Lessons Learned from Publishing “The Degree Free Way” (DF#160)

Hannah Maruyama [00:00:01]:
A lot of young adults feel like people are just saying things at them and telling them what to do and micromanaging them and having their parents stand over them while they say, Hey, do this assignment. That's not it. It It also makes the young adult feel like there's a spotlight on them instead of their parent doing something with them.

Ryan Maruyama [00:00:19]:
Aloha folks. And welcome back to degree free. I am super excited to have you here. I'm super excited to be here today because we have a very, very special episode and this took me a really long time. I am hoping that people like this episode because this took me forever. And just because it took me a long time, doesn't mean that it's going to be good, but I think it might be. And so what we're going to be going over today is we're going to be going over the publishing process that you and I went through to make these 2 books here, the degree freeway. And I know that we've done something similar to this in the past.

Ryan Maruyama [00:00:56]:
One of the reasons why I love the podcast and I love podcasts in general, and although I'm pretty sure nobody uses it this way, but the reason why I like podcasts is that it's all archived for you. So you can go back and listen or watch everything that we've done before. Everything that your favorite content creator or whatever, whoever it is has done before. If you want to watch Steve jobs, give a talk in 2,008 or whatever it is that you can go and watch that. And so for us, you can go back and watch the episodes that we've done about how to publish or how to write your own book or why you should write your own book. I will put links to that in the show notes degreefree.coforward/podcast. You can find them there. And that's where the show notes always are for those new listeners.

Ryan Maruyama [00:01:39]:
But for this episode, we are going to be going over the process that we went over writing this workbook set.

Hannah Maruyama [00:01:46]:
I'm really pumped to get into this because we have gotten questions about book writing and authorship in general for years. People will DM or contact, do you have any information about how to write a book? Comment we have gotten multiple times is, you need to go to college to learn how to write a book. That's embarrassing. We're going to talk about that today, about how to do it, the ins and outs. And you did a ton of prep for this, so much hours of prep for this episode. So I'm really excited to tell the story.

Ryan Maruyama [00:02:13]:
Normally a prep for an episode or like the total man hours for the episode is like 10 to get this whole thing done. I just alone on the prep for this thing was, like, 4 hours of work. And that's not like, oh, wow. So much work. It's just that I had to think through the entire process. And the reason why I did that too, and it's not just for the podcast, although I care about you guys a lot for sure, is that through multiple points of my life, whenever I do like a big project or whenever you and I make a big decision in our life or in our business or in our professional careers or something like that, I always like to do like post mortems. I always like to go back and make a lessons learned document. Basically what's terrible about it is I have all of these lessons learned documents, but they're like all scattered over the universe of cloud providers and data centers.

Hannah Maruyama [00:03:05]:
They are everywhere.

Ryan Maruyama [00:03:06]:
Yeah. They're just like, well, I used to use OneNote back in 2,008 and then I switched over to Notion and then Notion was really kind of expensive. So then I went to Evernote and then

Hannah Maruyama [00:03:16]:
I And then you would just go back.

Ryan Maruyama [00:03:17]:
I just went to the notes app on my iPhone because it's easier. And then I just did voice notes.

Hannah Maruyama [00:03:23]:
I saw a meme that I almost sent you the other day that was notes app. It was the midwind meme. It was notes app, and then it was like Google Drive, OneNote, Notion. I don't know. It was like and all these make, and and then it went to OneNote app. I was like, oh, no. I should have sent that to you. Would have been pretty funny.

Ryan Maruyama [00:03:40]:
Anyway, I try to make these lessons learned documents and so that's what I was doing. And I was like, well, we might as well turn this into an episode because we get this question a lot and I think that this is going to be very useful. And so that being said, this, we are going to walk you through the entirety of the entire process of writing this book from ideation all the way to where we are now, which we are about to launch the book. And so for those that are interested in getting their copy of the degree free way, how to help your 16 to 20 year old build the life they want, you can go to degreefree.co4/book and order it. Now, after so many months, we have an official launch date.

Hannah Maruyama [00:04:23]:
Before we get to it, everybody. It's my fault that we were late on the launch date. It is not Ryan's fault. Ryan said, we should wait. We should publish this book next year. And I said, no. We should do it now. And he said, I don't think we should do that.

Hannah Maruyama [00:04:38]:
And I said, we should do that. And he said, okay.

Ryan Maruyama [00:04:41]:
Yeah. You were like, let's publish this in March 6 months ago.

Hannah Maruyama [00:04:44]:
So I do apologize to everyone that said we did get it done. We did get it done. It was awesome. And you guys are going to get it way sooner than next year.

Ryan Maruyama [00:04:52]:
They're going

Hannah Maruyama [00:04:53]:
to get it way sooner than next summer. So there's that added benefit. So I do apologize for the delay, but it's done. And we're about to tell you how it was done.

Ryan Maruyama [00:05:01]:
It's 8 months sooner than when I wanted to do it, which is I wanted to do in May of 2025. You have 8 months more to work on this for those people that have especially high school seniors that had just graduated and they are about to go to college or they decided not to go to college and they're thinking about, okay, what are my next steps? Like, what do I do? I'm lost. I have no idea what to do, which is very valid. I mean, I totally get that. That's literally who we talk to all the time. I mean, I was that person. I mean, I did go to college, but I just went to college because I did it blindly and I tell that story a little bit in the book here for all those people. If that's you, we got this out to you 8 months earlier than if I had full control of this book, the launch date.

