How to Finish a Book

If you want to learn how to finish a book, this page is the place to be. I've seen many articles on writing books, brainstorming for books and how to publish books, but I've been hard pressed to find a site or page geared toward finishing the darn thing. If the hardest part of a book is putting the first words down on paper, the second hardest thing has to be putting the last ones down. Once you put together the nerve, tenacity and will needed to start a book, a good routine and a little bit of work each day can get you pretty close to completion. Learning how to finish a book, get it to your publisher or your self-publishing platform and put it away with hopes of starting another can be a real challenge.

When you work so hard on one project there's a part of you that wants it to be absolutely perfect. There are some passages in the book that you absolutely love and others that you want to do everything in your power to change. These are the kind of passages that cause your obsessive compulsive disorder to take over and make you want to go over a million times. I realize that people say "writing is re-writing." Well, writing is also about your readers actually reading what you write and if you're never willing to let the book out of your hands, you're missing out on a key part of the process.

One of the best pieces of advice I ever heard was to push forward now, even if you aren't sure of something, because you'll be much farther ahead a year from now than people who waited until the perfect moment. I've taken that approach to a certain extent with my writing. I still give my books a thorough revision when they're completed and I have an editor who looks over my stuff, but I know that I have a lot of years left to write in my life. If I spend months of years changing one line or another, I'll never know how to finish a book. I would also never be able to work on the next one, which might become the big one.

The fact that publishing has, for some, become a point and click process, gives you even less reason to hold back from concluding your book and releasing it into "the wild."

My tips on how to finish a book are as follows: 1. Set a clear date to complete your editing and to release the book. 2. Prepare for the release by hiring a cover designer and by writing out the back content, dedication, about the author, etc. 3. Get all your ducks in a row: ISBN number, marketing plan, website, etc. 4. As soon as the book has gone through the necessary edits, get it published immediately.

Speeding through the editing process has led to a few errors here and there, but a book with an error is more likely to sell a copy than a book that hasn't been released yet. Happy writing! 

Done with How to Finish a Book? Go back to Creative Writing Tips. 

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Written by Bryan Cohen


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