“Help! I’m almost done with my book but now I’m having a psychospiritual crisis!”

We’ve all heard of the dark night of the soul, right?

Traditionally a concept out of Christian mysticism, it was perhaps most beautifully and substantially defined by St. John of the Cross who wrote poetry and a treatise on the experience from a devoted monastic’s perspective, describing the separation that one feels from God when undergoing a process of intense spiritual growth.

In contemporary life, of course, the term can more broadly refer to any crisis of faith, when it feels like nothing is going right, like nothing is working out. And of course those moments hit most acutely when it feels like the most is at stake, whether personally or professionally, when you’re tackling a substantial, or at least substantially meaningful, project.

And for an author, what could be more meaningful than finally getting your manuscript into the production pipeline on its way to being officially published?

Depending on the project, you may have been working on writing the manuscript for years. You’ve probably been amassing the knowledge or experience in your topic area for much longer than that, and it’s not inconceivable that you’ve been dreaming about being an author, about seeing your name on the cover of a book, since you were very young indeed.

Even if, according to the calendar, the production process involved in getting your book from screen to shelf may feel like it’s taking forever, it’s really only a handful of months in the grand scheme of things. It’s a drop in the bucket compared to all the time you’ve spent envisioning what it will feel like to hold in your hands a printed copy of a book that you’ve written.

But like the process of a caterpillar making its cocoon in order to turn into a butterfly, there’s a whole phase in there when you’re honestly gonna feel like you’ve turned into soup.

What gives?

For authors who’ve never been through this process before, it can all be extremely overwhelming, especially if no one has taken the time to explain the order of events, to share what the benchmarks are, or to clarify exactly why you need to do any of this in the first place.

Coupled with the natural anxiety that comes with preparing to release a deeply meaningful project into the world, the stress of all this can start to take its toll on anyone.

This, my book-writing friend, is the point at which you’re likely going to find yourself experiencing a crisis of faith. Frankly, just put it into your Google Calendar and plan to block yourself some time to wrestle with your own dark night of the soul. You deserve a proper little freak-out, as a treat.

What this freak-out looks like for any given writer is going to differ person to person, of course. 

But the patterns I see most often usually fall into two camps: personal drama unrelated to the book itself, or extreme last-minute temptations to overhaul the text.

OK, So what do you do about it?

The first and most important thing here is just to recognize it’s going to happen.

This is exactly why I’m giving you the cheat code here and straight-up telling you to watch out for it. Hopefully this might soften the experience for you a little bit, even if you aren’t able to outright avoid it.

The second most important thing to know is that a good editor has your back. I promise you that an experienced editor will not only anticipate that something is inevitably gonna go sideways during the editing and production process but will also have systems in place to help you mitigate the issue. So, trust them. Lean into their guidance. Let them assure you, “This is totally not a big deal at all!” Because that also means that when they go, “Hmm, this might cause a bit of a problem,” you know they’re not saying that to worry you or make a mountain out of a molehill. They’re drawing on their expertise to help you avoid bigger headaches down the line.

What Does This Look Like for Personal Crises?

If you’re experiencing a personal catastrophe that doesn’t have anything at all to do with the book itself, this looks, as I said above, like trusting that your editor has built enough time into the production schedule so that your needing to step away to deal with your “real life” isn’t going to completely derail the process.

Maybe someone in your family falls ill. Maybe a big unexpected crisis comes up at your day job. Maybe the plumbing goes wacky in your house.

Well, if the manuscript is still being edited, your editor probably has their head in the dictionary anyway and won’t need your input for several more weeks. If the book is further into the layout process, the editor might be communicating with the designer directly about fine-tuning formatting things and, similarly, might not need your immediate attention on the project in order to keep the ball rolling.

Even if you are in the midst of the query resolution process when your participation is more actively required, a seasoned editorial pro knows not to schedule any one element of the process too tightly against the next phase. There should always be a bit of wiggle room built in so that the entire workflow doesn’t fall apart because of one missed deadline.

And hey — this is why you’re self-publishing to begin with, right? So that you, as the author, are calling the shots? Even though most reputable trade or academic publishers will have editorial schedules operating on a similar principle, their deadlines will be locked at a certain point in order to meet their own benchmarks for publication. So there might not be as much flexibility that they can offer, timing-wise. But when you’re self-publishing, you have the power to push back your projected publication date if you really have to. In most circumstances, getting your book finalized in August when you originally anticipated being done in July (or, heck, even way back in May) isn’t going to ruin anything for an indie author.

So take the time you need to deal with your situation, even though it may feel frustrating when all you want to do is focus on getting your book to the finish line and you may resent the intrusion into your schedule and feel like, “Why the heck is this all falling out of the sky on me now?”

