Write Useful Books: A Modern Approach to Designing and Refining Recommendable Nonfiction by Rob Fitzpatrick

Author:Rob Fitzpatrick [Fitzpatrick, Rob]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781919621609
Google: epuVzgEACAAJ
Publisher: Useful Books Limited
Published: 2021-06-16T23:22:23.537953+00:00

(All the reader comments displayed in this chapter are from real beta readers of my books — mostly from The Workshop Survival Guide.)

Evidence of value, insights, and takeaways

I’ve been surprised to discover that I can rarely predict which specific parts of a book will be most valued or enjoyed. But once the best bits have been identified, I can easily go through the rest of the manuscript and add more moments like them.

The first comment above shows that I’d hit some value. Sometimes the value is where you expect, and you can simply move along, happy that the section is working as intended. Other times, readers will find major value in what you thought was a minor side point, which might prompt you to emphasize it further or even expand it into its own section.

The second comment shows that I’d found a tone and style that the reader loved. (In this particular case, it was a matter of shifting from saying “here are all the options” to “here’s what you should do.”) After confirming this with a few other people, I went through the book and employed that style a whole lot more.

Identifying the value can fundamentally change a book. In the early versions of The Mom Test, I had included a silly mock conversation to demonstrate how getting feedback tends to go wrong. I felt a bit sheepish about its goofiness and had only used one such example. But beta readers loved it, saying that it solidified a normally abstract concept. So I ran with it by adding absurd — but useful — example conversations to nearly every chapter of the book. And although the occasional grumpy reader might disagree, these mock conversations are a big reason that the book ended up working. And they started out as an accident. I never would have known they mattered without my beta readers.

Even when a comment isn’t directly actionable, it’s still awfully nice to hear that folks are getting value. When editing becomes a grind, a few encouraging words can make all the difference:

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