People can’t buy it if you don’t publish it. Or as one of my Day Job colleagues reminded a student “If you don’t hit submit, it isn’t turned in.” Every year, there are one or two people who keep polishing and keep polishing, and sometimes polish past the due date because “it’s not perfect/found another source/think there’s an error” and so on. You may or may not have a coworker like that, who won’t turn in a report or gets so tied up in the perfect format for the data (or *shudder* slide show) that the thing can’t be finished by deadline.

Nonfiction authors seem to be worse about this than fiction. Look up the saga of Frederick Jackson Turner to see a classic example. “I need to find just one more source” or “fill in this detail over here” became one and only one published book, a famous essay, and one or two articles. Along with a huge stack of notes, books, references, and other things. Some fiction writers do the like. I know of a former classmate who has three manuscripts, none of which will ever see the light of day because she’s revising, improving, editing, getting yet another set of cover ideas, because they are not perfect yet. She has yet to send anything to an agent, since “they’re not ready. I found a typo.”

Note, that I’m NOT encouraging you to finish your story, upload it without revision or edits, have the ‘Zon do a cover for it, and hit publish. That might, maaaybe, have worked in the first two years of self-publishing with Amazon. And even then, you were better off with an original-to-you cover and and doing some formatting yourself (conversion to Mobi wasn’t wildly hard, just tedious.)

Conversely, if you hire a cover artist, then a marketing person, and get social media accounts so you can advertise, and have someone help you record a Book-Tok video, or Instragram video for the book, and then revise, and edit, and revise more, and change something because your “Sensitivity advisor” flagged a word that might be taken amiss by someone with no clue about the context, and spend $$$$$ without launching the book because something’s not perfect …

Neither will make you money, or get eyes on your book.

Kick it out the door. Do some research, find a decent cover* or hire someone, or use your favorite graphics generator* to do a reasonable cover. Hire a copy editor or swap copy editing with someone you trust. Have someone else read over the manuscript so you don’t accidentally duplicate chapter numbers. The upload it and the cover, pick tags and categories [you did look at options and similar books, yes?] set a price and hit “publish.”

You will find a typo, I assure you. You will discover that your cover doesn’t quite fit the genre, or there is a cow in the background that shouldn’t be there, or there’s an error in the “other books” page, or you remember that you needed to add something to the sales copy, or … Welcome to authorhood. Or Big Name Author just released a book with a similar title in a totally different genre and all searches lead to that book.

However, the book is out there, and people can find it. Time to take a deep breath, enjoy an adult beverage if you so desire, and start the next book. Or do all those chores your Best Beloved has been patiently compiling as you wrote.

*If your primary sales income comes from hand selling at cons and fairs, do NOT use an image generator or hire an artist who uses image generation if those cons and fairs ban “AI generated content, including art.” Do your homework before signing the contract and paying for your table or booth, or buying art or what have you.