Wield The Pen Responsibly by Lacresha Hayes, Bestselling Author

As an author, your job can get easier with time. As we write, we gain much needed experience. Our failures mesh together perfectly with our successes to teach us how to promote and touch our readership. And we learn the funniest lessons. We learn that two books on identical subjects may not actually appeal to identical readers because our styles adjust during our careers. As we grow and evolve, so does our writing. But sometimes, we can become lazy and insensitive and that spells trouble.

There are some authors who will only ever write a book and maybe a few articles, but this article is for those of us who write as a way of life. Most of us will be writing for the rest of our lives due in part to the stories and circumstances that beg our attention and ask us or even pester us to write about this or that. We keep living and learning and the teacher in us or entertainer in us keep us wanting to share. Therefore, the day we die, we'll probably die with some work or other in progress. That is why I am writing this article.

The written word has a power not wielded by anything else, and matched by very few things. No matter how much technology advances, there will never be a replacement for what is written. How we read, when we read and where we read may change, but the fact that we read will not change. Therefore, it behooves us to be responsible with what we share with the world. We never know if something we write will become a part of history thirty years or 100 years into the future. Please wield your pen and fingers responsibly!

About the Author:
Lacresha Hayes is the author of The Rape of Innocence, Truth and Intimacy: A Couple's Journal, Becoming: My Personal Memoirs, Raw Redemption, Tangled and many more books. She writes regular articles at her Pretty, Powerful and Prosperous blog as well as several guest posts all over the internet. She has risen to stardom through her multiple programs for women, business owners, victims of abuse and authors. She reaches out to help those who need it and that has won her the respect of novice writers and professionals in the literary world. For more information, visit her website, www.lacreshahayes.com today.

Time and Perseverance

So many authors fall through the cracks with great books because they have not yet decided what part of their message in each book is the strongest. Your book can't be about everything for everybody. It has to be about something specific to speak to a specific audience. Otherwise, it meets with a "blah, blah, blah" attitude from readers and no one will take you or your book seriously.

I love reading from unknown authors but it takes more than a feature from me and a few other bloggers for someone to notice you and take you seriously. Marketing your book is marketing your message and that takes time and perseverance.

Bloggers, Writers, Authors

Many bloggers who do not write anything else sometimes mistakenly believe they are not writers. Writers come in many forms and shapes. Not every writer pens articles for newspapers and magazines. All of them don't do educational material. All don't write books. But the one thing they all have in common, blog, author, freelancer journalist, is they work with words daily. Those words are then later read by someone else, even if that someone is just family members.

I take great pride in my writing here on my blog. Maybe I'll get to doing my children's book one day or maybe not, but I know that I write well and I don't have to publish a book to prove I am a writer/author.

Welcome to what will be called Lacresha's Motivational Moment. This will be geared toward writers and authors, unpublished and published, or freelancers.

Lacresha has been such a huge inspiration in the lives of so many that I thought it'd be nice to give her one more place to spread her wisdom and wiles.

LMM will post every Monday until which time we discontinue it. She's a very busy woman and I don't suspect we'll be able to hold her here long but let's enjoy her while she's here with us sharing her knowledge. Please leave comments, if nothing but amen or I agree. Thank you.

Writers Versus Authors

There's this school of thought that writers are those who write, whether published or not. Authors are those who have signed contracts with publishers to produce a book.

Within the category of writers, you have freelancers and staffers. In fact, there are so many kinds of writers and authors that we can get lost in definition. To me, the qualifications for writers and/or authors are not so strict. If you have a book, self-published or traditionally published, you are an author. If you write regularly, whether it be blogging, articles, research pieces, etc, then you are a writer.