Once you’ve shipped your book, leave it at sea

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:

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.

Here’​s an example of re-editing in action. ​Back in 2016, Stephenie Meyer published Life and Death, a reimagining of her bestselling book Twilight.

In her foreword, the author breaks down the changes she made in the new version of her book. Only 15% of the revisions were in line with rewriting Twilight with gender-swapped characters (which was the point of the exercise). All of the rest of the changes were down to Stephenie re-editing her book ten years since its publication, to fix perceived mistakes and inconsistencies and add in elements she’d dreamt up in the last decade. She writes:

70% of the changes I made were because I was allowed to do a new editing run ten years later. I got to fix every word that has bothered me since the book was printed, and it was glorious. [Author’s emphasis]

I wondered when I read this:

• How did ardent fans (of which, at the time, there were many) feel about these edits? Some, presumably, adored every original word. Sometimes, what an author sees as a weakness is a thing of beauty to a reader. 
• Did re-editing Twilight help Stephenie write the next book, and the next? I wonder whether going back and essentially criticising her younger writer self dented her confidence at all in writing the next book. If as you write a book you know that in the future you’ll come back and pull it apart, how do you find the courage to finish it and ship it?

Here’s a simple approach to writing: ship the book, and then leave it at sea. It’s not an easy path to tread for any author, but it’s a path that leads to writing more, learning more and, crucially, enjoying the writing journey.

With best wishes,