The Creative Penn Podcast For Writers

After more than a decade of releasing this show on Mondays, I’m moving it to Wednesdays, and this is the first episode of the new time slot.  On the one hand, this might sound like nothing at all, but it’s also a big deal, for you and for me, and in this episode, I explain why I'm making the change, and past guests give some tips on sustainable creativity for the long term. Joanna Penn is an award-winning New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of thrillers, dark fantasy, short stories and travel memoir under J.F. Penn and also writes non-fiction for authors and hosts The Creative Penn Podcast. Why the podcast is moving to Wednesdays (1) Take time out to question what you’re doing (2) Learn to pivot if you want to keep going long term(3) Set a sustainable pace, and don’t build reader expectations you can’t deliver on (4) Don’t try to do it all, and try to identify the fear that might be driving your choices (5) Question what still serves you, especially as things continue to change(6) Consider different approaches to creativity. It doesn’t have to be every day, or every week(7) Creative humans evolve. Build a body of work for the long term. You can find the backlist episodes at TheCreativePenn.com/podcast, just click into the episode to find the transcript. Why The Podcast Is Moving To Wednesdays, And 7 Tips for Sustainable Creativity Here’s my big news! After more than a decade of releasing this show on Mondays, I’m moving it to Wednesdays, and this is the first episode of the new time slot.  On the one hand, this might sound like nothing at all, but it’s also a big deal, for you and for me!  I know many of you have a routine of listening to the show during a certain thing on a Monday, so I’m sorry to have to disrupt that, and I hope I don’t lose you along the way — although I guess you could just save the episode for Monday!  For me, it’s a much bigger deal, because a Monday show has meant I have often recorded the intro and edited and scheduled the episode over the weekend. The main reason is that I need to record in the mornings when I have energy and when the house is less noisy, since Jonathan is often on the phone since he works from home as well. So I would prepare the episode on Fridays, and I type out this intro before reading it, and source the news and my thoughts and all that — and then I’d record it Saturday morning, or Sunday morning if Saturday was busy — and so recently, I have felt like something has to change.  Moving the show to a Wednesday means that I can prep on Monday and Tuesday, which is perfect.  Its so funny because I agonised over this, in the same way I agonised over changing the theme tune a few years back. Some of you may remember that — and it also turned out to not be a big deal at all. We build things up in our minds and then sometimes the problem can be solved in a different way.  So instead of going to ad hoc episodes, or once every two weeks, I hope that moving to Wednesday makes the show more sustainable again, because let’s face it, there’s a lot going on, and if I did a show every 2 weeks, I might have to make them longer to get through everything!  So, same show, just on Wednesdays from now on. And this change underscores what today’s episode is about: sustainable creativity over the long term.  How do you keep writing, and publishing, and podcasting — and creating for years — and I am now at two decades — without burning out, and without becoming a slave to the algorithm, or the market, or even your own audience’s expectations?  The goal is not to just survive this year’s release schedule, or to keep feeding the machine until you crumble under the speed of it all.  The goal is to still be creating, and still be enjoying it, next month, next year, in five years, in 10 years, in 20, in 30. Who knows how many years we all have left — but for sure, we are NOT machines, we are not AI — and we cannot churn it out – and what is the point of that anyway?  So in today’s show, I’ll share some thoughts and tips from me and also other authors from the show on this topic, and you can find the full episodes in the backlist, and links as ever in the show notes on TheCreativePenn.com/podcast  (1) Take time out to question what you’re doing In early 2024, The Tim Ferriss Show, one of the biggest podcasts in the world, hit its ten-year anniversary with over a billion downloads and over 750 episodes, and Tim decided to take a sabbatical.  He paused the show for four months and seriously questioned whether to continue. Not because it was failing, it was hugely profitable and he enjoyed talking to people, but because the landscape had changed.  Podcasting had gone from a wide-open space in 2014 to a saturated market, and his question wasn’t “can I keep competing?” It was “is this still the game I want to play?”  Just a little note here, I started The Creative Penn Podcast in 2009 when there were even fewer shows so I know a lot about a changing podcast market!  After four months, Tim came back from what he called a sabbatical with a blog post on My New Rules for Podcasting — To Keep Things Interesting. He starts with the sheer number of podcasts, saying, “Having a good show is no longer good enough. Having a great show is no longer good enough. If you want to survive in the mindshare of listeners, you need differentiation.” I think this is true for us as authors as well as podcasters, or YouTubers, or social media, or anything. But the good news is that your differentiation can be you.  Regular listeners will know that I have questioned ending the show over the years, worried that I was no longer useful, or that my voice no longer mattered when there are so many podcasts on similar topics. But after your wonderful feedback, and the fact that the show still gets a lot of downloads every week, and the growth in my Patreon Community, I don’t worry about that anymore. It’s unlikely that any of us will have a podcast as big as Tim Ferriss’s or sell as many books as The Four Hour Work Week, but that’s OK, because we are not Tim.  I am Jo Penn and you’re here because you find my take on the publishing industry is still useful in some way. When it’s not anymore, you will go elsewhere, and I find myself at peace with that.  Back to Tim’s article — he asks some questions of himself, including:If I get to do this for another decade, or had to do this for another decade, what new rules might I create to keep it interesting? Of course, we all have different ideas of what this means for us. And I have already implemented one of these rules, which is that I interview people on topics I find interesting. I frequently get pitched by more famous authors and bigger names, but most of the time I turn them down, and choose to talk to people who are not famous but are more interested in serving you, my audience, because that is the point of this show.  I also have people on that I enjoy talking to, because checking in with my friends while you listen in, can be useful too, since my friends are often authors who’ve been in the industry a while now. I have to make the interviews time that I find interesting or useful or fulfilling as well.  But the point is to stop and take time to consider what might need to change, even if you are really successful. You cannot be a slave to the algorithm, to the media, to your audience, for the long term. You have to put some circuit breakers in sometimes.  It’s the old adage about the small business. You have to work ON in the business, not just IN the business, which means you need to step away.  This does sometimes mean that you have to get away physically. I had this realisation while we were in Bruges in Belgium talking to Jonathan about what changes I could make because I just felt a lack of freedom — and freedom is my highest value, so I really need to honour that.  So, the first question for you is: If you feel like you need a change, if your routines are becoming too much, or your workload is too much, or you are eating into time you need for rest and recovery or family or whatever you need, can you schedule time out to have a think about what you need and how things can change?  You don’t need to burn it all down. You might find the answer is just moving the show from a Monday to a Wednesday!  (2) Learn to pivot if you want to keep going long term I love talking to authors who have been doing this career for a long time, and in December 2025 in episode 839, I talked to Jennifer Probst, the New York Times bestselling romance author of more than sixty books, about why some authors build decades-long careers while others vanish after one breakout.  Jennifer has been through the indie gold rush, the fallout, traditional deals, Kickstarter, all of it, and I asked her how she thinks about how everything keeps changing, and we start with marketing but it goes much further than that.  Writing Free: Romance Author Jennifer Probst On A Long-Term Author Career *** Jo: In terms of how we do marketing, TikTok is still a thing, and we can see maybe generative AI search coming on the horizon and agentic buying. A decade ago it might have been different, more Facebook ads or whatever. Then before that it might have been something else. So there’s always things changing along the way. Jennifer: Yes, there definitely is. It is a very oversaturated market. They talk about, I don’t know, 2010 to 2016 maybe, as the gold rush, because that was where you could make a lot of money as an indie. Then we saw the total fallout of so many different things. I feel like I’ve gone through so many ups and downs in the industry. I do love it because the longer you’re around, the more you learn how to pivot. If you want this career, you learn how to write differently or do whatever you need to do to keep going, in different aspects, with the changes. To me, that makes the industry exciting. Again, perspective is a big thing. But I have had to take a year to kind of rebuild when I was out of contract with a lot of things. I’ve had to say, “Okay, what do you see on the horizon now? Where is the new foundation? Where do you wanna restart?” Sometimes it takes a year or two of, “Maybe I won’t be making big income and I cut back,” but then you’re back in it, because it takes a while to write a few new books, or write under a pen name, or however you want to pivot your way back into the industry. Or, like you were saying, diversifying. I did a lot of non-fiction stuff because that’s a big calling for me, so I put that into the primary for a while. I think it’s important for authors to maybe not just have one thing. When that one thing goes away, you’re scrambling. It’s good to have a couple of different things like, “Well, okay, this genre is dead or this thing is dead or this isn’t making money. Let me go to this for a little while until I see new things on the horizon.” ***  I love that from Jennifer, because there are always new things on the horizon, and we try new things and we pivot, and we bring in other streams of income as some drop off, and we go again and we keep creating. Authors with longevity are authors who pivot over their careers. They may lament the end of one era, but they don’t stop, they find a new way forward.  (3) Set a sustainable pace, and don’t build reader expectations you can’t deliver on Kevin J. Anderson is one of the most productive writers alive, with hundreds of books, most of which he writes with dictation while out hiking, and he has been on this show many times.  In January 2025, in episode 791, we talked about building a long-term author business, and how authors need to be careful about setting reader expectations around pace of releases.  Building A Long Term Author Business, Dictation, Kickstarter, and Short Story Collections With Kevin J Anderson Kevin: Now, again, we get back to the longevity of a career. It is exhausting to write lots of books a year, and most people can’t keep doing that for 20 years or 30 years. That’s one of the reasons, especially indie authors, where readers expect you to write several books a year. Some indie authors I know are writing a book a month. I couldn’t do that for any long period. Well, I couldn’t do that probably for a single year. You start building expectations, and when you fail to meet those expectations, they will leave you very quickly. That’s why you should have Plan Bs. If you really, really can’t stand writing your steampunk vampire romance series after book number 29, well, make sure that you have some other series you’re starting and building up. Well, Hugh Howey’s got several series that are going. Michael Anderle has all kinds of series, and Craig Martelle has all kinds of series. You don’t just put all your eggs in one basket. You need to have Plan B and Plan C, to circle around to what I started with. ***  Whatever cadence you choose, for your books, your email newsletters, or or your podcast, or your social media, choose a pace you can still be keeping up in a decade, because this is a long term career, and longevity in the market is one of the most important things. It’s better to pace yourself than burn out.  (4) Don’t try to do it all, and try to identify the fear that might be driving your choices I couldn’t do an episode on sustainability without Becca Syme!  Becca is an author coach who has worked with thousands of writers, she is the creator of the Better-Faster Academy and the Quit books, and the QuitCast podcast — and In January 2023, in episode 668, at the end of our conversation about intuitive writing and marketing, I asked her what authors who sustain long careers have in common. Intuitive Writing And Book Marketing With Becca Syme *** Joanna: So in terms of sustainability, let’s talk about that. You coach writers every day, you see writers on every spectrum of every personality type, and people who write differently and release differently and publish differently. So what do you see as your recommendations or, I guess, commonalities for authors who want this sustainable career as a writer for the long term in order not to burn out? What are you seeing in terms of the best way to be sustainable in a creative career? Becca: Conquering the fear that we have that we’re not going to get what we want out of the career, like 100%. Because the fear is the thing that’s driving us to burn ourselves out. The fear that if I don’t do it this way, I’m not going to make money. If I don’t do it this way, I’m not going to have a long career. I’m going to miss out on something if I don’t do absolutely everything. And then I think the most important knowledge that we can have is that everyone in this industry who’s a nonfiction person, including me, is giving you a perspective on how author life can be done. Every single one of us, not the perspective on how it should be done in order to have success. And if we could just change our expectations of how we look at the people who are helping us who are being good, helpful people who are very sure that their way is the correct way and who should be, again, because like all experts, they’ve had success doing what they are doing. But the downside is from someone whose job is to sit with authors for 45 minutes at a time, all day, every day, I see the outcome of the people who have tried to “do it all,” in quotes, with capital letters, and who are burned out because they were doing everything out of a fear place. And I think one of the best things that can happen in our — and what burnout often does is it forces us to reckon with the fact that we were doing all of this because we were afraid. My book isn’t going to sell, I’m not going to be able to do this, I have this dream that I’m holding on to and what happens if it doesn’t manifest itself. Then we make a lot of our decisions about how much to take on based on fear, and we don’t know it. Because we don’t realize that our brains are wired for survival, and so anytime fear kicks in, your brain is like, well, we have to do that because if you’re afraid of it, then that must mean that we need it in order to survive. And we don’t. We will survive if our books don’t sell.  