September 2026 · Month One
Friendship, discipline, courage, sixteen book reviews, ninety-five-plus emails, three languages, two books sold, 400 Kindle Unlimited pages read, thousands of views and enough Coke Zero to deserve its own statistic.
Dear Rebels,
Wow. What a month.
So many things happened. So much work got done. There were moments when I genuinely thought steam was going to start coming out of my Mac, but thankfully the steam came only out of my head.
If I had to describe September with one word, though, it wouldn’t be growth. It wouldn’t be numbers. It wouldn’t even be work.
During this first month of the Indie Author Experiment, I met so many genuinely kind people. Some of those connections became real friendships, the kind where you end up talking almost every day, sharing ideas, discoveries, frustrations, little victories and the occasional existential crisis.
We read each other’s work. We exchanged advice. We encouraged each other.
And Rebels, if there is one thing an indie author needs almost as much as time, a functioning laptop and approximately four cans of Coke Zero a day, it is encouragement.
Sometimes motivation has to come from outside of you.
Because yes, self-sabotage is real.
And she is a bad bitch.
What 30 days taught me
Discipline
Motivation gets you excited. Discipline is what makes you sit down and actually do the work.
Courage
Send the email. Invite the author. Publish the story. Ask the question. You cannot receive a yes from something you were too frightened to ask.
Acceptance
Sometimes the answer is no. You accept it, learn what you can and keep moving. A no does not get to decide what happens next.
Discipline came first
You saw this happen in real time.
At the beginning of the experiment, I disappeared for four days. On other days, I had to squeeze several days of the Journal into one post because I had been very “busy.”
Busy questioning myself.
Busy analysing every decision I had made this year.
Busy holding emergency meetings with the voices in my head.
Very productive meetings, obviously.
Eventually I understood something ridiculously simple: if I wanted to discover whether this experiment worked, I had to actually show up for the experiment.
Then came courage
Courage can look dramatic from the outside, but most of the time it is tiny.
It is writing the message inviting an author you admire onto your podcast while part of your brain is screaming, Why would they say yes?
Plot twist: sometimes they say yes.
It is putting your writing online before you know whether anyone will read it.
It is launching another project when your brain has already produced seventeen excellent reasons why you should wait.
Courage is also learning to say no.
Saying no to an ARC because the calendar is full. Saying no because you already have too many emotionally heavy books waiting for you and your brain simply cannot handle another sad one right now.
Protecting your time is part of taking your work seriously.
And acceptance
This lesson actually started in August, but I carried it straight into September.
Sometimes you really want to read a particular book as an ARC reader. You ask. The answer is no.
You can spend the next three days creating a Shakespearean tragedy inside your own head, or you can accept the answer and continue.
Thirty days later, something had changed.
Authors were offering me their books.
That feels like a pretty big shift for one month.
Apparently, I got softer too
Somewhere between the analytics, the manuscripts, the podcast recordings and the inbox chaos, I realised something else.
I think I became kinder.
I get more emotional now. I can cry reading an email. I can cry over a tiny fifty-page book. I get ridiculously happy when an author tells me that something I wrote about their work mattered to them.
Apparently this is who I am now.
The biggest lesson? Blogs are not dead.
Actually, I think a lot of us are quietly missing the old internet.
The internet where you could sit down and read something.
Where people wrote long posts because they had something to say, rather than trying to compress every thought into seven seconds of video.
Where websites felt like places.
You wandered around. You clicked another article. You found something strange. You stayed longer than you intended.
Somehow you ended up knowing far too much about a person you had never met.
September made me believe that kind of internet still has a pulse.
And now we get to the evidence.
August → September
The Indie Author Experiment began on September 1. One month later, the difference was visible.
Instagram reported September views as 128% higher than August. The approximately 4.7K August figure shown above is calculated from that platform-reported percentage and is therefore an estimate rather than an exported exact total.
Month One by the numbers
These are not promises, predictions or motivational poster mathematics. They are the numbers September actually produced.
The website stopped whispering
August finished with 443 views.
September finished at approximately 2,200.
That means the site attracted roughly five times as many views in the first month of the experiment as it had in August.
And the traffic was not landing on one page and disappearing.
The review hub grew. The Journal grew. The ARC pages grew. Individual reviews were being discovered.
Then The Chosen arrived late in the month and immediately became one of the site’s most-viewed destinations.
My ARC Review Calendar grew so quickly that it may also explain why my inbox spent September behaving like an unsupervised toddler with espresso.
