81 | What I'd Do Differently If I Were Starting My Author Brand Today

📗 FREE Discover Your Christian Author Brand guide

What would I do differently if I could start my author journey over? After eight years, twenty novels, and a long list of hard-earned lessons, I have some honest answers.

In this personal episode I'm taking you back to where it all began for me — an impulsive first novel in 2018, several failed book covers, money poured into ads and promotions that never worked, and the financial pressure I was silently trying to build under at the time. I share what I'd do differently if I were starting my Christian author brand today, and the point at which God called me to pivot my entire career…contrary to popular authorpreneur advice.

We'll talk about the three Ws every author needs to know and why getting clear on these changes everything about how you write, publish, and grow your author business.

Whether you're writing your first book and just starting out or several books in and sensing it's time to make some real changes as a Christian writer, this episode will give you a clear, honest place to begin.

🎁 Visit the Anointed Scribe Academy Store to view all the resources mentioned in this episode.

Transcript

If I could go back to 2018 and sit across from the version of me who was about to publish her very first novel,

I would have a lot to say to her.

Not because she did everything wrong,

but because she did almost everything on impulse.

No strategy,

no clarity,

no real idea who she was writing for or why.

Just a woman with a story and a bucket list dream to tick off.

Thankfully, it all worked out eventually,

but I made it so much harder than it needed to be.

So today I want to tell you what I would do differently if I was starting my author brand from scratch today.

The things I wish someone had told me before I published a single word.

Whether you're just beginning or you are several books in and silently wondering if you messed it all up somewhere, I think this episode is going to help you a lot.

At the very least, I'm hoping it would offer hope and encouragement and a few things you can do to help you in your author life right now.

So friend, come sit with me a while as I share with you a few lessons I've learned along the way.

This is the Anointed Scribe Podcast.

I'm Urcelia Teixeira, ex real estate agent turned award winning Christian fiction author.

When I wrote my first novel on a bucket list whimsical, I had no idea it would spark a spiritual journey that would redefine my calling. But you know what friend?

Self publishing wasn't easy. I got caught in the hustle chasing rankings and sales while desperately trying to stay rooted in Christ.

Now, by God's grace, I'm building my author business his way. And now he's called me to help you do the same.

Welcome to the Anointed Scribe Podcast where faith meets business business for Christian writers. Let's write, publish and grow our author business God's way. Are you ready? Well then, let's get started.

Hey, it's your author friend, Urcelia, and welcome to the show.

And if you are joining me for the first time, welcome to. You are catching me in a reflective mood today as I get honest about some of the mistakes I I've made.

They are too many to cram into one episode, but they were big ones. So I'm sharing them here with you today because this podcast is all about building our author lives and businesses God's way,

rooted in Christ and using biblical principles and strategies that grow our sales while giving God the glory he deserves.

And so today I'm getting personal. I I'm walking you through my own story and the lessons I learned the hard way.

So that hopefully you don't have to.

And not forgetting my regular listeners and subscribers, thank you for following the show and for being here again today. I think you are going to really enjoy getting to know my backstory a bit more.

You know, I usually dig into scripture and teaching and we'll get there today too.

But this episode is a little more behind the scenes, a little more unfiltered, if you will.

Because I think sometimes the most useful thing I can offer you isn't a principle,

it's the truth about what this author journey actually looked like for me.

So let me take you back to the beginning of my eight years as an indie author.

Twenty plus novels in five novellas, and a whole lot of lessons learned along the way.

In 2018, I published my first novel, an archaeological thriller,

and I want to be honest with you about how that happened, because it's not the strategic, prayerful, carefully planned story you might expect from someone who now coaches other authors.

I wrote it purely on impulse.

Writing a book was on my bucket list and I had a half baked story idea so I sat down and I wrote it and then naively decided to see the process through and so went ahead and published it to Amazon kdp.

And that was that. And it was more or less the entire extent of my author strategy, if you could even call it that.

I didn't think twice about who I thought was going to even want to read this book.

I didn't even consider that maybe, just maybe, God wanted to share a specific message through me.

And I didn't really understand anything about self publishing at all.

Not properly. In any case.

I didn't know about Amazon categories or back end keywords or book covers or Reader magnets or email lists or any of the infrastructure that actually makes an author business work.

I was, to put it plainly, winging it.

And here's the thing.

I don't share that with shame because God has done awesome and incredible things with that messy beginning of mine.

But I share it because I want you to know that if you are someone who is winging it right now,

who feels confused and overwhelmed and like you don't have a clue if what you're doing is what you're supposed to be doing,

know this.

It does not disqualify you in any any way. Not in the least.

You are just at the beginning of a learning curve that I've already climbed. And my goal through this podcast and the Anointed Scribe Academy is that I'd love to save you some of the falls.

So let me Start with One of the biggest mistakes I think I made.