We have to calm that fear and answer the question. Like, what will happen if in five years, I have not sold more than $1,000 on every book that I am writing? Like if each of the individual books that I write have not made more than $1,000. And I have to reckon with what might happen if that happens, because if I don’t, that fear is going to drive me to burnout over and over and over and over again. That is why we’re making so many of our decisions, including: do I pay for this class or conference? Do I pay for this book? Do I spend money on this advertising? Do I hire this expert consultant? So many of us are making those choices out of fear and we don’t realize it. And that’s why when we do our public live coaching, and whenever I’m at a conference, I’m always listening for, “but what are you afraid is not going to happen? Or what are you afraid is going to happen?” Because if we don’t deconstruct that part of yourself and calm your survival mechanism down, you’re going to continue over and over again to make those decisions out of fear. Then you’re going to not listen to your intuition because you think it’s risky to listen to it. And so I really think, and some of this might include therapy for some of us, I’m just going to acknowledge some of us have trauma around not getting what we want or around not actualizing our desires, and we can’t just talk ourselves into letting the fear go. But some of us do just need to consistently confront the fear and make a plan for what happens and then act in spite of that fear because we are not making good decisions when we are in survival mode. ***  Becca is very wise, and also pretty hardcore! So if you feel like you are trying to do it all, and you are on the edge of burning out, can you identify the fear beneath it? (5) Question what still serves you, especially as things continue to change Sometimes we keep doing things the same way, even when things have changed.  What is lost if we give things up? What is gained? And what kind of game do you want to play? In episode 845, Claire Taylor, humour and mystery author, owner of FFS Media, certified Enneagram coach, talks about how social media has changed and why she gave it up.  Leaving Social Media, Writing Iconic Characters, and Building Trust With Claire Taylor *** Joanna: One thing I know will have perked up people’s ears is: “I left social media.” Tell us a bit more about that. Claire: This was a move that I could feel coming for a while. I didn’t like what social media did to my attention. Even when I wasn’t on it, there was almost a hangover from having been on it. My attention didn’t feel as sharp and focused as it used to be, back before social media became what it is now. So I started asking myself some questions: What is lost if I leave? What is gained if I leave? And what is social media actually doing for me today? Because sometimes we hold on to what it used to do for us, and we keep trying to squeeze more and more of that out of it. But it has changed so much. There are almost no places with sufficient organic reach anymore. It’s all pay-to-play, and the cost of pay-to-play keeps going up. I looked at the numbers for my business. My Kickstarter was a great place to analyse that because they track so many traffic sources so clearly. I could see exactly how much I was getting from social media when I advertised and promoted my projects there. Then I asked: can I let that go in order to get my attention back and make my life feel more settled? And I decided: yes, I can. That’s worth more to me. Joanna: There are some things money can’t buy. Sometimes it really isn’t about the money. I like your question: what is lost and what is gained? You also said it’s all pay-to-play and there’s no organic reach. I do think there is some organic reach for some people who don’t pay, but those people are very good at playing the game of whatever the platform wants. So, TikTok for example—you might not have to pay money yet, but you do have to play their game. You have to pay with your time instead of money. I agree with you. I don’t think there’s anywhere you can literally just post something and know it will reliably reach the people who follow you. Claire: Right. Exactly. TikTok currently, if you really play the game, will sometimes “pick” you, right? But that “pick me” energy is not really my jam. And we can see the trend—this “organic” thing doesn’t last. It’s organic for now. You can play the game for now, but TikTok would be crazy not to change things so they make more money. So eventually everything becomes pay-to-play. TikTok is fun, but for me it’s addictive. I took it off my phone years ago because I would do the infinite scroll. There’s so much candy there. Then I’d wake up the next morning and notice my mood just wasn’t where I wanted it to be. My energy was low. I really saw a correlation between how much I scrolled and how flat I felt afterwards. So I realised: I’m not the person to pay-to-play or to play the game here. I’m not even convinced that the pay-to-play on certain social media networks is being tracked in a reliable, accountable way anymore. Who is holding them accountable for those numbers? You can sort of see correlation in your sales, but still, I just became more and more sceptical. In the end, it just wasn’t for me. My life is so much better on a daily basis without it. That’s definitely a decision I have not regretted for a second. **** To be clear, we’re not saying you should give up social media, but it’s about questioning how things make you feel, and what you can sustain and how you want to spend your time.  I did question once again whether to give up this show entirely, but it is an important part of my creative body of work, and quite frankly, I reach more people with the podcast than I do with my books, and I still love talking to people, and I learn, and it underpins my business.  I don’t do much social media though. I learn about AI things on X and I do post photos and things on Instagram but I don’t do much else. You have to decide what is right for you, but also, what is right for you might change over time. If we have a long term career, or a long term anything, things will change, and we will need to move on sometimes, or at least question whether it is still working in the way it used to.  (6) Consider different approaches to creativity. It doesn’t have to be every day, or every week.  In April 2026, in episode 858, I talked to Sara Rosett, USA Today bestselling mystery author and co-host of the Wish I’d Known Then podcast, about low-key marketing, and a more seasonal approach, or phased approach to podcasting as well as writing.  Special Editions, Seasonal Podcasts, and the Art of Low-Key Book Marketing with Sara Rosett *** Jo: Although I must say I had forgotten about your Mystery Books podcast and going to seasonal. I also had my second podcast, Books and Travel, which is now on a kind of hiatus, but going to a seasonal approach is actually really interesting. Do you find that listeners come back to that podcast? Sara: Yes, and it surprises me because I’ve always thought you have to be weekly with a podcast to gain any traction at all, which I think is the best way to do it. You can build an audience quickly then, but I just knew I couldn’t sustain that. So when I set out, I started with maybe seven to ten episodes and I did them each year — each year has had a season — and I do five to ten episodes. Readers find it, and I have highlighted specific books. I think maybe they’re searching for a podcast about the Thursday Murder Club or something like that. They find it that way, and I get downloads, just steady downloads throughout the year, and I don’t do much. I do some Pinterest pins for that, and that’s about all I do. This is one of those things — it’s the kind of low-key marketing that’s low threshold, but it does work. I think if your readers are looking for stuff to listen to about the topic you write about, it could be a good way to do some low-cost, long-tail marketing. I love it. I keep doing it because I love it. Jo: That just seems more sustainable to me. I didn’t like doing everything every day or every single week. Sara: Me either. I like switching it up, and I do enjoy the different phases of writing. I like the research and then I like doing the — well, I don’t like the drafting that much, but once I get a draft done, I like the editing. And then when it comes time to promote it or do a special edition or whatever, I enjoy that part. Finding whatever I’m going to use for the interior photos and stuff — just things like that. I enjoy each phase and I like switching it out. Jo: I think that’s really good. Some people think this writer’s life is you write new words every single day and you manage your ads every single day. That seems to be what some people do, but that’s certainly not us, is it? Sara: No. And that’s great if you want to do that. I just don’t want to. And I think we’ve come to the point now where each person can do this as they want. Hopefully people don’t feel the pressure to meet these self-imposed deadlines or parameters that don’t exist. There’s no rules for writing or publishing. You can do whatever you want. *** I am definitely a seasonal creator, I don’t write every day. I never have. I binge write when a book emerges, or binge create. As I record this I am working on the treatment and trailer for what is now called Cathedral Zero, a positive futurist sci-fi feature film that I am entering in the FutureVision X Prize in the next week or so, and then I will move to the next project. I also love Kickstarter launches for this reason. They feel much more sustainable because it’s such a focused marketing push. My Books and Travel Podcast is still on hiatus, but I may still resurrect that at some point. I still feel the pull of it. And of course, this show remains weekly, but the Wednesday shift will hopefully help keep it this way. I can’t see me going seasonal with this, but never say never!  The main thing is to consider seasonality, or consider phased approaches to your work, rather than trying to do exactly the same thing week in week out.  (7) Creative humans evolve. Build a body of work for the long term. Roz Morris first came on this podcast in 2011, and in March 2026, in episode 853 we talked about her memoir, discovery writing, and slow, sustainable book marketing. Roz is an award-nominated literary author and former bestselling ghostwriter, an editor and I always appreciate her perspective as she has been doing this far longer than I have. ****  JOANNA: Do you still actively choose indie for a particular reason? ROZ: I do. I really like building my own body of work, and I’m now experienced enough to know what I do well, what I need advice with, and help with. I mean, we don’t do all this completely by ourselves, do we? We bring in experts who will give us the right feedback if we’re doing a new genre or a genre that’s new to us. I choose indie because I like the control. Because I began in traditional publishing—I was making books for other people—I just learned all the trades and how to do everything to a professional standard. I love being able to apply that to my own work. I also love the way I can decide what I’m going to write next. If I was traditionally published, I would have to do something that fitted with whatever the publisher would want of me, and that isn’t necessarily where my muse is taking me or what I’ve become interested in. I think creative humans evolve throughout their lives. They become interested in different things, different themes, different ways of expressing themselves. I began by thinking I would just write novels, and now I’ve found myself writing memoirs as well. That shift would have been difficult if someone else was having to make me fit into their marketing plans or what their imprint was known for. But because I’ve built my own audience, I can just bring them with me and say, “You might like this. It’s still me. I’m just doing something different.” ****  Inspiring words from Roz there — “It’s still me, I’m just doing something different.” And indeed, I am a very different Jo from the new author who started this podcast back in March 2009. I have evolved and this show has evolved and this is not the end, it is a new phase. It’s funny because it’s just a shift of two days, but it also breaks a habit, for you listening and for me creating. It changes a time slot, and that itself can be a way to change energy, to change direction, to shift what matters and how we do things.  So that’s what I want to leave you with today. A question around how shifting something, even something small, might make a big difference to your creative body of work, the quality of time you have for yourself or your family, and I’d love to know what you think about today’s episode and what we covered, as well as your thoughts on the Wednesday shift.  Please leave a comment on the show notes, or the YouTube channel, or email me. I will see you next Wednesday, so happy writing and I’ll see you next time!The post Why The Podcast Is Moving To Wednesdays, And 7 Tips for Sustainable Creativity first appeared on The Creative Penn.

