88 | Christian Author Success: Can You Want More and Still Be Content?

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Can you want a profitable, successful author business and still be content in Christ?

Many Christian authors feel spiritually conflicted about wanting more readers, stronger book sales, greater opportunities, and a healthy return on everything they have invested in their writing career. We may minimize those desires because we fear they reveal pride or discontentment. Or we chase growth through hustle and pressure while wondering whether our ambition still honors God.

In this episode, Urcelia shares honestly from her own author journey as she explores the difference between caring about your results and depending on them. You'll discover what biblical contentment actually means, how godly ambition can become tangled with identity and approval, and why your KDP dashboard should inform your author business decisions without determining your worth.

You'll also learn:

 • Why wanting profit and impact can be part of faithful stewardship

 • How to recognize when your author success is carrying emotional or spiritual weight

 • The difference between contentment and complacency

 • What it means to build a Christian author business for God's glory

 • How to set an author business goal without sacrificing your peace, integrity, health, or relationships

Stay until the end for three reflection questions designed to help you examine what you genuinely want from your author business, what may be driving that desire, and how you want to pursue your author success moving forward.

This is an episode you may want to save, revisit with your notebook, and share with another Christian writer who has ever felt guilty for wanting more.

Supporting Scriptures: Proverbs 27:23–24, Matthew 25:14–30, Philippians 4:11–13, Proverbs 16:2, and 1 Corinthians 10:31.

👉 Take the free Growth Quiz™ to discover what God may be growing in your author business this season. 

© 2026 Urcelia Teixeira. All rights reserved. This episode and its accompanying materials may not be reproduced, republished, transcribed, or adapted without written permission.

Transcript

© 2026 Urcelia Teixeira. All rights reserved. This episode and its accompanying materials may not be reproduced, republished, transcribed, or adapted without written permission.


A profitable, successful author business and still be content in Christ.

I think many Christian authors carry guilt around this question, and I'll be honest, I certainly wrestled with this many times.

We want more readers, stronger book sales, greater opportunities, and perhaps a enough income to make all this self publishing work worthwhile.

But the moment we admit this, we also immediately catch ourselves wondering whether our healthy ambition has crossed into pride and discontentment territory.

So we either minimize what we truly desire and push it to the back burner,

or we pursue growth through hustle and pressure,

all while continuing to feel spiritually conflicted about wanting it in the first place.

In today's episode, we are going to untangle this tension. We'll look at what biblical contentment actually means,

how to recognize when you're expecting your author's success to prove something it cannot,

and how to pursue a meaningful author business goal without sacrificing your peace,

integrity, or relationship with God.

By the end of this episode, I'm going to leave you with three questions to help you pursue author growth with greater honesty, freedom, and purpose.

Settle in friend, and grab a notebook. I have a feeling you're going to get real value from this one.

This is the Anointed Scribe™ Podcast.

If you're a Christian writer, whether you are starting out or want to build right from the beginning, or you've published a book or two and feel off course,

this is your home for growing your faith and building a profitable author business.

God's Way. Come on in friend. It's great to have you here.

Hey, real quick, are you wondering what needs your attention most in your writing life or author business right now?

Take the Free Growth Quiz™ for a quick, personalized insight into what God might be growing in your current season.

It only takes around two minutes and you'll walk away with greater clarity on what to focus on next.

Visit anointedscribe.com/quiz or use the link in the show notes.

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

If this is your first time here, though, I'm your host and founder of Anointed Scribe. I'm also an indie author of more than 20 Christian mystery thrillers, and it's my honor to walk alongside you sharing biblical wisdom and practical lessons from my own author journey to help you deepen your relationship with God and build a profitable author business that makes a real impact today.

I want to be honest with you and I want to start with a confession.

I want my author business to grow. I want more readers to discover my books. I want Stronger sales. I want. I want this podcast to reach more Christian writers like you.

I want the years and the money I have poured into this work to produce something visible.

And I know I'm not the only author who wants this.

Now, your version of it might look different from mine. You might want to earn enough from your books to cut back the hours you work somewhere else.

You might want to recover some of what you've already spent on editing covers and advertising.

You might want your books to reach thousands of readers instead of dozens, because you have a message you believe in, and you want it out in the world.

Now. There is nothing strange about wanting any of this. The strange part, however, is how uncomfortable we feel when we admit it.

Especially out loud, because you are a Christian and you know you are called to serve. You know your identity comes from Christ.

You know that money and rankings and recognition cannot define the value of your life.

So the moment you notice that you want your business to succeed, you become suspicious of yourself.

You start examining whether you are being selfish.

You wonder whether wanting more visibility means you are chasing your own glory.

You might even tell yourself that you really don't care about sales and that your profit doesn't matter and that you would be content if only a handful of people ever read your books.

