Decisions in Self-Publishing “The Degree Free Way”: Testing Titles, Cover Design, and Distribution (DF#161)

Ryan Maruyama [00:00:00]:
Your typesetter writes your book. You don't write your book. If you think that you write your book, you're wrong. The person that puts it into Adobe InDesign and designs it, that

Hannah Maruyama [00:00:09]:
is the person that's in charge of writing your book.

Ryan Maruyama [00:00:16]:
Aloha folks, and welcome back to degree free. We are super excited to have you here again for another episode. This is going to be part 2 of our series on publishing a book and everything that we went through writing the book, the degree free way, how to help your 16 to 20 year old build the life they want. We're going to jump in into the thick of it. So if this doesn't make any sense, go back to last week's episodes. I'll put the link in the show notes. Degreefree.clforward/podcast and it'll catch you up. Go ahead and watch that episode.

Ryan Maruyama [00:00:49]:
Listen to that episode first, and then you can come back here. I will also say that for those that haven't listened to last week's episode, we have done a couple of episodes before on how to self publish and how to author a book and why you should do that. I will put links again in the show notes as well. So you can go back and this is a couple of years ago, but it still holds up. And this is a little bit of an updated version of that and what we went through going through and writing the degree freeway and getting this published. And like I said before, kind of in the middle of last week's episode, this is

Hannah Maruyama [00:01:20]:
just the way that we did it. Yeah. You don't have to do it this way. Take what you want. Leave what you don't.

Ryan Maruyama [00:01:25]:
If you're working in the publishing industry or if you have written a book before

Hannah Maruyama [00:01:29]:
Cringing. Yeah.

Ryan Maruyama [00:01:30]:
Fair enough. That's probably completely fair.

Hannah Maruyama [00:01:32]:
That's fine. This is how we did it. We like to do things harder than they should be.

Ryan Maruyama [00:01:35]:
I think this would be useful for parents and young adults that have already purchased the degree freeway, who are thinking about the purchasing of the degree freeway and who are working through these problems. I don't know where to start launching my child with getting them a set up in the right foot on their career path and finding jobs that fulfill their goals. If you have no idea, I think this is going to be very useful to you. Aspiring authors, content creators, podcasters, small business owners, entrepreneurs. If you've been in the degree free community for a long time as well, this just gives you a little bit peek behind the curtain of how you and I go through and actually accomplish big projects.

Hannah Maruyama [00:02:13]:
Yes. Maybe that reflects well, maybe it doesn't. I don't really know. We get stuff done. That is the one thing.

Ryan Maruyama [00:02:18]:
Yeah. Eventually not, 6 months late.

Hannah Maruyama [00:02:20]:
Yes. 6 months late or 8 months early depending on how you feel.

Ryan Maruyama [00:02:24]:
Exactly. Hey. That's true. That's a half glass full. The glass has liquid.

Hannah Maruyama [00:02:29]:
Is the glass full of time? Where are we anyway?

Ryan Maruyama [00:02:33]:
For those that don't want to listen to it, or for those that need a refresher, last week we took you from ideation all the way to having a finished manuscript. And then I want to talk about some of the other decisions and some of the things that happened afterwards, after all of that, and then catch you up to where we are right now in the present. We talked about using Google docs. We use Google docs to write this mainly because we use Google docs in our company, but then we use the Google workspace suite within our company. And it was easy, but then mainly also too, because we co wrote this, it's very easy to collaborate. We were like, okay, we already use it every day. We know how to use it. Let's just use that.

Ryan Maruyama [00:03:19]:
It's basically word, right? Spoiler alert.

Hannah Maruyama [00:03:22]:
No, that is not the case.

Ryan Maruyama [00:03:23]:
Exactly.

Hannah Maruyama [00:03:24]:
But we found that out the hard way.

Ryan Maruyama [00:03:25]:
We did.

Hannah Maruyama [00:03:26]:
The hardest way possible, which is when you put your manuscript into word and you oh, this doesn't look the same. That's unfortunate.

Ryan Maruyama [00:03:31]:
And I'll go over the decision to self publish in a little bit, but because we self publish, we had to handle all aspects of everything ourselves. And we had to handle including formatting typesetting. This is including what page size we are going to print this book at, everything like that.

Hannah Maruyama [00:03:47]:
We ended up using Canva actually to create the worksheets, which was good because we had to change them so many different times.

Ryan Maruyama [00:03:52]:
Yeah. Canva is, like, super easy to use and we've been using it for literally, like, 5, 6 years.

Hannah Maruyama [00:03:58]:
Brian's really proud of the fact that we have grandfathered version of Canva.

Ryan Maruyama [00:04:01]:
You have no idea. I'm super stoked. I think that we pay, like, 6.95 a month for Canva. And I think if you get the Canva, I think it's, like, 14.95, which is still actually a deal. For all that it does, $15 a month is, like, I yeah. Sure. I pay that every day of the week. But we've been paying for so long, and they grandfathered our pricing in.

Ryan Maruyama [00:04:20]:
I think it's, like, 6.95 or 5.95 or something like that.

Hannah Maruyama [00:04:24]:
He's real proud of that. He treats them like a world series tickets. Oh, you have box seats to the you have floor seats for 6.95

Ryan Maruyama [00:04:32]:
a month. Exactly. And what's so funny

Hannah Maruyama [00:04:37]:
is that we still have a

Ryan Maruyama [00:04:39]:
very small team, but we do have a team and there are many people or at least a few people that are in that Canva instance. And it's still like, I don't want to upgrade to the Canva team. So I was like, I want my 6.95 a month. This makes no sense, but

Hannah Maruyama [00:04:51]:
he's going to buy another subscription. I know you've thought about it. I know you have. It's funny is I've never talked to him about this, but I knew he was gonna say, hey. I thought about just adding another payment because I wanna keep this exact amount. That's insane because you'd pay more. No sense.

