68 | What I Wish Someone Had Told Me When I Nearly Gave Up

This is my backstory — and it's something I've never shared before. Not like this.

In today's episode I'm bearing it all — the full, raw story of just how depressed and desperate I was two and a half years ago. Desperate enough to take out a credit card, go into debt, and fly halfway across the world — twice — hoping someone in a conference room would finally tell me what I was missing.

I had answered God's call. Pivoted my entire career in obedience. Won the award. And I was still failing. Or at least, that's what it felt like.

This is the story of what five years of building my author business the wrong way actually looked and felt like — and the eleven words God said to me on a beach in Florida that changed everything.

If you've felt alone in this author journey and wondered what you're missing — this one's for you. 

🔥 The Revive to Thrive Way™ is now open — head to https://anointedscribe.com/revivetothrive to find out more.

👉 Listen now to uncover the secret to becoming an anointed scribe!

Transcript

I've never told anyone just how depressed and desperate I was only two and a half years ago.

So desperate that I took out a credit card, went into debt, and flew halfway across the world hoping that somewhere in a conference room I would finally find the missing piece of that would make me as successful as the authors around me.

Today I'm going to tell you what I found there instead.

And it wasn't what I expected.

Grab your favorite beverage, sit back and take a listen.

This is my backstory and you're listening to 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 whim, 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 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 Anointed Scribe Podcast.

If you're tuning in today for the first time, your timing couldn't be more perfect. Or should I say,

God's timing couldn't be more perfect.

Because today I'm bearing it all. My dirty little secret that I've never shared with anyone.

No strategies, no frameworks, no tips.

Just me and you, author to author,

having the honest conversation I wish someone had sat me down and had with me years ago.

Because if something in your author life feels heavy right now, not just slow,

not just quiet, but genuinely heavy,

I want you to stay with me today.

What I'm about to share might be exactly what you've been waiting to hear and, dare I say, been praying for.

I want to take you back to 2018.

That's when I published my first novel,

a mainstream thriller. The first book in what became the Alex Hunt archaeological thriller series.

And I want you to know I loved it. I loved the writing,

I loved the readers.

I loved every single part of building something from nothing.

And. And for a while, it was good. Really good.

But it didn't take long before I started paying attention to the numbers.

And then to other authors numbers and then to why some books climbed and others didn't.

And before I even realized what was happening,

I was in it. That place where your worth as an author gets quietly tied to your rank,

your reviews, your sales figures.

I kept writing. I kept publishing, because frankly, there was no turning back. I had readers I didn't want to disappoint.

By book five in the series, I was doing everything an indie author is supposed to do.

Learning the strategies, running the ads,

studying what worked for others, working harder,

trying to crack the code.

And then about 18 months into that series,

God told me to pivot.

Not a vague nudge, a very clear, unmistakable call to leave the mainstream market and write Christian fiction.

Now, I want you to understand what that meant practically.

I had built a readership.

I had momentum. And I walked away from most of it willingly because I genuinely believed God was calling me into something bigger.

A ministry, not just a career. And at first,

it was beautiful. It felt so at peace. I felt so at peace and in step with God.

My first Christian novel went on to win an award.

Readers found it and wrote to me saying it had changed something in them. I felt like I was finally doing what I was made to do.

Like everything had clicked into place.

But here's the part I've never talked about.

It didn't last.

Not because the calling was wrong, the calling was absolutely right.

But because I brought myself into it.

The old version of me, the one who checked sales rankings before coffee, the one who measured her worth against other authors. Success.

She came right along for the ride.

And slowly,

without me even noticing, the ministry started to feel like a business again.

The comparison crept back in.

The pressure crept back in. The sales plateaued.

The quiet question of why is it working for them and not for me? Crept back in.

I had answered God's call. I had pivoted. I had done what he had asked me to do.

I won an award.

And I was still doing the same thing I'd always done.

Building from pressure, confusion, and second guessing.

The setting had changed, but the foundation hadn't.

So I did what any motivated author does when things aren't working right.

I went looking for answers.

I spent more money on secret strategies, tweaked blurbs, changed covers,

wrote what the market demanded, yet none of it stuck.

In my desperate quest for success,

I found myself at a major indie author conference in St. Pete's Beach, Florida.

And I sat in those sessions and I took pages of notes and I thought,

this is it. This is what I've been missing.