Ryan Maruyama [00:05:42]:
The reason why that's significant is if you have pre ordered to this point, as soon as we get the books in, we will ship those out the day that we receive them. And that's a promise that we made, but the significance of the launch date, labor day 9, 2 or September 2nd, 2024. That is when we're going to launch degreefree.co4hsbookupuntilthatday.Youcangetitstillatthepreorderpriceof50 It will go up to $70 On 9, 2. So if you are thinking about getting your copy, I would do that right now while it's still discounted. And if you have multiple children, there is an opportunity to get multiple young adult workbooks because you don't need multiple parent workbooks, but your child, your young adult is going to be writing in this. And so if you have multiple children in this age range, go ahead and in the cart, you can just take a couple of boxes to get an extra three copies. So 4 young adult copies total, and go ahead and do that. We can only offer that now while I am literally still fulfilling all of this, because when we go to a different provider, like when we send this to a fulfillment center, eventually

Hannah Maruyama [00:06:51]:
we're going to pay

Ryan Maruyama [00:06:52]:
them and it's just going to be too complicated. I think I've been doing my research here and we try to be as simple as possible. The simplest way that I looked is that for the picking and packing solutions was as long as it's just one set, we print them and then we pack them all in one cellophane wrapper, and then you just sell it as that one set. So I'm pretty positive that sometime soon that the ability to buy more young adult copies is going to go away and you're just going to have to buy another set completely. So if that's interesting to you, go ahead and go to degreefree.co4/book to pick up your copy. Now, this is a massive episode. There are so many learnings and there are so many things that we went through here. We don't have the 2 hours straight to sit down and record this right now.

Ryan Maruyama [00:07:37]:
So we are going to split this up. I'm telling you right now, this is going to be Harry Potter Deathly Hallows part 1.

Hannah Maruyama [00:07:45]:
Return of the king.

Ryan Maruyama [00:07:46]:
There's going to be a part 2. We are going to stop as soon as Dumbledore dies, and then we are going to

Hannah Maruyama [00:07:52]:
Spoilers.

Ryan Maruyama [00:07:52]:
Spoilers.

Hannah Maruyama [00:07:53]:
Dude. Sorry. Wow. Okay. Anyway, we're gonna stop as soon as that happens. I didn't do that for the record.

Ryan Maruyama [00:08:00]:
And as soon as he gets the, power wand.

Hannah Maruyama [00:08:04]:
There we go. Stop. He's a menace. I'm sorry, folks.

Ryan Maruyama [00:08:09]:
And then we're gonna pick up next week. We're gonna finish it out. So now jumping in, who is this episode for? And I wanna be clear about this because you might be listening to this and you might just be, well, this isn't for me. It might not be. This episode and the next episode are going to be for parents of 16 to 20 year olds and their young adults. Like, if you are looking for options, if you have no idea what to do, if you are thinking about college, not thinking about college, just not sure what your child is going to do, like this episode is for you. You can see what we went through in the process to make this resource for you to use. I also think it's going to be very helpful for aspiring authors, entrepreneurs, small business owners, podcasters, content creators.

Ryan Maruyama [00:09:02]:
And generally, if you've just been in the degree free community for a long time, if you've been listening to this episode for for years from the very beginning, which I know a few of you have been doing that, and we thank you for being along for the ride for 3 years. I think this will give you a little bit of a glimpse into the way that our mind works when we're approaching projects and we're approaching how to tackle these big deadlines or these big problems.

Hannah Maruyama [00:09:29]:
And just for those who were curious about writing a book too, so many people would love to write a book.

Ryan Maruyama [00:09:32]:
There's a lot of reasons why you should write a book and I will link to the episode. Like I said before, like why you should write a book. We go into depth in that episode. And even though that was a few years ago, I still stand behind everything that we said back then, but just in generally quickly, if you have something to say to people, if you have something that you think other people should hear, then writing a book is a good way to get that out to people. And if nobody buys it, not like who cares, but along the way, you will also clear up your thoughts on whatever subject that is.

Hannah Maruyama [00:10:04]:
Yeah. It'll help you to examine your arguments and look for weak points and improve and simplify. So it's understandable to people who are not you, whatever it is you're trying to relate. It's a very good and useful exercise and a good way to stretch your mind and stretch your theories.

Ryan Maruyama [00:10:19]:
At the very beginning of all the content creation. That's a big term, but just anything that is outward facing doing things in public, as I say, there's one big thing that I've learned and I think you've learned it as well. And the biggest thing is that you have to have something to say that you want other people to know.

Hannah Maruyama [00:10:37]:
Or a story you want to tell if it's fiction?

Ryan Maruyama [00:10:39]:
Well, that's what I'm saying. Like just something to say, and that's not exclusive to books. That's just with any content at all. That's with a video on TikTok. That is with a YouTube video. That is with fiction books, nonfiction books, doesn't matter. Magazine articles. You just have to have something to say.

Ryan Maruyama [00:10:57]:
And you think it's good enough or you think that other people might want to read it or might want to consume it. What's funny is that since I knew that I knew that you need to have something to say, you need to have some sort of point of view or anything. I thought that writing this book and creating this book was going to be a lot easier. I was like, oh, okay. I got this. We publish content all the time. We do this pretty much every single week. We were pretty good about having something to say.

Ryan Maruyama [00:11:32]:
I think this is going to be a little bit easier.

Hannah Maruyama [00:11:34]:
No. Wrong. It was much more difficult actually for the record. I don't

Ryan Maruyama [00:11:40]:
know if it was much more difficult, but it was still difficult. It was still very hard.

Hannah Maruyama [00:11:46]:
The main reason for us doing this too, was because we wanted to create a resource that was more accessible to people because there's only so much of our our time. There's only so much of our team's time. And also because there's only so much time we have to charge accordingly for that time and not everyone can afford that at this time. So we wanted to create something that people can access and use in order to help their young adults get on their way in life.

Ryan Maruyama [00:12:13]:
I think just to come out and say it, like, we have the launch program where we work Hannah and I and the team 1 on 1 with 16 to 20 year olds with young adults to help them build custom career curriculums, custom career roadmaps that help them figure out what they need, figure out what jobs will help them accomplish those goals, and then figure out how to get those jobs. That is what we do. Our service is expensive for a lot of people and not everybody can afford it. We know

Hannah Maruyama [00:12:47]:
there's only so much time in the day. Unfortunately,

Ryan Maruyama [00:12:49]:
I think it would be better for us to create some sort of resource that we could give to other people that is much, much more accessible. And so that is really the motivation behind the book. Like that was the whole motivation behind it. It was just like, how do we take a little bit of all of what we do and put it into an actionable book or an actionable resource? Cause at the ideation phase, actually, we thought about courses. We thought about ebook. We thought about audio lessons. We thought about just like a podcast series. Like you literally just putting it up on the podcast feed and

Hannah Maruyama [00:13:25]:
which we might still do.

Ryan Maruyama [00:13:26]:
I don't think so.

