write a useful book - rob fitzpatrick

Learn how Writing a nonfiction book is a wonderful project, allowing you to preserve and u0026 share the most important things you’ve ever learned. Plus, a successful book will improve your reputation, your career, your earnings, and u0026 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 and u0026 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, and u0026 refining nonfiction, drawn from the hard-won lessons of product designers and u0026 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 and “writing a book and ” 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 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 and u0026 2019) now do more than $150k year in royalties (and growing). You can do it too. It’s not easy, but it is reliable and u0026 repeatable. And in the normally hit-driven, feast-or-famine world of writing, there’s something to be said for reliability. 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 and u0026 traditionally published authors. I won’t walk you through every tool and u0026 technicality of formatting, printing, and shipping a book. Those tasks are fiddly and u0026 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.