I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Tuesday Book Club, I share an idea from a book.
I’m hesitant to spend too much time following other people’s guidance about how to write, publish, and market a book because I think I need to figure out the process for myself. How-to books in this field can be somewhat like what I’ve found with acrylic painting books—they present just one method, the method the author figured out worked for themselves.
Still, I am reviewing various books and blogs to get ideas, as I write my manuscript.
I’m intrigued by the ideas in Write Useful Books: A Modern Approach to Designing and Refining Recommendable Nonfiction. Author Rob Fitzpatrick’s idea is that you should write a book that solves a useful problem so effectively that people will recommend it after they’ve used it to solve their own problem.
As part of that, he suggests making your book product page with book blurb so specific that it turns people away:
Here’s the secret to a five-star Amazon rating: be clear enough about what your book is promising that people can decide they don’t need it. It can be counterintuitive to try to drive potential readers away. But good books receive bad reviews after making too broad of a promise and luring the wrong people into buying. You can’t fully prevent bad reviews from ever happening, but you can certainly make them a rare exception by plainly stating who your book is for and what they’re going to get out of reading it.
This is similar to the advice that online entrepreneurs get, to define their niche audience and service so narrowly that they rule a lot of people out. In so doing, they become much more likely to attract people willing to pay for what they do.
I started to think about how I could make the book I’m writing more pragmatic and more targeted. Here are some subtitle ideas to go with the title Reckless Love:
- How Pursuing Risk, Danger, and Destruction at Midlife Can Bring You the Intimacy You Want
- Why Everything You Think about Finding and Building a Relationship at Midlife is Wrong
- Finding True Intimacy at Midlife, Beyond the Safe Choices That Failed You
- Finding the Romantic Relationship You Want and Deserve at Midlife
Fitzpatrick suggests you try your book elevator pitch in conversation to see if people “get it”:
The best way I’ve found to get there is to try it out in conversation. When someone asks what you’re working on, attempt to describe the book in just one or two sentences. And then you need to do the hardest thing of all: to shut up and listen to them completely misinterpret and misunderstand what you’re trying to do.
Each time you try describing it to someone, you’ll get a little bit closer. And once people are immediately getting it — without requiring you to clarify or correct anything substantial — then you’ll know you’ve found the words. Put them on your cover.
He defines the scope of a book with the following formula:
Scope = Promise + Reader profile + Who it’s not for + What it won’t cover
Let me give that a try:
- Promise: You can find true intimacy at midlife in a romantic relationship
- Reader profile: someone at midlife who has failed at love. They might be divorced, or in a stagnant marriage or long-term partnership, or might never have gotten married. They have failed to find joy and companionship in love. They have not found the transformative transcendent experience of love that they wanted.
- Who it’s not for: Gen Z and young millennials who still have the luxury of using conventional ways of finding and building love relationships
- What it won’t cover: pop psychology (attachment styles, love languages, Gottman method, therapy-speak), how to fix a dead marriage (maybe it’s really only for people looking for love not stuck in a relationship), stories of people other than me and from novels and movies.
Fitzpatrick uses the acronym DEEP to suggest the qualities a problem-solving nonfiction book needs to be recommended frequently enough to endure and grow:
- Desirable — readers want what it is promising.
- Effective — it delivers real results for the average reader.
- Engaging — it’s front-loaded with value, has high value-per-page.
- Polished — it is professionally written and presented.
How does that apply to my book, which will promise to help readers find the relationship they crave and deserve at midlife?
- Desirable – yes, many single people at midlife want to find a relationship that is transformative and transcendent, the promise of pursuing reckless love. And in many cases the ways they’ve used in the past haven’t worked.
- Effective – Yes, provides a new mindset an approach that could revolutionize their dating and romantic experiences.
- Engaging – front loaded with value, high value per page, feels rewarding to read. I will think about how to ensure this.
- Polished – This is something to worry about later!
The book really doesn’t need to be polished! It’s far more important that it addresses a pressing problem someone has, and does so with effectiveness. Fitzpatrick writes:
In fact, it’s so rare for a book to deliver on its promise that readers will adore you for doing just that one thing. I’ve heard plenty of people recommend a messy-but-effective book by saying:
Listen, it’s terribly written and full of typos and has a cover that appears to have been drawn by a distracted toddler, but it’s gog something inside that’s just too important to miss. It’s going to change your life. You’ve got to read it. Trust me.
I don’t want to take Fitzpatrick’s ideas as the only way to write a nonfiction book that sells. But I do think incorporating this idea of making a book’s promise so clear and ensuring that it actually presents an effective solution for people could really help make my book something people want to buy and read.