Ryan Maruyama [00:05:04]:
I would just be paying $7 a month. So literally for nothing, but just to say, like, oh, look at my $7 a month.

Hannah Maruyama [00:05:11]:
We can stay irrational longer than anybody else. Anyway, so we use Canva and this is where I will take this for a little bit. So I hired a bad typesetter and because of that, Ryan and I learned something, which is that your type setter writes your book. And what I mean by that is that your typesetter decides how things look, how readable it is, how it looks on the page, where things are. And if you have a bad one, it is going to take you forever to get it to the point where you can actually print it. And then when you do print it, it will be terrifying because you won't think that it is going to look right. Fortunately for us, it did, but it was very scary. And you went through so many revisions with this typesetter.

Ryan Maruyama [00:05:52]:
The big lesson is that your typesetter writes your book. You don't write your book. If you think that you write your book, you're wrong. The person that puts it into Adobe InDesign and designs it,

Hannah Maruyama [00:06:02]:
that is the person that's in charge of writing your book. Hey there. I hope you're enjoying this episode of the degree free podcast

Ryan Maruyama [00:06:08]:
At degree free, we wanna help everyone thrive and succeed without needing a college degree. And the only way to truly reach everyone is with your help. If you're getting value out of this episode or if this is your second, 3rd, or 4th episode that you're tuning into, if you could just ship this to a friend, just click that one button and share it with someone in your contacts or on your stories. It would mean the world to us. And more importantly, get our message out to more people who need help getting out of their current situation. If you could do that right now, that would mean a whole lot might say your name. Like I'm holding up the degree freeway right here. It might say my name, Hannah's name on

Hannah Maruyama [00:06:47]:
the outside of here, but this is the guy that we hired to typeset. Like that's actually who authored this book

Ryan Maruyama [00:06:53]:
and that's the person that is in charge of the final product that you see or not in charge, but rather if you don't catch some of their mistakes, your manuscript could be clean, which is a, and I'll go into this now, I guess, which is I gave him a really, really clean manuscript. What I mean by clean is that literally, I went through that thing 5 or 6 times, both books. Took me hours upon hours. It took me days of work. I mean, this is a 100 pages each. So I literally read every single line, make sure that there was no typos, make sure that it all flowed correctly. You know, make sure there was no double periods, no double spaces, all of that type of stuff. And I was like, okay, here you go, dude.

Ryan Maruyama [00:07:30]:
I just need you to make this into Adobe InDesign, do this exact thing, but just put it in Adobe InDesign. I was like, how hard can that be? Really hard.

Hannah Maruyama [00:07:40]:
As it turns out, ta da, I know. And a

Ryan Maruyama [00:07:42]:
lot of it, and this was my failure is that I had a lot of formatting. So in this book, you'll see when you purchase it, there's a lot of boxes. There's a lot of call out boxes. There's a lot of images and dividers and headings and stuff like that. And that's just to make it a little bit easier to read. I went ahead and I did all of those. I made all of those things thinking that it was going to be easier for this person do this exact thing just over there. And it wasn't until we got the 1st round back.

Ryan Maruyama [00:08:15]:
Do you remember getting the 1st round back on if you looked at it?

Hannah Maruyama [00:08:17]:
I did. And I was just like, my mouth was hanging up and I was just like, what? If it sounds like I'm frustrated right now, it's because I am it's because we wrote a brief for this person that was so specific and so clear that even I could have used it to typeset, even though I've never used Adobe InDesign in my life, it was very clear and Ryan proved it. It was very orderly. It do this, do this, do this, and they just did whatever they want. So they just did whatever they felt that day, I guess. And we got it back and we went, this doesn't look remotely like the instructions that we gave you to the point where I don't even think they read them. And then it proceeded to be a, I don't know, 6 to 8 week long battle to get them to put it the way it was supposed to be because every time they would send it back and they would sometimes fix the things, but sometimes not. And then every single time they would also sometimes make new mistakes that had nothing to do with the original mistakes.

Hannah Maruyama [00:09:05]:
And I will say Ryan took this on himself and he read both copies every single time, multiple times, every time there was a revision needed. And that's why it took forever because they kept continually creating new mistakes.

Ryan Maruyama [00:09:16]:
Yeah. And I think it was 100% it was on us. The whole process is on us. We self publish, and we're the boss. 1, we shouldn't have hired this person. 2, we should have fired them quicker regardless of the amount of money. And I'm just talking to you now. The amount of a

Hannah Maruyama [00:09:28]:
new person?

Ryan Maruyama [00:09:29]:
Yes. Regardless of the amount of money that we paid, even though we we paid them a lot of money, we hired him from 99 designs. And what we should have done is we should have just said, okay. That's a drop in the bucket. Whatever. That's fine. And we just go with a different person, and then we can fight with him about getting a refund or whatever or just not. It doesn't matter.

Hannah Maruyama [00:09:45]:
But when we've got the first version back and saw it was that bad, we should have been like, no. New guy.

Ryan Maruyama [00:09:49]:
And then this is just like a lesson learned for you. We've never talked about this before. I think going forward, if that ever happens again

Hannah Maruyama [00:09:55]:
Or just give them the money and just find somebody who actually do the work.

Ryan Maruyama [00:09:58]:
Right. Because this thing was really bad. The brief didn't even matter at the same time. Although the brief was solid. I read that thing. I edited that thing. And I was like, I looked at it. I was like, okay, this is a solid brief.