Hannah Maruyama [00:13:27]:
It's more useful for people to be able to, and you're hearing in real time why we ended up doing this because we believe that this is the most effective way for families to help their young adults with this decision.

Ryan Maruyama [00:13:37]:
Yeah. Exactly. And so we came up with a book, and this is getting a little bit in the weeds here, but we were thinking we talked to all day, we talked to people in this age range and we talked to their parents and we're like, one of the things I know from people in this age range and their parents is that they're extremely busy. I was like, to be honest, one of the best things that we probably could do is a course, but then they have to sit around a computer like together in the limited amount of time that this young adult and this parent have together. There's a lot of them, they work and they go to school and they just have a couple of hours together at night or on the weekend and that limited amount of time that when you're gonna huddle up around the laptop and

Hannah Maruyama [00:14:18]:
Watch a course.

Ryan Maruyama [00:14:19]:
Watch a course

Hannah Maruyama [00:14:20]:
Instead of Netflix.

Ryan Maruyama [00:14:21]:
And then do that. I mean, granted, well then the argument would be, well, why would you do a workbook too? Because I have to do the same thing.

Hannah Maruyama [00:14:27]:
But it's different. There's a different value to sitting down without screens actually, and connecting with your child and actually asking them these questions in this structured way and going through these guided exercises together.

Ryan Maruyama [00:14:41]:
It's not that you won't need screens.

Hannah Maruyama [00:14:42]:
Yeah, you will at one point several points, actually.

Ryan Maruyama [00:14:44]:
Yeah. Once you get past the first few exercises in here, you will need screens.

Hannah Maruyama [00:14:47]:
Yeah. There's research. Like you have to

Ryan Maruyama [00:14:49]:
do heavy research. I mean, it's what we do in the launch program.

Hannah Maruyama [00:14:52]:
Yeah. That's why we do it for people. But if you want to do it yourself, it's in this book.

Ryan Maruyama [00:14:56]:
Right. Exactly. Or at least a portion of what we do is in this book because be I don't know. I'm gonna get into it.

Hannah Maruyama [00:15:00]:
What made it in and what didn't.

Ryan Maruyama [00:15:01]:
Yeah. Right. Exactly. And so we had a clear problem to solve. We wanted to make a more accessible thing to more people, and we wanted to help other people be degree free. Because right now, currently we can only help however many people you and I can take. And then however many people can afford our service, But we wanted to help even more people than that. The idea at first was literally just a book.

Ryan Maruyama [00:15:29]:
It was like a More of a reference book. It was a reference book, kind of similar to an encyclopedia or something like that.

Hannah Maruyama [00:15:35]:
Encyclopedia.

Ryan Maruyama [00:15:35]:
Encyclopedia for all those How I Met Your Mother fans, which I don't

Hannah Maruyama [00:15:39]:
know. And

Ryan Maruyama [00:15:42]:
the idea was to make it an entire encyclopedia with us freaking smorgasbord of information in there. And you could refer back to it at any time. At any time, you can just go back and be like, okay, this is what I'm stuck with. I'm gonna go back to it. This is what I'm gonna get stuck with. I can go back to it.

Hannah Maruyama [00:16:02]:
What's funny about that is we've done things like that before though, and people don't use them because they are boring.

Ryan Maruyama [00:16:09]:
People don't use them because they're boring.

Hannah Maruyama [00:16:12]:
And overwhelming.

Ryan Maruyama [00:16:12]:
That's exactly what I was gonna say. It's really not just so much about the boring. I think a lot of it has to do

Hannah Maruyama [00:16:18]:
with the overwhelming. Like, Hey, let me fix your career paralysis with an overwhelming amount of You and I have created we didn't publish it like how we did here and with a few of

Ryan Maruyama [00:16:25]:
the other books that we've written, but you and I have made a 250 page textbook on how to change jobs. Like, literally for job seekers, how to go in one industry. I'm unhappy with where I'm at in life right now, and then I need to go over here. And it was a 250 page textbook. I've looked through it recently or like in the past 6 months, still holds up. It's still very good. And when we sold it, 1, people that used it said it was great. People that didn't use it said it was terrible.

Ryan Maruyama [00:17:02]:
Obviously that's feedback on our product. After looking at all the feedback from the product, I realized they were saying it was terrible because it didn't solve any problem.

Hannah Maruyama [00:17:11]:
It just gave them a bunch of information.

Ryan Maruyama [00:17:13]:
Well, it did solve the problem. It did take them from here to here. If you did all of it, you would change jobs. 100%. Guarantee it. Like, 100%, if you did all of it, I mean, it's gonna take a lot of time, and it's gonna take be a lot of hard work.

Hannah Maruyama [00:17:26]:
But you'd know how to do it.

Ryan Maruyama [00:17:27]:
But you could do it. But instead, what people were saying, and they weren't actually saying this, but I had to read in between the lines with the user feedback, which is I wish that I would spend even more money for a clearer solution to a more narrowly defined problem. If instead you had just told me how to fix my resume instead of which we taught you how to fix your resume. Like that was one of 27 secondtions in this whole thing. And, and I was like, we did that, but if we had just taken that out.

Hannah Maruyama [00:17:58]:
And just had them do that. They would have gotten further probably too. Cause they wouldn't have gotten stuck on everything else, which is, it's just something that you and I are as people who are building solutions to problems that a lot of people have. We're just getting better at how we solve

Ryan Maruyama [00:18:13]:
them. It wasn't until later. We went ahead and we outlined this thing, the outline originally. And so this is back when we were thinking this was a complete textbook. It's not like we decided that it wasn't going to be a textbook overnight. We ended up making an outline. We ended up moving things around and then we ended up writing entire manuscript of this big informational textbook of everything degree free. It was everything of degree free.

Ryan Maruyama [00:18:38]:
It was ideology. It was here are the numbers of statistics in college. And here's why we think being degree free first makes sense. And you should only go if it's legally required to go. And it gives you a lot of philosophy, a lot of ideology behind the whole degree free movement and everything. And then it also gives you like, okay. Well, this is how you get a job later, all this. It was everything.

Ryan Maruyama [00:19:02]:
And then it wasn't until we had looked at this manuscript completed, or at least the first second draft was completed that I sat back and I was just, look, we're not solving any problem here.

