Why You Need to Schedule Time to Do Nothing on Your Book
You can’t dilly-dally these days as an author. Time to market matters more than ever if you want your writing to bring in an income that’s viable enough to cover your bills.
But if you look at your production schedule, is there time to…
…do nothing?
It feels counterintuitive to digitally or physically shelve a manuscript that needs to work for you and your brand. But time means perspective, and perspective makes books better.
When you’re deep in the writing and editing process, you eventually end up too close to the work. Everything starts running together and feeling absolute.
Setting a manuscript aside — even for just a few weeks — gives you the space necessary to break free from the mental familiarity and sequencing. The writing becomes new enough again to your brain that you can consider other facts or developmental approaches, and it’s easier to spot and address potential typos, grammar, or flow problems.
Think of it like doing a painting. If you come back after waiting for a layer of paint to dry, the canvas will look a little different than when the paint was wet. Colors often darken and lose intensity, appearing more matte. Artists try to accommodate this by mixing colors a little lighter to start and coming back to add varnish. But even after that, they have to allow the paint to fully cure to its maximum hardness and adhesion.
There’s no right or wrong for how long to hit pause. It all depends on the length and complexity of the material, and life circumstances often play a role in the scheduling, too. You also have a choice about whether to do small milestone pauses or wait until the draft is complete — many authors do both, taking a break after every few chapters and then taking a longer break at the end.
Editors, designers, marketers and others on a book launch team will encourage you to get your manuscript out as quickly as you can. But adding time to your production sequence for your words to dry and cure is not wasteful. It’s critical to the quality of the end result. Aim to be quick, but always build a calendar that acknowledges time often means improvement that reduces overall risk.
[Transcript summary]
As an author, you are probably working really hard to schedule a bunch of things to get your book out into the world. You’re scheduling editing, you’re scheduling time with a cover designer, a whole bunch of things. But if you are not scheduling time to just leave the manuscript sit, you’re shooting yourself in the foot.
The whole idea is that when you leave your manuscript to just sit, whether it’s a couple weeks, couple months, maybe even a year or more, when you come back to it, you see it with fresh eyes. That does not happen if you try and rush things.
And the problem is that now, especially with AI, we have this furious pace that we have to, we feel like we have to turn out all of these books really, really fast.
But I’m telling you, take the time. Factor it into your schedule and your calendar. Leave the room to do that. The book will turn out better. Take care.