Ryan Maruyama [00:10:07]:
And then the thing that on top of a solid brief is that he had a very solid clean manuscript. I was like, do this exact thing. Don't change a thing. Just do this in Adobe InDesign. And he literally didn't do any of it. He just put in whatever he wanted and it took literally 5 revisions. Five times I had to review it before it even remotely looked what it was supposed to look like. And like I said, any one of those revisions, I should have said what I just said, which is we should have hired somebody else.

Ryan Maruyama [00:10:35]:
That was your money, whatever. Here's a once our review, we just hire somebody else to do it because it extended our project by literally months.

Hannah Maruyama [00:10:41]:
Yeah. And you guys, we were so excited when we sent it to the typesetter. We had so much hope. We're like, oh, well, in 4 days.

Ryan Maruyama [00:10:46]:
Yeah. Well, that's the original quote that he gave us.

Hannah Maruyama [00:10:48]:
Yeah. He said 4 days this would be done. It took almost 8 weeks. So obviously we're still pretty bitter about this, but mostly because we misjudged and I hired poorly and that will not happen again. Cause that's what we're going to do.

Ryan Maruyama [00:11:00]:
The typesetter came back astonishingly, like astonishingly, it came back with a whole bunch of double periods. It came back with misspelled words. It came back with double spaces.

Hannah Maruyama [00:11:09]:
When there had been none.

Ryan Maruyama [00:11:11]:
Yeah. I was like, what is going on? The headings were all off. I literally spent days.

Hannah Maruyama [00:11:16]:
There's missing worksheets, even though we labeled inside, put the worksheet here in capital.

Ryan Maruyama [00:11:20]:
Yeah, exactly. I literally spent days doing this and I knew it was clean. I was like, dude, this is like crazy. Yeah. Anyway, for everybody that is going, especially the self publish route, I'm sure that publishers have different fail safes for this. And they also have more professional people I'm sure on staff or otherwise you'd probably get fired, which is what we should have done. If you're going to go this way, just know that the typesetter writes your book. Yeah.

Ryan Maruyama [00:11:44]:
The typesetter is in charge of your final product. Because if we didn't go back and forth 19 times with this guy, you would get this book and you would be like, man, Ryan and Hannah, this is like really bad.

Hannah Maruyama [00:11:54]:
Yeah, this is embarrassing. It would have made us look really, really bad.

Ryan Maruyama [00:11:57]:
This is embarrassing. Although that's not the word that we

Hannah Maruyama [00:12:00]:
were about.

Ryan Maruyama [00:12:00]:
That's not what we gave them. But it's the end product that you see. I think that was the biggest challenge. And I wanted to kind of start there for today's podcast. That is the biggest takeaway. And I think you've got your money's worth right there. The rest is just gravy. Eventually it did get done.

Ryan Maruyama [00:12:15]:
So that's one of the things about this person.

Hannah Maruyama [00:12:17]:
It did get finished. It just took 10 years. It

Ryan Maruyama [00:12:19]:
just took a really long time. The cover design is something that we knew mattered significantly.

Hannah Maruyama [00:12:27]:
So much. Cause if people don't like the way something looks, they won't buy it.

Ryan Maruyama [00:12:29]:
And so without a publisher, like we have to handle the cover design ourselves.

Hannah Maruyama [00:12:32]:
Our review of the typesetter made it sound like we were not fans of 99 designs. That's incorrect. We actually really like 99 designs. We've gotten great results from them on other things, specifically design work, like the cover, which you and I are both huge fans of. They did an amazing job. That was so cool to see, the way 99 designs work for those of you who are curious is you can run contests. You don't have to do that. You can choose a cover designer.

Ryan Maruyama [00:12:52]:
It was different though. Yeah. I was able to say we did something different for the cover. We actually ran a contest.

Hannah Maruyama [00:12:57]:
And we didn't know what we wanted to

Ryan Maruyama [00:12:58]:
Whereas the typesetter, we just hired them on 99 designs. Yeah.

Hannah Maruyama [00:13:01]:
Because you can do both. Running a contest. If you're not sure what the front of your book should look like, it tells you a lot about the way people perceive your title and the way that the action or feeling that they feel like it evokes, which is so interesting. And then it is cool because designers, it's their job to do that. And they're better at it than you. And so it's really useful to see what they came up with.

Ryan Maruyama [00:13:21]:
Totally. I actually want to back up just a little bit because we went ahead just a smidge. Is that the first thing that we had to test, we had to test our our titles and subtitles. We wrote this entire book without having a title, without having any idea of what the title would be, having any idea of what the subtitle would be.

Hannah Maruyama [00:13:36]:
Yeah. We actually pre sold the book with no title. Yeah. Which is crazy. Some of you pre ordered this book from us with no title and no cover. You had no idea what it was going to look like and you had no idea what it was called.

Ryan Maruyama [00:13:45]:
Yeah, exactly. Which is wild. Which is wild, but it shows you that the problem is so deep that you and I are solving the right problem here. And I hope that when they get this granted, it's 3 months late, but you know, when you got this, that you can finish this in a weekend and basically change the trajectory of your young adult's life. So we ended up making a spreadsheet and I'll just go through this quickly because you can find different AB testing. That's what it's called. You're just looking at different things, but we ended up making a big spreadsheet of titles that we thought were good titles. And there was just 50 different title names.

Ryan Maruyama [00:14:17]:
And then there was like 200 or so different variations of subtitles. So it's like how to help your 16 to 20 year old build a life they want or help your 16 to 20 year old build a life they want launch their life. Those types of things. It was just like different combinations and permutations of the titles and subtitles and we couldn't test them all. And so what we did is we just vomited it basically all onto a spreadsheet, both the titles and subtitles. And that was one day where we were just like, boom, okay. We're going to sit down for 4 hours right now. And just rattle off titles.

