfiction (like biography or history), but will be invaluable for any author who intends to help their reader to achieve a goal, improve at a skill, undergo a process, understand a concept, or solve a problem.
CHAPTER 1. What this guide is and isn’t, how it can help, and who I am
- Why I’m a relevant source of advice
- The goal of book marketing is to stop needing to do it
- The motivations and business models of writing a book
- Profitability and self-publishing
- Some encouragement for folks who don’t think they can write a book
- This isn’t the only way, just my way
CHAPTER 2. Useful books are a problem-solving product
- Make a clear promise and put it on the cover
- Narrow the Reader Profile to become the world’s best solution for someone
- Desirable books begins with a strong Scope
- DEEP books vs. ineffective Problem-Solvers
- Word of mouth can be anticipated and designed for
- Recommendability removes competition
- Write for the back catalog with timeless content
CHAPTER 3. Improve your book before writing it
- Escape the Curse of Knowledge
- Listen to their life, don’t pitch your idea
- If they care and you care, then it’s worth writing
- Build your Table of Contents from Learning Outcomes, not clickbait
- Your ToC will require testing and iteration
- Teach the book to test its contents
- How to find people to talk to
- What if nobody wants to talk to you?
- Expand the Table of Contents into a first draft
CHAPTER 4. Design a stronger Reader Experience
- What keeps a reader reading
- Value enablers vs. actual value
- Front-load the value
- Length is a liability; value-per-page is an asset
- Hunt for fluffy chapters, sections, paragraphs, and words
- Visual callouts break the reader’s flow
- Avoid cross-references, teasers, and hooks until the manuscript is solid
- A strong bio creates just enough credibility for them to start reading
- Revise into a second and third draft
CHAPTER 5. Use Beta Readers
- Invite Beta Readers over time to find the next set of problems
- Your Beta Readers will show you when you’re finished
- Prepare the manuscript for live commenting and encourage negative feedback
- Evidence of value, insights, and takeaways
- Confusion, skepticism, and missing information
- Factual inaccuracies, oversimplifications, and overgeneralizations
- Boredom, abandonment, and the hidden analytics of reader engagement
- Feedback, defensiveness, and ego
- Follow ups, check-ins, and Beta Reader communities
- Save the most influential readers for last
- For feedback to be useful, you need to use it
INTERLUDE: The path toward the finish line
- Begin pre-sales as soon as it’s working for Beta Readers
- Polish and publish
- The book design process (quick reference)
CHAPTER 6. Find your first 1,000 seed readers
- Launch is unfair, but growth is meritocratic
- You must seed an initial audience by hand before organic growth can begin
- Five steps to seeding an audience
- Four reliable paths to seed readers
- The “normal” approach: build an author platform
- Most authors ignore their fans, so you should engage with yours
- Once the book is selling, optimize the funnel
- Once the book is selling, create percentage sales boosts
- Building a bigger business on top of your book
CHAPTER 7. Optimize your Amazon
- The store blurb should sell, not just describe
- Amazon’s algorithms reward a quality product
- Audiobooks tap a separate audience and can boost word of mouth
- Amazon’s PPC ads are incredible for problem-solvers
- Hitting #1 is easier than you think
- Amazon self-publishing tips and traps
The nonfiction author community

It's hard to write a useful book. The community is here to help.
We're currently a group of 70+ authors who are working on our own books and helping each other out. We'd be glad for you to join us.
You'll get quick answers to whatever's got you stuck, feedback from sharp peers, and weekly events for accountability and learning. Unsubscribe any time and keep the book.
$19 / mo: Book + Community
Pre-order for immediate access and more
- 📑 Instant access to the current manuscript containing 30k words of actionable guidance and advice
- 📘 A paperback copy once it's ready (shipped anywhere)
- 🙌 [Subscription only] Invitation to our nonfiction author's community for accountability, Q&A, problem-solving, and events
- 🙏 My undying gratitude for your support
*Full refund available any time within 30 days — just email rob@robfitz.com
Thanks :)
To learn more about myself or my other books, check out robfitz.com or youtube.com/c/robfitzpatrick.
Contact: rob@robfitz.com
All rights reserved © Robfitz Ltd 2020.
PS. If you aren't sure about the book, I'd suggest giving it a try — I'll happily issue a full refund if it's not for you.