Hannah Maruyama [00:19:16]:
No. We're creating them. If anything,

Ryan Maruyama [00:19:17]:
We are doing the exact same thing that we did before, which is we are just making an incredibly

Hannah Maruyama [00:19:23]:
dense amount of information and putting it between covers

Ryan Maruyama [00:19:26]:
and for the people that we help parents and teenagers, mostly late teenagers. They're busy while it's nice for us and our feelings to have a 300 page textbook and just be like, oh, wow. I'm so important. Said everything that I wanted to say and all my thoughts are in there and everything like that. I was like, I don't think that this is incredibly useful, even though it was, I think it was useful, but I just don't think anybody was going to get get to reading it.

Hannah Maruyama [00:19:52]:
There's an art form to making sure that something is usable for people. And like I said, we're learning it.

Ryan Maruyama [00:19:59]:
For those thinking about not moving on to the actual writing of the manuscripts here. We started writing the book and as I think a lot of authors and especially those that don't have book deals, and we'll go into the reason we self published in next week's episode, because I think it's just a bigger decision that we'll talk about later. But for most people, especially self publishers, you don't get a book deal. So you're front loading all of the work. Like you don't have a book deal. The way book deals work is that if you sell it to them, sell the, your idea to a book publisher, they're going to give you

Hannah Maruyama [00:20:34]:
money. They're going to pay you to do

Ryan Maruyama [00:20:35]:
it. Right. Exactly. This is gonna give you some sort of advance to do it. And then you use that to live off of, and you write it.

Hannah Maruyama [00:20:44]:
I was on a podcast while we were writing the book and the podcast host. And she said, yeah, you know, I was kind of radio silent with content on TikTok and with my podcast because I was writing a book because I had a book deal. And so I had gotten in advance. And in my mind, I went, oh, how nice. Because instead of doing that, what we did was the opposite, which was we just did that in addition to everything else that we were already doing, which is a way to do it. I don't know if I would recommend it, but it's definitely a way you can do it.

Ryan Maruyama [00:21:14]:
Yeah. It's definitely an option.

Hannah Maruyama [00:21:16]:
And so what I was going to say is that because we didn't get in advance or we didn't get paid upfront to write this book,

Ryan Maruyama [00:21:16]:
it's not like it was our job. We had to make time in our day to write, edit, do all the things that all authors have to do, but we just had to do it within our also workday because we're not getting paid to do this, literally.

Hannah Maruyama [00:21:32]:
So keep in mind, if you're gonna write a book, it is you are taking on another job.

Ryan Maruyama [00:21:35]:
Oh, absolutely. Here, we knew that we wanted to coauthor this book together. So this is by you and me, the 2 other books that we've written, we did write together, but you are the author on those. For this one, we knew that we wanted to co author together one because there was so much information. And then 2, I think we have different perspectives on different things. And I think our combined perspective is helpful. The way that we did it is I've never really coauthored anything. Because the last time that we did this, like I said, we did it under your name.

Ryan Maruyama [00:22:09]:
So it was easy. It was easy. It was very much just like

Hannah Maruyama [00:22:12]:
I wrote it.

Ryan Maruyama [00:22:13]:
Yeah. So even though I was quote ghost writing or whatever, even though I was writing it, it was easy because I could just write from your perspective.

Hannah Maruyama [00:22:21]:
Because it was one person speaking.

Ryan Maruyama [00:22:23]:
Right. Exactly. I could just write from your perspective. That was just easier. And with this book, I was like, okay, well, how are we going to do this? Like, are we going to sit the 2 of us over one keyboard and just write the entire thing? And so we were thinking, okay, the way to do it is divide and conquer, divide and conquer. And so we had our outline and we just made little index cards of the different sections of the outline. And that's one of the task management things that you and I

Hannah Maruyama [00:22:52]:
We do. We use index cards run our life.

Ryan Maruyama [00:22:54]:
I have tried every single project management app in the world. And one of the biggest things that anybody runs if anybody works in b to b, they know this if they're making b to b SaaS software. Like, one of the biggest things that you have is just user adoption.

Hannah Maruyama [00:23:09]:
He's calling me out on this pod again Last week's episode 2, man, he was outing me to the whole everybody.

Ryan Maruyama [00:23:15]:
You need to have people actually use your product. And so even though we've tried, you name it, we've used it and I use it pretty well. I usually use whatever product it is 70% of the time, which is still not great, but it's still better than you, which you use it maybe 20% of the time. If maybe never.

Hannah Maruyama [00:23:35]:
No, I'd say I put me at 40%. I've improved. I want acknowledgment that I have improved.

Ryan Maruyama [00:23:41]:
Yeah. Anyway You're

Hannah Maruyama [00:23:42]:
not gonna move on from this until you admit it.

Ryan Maruyama [00:23:44]:
Okay.

Hannah Maruyama [00:23:45]:
Slightly. Right? Yeah. Okay. Thank you. I appreciate that. Alright. We can move on now.

Ryan Maruyama [00:23:50]:
And what we found though is the most effective, which is really freaking irritating. It's like not really good. It's really just index cards.

Hannah Maruyama [00:23:56]:
And you don't move to the next one until you finish the one that you're on.

Ryan Maruyama [00:23:59]:
Yeah. And index cards are the best. So anyway, we had our outline and then we just put section 1, section 2, section 3, section 4, section 5, section 6, section 7. And you can do this too if you're not co writing. If I was just writing this by myself, I would create the outline in a Google doc or in whatever your OneNote Notion, whatever you use. And then I would take a physical stack of index cards and I would write every single one down. And then even though it's just me and I would just sit there and stare at section 1. And then I don't move from that index card until section 1 is done.

Ryan Maruyama [00:24:36]:
And so you and I agreed that that's the way that we're going to approach it. And so that is what we did. And it worked. Yeah, it did. But to create time in our schedule, we ended up having to wake up and set a schedule to wake up at 4 am.

Hannah Maruyama [00:24:52]:
We did.

Ryan Maruyama [00:24:53]:
We had to basically wake up earlier, write for a few hours in the morning. And then we'd do our entire Workday and then we would write for a few hours at night and then we would wake up, do it again the next day. And we did that.

Hannah Maruyama [00:25:06]:
For months. And that's how you write about the end.