Ryan Maruyama [00:14:49]:
We're gonna sit down for 4 hours and rattle off subtitles. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then the next day we would go and we're like, okay. Now we're gonna read these titles and subtitles, and we're going to eliminate them. And we didn't stop eliminating them until we had about like 15, 10, 15 titles, and then, 15 to 30 subtitles, which is still a lot. I actually suggest if you're doing this yourself to, to get it down to even much, much less than that. To test all of those took a really long time. I think that we could have done a better job of just eliminating those titles and subtitles off the rip.

Ryan Maruyama [00:15:25]:
But then we wouldn't have never would have tested them. Basically, I won't belabor it here because it's getting into the weeds here, but you just do an AB test and you can look that up online, how to do it. For us, we were very fortunate that we had people that pre ordered the book, people that pre ordered the book without a title and without a cover, they're obviously the audience for this. So we were like, okay, we should ask them because they obviously bought the book.

Hannah Maruyama [00:15:49]:
Invested in the book. Right.

Ryan Maruyama [00:15:50]:
They're buyers of this product. So we'll ask them which one they think makes the most sense. And then we also have a large TikTok audience. So then we just made a TikTok poll as well. And then through TikTok and other means, we just tested the titles and we just tabulated all the results. And then we ended up having 2 different title names. And at the end of the day, they were very, very, even at the end of the day, we looked at it and we said, what is it going to be? The degree freeway or degree free launch. And you and I just sat down and we were like, which one is it going to be? And we decided the degree freeway is going to be it.

Ryan Maruyama [00:16:25]:
And then how to help your 16 to 20 year old build the life they want that actually won by a landslide. So we knew regardless of whatever the title was, the subtitle was going to be that. And then with the title and the subtitle hammered down, then we could go and do the 99 designs. We could go and get run that competition for the cover. After we ran the competition, we had a whole bunch of submissions and a lot of it was the same thing. We just got rid of the ones that we didn't like, but the ones that we did like the 10 or so covers that we did like, we ended up running a whole bunch of tests for those as well. And we did the exact same thing. Now more people at this time had pre ordered the book.

Ryan Maruyama [00:17:03]:
And so we went to them and we just said, Hey, you guys pre ordered the book. Can you help us listen to the title? Can you help us with the cover as well? And they helped with the cover. And then we made a whole bunch of tests on TikTok and there were email newsletter as well. And it ended up holding it up now. It ended up being the cover that you see here. There are some people actually that didn't like this cover, and I'm sure there's gonna be a lot of people that don't like this cover.

Hannah Maruyama [00:17:29]:
We like it. And the audience that we tested for it likes it.

Ryan Maruyama [00:17:32]:
For the cover and for the title and everything. I think my biggest suggestion to everybody is just to look up how to AB test things.

Hannah Maruyama [00:17:39]:
It's useful skill.

Ryan Maruyama [00:17:41]:
And then do AB tests for it. The thing about it is that you don't need to have a large market to do it. Any amount of data points that are outside you and whoever else is working on the book is useful. I mean, it's good if you know how to run Facebook ads or Google ads. I mean, if you know how to do that, then you already know what an AB test is. So this is a moot point, but if you wanted to, you could run a Google ads or Facebook ads and be like, which one makes more sense? Or there are sites like PickFu and others where you can just run these tests yourself. Like they run the ads on your behalf and they tell you what is the result of what people think you choose specific demographics. And then it shows that ad to these people and then they choose and then give their feedback on what they think.

Ryan Maruyama [00:18:27]:
That is the cover design. Once again, this is all downstream from going the self published route. If we had a publisher, we would have had a lot of support in all of this. Granted you still have to test titles and you still have to test covers and things like that. And you still have to approve the typesetting I'm sure. But you don't have to then hire the people to do it, or they at least give you a bunch of people and they might've give you a bunch of designs themselves. It's all downstream from that decision to self publish. And I know that I've been alluding to, we would talk about the decision to self publish and why we did that.

Ryan Maruyama [00:18:58]:
And I thought it'd be good to talk about it right now. The primary reason that we self published was to get the information out without needing anyone's permission.

Hannah Maruyama [00:19:09]:
Yeah. And we were a little bit worried, not a little bit. I was a lot bit worried that people would not like the way that we said things and how we said them. And I didn't want anyone trying to correct those things in order to sell what they thought was a book that they didn't understand the concept of.

Ryan Maruyama [00:19:22]:
I wasn't super worried about that, but I think the main thing was that you wanted to publish it tomorrow and to publish it tomorrow, we couldn't go with a publisher because a lot of times, especially in a non fiction world, at least from what I've read, never had a book deal. A lot of times you don't just shop an idea. Like you can shop an idea and they do give you a book deal. Sure. If you have an audience and you have a name and things like that. But a lot of times you have to write the entire book and then you go shop. You write the entirety of the book and then you go and give it to these people. And that's especially in fiction too, from what I've heard, if you don't have a name.

Hannah Maruyama [00:19:57]:
So they can help you with the name and the cover.

Ryan Maruyama [00:19:59]:
No, no, no. No. What I mean, like you yourself, if you don't have a brand, if you're not already a published successful author or you're not a person that has huge following, they're not going to just buy your idea. We didn't shop it, so we don't know, but it's much more convincing. If you give them your first manuscript, you give them your 1st draft and you say, do you want to buy this? Would you like to option this? And they say, yeah, sounds good. Let's make this. And then they give you the book deal, but then you have to write it first because we want it to publish it tomorrow. We were like, well, I don't want to ask anybody's permission to help us with this.

Ryan Maruyama [00:20:30]:
And so we need to get this out information out as quickly as possible. Self publishing allowed us to bypass any lengthy contract negotiations or support discussions with a publisher.

Hannah Maruyama [00:20:43]:
Yeah. That would have slowed us down.

