Best wishes with the book!
A couple months after getting started on Steemit, I was thinking Steemit sure could use a "Steem for Dummies" guide. The FAQ is great, but it's in a random order from the standpoint of someone learning. Other lists folks have pulled together are useful, but often the posts are a bit advanced and include a bunch of unfamiliar terms -- so a beginner's left with more questions than answers. So folks are left with a long, meandering process of hunting, pecking, and slowly synthesizing until the picture becomes clear.
It seems simple on the surface: post, comment, upvote. Earn money.
But for the people I meet in-person who've tried Steemit, they came to make some money and left when they nothing happened. They took content they posted on their main blog and posted it here thinking it would make money because the content was great. They were frustrated by making nickel or dime on a post (or often zero). Then they were angry when they realized the post was locked down after 7 days and no longer earned anything. They decided to invest in their main blog and the community they already built instead of starting over here -- and trying to overcome the problems on Steemit with content discovery.
These are real problems that Steem faces.
I wonder if SMTs will encourage Steem totals to fade into the background a bit and highlight SMTs instead. Personally, I have fun on Steem and enjoy chatting with people on here, but it's also something of a job and I use it to make money in a few different ways.
I think the trick is to encourage more developers who will make Dapps that will bring people in even if they make nothing.
Steem Monsters seems the first real Dapp to do this. Looking forward to more.