What's the difference between a bundle, a box set, an anthology, and a collection? How can being part of an anthology be creatively interesting and useful for marketing? With Jamie Ferguson In the intro, Amazon Kindle increases the 70% royalty share; audiobook marketing tips (Voices by InAudio); The Builder’s Creed [Seth Godin]; Future Vision XPrize; Researching the dark side of travel [Anna Sayburn Lane]; Photos from Bruges @jfpennauthor; Bones of the Deep: A Thriller – J.F. Penn. Today's show is sponsored by Bookfunnel, the essential tool for your author business. Whether it’s delivering your reader magnet, sending out advanced copies of your book, handing out ebooks at a conference, or fulfilling your digital sales to readers, BookFunnel does it all. Check it out at bookfunnel.com/thecreativepenn This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn  Jamie Ferguson is a fiction and short story author, editor, and publisher, with over 20 anthologies and multiple ebook bundles through her own press. Her latest book for authors is Bundle Up! A Practical Guide to Anthologies and Box Sets That Sell. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.  Show Notes The difference between bundles, box sets, anthologies, and collections Why a multi-author project means lots of people promoting the same book, not just you How to find and pitch for anthology opportunities, and what editors look for in a contributor Contracts, rights, and royalty splits explained for short fiction Why Kickstarter and special print editions are changing the anthology game Inkwren, the publishing management tool Jamie built for backlists and anthologies You can find Jamie at JamieFerguson.com. Transcript of the interview ith Jamie Ferguson Jo: Jamie Ferguson is a fiction and short story author, editor, and publisher, with over 20 anthologies and multiple ebook bundles through her own press. Her latest book for authors is Bundle Up! A Practical Guide to Anthologies and Box Sets That Sell. Just for context too, one of my short stories, “The Dark Queen”, is in the Amazing Monster Tales: Into the Briny Deep anthology. So I'm excited to talk about this today. Welcome to the show, Jamie. Jamie: Thanks for having me, Jo. Jo: Lots to talk about. But first up— Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and self-publishing. Jamie: Well, I wanted to be a writer since I was at least six, maybe before then. So it was just something I always wanted to do, but I always did it on the side. I had a year, many years ago, where I was really busy with work, and I just felt like I didn't write anything the entire year, and I thought, “I'm going to give it up.” Then the next year—that was 2011—I started seeing more about self-publishing, and that really invigorated me and made me feel like, “No, why am I giving up something I've wanted to do since before I went to school?” So I got back into a novel I had worked on years before. I went to a writing workshop with Dean Wesley Smith up in Oregon, back in the day, and then I had my energy back. I've been writing ever since. Still on the side, unfortunately, but someday. Jo: Hopefully! Tell us a bit more about what kind of genres you write. Because balancing your own books with also doing these anthologies and things is quite difficult. Jamie: Yes, it definitely is. I'd say I primarily write contemporary fantasy, but I'll write anything in any genre if I'm really excited about it. I also have a soft spot for Westerns. They take a little more time because I like to research all the facts, but those are really fun to write. Creating anthologies on your own is actually quite a bit of work. One of the things I also do is work with two other authors, DeAnna Knippling and Tami Veldura, and create more anthologies with them. That's really fun because then we can each take a different piece. There's also always somebody to talk to, as opposed to doing it on your own. Jo: Let's start with the terminology, because I definitely struggled with this, and I think people still do. We've got bundles, we've got box sets, we've got anthologies, we've got collections—and are these in ebook, audiobook, or print? Can you start by explaining what all of these words actually mean? Jamie: Yes. In my book I actually use the term “multi-author collection” or “multi-author project”, because there are so many different permutations and it does get confusing. From my perspective, I think of a bundle as a collection. It could be a collection of ebooks. Technically it could be a collection of print books, although people generally use “box set” for that—but then a box set can also be a box set that's all ebooks. An anthology, I usually use for something that's a collection of short stories where there's an editor who's actually edited all the stories. I have had stories in anthologies where somebody didn't edit them, and they would technically be called a curator. So it is definitely confusing. I have not done anything with audio collections, but that certainly is another area that I actually think is pretty interesting. Jo: I also think that a single author… so I've done a short story collection, but an anthology is multiple authors. Is that right? Jamie: Yes. Jo: I think when I came into the indie space, there were a lot more multi-author… we all called them box sets back in the day, when it was just ebooks, right? And now we can actually do boxed sets with boxes through things like BookVault. So it feels like the term “box set” has also gone out of fashion. So if people listening are thinking of doing any of this, you do have to figure out what is the thing you might be signing up for. So let's talk about the multi-author projects, as that's where you specialise. What are the benefits for an author to be involved in a multi-author anthology project? Jamie: The biggest benefit is that you are one of multiple people promoting the same project, whether it's print or ebook or whatever. If I put out a short story collection on my own, I'm the one promoting it, and maybe I can get a couple of other people to write about it, but it's really just me. If I'm part of an anthology with 15 other authors, that's 15 other people who are promoting the same project. That's more newsletters, more Facebook posts, maybe something on their Patreons, whatever it is. You get more synergy, and you get more touch points with potential readers. Then hopefully that translates into sales as well. So that's definitely the biggest part of it—the promotion. Then I also personally really enjoy these types of collections because it's just fun to work with other people. There's a nice energy when everybody's like, “Oh, I put this in my newsletter, and I put this here, and I put this here,” and you feel like you're part of something bigger than just your own piece. Jo: What about the creative benefits? Especially with short stories, often people will write them for a collection or for an anthology project. Jamie: Yes. I've definitely written some stories that I never would have thought I'd write, because somebody I knew asked if I would be interested in being in their collection—whether it's an ebook bundle or a print anthology. So at least for me, that's been really fun. One of the ones that stands out is that I was asked to be in a dinosaur collection once, and I was like, “I don't write dinosaur stories.” And then I did. I set a dinosaur story in London, and it was really fun to write, and I never would have come up with that in a million years. Jo: Let's say we've got 12 authors. They've all written short stories, and now it's in this anthology. But what is the market for these kinds of things? Have you found that there is a readership for short story anthologies that carries over to the author's longer work? Jamie: There is. I like to think of it as: if I have a story in a collection or an anthology—whether it's one I'm editing or somebody else is editing—that's one more place for people to find me. A lot of times anthologies will take reprints as well, like your story. “The Dark Queen”—that was a reprint. We asked if you'd be interested in participating in the Amazing Monster Tales series. And I actually really like printing stories again that have already been published, because there are a lot of stories out there that can be hard to find. Or if it's an older book. I have one author I've known for, like, 30 years. I reprinted one of her stories that was originally published in, I think, 1999, and the anthology it was in was out of print. You couldn't find it, and it was a fantastic story. So it's fun to be able to give new life to those stories and give them more opportunities, and also just have more ways for people to find you. Jo: Yes, I definitely think it's a long game. I don't think appearing in a short story anthology in one particular month is going to mean that your whole back collection just sells, right? Jamie: No, definitely not. It's more about avenues to be found. I know there have been some anthologies that have made quite a bit of money, but in general you're probably not going to make as much money, but you will have those extra places for people to find you. Jo: I always feel like yes, there is maybe a small amount of money, but it is more about almost a marketing thing in itself. So let's say an author is listening and they're like, “Do you know, this sounds like a great idea.” How can they pitch for things like this? How do they find out about opportunities, or get noticed to be asked? And what are the expectations for them? Jamie: The biggest thing is networking. There used to be a couple of opportunities where you could make people aware that you had stories that you were interested in potentially having picked up for something. I'm not aware of anything like that now. When I create a collection, I have a mailing list that I send out, and it includes authors I've published before. It includes a couple of extra people who somehow found my mailing list. And I'll publish, like, “Here's what I'm doing.” There are also authors I've met at writing workshops. I've been able to read some of their work, I'll approach them and say, “Hey, I really liked such and such a story. Would you be interested in writing for this?” Then there are a couple of other websites, like Duotrope, and places that advertise markets and calls for submissions. Jo: Yes, I've found them also on small presses that do these kinds of projects. They often put up one call for submission a month or something, and you can write for their particular thing. In general, the short story markets are the places to keep an eye on. Jamie: Yes, definitely. Jo: If an author wants to pitch to have their story as part of an anthology, do you want to know things like platform, or is it just the story itself? Jamie: I personally look at the author's platform. I do make exceptions—there are actually two authors I've worked with a couple of times who don't have websites. They are people I know personally and they are very, very good writers, so I'll make an exception for things like that. But otherwise, if somebody submitted a story to me and I didn't know that person, I would check out their website, I would check out their social media, I would see what else they had done. Part of what you're doing when you're creating a collection is thinking not just about how you, as the person organising this, will promote the collection, but how the authors who are participating will help promote it as well. If it's somebody who has a lot of fans, even if they're not very active on social media, that can help a lot too. There are a lot of different factors, though. Jo: So then talk us through the project timeline. How long do things take, and what sort of involvement do the authors have along the way? Because it's a lot to juggle. Jamie: Yes, it is a lot to juggle. I can give you an example with the Monster Tales series. We'll come up with an idea, and we also like to try to get the artwork done early on in the process. We don't need it that soon, but it's really great to have that taken care of. We'll contact authors. I think for this one we used my mailing list, but we've also contacted a number of people individually that we know who write the style of stories we like. Then, as the submissions come in, we usually wait until we have a nice chunk of them to start going through, and then we'll pick some right away. Sometimes it'll be like, “Oh my gosh, of course we want this story,” and we'll wait to fill out the other slots. Then we'll negotiate sometimes. Sometimes it's like, “I want this story.” “Well, I want this other story.” And we have to figure out how the word count works. Once we finalise the stories, then usually what happens with that anthology is that DeAnna—who is a very, very good editor—will make the first editing pass, and then I'll make the second. And now Tami's involved, so Tami will make the third, and then we'll iterate. Once all three of us have gone through the first time, then we'll send the story back to the author for edits. So the most the author has to do for most of the process is just wait for us to edit their story, and then work on their edits and get them back. Then, once we get closer to launch, we'll give them information about what we're going to do. For example, we're going to launch the next issue with a Kickstarter. So our authors know that we have a Kickstarter coming, and we'll give them more information as we get closer to the actual launch date. Jo: So how long might an author expect before their work is out there? Jamie: It really varies. I've had some collections published very quickly—let's say a couple of months. Some have taken longer just because somebody ends up having some life issue and things get delayed. So I'd say ideally it would be more like three to nine months. Jo: Yes, I think… depending on the— Jamie: —collection and the complexity. Jo: Yes, exactly. Jo: And you did mention word count there. Just give us a range of what word count you like to get. Jamie: So these days I'm shooting for between 75,000 and 80,000 for the total word count for a collection. That includes the stories, but it also includes the opening, the introduction. For one we're working on now, we're going to have some interstitials, where we have little bits of things we're going to write in between each story. So that's the overall size of the collection. I'll keep track of the word count as the stories come in, and then as we edit the stories, sometimes they grow, sometimes they shrink. Sometimes that's a big enough difference where we're like, “Okay, we need one more story to fill it in.” But that's the target. Jo: And how much for each individual story? Jamie: That varies. I've done a bunch of different things. These days, what I'm advertising is between 3,000 and 8,000 words. I also always tell people: if you're outside this range on either side, just check with me, and if it's something that's really an excellent fit for the book, I'll make an exception. The one that's coming out, I think we have a 1,500- or 2,000-word story that was just amazingly perfect for what we wanted. There was another story, actually I think it was the issue that you were in, that was at least 12,000 words, but it also was a perfect fit for the theme. So I will make exceptions, but within reason. I wouldn't put a novella inside an anthology, because then you'd have a 22,000-word story next to a 3,000-word story, and I personally feel like that's really jarring for the reader. You don't want to go from something super short to something super long. It just doesn't feel like it flows well to me. Jo: No, absolutely. Jo: We'll come back to the making of it because you mentioned some really interesting things there. But just on the contractual side—a lot of indie authors don't necessarily do any publishing contracts for their work, unless it's signing the terms and conditions when uploading on Amazon or Kobo. So tell us a bit about the contract side. What rights are we talking about here? Any red lines in contracts around this kind of thing? Jamie: For contracts, I would recommend people read Kristine Kathryn Rusch's posts on this. She is way more informed about this than I ever will be, so when I have questions, I'll look at her posts. I've asked her a couple of questions. What we're doing for the Amazing Monster Tales… this is the first time that I've actually had authors sign contracts. Prior to this, I've used PubShare, which handles royalty splits and all of that, and that was really great. We want to do direct sales and Kickstarters and have lots of other options. So we did put together a contract this time. I'd have to pull it up, but I think we asked for first worldwide rights in English—I'm getting the terminology wrong here—but that was basically it. Jo: Or, I guess, reprint rights if the story's already been licensed. Jamie: Correct. We have two contract templates, one for original stories and one for reprints. We made sure to make that distinction, because it is definitely a distinction. In the book by Kristine Kathryn Rusch—it's called Closing the Deal… on Your Terms—I highly recommend that for anybody interested in learning