Immediately practical, eminently insightful, tried and tested, Fitzpatrick has written a book worth its weight in gold.
Write Useful Books is the definitive guide for the next generation of bestselling nonfiction authors.
Nir Eyal, bestselling author of Hooked and Indistractable.
Buy on Amazon
If you want your book to thrive, you need a better process.
Rob's first two nonfiction titles have grown organically to reach more than 100k happy readers and are now generating $160k per year in royalties. All with nearly zero active marketing. This is due to how the books were built.
The process for building useful nonfiction is iterative, data-driven, and reader-centric. It's the polar opposite of the standard gamble of “plan, polish, publish, and pray.”
This guide contains everything Rob knows 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 royalties, reputation, reach, or impact, this guide can help you get there.
What authors are saying
Write Useful Books is an incredibly useful book. With Rob’s lessons, I was able to write my own bestseller, and I kept referring back to it, underlining and highlighting, throughout the process. If you’re thinking of writing a book, I cannot recommend Useful Books highly enough.
I read Write Useful Books and I love it. It’s the best book on designing, writing, and publishing nonfiction. It walks you along a clear, viable path of realistic and actionable steps and doesn’t just rehash the usual vague advice.
Even if you aren’t currently planning to write a book, Write Useful Books is so helpful for thinking about the jobs-to-be-done of readers and for writing useful things. It was so helpful for writing my own book.
Write Useful Books is the blueprint that nonfiction writers have been waiting for, and my own books have benefited from all the lessons Rob lays out in it. From writing for a clearly defined audience to involving readers in the process as early as possible, Write Useful Books will help you to create a book that you are proud of, and that your readers can’t stop talking about.
I’m in the beginning stages of writing the draft manuscript of my upcoming book, and I’m SO happy I picked up this incredible book by Rob Fitzpatrick
I’ve found the approach described in Write Useful Books really helpful for thinking about how to write books that resonate with the audience.
I like the way “#1 new release” looks beside the title of my book. Thanks :)
Write Useful Books was instrumental for helping me push my book out the door.
Write Useful Books may be the least abstract thing I’ve ever read. It straightforwardly explains both the logic and the specifics. It’s also delightfully self-demonstrating. As a useful book, it practices what it preaches.
About the author
Hello! I'm Rob Fitzpatrick. Back in 2013, I wrote a short book called The Mom Test to teach entrepreneurs to ask for better customer feedback. In its first month, it earned a paltry $535. Six years later, thanks to steady word of mouth, it passed $10k in monthly royalties and has continued to grow from there.
It’s now taught at universities like MIT, UCL, and Harvard; recommended by startup accelerators like Y Combinator and Seedcamp; and used by teams at companies like SkyScanner and Shopify. It has hit #1 in most of its Amazon categories and has been translated by enthusiastic readers into nearly ten languages. All of this happened while I was largely ignoring the book and doing approximately zero active marketing. To date, it has put more than $550k in my pocket, all via reader recommendations. The growth in monthly profits is shown in the graph below. You'll notice that there was no big launch or magic bullet — just a steady, organic climb.
I released my second book, The Workshop Survival Guide, about designing and teaching educational workshops (coauthored with Devin Hunt). It seems to be following a similar trajectory to The Mom Test — except better. Its sales at month five were the same as The Mom Test’s at year five, all via reader recommendations. It’s growing steadily, has organically hit #1 in its main Amazon categories, and is already generating enough royalties to comfortably cover my entire cost of living.
As before, The Workshop Survival Guide didn't benefit from any sort of flashy launch, a big mailing list, or clever marketing. It just does a good job of solving an important problem for readers, so they recommend it. This recommendability wasn’t an accident; it was our explicit goal, and we worked hard to achieve it. And with the right process and toolkit, you can do it too.
To learn more about Rob and his other books, check out robfitz.com or youtube.com/@robfitzpatrick.
Rob also teaches the Useful Books Academy.