I went home with a full notebook and a new plan and a genuine hope that this time things would be different.

Well,

they weren't.

Or not in the way I needed them to be.

See, the strategies helped a little,

but that underlying feeling of heaviness,

that sense that I was pushing against something that wouldn't move,

that God was blessing other authors while mine sat quiet,

that didn't shift, not even a little.

And over the coming year, I found myself working harder than ever before,

implementing all I had learned at the conference,

but drifting further away from God because I was meant to be this called author,

set apart for a purpose,

a purpose that was meant to carry fruit on the other end of it, right?

And all I'd see were the other authors speeding past me.

It ate me up inside. It gnawed at my faith,

because some of them weren't even saved.

And I couldn't give up.

I had to keep going, because by now we had also fallen on hard times financially.

So when that same conference rolled around the next year, I went back.

Year two,

same conference, same place.

And I want to be really honest with you about where I was the second time around, because I think it might sound a little bit familiar.

See, I wasn't going because I wanted to keep up with the latest industry trends or even network with other authors.

I was going because I was desperate.

Desperate for sales.

So desperate that I took out a credit card and went into debt just to get there.

I was watching authors around me, some with smaller backlists,

some newer than me,

and they were hitting numbers I couldn't touch.

And I honestly could not understand what they had that I didn't.

What they knew, what they were doing differently. Believe me, I asked.

And I sat in those sessions, and underneath my notebook and my pen and my professional author composure,

I was basically whispering, please, please, let this be the thing that fixes it.

That's where I was.

That's how long this had been going on.

Five years of writing,

a divine calling,

an award,

a true love and passion for the work.

And I was sitting in a conference room feeling like I was failing,

like I had already failed,

and desperately hoping someone on a stage was about to tell me why.

Except no one did.

And if I'm honest, I didn't learn anything I didn't already know and hadn't already tried.

On day three, I ditched the round tables because I was an emotional wreck.

And I fled to a quiet corner on the beach, tears streaming down my cheeks. I've never felt more alone in this journey than at that moment.

And that's when God got quiet. With me. Not dramatic, not loud,

not in a burning bush.

Just that particular kind of quiet that cuts through everything else.

And what he said,

speaking to me for the first time in years, I felt hit me like a bolt of lightning right in the chest.

You know what he said?

He said, girl, you're building for me, but you're not building with me.

Eleven words.

And they undid five years of spinning around in circles.

Because here's the thing.

God was right.

I had been building for him every book,

every launch,

every pivot, every prayer,

every gratitude,

honestly believing I was doing it for the right reasons.

But I had slowly and without ever deciding to,

made the whole thing about the results,

about the numbers,

about the money,

about proving that the calling was real, that the pivot was worth it,

that I wasn't behind.

And in doing that,

I had taken the wheel completely.

I sat there on that beach and I sobbed. The kind of tears that come when something true finally lands after a very long time of almost hearing it.

Because the problem was never the strategy.

It was never even the covers or the ads or guess what? The Amazon keywords.

The problem was my foundation.

I had been trying to make progress for five years when what I actually needed was to sort out what I was building on.

Everything I'd tried to fix on the surface was sitting on ground that wasn't stable.

No wonder nothing held right now. Why am I telling you all of this?

Because I want you to understand that what I'm describing isn't a beginner problem.

It's not a you just need to learn more or do more problem.

And it's not something that goes away just because you get more serious about your faith or more intentional about your writing and your author business.

See, it crept up on me over five years through a complete genre pivot, through an award,

through a genuine heart to serve God.

And I hear versions of this story from Christian authors almost every single week.

Maybe you recognize it right now, too.

Maybe you've launched a book you prayed over and believed in several even,

and the sales just didn't come.

And you're trying not to let that shake you, but quietly it is.

Maybe you keep checking your KDP dashboard, even though it stresses you out because not knowing feels worse than the bad news, right?

Maybe you're looking at other authors, maybe even less experienced ones, or like I did, the ones that weren't even saved,

and you wonder what they know that you don't, why things seem to click for them,

whether God is just more in their corner than he is in Yours.

Maybe you've started wondering if you heard him wrong,

if this is really your calling,

if you were really cut out for this and you're exhausted.

You're tired. Not the kind of tired that a weekend off fixes.

