A Mini Guide to Self-Publishing A Book

By: Jay Yang

Ever since my first book, You Can Just Do Things, people have asked me the same 3 questions:

1. How did you write it?

2. How did you publish it?

3. How did you market it?

I never had the time to answer properly. So this time I'm documenting it in real-time with my second book.

My promise is that by the end of this, you'll understand how to write, publish, and market a book on your own. Let's start with why I chose to self-publish both of my books…

Why I self-published (instead of going traditional)

I self-published my first book because I didn’t get any inbound offers, and my ego was too big to reach out to publishers. Plus, I didn’t want to wait 18+ months to publish my book.

Mature answer, I know 😂

For context, with the traditional path: you write a proposal, you send it to a literary agent, they help you rewrite and improve it, and they pitch publishers on your behalf. If you're lucky, you get a deal (the agent typically takes 15% of the advance). Then you start the writing process and somewhere around 18 months after you sign the deal, you finally get to publish your book.

… ugh. So many hula hoops to jump through.

I just wanted to write my book.

For this second book, I did look into traditional publishing. I wanted to see whether my audience size (500k+ now) would warrant an enticing deal. I reached out to an agent, and the first thing they asked me to do was find 5 books on a similar topic, by authors with a background like mine, published in 2022 or later, each with more than 500 Amazon reviews.

At first, I was down to do it. I'm all for market validation. But then I thought about it more and realized it was backwards. I'm writing this book because it doesn't exist yet. I'm not trying to write the sixth version of Atomic Habits just because habits are popular.

That said, traditional publishing does come with a few benefits:

• You get an advance that buys you time to focus

• A team that handles the editing, cover, and some of the launch

• The credibility of a publisher's name, and a shot at a list like the New York Times bestsellers.

With self-publishing, you don’t get any of that… BUT you keep your royalties and rights.

For me, my rights mattered most. I read the free online version of The Almanack of Naval Ravikant in high school, and it changed my life. I always knew I wanted to give my book away as a free digital version so it could do the same for someone else. A traditional publisher wasn't going to let me do that.

With self-publishing everything is on you, and you still have to ship a high quality product. So I hired a professional cover designer and a professional editor (more on this below). You also have to own the launch yourself, but I'd already helped launch several books, so I knew the mechanics.

Okay, let’s dive into the writing process…

Part 1: Writing the book

The #1 question I get is "what was your process for writing your book?"

I get it. It's intimidating to stare at a blank page with that little cursor blinking back at you.

The trick is to stop trying to write a book and first focus on getting your thoughts out.

This book is 5 years of notes. It's everything I've learned about creating opportunities, getting in rooms with people I admire, and apprenticing under entrepreneurs. It’s the byproduct of a running Google doc, full of ideas, stories, quotes, and half-formed thoughts I collected as I went.

David Perell calls this “writing from abundance.”

I keep a Google doc open at all times. If an idea, story, or line is worth remembering, I add it to the doc. When I do sit down to write, I split screen my notes doc with the chapter I’m writing.

Obsess over the outline first

Once you have your material, the next step is the outline.

If you write the book first and then realize the structure is wrong, you're in for a brutal rewrite. So before I write, I sort through everything and organize it around 2 questions: (1) What outcome am I helping the reader reach, and (2) what's the roadmap to get them there?

To be clear, your structure will most likely change. But you want a few chapters to be resequenced, not entire sections to be rewritten (trust me lol).

My original outline was 2 parts: figure out what you want, and get what you want.

I realized “get what you want” was too vague and needed to be broken up into more actionable parts. The new outline became: figure out what you want, create value, deliver value.

old outline

Writing is arranging, not typing

Once the outline is set, you write the chapters. To me, writing a book is less about writing and more about arranging puzzle pieces (stories, examples, and ideas).

For each chapter, I dump in all the raw material I collected, then organize it, rewrite it, and slowly shape it into something that reads well.

Each chapter I try to:

• Start with a story

• Explain what the principle is

• Explain why it matters

• Show how to do it well

Then I ask myself, would another micro-story or example help make this point easier to understand? Can I visualize this idea? Do I have a screenshot or evidence I can add?

