“Why not try?”: Austin Greene ’25 Reflects on Publishing Book

As I chomped down on a sandwich during lunchtime in Dr. Nunalee’s Middle School classroom, I looked at the book I was reading and thought to myself: Could I read every book on the basketball shelf in the Keim Center library?

Having moved to Ravenscroft in eighth grade during the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was only so much socialization I could do during the two-hour block of free time we had between advisory and lunch. So, in order to occupy my brain, I looked toward the Keim Center and the immense amount of books housed there.

A huge basketball fan, I set myself a goal to read as many books as I could that year, including all the books from the basketball shelf. Not only did I read every basketball book they had, I checked out 111 books total that year. The Keim Center librarians grew accustomed to seeing my face day after day, checking out new books and returning old ones. After all, the Middle School’s homework load was very light, and it left me ample time for reading. They even made a tiny plaque for me saying that “Austin Greene had read every book on this shelf.”

Austin Greene ’25 in the Keim Center library, where a plaque commemorates his year of reading every basketball book on the shelf

Once that was done, I began plotting my next endeavor: writing a book of my own. In March of 2020, I started a blog about the National Basketball Association, because my mom was that tired of the redundant basketball facts that she neither cared nor knew anything about. I liked writing and had gained meaningful experience; why not try and write a book?

At first, I was naive to how long the process took. I was convinced I could finish the book, which would be about the NBA’s 2022 All-Stars, within a year. Unfortunately, I learned this wasn’t in the realm of possibility for me, as writing a book (particularly a first book) takes a really long time. Writing a book that only holds relevance in 2022 wouldn’t make it timeless either, meaning it would only hold relevance for, at maximum, a few years. 

I changed the book’s focus to the 2010 NBA All-Stars, reflecting on the journeys of the most dominant players from a decade of basketball. Researching them was much easier, as having a decade’s worth of accolades means a lot of features and stories. 

All of my ninth-grade year (2021-22) was spent writing this book, as well as the summer going into 10th grade and the first semester of the 2022-23 school year. Once I finally finished the last chapter, I felt this wave of relief and pride fill me, amazed at what I’d accomplished. My book was called “Overcoming Adversity: The 2010 NBA All-Stars.” 

The next challenge I faced was the editing stage. Waking up at 5:30 on schooldays to write meant a lot of typos or sentence fragments that shouldn’t have occurred. Grammarly could help with the basics, and BibGuru proved a godsend with the automatic citations, but I was the one who had to comb back through each chapter and do my best to find errors and restructure fragmented sentences.

Sometime during the second semester of 10th grade, I had finished with the tedious process of editing. By then, I’d begun working with a small publisher called Newman Springs. They read, edited, typeset and ultimately published the book — under a pen name, Tex Greene — through the Ingram Content Network, making my book available on platforms like Barnes and Noble and Amazon. 

Having spent so much time reading and editing the book, the publishing process — which took months — felt like it took years. But it’s finally done! My book is available for any person in the world to read, a sobering thought. I’m grateful for the lessons I learned along the way, and I can’t wait to see where my writing will take me.