Ryan Maruyama [00:20:44]:
Exactly. It was literally as simple as that. And we were thinking, okay, well, you and I have been entrepreneurs for a long time. And this is from what I've read from where we would find help with the publishing is that they would help do everything that I just talked about. Everything that it had just helped talk about, they would help you do, they might help you with the promotion of it. They might have bookers and things like that that have relationships with big podcasts and then book tours that you could do as well. But from what I've read once again, if you don't have a name, it's going to be difficult to get in. Whereas like, okay, we're okay at marketing.

Ryan Maruyama [00:21:16]:
We kind of know our audience pretty well. I think that we can do all of that ourselves. And then once again, we wanted to get this information out to you as quickly as possible. We were like, K self publishes it. It was literally as simple as that. Even though that decision affected every single decision underneath it, literally every single decision underneath it, it was one of the quickest decisions that we made. And that was it. So going to the next thing, which is if you notice when you get this book, there's no ISBN here and the ISBN is a barcode on the back of every book.

Ryan Maruyama [00:21:51]:
It's like standard barcode number or something like that.

Hannah Maruyama [00:21:53]:
It's so people can scan your books in stores or in libraries or things like that.

Ryan Maruyama [00:21:58]:
Yes, exactly.

Hannah Maruyama [00:21:59]:
It's like an inventory of your book.

Ryan Maruyama [00:22:00]:
So the next thing that we have to decide is whether or not we are going to get ISBN this thing and standard books all have ISBNs. I was thinking, okay, are we going to get an ISBN or not? It's not for the fact that I don't have ISBNs.

Hannah Maruyama [00:22:13]:
Another thing is that people might not know your book doesn't have to have an ISBN to be published.

Ryan Maruyama [00:22:17]:
Yeah. But if it needs to be have an ISBN to be widely available.

Hannah Maruyama [00:22:19]:
Yes. But you can publish a book without having an ISBN.

Ryan Maruyama [00:22:23]:
A 100%. I mean, we're looking at 1 right here. A lot of

Hannah Maruyama [00:22:24]:
people don't know that, that technically you can still publish a book. There's no requirement for it to have the barcode on there. Yeah. A lot of people think that you do.

Ryan Maruyama [00:22:31]:
It's not that I don't have ISBNs. I have a lot of ISBNs. I fall prey to bulk pricing people. They're like, here's this thing that you'll never use. And it's a $100 for 1 unit, or here's a 100 units of this thing that you'll never use. And it's a $1,000 and you're like, that's $10 a piece.

Hannah Maruyama [00:22:49]:
This happens all the time. He's using an example of a thing that has already occurred multiple times.

Ryan Maruyama [00:22:56]:
I'm sorry.

Hannah Maruyama [00:22:57]:
He's not perfect. That's one of his only faults. Yeah. Bold pressing victim every single time.

Ryan Maruyama [00:23:01]:
Totally. Anyway, I have a bunch of ISBNs that I could use for these. And this is from when we publish our other books, I'll back up and say, well, what are the benefits of doing it? The benefits of doing it is that our books become more widely available. You can sell them on places like Amazon. You can sell them Barnes and Noble's. You can sell them in local retailers then you can put it into a distribution network. We're self publishing 1, I figured, okay, because we're self publishing, we are fronting the money ourselves for inventory. It's not like we're going to be able to buy 40,000 books and sell those and put those in Amazon and have them like be sold super, super quickly.

Ryan Maruyama [00:23:37]:
These are 2 books to be printed. It's not like we have money to buy a run of 80,000 individual units because it comes in a set of 2. That was a huge one. So I was like, okay, well, widely available. Isn't really a thing. Not right now. Not

Hannah Maruyama [00:23:50]:
a priority.

Ryan Maruyama [00:23:51]:
Yeah, not really. I was like, we'll just sell it on our website. It's fine. And it's still more widely available than it was. We're still accomplishing our goal of having something at a price point that everybody pretty much can afford. The second reason why I didn't want to have an ISBN was because you and I think of this workbook set as similar to things that we've do within the launch program, within other products that we've sold is that it's the first iteration. When you ISBN something, whenever you make a really, really big material change to it, you have to then ISBN it again. You have to change it again.

Ryan Maruyama [00:24:24]:
You have to update it. You have to say, this is an updated version. You have to change it. And then you also have to get your covers redone with a new ISBN on it. And then that makes all of your old inventory obsolete. That will do it as well. But I just was like, I'm not sure if we are going to update this thing to just the first run. So I want to reserve the right to change this.

Ryan Maruyama [00:24:47]:
I can go ahead and put an ISBN on this at any time. Like I said, I have them already. I can put an ISBN at any time and make this more widely available if it does really, really, really well. But I don't want to have to go ahead and have to update and update and update. If I continue to update this book, if we continue to update this book, which I think is reasonable because after reading this thing, 200 plus times, there's already things in this book that I would like to update. Not anything in the content perspective, but just a little bit of things here and there. Not like to make things more clear, but just a little Polish. Yeah, just a little Polish on top of the book itself and the contents of it.

Ryan Maruyama [00:25:24]:
I stand behind and it's very good, but just everything around it. I would like to update just a little bit. I'm glad that we did not go with an ISBN. I think for most people, especially if you're going to front the money yourself and you don't have a lot of money going without an ISBN at first, makes sense. See what the user feedback is and then gain more orders. And then you could eventually get an ISBN and then push it out to Amazon and push it out to the other book retailers out there, but test it first. Easy for me to say, because that's literally what we're doing. The next thing that we had to do once we finalize the cover, once we figured out, okay, we're not doing an ISBN was the printing and the distribution.

Ryan Maruyama [00:26:02]:
And this is a downstream effect from the major decision that we made at the very beginning to self publish. And I knew at the very beginning that printing the books was going to be super expensive because we don't have the economies of scale that publishers have. We don't have those connections that publishers have. After doing my research, I was like hardcover books. How can these publishers offer hardcover books for $25? Mhmm.

