When I first started out as an author, I did something that felt really smart at the time.
I looked around at the writers who seemed to be succeeding, and I tried to do exactly what they were doing. Their process,
their strategy, the way they launched, the way they marketed, the way they did almost any everything.
Success leaves clues, right?
So I followed the clues and it sent me around in circles for longer than I'd like to admit.
It took me a while to understand why I soon realized I couldn't find my own way by walking in someone else's footsteps.
Because, see, the way that worked for them was built for their calling, their readers, their mission, not mine.
And I think God has a specific way. He's growing for each of us,
one that will never look quite like anyone else's, no matter how much we admire them.
So today we are digging into the roots of it.
And by the end of today's episode, you'll know how to tune out the noise of what everyone else is doing and tune back into what God is actually growing in your author life right now.
You'll also know why we do it and have a way to find your own direction in your author business. Right now,
if you're feeling lost or behind, you'll walk away little lighter, freer, and a whole lot more confident that the road God has you on is the right one, even when it looks nothing like anyone else's.
Plus, I've created something that will help you discover new direction and opportunity for growth in your author business.
So stay tuned.
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 quite 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 you are listening to the Anointed Scribe Podcast,
the show that helps Christian writers grow their author business and their relationship with God.
We are jumping straight into today's topic, friends, so settle in.
I think you are going to Find some real food for thought here today that I'm trusting will move you further along in your author journey journey and closer to God.
I want to start back at the beginning of my own author journey because I made a mistake early on that I see a lot of writers making. And I want to spare you some of the circles I walked when I was new to this.
I was eager, I had a story, I wanted to get it out into the world,
and I had no idea what I was doing.
So I did the natural thing. I found writers who looked like they were succeeding, and I studied them and I copied them.
Their publishing process, their launch strategy, the way they ran their whole author business.
And on the surface, that seemed wise. We are told that success leaves clues, right? That if you want a result, you should find someone who has it and do what they did.
So that's what I set out to do.
But it didn't work the way I thought it would.
Instead of getting me where I wanted to go, it seems sent me around in circles because I was trying to walk a road that was built for someone else's calling someone else's reader someone else's mission.
It fit them, it didn't fit me.
And no amount of copying it was ever going to make it fit.
That was one of my earliest and most expensive lessons,
and I share it lightly because I'm not here to dwell on what I got wrong.
I'm here because of what God taught me through it. And that's the part I really want you to hear today.
So before I go on, let me say something about the word I've been using, because I don't love it.
Copying carries a whiff of theft,
and that's not what I'm talking about here. I'm not accusing anyone of stealing.
What I'm talking about is gentler and more common than that, and honestly, more dangerous because of it.
It's the belief that if we want to be successful at something, we just need to do what the successful people are doing.
That sounds like wisdom,
but underneath it, if we're honest, is something harder to admit.
It's a quiet lack of trust in the call of God on our own lives.
Because if we really believe God had a specific path for us, we wouldn't be so quick to abandon it for someone else's, right?
And here's the beautiful thing about how God works. He has never been impressed by the obvious successful choice.
I think about David.
When Samuel went to anoint the next king of Israel, he took one look at David's tall, impressive older brothers and assumed the king must be among them.
But God said, no man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.
And he chose David, the youngest, the overlooked one, the boy still out in the fields with the sheep.
And I love what happened when David went to face Goliath, they tried to dress him in Saul's armor, the king's own armor, the impressive, proven successful looking gear.
And David put it on and then took it off again because it wasn't his.
It didn't fit him. It literally didn't fit him.
So he went out as himself, with his own sling and his own stones and his own God. And that's how the giant fell.
David didn't borrow someone else's armor to win. He couldn't.
He had to go out as who God made him to be. And so do you and I.
And there's another person of the Bible that I can think about, and I think about him often, and that's Gideon.
When God raised up Gideon to defeat the Midianites, Gideon gathered an army of 32,000 men. That's who he thought he was going to need to win the battle.
And God said, that's too many. So he kept reducing it again and again until Gideon was left with just 300.
Why?
God says it plainly so that Israel could not boast that their own strength had saved them.
God made the numbers so small that when the victory came, there could be no mistaking who had won it.
And that makes me ask a question I want to tenderly hand to you as well.
If you copy someone else's strategy and it sort of works, who gets the credit?
The strategy, the person you borrowed it from?
Maybe your own hustle in pulling it off, but not God.
When we build on borrowed strategy, even our success points back to the method instead of to the one who called us.
But when you walk the path God laid out for you, the one that makes no worldly sense, the one with an army of 300 instead of 32,000,
then when the fruit comes, and it will come,
there's no question at all about who grew it.
And he gets the glory because the path was his from the start.
Here's the deeper truth I came to understand and the part I hope you will also hear today.
You cannot hear God's voice for your author career while your eyes are fixed on someone else's.
You just can't.
When you are busy studying their past,
measuring yourself against their progress,
and trying to reproduce their results, your attention is on them.
It's not on God.
And it's very hard to follow God's direction and voice for your journey when you are staring at the map he drew for someone else.
We might write in the same genre, we might serve a similar reader, we might even share some of the same values. But we will never have the same mission.
The specific thing God has called you to do, the particular message he's placed in you,
the exact people he's sending you to reach, that's yours.
It was never going to be a copy of mine or hers or his.
So when you copy someone else's road, even with the best intentions, you are quietly stepping off your own.
And that path,
the one that's a duplicate of someone else's, will always lead you to a dead end.
Not because you did it badly, but because it was never the road God laid out for you.
I think this is one of the enemy's quietest strategies, honestly. He doesn't always have to stop you from writing.
Sometimes he just has to get you to spend your energy walking someone else's road so that you are busy and exhausted and going nowhere that was ever meant for you.
