little more research…” and then two years later your book is still stuck. That is bullshit, and procrastination to stop you from finish- ing your book. If you want to become a better writer to eventually write a much better book, you can do that. But the path to that destination is publishing this book now. A FINAL NOTE ON FINISHING YOUR EDITS Most first-time authors fall into the “editing death spiral.” This is when they keep editing the same thing over and over, and cannot stop. We see this all the time. They will do the first three rounds of edits fine, then we finish our edits on the book, give it back to the author, and they spend six months with it. Not because they are making substantive changes. Instead they get lost in details, fretting over small word choices, making tiny edits, and obsessing over obscure details. We almost have to pry the book out of their hands so we can finish it, even though they don’t really have anything left to change. This can be driven by many different forces, such as perfection- ism, fear of publishing, fear of success, or fear of failure. There will always be more to work on, more to change, more to improve. That thinking will kill your book. There are two aphorisms we use to help get authors past this point: “Perfect is the enemy of good, shipped is better than perfect.” —Seth godin “[Books] are never truly finished, only abandoned.” —leonardo da vinCi 172 · ThE SCriBE METhOD