Authors are Human

There are times in this indie author’s life when I feel quite professional—usually when I’m doing professional things like formatting an ebook or creating an Amazon listing or designing my own business cards. But there are other times—such as when I’m sitting on a piano bench in a dining room full of bedroom furniture, wearing paint-splotched old clothes and a dollar-store baseball cap and trying to do book marketing on my laptop—when I suddenly look around me and feel like a monstrous imposter.

Me, a professional author? Oh, no. I’m just some starry-eyed little girl who makes up stories and thinks they’re good enough to be called Fiction, who is kindly humored by retailers that allow her to offer her books for sale on their websites.

And then I begin to remember. Authors are human. Authors, with a capital A, even those who have the emblem of some prestigious publishing company on the spines of their books, actually exist in real life, beyond the glossy covers and literary journal reviews. Authors paint their houses, and presumably look like frights while doing it. Authors have to take their dogs out to play, and cook dinners, and probably wonder while they’re doing it why anybody in their right mind would want to buy a book written by someone as ordinary as them.

And then I don’t feel quite such an imposter anymore.