Why I call myself an authorpreneur instead of writer #WriterWednesday #AmWriting #BookMarketing #AuthorPlatform

Those of you who follow my blog may be scratching your head at the title to this blog as you know I recently released my twelfth novel. And yes, I repeatedly tell everyone it’s my twelfth! But writing twelve novels is just a portion of how I spend my time. To make this clear, I recently started answering ‘authorpreneur’ to the question of ‘What do you do?’ instead of ‘writer’. Since the term ‘authorpreneur’ isn’t actually in the dictionary, you get a lot of raised eyebrows and questions when you start using the expression.

I first learned of the term when I read a blog from Derek Haines who wrote about the eleven key attributes of an authorpreneur (read the article here). After that, I kept hearing the term. I freaking love this term. Not only do I – as a language aficionado – love the idea of the word defining my job being a portmanteau (look that up here), but everything just clicked when I heard it. I may have been listening to a podcast about authorpreneurs while walking along a beach in Spain and shouted something like “Totally!” (I’m embarrassing like that.)

Why am I so excited about a word? Two reasons. One, it’s a much better description of my daily life than ‘writer’. (As a writer, I’m obviously into words and their proper usage.) The actual writing portion of my job takes up less than 50% of my time. As I’m a fiction novelist, I’m referring here to writing on my manuscript and not blogging or other marketing items such as interviewing. The remaining time is spent doing ‘entrepreneurial’ activities such as marketing, maintaining an author platform, blogging, etc., etc. So yeah, combining the term author and entrepreneur to define my job sounds like a perfect fit.

The second reason I love, love, love the term ‘authorpreneur’ is due to the reaction people have when I call myself an ‘authorpreneur’ instead of a writer. One problem I encounter again and again as a writer is the complete lack of understanding by others of what I do during a normal work day. This picture is a decent representation of the problem:

If you look at the first five photos, they look fairly one-sided – either a glamorous writing life (and seriously, who has one of those?) or a simple writing life. The “What I actually do” picture with its piles and piles of papers is more accurate. I’d like to claim my desk looks more organized, but I’d just be lying.

Anyway, when I tell people I’m an authorpreneur, they are almost always curious. What’s that? Why do you call yourself that instead of an author? This leads to a more constructive conversation about my working life than when I say I’m a writer. In response to that, I often hear ‘Are you famous?’ And isn’t it just demoralizing when I have to admit that ‘No, I’m not famous. Not at all.’? (Please note that I sometimes don’t care to have a constructive conversation with someone. In that case, I just make up some crap about what I do for a living. What can I say? I’m an introvert. An introvert with a drinking problem, but still an introvert who prefers reading books to talking to people.)

So, folks, that’s why I call myself an authorpreneur. How about other writers out there? How do you feel about the term? Will you be using it as well?