I Can't Publish Because... The Book Isn't Good Enough

Last week, I said the worst writer fear is "I'm not a real writer if I don't publish" because it just stops the writing altogether. I said that no matter how good or bad it is, writing is writing, and it all helps you get better.

So let's say you do get over the voice in your head that tells you you shouldn't write what you can't publish (and from my experience, that's almost impossible to do, especially after you start publishing). You finally write, and you aren't worried about whether or not it's something you can publish. You just write whatever you want to, and one day, you finish your manuscript that was just for fun and say to yourself, Hey, maybe I actually could publish this.

If you're anything like me, your brain responds to your dreams with an abrupt "Ha! Be realistic. You could never." In his book on marketing, Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World, Michael Hyatt says, "I wrote once about how the mind-set of successful creatives...differ from less successful ones. I listed thinking big as the number one characteristic....As soon as we have a big thought, we check ourselves: C'mon. Get real. That will never happen. You have to be more realistic. And so it goes. We mistake this for wisdom" (Hyatt, 36).*

That's what this blog post series is for - to convince you that the voice saying "you can't do that" probably isn't actual wisdom. No matter what excuses the voice in your brain feeds you - whether it's that you aren't good enough, you don't have the money, you don't have the time, you don't have the resources - it's probably wrong.

I'm not good enough is one of the first things that pops into your brain. That little voice is always ready to tell you your book is no good, your writing is terrible, you have no plot, you have bad grammar, you can't spell, you're bad at description, your dialogue is unrealistic, etc., etc., etc. For a split second, you have the dream - the world in your head could be out there for everyone to see - and then you squish it with, "This isn't good enough to publish."

But in a way, the voice is right. If you just finished your book, there is a 99.999% chance it's not good enough to be published.

The good news is, no one's is. "Good enough" is a ridiculous concept.

Your first draft is fantastic. It's absolutely "good enough." Look at that. You had an idea, you sat down, you used your beautiful God given creative skills to figure out how to put that idea into a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand words, and here it is. You carried through. You finished. Think about it for a while - it isn't wrong to feel proud of what you've done just because you have further to go. That idea is no longer an idea. It's a story - a book - a novel.

Is that first draft "good enough" to be published?

No. In almost every case for every author - from J. K. Rowling to C. S. Lewis to me, what little experience I have - when you type "The End," you're nowhere near the end.

Is that bad?

No! It just means you have further to go. You finished the first draft, and that's huge. Celebrate it. Don't let the thought that it isn't good enough to be published get into your head and kill your dream.

I like to think of it as the potential your book has. When you finish your first draft, it's living up to its full potential as a first draft. Grammar mistakes, lost plot points, rocky scenes, it doesn't matter. It's finished, and that's all a first draft needs to be.

But look at it for a second, and instead of thinking about how it isn't good enough, think about how much potential it has to become a final draft. I like this much better. It keeps me thinking realistically. Yes, it's not ready to be published yet. But it also keeps the dream in my head alive. Think about how good it will be someday. It's so ready to be so amazing, and no one can help it get there but you.

And once it's there, what's stopping you from putting it out into the world?

*I'll probably quote this book a lot - it's inspired me a lot, and I absolutely recommend reading it if you're going to try to manage your own publicity (or have any sort of big idea you might pursue).