Why My Book Isn't Published Yet
And Why Delaying It Again Is Okay
I was hoping to launch this substack as a published puzzle book author. It would have been brilliant to have a succinct seven-step guide on how to take your creative idea and share it with the world. The problem is, to this point my journey has not followed a step by step guide. Claiming my journey followed a simple guide would misrepresent my real experience of trying to publish my book.
For the past three months, in my mind, I have been about two weeks away from publishing the book. At one point I was a day away from uploading my cover and text to Amazon for printing. The delay has not been for lack of effort or consistency. I have been working on the project nearly every day for months. It has been more a symptom of unbridled optimism combined with complete ignorance into the editing and feedback process of publishing.
The crazy part is that I am self publishing, the standards that I am trying to meet are my own. There is no editor sending me back copy after copy that needs to be fixed. I do have people proofreading and testing the puzzles for me, but in the end the updates and changes are up to me. I have the final say in when the book gets published.
Are the delays going to be worth it?
As I’m delaying the publication once again, there are a bunch of questions that become really important to reflect on. Am I letting the scope of the book grow out of control? Is perfection becoming the enemy of good? Is there a fear that is preventing me from hitting that publish button? To answer these we need to step back for a second and explore my goals.
My initial goal in writing this book was simply to publish my work. I have zero sales goals; even if I can count the total number of sales on one hand I will be happy if the book is published. Anything beyond this and I will be ecstatic. The problem is, I could have published weeks ago and accomplished my goal. I have a complete set of puzzles that work, and are satisfying to solve.
Is the scope out of control?
For people who love cryptograms and logic puzzles, and who are good at solving both, my book will be a big hit. It is a satisfying series of puzzles with a clever mechanism for revealing the overall book solution. However, until last week, it didn’t occur to me that there might be people who buy the book who are unable to solve it. The only solution in the book requires solvers to solve most of the book before they are able to verify if they are correct.
This is consistent with similar stand alone puzzles where you solve and then a program checks if your solution is correct. Those take minutes, maybe an hour for a hard puzzle, but imagine spending 20 hours trying to solve a book and having no explanation as to why your solution is incorrect!
I could have published to hit my goal, and told myself that I don’t care about sales goals. Although I really don’t have a number of sales that I expect to hit, I do have a standard that I want to meet for anyone who does purchase the book. It is my hope that anyone who intends to complete the book has a satisfying conclusion regardless of being able to solve it on their own.
This shift in goal requires a significant amount of additional work. A more robust set of instructions needs to be written, along with a solution guide. The reveal of the solution needs to be tweaked and some clues need to be updated. Even the cover design needs some minor adjustments to account for the increased page size of the book.
As for my assessment of this increased scope, I believe it adds tremendous value to the project overall. Specifically, having a solution guide should have been part of the initial scope.
Is this perfection being the enemy of good?
This delay is more about making sure all of the pieces for a complete puzzle book are in place. I don’t believe this specifically is a case of me trying to get everything perfect. That is not to say that there are no parts of the project that could fall into this category.
There is one character in the book whose personality is not as cohesive as I would have liked. There is nothing specific that jumps out as being inconsistent, but rather the clues about her feel unplanned (which for the most part they were). In the overall product of the puzzle book, this is really a minor detail. Obsessing over getting her character just right would most definitely be perfection getting in the way of good.
The sheer amount of work that would be required to perfect that character would be overwhelming. Instead of dwelling on this small piece that I see a flaw in, I am going to let this part rest. It will be a reflection of my skill at the time of writing and a lesson for future work.
Is fear holding me back?
“I don’t know if I could take that kind of a rejection”
- George McFly
There is for certain some anxiety that goes along with putting anything out into the public space for everyone to see. In terms of putting things out there though, I actually have way more anxiety about publishing this article. I think the book is really good and puzzle solvers are going to like it. I am perhaps a bit too eager to publish the book.
Writing on substack on the other hand feels a bit daunting. The impostor syndrome after reading dozens of other excellent substacks is real. The first paragraph of this article captures some of my anxiety about this. I’m trying to figure out how to get a creative idea into a packaged product to show the world. I have no idea what I’m doing, but here are my top tips on how to do it!
Although my journey has not been as straightforward as I imagined it to be, the important part for me is to keep marching towards my goals. I have a clear vision as to when the book project will be complete, hopefully this time it will be a true target. I’d love to hear from you, have you ever struggled with knowing when a creative project is "done"? How did you decide it was complete?
Next Week
All of the updates that I am currently working on for the book are driven by the feedback I have received from people reviewing the book. Prompting people to provide useful feedback, then deciphering that feedback to implement changes are important skills that I use everyday in my job as a software engineer. I’ll be starting my series on feedback to provide some of my best tips and go into detail on how you can get better feedback on your work. So make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss any part of the series!