Am I Too Old to Publish My First Book?

I am 70 years old and published (through independent publisher Saguaro Books, LLC) my debut Middle-Grade novel, Eddie and the Vegetarian Vampire, in the summer of 2022. The novel features a big-hearted orphan and a kindly vegetarian vampire who team up to find the boy’s missing family and the nutritious, vegetarian food the vampire desperately needs for survival. The book is full of juvenile humor, farting and burping jokes that seem as funny to me now as they did when I was 10 years old.

I worried that this book might reflect poorly on my level of emotional maturity but have decided to, as the cliché advises, accept myself as I am. A more nagging question is whether I am too old to be writing in the first place, dealing with the lonely hours and the rejection that come with the writing life. Will I remember what I wrote yesterday? Will I be able to see the page for edits?

Why can’t I be content to bounce beach balls with my fellow seniors in the water aerobics class? We all know and love lots of authors - like Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Isabelle Allende and Cormac McCarthy - who are writing well into their senior years. But you may have noticed that they started their writing and publishing at a much earlier age.

Perhaps my role model should be Laura Ingalls Wilder, who wrote the first book of the famed Little House on the Prairie series in 1932, when she was 65 years old. Better yet, I might look to the oldest debut author ever, Bertha Wood, who published her debut book about holiday camping in Blackpool, England, Fresh and Fun, at 100 years old.

Wood was a shrewd businesswoman who predicted her own death to occur in 1983. She planned and paid for her funeral for that year. It didn’t happen. Twenty-two years later she published a novel. Good for her. Thankfully I don’t have to travel by covered wagon to write a novel and as far as I know, my wife has not yet planned my funeral. Still, the publishing industry is not immune to our youth-obsessed culture – “20 under 30, Best Stories by America’s Young Writers!” Why not ’20 over 70: Best Stories by America’s Old Fogies”?

The hard truth of the publishing industry is that the average age for debut authors is 37 years old. It is a truism that as we age, the number that we think of as ‘old’ gets higher and higher. Seventy is the new 30? Fortunately, the good news is that most people who buy books don’t care how old we the writers are. They typically don’t look beyond the name of the author of the books they purchase. It’s really us, the writers, who are age-conscious. Thank goodness book buyers care about our books and not us. At first glance, that might not sound great, but put down your plastic beach ball for a moment and think about it. If you’ve got something to say, you ought to say it, and keep saying it until you can’t.

To quote Toni Morrison, “If there is a book you want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”