Neighborhood Authors
More than a Local Author
Recently, the most common question I’ve gotten from people visiting my market booth is “how long have you been writing?”
It’s a tricky question because, in one sense, it asks when I figured out how to use this specific technology. In another sense, I think what they are asking is how long I have been writing novels. Even this is not so clear cut, though I can say that the first time I attempted to write a novel was when I was fourteen. But this is a bit late to start counting, now that I’ve thought more about it, because by the time I attempted that first novel, I had already filled notebooks with stories. There was the one about a crystalline version of the Death Star, the diary of a super villain with a knack for gene editing, and the reverse portal fantasy where someone from a magical world visits post-apocalyptic Earth. There was a stack of fanfic my wife is quite disappointed she can’t read, and a pair of autobiographical vignettes about the time I fractured my skull and the first time the power went out in my home during a blizzard.
If someone at the booth is feeling chatty, I’ll recount the story of the skull fracture again because I think the subsequent prohibition against playing on the playground forced me to daydream.
But there were stories before that one. As I recall, the first story I ever wrote was in second grade. It was about a group of mice with magic powers and the poisonous gas that threatened their tiny mouse village.
Perhaps the reason I remember that story as the first is because one of my second grade teachers (I had three), crossed out pages and pages of that story with big red x’s because seven-year-old me had not resolved the conflict about the poisonous gas. I went back, rewrote the ending, then copied the text from my notebook onto special lined paper that had places for me to draw pictures. With the text copied and the pictures drawn, I bound the whole thing in construction paper. It was my very first book, and it’s still sitting in storage somewhere.
If we mark my story about the magic mice as when I started writing (which is not that long after I first learned how to write), then 2027 will be 20 years of writing. Contemplating that stretch of time and everything I’ve done and experienced when it comes to writing, I think seven-year-old me embodied something about writing that I am relearning.
Several months after I wrote that story about the magic mice, my teacher told the class that we were about to become authors. This time, instead of binding a story in construction paper, we would send glossy pages covered in the penned words of our story to a publisher, who would bind the book and send it back to us. When all was said and done, we would be published authors, my teacher told us.
What excited me about this wasn’t so much that I would be a published author; I didn’t understand the significance of that at the time. It was that I would get to share my stories with others. My library had copies of the books prior classes had written, and one of them had filled my daydreams with the record of the author playing bounty-hunter on the playground. I think I imagined my book next to that one on the shelf, and I was excited to add my story to one that had inspired me.
Seven-year-old me was not thinking about fame or influence or making a living on writing and selling books. He wasn’t encumbered by worries about ratings or Large Language Models or piracy.1 He was thinking of being a neighborhood author.
A neighborhood author is not a career author, nor even a local author. Where a career author must deliver what is sufficiently popular if they hope to eat, a neighborhood author brings their story as an offering to the potluck of literature. Neighborhood authors have a day job to pay the bills, so they will still get to eat if their story does not sell well, but they will also have contributed what is uniquely theirs to the Great Conversation. Where the career author must appeal to an idealized reader stripped from the place where they live, a neighborhood author is embedded in a place and lets the spirit of that place imbue their work. These are stories like This is the Part Where You Laugh, which was written by one of the English teachers at my high school and takes place near where I grew up. Or the story I read while judging a local writing contest which imagined the fate of the apple orchards of Utah after the apocalypse. Or my favorite anthology of short stories: Monsters & Mormons. Neighborhood authors, because they don’t write for mass appeal, can channel the spirit of a place for the people who live there. That has been the great victory of the rise of self-publishing in my view: not the creation of a system to challenge the traditional publishing industry, but making it possible for neighborhood authors to reach their neighbors.
To my readers, my neighbors, I hope you’ll look out for more neighborhood authors and support them as they tell the stories that speak to the place where you live. You might find them where you found me—at a farmers market—or at a local author event sponsored by your library. You might find them at local writing conferences or even online using a tool like My Local Authors. Once you’ve found them, you can support them by purchasing their books in person if you can2 and telling your friends and family about them. Their stories are special, and you’re unlikely to find them on the shelves of your local Barnes & Noble.
To aspiring authors, I hope you’ll consider the merits of being a neighborhood author, rather than a career author. There is less money in it, true, but the yoke of the neighborhood author is easy and light and effectual at bringing you closer to the people nearest to you.
How do you become a neighborhood author? First and foremost, you arrange your life such that writing is something that you do on the side rather than as your primary source of income. Then, instead of chasing engagement on social media algorithms, you go to where your neighbors are and you talk to them about books. Suggest your favorites if you read the same genre and pitch your book to them if they are interested. I have found great success in this approach, and I’m sure you can as well.
May we all find our neighborhood authors and offer our own stories to each other in return. Then, I hope we will enjoy the spirit of seven-year-old me as I tenderly bound my story of the magic mice in construction paper.
If you know a neighborhood author I should read, send them my way—I’m always looking for interesting new books!
This is a half-truth. I was not concerned at all about people stealing my work, but the anti-piracy warnings in front of movies weighed heavily on my mind because I did not understand that a federal judge wouldn’t sentence a child to five years in federal prison for binding his fanfic.
Buying someone’s work on Amazon is also helpful, but when you buy from an author in person, more of your purchase goes to them. That being said, if you leave a review on Amazon (which is also a great help), it can be helpful to have purchased a copy from the site.