Page 6 - Read My Mind Best of 2017
P. 6
WHAT MAKES YOU THINK
YOU ARE AN AUTHOR?
By Lily Amis
Lily Amis How many times have you asked yourself if what
The Mind-opening Mind you’re doing is right? How many times did you think
you would stop writing because this path is going
Read My Mind – The Best of Lily Amis nowhere as an Indie author? People just don’t realize
how extremely challenging and sometimes emotionally
exhausting it is to work as an Indie author.
This year I joined many author groups on Facebook and
almost all Indie authors I got to know better are
complaining about the same problems. The lack of
sale, the lack of support from readers who don’t realize
how important it is to write reviews, etc. It’s a long list
of complaints and disappointments.
The question is: Why do we keep writing and
publishing books if it only makes us miserable? Why
are we taking the time to write our deepest thoughts
and experiences? Why do we create fictive characters,
fictive places, and fictive stories? What expectations
do we have? Are we writing for the money? Are we
writing it to get noticed as a creative human being? Are
we writing to prove ourself to us or to others?
If someone had told me years ago that one day I would
call myself an Indie author, I would have laughed loud
and said: What? Me? You must be kidding! I always
saw myself as a PR manager, graphic designer, but
surely not as an author. Well, life always surprises us.
My destiny and my personal struggles for almost three
decades as a former war refugee and foreigner in
Europe made me become an author. It was really kind
of a self-therapy. I never had any writing classes except
the few during my public relations studies a couple of
years ago. But writing in PR is mainly about writing
press releases, articles, etc. and not about literature
and the art of writing.
Last year I was seriously considering taking a literature
class to bring my writing skills to a professional level.6
