An Interview and a Question: What Does it Take to Make You Feel Like an Author?

A strange thing happened on the way to the blog.  I received an email out of the blue from someone I’ve never heard of.  That’s not so strange in itself; I get enough spam to feed a spambot until it vomits flowery poetry.

What was strange is that it was a request for an interview.  This wasn’t the usual, “Let’s fill out interview questions and share them on each other’s blogs to cross promote ourselves,” interview request.  This was a straight up, “I want to interview you.”

 It surprised me.  The first thing I did was check the email address it came from.  It looked legitimate.  Then I skimmed (that’s what my eleven year old called it) her online.  I Googled, found and checked profiles on Facebook and LinkedIn, investigating if the person looks legitimate.  She looked legitimate.

It was time for the, “Oh, uh, wow?” moment.  Me?  Why me?  Out of all the authors out there?

 Now I had to know.  I’m not a cat, so hopefully curiosity won’t bring me to my swift demise.

 I asked others on one of the author groups what they thought.

 I contacted the young lady requesting the interview to ask those two big questions: Why me? - and - How did you happen to find me?

 Honestly, I didn’t think I would be all that findable without specifically looking for me.

 Her answers were simple.  I’m an author and she got my information from the local writers’ guild, which I’m a member of.

Then I had a moment of terror.  I’ve never had a real interview.  I almost did once on a blog radio show, but it fell through due to technical issues.  We, the interviewers and my fellow intervewee, spanned states and countries.  Something went wrong and we couldn’t call in.  The blog show failed after too, so there was no redo.

 Why does that even matter?  Because, I was in very near to a state of panic.  An actual talking interview with people I have to answer on the spot.  I can’t come back hours later when I think of something that I think sounds clever.

 And now I’m panicking again at the thought of a face-to-face interview.  I would have to try to be clever on the spot.  I can’t do that.  I can write, the words coming effortlessly and fluidly, and sounding marvelous.  I can’t bloody talk.  In fact, I’m pretty sure I sound like a complete moron when I talk.  The words in my head just don’t come out the same way through my mouth.  My brain freezes, I jumble, stumble, and stutter.  I couldn’t do a speech with my eyes glued to the cue cards I’m reading mechanically from.

 To truly live, you have to step out of your safety zone.  I decided to swallow my anxiety and give it the old college try.

 It made it easier that I wasn’t doing it for myself.  I can’t count the times I opted not to do something because it was just for me.  I’m not used to doing things just for me.

 The young woman interviewing me is from McMaster University. She won funding for a research project exploring the connection between Canadian literature and identity.  I was a stop on her trek across Canada interviewing authors about their craft and sense of identity as Canadians.

 I went to the interview hoping that I would be of help, but still with that nagging doubt pulling on me like a toddler sized imp trying to whisper in my ear, “Why you?”

 I survived the interview and she didn’t look ill listening to my jabbering.  I have to say, the best part of the interview was the end when I gave her a copy of my latest published book, The McAllister Farm.  She was actually excited I gave it to her.

After the interview, that same nasty little imp kept tugging on my shirt hem and whispering my doubts.  Why me?  There are a lot of authors out there, ones people actually heard of and know; authors who sold a lot book books and made bestseller lists, and everything.  Telling me, “You don’t even feel like a real author.”

 

What does it take to make you feel like an author?  Of course, the simplest answer should be, “You wrote a book,” or, “You published a book.”  If only life were so simple for everyone.

In all the years I spent writing, I’ve always had that nagging doubt.  I’m nobody.  Unknown.  Just some person with a story in her head (okay many stories) that need to get out.  I’m not James Patterson or Stephen King.  I don’t go by the moniker Dean Koontz or any other name anyone would recognize and say, “Hey, that’s an author!”

 I always had the doubt, expecting anyone at any time to say I’m wasting my time, I’m not a “real” author, or that my writing stinks like the rancid breath of the partially desiccated reanimated corpse of a komodo dragon with a dead skunk stuck in its mouth.

 Even after my first book, Where the Bodies Are, was published, doubts remain.  It’s only one book, after all.  But, it can’t be all that bad if someone else found it worthy of publication, right?  I still didn’t feel like a “real” author; which is probably odd, since I would without question think of anyone else who published a single book as a “real” author.

 Now I have a couple of books published, with Indigo Sea Press picking up not only Where the Bodies Are, but also my latest book, The McAllister Farm.

 With published books I now have to count on more than one finger, I still don’t feel authorey; and yes, I did just make up that word.

  To me, an author has always been that intangible person on the other side of the book.  The magic behind the story.  Funny, I don’t look or feel magic.  Not mystical in any way.  I’m just me.

 If I had ten published books, I would probably feel the same way.  I’m just me.  Someone asked me to autograph my book she bought and it felt really weird.  I very recently sold a few books to a few people I know and they asked me to sign them.  It felt just as strange, awkward really, in a, “This is a joke, right?” kind of way.  And these were all people I’ve known for years.  I might get sucked into an abyss of weirdness in the floor if an actual stranger wanted me to sign a book.

 I’m not sure what it will take before I feel like a “real author”.  At what point this will happen, if ever.

 I asked my eleven year old what would make her feel like a “real author”.  Her answer: “If my books sold; lots.  A lot of them.”

 I asked my thirteen year old the same question. Her answer: “When a lot of people buy my books and are asking for them, and when I’m making a good profit.  And, when I’m a New York Times bestseller, because all my books are New York Times bestsellers.”

  

I pose the question to you, and this is all about YOU, not for you to try to convince me that I’m a “real” author.

Authors: What made or would make you feel like a “real author”?

 Readers: What defines a “real author” for you, as opposed to thinking, “Yeah, whatever, so you wrote a book, but you aren’t a real author”?