The Manuscript-Meddling Freak-Out

For other authors, the call is coming from inside the house — the crisis happens in their own brain. They start second-guessing the work, wanting to fiddle or rewrite.

A little bit of second-guessing is natural and to be expected. A tricky passage might need to be rephrased several times in order to make sure a concept is conveyed as clearly and effectively as possible. Or, new research comes to light late in the production process and a new paragraph or footnote needs to be slotted in to address it for the sake of accuracy and timeliness. Making a late-breaking addition may be awkward and cause a bit of reflow in the design, but if it’s truly important, it’s doable.

No, what I’m talking about here is wholesale rewriting of large swaths of text in ways that don’t improve anything or even actively undo the clean-up and standardization that the copyeditor and/or proofreader has already imposed.

When It Happens During Copyediting

For example, I once had an author run the first third of his manuscript through ChatGPT after it had already been thoroughly copyedited and was just days away from being sent to the designer for layout. He sent the revised manuscript to me with Track Changes activated, and my heart sank as I saw page after page of red marks completely revising most of the text that I’d just spend the past month painstakingly cleaning up. Leaving to one side the whole issue of AI use in the book-writing process, this was a huge problem because it would necessitate re-editing that new text all over again.

I gently queried the author about what he was trying to achieve by doing this. It boiled down to anxiety — he was worried about his voice and the overall quality of his writing. Disclosing this nervousness to me made all the difference. I assured him that his writing was already in fine shape, that it was actually the vulnerability in his voice that gave his writing its power. I also reminded him that in my own editing process I’d been mindful to clean up minor infelicities of phrasing while doing my best to retain the essence of his style (which is something that LLMs can’t really do). So, whew, he heard me, and we reverted back to the previous version of the text without the AI’d adjustments. The Word doc went off to the designer as scheduled.

When It Happens During Typesetting

Sometimes, though, it’s in the design phase when authors start to doubt themselves most intensely. Something about seeing the book laid out with an elegant typeface in a properly rendered PDF can feel a bit too real. The fact that the book is going to be in readers’ hands imminently, after it had just been living in a manuscript on the author’s hard drive, can absolutely catalyze a wave of panic. It’s easy for an author to start ruminating on all the things: “What if the book is bad? What if people hate it? What if people hate me? What if I wasted all this time and money and no one is gonna buy it or read it?”

These kinds of worries are natural enough. Again, a sensitive and experienced editor can help talk an author through the self-doubt and can provide reminders of all the stages of the production process that are in place to bolster the overall quality of the book. (That’s one of the reasons why you’re hiring and working with all these professionals! So your book has the greatest chance to stand up to the quality of anything else available on the market.)

But sometimes an author makes the mistake of showing the book’s draft pages to someone who hadn’t previously been involved in the production process, someone who doesn’t have any knowledge of publishing/typesetting conventions. That person may (however unintentionally) start seeding doubt in the author’s mind, making bonkers suggestions that might feel alluring to an author if they’re already feeling vulnerable about their impending publication date. So now the author might announce to their editor or designer that, based on Rando #1’s advice, they need to add artwork throughout the book in a layout that had always been conceived of as simple straight text. Or they suddenly feel like the trim size needs to be shifted from 5.5 × 8.5 portrait orientation to 7 × 10 landscape. Or something else that would require going back to square one without actually improving the design in any way.

The remedy for this temptation is, again, mostly just honest and open communication with one’s editor, designer, or production concierge. If an author can explain why they’re asking for a major overhaul at that point, someone on the production team can help assess if it’s actually a valid concern. I mean, there might actually be a good reason for it that’s only coming to light at the eleventh hour! Even if this is the case, a seasoned pro can also suggest a workaround or a less invasive adjustment that might achieve the same effect without a massive overhaul of the pages already in progress. Or, they can just honestly say, “Bruh? Bad idea. No.”

The Liminal Zone

Becoming a published author is a transformational process. You are moving from one state of reality into a brand-new one. Your identity is shifting. Where you once used to be one kind of person, you’re now also going to be an author.

Think back on any other major milestone in your life: graduating from school, committing to a relationship, having a significant surgery, retiring from the workforce. There were inevitably a variety of emotions that came up for you with any of these changes. Fear. Joy. Anticipation. Self-doubt. Regret. Pride. Impatience. Nostalgia. Truly, the variety of emotions that arises when launching a book are no different. And just like the people in your life certainly had their own reactions to other identity shifts that have happened over the years, so too is this big book launch event going to see some folks behaving supportively and some folks behaving confrontationally (and everything in between).

While it may not be easy to work through these challenges, they’re truly a sign that you’re doing something significant. And it will hopefully all be worth it in the end. Take a breath, do your best to remember that this is all quite normal, and trust your editor to get you through it.

And maybe keep St. John of the Cross’s poetry on your nightstand, just in case.