Hannah Maruyama [00:26:26]:
Because books are expensive for those of you that don't know.

Ryan Maruyama [00:26:28]:
I mean, how can they do that? Hardcover books. And that's like 2 50 pages hardcover book. And that's like $30 now. I think it's more like $30. It's 28.99 or something like that. Is it regular hardcover book? And I was like, how can they do that? This is a softcover book. This is a paperback, and it's only a 100 pages. I couldn't offer this at $25 There's no way we would lose money on every single one.

Ryan Maruyama [00:26:49]:
Once again, it's just the economies of scale. And I think that's my biggest regret of not going with a publisher and not taking the time to shop this book, which is

Hannah Maruyama [00:26:56]:
because we could have charged less.

Ryan Maruyama [00:26:57]:
We could have charged less. What we really care about is creating a product that is a lower price where we still make money. Obviously we probably could have shopped this and gone with a publisher to get that economies of scale, to then lower the cost of the printing, to then pass it on to you because there's 3 major costs and any self publisher that's going to fulfill it themselves, which is what I'm going to do at first. The fulfillment center is my office. So there are 3 major costs and yeah, sure. Well, 4, I guess, which is the price to print each individual book. And for you and me, we're printing 2 of these, right? It's a set of books. So not only just one that we have to print and then we have to get them shipped to our fulfillment center and then we have to ship it to the end customer and then we have to package it.

Ryan Maruyama [00:27:40]:
We have to package it to ship it. Those are the 4 major costs involved. And I think that a publisher would help us and would have helped us with all of that. And we would have been able to offer this at a lower price due to that. But because we were self fulfilling and we're doing very small runs compared to what a book publisher does, we have to charge what we charge. But granted to that, I thought this is also 2 books.

Hannah Maruyama [00:28:04]:
It's not just one. If it was one book, it wouldn't be as outrageous. And then also we had to pick our printer, which was complicated by itself and trying to decide which one to go with. And then, because we didn't put an ISBN on it, we can only sell on TikTok shop on our TikTok and on our website and on other social channels, but that's okay.

Ryan Maruyama [00:28:21]:
Currently, I didn't go with a fulfillment center or anything like that because it's going to cost more money and I would have to charge even more.

Hannah Maruyama [00:28:27]:
So that we are not paying to publish the book.

Ryan Maruyama [00:28:30]:
Ideally, what we wanted to do was we wanted to create something that was at least a little bit affordable. I think $70

Hannah Maruyama [00:28:35]:
For 2 books is pretty good.

Ryan Maruyama [00:28:36]:
Yeah. It's a lot of money, but it's still affordable considering the value that you get here. Consider how

Hannah Maruyama [00:28:40]:
much it can save you.

Ryan Maruyama [00:28:41]:
Right. Exactly. Which is like, it can save you 4 years and a $100,000 4 years of your kid's life, $100,000 total, dollars 70 is a steal. But then I was just saying, okay, I did some research of fulfillment centers and everything like that. And I'm just not sure the volume and the throughput we would have to pay if we don't sell enough books and things like that. Every month you have to pay for storage. And anyway, it gets complicated, but in order to do that, we would have to charge significantly more as well. I just don't want to do that.

Ryan Maruyama [00:29:10]:
I will fulfill the orders at first. I have a job already. I can't fulfill books all day. But eventually we will move it to a fulfiller. And like I said before, in the first episode, when we move it to fulfiller, we will probably only sell them as a set, as a parent and young adult workbook together as one. If you have multiple kids in this age range and you need multiple sets, I would go ahead and pre order right now because while I'm still doing it, you can go ahead and order more and you have one time to do it. And when you add it to your cart, you can add 3 extra copies. So 4 young adult copies total for just the cost of the one book, which is very limited time because once I send it to somebody else, you won't be able to do it because it's just easier to do it.

Ryan Maruyama [00:29:53]:
So sell them as a set. So if you need more young adult copies, you'll have to buy another set. That is the printing and the distribution there. I think that there are many low cost providers or there are many providers in this space. The biggest thing that you could do in this space is to do your research. I don't want to say who we went with. I just don't want you to have a bad experience if you have a bad experience with them, but do your research and try to get your book as long as it looks good, try to get it printed for as little as possible. And then there's the packaging decision as well.

Ryan Maruyama [00:30:25]:
We talked about that in another episode. I'm not going to belabor that here. Make sure that your packaging makes sense for your book. If it's a hardcover book, you can probably put it in like a flimsy package. These are paperback books, so we need to put them in like cardboard boxes basically. And that cardboard boxes cost more money than the flimsy packaging, which is it is what it is.

Hannah Maruyama [00:30:44]:
Basically the main problem with the whole process was my fault. The reason that this was harder than it should have been and something you should take into account is that I wanted to launch the book a lot sooner than it probably would have been wise to, which is like Ryan said, next year, probably in the summer. And because of that rush, it made it more difficult for us to do things because whenever you try to do things faster, it is harder for you to do that. So that would be something that next time we want to launch something, we're going to do what Ryan says, and we're going to wait longer to do it and make sure we have time to market actually before we're shipping books, because then, we wouldn't have had to say, Hey, sorry, there's delays as the delays would have happened during the time where we were working on and getting the book shipped to us as opposed to when people were waiting on it. So that's something that we're going to change next time in the future.

