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.

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:

1. When you mess with art too much, you mess it up. Over-editing can destroy what was unique and beautiful in a book.
2. You improve in your art through practice, so if you’re serious about writing, you need to move forward and write the next book, and then the next book, and so on.

Remember all the long years that you yearned to become an author, and you envisioned what that would feel like? I wonder: is the reality everything you’d hoped it would be? Or have you slipped into feeling miserable for any (or many) of the following reasons: 

• You just can’t stop rewriting and editing your book in the pursuit of perfection.
• Sharing your book has proved way too scary; what if reviewers criticise it?
• You’ve tried to find an agent and publisher, and ‘failed’ to do so.
• The world of self-publishing into which you delved turned out to be a complicated minefield with a steep learning curve.
• You published the book traditionally and were disappointed by sales and/or reviews.
• You published the book independently and were disappointed by sales and/or reviews.
• Marketing requires skills, know-how, energy and funds that are sorely lacking.
• You feel huge pressure to put out another book quickly, and another, and another, even though the whole experience of writing and publishing has long since ceased being fun.

I’ve been working one-on-one with authors for more than 18 years, and in that time I’ve known plenty who’ve become disappointed, perhaps even bitter, that the reality of being an author doesn’t meet their expectations. They grit their teeth and plough on, until they reach breaking point. For some, that’s after one book; for others, after five or ten. But it’s a safe bet that for those authors who really aren’t enjoying writing, the end will come, and it won’t be in the form of a three-book deal from Bloomsbury.
 
Robert Frost wrote: ‘No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.’ To that I would add: ‘No enjoyment for the writer, no enjoyment for the reader.’