But I'll be honest with you and tell you that I wouldn't.

And I don't think pretending otherwise would make me more spiritual or right in God's eyes.

Here is the distinction that took me years to see, and it changed how I run my whole author business.

Caring about your results and depending on your results are two different things.

Caring is part of the job.

Depending on them is where your piece goes.

That difference is difficult to spot from the inside because both of them start in the same place with a reasonable desire.

You want more readers because you believe in the books you have written. You want more income because this business costs real money to run.

You want more opportunities because you know you have something worth contributing, right?

But underneath all of it,

something else can attach itself without you even noticing it.

So let me take the two halves one at a time, because I think you need permission for the first one and freedom from the second.

Proverbs 27 tells us to know the condition of our flocks and give careful attention to our herds.

That was the business reality of the time.

In an author business, it means paying attention to what you are investing,

what is producing fruit, and what needs to change.

So yes, I care whether my books sell. I care whether my advertising is profitable, because I'M handling resources God gave me. I care whether this podcast grows because I was called to serve you.

Jesus made the same point in the parable of the talents in Matthew 25.

We know it well. A master hands three servants different amounts before he leaves on a journey, right?

Two of them put what they received to work and it multiplied. But the third one buries his and hands it back exactly as he got it.

Now, I don't believe we should turn that into a promise that every faithful Christian author would become a commercial success that we all know isn't true.

There are gifted authors writing excellent books that never sell in large numbers. There are books that miss the market,

covers that don't connect, and advertising campaigns that eat money for breakfast and give very, very little back.

Hard work does not automatically guarantee the outcome you want,

but the parable does show you something about your part in it.

Stewardship involves using and developing what God placed in your hands for you. That might mean improving your craft, learning to publish well,

building an email list, studying your sales data,

or making a hard decision about something you need to stop funding.

Stewardship requires your participation,

which means caring about your results is not a failure of faith, it is the work.

And a profitable author business can serve very good purposes. It can pay for better editing and stronger covers. And it can give you the freedom to keep creating and to give generously to the people and the work God puts in your path.

Now the Other Half here's the other half of this whole equation, and this is where contentment comes in.

We are told to be content, and somewhere along the way many of us decided that a content Christian should stop wanting anything to improve or grow.

Paul says in Philippians 4 that he had learned to be content whatever his circumstances. He he knew what it was to be in need, and he knew what it was to have plenty, right?

I think that second part matters, the plenty part, because biblical contentment is not a commitment to lack.

Paul had learned to stay grounded in Christ when he had little and when he had abundance. The amount changed, but the source of his security and his joy did not.

Contentment does not ask you to give up your goals or become careless about your business.

It does not mean you stop learning or testing and planning or building.

It means your peace, your identity, your joy, and your relationship with God are not postponed until your goals are reached.

You can be grateful for your current readers while working to reach more.

You can thank God for a small email list while learning how to grow it.

The trouble starts when growth becomes the condition for your Gratitude,

you tell yourself you will feel successful when you reach a certain income.

You will relax when your list is bigger. You will believe your books make a difference once enough people buy them.

You will feel like a real author once you have the badge, the award, or the review count beside your name.

And when you think that way, contentment keeps moving further away from you because there will always be another milestone.

And I know how fast this happens because it happened to me.

You reach something you once prayed for and it feels wonderful. It feels awesome.

Then it starts feeling normal and your attention moves to the next number.

Now there's nothing wrong with setting another goal, a bigger, better goal.

It is worth noticing, though, when yesterday's goal, yesterday's answered prayer, becomes today's and disappointing result. That leaves you joyless.

Personally, what has helped me is holding gratitude and growth together in the same sentence. I might say I'm grateful for the readers who already buy and enjoy my books, and I'm working towards reaching more of them profitably.

Both halves are true at the same time.

I don't have to devalue what I already have in order to pursue more, and I don't have to stop growing in order to prove that I'm thankful or grateful.

Now here is the difficulty, and it is the reason this episode exists.

You cannot always tell which side of that line you are standing on.

Proverbs 16:2 says,

All a person's ways seem pure to them, but motives are weighed by the Lord.

I find this verse uncomfortable because it reminds me that I'm not a reliable judge of my own motives. Our motives are seldom one neat, pure, perfectly wrapped thing. You can want to serve people and still enjoy being noticed.

You can want to build a profitable business and still hope the income proves you made the right decisions.

You can want God to receive the glory and still feel rather pleased when someone praises your work.

Newsflash. Spoiler alert. We are human.

The answer is not to pretend those mixed motives don't exist.

The answer is to let God into them.

Now I have found it far more freeing to pray something like this. Lord, this is what I want.

