What is an Author?

This question has been bugging me. People have different views on what exactly an author is. Is it someone who already has something published? Or is it someone who writes stories? If it’s the latter, then we’re all authors because our elementary school teachers made us write silly ones for grades that didn’t really matter.

According to thefreedictionary.com, an author is the writer of a book, article, or other text, or one who practices writing as a profession. Cool beans, that doesn’t really help, I already knew both of those things. I’m just going to go with the first definition; someone who writes stuff.

Why am I so interested in what an author really is? Because I don’t think they’re just people who have their books on the New York Times bestseller list. They can be people who just randomly write stories in notebooks on their kitchen tables, or in coffee shops, or even on the computer.

You don’t have to be represented by an agent to be an author. You don’t have to have gone to college for a writing degree to be an author. You don’t even have to have something published to be an author. To be an author, you just have to write something.

Why am I telling you this? Because I want people to get inspired to write and take the first step in their literary career and get published. Not through the hard way of finding a publisher somewhere in the country and sending in manuscripts that will probably get tossed to the bottom of the pile, but to just upload it digitally and see if people like you. Maybe not even that, maybe people despise your books but you still write them because you enjoy it, that’s cool too. Just take the first step and get your words into the hands of others.

Free writing quotes from Authors For A Cause


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