120 Creative Instagram Captions For Authors

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Updated: January 19th, 2023

Jaw-dropping pictures aren't the only way to generate social media engagement.

Instagram captions, while frequently overlooked, are a powerful tool that may make or break your post.

Some businesses continue to put much too much emphasis on Instagram photos rather than captions.

Great Instagram captions have the power to offer even more insight to the post, potentially boosting engagement, bio visits, and click-throughs.

In this article, we've provided you with 120 Instagram caption ideas for Authors. Additionally, we walk you through the 5 easy-to-follow tips on how to create a great Instagram caption.

Here they are:

Cute Instagram Captions For Authors

Authors were shy, unsociable creatures, atoning for their lack of social aptitude by inventing their own companions and conversations. ~Agatha Christie
“All stories have to at least try to explain some small portion of the meaning of life. You can do that in 20 minutes, and 15 inches. I still remember a piece that the great Barry Bearak did in TheMiami Herald some 30 years ago. It was a nothing story, really: Some high school kid was leading a campaign to ban books he found offensive from the school library. Bearak didn’t even have an interview with the kid, who was ducking him. The story was short, mostly about the issue. But Bearak had a fact that he withheld until the kicker. The fact put the whole story, subtly, in complete perspective. The kicker noted the true, wonderful fact that the kid was not in school that day because “his ulcer was acting up.” Meaning of life, 15 inches.”
“Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now.”
“I would advise anyone who aspires to a writing career that before developing his talent he would be wise to develop a thick hide.”
Either a writer doesn’t want to talk about his work, or he talks about it more than you want. ~Anatole Broyard
“When your story is ready for rewrite, cut it to the bone. Get rid of every ounce of excess fat. This is going to hurt; revising a story down to the bare essentials is always a little like murdering children, but it must be done.”
There is no idea so brilliant or original that a sufficiently-untalented writer can’t screw it up. ~Raymond E. Feist
“If you tell the reader that Bull Beezley is a brutal-faced, loose-lipped bully, with snake’s blood in his veins, the reader’s reaction may be, ‘Oh, yeah!’ But if you show the reader Bull Beezley raking the bloodied flanks of his weary, sweat-encrusted pony, and flogging the tottering, red-eyed animal with a quirt, or have him booting in the protruding ribs of a starved mongrel and, boy, the reader believes!”
Well-behaved people don’t make it into the history books
It is better to fail in orignality than to succeed in imitation – Herman Melville
“Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.”
“Outlining my findings, using my life as a stencil.” – Kero One, In All The Wrong Places
“I do not over-intellectualise the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.”
“If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it. Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can’t allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative.”
“Remember: Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations.”
“The rest of the was in black and white, but we were in screaming colour.” – Taylor Swift, Out of the Woods
“You don’t actually have to write anything until you’ve thought it out. This is an enormous relief, and you can sit there searching for the point at which the story becomes a toboggan and starts to slide.”
It’s better not to know authors personally, because the real person never corresponds to the image you form of him from reading his books. ~Italo Calvino
“You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.” – Jodu Picoult
“You do not have to explain every single drop of water contained in a rain barrel. You have to explain one drop—H2O. The reader will get it.”
We don’t know what’s tighter, our jeans or our bookclub
Authors like cats because they are such quiet, lovable, wise creatures, and cats like authors for the same reasons. ~Robertson Davies
“People say, ‘What advice do you have for people who want to be writers?’ I say, they don’t really need advice, they know they want to be writers, and they’re gonna do it. Those people who know that they really want to do this and are cut out for it, they know it.”
“Plot is people. Human emotions and desires founded on the realities of life, working at cross purposes, getting hotter and fiercer as they strike against each other until finally there’s an explosion—that’s Plot.”
To say that a writer’s hold on reality is tenuous is an understatement – it’s like saying the Titanic had a rough crossing. Writers build their own realities, move into them and occasionally send letters home. The only difference between a writer and a crazy person is that a writer gets paid for it. ~David Gerrold
“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is … the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”
“When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art.’ I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.”
Happy Sunday! There maybe no excuse for laziness, but I’m still looking.
“Write while the heat is in you. … The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with.”
“Know your literary tradition, savor it, steal from it, but when you sit down to write, forget about worshiping greatness and fetishizing masterpieces.”
“To defend what you’ve written is a sign that you are alive.”
“Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players. … I have 10 or so, and that’s a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.”
“The first sentence can’t be written until the final sentence is written.”
A story is a letter that the author writes to himself, to tell himself things that he would be unable to discover otherwise. ~Carlos Ruiz Zafón
“Write. Rewrite. When not writing or rewriting, read. I know of no shortcuts.”
“When I say work I only mean writing. Everything else is just odd jobs.”
All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. ~George Orwell
“Not a wasted word. This has been a main point to my literary thinking all my life.”
“Anyone who is going to be a writer knows enough at 15 to write several novels.”