If I was starting completely fresh today with zero audience,

zero email list,

zero following the very first thing I would do before writing a single chapter is get clear on three who I am or want to be as an author,

who I'm writing for, and why I'm writing for them.

None of those questions even crossed my mind back in 2018.

And because I never answered them,

everything downstream got harder.

Take my book covers, for example.

Because I had no clarity on who my reader was or what promise my book was making to them, I got the covers wrong.

Not once,

three times, three different covers before I landed on something that actually work.

And each of those redesigns cost me time and a lot of money I didn't need to spend.

If I had been clear on my reader from the start, I'd have got it right the first time. Because a cover is really just a visual promise to a specific person.

You can't make the promise if you don't know who you are making it to, right?

My book launches suffered for the same reason I was launching books into a void.

Because I hadn't built a relationship with a specific reader.

I was hoping the right people would find them rather than knowing exactly who I was trying to reach.

And here's one that still makes me shake my head.

I wrote my series prequel, the perfect reader magnet, the ideal way to bring new readers into my world and build my newsletter list only when I was already three books deep into the series.

I didn't write it as a strategic entry point because I didn't yet understand that I needed one.

I stumbled into it later when I finally realized I needed a way to build my list.

All of that the covers, the launches, the prequel,

all of it, traces back to one thing.

I didn't know my three W's before I started.

The second thing I'd do differently is resist the urge to jump straight to tactics.

Because here's what I did instead.

I spent a lot of time and a lot of money I didn't necessarily have on book promotions and learning paid ads,

course after course. And none of it worked the way it could have.

Not because promotions and ads didn't work,

they absolutely can, but because I was running them on top of a foundation that wasn't there.

I had no clear reader,

no clear positioning,

no infrastructure underneath the marketing.

So I was essentially pouring money into amplifying a message that wasn't clear in the first place.

And an unclear message just becomes a louder, unclear message when you put ad spend behind it.

Now I want to be honest about the pressure underneath all of this too.

At the time we were living in Portugal. We had just moved from South Africa to Portugal,

and I wasn't working in any other capacity. Writing books was what I had decided was going to be my full time job.

The opportunity kind of presented itself, but not without its fair share of pressure.

There was this constant financial undercurrent, this silent pressure that my writing needed to start producing.

And when you are building under that kind of pressure, you make reactive decisions. You grab at tactics. You throw spaghetti at the wall and hope anything stick right.

You chase whatever promises the fastest result.

You skip the foundational work because foundational work feels slow and you feel like you don't have time for slow. Right. I get it. I understand that pressure intimately.

And what I've learned is that building from pressure almost always costs you more in the long run than building slowly and clearly from pressure. The Start now here's where my story takes the turn that changed everything.

When I started, I had no idea who I was as a writer,

much less as an author.

I was writing general market archaeological thrillers and doing reasonably well at it. But I hadn't come face to face with my own identity as a writer at all.

That took six books and a novella.

It was around then that God called me to pivot from the general market to Christian market. And I'll be honest with you, that threw me for a loop. A big one.

I had built something in the general market. I had readers there. I had momentum. I even had a little bit of industry recognition.

And here God was asking me to change direction in a way that didn't make obvious business sense sense.

But no matter how many times I tried to ignore it, God chased me down until I could no longer run from it. It wasn't that I didn't want to trust Him.

I did.

I just couldn't let go of the worldly business advice that made more sense to my human brain.

But I did. Eventually.

And I started going through a process of transformation.

The exact process I've now structured my revive to thriveway course around.

Although I had no idea at the time that it would become that.

But I released the whole thing to God. My identity as a writer,

my direction, my career.

The so called legacy I was trying to build and leave for my boys. And I allowed God to show me the real me.

Who I actually was in his eyes and what he was calling me to do with my writing according to his plan and over time. And I mean, this is still happening daily.

God molded me into the author I am now.

He picked off the insecurities one by one. The competitive spirit, the comparison, the envy.

All the ugly things I'd been carrying without even realizing they were weighing me down.

And I replaced them with peace, with freedom, with clarity about who I'm serving and why.

I no longer obsess over my finances.

I don't chase other authors strategies.

I don't feel threatened when someone else succeeds.

My eyes are on God and on the kingdom mission he's given me,

and I stay rooted by being in His Word daily. That's a practice I genuinely don't skip because it's the thing that keeps my ears tuned to his direction in everything I do.

Do I still slip up sometimes? Of course. I'm human.

I live under God's grace and mercy every single day.

But my heart is no longer divided between two masters.

It's fixed on one God.

Here's something I want to share that I think matters for anyone listening who feels like they've made a mess of their author journey so far.

I told you that God wasn't part of my brand building in the beginning. And that's true,

at least in the sense that I never consciously invited him into my career.

I was building on my own.

But looking back now, I can see him in every single detail.

Every shaping,

every wrong step,

every one of those three book covers that I changed, every failing promotion,

every season of pressure in Portugal and then later when we moved to England.

