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

$24: Just the book

📑 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.

About the author

Hello, I'm Rob Fitzpatrick. Back in 2013, I wrote a short book called The Mom Test to teach entrepreneurs to ask for better customer feedback. In its first month, it earned a paltry $535. Six years later, thanks to steady word of mouth, it passed $10k in monthly royalties and has continued to grow from there.

It’s now taught at universities like MIT, UCL, and Harvard; recommended by startup accelerators like Y Combinator and Seedcamp; and used by teams at companies like SkyScanner and Shopify. It has hit #1 in most of its Amazon categories and has been translated by enthusiastic readers into nearly ten languages. All of this happened while I was largely ignoring the book and doing approximately zero active marketing. To date, it has put more than $350k in my pocket, all via reader recommendations. The growth in monthly profits is shown in the graph below. You'll notice that there was no big launch or magic bullet — just a steady, organic climb:

Just over a year ago, I released my second book, The Workshop Survival Guide, about designing and teaching educational workshops (coauthored with Devin Hunt). The book’s ultimate success is still too early to call, but it seems to be following a similar trajectory to The Mom Test — except better. Its sales at month five were the same as The Mom Test’s at year five, all via reader recommendations. It’s growing steadily, has organically hit #1 in its main Amazon categories, and is already generating enough royalties to comfortably cover my entire cost of living.

As before, The Workshop Survival Guide didn't benefit from any sort of flashy launch, a big mailing list, or clever marketing. It just does a good job of solving an important problem for readers, so they recommend it. This recommendability wasn’t an accident; it was our explicit goal, and we worked hard to achieve it. And with the right process and toolkit, you can do it too.

Pre-order for immediate access and more

$24: Just the book

📑 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

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.