79 | Are You Being a Faithful Christian Writer—or Just Afraid to Stop?

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Being a self-published Christian Writer is hard work. It's demanding and rest often feels like failure. But what does it reveal about fear, pressure, consistency, and the way we sometimes carry our author calling as if everything depends on us?

In this episode, we're talking about the difference between faithful stewarding and fear-driven control, why Christian authors often struggle to rest, and how to know when your writing, novel marketing, book sales, or author platform growth has started carrying too much weight in your heart.

Plus I share three signs fear may be running your author business—and what to do about it.

If you've been feeling tired, pressured, behind, or afraid to stop—this conversation will help you breathe again and remember who is actually building the house.

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

Transcript

Have you ever felt like if you stop even for just one week, everything you've built might fall apart?
Your momentum, your sales, your visibility, your ranking, your calling. Well, that was me last week.

For the first time since this podcast launched in November 2024, I missed an episode.

18 months of showing up every single Friday and then silence.

But what surprised me wasn't the missed episode. It was what missing it revealed because I realized something rather uncomfortable. Not all of what I was calling faithfulness was in fact faithfulness.

As it turns out, some of it was fear.

And if, like me, you are a Christian author, carrying your books, your author platform, your sales,

your deadlines, your marketing, or your author business, like everything depends on you,

this episode is for you.

So whether you're walking your dog, doing the laundry, or simply taking the next 20 minutes or so for yourself,

grab your favorite beverage and settle in.

I can't wait to share this with you.

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 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 I am back. And boy, am I glad to be back this week.

If you're new here, welcome. You've joined us at an interesting moment. I'll tell you that this is one of those episodes that wasn't planned. It came straight out of a rather difficult week or 10 days and actually what God showed me in the middle of it.

So hit, follow or subscribe and stick around because this is the kind of conversation we have here regularly, honest, personal,

and always rooted in what Scripture actually says about building our author lives God's way.

And to my regular listeners, thank you for being here. Yes, I missed last Friday's episode. Thank you for your DMs, your concern.

I don't take that lightly. I so appreciate you.

But I also don't want this episode to become an apology.

I want it to become a conversation about what happens when faithfulness quietly turns into fear. Because that's what happened to me.

See, about 10 days ago, I came down with this nasty COVID variant. I thought we were rid of COVID forever,

but it seems that there's this nasty variant that is doing the rounds. And when I say I was down, I mean I was man down. Sleeping for five days, solitary,

I could barely lift my head or think clearly, let alone record a coherent podcast episode.

But here's what bothered me most during this time.

Even while my body was clearly saying stop, my mind was still trying to negotiate a way to put out an episode.

Could I record something short? Could I repurpose an old episode? Could I push through the 20 minutes?

And it was a real inner wrestle. But guess what I soon realized?

I realized all this pressure to put out an episode wasn't coming from God. It was coming from fear.

Because underneath the I should record something thinking was a whole layer of anxiety I hadn't fully acknowledged.

I was afraid of losing momentum, afraid that a gap would hurt the podcast's momentum and discoverability,

afraid of disappointing you, my listeners, who show up every Friday and expect something to be there.

And underneath all of that,

something a little harder to admit.

I was afraid that not showing up meant failing the assignment God had given me.

I sat there in bed, fever and all, genuinely wrestling with whether to drag myself to the microphone just to fill the gap.

And that's when God stepped in.

Not with a loud voice or a dramatic moment, just a quiet nudge. You know, the kind that you only hear when you stop trying to fix everything yourself.

And he reminded me that I wasn't the podcast. He is.

I'm not the one carrying it. He is.

I'm not the author.

He is.

And Almost immediately, Psalm 127:1 came to mind. You know it well by now, too.

Unless the Lord builds the house, the builders labour in vain. I know that verse.

I believe that verse.

I probably quoted that verse on this podcast a hundred times by now.

But lying there sick,

worried about rankings and momentum and whether I was letting people down and whether I was letting God down,

I had to admit something rather uncomfortable.

Not all of what I was feeling was faithfulness.

Some of it was actually rooted in fear.

Somewhere along the way, I had started carrying what only God can sustain.

Does it sound familiar?

Maybe it's not a podcast for you.

Maybe it's a book launch that has to work,

a series that has to find its readers,

a platform that has to grow a writing career. That has to prove itself.

I'm willing to bet you've been there too, with your manuscript, your launch, your sales numbers, your reader reviews, your email list.

That feeling that if you stop watching it, managing it,

pushing it,

something will slip.

Right?

Here's what I want to talk about today, because I don't think this was just a me problem,

and it absolutely relates to all of us as authors.