Because he really does turn ashes into beauty. There's a verse in Isaiah 61 where God promises to give his people a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of joy instead of mourning.

And that is exactly what he did with my early author years. He took the striving,

the pressure, the wrong turns, all the things I'd have thrown away as wasted.

And he made something beautiful of them.

He used all of it to bring me to where I am today, clear on who I am,

clear on who I'm serving,

clear on what he's called me to do,

clear on where my business is headed.

None of it was wasted. He used the very things I would have called mistakes to equip me for what I'm doing right now,

including sitting here talking to you on this podcast.

So if you're looking back at your author journey and seeing nothing but missteps,

I want to gently offer you a different lens today.

Those missteps might be the very material God uses to build something in you that you can't see yet Nothing in your story is ever wasted in his hands.

So let me bring this all together into something practical you can actually take away today.

If I could give just one piece of advice about building your author brand,

whether you are just starting out or you are several books in and realizing something never got built right,

it would be this.

Know your three W's.

The first W is,

who are you as an author?

Because the answer to that reveals your genre and your author voice.

It's the foundation everything else is built on. When you know who you are, you stop trying to write like everyone else and you start writing like you.

The second W is who is your reader?

Because knowing your reader shapes your story, your content,

and even the practical things, like which categories you should be in.

When you know exactly, exactly who you are writing for,

you write to someone rather than into a void. And readers absolutely feel the difference.

And the third W is what is your kingdom mission?

Because this is the thing that keeps you rooted. It keeps you aligned. It clarifies your calling and gives you purpose that goes deeper than sales figures and Amazon rankings.

When you know your kingdom mission,

the slow seasons won't unravel you because you are not building for numbers. You are building for something eternal.

And here's the important part.

These three W's aren't separate. They fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. Who you are, who you serve, and what you are called to do. They each interlock, and together they form the foundation of your entire author brand.

I didn't have any of these when I started.

I didn't even know where to start looking for it. I had to discover them the long way around. Over six books and a major pivot and a lot of tears and a lot of striving.

But you don't have to take the long way, friend. You can start here,

right now, today.

And I want to say this gently because I'm not trying to turn this episode into a sales pitch. Definitely not. But it would be strange for me to talk about all of this and not tell you that everything I now create inside the Anointed Scribe Academy exists to help you with exactly these things.

If you're just starting out and you need to get clear on your three W's, I have resources for that to help you nail them down.

If you're several books in and you feel weighed down, like you can't quite figure out what's holding your author business back and why it's not growing, I have something to help you identify that.

If you need to nurture your readers or your newsletter list and you don't know what to say to them, I've created a tool for that too.

And if you know the issue goes deeper, and if you need the kind of reset I needed when I was six books in and no clue of what was going on and where to go, and when God called me to pivot, that's exactly what my Revive to Thrive Way™ course was built for.

The point I want you to hear is this.

Wherever you are in your author journey, whether you are staring at a blank page wondering if you can even do this,

or whether you are 20 books in and sensing it's time to rebuild,

there's a next reliable step for you.

You're not too early, you're not too late or too far gone.

God hasn't abandoned you, and you definitely haven't missed your opportunity.

You just need a little bit of help and guidance.

If you'd like to take a closer look at any of these tools I mentioned, I'll put a link to everything in the episode description so you can find whatever meets you where you are right now.

So to wrap up, if I could go back and sit across from that woman in 2018 about to publish her first archaeological thriller with no plan and nothing but a bucket list dream,

I wouldn't tell her she was doing it wrong.

I would tell her that God was going to use every bit of it.

The impulse, the wrong book covers, the financial pressure,

the pivot, the hardship, the confusion, the insecurities.

All of it.

But I'd also tell her this.

You don't have to strive your way into clarity.

You don't have to hustle your way into acceptance.

You can ask God for it from the beginning. You can build with him instead of trying to do it all on your own.

And the sooner you know who you are,

who you are writing for, and what he's called you to do, the lighter this whole writing journey becomes.

That's what I'd do differently, and that's what I want for you.

So friend, I'm praying today's episode encouraged you in some way and hopefully brought you some insight too.

May your pen stay faithful, your roots grow deep, and every word you write bear fruit for his glory.

One more thing before you go.

If you are ready to get clear on who you are as a Christian author,

your message, your mission, and the unique voice God has given you, grab my free Discover your Christian Author Brand Guide. The link is in the show description and if you know the issue goes deeper than your brand.

If you are tired of second guessing every decision,

chasing strategies that don't you don't feel right, and trying to build your author business from pressure, fear or comparison.

Then the Revive to Thrive Way™ was created for you. It's my self paced online scripture rooted program that helps Christian authors surrender the pressure,

rebuild their God given identity and get clear direction for what to build next.

You can learn more and join at anointedscribe.com/revivetothrive
link is in the show notes too.