Let the game begin.

Can you handle a little darkness?

L.V. Gaudet is the author of the McAllister Series and Garden Grove.

Tormented by his inability to stop killing, the killer is taunted by his need to find the one thing he must find ...

Learn the secret ... behind the bodies and how the man who created the killer became who he is ...

The third book will bring these two stories together for a dramatic climax... but no story truly ends.

Sabotage, vandalism, poisoned work crew, buried bones, and two strange old people ... why is someone trying to stop the new housing development?

Why Writing Isn’t a Full Time Job (for most)

It struck me when I recently saw some comments on a few social networking sites that there are a lot of different ideas of what a writer is.  Even among writers themselves, there is a wide range of ideas and hopes when it comes to writing.

Myself, I think of being a published author as the book nerd’s  version of the pro athlete dream.  Droves of people around the world sit pounding out words into stories with the dream of someday making it big.  That does not apply to all writers, of course.

The simplest reality of being a writer is that it is damned hard to be published and earn money from it.

With the growth over these last years of accessibility to self-publishing, the very landscape of publishing has changed in leaps and bounds.  Not that long ago just the mere mention of the words “self” and “publishing” together in an online post risked being immediately mobbed, tarred, and feathered by others in the online community accompanied by rants about vanity presses.

For the unpublished, being published was like a secret club that you just could not get into and self-publishing was treated like cheating.  Somehow, you were breaking all the rules if you wanted to self-publish and those who followed them seemed in large numbers to resent that.

For the most part that attitude has changed in these past years, self-publishing is still becoming increasingly more accepted, and has been widely embraced by many who long to be published authors.  You will still encounter those who argue on what actually makes an author, how many books qualifies you, what kind of publishing, how big the publisher has to be, and whatever criteria they personally place on it.  Others will say that if you wrote a book, published or not, however it’s published, you are an author.

No matter what kind of author you are, what genre, how you are published, or the quality of your writing or book cover, there is one reality all writers share.  Making money doing it is damned hard.

Networking is imperative to success, just as it is in any business and many occupations.  Whether you are published by a big publisher or self-published, writing for magazines or business, or any other market, for the large part you have to promote yourself and your writing on your own.  Even the big publishing houses have limited budgets for promoting their writers and books.  There are reasons they tend to stick to publishing guaranteed successes, and that is just one of them.

Sales is also all about supply and demand.  The explosion of self-publishing has over-saturated the book market.  With the glut of books over-saturating the market, you are very small in a big world of books, a single tiny voice in an overwhelmingly huge mob.  To get sales you have to get noticed.

What Can Be Harder Than Being a Writer?

What can be harder than being a writer?  Being a Canadian Writer.

Of course, there are other countries that similarly have their own challenges when it comes to writing.

As Canadians, much of our experiences are influenced by our neighbors to the South.  Most of our online feeds are filled with U.S. content.  Our world news feeds tend to be dominated by their news events.  Our own Canadian made movies and television content even seems to be lacking in comparison to what is available on U.S. television, with the notable exception of Vikings, which is a Canadian/Ireland co-production filmed in Ireland and written by Michael Hirst, and Englishman.

If you search publishers, both large and small independent publishers, literary agents, book printers catering to the relatively newly accepted (and still growing out of the slop-heap of disdain by non-self published writers into acceptability) self-publishing writers, you get long lists of possibilities.

The problem is that almost all of them will be South of that border that is not only a barrier to free movement of people back and forth (you have to line up and make offerings by way of showing your passport and answer questions that make you feel like you are interviewing to join some special and secret club to pass in either direction to visit your neighboring country), but also is a barrier to the simple and free movement of joining the ranks of going from some guy or chick who wrote a book to being some guy or chick who has a published book.

That’s great if you are a U.S. citizen, not so great if you are Canadian.

The Canadian publishing market in all ways seems almost non-existent compared to our neighbors to the South.

We have a handful of just a few literary agents, compared to the much larger population of them over the border.  Although, in recent years it seems that most of the U.S. agents I followed online have moved on to other forms of employment.  (Could the literary agent be a slowly dying breed?)

Odds are, any attempts to contact and court one of these very few Canadian agents in the hope they will consider you as a client will be met with … nothing.  They won’t even bother to take the time to respond because they are very few.

Similarly, getting a response from a publisher if you are a U.S. citizen sending query letters to a U.S. publisher are about a thousand times more likely to receive no response at all than a polite rejection.  And a thousand times more than that likely to not receive an invitation to send your manuscript.

The Canadian market for authors seeking publishers is the size of one of those little nubby things on a new car tire compared to the number U.S. publishers of various sizes (the whole tire being all the U.S. publishers).

Canadians are notoriously charged more for most things than our U.S. neighbors are too.  Everything from clothing to food to raw materials to services like book printing cost more North of the border.  If it is shipped to Canada, you can pretty safely assume the price was hiked because they can get away with charging more.  That makes the both the cost of living and the cost of doing business higher than it would be otherwise.  Books and other printed material are one of the products where this is obvious.  In Canada, books must list the Canadian price too, which is always considerably higher.

 That means you can expect to pay more for any services associated with publishing and being published, and having to charge more for your books to recover your expenses.

So, what is a Canadian writer to do?

With the added challenges of trying to be a Canadian published writer, your odds of success are likely none to something North of there.  If you have not made a name for yourself to attract the attention of Canadian publishers and agents, it’s going to be like finding intelligent life on another planet, seemingly forever out of your reach.

Your best chance is to open yourself to markets outside of Canada.  But that too has its own set of challenges.  You can be published anywhere in the world, as long as you are not actually being paid for it.

Being a Canadian writer published outside of Canada and being paid for it is a whole new challenge, especially if you prefer to not be taxed by both countries on that income.