Short Instagram Captions For Authors

Be a lttle more you, and a lot less them
“If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.”
You’re just my (book) type
When nothing goes right, go left.
Running on caffeine and book cheer
“Writers are always selling somebody out.”
“It ain’t whatcha write, it’s the way atcha write it.”
“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”
All I need is book. (And maybe wine + chocolate too.)
Stop working and start working smart.
“If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”
Be sunshine mixed witha little hurricane
“Style means the right word. The rest matters little.”
Namast’ay bed
I got 99 problems, but an aswesome book ain’t one
Life is simple. It’s just not easy.
“I don’t need an alarm clock. My ideas wake me.”
Cozy Nights. Good books. Hot chocolate.
All the book babies…
Sorry, I’m in a relationship with my book
"I think all writing is a disease. You can’t stop it.”
The historian records, but the novelist creates.
Rejection is just redirection
“We aren’t ever getting older.”
Friday…our second favourite F word
“If I fail, if I succeed, at least I’ll live as I beieve.”

Cool Instagram Captions For Authors

“Keep a small can of WD-40 on your desk—away from any open flames—to remind yourself that if you don’t write daily, you will get rusty.”
“The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book.”
“All readers come to fiction as willing accomplices to your lies. Such is the basic goodwill contract made the moment we pick up a work of fiction.”
A writer never has a vacation. For a writer life consists of either writing or thinking about writing. ~Eugene Ionesco
I’m just a girl, standing in front of a salad, asking it to be a cupcake.
“If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, all of us.”
“It’s none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them think you were born that way.”
“Cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can’t fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.”
I don’t care what people think about me. Unless they are my target readers. I definitely care what my readers think of me.
We know the voices in our head aren’t real, but sometimes their ideas are just too good to ignore.
“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”
“Read a thousand books and your words will flow like a river.” – Lisa See
Sometimes you just need to write a thing called “what you want”
“I almost always urge people to write in the first person. … Writing is an act of ego and you might as well admit it.”
Authors must spend months, years making fantasy believable in a single work while reality runs rampant and complete chaos elsewhere. ~Don Roff
We tried to be normal once. Worse two minutes of our life.
Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite. ~Edward Albee
Writers and artists know that ethereal moment, when just one, fleeting something–a chill, an echo, the click of a lamp, a question—-ignites the flame of an entire work that blazes suddenly into consciousness. ~Nadine C. Keels
What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers. ~Logan Pearsall Smith
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author. ~G.K. Chesterton
“You may say I’m a dreamer but I’m not the only one.” – John Lennon, Imagine
The only reason for being a professional writer is that you just can’t help it. ~Leo Rosten
I suspect that most authors don’t really want criticism, not even constructive criticism. They want straight-out, unabashed, unashamed, fulsome, informed, naked praise, arriving by the shipload every fifteen minutes or so. ~Neil Gaiman
“The first draft is you telling yourself the story.” – Terry Pratchett
“The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes."
“Genius gives birth, talent delivers. What Rembrandt or Van Gogh saw in the night can never be seen again. Born writers of the future are amazed already at what they’re seeing now, what we’ll all see in time for the first time, and then see imitated many times by made writers.”
A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. ~Thomas Mann
“There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.”
“I always start writing with a clean piece of paper and a dirty mind.”
“One thing that helps is to give myself permission to write badly. I tell myself that I’m going to do my five or 10 pages no matter what, and that I can always tear them up the following morning if I want. I’ll have lost nothing—writing and tearing up five pages would leave me no further behind than if I took the day off.”

