Name: Become an Author! [10 Steps to Publish Your Book]
Uploaded: 2025-06-18T17:41:54.000Z
Duration: 4 min 41 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Writing a book involves a sequence of steps, each critical to the production of a polished product.

Adverbs of manner

While many start this adventure, only 3% finish writing their manuscript, less than 1% end up publishing their book,

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and even fewer see their work withstand the test of time.

But since we published a book and want to see you succeed too, here are 10 things we learned for becoming a published author.

First, develop a concept, it can be an idea for a story, a collection of essays, or a central argument of non-fiction.

Inspired by Jason Zweig's The Devil's Financial Dictionary, we created an educational encyclopedia from the perspective of a clever child who questions traditional schooling and recommends alternatives.

Plan an outline that structures your main points or story arc, this acts as a road map and keeps your content organized as you write.

Our book has two parts, part one covers everything you should know about learning and the unintended consequences of formal education.

Part two is a comprehensive guide to 16 alternative schools.

Write the first draft of your manuscript, this step is often the most time consuming as it involves fleshing out all details, doing plenty of editing, and contemplating and even more self-doubt.

We thought it would take us about six months as we already had hundreds of popular video scripts, it took us nearly two years.

Revise your manuscript, this includes reworking the text for clarity, structure, voice and style.

We revised our text considering George Orwell's six writing rules and followed the advice of Elmore Leonard, who said that when it sounds like writing, rewrite it.

Have others read your manuscript to get feedback.

These can be peers, beta readers, or professional editors.

Our book was fact checked by two from our team and reviewed by a freelancer for grammar.

Now, find a publisher, Mango, our publisher has a data team that actively looks for creators who already have an audience and writers who could fill a gap in the market.

But there are plenty of publishers that work with independent writers, research to find the right one for your book and then give them your manuscript to look at.

Alternatively, you can self publish, including directly on Amazon, which ships over 300 million books annually and is responsible for over 80% of all ebooks sold in the UK.

Once you think you are finally done, you should get a professional editor to refine your manuscript.

Editors can help with big picture changes, grammar or style, and do a final proof reading.

We were lucky that our publisher gave us editorial guidelines and told us to use the Chicago Manual of Style, which has defined how to format text since 1906.

They also made a legal review to ensure it's safe to be published.

Once the text is set, you have to design the look and interior of your book.

This involves choosing fonts, colors, type setting, adding chapter headings and page numbers, we also added illustrations, QR codes and created graphs.

Although the most difficult part was putting it all together.

Before printing, share a go proof with all people who are involved in the publication process.

This document ensures that publishers, editors, authors and designers agree with the final layout, text and images, the goal of the go proof is to catch any remaining errors before the book is sent for production.

If you publish yourself, this is where you want to get help because you really don't want your text to come out all wrong.

Once the book is out, focus on marketing so people get to see your work, in other words, you have to go hustle.

We tell everyone we know to get their copy of our Unschooler's Educational Dictionary right now, it's insightful, it's dark, just check the links below.

If we did everything right and were lucky, our book sales spike immediately after the publishing date, drop drastically afterward, and then rise steadily over the coming years.

That's the pattern of a long seller, and while our book will never come close to selling like a true classic, we might beat be bold with bananas.