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Disclaimer: I want to be brief, not abrasive (but the two are often conflated).

The monograph is half "Tao of Gnus", quarter "basic commands", and quarter
"setup detail".  The "Tao" part can be much shorter.  For instance:

> Gnus treats mail and news uniformly as categorized message queues.  One can
> think of a mail folder or mailing list as isomorphic to a newsgroup.
> Threads are identical in both realms. Traditionally, however, users prefer
> keeping "TODO" mails at the top of their inbox, and here the mail-news
> abstraction fails as Gnus *qua* newsreader does its best to hide what's
> already been seen.

Boom, onto the next chapter: "Basic Commands" should essentially be a `C-h m`
dump of the Gnus keymap, with very little prose.

Setup options (every sentence ending in "see XXX") need not be mentioned, as 
they all get their own chapters.

One attracts users by making things easy, not boring.  Your monograph contains
a level of detail that's not appreciable until users actually start using Gnus.