Lean Publishing Tip of the Day: It's Rare, But Why Are In-Progress Books Sometimes Stalled or Never Finished?

Leanpub encourages authors to publish their books chapter-by-chapter, as they write them.

That's why our motto is "Publish Early, Publish Often", which we explain at length as the Lean Publishing approach to writing and publishing books.

How To Tell If A Book Is Being Published In-Progress

A typical in-progress book on Leanpub will have a "percent complete" number displayed under the book cover image:

Why Would Progress On a Book Be Stalled?

There are many reasons progress on a book could be stalled, and they're as old as writing itself.

Writer's Block

Sometimes writers get "writer's block", where they just can't bring themselves to write any more.

Bruce Springsteen's famous hit song Dancing In The Dark captures the feeling nicely:

I get up in the evening
And I ain't got nothing to say
I come home in the morning
I go to bed feeling the same way
I ain't nothing but tired
Man, I'm just tired and bored with myself
Hey there, baby
I could use just a little help

There's no formula for getting out of writer's block. Sometimes it can take days, weeks, months, or even years for an author to be able to restart a writiing project, for what you can only call purely psychological reasons.

Scope Expansion

Sometimes an author's plan for their book expands, so that even though the "percent complete" number is staying the same, the book is actually having new chapters added to it.

Scope expansion can also delay the publication of new chapters, if the author needs to do more research than they originally expected.

Life Changes

Things change. Sometimes an author might start a book and then something happens in their life that disrupts their plan.

Life changes that can cause an author to pause work on their book include getting married, having children, getting sick, and any number of other things.

Career Changes

Sometimes people have big career changes that mean they need to set their book project aside, like getting promoted, getting laid off, starting a business - things like that.

Death

Death comes for all of us, including authors working on unfinished books.

Writers Sometimes Just Take a Long Time

Some authors just take a really long time to write books. Ask any editor who works with writers about it and you may be in for a long conversation.

For example, the American author Sam Tanenhaus’s book Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America took 27 years to complete.

Authors Sometimes Use "Percent Complete" In Creative Ways

Sometimes authors use the "percent complete" number in creative ways.

For example, they may mark a book as 99% done permanently, to indicate that it can be updated any time, and is a "living book".

Or, they may write a book that's hundreds of pages long and leave it marked as, say, "20%" complete, as a joke about how big the subject area is, and how much of it their book actually covers.

What You Can Do If You See Progress On A Book Appears To Be Stalled

We have a feature that lets people contact the author of a book they've bought, or that they're considering buying, to ask about the author's intentions for their book project going forward. We talk a little bit about that here.

If you buy a book and don't see any progress within 60 days, you can just get a refund, and wait to see if the author publishes a new version with more content in the future, and buy it again. (We make it easy to get a refund within 60 days of any Leanpub purchase.)

Clips from the Livestream