I’ve been trying to write this post for a while now, and I keep running into the same problem: the honest answer is so large that it’s difficult to fit into sentences.

But I’m going to try.

When you publish independently, you are doing something that requires a particular kind of courage that nobody really prepares you for. There is no publisher behind you with a marketing budget and a publicity team and the institutional weight of a known name. There is no guarantee that anyone will find your book, let alone pick it up, let alone stay up until two in the morning because they can’t put it down. You put your work into the world and then you wait, and the waiting is its own particular flavour of terrifying.

And then someone finds it.

I don’t think I can adequately describe what it feels like the first time a reader reaches out to tell you that your characters got under their skin. That they stayed up too late. That they cried somewhere they probably shouldn’t have. That they immediately went looking to see if there was more. It is not a small thing. It will never be a small thing, no matter how many times it happens.

Because here is what readers actually are, for an indie author: they are the proof. The proof that the stories are worth telling, that the characters are real enough to love, that the hours and the doubt and the four in the morning rewrites and the moments of wondering whether any of this is going anywhere — that all of it meant something. A reader who connects with your work is handing you the most valuable thing they have, which is their time and their trust, and they are saying I chose this, and it was worth it.

Readers are also, practically speaking, everything that makes continuation possible. Reviews, word of mouth, a recommendation to a friend, a mention in a reader group — for an indie author these things are not nice-to-haves. They are the difference between a series continuing and a series stopping. Every single person who has ever taken a moment to leave a review or tell someone about a book they loved has kept a story alive. I don’t think most readers know how true that is, or how much it matters.

And beyond all of that — beyond the practical, beyond even the profound — there is this:

You make the loneliness of the work smaller. Writing is solitary by nature. You spend an enormous amount of time alone with fictional people, inside your own head, wondering if what you’re building connects to anything outside of yourself. Readers are the connection. They are the moment the story stops being yours alone and becomes something shared, something that exists between you in the way that only stories can.

What do readers mean to this indie author?

Everything. The world, and everything in between.

I am not being hyperbolic. I mean it precisely as literally as it sounds.

— Bella 🏒