more about contracts. Jo: Yes, that's great. And just for people listening: when you said you didn't have contracts before, you just used PubShare. So in that way, the author still retained the rights and you just split the royalties—it was more of a co-writing thing. Jamie: Correct. When you publish stories through PubShare, the author signs an agreement with PubShare, and then I, as the editor or organiser, would also sign a separate agreement. So each of us has an agreement with PubShare. We don't have agreements with each other, if that makes sense. Jo: Yes, so it's very different to move into Kickstarter. So tell us about what you're now moving into. Jamie: Well, Kickstarters are a new world for me personally. I have many friends who have had Kickstarters. I've supported Kickstarters. I watch them. But it's something where I'm very happy to have two partners who have done Kickstarters before. I'm not sure how many Tami's done—I think Tami's done the most at this point. So this is all new to me. But it's very exciting. At this point we have a backlist, so part of the plan, for the Monster series, is to offer issues one through four as part of the rewards when we launch issue number five. That's really exciting, because I never had a backlist like that before. Jo: Yes, and in fact the money is in the backlist, as ever, and those add-ons or bundles as part of Kickstarter are great. So are you going to do special print editions, or is it digital only? Jamie: We are talking about special print editions. You mentioned BookVault earlier—we've been looking at BookVault. Our other anthology series that hasn't come out yet will also launch with a Kickstarter. It's dragon-themed, and Tami actually did the cover work, which is beautiful. BookVault just gives you so many options that we never had before, so I'm very excited about that. Jo: Yes, I think it's a really good idea. I did gorgeous hardbacks for my solo author collection, so I think it's a great idea. So from the publisher side, let's come back to that. You've mentioned you have to write things like an introduction and interstitials, and you're trying to balance the stories. What are some of the other things that people might think about if they want to organise their own anthologies? Jamie: Oh gosh, where to start? There's the basic setting up of the anthology, so you have to define the table of contents. You might get a bunch of stories that are really awesome, and you might have to tell somebody who has a wonderful story—and maybe even who's a good friend of yours—that you're going to pass on it because their story doesn't fit with all the other stories. Every time I have to do that, I feel kind of bad. But being on this side, it's really interesting to see how you can tell which stories fit together and which don't. There's also the editing process, which can be a lot of work. Part of what I like about working with Tami and DeAnna is that DeAnna really loves editing. I feel like I'm a good editor, and I can do it, but for me it's more of a job. For DeAnna, she loves it, so she does the bulk of the editing, which is great. When I do it on my own, I feel like it's a task I have to do. There's lots of cat-herding. Sometimes people take a while to get their edits back. Sometimes they have life events, and you have to delay things because you're waiting on them. There are all the little tiny pieces of organising things—like, if you're reprinting stories, you need to make sure you get the copyright attribution correct. A lot of times I'll have to go and look up where something was originally published. An author might say, “Oh, it was published in this year,” and I'm like, “Okay, actually it was published in this other year, by this other publication first.” So I'm trying to be organised there. henT one of the things that very infrequently—I think it's only happened to me twice—every once in a while, you're in the middle of editing a story and you have to pass on it, even though you've already accepted it, because the editorial vision and the author vision for the story are not the same, and you can't reconcile that. Jo: I think that's really interesting, because so much of what you're talking about there—you mentioned vision—it's almost taste. You're saying which stories fit. It's not just a case of, I don't know, a pirate anthology and then picking 10 stories about pirates, right? You seem to be thinking about this in a more artistic way. So can you talk a bit more about that? How do you decide on a theme, and then how do you know that a story doesn't fit? Jamie: In the beginning, I was not this selective. In the beginning I'd say, for example, “Hey, I'm putting out a collection about fairies. Give me a fairy story,” and that was it. As I've edited the stories, it's become easier to see how things fit. So, for example, if I have 10 stories in an anthology and I have an 11th story, and they have different tones—let's say the 11th story is really funny and all the other stories are very serious—then that would be a fit thing. That's not necessarily taste; it's just that you don't want one funny story if everything else is really dark and scary or serious. As far as picking a theme, the theme could be very broad. With this dragon anthology we're working on, we decided we wanted it to be called A Hoard of Books. So the theme was: has to have dragons, has to have books, and that's pretty much it. And then we were like, “Let's just see what we get.” We were very surprised at what we got. We thought we'd have more serious stories, and it turned out most of them were very light-hearted and really fun. And we're like, “You know what? That actually changes the way we're looking at the whole series,” because we did not expect that. With the monster series, we'll pick a theme. So, for example, the next issue is Monsters in Love, and for those it's more like, let's just see what happens. Sometimes I'll have a more specific theme. The next anthology I'm publishing on my own is called Fairy Bargains, and I wanted people to obviously have fairies, but I wanted there to be something related to the mythology and lore of having a bargain with a fairy—and there's a lot of stuff about that. So for some things like that, when I put out a call, I'll provide information. I might say, “Here's a link to a Wikipedia article. Here's some mythology that might be helpful for you,” just because I want things to stick a little bit more to the theme itself. Whereas with Monsters in Love, there's a very wide range of stories, and that was very fun to work through. Jo: Oh, yes. There's a lot of monster, on the spicy side as well. But were you doing a clean Monsters in Love, as opposed to in lust? Jamie: Yes, this is a clean one. That's pretty funny. But boy, when you give authors the room for these types of things, you get all kinds of stories, and it is super fun to work with those collections. Jo: As you're talking, I definitely want to do more short stories. It's really interesting, because you can actually generally get paid more for a first print—first print rights on a short story—but I often want to just publish it myself. Then I was really happy to be in yours, because it was a reprint anyway. So I was like, well, there's absolutely nothing to lose if it goes in as a reprint. So these things can be really interesting. Talking of the finance from your side of things: you have a small press and you're doing this publishing yourself, but you're paying all these authors and doing a lot of work. So how does it work as the publisher, in terms of these anthologies, financially? Jamie: With the ones we've published so far, because we've gone through PubShare, it's been a royalty split. As the editors, we would take a percentage, and then we pay for the artwork, and of course all of our time. I think what we were doing there was saying 70% of the royalties would be split equally between all of the authors and the stories. So, for example, if I had a story as well, I would get part of the author split—the same percentage as everybody else in the collection—in addition to the editor split. For what we're doing now, we've changed this a little bit, and I believe we said 60% goes to the authors, and then we're going to keep a share of the proceeds for the business because we want to be able to pay for the artwork out of the business account. We want to pay for advertising, whatever we need to do—like setting up our store, or if we wanted to invest in anything, we want to be able to do that as the business, as opposed to it just being us doing this on our own. We're just trying to treat it a little bit differently. Jo: And I know it's so much work—a crazy amount of work. How many anthologies and books do you have to do in a year to make it worthwhile financially? Jamie: Oh, I don't know. I would say, unless you get an opportunity—like, for example, to have an anthology in a story bundle or something like that—you may not break even. But if you're going to do this, do it more for the marketing, do it more because you enjoy it. Now, going forward, I think that will change, because we are looking at Kickstarters, we are looking at direct sales. We're very motivated to try to make this more of a business thing than a fun side project. So, ask me in a year. Jo: Yes, hopefully more. I do think Kickstarter is great for short stories. I actually buy quite a few collections on Kickstarter. I think they're actually really hard to discover through, say, Amazon—it's a place that is quite hard to identify short stories. Whereas I've found I've bought collections on Kickstarter because there's so much more of a sales page—there's so much more rich media that tells me how I'm going to feel about the stuff. I've bought short story anthologies and collections from people I don't know. So I think it's a really good thing to do. There is an audience there. Jamie: Yes, definitely. And it does feel like the anthologies on Amazon don't sell as well—you don't make as much as you used to. I've been doing this for, well, gosh, 10 years now, and I feel like the sales numbers on Amazon in the past year were noticeably lower than they would have been six or eight years ago. So I am very excited about Kickstarter. Plus, Kickstarter just feels really fun. You're not just throwing your book up; you also have all the extra stuff with the page, you have the rewards, and it just feels really exciting. Jo: No, I agree. I really love it. I didn't do it for a long time, and now I just love it. Jo: So, staying with the publisher side of things— Any practical formatting and production tips? Because in these types of projects, all kinds of people just send you different stuff. Jamie: I have a style guide. So whether it's me or it's the group project, once all the edits are complete, I'll do a formatting pass, and I'll make sure I use curly quotes and the same em dash format and everything, just so everything in the book is formatted the same way. Every once in a while there's an author who has something particular that they want, and I can work around that, and that's fine. I also work with a lot of Canadian authors, and I'll let them keep their Canadian spellings. I don't think everybody does that, but I feel like that's their voice in a way, so I don't correct those. I might check some things there. I think the formatting is important—it makes things look better if everything has the same style. Then I use Vellum, which makes things really easy. I love Vellum. Because I publish so many authors at this point, I have a Vellum file where I store their biographies and their links, so when I publish a new anthology I'll just go grab, say, Jo's “about the author” page from that collection and put it into the new file. Then I also track when the last time was that I checked with the author about their biography. If it's been more than a year, I'll check in with them and say, “Hey, do you have an updated biography you want me to use? Here are your links—do you have any different links now?” So that makes it a lot easier from the formatting standpoint. Jo: And you mentioned Vellum—having done box sets on Vellum, you can just drag a whole book in there if you want to do a three-book box set, or three short stories, whatever. It's much easier to just drag things in, and it makes it easier to format. So I would say to people: you don't need to worry too much about that. There are lots of things that can help you. But even with doing the print stuff for the Kickstarter—people have opinions, don't they? So in terms of authors' opinions and managing—you mentioned herding cats—how do you manage all of that side of things? Jamie: I haven't actually had a lot of trouble with that. The authors I've worked with seem to feel like they gave me their story, and then once the edits are out of the way… I haven't had anybody have any issues with the covers. Usually they love the covers, especially for the Monster series. So, no problems there. Jo: Oh, that's good. Well, I would say a tip would be to make sure you're communicating, if you're somebody who's organising. So talk a bit about communication. Jamie: Communication is very important. What I try to do is send regular updates, especially if I'm in the middle of edits or working on something and I'm not ready to launch. I'll send an update email out to the authors and just say, “Here's what's going on, here's what the plan is.” Or if the plan has to change, if the launch date has to change for some reason, I'll let the authors know about that. Actually, with the upcoming Monsters in Love issue, we were originally not going to do a Kickstarter. That was a late decision, so I contacted all the authors and said, “We've changed our plans. We're going to launch this with a Kickstarter. Please confirm that you're okay with this.” One author was not comfortable with the Kickstarter idea, so he pulled his story, and then we found a replacement story for that. But I just feel like the communication piece is really essential. It's really important for the authors to know what's going on. Jo: Yes, absolutely. So, we've talked about how marketing is a good thing, in terms of there being lots of people marketing. How are you effectively marketing these kinds of books, as the premise is quite different to a single author project? Jamie: Right. There's the usual—write a release post, write posts on social. I do additional things, so I'll publish what I call a story spotlight for each story in the anthology. That's just where I talk a little bit about the story, I provide an excerpt, and then I provide the author's bio and links to find them. Those are really great, because they're very quick to put together. The hardest part is getting a short excerpt that shows enough about the story to be engaging. But that really isn't that much time, either. Then those are also nicely evergreen. I've actually searched for authors before, when I'm trying to research them for an interview, and I've found my own spotlight posts and my own interview posts with authors come up at the top of the list, which is kind of funny. I also do interviews with as many of the authors in a collection as are willing to participate. Sometimes people just don't have the time—I don't make this required—but I usually get 80 to 90% of the authors participating. So, for example, this year I'm in a couple of bundles on StoryBundle, and I'm doing interviews for people there. It's also really fun, and you're not paying for advertising—you're