M.B NOVELS®

One of the strangest things about being an indie author is that others assume the goal is attention. Not entirely unfair — we spend a lot of time talking about marketing, visibility, reviews, sales, engagement, and all the other things that come with putting books into the world. From the outside, it can look like writing is simply what we do to get noticed. But now and then, usually after I’ve spent far too long staring at analytics or refreshing a sales dashboard that hasn’t changed in hours, I ask myself a question that cuts through all the noise: would I still write if nobody were watching?

The answer is always yes.

Not because I’m above validation. I’m not. I love readers. I love messages from people who connected with a character or highlighted a sentence or stayed up too late finishing one of my books. There are millions of stories competing for people’s attention, so the fact that anyone chooses mine is something I’ll never take for granted. But readers aren’t the reason I started writing. Long before there were book launches, websites, social media posts, or marketing plans, there was just me and a blank page. I wrote because stories kept showing up in my head and refused to leave. I write because I genuinely enjoy it.

I think that’s something a lot of indie authors understand. If all we wanted was recognition, there are easier ways to spend our time. Writing a book takes months, sometimes years, and most of that work happens in private. Nobody sees the deleted chapters, the abandoned ideas, the scenes rewritten fifteen times, or the afternoons spent trying to fix a paragraph that somehow got worse every time you touched it. The writing life is much quieter than most imagine.

That’s why I’ve never been able to measure success entirely through numbers. The public side of publishing matters, of course. We all want our books to find readers. But the relationship that sustains a writing career isn’t the one between writer and audience. It’s the one between writer and writing. At some point, you have to enjoy the work itself. Otherwise, the stillness between milestones will eat you alive.

So yes, I hope people read my books. I hope they continue to find their way into your hands. But if the algorithms disappeared tomorrow, if the numbers vanished, if nobody was paying attention, I’d still be here opening another document and starting another story. Before writing became a business, it was something I loved. And after all this time, that’s still the most important reason I do it.