Are you feeling pressure to publish your book? A sense that you’re not a ‘real’ author unless you publish? I recently wrote a post about shipping your book and then leaving it at sea. I reference Steve Jobs, who told his staff at Apple, ‘You must ship.’
Actually, these are the exact words he said, in a 1983 speech to the Apple Macintosh development team: ‘Real artists ship.’ Of course, Steve was trying to inspire his team to share the products they were developing. Was he making a statement about all creatives in all artistic fields? Probably not. But that neat little aphorism has gone on to haunt some writers (and artists and composers etc., I imagine). If you don’t publish your book, does that mean you’re not a real author? Actually, no. If you look up the word ‘author’ in most dictionaries, you’ll see that publishing the book isn’t integral to the definition. Here’s the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of ‘author’: ‘The writer of a book or other work.’ And if we look at the etymology of ‘author’, we see that it’s derived from Latin and Old French words meaning ‘creator, one who brings about, one who makes or creates’. If you write a book, you’re an author. A real artist. Is one read-through enough? Three? Seventeen? When is a book ready to publish? Let’s talk about proofreading. Not whether your book needs it (it does; all books need proofreading), but how many rounds of proofreading it needs.
Rounds? you may be thinking. But surely one is enough, especially if I hire a professional proofreader? Yes, one round may be enough, if:
The last point may rile you up. Surely a proofreader’s job is to weed out ALL the mistakes? No, actually. As the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading in the UK points out, ‘No matter how well trained, experienced and diligent they are, [proofreaders] are still human.’ A proofreader’s job is to make the book ‘ready for publication – suitable, and of a high enough standard, for the purpose and audience required’. On resisting the urge to re-edit your published book... Steve Jobs famously told Apple employees, ‘You must ship’, meaning that delivery is essential. Creatives can easily get lost in their art and fail to ship it, usually due to an inability to accept the endeavour as complete and ready to share with the world.
Shipping requires courage and self-discipline, and it requires staying power. That means leaving the book as it is once you’ve published it. Not re-editing it. Of course, it’s fine to publish a new edition in which you’ve corrected a typo that slipped through the proofreading net. But fiddling and tinkering and reworking... ask yourself: is this really helping me in my writing journey? Every author is capable of looking at a past work and pulling it to pieces. But in doing so, you’re looking backwards, not forwards; you’re pulling a piece of art out of the time to which it belongs; you’re beating your younger writer self with a large, prickly stick. Toying with a book for months, years even, isn’t helpful because:
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A blog for authors...Writing. Editing. Publishing. Creativity. Inspiration. Books, books, books.
‘If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.’ – Toni Morrison Recent postsCategories |