Is Your Book "Ready"?
and how will you you know?
Hi, I’m Kate. Ask an Author is a reader-supported newsletter providing advice and support for authors at all stages of writing, publishing, and hand-wringing. If you know someone this applies to, you can forward them this email and encourage them to sign up. Have a question? Fill out this form and I’ll answer it in a future response.
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Dear Kate,
After you have gone back and fixed all the issues you just discussed, how do you know when your book is ready? I'm really confused.
— Diane
Dear Diane,
This is a really good and — alas! — really difficult question. :)
When you talk about fixing the issues I’d discussed, I think you’re referring to this post on rewriting a manuscript after you’ve finished a solid enough draft to understand more deeply what your book is about:
Rewrite Your Book
That post was in some ways building on another post about what to look for as you go through the stages of revision, from big picture to medium picture to fine tuning:
The Revision Checklist
I know I’ve lobbed a LOT of info your way in different posts about things to look for in your work, with strategies for how to address the diferent types of problems that can arise. And sometimes it’s not so much about fixing obvious issues as just finding ways to continually deepen and tighten and amplify. But how do you know when you’ve done enough? There’s ultimately no definitive way to tell when a manuscript is “done,” because there’s no clear finish line. A lot of it is instict and practice — writing enough, and revising enough, that you start to internalize a deeper sense of when something feels complete.
The first thing I’d ask you back is: ready for what?
When you ask how do you know when the book is ready, it depends on what you mean by ready. Ready for beta readers and critique partners? Ready to send to an agent? Ready for your agent to submit to publishers? Ready for you to submit to small presses yourself? Ready for your publisher to send to production (ie start the process of publication)? Ready for you to upload to retail sites yourself?
For me, I consider a piece ready for outside readers and feedback when I feel I’ve taken it as far as I can on my own. I’ve reread it a lot on my own, I’ve looked for all the plot holes and problem spots that I can find, I’ve done my best to give it a solid shape and story, and every time I sit down I feel stymied as to what to do next. That feeling of “I don’t know where to go with this now” is my internal barometer for what “ready for the next steps” means to me. I might know there are problems but not know how to fix them. I might not realize there are problems, but hearing other people’s views will help me see where I haven’t fully conveyed on the page what exists more clearly in my mind. I might learn where something could become clearer, or more interesting, or more dramatic, or more [fill in the blank].
I hit that “done for now” spot multiple times over the course of writing and revising a manuscript. I write to the end of my abilities, pause, get feedback, reread, go back to the beginning, and push to the end of my abilities again.
I once had a drawing teacher who would frame this process as: work until you’ve reached “a satisfactory stopping point.” He never used the word “done.” A piece was never finished, because what would that even mean?? I’ve carried this framework over into my writing, so that whether I’m finishing up a first draft, a twentieth draft, even a final draft, I’m asking myself: have I reached a satisfactory stopping point? Or is there still more I can work on?
What about determining when something is ready to go wider than that inner circle for feedback? I’m talking about ready to query, or submit, or publish. That gets harder, because the stakes are higher. You don’t want to query too soon, and you don’t want to publish a book that you’ll later wish you’d taken more time with. My advice on that is two-fold and completely contradictory. (yay!)
Do your best, send it out, and see what happens. Sending work out is an important step in the process of honing your craft and always pushing yourself forward, and sometimes you just have to do it so that you get used to it, you get input when you see how things do or don’t land with your intended audience, and you can always go back and revise if you wind up with an avalanche of no’s. It’s not uncommon for people to self publish a first novel, decide later that they put it up too soon, and take it down to rework. As my brilliant agent likes to say, no one’s on the operating table in publishing. Even if you get rejected, you will be okay. (See this post on rejection, and whether you’re sending your work out enough.)
Give your work more time to cook before you get too excited about getting it into the world. If this is your first novel, or your first time writing something with the intention to publish, your own eyes and the feedback from, say, your best friend or your neighbor or your spouse or the other unpublished pals in your writing group might be a good starting point, but the more you write and read and practice, the more you’ll start to notice more areas you can improve upon even when your biggest fans are telling you how good it is. This process of improvement is (hopefully!) never-ending, which is where point #1 comes into play. But as I’ve written in other posts on when to start querying, I think people can tend to rush this step and go out before they’ve tended enough to their work. I stand by this point as much as I stand by the point that sometimes, you just take a leap into the unknown because there’s no one who can tell you when something is truly, definitively, “done.”
I don’t actually think I know any agented, published authors whose first published novels were the first novels they wrote, or even the first novels they queried. Often they aren’t the first novels they submitted, either — I’m in this category, too. Certainly there are people whose process works out this way, but there are more of us in the “try, and then try again” camp. I always think you should take your manuscript as far as you can — to that “satisfactory stopping point” or the point where it feels fully realized and complete — and develop the muscles that come from seeing a project all the way through. But a lot of us have to go through this process multiple times, so please don’t despair if you find yourself in this position. The upshot is that project #2 will almost inevitably start off stronger right off the bat, because you’re able to apply everything you learned from finishing and sticking with project #1 and have so much more experience to draw on.
I know this maybe more confusing than clarifying, because I talk about being done and then have basically said there’s no way to say when done is. !!!! But it’s a question like asking how to know whether a book is good or not. There’s no external, objective measure to tell you. You’re feeling you way to the ending of this process just as much as you felt your way through the beginning and middle of it, working out what the book would be about and how you’d go about writing it. You might decide your manuscript is done, and then change your mind later and come back to it. You might decide your manuscript is done, change your mind later, but not come back to it because you’ve moved on to something else. (I have done both of these things!) You don’t want to hang on to a piece forever, never letting yourself finish or giving yourself the chance to start something new. You also don’t want to deny yourself the opportunity to really sit with your work and give it the time and space to steep. The answer, to the extent that there is one, is somewhere in the middle and will take some trial and error with each project as you decide what “finished” looks like, and whether it’s there or not.
No matter what, Diane, keep going!
Kate