This is one of the hardest questions to answer since it’s never done. A book can keep going and going… and going. For years. In fact, full disclosure, I just submitted my "Revised" manuscript to an academic publisher. The project started in 2007, dissertation defended in 2012, pages first submitted in 2014, and manuscript revised in 2020 (on December 31!).

Authors I work with often fear that their book is not good enough or not done enough. Isaac gets requests to revise after publication, too. The truth is, the text is alive. When we write, our mistakes and omissions are just a reason to write more and more.

I know this firsthand as a historian. Why do historians continue to write, once "history" is already known? They write because they are in conversation with all of the historians that came before. Apart from the comments section of a Facebook post, the next best illustration of this is the Talmud, where scholars argue with each other over time and through space.

To answer the question posed in the title, NEVER. A book is never done.
Post by Jessica
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