just creating something that the authors are excited about and they want to share. So it promotes the collection, but it also promotes the author, which I find really nice. It's a nice networking thing too, and I'm happy if someone wants to interview me. It's like free publicity for each person, in addition to the collection. Jo: I love that you've used the word “fun” quite a lot, which I find amazing. You're obviously a super collaborative person. I've co-written a number of books— I've been part of some collections, and I really think that there are two personalities. One is like me, where we really love the creation stuff and the publishing stuff, but we're hyper-controlling. And then someone like you—you're very collaborative, and you're doing such a great job. To people listening, I would say: if you're more like me, don't organise an anthology. What you want is Jamie, or somebody who actually finds it fun to organise a big group of authors. Jamie: Yes. It is definitely interesting working with other partners in this, because when I publish an anthology on my own, I make all the decisions. I pick the artwork, I pick the theme, I do everything, I decide the table of contents. But when you're working with other people, you do need to negotiate. So we've had a couple of times where it's like, “I want this story.” “Well, I want this other story, I don't like the story that you want.” And so we have to barter, in a way. Aside from that, it is nice, because you get to split up the tasks. I could focus on things like the organising—I do the Vellum files, I do the final cover and everything. For the Kickstarters, actually, Tami's got more expertise, so Tami's going to be working on the Kickstarters for our collections together. If I had to do all this on my own, it's a ton of work. It's a ton of work. So it is nice to split it up. Jo: And of course, one of the things is managing so many moving parts—and you've actually built a tool to manage all this. So tell us a bit about that tool, and how it might be useful for people with big backlists as well as anthologies. Jamie: I built what I think of as a publishing management application. The original idea is that, for years and years, I wanted a software tool that would do catalogue management, because I was managing my own catalogue, and I was also managing—at this point I've published at least 20 anthologies, so that's a lot of authors. Then last summer, I had an author who I'd published a number of times, who was going to, I think, WorldCon, and she asked if I could give her covers for five anthologies she'd been in, so that she could make some promotional material. I was like, “Oh, sure, I can do that.” And then I was like, “Well, wait a second—is this in Notion?”—because I started trying to use Notion last year—”or is it in a spreadsheet?” It turned out her information was in, like, three different places, and I had to work to pull it together. And then I was like, “You know what? That's it. I'm just going to finally write this application.” So Inkwren manages your stories. As an author, I can manage my stories—I can track which are published, which are drafts, which are just ideas. I can track my publications. From the publisher standpoint, it's really helpful, because I can track each anthology I've published and what I'm working on. I can track the edits, I can track the contracts. I can upload contract templates—so we talked earlier about the original and reprint contract templates that I use. I upload those, and they have placeholders in them. When I generate the actual contract, the author's name will replace the placeholder—I'll have the text “author name” in the contract template, and it'll get replaced by, like, “Joanna Penn” or whatever. So that saves a lot of time. Then I also added in task tracking, because I started to feel like, well, now all my stuff is in one place, but my tasks are somewhere else. So now I can associate tasks with a publication. For example, for the book I'm working on right now, I know which tasks I need to do for the cover, and which for the interior, and everything. I have a template of tasks. Then I can also track tasks related to promotions. For example, the story bundle I'm promoting right now, I have a task for each interview I'm doing with the authors, and I have a calendar view. I can see when I'm going to publish them and know that they're all spread out. It saves me so much time, and it's so much easier. Jo: I do think building tools when you actually need the tool yourself is very useful. Just say the name again, and spell it out for people. Jamie: It's Inkwren. My own personal publishing company is Blackbird Publishing, and I wanted something related to birds and writing. So I came up with Inkwren, which is I-N-K-W-R-E-N, and it's just inkwren.com. Jo: And it is available for other people to potentially buy and use? Jamie: Yes, it is. Jo: Well, I think that's super useful, because it's very hard when people are starting out and they think, “Oh, I've only got one book—why would I need any kind of tool to manage it?” But over the years, your backlist grows, especially with short stories. So I love that you've built this, and there's probably more that you can add over time as you expand the business yourself. So much potential. So we are at the end. Where can people find you and your books and everything you do online? Jamie: My author website is JamieFerguson.com. And then, obviously, I mentioned Inkwren earlier. My publishing company is BlackbirdPublishing.com. And then the projects I'm doing with Tami and DeAnna—we have a couple of websites, but the easiest way to find us is our press, which is BorogrovePress.com. Jo: Fantastic. Well, thanks so much for your time, Jamie. That was great. Jamie: Thanks, Joanna.The post Bundles, Box Sets and Anthologies With Jamie Ferguson first appeared on The Creative Penn.

What happens to your creativity when you're in pain or sick, and can you ever get it back? How can you find and sharpen your author voice? J. Daniel Sawyer talks about voice mastery, writing with chronic pain, and building an eclectic author business. In the intro, leaning into your Strengths and deciding what you want to achieve by the end of the year; and Bones of the Deep by J.F. Penn. Today's show is sponsored by ProWritingAid, writing and editing software that goes way beyond just grammar and typo checking. With its detailed reports on how to improve your writing and integration with writing software, ProWritingAid will help you improve your book before you send it to an editor, agent or publisher. Check it out for free or get 15% off the premium edition at www.ProWritingAid.com/joanna This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn  J. Daniel Sawyer is the author of over 30 books across science fiction, fantasy, crime, short stories, and nonfiction, as well as being a podcaster and filmmaker. His latest book for authors is The Pitch-Perfect Author: Voice Mastery for Writers. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.  Show Notes Writing fiction through chronic pain and re-emerging into health after surgery How your physical health shapes (and darkens) your fiction Rebooting an author business around a weekly Substack column What author voice really is, and why it's fundamentally about sound The building blocks of voice: functional vocabulary, dialect, and musicality The “crossing the line twice” trick for hearing your own voice objectively You can find Dan at JDsawyer.net or on Substack. Transcript of the interview with J. Daniel Sawyer Jo: J. Daniel Sawyer is the author of over 30 books across science fiction, fantasy, crime, short stories, and nonfiction, as well as being a podcaster and filmmaker. His latest book for authors is The Pitch-Perfect Author: Voice Mastery for Writers. So welcome back to the show, Dan. Dan: Hello, Joanna. It's good to be back. Jo: Goodness me, you have been on the podcast a few times, but actually, the last time was April 2017, which is crazy. It's nine years ago. When I saw your book, I was like, “I can't believe we haven't talked for that long.” For anyone who doesn't know you, tell us a bit more about— What does your creative and author business look like these days? Dan: Oh, well, these days it's in a state of recovery because it basically ground to a halt while I was dying a few years ago. It turned out I had an organ disease from the time I was a kid that I didn't know about, and it just progressively got worse and worse, putting me in more and more pain. I hit a point around about 2020 or so where I was in so much pain that I couldn't write fiction. I continued to write nonfiction, but when you're carrying around a lot of physical pain, there comes a point where so much of your brain's activity goes into coping with it that you actually lose the ability to model other people's emotional states—or at least well enough to write fiction. So I was very frustrated, and I was despairing that I was ever going to be a novelist again. Then suddenly, what I was sick with went acute. I went to the emergency room, and they're like, “Oh, if you don't have surgery in the next 24 hours, you're going to die.” So I went and got surgery, and there was one bed in the whole state. There was a three-hour drive to get to the one that was available in the time window. I get there. They wheel me into the OR. I wake up afterwards, and I realise that I'm not in pain, and that I had never felt that before in my adult life. Jo: Wow. Dan: Just the walls of my whole reality came caving in. Two weeks later, I was back up and working, and since then I've been slowly reacquiring my ability to write fiction. So now I've got four novels going again, like I used to have going all the time, as well as doing a weekly column and all sorts of other stuff. Jo: I think a lot of people will be interested in this. A lot of writers have chronic pain issues or chronic health issues, and yours sounds like it was a sort of down, down, down, down—and then more of a sudden up. Maybe just talk a bit more, because I feel like a lot of the time people are too hard on themselves about, “Oh my goodness, if I can't write fiction, is it the end of everything?” So how did you adapt to that, with the mental health aspect of dealing with that change in circumstance? Dan: Well, it was happening so gradually, and it happened at the same time that a whole bunch of other weirdly stressful things happened, like COVID and a couple of family emergencies that derailed my whole life for a couple of years. I assumed it was just really bad stress that would pass with time. So I had the despairing feeling, because when you write fiction, it tends to occupy a central place in your self-concept. I'd also been through very tough times before, so I was like, “Well, got through that then, maybe I'll get through this now.” I just made sure to keep writing something, because at least you keep the discipline of the words flowing. There was still thought going on, so I would have ideas for novels and write them down. There were good days and bad days. Occasionally I would sit down and be like, “I feel like fiction today,” and I would write a couple thousand words, and then it would be 10 months before I could do that again. When you work with your mind, it is really easy to develop or sink into the delusion that your mind is not your body. Now, if you're paralysed or you're missing limbs, you can still write—but your mind and your body are a single system, and eventually, if something terrible is wrong with your body, it's going to affect your cognition, your emotive abilities, and all the things that we depend on for creativity. That doesn't necessarily mean that if you're sick or injured, or you've got chronic health problems from birth, that you can't write. It just means that it really is one of the factors that goes into shaping your experience of the world, that goes into shaping the way you process things and they come out on paper. When there's a massive change in your health, it's going to show up in your fiction somehow. If your health goes way down, especially if you get into a lot of pain or you have a terminal illness, your fiction's going to get darker. One of the reasons—I discovered this after I got my surgery—one of the reasons is that the sense of impending doom is actually a medical symptom of organ death. Jo: Well, don't say that to a dark writer like me. I have a sense of impending doom the entire time. Dan: Well, there's a cognitive sense of impending doom that you get if you're modelling systems and you see how things can go wrong. But the sense that you feel the claws of demons grasping at your heart all the time—that can be a medical symptom. So pay attention to that. I didn't know that until afterwards, or I'd have gotten looked at a lot sooner. Jo: That is really interesting. You mentioned there you are reacquiring the ability to write fiction, or that's what you've been focusing on. You also talked about having to reboot the business. So what are some of the concrete things you're doing to rebuild? Dan: Well, the first thing I did is I allowed myself to get talked into doing a weekly Substack column a couple of years ago, and that's worked out really well. Pay is pretty decent. I've been posting most everything for free except for some previews of upcoming books, but I'm now learning the art of paywalling, so that also helps. Getting paid for the weekly column is quite nice, and a side effect is that it does drive people occasionally to the fiction, even though I'm writing nonfiction. It more frequently drives people to the nonfiction books, but it gives me a good place to announce new releases, to promote book bundles, Kickstarters, and all that sort of thing. It's a very good place for that because the people who are subscribing there—especially the people who are subscribing and supporting—are interested enough in what I'm saying that they want my email every week. So it's a good filtering mechanism for building the email list as well. Jo: You used to do a lot of audio. That's how we connected way back, like 17 years ago, I think, when we first connected. So are you still doing a lot of audio? Dan: I am not at the moment. It's not because of a decision to drop the audio. It's because I am now building my house, and I don't have a place that's quiet enough to record dependably. I'm living in a little RV at the moment while I build the house. In the deep winter, everything is quiet enough in the forest to record some things, and so I do audiobooks for clients, and I work on audiobooks of my own that are coming out. It's not quiet enough to podcast, and it's not quiet enough to be recording any other time than when the whole world is asleep. Hopefully by next year I will have the recording studio building built, and then I'll be back at it. Because boy, I miss it. Jo: I know. So you mentioned there bundles and Kickstarters and things, and we reconnected because I bought a StoryBundle, and your new book, The Pitch-Perfect Author, was in the StoryBundle, which was part of why I bought it anyway. So let's get into the book and what's useful. Let's start with— What is author voice anyway, and why is it important? Dan: Author voice. Everything about the way that you write is part of your author voice. The themes that you gravitate to, the way that you turn a phrase, the way that you tell a joke, the way that you handle dramatic tension. When all of that combines, it creates in the