There is a difference between Faithful stewarding and Fear Driven control.

And sometimes we don't know which one is actually running the show until we're forced to stop and look at it under a microscope.

See, faithful Stewarding says,

God has asked me to steward this. Well, I'll show up, do the work, and I'll trust him with the outcome.

But Fear Driven Control says, if I stop,

everything will fall apart. It all depends on me. I can't afford to miss a beat.

They can look identical from the outside.

Both involve working hard.

Both involve caring deeply.

Both involve consistent effort.

But they produce completely different fruit on the inside.

One produces peace.

The other produces exhaustion that never quite lifts no matter how much you do.

And fear makes a terrible business manager.

And it makes an even worse spiritual partner.

So how do you actually know which one is operating in you?

Let's get into that, because I've identified three signs that fear may be running your author business.

Three signs that are worth paying attention to.

The first sign is that you can't rest without guilt.

Not because there's urgent work to do, but because stopping feels like failure.

Like you're falling behind,

like the authors who are doing better than you are working while you are not. And they'll stay ahead while you are lagging behind.

So you stop yourself from resting and you keep pressing on. And there's this guilt underneath it all.

You're building and you're laboring in vain until it leads to burnout. Right?

The second sign is that you check your results to measure your worth.

You don't measure your strategy,

you measure your worth by that result.

Your KDP dashboard is no longer data you use to make strategic decisions in your author business.

It has become a verdict on whether you're good enough,

called enough,

faithful enough,

worthy enough,

just enough.

Right?

A good sales day will feel like confirmation to you, but a bad one feels like condemnation.

The third sign is that you are more afraid of losing momentum than losing peace.

When momentum becomes the thing you are protecting at all costs.

More than your rest,

more than your relationship with God,

more than your creative joy, the work God gave you starts becoming heavier than God ever intended it to be.

Does that sound familiar? It does to me, because I was living all three of these while my body was telling me to rest.

So what does this look like in your author business? Well, let me get specific,

because fear in our author business has a very particular shape.

You can be afraid to stop checking your ads because you think the whole campaign will collapse without your constant attention.

You can be afraid to pause a book launch because you think the Amazon algorithm will punish you if you are not releasing a book every two months.

You can be afraid to rest from social media because you think readers will forget that you even exist.

You can be afraid to delay a book because you've told people it's coming and changing the plan will feel like you're letting everyone down.

You can be afraid to change direction or start a new series, or even end a series because you've already invested too much to admit that the current path might not be right.

And all of that fear produces a very specific kind of busyness,

the kind that never quite feels like it's enough,

where you're always doing more, tweaking more, posting more,

writing more. And yet your peace never arrives.

And here's why. Spoiler alert.

Because your peace was never going to come from the results in the first place.

If any of this resonates, I want you to know something today, friend. The issue isn't your work ethic or your talent or your dedication.

The issue is is what's running underneath it all?

What's powering that dedication and that writing talent? God blessed you with your mission. He's called you to.

And as I myself have come to discover, if what fuels your author engine,

if what's driving your desire to constantly be performing and producing,

if it's rooted in fear and confusion and guilty, guilt and comparison and all the other nasties,

nothing you do on the surface is going to make that go away.

It requires deep, intentional and transformational work on the inside first.

The kind of inner work that only God can do in you as a Kingdom writer and in your author business.

So if this episode is already pressing something on your heart,

I'd like to just remind you that it's exactly what my Revive to Thrive Way™ program will help you work through.

I'm not going to go into the details now. Go take a look at it for yourself. I'll leave the link in the show Notes so what does it look like, practically,

to operate from faith instead of fear? Let me try to make this tangible by naming four things you can do to operate from faith instead of from fear.

Start with the order of your morning before you open your KDP dashboard. Check how many sales you had last night before you check your Facebook notifications,

before you see how yesterday's reel performed. Go to God first.

Seek first his kingdom. Right?

Not because checking your stats is wrong,

but because wherever you go, first sets the tone for everything that follows.

If the numbers are the first thing you see,

your numbers will become the first thing that shapes how you feel about your day.

If God is first, you carry something steadier into everything else that day.

Then, if we look at your writing,

do you finish a scene or a chapter and let it go?

Or do you re read it six times trying to decide if it's good enough?

Is your perfectionism taking over?

Do you give yourself permission to write a rough draft that needs work?

Or does every sentence have to justify its existence before you'll move on?

Surrendering your writing means doing your best and trusting God with whether it's enough.

Next is your marketing. Are you choosing where to show up based on what first feels right for your specific calling?

Or are you chasing whatever platform everyone else is suddenly excited about?