Ryan Maruyama [00:25:11]:
Yeah, exactly. And we just did it for absolute months.

Hannah Maruyama [00:25:15]:
And there were so many rewrites. That's how we rewrote too. We just back and forth, double check, rewrite other person, double checks. It was a lot.

Ryan Maruyama [00:25:22]:
I didn't want to say like, what were the tools that we were using? Cause I'm a big tool guy. Cause that's the stuff that you focus on when you're not actually focusing on being productive in your work. And that's why I totally get it. What tool is going to make me more productive? Well, I don't know. Probably just doing the task that's in front of you is going to make you more productive instead

Hannah Maruyama [00:25:38]:
of That's rude. No.

Ryan Maruyama [00:25:39]:
That's rude to me. You had to have a little bit of an idea, but you listen have no idea. I will agonize all day over, like, oh, what is gonna make me more productive? The whatever, whatever, whatever. And it just makes me feel like I'm actually doing something, and I'm working on the goals that need to be done. And this could be personal or professional, but it's just like really just another form of procrastination. But anyway, because I am a tool guy and, you know, thinking about how would I do this? Or if I were writing a book again, the tool that we use to write all of the drafts, the entire manuscript, all 20 of our drafts, was Google docs. And the reason why we chose Google docs was because it was easy and we co wrote it. So you and I can work on the same manuscript at the same time.

Ryan Maruyama [00:26:30]:
And there wasn't any worry of you and I stepping on each other really because we had separated the sections.

Hannah Maruyama [00:26:37]:
Yeah. And we just really heavily relied on the comment feature in the document to check each other's work Right. And recheck and recheck and recheck.

Ryan Maruyama [00:26:45]:
Because I had looked at other things like Scrivener or Word or

Hannah Maruyama [00:26:51]:
Strawbox. Yeah. They have pages. Paper. Paper. Yeah.

Ryan Maruyama [00:26:54]:
And I had looked at all of these other alternatives, and I was just like, you know what? I think Google Docs makes the most sense, especially for the feature that we need the most, which is collaboration. We're just gonna use Google Docs. Now just to not bury the lead there. I regret it. I regret using Google docs because you'll get to the later stage, especially if you're self publishing. I don't think this is as big of a deal if you have a publisher because they are going to deal with all

Hannah Maruyama [00:27:21]:
this stuff. They know how to do that. That's what

Ryan Maruyama [00:27:22]:
they do. But if you're self publishing, a lot of the people that you're gonna hire to do your typesetting and to do your interior page design, they're gonna want whatever you did in Word. That is what they're going to want.

Hannah Maruyama [00:27:33]:
Still the gold standard.

Ryan Maruyama [00:27:34]:
Even though Google docs looks exactly like word from the interface perspective, it is not like word at all, or at least not very much, especially if you do a lot of formatting. So if you do a lot of formatting for your book first, and so you make it look nice so that you just hand over clean manuscript. And I'm gonna get into this more into the second episode next week. If you were gonna do nice formatting work to kind of just tell the person like, hey, this is how exactly pretty much I want it to look. Do it in Microsoft Word because then you're give them the Word document instead of going from Google Doc to word. And then when you go from Google doc to word, a lot of your stuff breaks, a lot of your formatting breaks. And this isn't that big of a deal if you're just going to hand over something that's not formatted at all. So what do I mean by that? I mean, like, if you're just going to say, I have my outlines, I have my chapters and I'm just going to go chapter 1 at the top and I'm not going to make it like big chapter, put a bunch of indents here, put a bunch of space above and below, move it to the center and then indent the first paragraph, those types of things.

Ryan Maruyama [00:28:44]:
If you're not going to do that, don't. And then you're just going to go chapter 1 at the top of the page and then you write. And then when you're done with that, you don't even insert a page break and then you go chapter 2 and then you write, if you're going to do that, Google docs works completely fine. Like it works completely fine. Anything will work at that point because it's literally just a, probably like a text document would work at that point If you're just going to do it like that. But if you are going to have any formatting at all that you want the typesetter to emulate, do it in word, save yourself the hassle, do it in word.

Hannah Maruyama [00:29:19]:
As those of you listening can probably tell Ryan did all of that and was extremely discouraged when he put it over into word and it was a disaster. So just learn from that because it'll save you a ton of time and a ton of headache. It was very discouraging because we thought we were almost done and then we weren't.

Ryan Maruyama [00:29:35]:
Yes, exactly. And I'll get to all of that so that you can avoid this when you are writing your own book. I'll get to all of that next week. At this point, we still had this tome. We had this tome of information. We had one book. It was still supposed to be a reference book. And we had all of this stuff in the book and we reread it and it was like, this is good.

Ryan Maruyama [00:29:56]:
It just doesn't feel like anybody's going to get through the whole thing.

Hannah Maruyama [00:29:59]:
It was huge.

Ryan Maruyama [00:30:00]:
It just doesn't feel like anybody's going to get through this whole thing. And it felt very much like what we've done before. At this point, we felt pretty lost because we thought we had made something great, but realized that it wasn't effective or we didn't think it was going to be effective.

Hannah Maruyama [00:30:14]:
Yeah. We got done. And then we stopped for a few days because we were in the haze of it. And this is a good thing for artists, for creatives. If you feel like you're almost on stop, take a couple of days, get away from it, Take a few days off if you possibly can. And I mean, a few days away from whatever task you were working on, you can do whatever else you want to do. And then come back to it with fresh eyes that have not been worn out from looking at it. And it will look completely different to you as a not burnt out person who's making something.

Hannah Maruyama [00:30:40]:
And when you do that, you will see 1 things that need to be fixed or 2, you'll just go, oh, we have to take this out or I have to redo this or I have to fix this. And that is exactly what happened. And then we went, oh, people are going to lose momentum. They're not going to get through that. They're not going to get through this thing. And if they don't, then it does not help them.

Ryan Maruyama [00:30:58]:
Yeah. And so what we did during those few days instead of writing, we decided to brainstorm a bunch of things. And I don't know what this is gonna look like for you, but it could look exactly the same. But I'll just tell you what we did. And this whole book writing process, it can look completely different. If somebody's, like, the works in the publishing industry is listening to this and is like, god. These guys are idiots. Like, why would you do it? Why would you do this? I don't know.

