One of the most important qualities for being a writer is often overlooked: Faith.

Not religious faith, but faith in your work and what you bring to it.

Before the April publication of my book, “Saving Ellen: A Memoir of Hope and Recovery,” faith in my book was not a problem for me.

I was determined to get an agent, and I did, after 34 rejections. I wanted my book be traditionally published, and it was, after 47 publishers rejected it. Skyhorse Publishing gave me a terrific editor and working as a team, we made the book better.

It was after publication that my faith – in my own words and in my book – got shaky.

Not at first. With the help of a marketing firm the book was the subject of several articles, eight podcasts, appearances at several bookstores, a journalism conference and a writer’s retreat.

But it was one statistic that began to erode my self-confidence and it’s this one: Amazon sells 85 percent of all books.

I have always been math-challenged, but I took that to mean that unless my book did well on Amazon, it just wasn’t selling. And since my publisher, like most, only sends authors sales numbers in a royalty report every six months, the Amazon numbers were the only ones I had to go on.

Authors whose books are on Amazon can track how many of their books are selling on its website on a weekly basis. Although my friend, author and fellow journalist Connie Schultz kept telling me to not, not, not to look at those numbers, I peeked anyway.

They were dismal. In the first 5 months, Amazon sold several hundred copies of my book.

I took that to mean that it was falling flat.

It didn’t matter that another journalist friend told me she bought my book at a store in Iowa City during the summer. Surely if a bookstore that far away had it in stock, she said, something was going right. It didn’t matter to me that we are in a tsunami of books, with millions being published every year – thousands of books a day. Lots of competition, in other words.

I allowed one statistic to shake my confidence.

But a few weeks ago, I got my first sales report from the publisher. It only went from April 1 to the end of June. The publisher’s figures showed that 1,200 copies of the book sold during that time.

That might not sound like much, but we are in a publishing environment where, by one count, just 2 percent of books sell more than 5,000 copies, and according to statistics from Bookscan, just 51 percent of all books sell between 1 and 999 copies. So I figured selling 1,200 copies in three months was just fine for a first book.

But why had I allowed one statistic about Amazon, to get me so discouraged in the first place? That faith thing, again. It’s always a challenge. It is something I and, I suppose, many writers occasionally struggle with. Yet having confidence in our work and our words may be the most important tool we have. Lesson relearned!

Photo: Casey’s memoir, “Saving Ellen” on sale at Bank Square Books, Mystic, CT