Funny Instagram Captions For Authors

“The freelance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.”
The writer has little control over personal temperament, none over historical moment, and is only partly in charge of his or her own aesthetic. ~Julian Barnes
“Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it’s the answer to everything. … It’s the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it’s a cactus.”
But writers and their woes: they couldn’t be parted. Not for anything. ~Naomi Wood
“I think the deeper you go into questions, the deeper or more interesting the questions get. And I think that’s the job of art.”
“The writing of a novel is taking life as it already exists, not to report it but to make an object, toward the end that the finished work might contain this life inside it and offer it to the reader. The essence will not be, of course, the same thing as the raw material; it is not even of the same family of things. The novel is something that never was before and will not be again.”
I’m the kind of writer that people think other people are reading. ~V. S. Naipaul
“When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people, not characters. A character is a caricature.”
“Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.”
“Geniuses can be scintillating and geniuses can be somber, but it’s that inescapable sorrowful depth that shines through—originality.”
“Long patience and application saturated with your heart’s blood—you will either write or you will not—and the only way to find out whether you will or not is to try.”
“For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.”
“Don’t expect the puppets of your mind to become the people of your story. If they are not realities in your own mind, there is no mysterious alchemy in ink and paper that will turn wooden figures into flesh and blood.”
“Let the world burn through you. Throw the prism light, white hot, on paper.”
“Making people believe the unbelievable is no trick; it’s work. … Belief and reader absorption come in the details: An overturned tricycle in the gutter of an abandoned neighborhood can stand for everything.”
“A book is simply the container of an idea—like a bottle; what is inside the book is what matters.”
“We’re past the age of heroes and hero kings. … Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it’s up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting.”
“I’m out there to clean the plate. Once they’ve read what I’ve written on a subject, I want them to think, ‘That’s it!’ I think the highest aspiration people in our trade can have is that once they’ve written a story, nobody will ever try it again.”
Crippled and crazy, we hobble toward the finish line, pen in hand. ~Siri Hustvedt
“Whether a character in your novel is full of choler, bile, phlegm, blood or plain old buffalo chips, the fire of life is in there, too, as long as that character lives.”
If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favour you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy. ~Dorothy Parker
“Just write every day of your life. Read intensely. Then see what happens. Most of my friends who are put on that diet have very pleasant careers.”

Learn more about starting an author:

Where to start?

-> Author plan
-> How to finance an author?
-> How much does it cost to start an author?
-> Pros and cons of an author

Need inspiration?

-> Other author success stories
-> Examples of established author
-> Marketing ideas for an author
-> Author slogans
-> Author names
-> Author Instagram bios

Other resources

-> Profitability of an author
-> Author tips

5 Tips For Creating A Great Instagram Caption

1. Write several drafts first

Make at least three different Instagram caption drafts.

This will allow you to edit, proofread, and compare your captions side by side to see which one has the most effect.

Your first draft will almost never be selected as the best option, which is why you should set aside enough time to write several.

2. Front-load the most important information

The 2,200-characters limit for Instagram captions is mostly a formality. However, it's worth noting that ig captions are cut off in users’ feeds to around 140 characters.

This doesn't mean you must make your insta captions extremely short so people can see everything without clicking "more."

Instead, frontload your captions with the most important sentence or calls-to-action, and save any @mentions, hashtags, or other unimportant information for the end.

3. Include a strong call to action

The most effective way to maximize the possibility for your Instagram post to get shared and improve engagement is to include a call to action in the captions.

Instead of passively scrolling through, you should use action verbs to encourage people to take action.

Here are some exåmples:

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4. Limit yourself to 3-4 hashtags

A hashtag on Instagram works the same way it does on Twitter and Facebook: it unites the conversations of many users into a single stream.

Anyone who searches for that hashtag on Instagram may see your Insta post if your account is public.

However, you should use hashtags sparingly. As a means to get more followers, some Instagram users add a string of searchable hashtags.

Too many hashtags can come off spammy to your existing followers. Limit yourself to three or four hashtags at most.

5. Use emojis and have fun with them.

Add some emojis to spice up your insta captions and make them more appealing.

Emojis added at the end of sentences or paragraphs may act as "bookends," visually breaking up long strings of text.

You can also use emojis to encourage readers to take action, such as clicking the link in the bio.

If you're going to use emojis, make sure they match your tone of voice and identity. You don't want to use too many emojis at once, particularly in the same caption.

Final Thoughts

Good Instagram captions take your content to new heights.

Remember not to rush your copywriting and to evaluate the success of your efforts so that you can use objective benchmarks to figure out what works.

Your content will go far if you combine a beautiful photo with a great Instagram caption.

-> Instagram bios for an author
-> Author Instagram name ideas

Part of

Becoming An Author: Everything You Need To Know

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meet the author

Pat Walls

I'm Pat Walls and I created Starter Story - a website dedicated to helping people start businesses. We interview entrepreneurs from around the world about how they started and grew their businesses.

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