What Does a Teenage Author do? 

An author writes books and publishes them on Amazon, an eBook or a physical copy, and sells it to readers. A teen author is not employed by anyone and their own pay is their own responsibility. This being said, it’s a risky job because you might not earn anything, but you also have the potential for earning a lot, it all depends on if people like your books or not. The responsibilities of an author are to research the book’s topic, write the book, edit the book, and sell the book. Any of these steps can be contracted out. For example, you can hire an editor to edit the book if you do not wish to spend your time on doing that, or you’d rather someone else gave it a read.

How Much Does a Teenage Author Get Paid?

As an author just starting out, you can earn from $100 dollars to $10,000 per book. The pay is extremely varied depending on the success of your book. This can be a problem for new writers, as new writers won’t have any fans to give them an audience right when they publish the book. For example, if a popular writer publishes a book, many people will flock to buy the book immediately, but not for you because you’re a new writer. But this can be easily fixed. You can follow all the steps listed below, and you should have no problem creating a successful book that will have a huge audience.

How Can I Get Started as a Teenage Author?

1. Before you begin, you’ll want to determine what to write about. A good topic is extremely important to the success of your book. The perfect topic to write about is something that you love writing about, since you want to passionate about what you are writing about. You’ll want to make sure your topic is a lesser known one amongst current books. If there are too many books written about your topic already, then you will have trouble getting an audience for your book, since you have a lot of competition.
2. Next, you want to see if your topic is something that people want to read about. You don’t want a book that doesn’t have any competition either, because then you won’t even have an audience to begin with.  We suggest doing a quick Google search about the topic you’re writing about and seeing how many results there are.  Of course, if you just want to write fiction or mystery stories, you’ll want to look in the niche that you’re writing in and research.
3. Now, you’ll want to learn how to write better. There is always improvement for writing, and if you want more people to read your book, you want to have little grammatical errors and a good writing style that people can adequately comprehend. Also, you will want to adapt a unique writing style so your book doesn’t seem like all the other books. To polish up your writing skills, you can take high school electives or college courses in writing. If taking courses in person isn’t your thing, you can take online courses. For example, you can search a course from Lynda.com called “Learning Ebook Publishing by Jason Matthews” which is for publishing eBooks, but it can also be used for authoring books.
4. Once, you’ve polished up your writing skills, you can write your book. Take your time when writing your book and don’t rush the process. Work at your own pace, and don’t forget to edit it when you are done, or have someone edit it for you. Successful books take months, perhaps even years to write, so you will want to do the same. The process of writing a book should be enjoying to you and if it feels like “work”, maybe you’re in the wrong field.
5. Once you’ve written the book and gone through editing, you’re done and now you can list it (for free) on Amazon.com in their direct publishing area.
6. We suggest that now you spend your time marketing the book and getting people to read it and see what their feedback is.  A good course to take at this point is also included on Lynda.com and you should search “Ebooks: Distributing and Marketing by David Wogahn” to get it.
7. Congrats, you’re officially a teenage author. You might not have a large audience right now and don’t have many people buying your book, but that’s okay. It’s an accomplishment in of itself to be able to say that I wrote a book, and it will be great experience for the future.  Whether you will continue writing in the future or not, it will be an impressive thing to put on your resume and will land you better and greater jobs in the future.

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Helpful Resources

• Article to determine book topic: Figuring out what to writer about as a teen author isn’t easy and this guide should help.

• Lynda.com: This platform will teach you the skills you need to become a teen author.Course(s): ​​Search for the course “Learning Ebook Publishing by Jason Matthews”Search for the course “Ebooks: Distributing and Marketing by David Wogahn”
• Amazon.com:  This is the Kindle direct publishing (KDP) platform that you’ll use to publish your book once it’s written.