Write Useful Books

<h4><strong>The goal of book marketing is to stop needing to do it</strong></h4><p>Learn how to:</p><ul><li>Scope your book into the world's best solution for a certain type of reader</li><li>Test improve & iterate your ToC without needing to rewrite anything</li><li>Design a engaging reader experience that makes your book a delight to read</li><li>Discover the hidden analytics of boredom & confusion to identify book-killing problems & make the most of beta readers</li><li>Treat marketing as a temporary activity instead of an ongoing obligation by designing a strong recommendation loop</li><li>Evaluate which of the four seed marketing options are best-suited for your goals constraints & skills</li><li>Write a book that endures & grows for years instead of fading into swift obscurity</li><li>Boost long-term growth by optimizing your pricing platforms & purchase funnel</li></ul><h4><strong>Most books don't work</strong></h4><p>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.</p><p>Up until fairly recently it was possible to receive at least some of these benefits by writing <em>any</em> 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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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 <em>the normal approach doesn't work!</em> For example:</p><ul><li>The average NYT nonfiction bestseller loses 95% of its peak sales within a year</li><li>70% of traditionally published titles fail to pay out a single dollar in royalties</li><li>Vanishingly few nonfiction books sell even 500 copies</li></ul><p>These are not good results but it doesn't have to be this way.</p><p>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.</p><p><br></p><h4><strong>What this book is not:</strong></h4><p><strong>This isn't a get-rich-quick scheme.</strong> If you want to write a mediocre book the easy way then you probably want to look elsewhere. </p><p><strong>This isn't about prose or creativity.</strong> 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.</p><p><strong>This isn't a self-publishing guide.</strong> The approach in this book applies equally well to both self-published & traditionally published authors. Our focus is on creating the most useful and most recommendable book possible.</p><p><br></p><p><strong style=color: rgba(51 51 51 1)>Still not sure?</strong></p><p>Head on over to writeusefulbooks.com to find more resources samples and information.</p>