The difference is that this time I could actually see the ecosystem forming.
Someone could discover a social post, arrive on the website, read a review, wander into the Journal, find The Chosen, discover the podcast and eventually click through to Amazon.
Amazon became the most-clicked external destination from the site during the period, with 21 tracked clicks. Spotify received 10.
A click is not a sale, and I want to keep those two things completely separate.
But a click is intent. Someone saw something, became curious and chose to go one step further.
Google God submitted his paperwork
September gave the site 2,198 Google Search impressions and 79 organic search clicks, with an approximate click-through rate of 3.6%.
More importantly, Google was beginning to understand what lived here.
Book reviews were appearing.
The Journal was appearing.
Podcast content was appearing.
The Chosen started appearing.
That does not mean the SEO work is finished.
It means Google God has finally noticed the house.
Now I need to convince him to come inside.
Social media did something useful
Instagram closed September with 10,747 views, up 128% from August.
What I find more interesting is that 45.6% of those views came from people who did not follow me.
That is discovery.
And despite everything we are constantly told about social media, I did not spend September turning myself into a Reels factory.
I published 58 posts, 124 Stories and exactly two Reels.
Two.
The internet survived.
LinkedIn reached 3,288 impressions, with 76% coming from outside my existing network.
Facebook added another 817 views.
Different platforms were doing different jobs, and that may be one of the most useful things I learned this month.
The podcast started finding its people
Spotify recorded 728 impressions during the period.
The podcast reached 88 plays and downloads, and almost 27 hours of total listening time accumulated.
People were finding episodes through Spotify Search, Home and their own Libraries.
Again, discovery.
Not millions of people.
Real people.
At Month One, that matters much more to me.
Apparently I had several full-time jobs in September
During a reading slump. Make of that what you will.
Authors, ARCs, publishers, podcast conversations, readers and assorted internet chaos.
WordPress quietly informed me that the site had reached its hundredth published post.
English, Italian and Brazilian Portuguese.
Tiny number. Very real books. Very real readers.
Somewhere out there, people were actually turning digital pages.
The hundred-post milestone might actually be one of my favourite numbers.
Reviews. Journal entries. Interviews. Fiction. Experiments. Things that worked. Things that absolutely did not.
The hundred posts are the work.
The most scientific statistic of the experiment
Three to four cans of Coke Zero. Every day. 330 ml each.
Which means September required somewhere between 29.7 and 39.6 litres of Coke Zero.
Scientific precision was lost somewhere around can 73.
I am still investigating whether this qualifies as a publishing expense.
And then I started The Chosen. In three languages.
Because apparently the experiment was not already complicated enough.
September became the month I launched The Chosen, my serialized gothic horror, in English, Italian and Brazilian Portuguese.
That meant fiction, editing, translation, artwork, individual chapter pages, search optimisation, publishing schedules and the small matter of actually continuing to write the story.
It also became one of the site’s most-viewed destinations almost immediately.
This was not on my original list of sensible ways to make September calmer.
Worth it.
So what actually worked?
Not one magical post.
Not one platform.
Not one trick.
September worked because everything slowly began connecting.
Reviews brought readers and authors.
Social media brought people to the website.
The website introduced them to other projects.
Google started indexing more of the work.
The podcast created conversations.
The Journal gave all of it a story.
And consistency gave people something new to find when they came back.
I started this experiment because I wanted to know what an indie author could build in one year without buying visibility.
After thirty days, I do not have the final answer.
Good.
We still have eleven months.
Now October gets its turn
Month Two starts with a website moving faster than it was thirty days ago, a growing review platform, a podcast finding new listeners, The Chosen unfolding in three languages and a book called Before October Ends.
Which feels suspiciously appropriate.
There is still an absurd amount to learn.
Search impressions need to become more clicks. Readers need clearer paths between projects. The podcast can grow. The books need more discovery.
The experiment needs better systems, better discipline and probably another delivery of Coke Zero.
But September gave me something I did not have on Day One.
Evidence.
Evidence that people are finding the work.
Evidence that some of them are staying.
Evidence that some are coming back.
And maybe most importantly, evidence that while I was trying to build an author platform, I accidentally started building a community too.
Eleven to go.
September was very, very busy.
It was also kind, chaotic, exhausting, surprising and full of people who made this strange little experiment much better than I expected it to be.
So thank you for reading, sharing, commenting, sending books, answering emails, listening, encouraging me and occasionally watching me publicly negotiate with the voices in my head.
October starts now.
Love you, Rebels.
Lupe