reader's mind an emotional fingerprint, a gestalt that says, “This is a Joanna Penn book. This is a Dan Sawyer book,” or whoever. When you bring the focus down further, author voice is fundamentally an auditory phenomenon. You can see this if you look at the careers of writers who had major worldview shifts during their career, or who shifted genres. If you read an Isaac Asimov mystery, and you read Asimov's Guide to the Bible, and you read Isaac Asimov's The Robots of Dawn, they're all Asimov. You can hear him talking to you through all of those different venues. So author voice is not a genre thing. It's not dependent on content. It has to do fundamentally with how your brain processes language and how it comes out of your mouth. That, in turn, is based on patterns that were laid down when you were pre-verbal as an infant. You learned language by mapping the music of the conversations around you, and then gradually learning that the sing-song you were hearing corresponded to ideas. That's how the brain bootstraps itself into language. So when you start writing, just like when you start speaking, you wind up imitating a lot—unconsciously—the people you've read and heard, because that's how you develop your voice. There comes a point at which all the various influences on you, and who you are, and how they pass through you, crystallises into something definite. By the time you're a moderately competent writer, and you're finishing novels and short stories well, your author voice is pretty well established. But that doesn't mean it's sharp, because most people don't actually concentrate on learning to hear their author voice, so they can't tell when it's off. This is why new writers who revise a lot tend to revise their voice right out. When they write, they're using language as feels right to them, but when they read, they're reading it like an English teacher, or through the lens of someone who has very definite ideas about how grammar should work in all circumstances. So they tend to smooth the quirkiness out of their voice, and what you get is something flat. It doesn't feel alive. It may convey information, it may tell a good story, but it doesn't feel like you're entering something that's living. Jo: I think this is so difficult, especially for people who are new to writing. Because I remember very much spending the first few years going along to writers' conferences, and there were always sessions on “you must find your writer's voice.” You must find your author's voice, and we publish books because of the voice, and all this. It was very, very confusing to me. As you say, it has to emerge somehow, and yet that emergence seems to be very hard to accept. So what are some of the ways we can perhaps think about voice? You mentioned there some patterns. You talk about music. So what are some of those angles? In the book, you have different chapters on all of these things, but maybe just talk more about some of the elements. Dan: The first and most obvious is functional vocabulary. This is not the number of words that you know. These are the words that you can reach for in the moment. You can expand your functional vocabulary by deliberately using more words—burnish your inner thesaurus. The greater your functional vocabulary is, the more your personality is going to come out through your voice. When you've got more options to do something that's just the way that you want to do it, the closer it's going to be to the way you want to do it. So there's functional vocabulary. There's your native dialect and accent. You, being British, have a different set of preferred terms for everything than I, being a West Coast American, do. One of the great differences that's always visible between an English writer and an American writer is that you guys have a different way of speaking. When you speak of a difference between one thing and another, you talk about how this car is different to that car. And Americans say this car is different from that car. It always marks out a British writer versus an American writer. There are 100 little things like that. They happen not just between major countries, but within regions in every country. You could tell on paper the difference between someone from Yorkshire and someone from London, just as I can tell on paper the difference between someone from the West Coast and someone from Mississippi. Even if they're highly educated, the idiom, the preferred turns of phrase, the preferred imagery—all of that is going to be a little bit different, and it conveys that regionality. There's also the musicality of the language. This is the actual rhythm of the words with which you speak. When you learn to analyse poetry or to write poetry, you learn something called scansion. How a poem scans is—what are the beats of the lines, how are the beats of the lines related to each other, and how does the rhyme move in and out of that? A Shakespearean sonnet, or a sonnet from the Elizabethan era, has a specific metre, a specific number of lines, and a specific rhyme scheme, and the metre is iambic pentameter. An iamb is “bum-bum,” if I remember right. It's the rhythm of the heartbeat. It's “bum-bum, bum-bum, bum-bum.” And you can hear it in the name of the metre, the iamb. The iambic pentameter is where the stressed syllable is the second syllable and the unstressed syllable is the first syllable. All of Shakespeare is written in blank verse, which is unrhymed iambic pentameter. The pentameter is five feet per line, so one iamb is “bum-bum”—that's one foot—and five of those makes one line of Shakespeare. We all have inherent rhythms like that in the way we naturally speak, but we can also tweak those rhythms on purpose to achieve dramatic effect. The iamb has the sound of the heartbeat. It's a very reassuring speech rhythm. The trochaic is a much more rapid one—it mirrors the rhythm of a rapidly beating heart. So you see this a lot in Edgar Allan Poe, especially in his frenetic poems like “The Bells,” how they jingle, jingle, jangle on a hoary moonless night. There's a rushing sound to that metre. You're going to find that you will automatically do a little bit of this, just the way that you'll automatically have picked up the convention of breaking sentences up into shorter lengths during really exciting or suspense-filled parts of your book. Once you know what it is, you can start to use it on purpose. Quite a lot of developing your voice is learning to recognise these latent, existing qualities in the way you communicate, and sharpening them up and making them conscious tools that you can pull in whenever you want. Jo: On the one hand, there are a lot of technical words there that are really interesting, and maybe poets know a lot more of those words than most other writers. The book is really interesting in that way—kind of learning about these different things. I guess I want to reassure people as well that, as you said, some of this can be unconscious. So often when I'm self-editing and I'm reading a sentence to myself, there's something that doesn't feel right about it. So I will rewrite that sentence so that it feels right. Sometimes we do something that might be grammatically less correct, but it sounds better than it did before. So many of these things we almost know instinctively, just from reading so much. Dan: Oh, yes. From reading so much and talking so much, and again, from the way you acquire language. That gives you a template in your head of what sounds right. Language is inherently musical. So if you've ever listened to a song—especially one that wasn't recorded by a professional, but someone singing in a church choir, or your kid practising for a recital, or you practising for a recital—you know that feeling that happens when someone hits a wrong note. There's that little wince down in the core of your being, and then the song carries on and you forget about it, unless there are too many of them, in which case you just sort of cower and ooze out of the room. That feeling of “Ooh, someone just hit a wrong note”—that's exactly the feeling you get when you're reading through to edit your work and something is off in the technical layer of your voice. You should pay attention to that and rewrite so that it feels good, or feels great, which is even better. You've got the opposite of the wince, which is that sense of rapture and joy if you're listening to a professional musician and they go on an amazing guitar solo, or a flautist does an incredible trill that just sends shivers up your spine. That sense of excitement and joy—that's what happens when you're reading and the author does something with the language that makes the whole piece fly. So you want to be paying attention for those too, because those you'll commit without intending to. When you're reading back and you find those, you want to make note of them, because that's you seeing where you are at your strongest with your voice. By learning both where you're making mistakes and where you're being brilliant—just like with anything else—you can start to advance towards being brilliant more often and making fewer mistakes. Jo: Then there's a difficulty around where the line is, especially when you're an early-stage writer. Many people work with editors, and you mentioned the problem of revising your voice away, and that may also happen if you're working with an editor. Like you said, as a Brit, I work with an American editor, Kristen, and she's excellent. She's very, very good at letting my voice be my voice, and then fixing things that make it better. But a lot of people don't feel that way about their editors. So how can people understand where those lines are between being well-edited and becoming a better writer, and then needing to hold the line on their voice? Dan: It really helps if you understand where you are weak. Why are you hiring the editor in the first place? I'm a big believer in the utility of having other eyes on the manuscript, but it's really important to know what you're looking for from them. You and I have both been to the Oregon Coast writing seminars, back when that was a thing. Jo: Mm. Dan: One of the things they would talk about with editors is when you've got a story editor or a beta reader who says, “Hey, something here didn't work in the story for me,” you usually don't want to look at that point. You want to trace back from that point to figure out where you set the wrong expectation. Any editorial feedback is going to have a gap between what they notice and what really needs to be fixed. As a writer, learning to interpret the feedback properly so that you actually elevate the material, instead of interpreting the feedback like you're trying to do customer service for an employer, where you just want to make the customer happy, is a really important skill to develop. That's regardless of whether the feedback has to do with voice or plot or characterisation or whatever. Some editors are really good at back-tracing and actually spotting the real problem. Editors make their money, or get hired, or get picked by you to volunteer, because they're good at being an audience—not because they're good at being a writer. So learning to interpret the editorial feedback is a really important step in that maturation journey. Jo: Yes. I think “maturation journey” is a good way to put it. Personally, I think it was around book five when I really felt, “Okay, now I see what my voice actually is.” Like, it had to be five novels, and then I was like, “Okay, now I know.” I just didn't get it before then, and then finally—I don't know—a penny dropped or something. Maybe I grew into it, grew more confident, that kind of thing. Dan: Yes, and that's actually about right. If you look at writers with a big catalogue, five books in is usually where they start really sounding like them. So that's a pretty normal maturation curve. There is a way to speed it up, which is to read your books aloud—or even better, make audiobooks and then listen to them a thousand times. Listen to them until you are sick of them, and then listen to them until you start to like them again. Jo: That's a lot. Dan: It's a lot, but there's a really specific neurological mechanism at work. You're familiar with the comedy term “crossing the line twice,” right? Jo: Not really. Dan: Okay. Have you seen the Monty Python Spam sketch? Jo: Yes. Dan: Okay. So for those of you who have not seen this—in the Monty Python Spam sketch, there's a couple, they're in a diner, and everything on the menu has spam in it. They say the word “spam” so much that you just want to shoot your television. But they keep it up, and then suddenly, at some point—it's a different point for everybody watching—they keep it going on long enough that everybody gets there. At some point, the word “spam” itself becomes hilarious, and you can't stop laughing, and you don't know why, because it shouldn't work, but goddammit it really does. It's so funny that we named junk email “spam” after this sketch, because it's a whole bunch of stuff that you don't want, but it keeps showing up anyway. That's crossing the line twice. What's going on is that your brain is getting accustomed to a sound. It has extracted all of the meaning it can, and so it's doing what it does with all sensory input. When it thinks it's got it mapped out, it's trying to filter it. Unless you are going to sit and concentrate on it, you can't feel the texture of the fabric of your clothing on the back of your legs, because your brain—despite the fact that it's getting that input all the time—is filtering that out, because it needs you to have your resources free for thinking. When you experience something over and over and over, no matter what it is or how complex it is, the brain habituates like that. But if that signal refuses to be filtered, and the input keeps coming, and it keeps getting more intense, or it stays persistent and it's too complex to filter easily, your brain starts to think, “Oh, maybe I shouldn't be filtering this out.” “Maybe there's meaning here that's important for my survival that I hadn't extracted.” And so suddenly it starts searching for meaning to associate with that sensation—and that's the point at which the joke becomes funny again, or you start to experience your voice as if it's somebody else's. When you begin to experience your author voice as if it's somebody else's, you can hear it as a distinct, objective style, rather than just as an echo of the voices that are in your head. That's why music students practise over and over and over, even on a piece they know cold. They're doing the same trick that I'm advocating with listening to your audiobooks until you're not sick of them anymore. Jo: I mean, I think that's terrifying, because I just don't want to listen to my books over and over again. I think it's very interesting that you think it could shortcut that voice process. Staying on audio—since we last spoke, I have done a lot of my own audiobook narration, mainly for nonfiction, but also my short stories. I haven't done my full-length fiction. What I discovered in doing this is that what read fine to me when I was self-editing my own work on the page—and obviously I'm hearing it in my head—when I perform the audiobook, I actually have to edit things again. So what are some of your tips for how we can bridge that gap? Because that's kind of strange. Dan: So what's happening is that there's a much wider latitude of things that work on the page than what works with voice. The