Ryan Maruyama [00:31:22]:
Totally. 100%. Probably. Yeah. 1000%.

Hannah Maruyama [00:31:25]:
Welcome to self publishing. Yeah.

Ryan Maruyama [00:31:26]:
And it's like, I don't know. I don't know what I'm doing. I'm just doing it. And so I'm not saying that this is how you should do any of this. I'm just saying this

Hannah Maruyama [00:31:32]:
is what we did. Take what you will.

Ryan Maruyama [00:31:34]:
Leave what you want. So what we did is during that time, we were like, okay. Well, I feel like this is super useful. At least some parts of this are gotta be useful, but how can we figure out what those useful parts would be? We have an amazing resource because we have the launch program. We talk to these people every single day. We just kind of revisited the conversations that we've had with parents and young adults.

Hannah Maruyama [00:31:56]:
Things that parents have said, concerns the kids have, all of that.

Ryan Maruyama [00:31:59]:
Yeah. In the launch program. And then we also review TikTok comments, YouTube comments, those types of things to understand the common concerns and the common problems, quote, that our audience and, you know, the people that are in this, demographic we're having. And after a lot of time looking through all of this, we found the most common problem and by far is not even close. And the most common problem that people have is that parents and their young adults, they don't know where to start.

Hannah Maruyama [00:32:31]:
They have no idea, even if they have an idea of what they want to do, they still don't know where to start.

Ryan Maruyama [00:32:36]:
They had no idea how to begin exploring different career options. They had no idea how to go look for work.

Hannah Maruyama [00:32:46]:
Or alternative paths inside careers that they're deciding to look for.

Ryan Maruyama [00:32:50]:
Which was, I mean, kind of made sense. It made sense once you saw it, but I thought that maybe some of the more actionable, not like actionable. This is very actionable, but some of the deeper stuff I thought would have been a little bit more prevalent. Such as my child doesn't have a work history. Like how do they get over that? That it was like a concern for like one person.

Hannah Maruyama [00:33:13]:
Yeah. Nobody really was worried about that because it's their first job, the beginning of their career. So of course you and I thought that was going to be way more important than it actually was.

Ryan Maruyama [00:33:19]:
Yeah. Like, oh, how do they write their resume and everything like that? And be like, that's just like way down the tracks, right? Like that's way far away. And I'm not saying that that's not not important. That is important. And that's something that we had in our original version. Like we had all of this resources in our original version, but we were like, okay, what's the main problem? And we realized that if this is the thing that they're asking the most about, I think that this is the thing that we should talk about, The problem that we should solve. If you have no idea where to start.

Hannah Maruyama [00:33:47]:
If you have no idea where to start helping your child figure out what they're going to do after they graduate high school, This will take you from, I have no idea what's going on. They have no idea what's going on, or they're completely overwhelmed with their options. This will get you from that to having 3 options that work for them. That is a tall order. And we had to cut a lot to make it focused enough to get that

Ryan Maruyama [00:34:10]:
result. Yep, absolutely. So we had to completely go back to the drawing board and the whiteboard to figure out how to address the problem. Like, I don't know where to start. We asked ourselves, how do we solve this problem of, I don't know where to start. And we already had elements of it in our draft. We had already addressed a bunch of this. We do this in the launch program, so it's not like it's new.

Ryan Maruyama [00:34:30]:
We had to completely rewrite a whole bunch of things. The hardest part more than rewriting things was getting rid of things. Because like I said, right, we wrote 2 50 pages plus of this thing. And now you're telling me that I have to get rid of like pretty much all of it.

Hannah Maruyama [00:34:46]:
It was painful after we had done all of that. And there's an element of pride too, which is, man, this is important. You know, when we spend so much time on this and this is internally, that's how we felt it wasn't really an argument. It was almost an existential argument that we were having with the universe where we just went, but they need all of this. The end result and it's not going to help you at all. Or rather, if you don't get to the end result and it's not going to help you at all.

Ryan Maruyama [00:35:07]:
Or rather if you don't get to the end of it.

Hannah Maruyama [00:35:09]:
That's what I mean. If you get so discouraged and lose momentum through the thing, because it's too complex or it's too many problems that solving at one time, it's not useful and people just quit. And that's the biggest thing that Ryan and I know and have seen. And so we wanted to make sure that didn't happen.

Ryan Maruyama [00:35:23]:
So we ended up having to restructure this whole thing and we ended up cutting, like we said, all of it basically. And in the cutting process at this time, it was still one book.

Hannah Maruyama [00:35:35]:
It was a book. I remember when we realized it was 2.

Ryan Maruyama [00:35:38]:
But not just that. First, it was still a book, but then we realized because of the problem, like, I don't know where to start. It's a very specific problem that we're solving the way to solve it, or what we thought was going to be the most effective was going to be a workbook was going to be like, okay, we have to make this into something that's interactive, something that you can actually write down because it's a big problem that they're solving. I don't know where to start. You kind of have to figure out like, okay. Well, if you don't know where to start, we kinda have to start with where you are now and where are you? And that's where we start in the book. And we realized, okay, well, it has to be a workbook. And then quickly after we realized, okay, well, this is going to be a workbook.

Ryan Maruyama [00:36:20]:
We started figuring out, okay, where are we going to put these exercises in? Like, what are the exercises? Where are we going to put them in? What does the worksheets look like? And not just table stakes of making a workbook. And then while we were going through this process, we were looking at it and we were like, well, really what we're doing is we're creating a resource for parents to help guide their young adults through this, like 1 on 1. And I said, well, they're going to be like huddled over 1 workbook.

Hannah Maruyama [00:36:51]:
And 2 people can't write in 1 book.

Ryan Maruyama [00:36:52]:
Yeah. But it's not just about 2 people writing because the only one person needs to write. Only the young adult needs to write really. And although there are some exercises that we've added in after many, many edits that make it a little bit more interactive and a little bit more fun. I think that the parents can do with their young adult, but most of it is the young adult doing it, but we just realized, okay, well, that's kind of crappy that the parent just has to kind of hover over them and just watch them the entire time doing work. Like you absolutely have to be on the same side of the table.