Test it in public before it goes in the book

Before a chapter is finalized, I test it. I post chapter excerpts as newsletters, I tell stories on podcasts, and I test individual sentences as tweets to see what resonates.

When something performs well, I know to frontload or highlight it.

Here’s an example of a sentence that I knew performed well, so I added it to the end of the book to end on a banger.

Talk your first draft instead of typing it

Another thing that helped a lot, and something I'm doing with this guide right now, is drafting by voice. I use a tool called WisprFlow that turns your speech into text.

Plenty of people I know get writer's block. Almost nobody I know gets speaker's block. If you say the first version out loud, you'll have something on the page to edit and tighten. Fixing a rough draft is farrrr easier than creating from scratch.

Sometimes I’ll go for a walk, pretend I’m on the phone with a friend, and voice out full chapters.

Write 20 blog posts, not one 300-page book

I don't buy the idea that a book has to be 280+ pages with 5,000-word chapters. I write books that are shorter and tighter, because I like the momentum. Some of my favorite books are short.

I always knew I wanted this to be a 2-hour book, something you could sit down with, finish, and act on. People don't act on books they don't finish, and they don't share them either.

I also wrote it for a younger reader, and most people don't read many books, so the more approachable I could make it, the more people it might reach.

How do I make my chapters tighter?

• Kill the setup (you don’t need to “warm the reader” up). Just make your point and move on.

• Cut the 3rd and 4th examples. The reader is not dumb. They get it.

• Ask, “If every word cost $10, what would I cut while keeping quality?”

• When you feel bored writing or reading it, the reader will too.

• If you’re not adding stuff back, you’re not cutting enough.

• Cut useless words. When reading through my first draft, I noticed that I used the word “actually” 90+ times. I cut nearly all of them and the book was fine. If a word doesn’t actually add to or change the meaning of a sentence, you don’t need it.

Editing, feedback, and design

Beta readers and the ABC method

Once my book was as good as I could get it on my own, I brought in beta readers.

I had a little under 50 of them, but I invited over 100. Roughly half the people you invite will say they’ll read it but never open the doc. That’s okay. Just keep that in mind.

Pick readers who match who the book is FOR, not who likes you. I leaned on people from my audience and people I knew from college.

Pro Tip: Send them out in small waves, 2 or 3 at a time, not all at once. The first wave spots the obvious problems. You can then fix those before the next wave reads, so you’re not collecting the same note 15 times.

If I could do it over again, I’d give each person a separate Google doc so they could comment in the margins with no distractions. I’d also put each reader's name at the top ("Advance copy for [Name], please don't share"), which keeps it from leaking.

Instructions I gave them: I told them there's no such thing as too many comments. And I gave them one question to hold the book against: "Is this so good you'd share it with an ambitious friend? If not, why not?"

I use the ABC feedback method: what's Awesome, Boring, and Confusing?

How to process the feedback: You will get contradictory notes. Someone's favorite chapter is someone else's "boring." If you try to fix every note, you'll sand the book into mush. So triage…

• One person says it, note it. Many people say it, fix it. 

• Trust where it hurts, not their prescription. There's a great line from Neil Gaiman. When readers tell you something is wrong, they're almost always right. When they tell you exactly how to fix it, they're almost always wrong. So pay attention to what they noticed, not to how they'd fix it.

Give yourself a few days before you touch anything. Your first reaction to criticism is defensiveness. So come back when you have a clear head.

And last point: never forget whose book it is. All their feedback is information. If you love something your readers didn't, keep it. It's your book, and you can do whatever you want with it.

Get an editor. It's worth it.

After the beta feedback, I brought in an editor, Dylan Kurt, who also edited The Book of Elon Musk, to go through my book sentence by sentence and restructure, tighten, prune, and make it punch harder.

If you take one thing from this section, let it be this: get an editor. Athletes have coaches. CEOs have advisors. A book is no different. A good editor has done this before, and they know what makes a chapter land and what makes it drag. They don't even need to be an expert in your topic. They can take your words and sentences, rearrange them, and hand you back a sharper version of what you were already trying to say. Trust me, it's worth every dollar.