reason is that with voice, all of those rhythmic elements I was talking about before are really pronounced, as well as all the sensual elements. Basically every word and sound has a mouth shape. The mouth shape affects the emotional valence of the sound. Stuff that's unpleasant tends to have a really close-in feel—I'm trying to scrunch my face up—where you would grit your teeth and scrunch up your face if something is unpleasant. And if something is really pleasant, it tends to have a rounded feel, and our language reflects it. In fact, all languages reflect this, because language is a physical thing that's based on the sensuality of the body. So, like, in all cultures “mama” is the word for mother that babies first say, regardless of what it is. It has a round feel, because babies associate their mother with roundness. A lot of language is built up that way, from baseline sensual cues. When you're working just in text, that aspect is not nearly as obvious to you. When you're reading, it's not as obvious to you. It's still at play, but when you go to do something verbally, and you go to read a text, all of those sensual cues come in at the same time. Then the rhythm comes in hard, and you suddenly realise that—hey, that conveys the thought, but it doesn't feel right. So you wind up retooling a bit. There's also occasionally tongue twisters, which you have to work your way around. So that's why that happens. Jo: Then I guess another thing—I hear quite often, people say, “Oh, I don't like my voice.” And they mean, “I don't like speaking out loud. I don't want to be on video. I don't want to be on audio.” I wonder— Does that sort of resistance potentially affect their writing voice? Are there ways people can get over that feeling? Dan: Yes, for sure. There are a few things that go into that. One is basic self-loathing. A lot of people carry it around. Most people learn to make a decent life even though they kind of secretly suspect that they're not worth anything, or they secretly find themselves revolting. That kind of thing you can't really fix with exercises. That's something you fix with — Jo: Therapy. Dan: Psychological work, or spiritual work, or that kind of thing. Jo: Yes. Dan: But the not liking the sound of your own voice—that's easy to fix. Here's why it happens. When you're listening to your voice as you speak, the bones in your head are amplifying the bass signals and attenuating the treble. It's kind of like if you were to shout in another room and your spouse hears you, but they can't make out the consonants. That's because all the consonants are being filtered out by the wall in between, but the bass is being resonated through. The same thing happens in your head. So when you get on a microphone—especially if it's an accurate microphone—you're suddenly hearing what everybody else hears when you speak, and it sounds thin and tinny and unpleasant compared to what you're used to hearing. The really easy way to get around this is to get a microphone that is tuned for singers. The condenser mic that I have isn't made anymore, so I can't really recommend a good condenser mic. If you're on a dynamic mic, the Shure SM58 is the one to use. I podcasted with that for years before I could afford an upgrade. It is tuned for singers to sound as good as possible without any other help from the sound engineer, which means that the baseline sound for that microphone is what you're hearing in your head. If you use the right equipment, you get around that problem really quickly, to the extent that you can technically. Then after that, it's just a matter of crossing the line twice. You listen to yourself enough that you stop hearing, “Oh my God, I'm talking,” and you start hearing, “Oh, that voice is making this sound.” And once you hear, “Oh, it's that voice making this sound,” you don't have that problem anymore, ever again. Jo: Oh, good. Well, hopefully that's fixed it for people. And of course, there are lots of brilliant things in the book, The Pitch-Perfect Author. Before we finish up, I did want to return to your Substack. I was having a look at it, and it includes some really interesting things. Like, you're doing this metalwork, which is really cool. It felt coherent to me, because I know you, and you're a polymath, and you're interested in so many things. So your Substack kind of stood out to me as quite eclectic, compared to, say, other writers who are going on Substack to try and sell specific books. So is this a deliberate marketing choice, or is it just be an interesting person and you will attract people who are interested more generally? Dan: Well, I suppose it kind of winds up being the latter, but basically it's that I get bored easily. If I'm going to be writing every week, I need to stay interested in it. One of the books I wrote when I was really sick—that's not out on the market yet, but it is serialised on Substack—is a guide to self-education. It'll be coming out later this year on the general market. It's called Reclaiming Your Mind: An Autodidact's Bible. I talk in there quite a bit about the illusion of discrete areas of knowledge. There is a level of learning at which the silos of information start to collapse together. Woodworking and writing have a lot to do with each other. A lot of the terminology we use in writing is pulled from the trades—especially woodworking, and metalworking, and gunsmithing. As you begin to spot these connections between different areas of knowledge, it becomes really easy to slide between them for your hobbies, for your writing, for just your personal gratification. As I've gotten older—and also as I've gotten access to a little space that's not contained within a teeny little apartment—I have just gone with it. As I've discovered, “Hey, this thing is tangentially connected to this other thing over here,” I'm like, “Oh, well, I'm going to go over to this other thing and see what's over there.” It's tremendously creatively fertile. Since a lot of the things that our language connects us to have to do with trades and crafts and nature, it gets you out in the open air, which is really good for any writer—because sitting at a desk all day is worse than smoking three packs of cigarettes a day for 40 years. Jo: I love that. Dan: My curiosity is the chief feature of my Substack, and it kind of works for me as a writer, because it's also one of the chief features of my fiction. Jo: Me too, and I was actually quite inspired by your Substack. Because I think this happens when you've been in the writing industry long enough. Substack has become the sort of trendy place to be now. People are going into specific niches, very much like blogging did, and then podcasting had to be on a specific niche, and all this. Of course, we know logically that, marketing a book—you know, if you had just a Substack on voice mastery, then for sure that would be a better marketing vehicle. But, as you say, how boring. Dan: Well, it depends a lot on what you're trying to cultivate as an author. If you're a single-genre author with a very narrow niche, and you're really happy writing that kind of stuff, then a narrow column supporting it is not a bad idea. Especially when you serialise old novels, once you've got 20 or 30 under your belt. That's not a bad idea, because you're trying to attract people who want one thing and want it regularly. If I were to get a reader who wants one thing and wants it regularly, and finds it, say, in my Clarke Lantham mysteries, and then they hop over to my science fiction—oh boy, are they going to be pissed. If they're not there for my voice, and they're just there for the way I write a mystery plot, then not only are they not going to get what they're looking for—but they're going to start to doubt whether they can trust that they're going to get what they're looking for in my next mystery. Whereas if they're coming to me through something where the multiplicity of what I'm doing is on display—whether that's this Substack, or whether that's what I used to do on The Every Day Novelist when I was podcasting that, or whether it's what I did with all the after-shows on my fiction podcast when I was doing that—then they kind of know what they're in for. The people who stick with me are more likely to be people who are in it for the experience of my voice. And for my bibliography, that's what I've got to offer, because I'm all over the place in terms of genre and subject matter. Jo: Yes, which is why I find you interesting. Dan: Oh, why thank you. Jo: So where can people find you and your books online? Dan: Well, you can find pretty much everything at JDsawyer.net. I've got the weekly column at jdanielsawyer.substack.com. At jdsawyer.net there's a page with all of my podcasts on it, and there's also a store with all of my books on it. Of course, everything is also available on Amazon and just about everywhere that the distributors take you. Jo: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Dan. That was great. Dan: Thank you, Joanna. It was great to talk to you again.The post Author Voice Mastery, And Rebooting an Author Business With J. Daniel Sawyer first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How do you write about the most painful experiences of your life without being overwhelmed by them? How can timed writing and a braided story help you untangle your hardest stories? With Nicole Walker. In the intro, Self-Publishing Pop Up Books [Self-Publishing with ALLi]; New in KU [BookBub]; The solar sail theory of indie publishing [ProductiveIndieFictionWriter]; Bones of the Deep; Selfie Awards Shortlist 2026. This episode is sponsored by Publisher Rocket, which will help you get your book in front of more Amazon readers so you can spend less time marketing and more time writing. I use Publisher Rocket for researching book titles, categories, and keywords — for new books and for updating my backlist. Check it out at www.PublisherRocket.com This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn  Nicole Walker is a nonfiction author, essayist, poet, and editor, as well as a creative writing teacher. Her latest book is Writing the Hard Stuff: Turning Difficult Subjects into Meaningful Prose. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.  Show Notes Why writing helps us understand “the puzzles of the universe” — and when to trust that intuition The braided essay: alternating between trauma and an everyday obsession to unlock the hard stuff How two-minute timed writing lets you go deep and then safely step back Rooting pain in the body, using the senses, scene, and dialogue instead of words like “trauma” Truth in memoir, big T versus little t, and the emerging genre of speculative nonfiction What actually sells books: pairing up on book tour and getting readers back out into the world You can find Nicole and NikWalk.com. Transcript of the interview with Nicole Walker Jo: Nicole Walker is a nonfiction author, essayist, poet, and editor, as well as a creative writing teacher. Her latest book is Writing the Hard Stuff: Turning Difficult Subjects into Meaningful Prose. So welcome to the show, Nicole. Nicole: Hi, Joanna. It's so nice to be here. Jo: I've lots to talk about, but first up— Tell us a bit more about you and your journey into writing and publishing. Nicole: I was always a writer. As all writers say, I've been writing since I was five. I kept little journals and things like that, and I was on the high school literary magazine. I was an English major in college, but that was always tempered with some serious commitment to the sciences, to English literature, to German, to Spanish. I had a wide variety of interests, but there was always something that tugged at me about writing that made me feel like, this is where I feel most at home. This is the way I like to understand the puzzles of the universe. This is how I make sense of the world—through writing. So even though I got my BA in English at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, I stuck around Portland for a few years because I loved it. I worked for various non-profits, and that was great. At some point I said, “I really want to take this seriously.” So I went ahead and applied to graduate school, and ended up in the University of Utah's PhD programme, where I stayed for eight very lovely years. I always recommend to my own students: never graduate. Stay in graduate school forever, because it's such a beautiful place where people support your writing. You have professors who support it, but more importantly, you have your cohort. To this day, I have so many great friends. You make a lot of friends if you stick around for eight years. That sort of community-building is, I think, the other part of why I became a writer. Writing by myself is obviously a lonely business, and there's a lot of internal struggle that happens with that. I have found a literary community, both at the University of Utah and then growing from there, serving as president of the NonfictioNOW Conference, teaching my own graduate students, serving as the series editor for Crux, the imprint at the University of Georgia Press. I feel like my world has expanded because of my writing. So that's been a true gift. Jo: Oh, I love that. I love that you said you understand the puzzles of the universe through writing, and that this tugged at you. Could talk about that a bit more? Because a lot of listeners, I think, sometimes mistrust that feeling. They think, “Oh, maybe I shouldn't necessarily lean into that intuition.” It feels like you leaned very strongly into an intuition that this was the way. Nicole: Yes, and this book in particular, Writing the Hard Stuff, takes that to heart. I think about writing the hard stuff as writing all kinds of tricky things—things that are really hard to communicate. The book begins revolving around personal trauma. Things that happened in my childhood, as well as difficult subjects that happen to us when we're growing up. It also includes things like environmental issues and political issues: things that are really hard to talk about, that are philosophically difficult to express, that can be controversial, and that you can put people off by talking about. One of the goals of the book—one of my own philosophies—is that by looking deeply into the knotted ball of string that is a kind of trauma or a kind of difficulty, and beginning to pull those strings out, that's where you start to not only make meaning out of what happened to you, or what this particular problem is, but those strings themselves become connections. I talk about Donna Haraway's book Staying with the Trouble. It's primarily about how we can overcome our political differences regarding climate change, and one of her examples is to change the way we think about narrative. In Western thought, we often think there's a beginning, a middle, and an end, and she brings up the Navajo game that we all know as cat's cradle. So if you think of that ball of knots—your trauma, your difficult subject—you start pulling out the strings, and then you start playing with it. With cat's cradle, you make one design with your hands, and then a friend pulls it around and turns it into another design. To me, that's how reading and writing work. We share, and we build on each other's ideas, but we're always connected by those strings. So if you have this difficult subject and you're shying away from it, you're losing, I think, some of the opportunity to make connections and to make sense of what that nest of