Hannah Maruyama [00:37:20]:
Which really plays into what a lot of parents say too. Is that it's a lot of young adults feel like people are just saying things at them and telling them what to do and micromanaging them and having their parents stand over them while they say, Hey, do this assignment. That's not it. It also makes the young adult feel like there's a spotlight on them instead of their parent doing something

Ryan Maruyama [00:37:38]:
with them. Hey there. I hope that you're loving today's conversation. At degree free, we wanna help as many people as we can thrive and succeed without needing a college degree. Having these guests on that share their experiences so that you can learn from their stories and their mistakes is one of the ways that we do that. Genuinely, I'm just grateful that these guests take the time to come on and share their wisdom. And if you're getting value out of this conversation or you've listened to 2, 3, or 4 plus episodes, I have one quick ask. Please take a moment right now to review this podcast on whatever platform you're tuning in on.

Ryan Maruyama [00:38:12]:
With your review, you're not just supporting us, but you're amplifying the voices of every guest we bring on and ultimately helping more people thrive degree free. Thank you for doing that right now And for being such an important part of degree free for me, it was more about sitting on the same side of the table. Like, I didn't want them to like, you know, then you

Hannah Maruyama [00:38:35]:
have to sit on the same side of

Ryan Maruyama [00:38:36]:
the table or you have to do that awkward, you know, like pass it back and forth. You have to pass this book back and forth. And I I was like, well, that just doesn't make any sense. That's when it became okay. Well, not only should it be a workbook, but it should be a workbook set. The parents should have one to guide them through. And then the young adult should have one to actually do the exercises. Very similar to curriculum books, very similar to textbooks.

Ryan Maruyama [00:38:59]:
A teacher has 1 and then the young adult has 1 as well. And it was a bigger decision that I thought it was going to be at the time. Like I was like, oh, well, it's going to be similar. It'd be really easy to make 2 books because it's basically the same book. It turned out to be very, very hard. We didn't realize that there was going to be 2 jobs that we had to do. We had to not only did we have to write a very clear and concise book and talk about, okay, this is what you're going to do, but then we also had to make sure that the worksheets that we designed were super clear. The first couple of iterations of the worksheets, we wanted to have like a whole bunch of things in them like, okay, we're going to do this.

Ryan Maruyama [00:39:39]:
We're going to do this. We're going to do this. And it was all super busy. And so not only did we have to create clear and concise words, but now we had to design and make clear and concise worksheets. And that was a huge task in and of itself. You're going to see in these work books, the final worksheets, That's because we decided that simple is that's because we decided that simple is the best. And even though it took you 11 iterations to get to.

Hannah Maruyama [00:40:13]:
Yes, It did. It was a really hard and there's multiple versions saved everywhere.

Ryan Maruyama [00:40:18]:
And when we were like trying to make it complicated, we're trying to make it look nice and all this stuff. And we were like, I think simple is better.

Hannah Maruyama [00:40:25]:
Designing worksheets is much harder than people think it is.

Ryan Maruyama [00:40:27]:
Oh, yeah.

Hannah Maruyama [00:40:28]:
I thought, oh, this is gonna be easy. And then every time I'd bring you one, you go, no. This is not usable because you try to do it, and then you wouldn't be able do it. It's not simple if someone can't do it without you explaining to them what it is.

Ryan Maruyama [00:40:37]:
That was a super big like, just literally just doing it myself. And I was just like, okay. Let me just try to go through this worksheet for myself. I was like, god. This is, like, not usable right now.

Hannah Maruyama [00:40:46]:
And so we had to redo it.

Ryan Maruyama [00:40:47]:
And so we just redid it. And so, like, some of the worksheets in here are literally just, like, instructions and then blank lines.

Hannah Maruyama [00:40:53]:
Yeah.

Ryan Maruyama [00:40:53]:
And then it'll be like, this took you 11 iterations to make. Yes. This took 11 iterations to make because it was very difficult to figure out, okay, this is what I want you to do. And this is what I want the person that's actually doing this to do and understand. The last thing that I'll say, and we can wrap the episode up soon because, and so we're going to leave you with this episode is basically finishing the final manuscript. In the next episode, what we're going to talk about is we're going to talk about all the other stuff that was a little bit higher of decisions, like self publishing versus going with a publisher, designing and formatting, picking packaging, those types of things, launch date, lessons learned. That's what we're going to get into in the next episode. But for those people that are actually going to write, I think this while it is a little rambly, I think this can be very, very helpful.

Ryan Maruyama [00:41:40]:
And for us, the last decision that we made that I don't know if I regret it or not, but we decided to not use a professional editor.

Hannah Maruyama [00:41:50]:
Yeah. We just decided to self edit for a lot of reasons, but yeah, we did it ourselves.

Ryan Maruyama [00:41:54]:
The main reason why we didn't was not price or anything like that. Although price has some bearing over it, but it was really speed.

Hannah Maruyama [00:42:01]:
Multiple edits. If you're co writing something, you can just edit back and forth and you can do it faster than editor. You both of you back to the editor. You editor back to the edge. It's just a lot of steps.

Ryan Maruyama [00:42:12]:
Well, this really came from your decision or our decision to launch the book not this year and try to do it in March of this year. And right. And we're, this is August now.

Hannah Maruyama [00:42:23]:
It's going to launch September 2nd.

Ryan Maruyama [00:42:25]:
Yeah, exactly. And so we didn't want to, like, we were thinking, okay, this is going to launch launch in March. And then we thought this was going to launch in April, May, June. And then we're like, okay, if we wanted to get it up this quickly, it's going to be very difficult to go back and ping pong this back and forth to an actual editor quote. You and I have a lot of writing experience. You and I have a lot of editing experience and we were saying, okay, I think that you and I do this to the best of our ability instead of ping ponging it back and forth, you and I can just edit it. Like I said, I don't know if I regret it or not. I've had people read the book and they said that it's good and that it's understandable.

Ryan Maruyama [00:43:01]:
I mean, maybe it's not the best writing in the world, but at least it's understandable. That was a huge decision that I think I would suggest if you were going to do this, I think I would suggest getting an editor. Editor.

Hannah Maruyama [00:43:10]:
I would too, especially if you're going to do it by yourself. I think

Ryan Maruyama [00:43:12]:
I would suggest getting an editor.

