There are a lot of misconceptions that hover around the writing profession. I can see them in people’s eyes when I answer the question “What do you do?” with “I’m an author.”
People think they have an idea of what it’s like to be a writer. (I thought I had an idea of what it was like to be a writer–before I became one.) They think writers sit around and write all day and that they either make a lot of money or they’ll be really poor (nothing in between).
I’ve heard these lies all my life (and even spread them), and for a while, I truly believed them. But what I’m discovering, as an indie author who also has manuscripts out with agents, is that I get to decide which ones are lies and which ones are truth. Here are the lies I’ve found.
1. You’ll be poor.
I know a whole group of authors who are doing this writing thing as their only job, and they’re not anywhere close to poor. Most of them are self-published authors who have control over all parts of the publishing process and also keep all the proceeds from their sales, but there are some traditional authors who are making good money, too.
Now. That’s not to say that all authors will be rich, of course. There are only a small percentage of writers who actually get rich at it, and they’re usually the ones sitting up on the bestseller lists for years at a time (not saying you can’t, just saying it’s good to know what it takes). It depends a lot of genre. If you prefer writing literary books like I do, you’ll probably never get rich at it, unless you have a thousand books. People don’t buy poetry and literary fiction like they buy thrillers and romance.
But we can all still make a good living off our writing if we’re smart about the way we run our business.
2. Writing is a creative endeavor, so you don’t have to worry about the business side of things.
False. The truth is, we’re all business people if we’re writers, and we’re going to have to learn things like email marketing and how to have a social media presence and what we can do to build a platform. That becomes especially important as indie authors, but traditional authors need to know about marketing, too. Releasing a book, unfortunately, isn’t as simple as releasing a book. There’s timing and wording and selling, and a whole bunch of things I didn’t really know about when I first got started..
I was surprised by how much I had to do to get my books published on the indie side. I shouldn’t have been. In the traditional world, it takes six months to a year (sometimes longer) to get a book published once a publisher accepts it. Of course it’s going to take a self-published author a little time to do it, too.
But if we’re not considering the business side of things, we’re not going to go very far in this business.
3. A writing career isn’t all that rewarding.
If you’re looking at things from a monetary standpoint, then maybe for some it isn’t really worth making a career of writing. My books have only made a handful of change in the last six months. But when I think about how those words were all bottled up inside me and now they’re finally out, finally free, I feel like writing is definitely worth the work it requires.
It’s always a worthy choice to tell our stories, whether or not anybody picks them up to read them. Do you know what happens when we tell our stories? We come to know ourselves better. We find our voice. So just because one project doesn’t sell well doesn’t mean the next one won’t, either—because we’re always practicing and always doing the work, which means we’re getting better and better and better.
4. Only a certain kind of person has a compelling story to tell.
Its true that sometimes it can feel hard to find a compelling story to tell, but I always tell people to start with their lives. What story can they tell from their life in fiction or nonfiction that might resonate with readers? Maybe you had a boring life (I think every life is fascinating, so you’d be hard-pressed to convince me that you haven’t led an interesting one), or maybe you don’t feel like anything all that significant happened to you growing up or maybe you never met a quirky person in all your years. In that case, I’d invite you to revisit your memories and open up your eyes. Look for stories everywhere and then practice telling them. Start a blog.
There’s this guy I know who writes a blog about all the homeless people he meets on the streets of his city. His stories are intriguing, and he is one of the most compassionate men I’ve ever known. His readers love hearing about the characters they’ve come to know from his street stories.
[Tweet “There’s a story to tell everywhere. We just have to crack our lives open and tell them.”]
These aren’t the only writing lies, and I have a Part 2 coming next week–about the lies we unknowingly place around the circumstances of our writing careers.
But for now, remember:
You have a compelling story to tell. So tell it.
