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Don't Publish That Book!

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If there’s a common flaw in self-publishing, it’s that too many books are published too soon. Experienced voices across the publishing world continually advise self-publishers to get help with editing, and not just copyediting but story editing too. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to properly edit your own work. But the siren call of the Kindle store is often too seductive. The urge to finish your first draft, chuck it through a spellchecker and release it in to the wild is often far too strong for eager writers to resist.

But resist you must. Not resisting results in your name being married, permanently, to sub-standard work which doesn’t show off your talents to their best. Do you really want, in five or ten years time, to look back on your early work and cringe? More to the point, do you really want your first act of publishing to result in the irreversible blotting of your copybook with your potential fans?

I had a chat about this with crime writer Steve Mosby and urban fantasy author Lou Morgan on Twitter yesterday after Lou discovered an old manuscript:

Very, very few authors can produce a stunning manuscript without ever having set pen to paper before. And whilst it’s an alluring thought, that you might be one of those incredibly talented few, the odds aren’t in your favour. If you can accept that fact, then you have to ask yourself whether you want to make your mistakes, many of which will be howlers, in public or in private.

An Evening with John Mayer (WireImage via @daylife)

Musician John Mayer talked about this very problem in a recent clinic at Berklee, as well as the importance of resisting the lure of promoting everything on social media as soon as it’s done (or before).

The period of time before you become well known is an essential opportunity for you to find your voice and mature your talent. And what Mayer says to musicians is equally as true for authors:

“This time is a really important time for you guys because nobody knows who you are, and nobody should. This is not a time to promote yourself. It doesn’t matter. This is the time to get your stuff together. Promotion can be like that. You can have promotion in 30 seconds if your stuff is good. Good music is its own promotion.”

I think social media is a great way to meet other authors, publishers, agents, book designers and readers, and it’s easy to forget that it's more than possible to engage with the online book community without having a book to promote. Mayer, though, feels that social media is not only a time sink, but also a creativity sink which steals users’ focus away from what they should be concentrating on: their music (or in this case, their writing). Much as I love social media, I do agree with him about that, and the fact that social media makes it far too easy to start promoting work that simply isn’t ready:

“You got the distraction of being able to publish yourself immediately, and it is a distraction if you’re not done producing what the product is going to be that you’re going to someday use the promotion to sell…I had to go through the same thing I’m talking to you about – what you have to go through – which is to completely manage all the distraction. Manage the temptation of publishing yourself.”

Whether you agree with Malcolm Gladwell that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to reach your potential or not, there can be no doubt that it takes hard work, a lot of mistakes, and the ability to recognise and rectify those mistakes to become a good writer. If you’re starting out and you’ve just written your first book, you really do have to ask yourself the hard question: Is this book actually any good? Would I benefit from leaving it in a drawer for a few months, or even years?

Maybe, just maybe, you shouldn’t rush to publish that book.