Hannah Maruyama [00:43:13]:
Is that something that maybe if we did it differently, we would do that now.

Ryan Maruyama [00:43:16]:
I think so. Well, a lot of it, like I said, was one decision upstream from all of that influence a bunch of downstream decision.

Hannah Maruyama [00:43:23]:
Our last episode where we talked about goals and whatever your goal is, it's going to influence the choices that you make.

Ryan Maruyama [00:43:28]:
You wanted to launch it like tomorrow. And I was like, well, tomorrow we can't get that to an editor, so we have to edit it. And turns out it was 6 months later and maybe we could have gotten into an editor. But the thing is, is if we had gotten into an editor, probably would have taken longer.

Hannah Maruyama [00:43:42]:
And it would have been next year.

Ryan Maruyama [00:43:43]:
Yeah. It probably would have been in November this year

Hannah Maruyama [00:43:46]:
or

Ryan Maruyama [00:43:46]:
something like that. So anyway, that was one of the many decisions that we've made that influenced this book. I think through many read throughs of this and getting some initial user feedback, I think that this book is very clear. And I don't know if it's so much entertaining, but it's clear at least.

Hannah Maruyama [00:44:03]:
Yes.

Ryan Maruyama [00:44:04]:
I think you're gonna get a lot of value out of it. The last, last thing that I wanted to say was that where we made a mistake in writing our books before is that we made textbooks.

Hannah Maruyama [00:44:13]:
Yes.

Ryan Maruyama [00:44:13]:
They were very dry.

Hannah Maruyama [00:44:15]:
And we did the design work too.

Ryan Maruyama [00:44:16]:
But not just that, but, like, they were very dry. This is very matter of fact. This is this, this, this, this, this. And then what I realized here after reading through it for the 7th time, I was like, oh, man, this is super useful. I just don't know if people are gonna get through this whole thing. And this goes back to what I was talking about before in a previous episode, the whole entertain, educate, inspire. Like, and I think it's a continuum. I think you have to do all 3.

Ryan Maruyama [00:44:40]:
And a lot of people think that it's just, you do one of those 3. You either make content to entertain or educate or inspire. I think that the holy grail is to get all 3 is you have to entertain them first. And then if it's entertaining, then they'll listen long enough. They'll read long enough to be educated about it. And if they become educated about it enough, they will be inspired to make that change in their life, whatever that change is. And even if that changes like listening to a different song or something like that. For me, I was like, okay, well, I think this does educate.

Ryan Maruyama [00:45:07]:
I think this does inspire. I just don't think it's very entertaining. Like, how do I make this more entertaining? And so then I went back and I looked at a whole bunch of nonfiction books that I have consumed in the past. I've looked at a whole bunch of workbooks that I've looked at in the past as well. And one of the things that was very prevalent is that there are stories and I was like, just to break up everything, there are stories. And I was like, okay, that is the answer. I think then after the 7th editor, so you and I had to go in and write a bunch of stories to kind of make these concepts real. So we had to go back into our archives of like memories of like what happened And we had to create stories and tell stories of things that happened in our life.

Ryan Maruyama [00:45:48]:
It was kind of amazing because once we added those stories, I read it through after we added the stories and I was like, wow, what a difference this makes. It doesn't feel as much like a textbook, but I mean, it

Hannah Maruyama [00:46:00]:
totally completely is, but it's disguised.

Ryan Maruyama [00:46:03]:
Yeah, exactly. Anyway, that was the whole writing the manuscript here. And then, so just to tie a bow on this, we went from ideation. We manuscript here. And then, so just to tie a bow on this, we went from ideation. We said, okay, well, what problem do we want to solve? We want to make our methodologies, our ideas, more accessible to more people. And we said, okay, well, that's a good problem. Let's create a textbook.

Ryan Maruyama [00:46:22]:
We created a huge textbook and we looked at it after the 5th edit and we were like, this doesn't make any sense. It's very useful. I think people are going to read it. They're going to receive it and their eyes are going to glaze over. Then we had to think about, okay, well, what have people said in the past to us? And then we figured out what the number one problem is, or like the most common problem.

Hannah Maruyama [00:46:43]:
That people have that we could solve.

Ryan Maruyama [00:46:44]:
Yeah. And the most common problem was that they don't know where to start. And I was like, okay, well, how do we create a resource just for that one single problem? And then one of the things that we didn't talk about before, but I'll talk about it quickly here because I don't think we're gonna talk about it anywhere else, is that you and I, once we figured that out, once it was that one single problem, we looked at the textbook and we were like, that's too much for them to read. Let's make it very easy for them to consume in one weekend. Let's make this one weekend, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Friday night, Saturday, Sunday. And that's what we did here. And so this book is only a 100 pages for both.

Hannah Maruyama [00:47:16]:
And that includes the worksheets.

Ryan Maruyama [00:47:17]:
Yeah. The young adult one is a little bit more than a 100 pages. The parent one is a little bit less because there's actually workbook pages. And the young adult one, it's like a 100 pages. And for some people they might feel like, wow, like only a 100 pages for this. It took us a lot to get it down to a 100 pages because I know that you don't have time. And I know that you just want a solution to their problem, which is, I don't know where to start and we will get you an answer to that question. We will get you an answer to that problem in 1 weekend.

Ryan Maruyama [00:47:46]:
If you sit down, do the Friday night, there's this sample schedule in here in the beginning of the book that we say, do these two sections, do these two sections, do these two sections, Friday night, Saturday, Sunday. Boom. It's gonna be a lot of work. That's all you're gonna be doing, but it can be done. And that was a huge for us. It was like the time to effectiveness, like the time to actually seeing the answer because so many of these things, like, well, maybe in a month or maybe in a week, you'll see the difference. No, this can be done in a weekend. And that's what we wanted to.

Ryan Maruyama [00:48:12]:
So we were like, how can we make this short as possible instead of how can we make it as long as possible? And so we got the manuscript done and then next week I'm going to be going over everything and all of the trials and tribulations and the lessons learned that happened after the manuscript. If you thought that the manuscript was tough, everything else after that was really tough. And that's pretty much it for this week, guys. I hope that you are subscribed. If you would like to pick up your copy, go to degreefree.c04/book. Until next week, guys. Aloha.