Here's the advice I wish I had heard when I started working on my book last year: You're going to get depressed because your sense of self-competence is overly reliant on FAST RESULTS. Writing newsletters, tweets, video scripts, those all earn you a sense of competence in minutes or days. MAYBE weeks. But a great book does not happen quickly. You need to be okay thinking it sucks for months, maybe a year, before you start to feel good about it. And you need to be okay working in the dark with no one giving you "likes" or "follows" to make you feel good about yourself. This will be VERY HARD if you've been an internet person for the last few years. There's no shame in occasionally emailing your editor just to ask if you're actually good at this. Or in picking up some side hobby where you can feel a sense of competence to buoy your emotions. But here's the good news: every day you stick with it, you're rewiring yourself to care more about MAKING IT GOOD than EARNING INTERNET POINTS. Eventually, you will start to enjoy making it better for its own sake. You'll be okay working in the dark. You'll start to think in terms of chapters instead of tweets. The adjustment will be painful, but you'll get through it. Just don't be too hard on yourself in the interim.