An illustrator for the visuals

I worked with an illustrator, Michael Borman (@wisdommadeeasy), on the in-book visuals. Any time a concept or story took off on Twitter, I wanted a visual for it.

To make it easy for him, I created a separate doc with the 20 visuals I wanted, a note on what each one was about, and a rough idea of how I pictured it. The clearer your brief, the better the result and the fewer rounds of edits.

I think they turned out great!

How I edit my own writing

I've now read this book fully upwards of 50 times, and I rotate how I read it. Sometimes out loud. Sometimes on my phone. Sometimes on my laptop. Sometimes I paste it into my texts and read it there. Sometimes I read it to my mom and watch her facial expressions. Each format helps me catch different things: a clunky sentence, a typo, a line I can cut, or a story that drags.

There’s not really a hack for this. This is the tedious work that separates meh books from books people can’t put down.

Book writing hack that I took from Morgan Housel on David Perell’s podcast:

Keep a "scraps" document. It made making edits so much faster and easier to let go of. 

The cover

Book covers can get expensive, and there are plenty of sites to find designers (this is a good podcast to learn more). I found a designer I love on Upwork who did my first cover, so I went back to her for this one.

What I'll say is this: invest heavily in your cover. People do judge a book by it. If it looks like a generic afterthought, most people won't give the inside a chance. I went through dozens of iterations before I landed on the one.

Formatting the interior with Reedsy

I formatted the book with Reedsy. It's a free tool that turns your manuscript into a clean, book-ready file, and the thing I like about it is that it gives you only a handful of options.

Your trim size and page count mostly come down to the sizes Reedsy and Amazon KDP offer, so you're picking from a short menu instead of inventing anything. Try a couple and see which one feels right in your hands. I like smaller books because they're easier to travel with.

One thing I did that was a little different was use block paragraphs instead of indented ones, because I prefer reading that way. It's a small thing, but it's one of the quiet joys of self-publishing.

Book Title & Subtitle

The original title of the book was going to be "The Permissionless Approach." After talking with a bunch of people I respected, they all said it was a mouthful and too corporatey, so I was like, "Okay, I'm going to change it to 'Permissionless.'" People said that was hard to say and still hard to roll off the tongue, so I had to come up with different ideas. I thought of:

• Be Unstoppable

• Be Inevitable

• Relationships Run the World

• Be Impossible To Ignore

Then I was playing basketball with a friend (shoutout Casper), and he asked, “If you had to describe the outcome of this book in one phrase, what would you say?”

“Work with the best,” I said.

“Wait… that’s it!”

Part 2: Publishing mechanics

ISBNs

If you want your book to count as a book, you need an ISBN. It registers your book and makes it official. If you don't have one, technically you haven't published a book.

You can buy them from a company called Bowker. Get the 10-pack, because you need a separate ISBN for every format (audiobook, Kindle, paperback).

KDP

Go to KDP, click through the steps, submit your information, and the book goes live in a day or two. That's it. It’s pretty intuitive.

If you only care about Amazon, KDP is all you need, and it pays the best print royalty. If you want your book in physical bookstores and libraries too, add IngramSpark, which distributes to the 40,000+ stores Amazon doesn't.

Pro tip: use both with your own ISBN, and to turn OFF KDP's "Expanded Distribution" (it drops your royalty and does a worse job than Ingram at the same goal).

Pricing

Amazon prints on demand, and a paperback costs roughly $1.00 plus about a penny ($0.012) per page to print. So a 200-page book costs you around $3.40 a copy to print. Your royalty is 60% of the list price minus that print cost.

• Priced at $9.99, you net about $2.60 a copy.

• Priced at $14.99, about $5.60 a copy.

• Priced at $19.99, about $8.60 a copy.

Two best practices (but again, there are no rules):

1. First, keep the paperback at $9.99 or above, because below that Amazon drops you to a lower royalty tier, so you lose on price AND on rate at the same time.

2. Second, for ebooks, Amazon only pays the good 70% rate if you price between $2.99 and $9.99. Outside that band you drop to 35%. So most nonfiction ebooks live at $4.99 to $6.99.

