As you might know, lately, I searched for books to write better content. Untangling myself in a long list of suggested readings, I’ve come up with a short version of titles about writing recommended by the experts. These are also the ones with the best reviews on Amazon as per today.
“If you want to be the best, you have to do things that other people aren’t willing to do.”
Michael Phelps
One of them is to study. The other is to keep practicing, and sharing my journey with you is part of it.
Here you find the 5 best books about writing non-fictional content and improving your writing skills. Handle with care.
Steven Pressfield – The War of Art
Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles
Anne Lamott – Bird by Bird
Some Instructions on Writing and Life
William Zinsser – On Writing Well
The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction
Jeff Goins – You Are a Writer
So Start Acting Like One
Ann Handley – Everybody Writes
Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content
Recently I was searching for books suggestions about writing. However unsuccessfully.
The day I’ve committed myself to write blog posts, I knew it would’ve been a challenge because of the daily time required and my limited English knowledge as a non-native speaker person.
But I started without caring about the outcome, yet seeking improvements every day and expanding my know-how along the way.
It may sound cryptical but follow me.
The fact.
Do you know that reading three books on a specific topic puts you ahead of 99% of the people on that topic?
On average, people don’t read books. Let alone three books about a single subject!
So we can climb to the remaining 1% swiftly, even considering that we are talking about 77 million people.
During my research, though, I stumbled on an issue.
The problem.
There are no resources online which display the best books to read if you want to become an expert on a particular subject. There are databases, recommendations, charts, lists divided by categories, but nothing as detailed as I was looking.
Surfing the web like this is like finding a needle in a haystack.
Hence I’ve got an idea!
If it’s difficult for me, maybe it is challenging also for others.
The solution.
I wanted to make a curated list of the best books that everyone should read to master a specific topic, such as marketing, writing, productivity, etc.
As for the first step, I let the idea flow out on a paper; writing down a list of questions helped me figure that I should test the demand with an MVP first.
So following Levelsio’s story about the early stages of the Nomad List, I created a quick spreadsheet on Google Sheets, where I started adding some data.
Once I set up the draft, it was time to gain some traction. I tweeted about the idea, asking help to collect data and validate the demand simultaneously.
After 48 hours, however, my tweet was seen 28 times only. Not enough.
