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

\nThe 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 funnelMost 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 \nThe 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 T