My take is to price it lower than you think. Your job as the author is to sell the first 10,000 copies. It's the book's job to sell the rest. You want to reach the point where the book starts selling itself, and that's hard to do when it's priced at $30.

This is one more reason I'm not a fan of traditional publishing. They control the price, they want to earn the advance back, so they price it high, and that chokes the book's growth.

Kickstarter and fulfillment

One thing I'm doing differently this time is launching on Kickstarter, with pre-order bonuses that scale with how many copies you buy. I'll cover the marketing logic of that in the next section.

Amazon KDP won't let you pre-sell print copies, only the Kindle version, so Kickstarter is how I run a proper pre-order for the physical book.

For fulfillment:

1. People back the book on Kickstarter (and share their addresses)

2. I place the orders through my own Amazon account using their shipping addresses, so Amazon prints and ships the copies directly, with no warehouse or third-party logistics company to deal with.

Physical stores and your imprint

If you want your book in physical stores, you'll likely register with IngramSpark and pitch local shops. I don't know much about that yet, so I won't speak on that.

On naming your publisher, for my first book I just listed myself. People recommend creating your own imprint so you get a logo on the book and it looks more official. I don't think it matters much, but it's up to you.

Part 3: Marketing

Start with your goal

My goal is to get as many people as possible to read the book (not to make the most money or hit a bestseller list).

Because I'm optimizing for readers, I price the book low, give a lot away, and spend most of my energy getting people to tell other people about it.

You can't buy your way to a lot of readers. You can buy a spike of sales with ads, but the moment you stop paying, it stops. Word of mouth is the only thing that keeps working after you do.

That's why everything I do during a launch has to answer at least one of 3 questions:

1. Is the book good enough that people want to pass it on?

2. Am I getting it in front of the right people?

3. Does the reader have a reason to buy now, and a reason to share it?

What I got wrong the first time

My first book did well, but I left a lot on the table. 5 mistakes I'm not repeating:

1. There was no urgency. Buying it on launch day was the same as buying it 6 months later, so people waited, then forgot.

2. I leaned on podcasts to sell copies. They're great for telling your story, but they don't sell many books directly. People who listen are different from people who read.

3. I spent weeks on 1-on-1 messages to mid-size creators, and it was mostly a waste of time. Spend more time on people in your inner circle instead of reaching out to semi-mutuals.

4. I barely teased the book before it dropped, so there was no build-up and no tension.

5. I didn't have enough allies promoting it with me, so I was mostly shouting alone. 

Build the well before you're thirsty

The best relationships in a launch are the ones you built long before you needed anything.

Over the past 6 months I took week-long trips to San Francisco, New York, Miami, and Los Angeles, mostly to meet my internet friends in person, people I'd known online for years and was finally seeing face to face. When you spend years being useful and easy to root for, you end up with a lot of people who want to see you win by the time you have something to share.

I also started teasing the book early. I began documenting the process in September 2025, about a year before launch. I shared the messy middle: finishing chapters, revealing the table of contents, teasing the cover, and testing the title and subtitle in public. By the time the book is ready to buy, the people following along have watched it get made, and they're waiting for it instead of hearing about it cold.

Give people a reason to buy now

My biggest mistake the first time was not having an incentive for people to buy the book immediately. There was no difference between buying on launch week vs. buying 6 months from now.

This time I'm running a pre-order where the bonuses get better the more copies you buy, and all of them disappear the day the window closes. When you back it early, you get the book plus a stack of bonuses.

The bonuses are cheap for me to produce but valuable to the reader: the 3 pitch decks I used to land roles with beehiiv, Noah Kagan, and Acquisition.com, plus 4 bonus chapters that didn't make the final book. They scale with quantity, so the person who was going to buy one copy starts thinking about buying 3 for their friends/team.

Borrow other people's audiences

The fastest way to reach new readers is to get in front of people who already have an audience.

I do newsletter swaps, where I share something of theirs and they share the book. I won't pretend that's a clever trick you can copy overnight, though. Most of it comes from friendships I've built over the last 5 years, and those take time.

Side note: one of the bonuses when you pre-order the 3-pack of my new book is a bonus chapter on “networking 201 without being cringe”. 

