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

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(as of Jul 27, 2025 03:27:21 UTC – Details)


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 readerTest, improve, & iterate your ToC without needing to rewrite anythingDesign a engaging reader experience that makes your book a delight to readDiscover the hidden analytics of boredom & confusion to identify book-killing problems & make the most of beta readersTreat marketing as a temporary activity instead of an ongoing obligation by designing a strong recommendation loopEvaluate which of the four seed marketing options are best-suited for your goals, constraints, & skillsWrite a book that endures & grows for years instead of fading into swift obscurityBoost 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 year70% of traditionally published titles fail to pay out a single dollar in royaltiesVanishingly 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 isn’t a get-rich-quick scheme. If you want to write a mediocre book the easy way, then you probably want to look elsewhere. But if you want to write a successful book the right way, then this guide will help.

This isn’t about prose or creativity. I’m assuming that you know how to write a coherent sentence and are able to do the work. Instead, this guide is about understanding how to design, test, and refine nonfiction that succeeds as a long-lasting, high-impact, and recommendable product.

This isn’t a self-publishing guide. The approach in this book applies equally well to both self-published & traditionally published authors. I won’t walk you through every tool & technicality of formatting, printing, and shipping a book. Those tasks are fiddly & tedious, but they’re also low-risk and easy to research online. Instead, our focus is on creating the most useful, and most recommendable book possible.

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0983HFQX7
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Useful Books Ltd
Accessibility ‏ : ‎ Learn more
Publication date ‏ : ‎ July 4, 2021
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 3.6 MB
Simultaneous device usage ‏ : ‎ Unlimited
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 144 pages
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1919621616
Page Flip ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Best Sellers Rank: #36,397 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store) #4 in Nonfiction Writing Reference #6 in Writing Skill Reference (Kindle Store) #7 in Authorship
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