The Weird Loneliness of Being an Indie Author

The Weird Loneliness of Being an Indie Author

There is a strange kind of loneliness that comes with being an indie author, and I don't think we talk about it enough. Writing itself is already a solitary thing. You sit alone with a laptop, notebook, cup of coffee, or whatever happens to be keeping you alive that particular evening, and disappear into a world nobody else can see yet.

For months, sometimes years, these characters exist almost entirely inside your head. You know what they sound like when they're angry. You know what they're afraid of. You know which characters are going to fall in love and which ones aren't going to survive long enough to see the final chapter. They become strangely real. Then one day, you type The End, and suddenly the room gets very quiet.

You Did It. Now What?

There is this romantic idea of finishing a book. You imagine closing the laptop, leaning back, and experiencing some enormous sense of accomplishment. And there is accomplishment... for approximately seventeen minutes. Then you remember you're an indie author.

Now you have to edit it, format it, figure out whether the chapter headings look ridiculous, upload it, order proofs, and find the typo that somehow survived fourteen readings and has apparently been hiding specifically so it could reveal itself the moment the physical copy arrived.

Then comes marketing. Graphics, social media, your website, metadata, descriptions, categories, keywords, pricing, and somewhere in all of that, you're supposed to remain the creative person who wanted to tell stories in the first place. There isn't a publishing house waiting to take the manuscript from your hands. There isn't a marketing department preparing your release or a team sitting around a conference table discussing how they're going to introduce your book to the world. Most of the time, it's just you.

Then Release Day Comes

This might be the strangest part. You've spent months thinking about this book. You've obsessed over sentences nobody else has read, worried about characters nobody else knows, and rewritten scenes at ridiculous hours because something about them wouldn't leave you alone.

Then the book goes live, and you wait.

You refresh Amazon. You check Goodreads. You look at Kobo. You check your sales dashboard and, because apparently you enjoy emotional damage, you check it again seventeen minutes later. Nothing changed. So you tell yourself you're not going to look anymore. Twenty minutes later, you're looking again.

The internet has made publishing incredibly accessible, but it has also given writers the remarkable ability to measure their anxiety in real time. Copies sold: 0. Wonderful. I'll stare directly into the abyss for a while.

Is Anyone Actually Reading This?

Eventually, someone buys the book, and that's when an entirely different form of insanity begins. Someone has it. Somewhere, there is a person who might be reading words that previously existed only inside your head. Maybe they're laughing at the part you hoped was funny. Maybe they've reached the scene you rewrote twelve times. Maybe they're horrified. Maybe they're bored. Maybe they put the book down three days ago and used it to balance a wobbly table. You have absolutely no idea.

That's the strange part. Writing creates this incredibly intimate relationship between an author and a reader, but most of the time, the author never gets to experience the other half of it. I send these stories into the world, and then they disappear into people's homes, Kindles, bookshelves, backpacks, and nightstands. I don't get to sit beside someone while they read, which is probably for the best. Imagine buying a novel and discovering the author crouched behind your couch whispering, "So... what did you think of Chapter Seven?"

Social Media Makes It Weirder

Being an indie author today also means being told constantly that you need to be visible. Post more. Make videos. Build your brand. Start a newsletter. Use hashtags. Make reels. Talk about your book without talking about your book too much because apparently that's annoying. Be authentic, but also marketable. Be vulnerable, but professionally vulnerable. Engage with everyone. Build a community.

And now there's another strange anxiety hanging over writers: AI.

Suddenly, you can find yourself worrying about things you never thought twice about before. Did that sentence sound too polished? Is someone going to assume I didn't write this? Should I change the way I naturally write because the machines have claimed certain punctuation?

I like em dashes. Writers have been using them for centuries. Edgar Allan Poe was scattering them across pages long before anyone dreamed of ChatGPT, but now AI uses them frequently, so apparently, using an em dash can get you accused of using AI.

We've reached the point where punctuation needs an alibi.

So now, on top of worrying whether anyone is reading your work, you're sometimes worrying whether people will believe you actually wrote the thing they are reading. There is something particularly frustrating about spending months or years developing your own voice only to feel like you have to alter that voice because a computer happens to use some of the same punctuation.

And somehow, while doing all of this talking and worrying, indie publishing can still feel

incredibly quiet. Likes aren't conversations. Views aren't readers. Follower counts aren't friendships. Sometimes you can post something you're genuinely proud of and watch it disappear into the algorithmic void with six likes, two of which might be bots trying to sell you promotional services. Meanwhile, you're sitting there thinking, I spent a year making this.

The Part Nobody Sees

Readers see the finished book. They don't see you sitting at your computer at two in the morning trying to fix a chapter. They don't see the deleted scenes, the cover versions that didn't work, or you reading the same paragraph twenty times because something feels wrong and you can't figure out why.

They also don't see the moment you wonder whether you're actually any good at this. Whether anyone cares. Whether you should stop. Every writer visits that place eventually. Maybe we don't stay there long, but we visit. The lights are terrible.

Then something happens. Someone leaves a review. Someone messages you. Someone tells you they loved a character. Someone asks when the next book will come out. Someone mentions some tiny detail buried halfway through the story that you assumed nobody would notice. And suddenly you realize: they were there. They walked through the world you built. They met the people who lived inside your head. They saw the thing you spent all those quiet months creating. For a moment, the loneliness disappears.

Maybe Writing Isn't So Lonely After All

That's one of the strangest and most beautiful things about writing. A book begins as one person sitting alone with an idea. Then eventually, someone else sits alone with that book—two people, probably miles apart, who may never meet, sharing the same imaginary place.

Being an indie author can be exhausting. It can be discouraging. It can occasionally make you question why you didn't choose a more sensible hobby, like collecting venomous snakes. But there is something incredible about taking something that existed only inside your head and turning it into a physical object someone else can hold. A world that didn't exist before you made it. Characters nobody knew until you introduced them.

Maybe only ten people read it. Maybe a hundred do. Maybe thousands. Numbers are strange things. They're very good at measuring sales and absolutely terrible at measuring meaning. Because somewhere out there might be one reader who needed exactly the story you wrote. One person who stayed up too late because they needed one more chapter. One person who saw themselves in a character you created. One person who closed the book and sat quietly for a moment because something you wrote stayed with them.

You might never know about them. That's the lonely part.

But they're out there.

And that's enough reason to keep writing, even when the room gets quiet.

— Damon Robi