Ryan Maruyama [00:31:33]:
And that was the biggest disagreement that we had, but we made a little bit of a podcast episode before this. And the takeaway for us was that when you have a disagreement like that with your business partner or in work or anything like that, and it is mutually exclusive, you have to choose 1 or the other. You can still disagree, but the main thing is that you disagree and then you commit. And so that's what we did. I still disagree with our actions of doing it, but I committed to the process of getting it done because we decided that's the way to do it. And I just went full force, like, okay, I'm 100% in. Let's get this thing done. And we went full bore into getting it done and look, it got done in the time that I thought it was going to get done.

Ryan Maruyama [00:32:10]:
And I think it's a great product at the same time. I'm very, very happy. I'm very, very proud of the way that it turned out. And I think it's going to help a lot of people. Anybody that actually goes through every single page of this workbook from front to back, even if it's like, oh, well the beginning of it, or like the end of it is bad. The beginning of his bad, whatever. There's going to be something in here. One thing that's going to change your life.

Ryan Maruyama [00:32:31]:
And I'm sure of that. Just to talk about the marketing and promotion side of it. I agree with what you're saying, which is the next time we are going to choose a date that's much further in the future.

Hannah Maruyama [00:32:40]:
More time than we think we need.

Ryan Maruyama [00:32:41]:
Is it for those that are thinking about doing a launch date for themselves? We are going to launch it now, September 2nd. So the launch date is September 2nd. It's going to be on pre order before that. It's on pre order right now. You can go to degreefree.cl4dashbook. It's on a discounted pre order price of $50 On September 2nd, we go live and we launch and it is $70 then. For people that are thinking about doing this themselves, what I was trying to do is just take a book out of the movie studios in Hollywood. And then also the book publishers, what did they do? They work on something for years and then they promote it for months years into the future.

Ryan Maruyama [00:33:20]:
You yourself can take a lesson from that. You say I can write it and print it and have all the books sitting here right next to me right now. But then just say that the launch date is 6 months from now. And then I can know that I have the books to fulfill it. I know that it's all good. And I just say that the launch date is sometime later. And then that means you have 6 months to then just promote it where you're not actually actively writing. You're doing one job at a time.

Ryan Maruyama [00:33:49]:
You're not writing it. You're not worrying about your typesetter. You're not worried about your cover. You're not worried about the suppliers. You're not worried about the shipping. You're not worrying about the packaging. You're not worried about any of that, except for one thing, which is promoting and marketing your book. Because at the end of the day, why did you do this? Why did anybody create any product in the world to sell it? That's it right.

Ryan Maruyama [00:34:06]:
And you want to sell it. If you can have that time, you can sell even more. It was what I think. I think you only have one chance to launch. You only have one chance to introduce your product to the world. And I think that you don't want to squander that away. Kind of like how we've squandered it.

Hannah Maruyama [00:34:20]:
I agree now I wouldn't do the same thing. I would do it differently now.

Ryan Maruyama [00:34:23]:
Whatever it is what it is.

Hannah Maruyama [00:34:24]:
Oh, yeah. I'm just saying it was a good lesson in that I would not do the same same thing now because this process taught me that.

Ryan Maruyama [00:34:29]:
That was pretty much it. I wanted to quickly go over the last two episodes, this episode in the last week's episode, and just kind of wrap up the reflections and the lessons learned and kind of just go through each one really, really quickly. The first thing with the writing process and figuring out the problem, even though we knew that we needed to have a problem and have something to say, it wasn't until we actually wrote down a 2 50 page textbook that we realized, but the real problem, this is not the problem. This is not useful to anybody.

Hannah Maruyama [00:34:59]:
Yeah. Your first draft will lead you to your final draft.

Ryan Maruyama [00:35:01]:
Exactly. And it was the writing process that it was that writing and the reading and then the editing ended up bringing us to the well.

Hannah Maruyama [00:35:09]:
Maybe it's not the destination. Maybe it's the typesetters we take along the way.

Ryan Maruyama [00:35:14]:
Yeah. And you know, so our book like literally evolved from like a large comprehensive quote textbook to a more focused, actionable workbook. And you're going to get this and you're going to be like, this is it. Yes, this is it. It's a 100 pages of actionable things. And it took us a really long time to actually whittle that down. And I think it was mark Twain or something like that. That said it was a letter, sorry, this letter is so long, but I didn't have time to shorten it.

Ryan Maruyama [00:35:39]:
Something like that. Some author, some writer, there's a lot of wisdom in that because it's very easy to sit down and just say a bunch of stuff and to just write a bunch of stuff. It's very difficult to shorten that up, to make it easy and make it just what you need.

Hannah Maruyama [00:35:55]:
On the end person reading.

Ryan Maruyama [00:35:56]:
Exactly. The digestible stuff. That's what I would say there is that in order to figure out the problem, just know that you have to probably just write and you have to probably end up throwing away a lot of what you wrote. And just as they say, kill your darlings. The biggest takeaway that I want you all to take away from this, if you're thinking about writing a book is that the typesetter is the person that writes your book, not you. And just know that going forward. If you finish your manuscript and you're like, man, it's done. Even if it's super clean, even if it's already formatted, just know that you have a lot of work ahead of you.

Ryan Maruyama [00:36:35]:
And hopefully you don't because you have hired somebody that's awesome. The marketing and promotion, we just talked about it.

Hannah Maruyama [00:36:43]:
It's the launch date. We would have done that very differently. And the next time we write something we will.

Ryan Maruyama [00:36:47]:
Yes.

Hannah Maruyama [00:36:47]:
Always give yourself more time than you think you need.

Ryan Maruyama [00:36:49]:
Yes. And make the launch date 6 months plus or so. We've once you've actually received your product, just to take that large amount of time where you're only doing that one thing. And you're not actually worried about the other things that you're also doing, especially if you self publish because you're not getting paid because you're also doing your other job. You're doing your job of actually working to pay the bills so that you can write this book. And I think the lessons from self publishing doing it again, what I self publish? Honestly, I would say that I don't know. I think that we've only ever self published. It was a lot of work and I think that I could have used a lot of the support that a publisher gives and provides And a lot of the economies of scale would have helped a lot.

