Happy New Year!
For some the prospects the New Year offers are offset by the frustrations of the year before. That’s particularly so for the indie writer:
I sold 22 books in 2025 😭🙌🏻✨
— Tai Harrow - Indie Author (@taiharrow) January 2, 2026
I don’t know that lady, but her bittersweet announcement strikes a chord with me. 22 books! God alone knows how long and hard she labored over her offerings. And while 22 is better than zero, I’m sure her aspirations ran to higher numbers.
There are a lot of us. We probably outnumber writers published by conventional publishing houses by a couple of orders of magnitude. And it’s a given that not all of us are really good writers or storytellers. But the doggedness of the indie writer carries a meaning independent of whether he’s got all the assets of a Steinbeck, a Hemingway, or a Faulkner.
There are stories in him. Regardless of his abilities, he wants to tell them. And they might just need to be told. If you’re my age or older, you might remember this tag line from an old television show:
There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them.
That show focused on a single police precinct in New York City. It was widely acclaimed. Yet it told stories embedded in relatively ordinary lives.
A human life is composed of stories. Some are complete; others are “works in progress.” Some shriek with immediacy. And very few are ever told.
Long ago, I wrote:
The distribution of writers attempting the e-publication channel goes something like this:
- 90% or more: Persons who cannot write and should not try.
- ~7%: Persons with a fair command of English, but who have no stories to tell that anyone else would want to read.
- ~2%: Persons with a fair command of English who have stories to tell, but whose styles and preconceptions are unsuited to telling them in a winning fashion.
- ~1%: Capable storytellers, including a significant number who could crack the “traditional” publishing channels (or who already have).
I rather regret that partition. I’ve come to believe that everyone has one or more stories in him. He may not have the ability to tell them in a winning way, but they’re there nonetheless. If they press him fiercely enough, they’ll come out: perhaps just in conversation over a beer, but they will be told. And those to whom they are told will feel their impact.
I’ve encountered quite a number of other indie writers these past fifteen years. (We tend to cluster. After all, no one else will have us.) They share the need to tell stories. Even the least capable of us is responding to pressures he cannot withstand.
Yet answering “What do you do?” with “I’m a writer” is the most reliable way I know of making the asker excuse himself and head for refuge. Sometimes it works even if the asker is an aspiring writer himself. Try it at your next social gathering.
Even once set down in print or pixels, some stories remain “untold” de facto. No one listens. Perhaps that’s what keeps America’s legion of therapists in business.
Don’t mind me. After all, I’m just a talkative old man. As I’ve said before, I write these pieces mainly for myself. That includes the stories I tell. No one is obliged to listen, and few do. But I do have a point.
You have stories in you. So do the people around you. They want to tell theirs at least as urgently as you want to tell yours. They might not be articulate. They might not have patience enough to do all that typing and formatting. But their need is no less than yours.
Among the simplest and greatest of charities is the gift one gives by listening.
Just an early-morning thought.
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