Is your book ever finished? Letting go of your baby. #selfpublishing

One of the best things about self-publishing is the freedom it gives you to go back into your book and tweak it, change it, improve it, amend it, and oh boy, do I take advantage of that!

I think of my stories as something organic and always open to change.  Sometimes a reader might ask a question about something they need clarifying, or make a comment that has me seeing a situation in a completely different way.  Perhaps something occurs to me in a flash of inspiration, and I realise that should have been in my story… or needs removing from it. Sometimes (to quote one of my early characters) people simply change their minds.  How easy it is in these days of e-books and self-publishing to go back to that finished book and make those changes.  But I sometimes wonder if this is sensible, if I should just say 'enough is enough' and focus only on new ideas.  I also wonder if other authors do this.  

I enjoy revisiting my stories and tweaking them, polishing them, hopefully improving them so new readers might have a better experience of them.  Perhaps I should leave well alone, but I doubt  I could if I tried.  Just recently I came across a poem that almost shouted at me from the computer screen.  It could have been written for one of my characters and I simply had to go back to my very first story and do a bit of rewriting in the light of that poem. There’s always room for improvement and I'm convinced an author’s work is never really finished.  But should it be?  

Authors often refer to their books as their babies, and, as all mothers know, your child continues to be your 'baby' throughout his or her life.  Are our stories that much different?  I’d love to know if others find it easy to bid goodbye to their projects once they’ve hit those magic words: Publish my book.