Ryan Maruyama [00:37:35]:
That one is to be determined there.

Hannah Maruyama [00:37:37]:
And we'll see if that was right.

Ryan Maruyama [00:37:38]:
We'll see if that's right. And there are a lot of books that were independently published first, and then they got picked up by a publisher. I think 50 Shades of Grey was originally

Hannah Maruyama [00:37:47]:
just like our book. Yeah. Can't tell the difference.

Ryan Maruyama [00:37:51]:
All right. Somebody's getting punchy.

Hannah Maruyama [00:37:54]:
Exactly the same.

Ryan Maruyama [00:37:57]:
But, yeah, you're right. That's a ridiculous thing to say.

Hannah Maruyama [00:37:59]:
But I totally I'm teasing you. She did. Yeah. The author.

Ryan Maruyama [00:38:03]:
Yael Hunt, I think. I believe that she self published 50 Shades of Grey first, and then it was such a hit.

Hannah Maruyama [00:38:12]:
That's the publisher picked it up. I feel like it's probably easier to do that because you have proof.

Ryan Maruyama [00:38:15]:
Well, it makes sense. Right? Exactly what I said.

Hannah Maruyama [00:38:17]:
It's harder on the front end, but easier on the back end.

Ryan Maruyama [00:38:19]:
Exactly what I said, which is they won't give you a publish they won't buy your stuff if you're not proven already. All you have to do is prove yourself. And, I mean, all you have to do is

Hannah Maruyama [00:38:28]:
sell a million books.

Ryan Maruyama [00:38:29]:
Right? Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Simple, not easy. Yeah.

Hannah Maruyama [00:38:32]:
Sounds like the only way we would say

Ryan Maruyama [00:38:34]:
that would have helped with a lot of the things that I didn't know in the publishing process. One of the things that I didn't talk about with the ISBN is I also didn't know about how to ISBN a set. Obviously I could look it up and I could call people and stuff like that, but I was just like, you know what? If I make the decision that eliminates all the other decisions, then I don't have to worry about that kind of stuff. So I was like, you know what? For the first run, no ISBN. So like, I just don't know those types of things and a publisher having been able to email a publisher or call a publisher and just being like, Hey, what makes sense here? And they're like, oh, this is the industry standard. This is what we do. This is what we do. This is what we do.

Ryan Maruyama [00:39:05]:
And then also welcome to this printer. They print your book for shekels and you're able to sell it for less money at the same time to then get out to more people. That's TBD. I'm not sure of whether or not we would go with a publisher next time or if this in the future isn't in a publishing house, possibly.

Hannah Maruyama [00:39:24]:
We will see. We have our theories about that. We'll show them later.

Ryan Maruyama [00:39:27]:
I hope that you guys had a good time on these episodes. I know there's 2 episodes where a little bit of rambling, but it took a lot of time to get us together. 1, if you're thinking about buying the degree free way, I'd never think you should do it. Go to the degreefree.coforward/book. Go ahead and buy your copy there. But then if you're thinking about writing a book

Hannah Maruyama [00:39:45]:
It's not as scary as you think it is. It's hard work, but it's not scary.

Ryan Maruyama [00:39:48]:
Yeah. And this is something that I wish that I kinda had before I went on this endeavor. Like with our very first book, I kind of wish that I had this. Okay. This is what you do. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. You just follow the playbook. And then there you go.

Ryan Maruyama [00:40:01]:
I mean, sure. Still you have to do it and you're doing a bunch of stuff that you've never done before, but at least you're like following somebody who has already done it. Whereas like we didn't do that, although we probably should have. Yeah,

Hannah Maruyama [00:40:10]:
we probably should have.

Ryan Maruyama [00:40:11]:
And then if you have listened to this, because you have bought it as well, I think one of the best ways that we could do it, one of the reasons, like I said before, we're not doing the ISBN is because we want to update it. We want to make this good for everybody else into the future. And we want to keep improving. I would love it if you were able to share your feedback once you got it. You've already bought the book. Thank you for your patience and trust. Like for the people that very first bought this, we were supposed to ship this in mid June.

Hannah Maruyama [00:40:36]:
And it's going to launch September 2nd.

Ryan Maruyama [00:40:38]:
Yeah. Right. Exactly. And so you basically loaned us your money for 3 extra months.

Hannah Maruyama [00:40:45]:
Yeah. So that we could get it done, which we appreciate. And we had you in mind the entire time we were going through this process. Every time we had to do another revision, we just, oh man, it's going to take us longer to get it to them, which again would have been fixed by the date, but next time. But in the meantime, thank you though.

Ryan Maruyama [00:40:58]:
Yeah, absolutely. And when you receive your book, your feedback and reviews are incredibly valuable. Your reviews and feedback would help us to reach more people and then improve the product over time. And the best way to leave reviews. I will email you folks a link that you can leave a review, however you want to leave it. Video review, audio review, text review. And then, but also if you could just post your thoughts to social media and tag us at degree free in most places at degree free pod and some other places, just look it up and see which one is us. But yeah, TikTok, Instagram, both at degree free.

Ryan Maruyama [00:41:34]:
That's the best way. I mean, just make a little video and just let me know your thoughts. I mean, that would be super helpful. Super, super, super helpful. But yeah, I think that's pretty much it. You have anything else?

Hannah Maruyama [00:41:45]:
No, just like Ryan said, thank you all. And we're super, super excited to see these get to you folks and for you to put them on your kitchen table or your breakfast area and to do these with your kids.

Ryan Maruyama [00:41:57]:
Yeah, absolutely. And that's pretty much it until next week, guys.