You are almost finished with your book! You plan to submit it to your publisher in a couple of months.

You’ve been working on it for a long time. You’ve not only got a full draft but you’ve developed a process for writing and revising the book. You think you know what you will do. You just aren’t sure how to know when you are finished.

This is exactly the issue a member of the Academic Writing Studio brought to a Writing Clinic at the beginning of the summer. This post is a revised version of our conversation.

• How do you know that this book is good enough? 
• How do you decide which questions need to be addressed in this book and which can be left for subsequent research and publication? 
• How do you feel confident that this is an original contribution when you are thoroughly sick of it?

Your concern is justified. You’ve learned a lot as you wrote the book. It’s very common to be a bit bored with it by this stage, and even feel as if there isn’t an original contribution at all. Furthermore, research raises more questions than it answers. You probably have a bunch of new questions and ideas you want to pursue.

My advice focuses mostly on the process.

This may seem odd, but over many years I have found that you develop confidence *through* your process.

You have no control over how other people will read your work, much less how they will respond to it. 

You do have control over your process.

You need a process that reassures you that you’ve:

• communicated your argument clearly,
• supported it with evidence, and
• situated it in the scholarly conversations to which you are contributing.

Your editor at the press, the series editor (if there is one), and the peer reviewers will provide comments that will help you make it good enough to publish.

The editors and reviewers have not been deeply engaged with this book for months or years. It is new and fresh to them. But they have relevant expertise. And you need a draft that is ready for their input.

Many years ago a colleague, Cairene MacDonald, wrote an insightful blog post about the difference between refinement and perfectionism that speaks to the way the process itself can help you feel confident.

In it, she pointed out that perfectionism is guided by fear of how people will read and respond to your work.

You know what that feels like, and it’s not fun. It is also something you can’t control, no matter how much you revise your writing.

Refinement is focused on the work itself.

“It’s about a certain precision. It’s about making smart choices about what one’s creation needs to do its job in the world.”
—Cairene MacDonald

Although her original piece is no longer available online, she allowed me to share her thoughts on my website at the time in “Refinement vs Perfectionism”.

What does “refinement” look like?

Let’s start with what it does *not* look like.

The process you have used to get to this stage is not the process you need to get your book to ‘good enough to submit’.

When you’re nearing submission of a book project, your inner voice may be saying:

“I’m close enough, I want to be done with this chapter and then move on [to the next chapter].”

However, no matter how hard you work to make an individual chapter really good, when you move on, there will be several moments where you are fixing something else and realize you have to go back.

You may be telling yourself that this only happened in the past because you weren’t doing the chapter revisions ‘properly’. That’s not true. This frustrating pattern is inevitable at this stage, unless you take a different approach.

Even though each chapter is doing something different, a book is not just a series of chapters. Each chapter relates to the others. Every chapter is contributing to the bigger argument the whole book is making.

As tempting as it is to continue to work chapter by chapter, this is not what your book needs in this final stage before submission.

A Whole Book Approach

Refinement means considering the book as a whole and making decisions to ensure it is doing what you need it to do.

That’s daunting.

There is a lot going on in the book. You can’t possibly keep track of everything at once. You will need to break up this process somehow. If not by chapter, then how?

This is where something I learned from Rachael Herron comes in handy. Rachael has a podcast called Ink In Your Veins (FKA How Do You Write?) in which she interviews writers about their process. She also writes fiction and memoir, teaches fiction and memoir writing, and has published a book about her process. 

Rachael talks about revision passes: Once you have a full draft, you can divide the revision process based on the specific thing you want to revise and refine.

In working with academic writers, I have adapted this idea to the process of producing the chapter drafts.

You’ve got all the chapters. You’ve been over them a few times. You know that the chapter arguments are clearly communicated and supported with evidence. You’ve integrated the literature that informed your analysis and argument. The internal transitions are clear. And the draft introduction and conclusion to each chapter at least attempts to make the connection to what comes before and after, and possibly the whole book argument.

Now you want to focus on those things that turn those chapters into a really solid book.

Pick specific things to focus on. For example,

• Identifying the overarching themes, then check each one
  • Does it go through the whole book?
  • Does it drop out somewhere?
• What is the big argument the book is trying to make?
  • Is the chapter order appropriate?
  • Does each chapter clearly relate to this bigger argument?
• Check the theoretical or conceptual framework
  • Have you repeated things in several chapters?
  • What needs to go in the introduction?
  • What needs to be in specific chapters?
  • Is it consistent and clear?
• Maybe check the wider literature you refer to
  • What is important to situate the book as a whole?
  • What is only relevant to specific chapters?
  • Is there anything in here that doesn’t serve the book?

This is not a complete list.

What revision passes do you need?

Your first step is probably to make a list of the passes that would be useful for your book.

As you do this you will need to think about your own expectations as a reader.

This draft is no longer for you. It does not need to show all the work you did to get here, nor be presented in the order that you figured things out. It needs to speak to your readers.

If you were peer reviewing a book manuscript, what elements would you pay attention to?

It’s a good idea to start with passes focus on the research itself:

• Argument
• Evidence
• Theoretical/conceptual framing
• Engagement with the literature

Once you have completed those refinements, you can shift to revision passes looking at specific aspects of the writing style.

• Transitions
• Sentence structure & word choice
• Subheadings

Finally, you’ll need to check all your references and footnotes, and make sure everything you have referred to is in your reference list and nothing is in the reference list that you have not referred to in the text. (If you have any funds, this is something you can pay an RA to do.)

Basically, on each pass you will be doing specific things. If you see something else, you can make a note, but keep moving on your focused revision. You do not want to distract yourself with other types of revision.

The whole refined draft will need to be proofread before you submit it, just to check for typos, spelling mistakes, and that type of thing. (Another thing you can pay someone else to do.)

How will this feel?

This method avoids the risk that you will be berating yourself, “Why can’t I even finish this chapter?”

As Cairene MacDonald says:

“While the process of refinement may be challenging and leave me tired, it’s a good sort of exhaustion – like after a good workout.”

As you work, your goal is to feel good about what you’ve accomplished with each pass. This will motivate you to keep going.

Because you are focusing on the whole book, you can feel good about finishing a particular stage. Celebrate these small wins!

If you find yourself being motivated by fear, stop. Do whatever you need to do to regulate your nervous system. You are not writing for your harshest critics. You don’t have to prove yourself.

Focus on the book and what it needs. Remember that your editor at the press and the series editor (if there is one) want to publish this book. They, and the peer reviewers, will provide comments to get it from the version you submit, to publishable. The editor will also help you figure out how to address those editorial comments.

Submission is always going to feel vulnerable. Even if you are feeling confident about the draft you are submitting, submitting still makes you vulnerable. Other people will read it. You will get comments on it from editors and peer reviewers. There will be another revision. It’s okay.

You can do this!

Related Posts:

Why are you writing this book?

How to find a book structure that works

Motivation and accomplishment in your writing practice

What to do about a stalled book project

This post was originally sent to the newsletter on 11 October 2024.