Write Useful Books
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 this guide can help you get there.
Stats for nerds
9recommend
10mentions
10people
2022–2024years
90% recommend10% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Yes, don’t write technical books for the money. But also do! If you approach the book as a business venture, there’s plenty of money to be made.
Here’s my recap of making almost $400k over a few years of working on books-and-such as a sidebiz alongside a full-time job. Not all of it was from books directly, a lot was from opportunities that the books unlocked. And that’s not even counting how the books enabled me to sponsor my own visa/greencard to come into USA and unlock oodles of opportunities.
The main insight I’ve learned is that the book is a product. Write your thing for someone to benefit from. What [useful thing] will they be able to do after reading your book that they weren’t able to before? How does it help them get more of what they want faster?
https://swizec.com/blog/5-years-of-books-and-courses-or-how-...
Sharing this to encourage, not to brag. We need more insightful and useful books out there.
If you’re gonna do this, I strongly recommend picking up a copy of Write Useful Books first. Wish it existed when I started. http://writeusefulbooks.com/
- For anyone else interested, I highly recommend reading through Rob Fitzpatrick's "Write Useful Books":
https://www.amazon.com/Write-Useful-Books-recommendable-nonf...
It isn't about technical books exactly but it does speak mostly on how to write recommendable non-fiction, some of which can obviously be technical. It's got a lot of practical advice for the actual "doing" of the book, and has inspired me to at least start dipping my toes in.
- For people in this thread, I strongly recommend Rob Fitzpatrick's book on how to write a book as a business, "Write Useful Books: A modern approach to designing and refining recommendable nonfiction":
https://www.amazon.com/Write-Useful-Books-recommendable-nonf...
Even though I'm not an author I found the advice very useful, it can trivially be applied to building and marketing any product.
- I'd highly recommend reading "Write Useful Books: A modern approach to designing and refining recommendable nonfiction" by Rob Fitzpatrick. Its a super pragmatic tutorial on writing non fiction that folks will actually use
- Honestly, whatever suite of tools allows you to organize your research, thoughts, and easily write text. Remove as much friction as possible. When we wrote The Workshop Survival Guide (https://www.workshopsurvival.com/), we used post-it notes on a wall and google docs. It allowed for a fluid collaboration.
On a more meta note, how you approach writing your book is probably more impactful than your toolchain. If you're working on a book that educates (rather than, say, entertains), I'd like to share the writing framework that my longtime collaborator, robfitz, describes in Write Useful Books (https://www.usefulbooks.com/). Basically, treat your book like a product, find your audience, and test your subject matter with them as your craft your prose.
* Disclaimer: Rob and I run Useful Books, a community and toolset for non-fiction authors.
- Ambitious and cool project! Over my head as I’m not a coder but I think one bullet you should emphasize is the impostor syndrome part. I think that would resonate strongly.
You might like Rob fitzpatrick’s write useful books:
He takes a very product development focused approach to book writing (he wrote the mom test book) and discusses how to find beta readers and such.
Best of luck!
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