Now, if you're sitting there listening to this and you're struggling to hear God or discern his direction in your author business because you honestly don't know where he is in your writing life today, I want you to consider something here.
God may be trying to strengthen your roots first.
He may be growing your roots, laying the foundations of your author life before. Before he brings the fruit.
And take it from someone who took far too long to recognize that this was exactly what God was doing in my heart and in my business before he could bring the harvest.
So today I want to help you get some direction. I want to help you see the one area God is growing that matters most for you right now.
The one that will make the biggest impact in your writing and your author business.
So I created a little tool for you. I created a quiz.
It's scripture based, God focused, and it takes about two minutes to give you your answer. You'll find it@anointedscribe.com quiz and I'll leave the link for you in the show notes too.
Because there's a reason you might be looking to others or feeling tempted to reach for someone else's path.
In fact, I've come up with six reasons. I've thought about this a lot. I prayed about it.
I looked back at my own life and watching other writers. And it usually comes down to one of these six.
See if any of them Land for you.
The first is that we are not fully trusting God. Deep down, we are not quite sure he'll come through on the path he gave us.
So we hedge our bets with someone else's.
The second is pressure. When the money is tight or the clock is ticking, we panic. And panic makes us grab for whatever looks like the fastest proven shortcut. Right.
The third is insecurity. We doubt our own ability,
so we lean on someone who seems to have it all figured out,
because surely they know better than we do. Right?
The fourth is that honestly doing it ourselves is hard work.
Copying feels easier than figuring it out from scratch.
But Scripture tells us in Romans that suffering produces perseverance, perseverance produces character, and character produces hope.
Feeling your way through the obstacles isn't a detour from the growth.
It is the growth. The very work you are tempted to skip is the work God uses to shape you. You just can't see it yet.
The fifth is competition.
Sometimes we copy because we are watching another writer pull ahead,
and something in us doesn't want to be left behind.
So we mirror what they're doing, trying to keep the pace, trying not to lose ground.
But a race we were never meant to run will exhaust us every single time,
because it was never our race to begin with.
And the sixth is that we don't actually know our own purpose or mission, or we are not clear on what God has planned for us or why he even called us in the first place.
And when you don't know your own path, your own mission, your own purpose,
someone else's is the only one you can see to follow.
That last one is the root of so much of it, and it's exactly where I want to take us next.
So let me turn to the hopeful part of today's episode, because this is really the heart of today.
There's a verse that anchors so much of what I believe about our writing Life.
It's Colossians 2:7, and it talks about being rooted and built up in him,
strengthened in the faith and overflowing with thankfulness.
Rooted and built up. I love that picture because it's about growth that goes two ways at once.
Down into him,
your roots, going deeper into who God says you are,
and up into fruit, the work and the calling. He's growing out of you.
And here's what matters about that image. A tree doesn't grow by watching. The tree next to grows from its own roots, its own soil, toward its own light.
Your growth as a writer works the same way. It comes from Being rooted in your own identity in Christ and letting God grow your own path up out of that.
So instead of asking what someone else is doing and how you can do it too,
the better question, the one that actually leads somewhere, is this.
What is God growing in me right now in this season?
Because he is growing something, friend.
Maybe it's your security in who you are, so you stop writing for approval.
Maybe it's your trust, learning to rest instead of striving.
Maybe it's your clarity, your sense of calling and direction. Maybe it's to get rid of pride.
Maybe it's your courage, the nerve to finally step forward and be seen.
It's different for each of us, and it's different in different seasons.
But he is always growing something, and it's always uniquely yours.
When you know what that is, you stop chasing other people's paths. You stop feeling the need to compare yourself or compete with the rest of the world.
And you free yourself up to stay focused on God's voice and guidance.
So how do you actually do this? Practically,
it starts with where your attention goes.
If you spend your days watching what every other author is doing,
your author journey will always feel like the one you are failing to keep up with.
So some of this is simply turning your eyes back.
Less time studying them,
more time asking God what He has for you.
It also means getting honest about why you are drawn to copy in the first place.
For me, a lot of the time, it came from fear and from being new and unsure.
Copying felt safer than trusting that God actually had a specific plan for someone like me. But he did.
He does.
And the moment I started building from my own identity instead of borrowing someone else's,
the circles stopped.
And it means paying attention to what God is actually doing in you,
rather than what he's doing in someone else's.
Your season is not behind theirs. It's not ahead of theirs either.
It's simply yours. You are exactly where you are meant to be.
The growth he's working in you right now is exactly the growth you need for the path he's actually called you to. It is all part of the preparation.
You were never meant to be a second version of another writer.
You were meant to be the first and only version of the one God called you to be.
So wherever you find yourself today, friend,
whether you are feeling the pull to follow someone else's lead, whether you're chased by comparison and competitiveness, whether it's pride that's preventing you from going deeper with God,
or you're simply not sure what your own next step is. I want to leave you with this.
God has a way for you that is yours alone, and he is the One who will reveal it in his time.
And if you're not yet sure what that looks like in this season, that's okay.
That's exactly why I made the quiz. It's a small,
prayerful place to start to help you see the one thing God may be growing in you right now.
So go to https://anointedscribe.com/quiz
Take the 10 questions and open yourself up to letting God do the necessary work in you and in your author business so you can stay rooted in who he says you are.
Keep your eyes on the one who called you,
not on the writers around you. And trust that the path he's growing in you, however slow it feels,
is leading exactly where it's meant to.
Keep your ears tuned to his voice,
keep your eyes on his word.
Keep praying and connected.
You don't have to follow anyone else,
you just have to follow Him.
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, 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's wrong to actually fixing it from the inside out. From the foundations up. The Revive to Thrive Way™ is that journey. It's not 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.