Social Media Strategy

The biggest lesson I learned from a mentor from his book launch:

The bigger a deal you make of something, the bigger a deal your audience thinks it is.

The goal is to stay top of mind without boring people or making them tune me out, so I've lined up a stack of small moves that each put the book back in front of people a different way:

1. I've scheduled 500+ posts across X, LinkedIn, and Instagram, mostly book excerpts on simple graphic cards. They aren't built to go viral, but they keep the book on the feed.

2. I post 3 times on launch day to create an everywhere effect. The more places people see it in one day, the bigger the moment feels.

3. When the launch post goes up, I go back to my first book's launch post and like every comment. It puts me back in those people's notifications, and some of them click over, see the new launch, and want to support it.

4. Every hour after the launch post, I add a comment with a new detail, a testimonial, or a small win. Each comment bumps the post back to the top of feeds.

5. On day 2, I quote tweet the launch post with another tidbit, since quote tweets are getting a lot of reach on X right now.

6. The day after launch, I post a reintroduction of me and my story, because a lot of new people are on my profile by then.

7. I run book-association posts, like a list of my favorite blue books, or my favorite books for ambitious young people, or the best books I read this past year, each with mine in the mix. It associates my book to ones people already like.

8. I repurpose my old tweets that already did well, tweak them slightly, and drop a CTA comment underneath linking to the book.

9. I set up ManyChat so that anyone who comments "best" automatically gets a link to pre-order. It removes the friction between wanting the book and finding where to buy it.

On top of the posts, I have a 15-email sequence over the launch. People don't open boring subject lines and don't like being sold to, but they'll happily read a good story. So almost every email opens with a story and turns toward the book near the end. Each email I've tried to make valuable enough so that even if you don't buy the book, you still get value in the email.

Small swings

Over the past year I've gone on a lot of small podcasts, partly to test ideas from the book and partly to iterate on how I tell my story. Each one tightens my answers and sound bites, so by the time I go on the bigger shows, I already know what resonates.

I'm also printing physical sales letters and giving them out to local neighbors. I don't expect much from it, but the more ways you find to put your book in front of people, the better, and every so often a strange little experiment surprises you (shoutout Jon for this idea!)

Another experiment I want to test is reaching the circle around a person instead of the person. That sounds weird, so let me explain. I wrote about this in the book… a bikini brand couldn't get Kendall Jenner's attention, so they sent free products to all of her friends until she wanted it herself. Similarly, if I can get copies into the hands of a popular entrepreneur’s team, and the book is good, it spreads through the company and works its way back to them.

Ask for reviews inside the book

A lot of a book's momentum rides on how many reviews it has on Amazon, since reviews make it easier for new readers to find and trust it. One thing I got right the first time was asking for a review inside the book, right in the middle. Some people think that's too marketing-y. But my first book has more reviews than other books that were launched at a similar time as mine (and got more sales), which tells me the mid-book ask beats saving it for the end.

Book Bonuses

Throughout the book, I have QR codes to download bonuses.

When people download the bonuses, they are automatically subscribed to an email sequence where, a week later, I ask them if they are willing to leave a review for the book.

Will this get a ton of reviews? Probably not. But it’ll probably be more than zero.

Asking for Blurbs

I'm not a big fan of asking well-known authors to write a blurb for my book just for the sake of it, especially if they haven't read the book. For the blurbs on the back cover of my book, I chose three people:

1. Dan Koe, because he played one of the biggest roles in my career, and I thought it'd be a cool full-circle moment.

2. Kieran Drew, same there.

3. Corey Wilks, who was a beta reader for the book and had really nice things to say. Also a super great friend :)

I would much rather have people who read the book and loved it be a part of the book's journey than someone I don't really know just because they're famous.

Conclusion

We did it. I know that was a lot to digest. Please, please, please don’t overthink any of this.

The TLDR: If I had to summarize a successful book launch in one word, it would be “intentional.” The best of the best spend a ton of time thinking through all the tiny details most people overlook. This is why they're the best of the best

And if you haven't finished writing your book yet, ignore all of this. Write the book first.

If you want to check out my new book, you can find it here.

Rooting for you!
-Jay ✊🏻