Dear Rebels,

As you may have noticed, and if you didn’t, please pretend you did for the sake of my ego, your Lupe Farkas went suspiciously quiet for four days.

No dramatic breakdown. No secret retreat in Tuscany. No sudden discovery of life-work balance. Please. Let’s keep this believable.

I was ghostwriting so I can keep financing my Coke Zero until Coca-Cola finally notices that I have basically been doing unpaid product placement for months.

Reviewer? Writer? Professional Coke Zero hydration consultant?

I don’t know what job title they will invent for me. They just need to hurry. I’m thirsty.

The client deadline was close, the days were around twelve hours long, and by bedtime the voices living rent-free inside my head had apparently scheduled a management meeting without asking permission.

One was checking what was finished. One was checking what was missing. One was already planning tomorrow. I tried to intervene.

Rejected unanimously.

So I worked, delivered, slept when my internal board of directors finally allowed it, and left the Indie Author Experiment alone for a few days.

That turned out to be useful.

This Is Day 13. I Am Not Pretending the Missing Days Never Happened.

I considered calling today Day 9.

Cute.

No.

Days 9, 10, 11 and 12 still belong to the experiment. I just wasn’t narrating every five minutes like a caffeinated wildlife documentary.

There were no fresh Journal posts, no new Instagram parade, no LinkedIn performance, no Facebook waving, no Lupe appearing in every available corner of the internet shouting:

For once, I shut up.

The interesting part is that the numbers did not.

Okay Google God. I See You.

This is where the experiment became much more interesting than “post more and get more views.”

That matters because I was not feeding Google a new article every morning and then dragging it around social media by the ankles.

These were pages we had already built doing what I wanted them to do: exist, get indexed, get found, send people deeper into the site.

WordPress traffic still reacted to the lack of fresh distribution, obviously. Look at the daily views:

And that distinction is the whole bloody point.

I Apparently Do Not Know How to Simply Press Publish.

When I say “I posted,” what I actually mean is that I made the task unnecessarily enormous.

I built custom HTML. Moved boxes around. Argued with headings. Renamed images because Google God likes context. Wrote alt text. Added internal links. Connected books to reviews, reviews to authors, authors to the podcast, and then translated the whole bloody circus into Italian and Portuguese.

After that I made social versions.

Because apparently pressing Publish and walking away would be far too emotionally stable.

Content Is King. Distribution Is Queen.

Well. I accidentally gave both of them a test drive.

The result?

Good content gave me a floor.

Distribution gave me the spikes.

That is it. No twelve-paragraph LinkedIn wisdom. No course for €499. You are welcome.

1,000 Plays & Downloads. We Are Celebrating This One.

Now This Is the Part That Makes Reviewer Lupe Very Happy.

The review pages are starting to behave like proper search assets.

Meaning: I write the review once, and Google may continue sending readers to it long after I have moved on to screaming about another book.

I also read three very short, very beautiful books over these days. Their reviews are coming next.

So much for being quiet.

Social Media Was Less Philosophical About It.

Social media behaved exactly like social media. Feed it and it jumps. Leave it alone and it sulks.

Useful lesson. Also slightly needy.

The ARC Requests Kept Arriving.

One request came from Brazil. Two came in Italian. The rest were in English.

Which means the ARC side of this ridiculous little ecosystem is growing too.

And then, naturally, the scammers.

Because nothing says “perhaps people are beginning to notice you online” quite like strangers appearing in your inbox offering to make you a bestseller.

Today alone I received two.

Two magical people who apparently possess the secret formula for making books famous and have chosen, out of the kindness of their hearts and definitely not because they want my credit card, to share it with me.

But LinkedIn remains the winner.

LinkedIn is where I receive daily visits from experts.

Experts whose expertise transformed businesses. Changed lives. Generated enormous success.

And yet, mysteriously, they can never name one single person whose life they transformed.

Privacy, Rebels.

Obviously.

Very exclusive transformation.