Because here's the truth.

Panic driven marketing and peace driven marketing look very different,

friend.

One scatters your time and focus and energy.

The other builds something that lasts over time and then the one nobody wants to hear Closing your laptop when your body or your spirit is telling you to stop.

Not because your work doesn't matter,

but because pushing through on empty seldom produces your best work. And God did not design you to run without rest.

The Sabbath is exactly there for this reason.

Rest is not giving up.

I want to say this clearly because I think a lot of Christian writers confuse the two,

and the enemy uses that confusion to keep you running on fumes.

Rest is not giving up. They are not the same thing.

Giving up is a decision made from despair.

It says, this isn't working.

I can't do this. I'm done. It comes from hopelessness.

Rest, on the other hand, is a decision made from wisdom.

It says, I'm at my limit. I need to recover. I need to rest.

I'm going to trust God with this while I step back.

It comes from faith.

Jesus withdrew regularly. He got into boats to get away from crowds.

He slept during storms. He went to the garden to pray before the hardest thing he ever faced.

Rest was not a weakness in Jesus. It was dependence.

It was a daily, deliberate act of trusting his Father with what he couldn't carry on his own.

Mark 6:31 records Jesus saying to his disciples, come with me by yourselves to a quiet place and get some rest.

He said that in the middle of ministry,

not when everything was said and done,

not when all the crowds had been fed and all the needs had been met. No smack bang in the middle of it all.

Because rest is not the reward for finished work.

Rest is part of faithful work.

When I chose not to record last week, which was a really, really hard decision, I will let you know,

I was not giving up on this podcast. I was not failing God.

I was not failing you. I was trusting God with it for seven days. And here we are. The show survived.

You came back.

God held in his hands what I lay down at his feet.

I know the juggle is real.

I don't think I acknowledge it enough here.

Building an author career is hard. It is hard work. In fact, I often say it's probably one of the hardest careers I've ever had. And I. And I've had a fair share of really tough ones.

It is hard to be an author. And for most of us,

it doesn't exist in a vacuum like they make you believe in the movies either, right?

Not counting my five novellas, I've just finished writing my 20th full length novel while trying to still get the anointed scribe brand up and going.

Producing this podcast every week, creating courses and resources for you.

Building my author career and carrying the normal home responsibilities too.

I have four men in the house.

It's a full time job,

but I do it all because I genuinely believe God has called me to it. That's what fuels me.

But walking in your calling doesn't make you immune to burnout, illness, deadlines, or the human reality that you cannot do everything at once. Right? I've learned that now God has to be in it with you at all times.

He alone is what sustains us. He alone is what will sustain you as a writer as you go through tough times and your author business friend. If you are in a season where you are juggling more than what feels manageable,

I want you to hear this from someone who is right there in it with. With you.

I'm right there in this juggling act.

You are allowed to rest. I want you to hear that from me today.

You are allowed to rest. You are allowed to let something slip for a week or two or three.

You are allowed to have limits. God is not surprised by your limits. He designed them.

He designed those limits. He designed the days for us to rest. He designed the Sabbath.

What he asks is not perfection. He asks faithfulness and faithful does not always look like showing up.

Sometimes being faithful looks exactly the opposite.

And maybe that's the invitation underneath all of this for you and me today.

So maybe the question for this week isn't how do I push harder?

How do I produce more?

Maybe the question is what am I carrying that God never asked me to carry on my own?

Your writing matters deeply to God.

Your book matters deeply to God. Your author business matters deeply to God.

Your kingdom calling matters. Your readers matter. Each and every one of those readers of yours matter to God.

And newsflash,

you matter to God.

But you are not the source.

You are not the Amazon algorithm. You are not the sales report.

You are not your book launch plan. You are not the ad campaign.

You are not the whole machine holding all of it together.

You are a steward,

he is the builder.

So lay it down. Not forever,

just long enough to remember who's actually holding it all,

who's actually holding you.

He's got your books,

he's got your calling. He's got your readers. He's got your finances. He's got your health.

He's got you.

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

Friend. If today's episode stirred something in you, if you found yourself thinking, yes, this is exactly where I am, I want you to know you don't have to keep circling the same mountain.

There comes a point where working harder and more information aren't the answer. What's needed is a step by step,

spirit led journey that takes you from knowing what do to wrong to actually fixing it from the inside out. From the foundations up. The revive to thrive way is that journey.

It's not another strategy, it's not another checklist. It's you,

God and the work that actually moves things forward at your own pace, in your own time.

If you sense this might be your next step, head to AnointedScribe.com/ReviveToThrive