Cailin Riley Books

I’m starting a new short blog series called “Author Viewpoint,” where I will share some of my personal experiences as a *reasonably* active author. This is the first in the series, so welcome!

In the last three years, I have published three books. I’m proud of what I’ve created and I wrote each book enthusiastically and simply because I wanted to.

But what I didn’t anticipate over the last three years was the external and internal pressure to keep writing.

When you become known as “an author”, even amongst just friends and family, your identity becomes forever changed. You’re still you but being an author is something that gets attached to you, like a pin to a jacket that’s visible for all to see. It’s your new identifier, and when you are introduced to new people, your friend or family member might add, “And Cailin is also an author! She has a few books.”

When writing at that level gets tied to your identity, it becomes a part of many conversations. Whenever you catch up with friends or family you haven’t seen in awhile, they will ask you if you’re working on your next book. They will ask how the writing is going or how sales for your last book went. None of these things are bad necessarily, but the difficulty lies in the answering.

Because oftentimes, the honest answers are as follows:

I’m not working on another book at the moment. (Because I’m tired, still work full-time, am considering starting a family, trying to spend more time going to the gym, pick your poison.) The writing is going terribly, thank you. I’m in a slump. Sales? What sales? I do this for the joy of it, I don’t make much money.

But, as you can imagine, nobody likes a Debbie Downer, and it’s hurtful to my pride to admit that being an author sometimes sucks. But they ask away anyway, and I have to live with that.

A lot of the external pressure to stay prolific also becomes internal. You compare yourself to other authors, some of whom seem to put out a new book every year and you begin to wonder why you can’t seem to do the same. You worry that if you don’t keep writing, you’ll lose momentum. In sum, it boils down to this: If you’re not writing, you’re a failure as an author.

I know intrinsically that’s not true. But the pressure sure makes you feel like it is. In a world where being an author is viewed as a job, a career or a role to play, it feels odd and uncomfy to admit that you view it as more of a highly enjoyable hobby.

Being an author, to me, is like wearing a special sweater. I take it out of the closet on occasion because I love it, it keeps me warm and snug, and it makes me feel happy. I might wear the sweater for weeks at a time, or I might just put it on for a few hours. It’s always there, it’s never getting donated to Goodwill. But I don’t feel the need to wear it 24/7, or show it off to everybody.