I believe there are good reasons for wanting this and for desiring these things. And I also know I might be asking this success to do something for me that it cannot do.

But please show me what needs correcting. Lead me, guide me, and show me what your version is of success.

Now that feels more real to me than trying to convince God and myself that I don't care about what happens. Right,

because when your business is carrying the weight of your security.

Every movement in the numbers starts affecting you personally and spiritually.

On a day when your book sales are low,

it can stop feeling like a day that it's just got low book sales and it starts meaning something is wrong with you.

You might stop checking your KDP dashboard to get valuable information from it and instead start checking it to get reassurance from it.

Friend, take it from me, your sales dashboards are terrible counsellors.

They can tell you what happened,

but they cannot tell you who God says you are.

So perhaps the question is no longer whether you are allowed to want more.

Perhaps you need to decide what more means to you because more has no natural finish line.

More readers could mean 10 or 10,000.

More income could mean covering your software subscriptions or replacing your salary.

If you leave your desires vague,

they stay endless.

So I want to leave you with three questions that are going to narrow down your desires for you. And it's going to make it crystal clear what it is that you have and that you want and what's lying beneath.

Write these down and come back to them whenever your goals and your motives start feeling tangled. The first question you should ask is, what do I want?

Be honest with yourself. You don't need to give the answer that sounds most Christian. Nobody's going to check your work.

Simply ask, do you want more profit? More readers? More recognition? Maybe a bigger platform or the ability to write full time?

It helps to think about the next 90 days rather than the rest of your author career. So chop it up into the 90 days and ask yourself, what would meaningful growth look like over the next three months?

Perhaps 100 engaged readers added to your email list is the answer. Or perhaps a specific increase in monthly book revenue.

Perhaps you finish and publish your next book, or you build one advertising campaign that pays for itself.

Give the desire a clear shape.

Okay, the second question you need to ask yourself is, what am I hoping this gross will prove or provide?

What do you imagine will change when you reach this goal? Would it make you feel secure? Respected? Confident?

Would it prove that you are talented? That you heard God correctly? That the years of work were worthwhile?

This question can be an uncomfortable one, but it can bring enormous freedom.

Because once you can see what your business is being asked to prove,

you can separate that emotional need from your practical goal.

And then you can pursue that goal without putting any pressure on it.

The third question you need to ask is, how do I want to pursue my goal?

Choose one meaningful business goal. Then choose one boundary that protects the way you go after it.

Perhaps your boundary is that you will not spend advertising money your business cannot afford.

Perhaps you want more visibility and you will not expose parts of your private life you have chosen to protect.

Perhaps you want to just publish more often.

But you will not build a schedule that costs you your health.

First Corinthians 10:31 says so whether you eat or drink or whatever you do,

do it all for the glory of God.

I love that Paul reaches for such ordinary examples.

Eating and drinking are everyday activities and so are writing,

pricing your books pack, planning your schedule, advertising, and reviewing your results.

And here's the thing we need to remind ourselves of Honoring God is not reserved for your mornings or those devotional parts of your author life.

It shapes how you build your author business.

A boundary cannot weaken your ambition.

It keeps you from becoming somebody you don't want to be on the way to getting what you want.

So to recap the three questions what do I want?

What am I hoping it will prove or provide?

And how do I want to pursue it?

Working through those questions may help you see your desire for growth more clearly,

but it may also uncover something underneath it that you weren't aware of.

Perhaps the goal itself is healthy, but something in your current season needs attention before you can pursue it.

Because growing in your faith and growing in your author business is not mutually exclusive.

They go hand in hand,

which is where taking my free Growth Quiz™ comes in. It helps you reflect on what God may be growing in your writing life and your author business right now so you know where your attention is needed most in this season.

It takes around two minutes and you will get a personalized result to help you know what to focus on next.

And it doesn't end at the result.

Once you have it, I'll follow up with a word of encouragement written for the season you are in.

You can take it at anointedscribe.com/quiz or use the link in the show notes so listen friend, it's okay to want your author business to grow. You are allowed to care about your book sales.

You are allowed to want more readers. You are allowed to pursue profit and opportunity and meaningful reach.

You don't need to minimize any of that to prove you love God. Bring it to him honestly and then let him examine what you're asking your growth to provide. Stay grateful for what is already in your hands while you build responsibly towards more and decide before your success arrives how you want to pursue it and who you want to become along the way.

Name what you want.

Ask what you are hoping it will prove,

decide how you will pursue it. Then go back to your desk and keep writing and trust God with the growth and the outcome.

And don't forget to take the Growth Quiz™ to see what God is growing in your author life and business today.

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

© 2026 Urcelia Teixeira. All rights reserved. This episode and its accompanying materials may not be reproduced, republished, transcribed, or adapted without written permission.