The Part No One Talks About: When People Quietly Leave

There is a version of being an indie author where everything builds in a reassuring, upward sort of way, where you post something and people engage, you share your work and people stay, you send out a newsletter and imagine it being opened somewhere with a cup of tea and a genuine interest in what you have written, and it all feels quite steady and quietly encouraging. 

What actually happens is slightly less organised than that. People leave. Not dramatically, not in a way you can point to or respond to, but in small, almost polite disappearances that you only really notice because you are the one looking. A name you recognise is suddenly not there, a person who used to comment stops, a subscriber drops off, an ARC reader gets halfway through your book and seems to vanish into another life entirely, presumably unharmed, possibly indifferent, and you are left with no real explanation other than your own imagination, which is unfortunately very active at this point.

Because if someone told you directly that they did not like your work, you could do something with that. You could agree, disagree, learn from it, or at the very least have a clear moment of, well, that did not land, and move on. What you actually get is silence, and silence is remarkably easy to personalise. Your brain steps in helpfully and offers a range of possibilities, most of which are not especially kind. 

Maybe it was boring, maybe it dragged, maybe the characters did not work, maybe the whole thing is quietly unravelling and this is how you find out, one person at a time, with no formal announcement. Or, and this is the option your brain tends to skip past, they just got distracted.

The difficulty is that when you are building something on your own, none of this feels abstract. You notice people. You remember who was there early, who commented, who seemed engaged, who felt like they were part of it in some small way. So when they are not there anymore, it does not feel like a number going down. It feels specific. It sits slightly to one side while you are writing the next thing or planning your next post, a quiet awareness that something has shifted, even if you cannot quite say what.

At the same time, there is this unspoken expectation that if you are doing things properly, people will stay, that if you are consistent, thoughtful, and putting in the effort, there should be some kind of steady return, something that holds. It does not quite work like that. Engagement does not behave in a predictable way, posts that you think will do well pass by quietly, others do better than expected, people arrive and leave without any particular pattern, and you are left trying to work out whether any of it means something or nothing at all. You check, just occasionally, just to see, just to confirm that it definitely does not matter as much as it slightly does.

What is rarely said out loud is that this part can sit in your mind more than you expect it to. Not enough to stop you, not enough to derail anything, but enough to run quietly in the background while you are doing everything else. Is this landing, is anyone really reading this, am I building something or just placing things carefully into a space that does not always respond in the way I imagined it might.

The answer is not particularly clear, and it does not arrive all at once. What you start to realise, slowly, is that people move through things in their own way. They follow, they drift, they intend to come back, they do not always do it, and most of the time it has very little to do with the quality of what you have created. You are one part of a much bigger, busier life, which is entirely reasonable and, occasionally, a bit inconvenient.

None of this is something you fix. It is something you learn to recognise without letting it take over the whole picture. You keep writing, you keep sharing, you let people come and go without trying to hold everything in place, and over time the shape of it becomes clearer. The people who stay do not always do it loudly,  they are not always the ones commenting or reacting, but they are there, returning, reading, following along in a quieter way that does not always show up immediately.

If you have noticed this, the drop-offs, the quieter posts, the lack of comments or shares that you thought might be there, and the way it sits with you more than you expected it to, you are not imagining it and you are not the only one. It is simply another part of this that does not get named very often, even though most people working their way through it will recognise it straight away when they see it written down.

I am continuing this series on the parts of being an indie author that sit underneath everything else, the bits around numbers, doubt, momentum, and all the in-between moments. If this resonates, you can follow along on the blog or join my newsletter to receive updates on the Indie Author Reality Pack when it’s ready, a short, honest collection of these pieces in one place.

click the Link: Emma Forrester | Dystopian & Character-Driven Fiction