The specific kind of tired that comes from giving everything you have for months, maybe even years,

and still feeling like something is off,

like you're pushing against something that just won't budge.

Friend, I need you to hear me right now. There is nothing wrong with you.

You are not less talented.

You have not been abandoned.

You have not missed your window.

But I do think your foundation might need attention.

And I think if you're honest, you probably already feel that this isn't a discipline issue. It's not a motivation issue. I'm also not even inducing guilt on you.

It's not even a strategy issue.

It's that you're building on shifting sand,

and you cannot fix a foundation problem by working harder on the surface.

Let me tell you what changed for me. Not the strategies. Those came later.

What changed first was something much quieter.

I stopped starting mornings with my KDP dashboard.

Not because I made a rule about it or had sheer willpower,

but because something in me genuinely stopped needing that number to tell me how the day was going to feel.

I stopped reading another author's launch results and spiraling.

Not because I stopped caring about my own success,

but because their success stopped feeling like evidence of my failure.

I started making decisions about my books, my marketing, my direction.

From a different place.

Not from what's working for everyone else right now,

but from a much steadier, quieter sense of this is the right next step for me.

And here's what surprised me most. The clarity.

I had been so used to the second guessing, the back and forth.

But what if I'm wrong?

That when it started to lift,

I almost didn't even recognize it?

Making decisions felt almost too easy.

That's what a shifted foundation actually feels like from the inside.

Not a dramatic overhaul, just a different quality of daily life as an authority,

a different relationship with the work, with the results,

with God in the middle of it all.

And when that was in place,

when I was building with him instead of just for him, the practical things started to move differently, too.

My writing changed.

My marketing changed. My income tripled.

But I want to be clear. The income was the downstream effect.

The foundation was the actual shift.

And the foundation is what I want to help you build.

Which is why today I'm so excited and, if I'm honest, a little emotional to open the Doors to the Revive to Thrive Way this is the program I've spent the past year building.

It walks you through three specific shifts,

the exact same ones God walked me through after that second conference in a structured, supported way.

The program includes video teaching, three journal style guidebooks to help you reflect and process as you go,

and lifetime access so you can come back to it whenever you hit a new season or need to reset, or when I add new updates.

And because I wanted this to feel like more than just another digital course you work through on a screen,

I've also turned those three guidebooks into a beautiful special edition hardcover journal.

So you're not just working through the process, you're actually recording it.

Something you can hold onto, write in, and come back to long after the program is done.

I should also just say that this is not a marketing course. It's not a strategy program.

It's the thing that makes the strategies actually work because it changes how you know which to use and then how to implement them.

I spent years getting there the long way through confusion, trial and error, and a lot of circling back to the same place.

What this program does is give you a clear,

structured path through those three shifts so you're not guessing at what comes next or trying to figure it out alone.

It's not a sprint. We move at God's pace, not the world's.

But you won't be wandering through the wilderness either.

Now, I want to say something that might surprise you.

You don't need me for this.

Yes, I said it.

God could walk you through every one of these shifts without a program, without me,

without any of it. He did it for me without a roadmap.

But it took six years,

a credit card debt, and a lot of hit and miss to get there.

What I've done is take everything the Holy Spirit walked me through and built a structure around it.

The questions, the reflection prompts, the framework so that you have something to hold onto as God does the work.

I'm not the one who changes anything. He is.

I'm just the one who's been there and cleared the path. A little Friend if what you've heard today resonates. If something in you, while you've been listening has quietly been going, yep, that's me.

That's exactly where I am.

I want you to know that feeling is not a coincidence.

Go to anointed scribe.com revivetothrive it's in the show notes too. And take a look at everything that's inside this program. Read through it,

Sit with it. Ask God about it.

I'm not yet to push you into anything.

I spend years feeling pushed by my own expectations, by my comparison,

by the pressure to perform,

and the last thing I want is to add to that pressure.

But if you read that page and something in you says yes,

trust that the door is open and I would love to walk through it with you.

Thank you for being here today.

Thank you for trusting me with your time and letting me share my story.

I know that none of us were called to do this burnt out alone and wondering if God has forgotten about our books.

Friend, you were called to thrive.

And there is a version of your author life waiting on the other side of this that feels completely different from where you are right now.

I know because I'm living it.

Head to anointedscribe.com/revivetothrive and I'll see you there.