string sitting in your stomach actually is. Jo: I love that metaphor. I think it's brilliant. I've never heard it described that way, and I think it's fantastic. What's interesting is that some people don't have a mind's eye—I know several listeners who don't. So while in my mind I'm picturing the ball of string and then the cat's cradle, some people won't be able to do that, which is also fascinating in terms of how people's brains work. In terms of how you'd recommend people think about it: this ball of string that we want to turn into a design like a cat's cradle is a total mess. So where do we even start? How do we know where to start pulling on the threads? Because it might just feel like it's out of control. Nicole: Oh, I deeply appreciate both the idea that some people don't have that mind's eye, or just think differently. We all have different ways of imagining what we call our trauma, this nest of problems, this ball of string. Of course a metaphor does oversimplify in some ways. I say, “Well, you just take one of the ends of the string and start pulling.” But practically, what does that really mean to do? There are a couple of things I suggest in the book and offer at workshops. One is an exercise I call writing the braided essay. I ask the writer to sit down and think about a scene that was difficult in their life—something that had a lot of tension, that they're really still struggling with, that they don't love thinking about. I'm going to ask them to go there for just a couple of minutes. Then there's the other side of the braided essay: I ask them to think about something completely different, completely off-topic. Perhaps a walk they took in the aspen grove, or what they were making for dinner last night, or perhaps they're deeply invested in the networks of the blood in the human body—anything they're fascinated and obsessed with. I say, “Okay, I want you to write about your difficult subject for two minutes, but then I'm going to give you a break, and you're going to pop over and talk about how you spent all day weeding your garden, and yet there are still weeds.” Then I'm going to ask people to go back and talk about their difficult subject, and then go back and talk about their obsession with weeds. They write about each of these things for two minutes. What happens—which I think is a pretty compelling experiment, from my point of view and from theirs—is that they write back and forth, and they're able to take a break from the hard thing. They're also tempted to go back to it once they've had that break in their research. The other thing that happens—and, you know, every book in nonfiction has to have a colon, so of course it's called Writing the Hard Stuff: Turning Difficult Subjects into Meaningful Prose—is that by going back and forth, you'll see the connections these writers make. They make connections with word choice, with verbs, with colours and different kinds of imagery. They start to make meaning between those two ideas. What happens to the writer then—and to me, when I'm doing it—is that I now have something that is constructed. So it's not just this knot in my stomach. It's not just my interest in research. Now I've put these things together, and then I get to play. We get to the cat's cradle part of the metaphor, where I really start thinking about craft issues. Why did I happen to bring these two ideas together? What might they have in common? What does it mean that I'm telling the story of my parents' divorce and my personal trauma, and in the research part I'm talking about weeds? Well, maybe I felt in the weeds. You come up with some sort of overarching understanding of why you chose that research story, and it lets you go deeper into that personal trauma, now with some of the techniques of craft, which I think help shield you from some of the trauma and pain of that original hard story. Jo: Again, I really love that idea. Do you also think the timed writing actually helps people go deep and then withdraw a bit, which psychologically may help them write about these difficult subjects? People are like, “I need to sit down for two hours and write about this deeply traumatic thing,” which of course feels like it's going to be too hard. So perhaps that two-minute process actually releases people from that. Nicole: Oh, absolutely. What a great way to think about it. It is prohibitive to sit down and think, “Okay, I'm going to go into the worst thing that ever happened to me and sit with it for two hours.” Going back and forth, you create energy and tension. But also, nobody wants to sit with something by themselves for two hours. If you think of research as your companion—”I'm coming in there with you, buddy”—you have something to rely on, this other side of the story, and it gives you that space. The timed writing, the two minutes, two minutes, two minutes, also reminds you that you don't have to write for two hours straight any day. I have a goal where I write 500 words a day, which is mostly true, unless I'm really in the weeds. We'll use two metaphors today: we'll use string, and now we'll be using weeds. But when I'm really in the weeds teaching, or going around the country talking about books, I really do write 500 words a day. I often try not to write too much more, because sometimes it loses freshness, and it can be overwhelming. So I really appreciate you saying that having that timed writing is important, but also that having that balance of deep emotional investigation with this more cerebral, informational crutch can really help you get into the subject and go deeper. Jo: Yes, and perhaps it anchors the writing in something concrete. Because with memoir particularly—having also written one—it can be too easy to lean on big words like “pain” or “trauma,” but that's actually meaningless in a book. So why is it so important to be specific and concrete in our writing in order to convey these bigger topics? Nicole: I think we know our own trauma. We know how it feels in our bodies, and we've been living with it for a long time. So it's pretty hard to communicate it to others. Why does it matter to other people? Of course it matters to you, but how are you going to convey the breadth of that trouble with words that aren't rooted in the physical world? The nice thing about rooting things in the physical world is that every one of us has a body. We have different bodies, but we share that in common. So it's the old trope of using your senses first. What did it feel like? If you can't think of what part of your body it particularly hurts in, you have the availability of metaphor to describe how that might have felt. You have the opportunity to create scene. This is particularly difficult for memoir writers, I think, because we imagine it's the fiction folks who have to use dialogue, who have to have a setting, who have to put their bodies in a place. Thatt's one of my mantras when I teach: we need to be able to see where you are. We need to see what is physically happening, how the interactions work. Dialogue, I think, is one of the best ways to literally get your body on the page—and to get your other characters, or subjects, on the page—because to speak, you have to have a body. Once you start having dialogue, you can picture the way the speaker's face moves, the way they cross their legs. You can even picture the colour of the paint behind them, or the kind of chair they're sitting in. So dialogue is one of the first ways you can say, “All right, I must have a scene here.” I can't go on just telling people, “It was so traumatic. I suffered so much. It was terrible. I felt so much pain.” You can say that sometimes, that's totally fair, but you have to pair it with that physical, concrete imagery, so other people can begin to understand what it felt like for you in your body, so they can feel it in their body. Jo: Interesting that you bring up dialogue because one of the issues with memoir is—I've had people compare it to truth with a small “t” and truth with a big “T.” So you're telling some kind of big truth about your life. If you're writing dialogue about something that actually happened to you, in memory, it's very unlikely that it actually happened in that way, so it's not necessarily small-“t” true. So on a practical note, what are your thoughts and tips on truth. How do we tell our own story even if others don't see it that way? Nicole: This is a subject I'm deeply invested in right now. When I first started teaching creative nonfiction, it was at the height of the John D'Agata and David Shields questions. What is truth? Big T, little t? What am I obligated to do as a creative nonfiction writer? I had a great friend, Angie Truong, who came to teach one of my classes, and she said, “Nonfiction is a pretty big spectrum. You have journalism on one end, and then you have the lyric essay on the other end.” You imagine the lyric essay is full of metaphors and things like that, so you can approach truth. You're saying, “This is what it felt like. This is what it seemed like.” Check out my newest favourite thing. It's called speculative nonfiction, and I use a little bit of this in my book How to Plant a Billion Trees, which Writing the Hard Stuff is somewhat based on. I wrote them in tandem, which was a very strange and interesting and fun thing to do. But in How to Plant a Billion Trees I use this thing called speculative nonfiction, which goes even further along the spectrum, past the lyric essay, to this opportunity to use language like “perhaps,” “maybe,” “I imagined.” So I have sections in my book where I can't remember the dialogue exactly, but I know that the dialogue in some sense matters—that what might have been said will do much more to convey what was happening than my exposition over the matter. By using those turns of phrase, you're alerting your reader: “Dear reader, this definitely is not exactly what happened, but this is how I recall it.” Then you're being not only honest to the story and honest to your reader, but you're also conveying the feeling and the mood of the event—that other kind of truth that memoir is really trying to get at. It was like this for me, which is why I think this way now. It's a fledgling genre. I just read a book by Laraine Herring called A Constellation of Ghosts: A Speculative Memoir with Ravens. It's brilliant. It's an amazing book that pairs her actual colonoscopy and discovery of colon cancer with the story of her dad, who has passed already and comes back as a raven and helps her through it. So you're pulling on some of the tools of fiction, which creative nonfiction already has been doing. But it does so in this bright and, I feel, incredibly ethical way. You're alerting your reader, “My dad is not really a raven.” But you're also saying, “Oh my gosh, I sensed he was with me. I sensed every time a raven approached that I had somebody's hand on my shoulder.” That, to me, has been a lot of fun—a much more imaginative way of creating some of those scenes than doing something like, “Well, I don't remember the dialogue.” Or, even worse—and we know people have been unethical in their approach—recreating the dialogue as if they'd had a tape recorder with them when they were 17 years old. Jo: Mm. Nicole: So I offer that as an option to your listeners, as something to experiment with. Allow yourself to have that imaginative opportunity to show the reader what it might have been like. Jo: I love that. It's interesting, you talk there about the spectrum of nonfiction, which is ridiculously big, as is fiction. Obviously these are very big. But I wonder if we do get hemmed in by genre. I love the idea of a speculative memoir. I'm going to have to go read that book because I can't even imagine what that really means. I feel hemmed in by my expectations of a memoir. But then, from a business and marketing perspective—because we're all trying to sell our books— Do we risk not meeting the expectations of a reader of a genre that way? Nicole: Right. One of the good and bad things about my literary career is that I've spanned a lot of genres. My PhD is actually in poetry. Nobody expects the full truth from poetry. One of my poetry professors once said she wrote this really sad poem about her father's death, and the audience was moved, and then her real father stood up and said, “Good job, daughter.” And someone in the audience was just shocked: “You just read a poem about your dead dad, and here he is!” We have absolute expectations of genre, and expectations of truth, in everything we read. If you label it fiction, you're kind of off the hook—even though, of course, fiction uses so many elements of nonfiction: so much research, so much information, so much personal memory to create those fantastic landscapes. So when I think about how one sells one's memoir, I do think you also have to acknowledge what you expect your audience to be. With Laraine Herring's A Constellation of Ghosts, by putting “colon, a speculative memoir,” you're alerting your reader to that possibility. And because it's a pretty far-out way of thinking right now, it probably does curtail some of the sales. On the other hand, think of memoirs that are written for celebrities, and how many of them are ghostwritten—or written with other people, where the ghostwriter's not even part of the thing—but it comes across as the most legit of all memoirs, because it's a celebrity and we know them. We associate their lives with their story, and their story must therefore be true. So I think, with all levels of creative nonfiction, it's incumbent upon the writer to suggest right off the bat what kind of nonfiction they're reading. Are they reading journalism? Are they reading lyric essays? Are they reading speculative nonfiction? I think a lot, too—as an editor for a literary series for nonfiction books—about what I look for in memoir. It's something that takes the personal story and connects it into the larger conversation. Even if the larger conversation is directly about what the main subject is about, to me it's still about the crux of the matter. Why does your story make an impact on the world in this bigger way? How do you let the world inform your story? How does your past and your trauma, or your difficulties, connect to a larger world? Jo: Mm. Nicole: To me, that's something some memoirs are capable of doing. Some memoirs are truly invested only in that personal story, which I think is totally legitimate too, because I love learning how people think. I love understanding. This is just how my brain works. But in terms of sales? I don't know. Again, as the series editor and as the seller of my own books, I think you can't determine it in advance. So you should probably write what you want to write, what feels right to you, using as many craft techniques as you can hone. But the market, to me, feels very non-negotiable. You never know exactly how things are going to turn out. So I deeply believe: write the best, most well-crafted book you can, and I do think your readers will find you. Jo: We'll come back to marketing in a minute, but just returning to your own writing practice. I've got your book page up in front of me, and you've written all kinds of things: your essays, your memoirs, some fiction, and some poetry, as you mentioned. So I wondered: when you're researching something, or you've got a feeling about wanting to write, how do you choose the type of book you turn it into—or a poem, or an essay? Or do you pitch it as some kind of external work, or turn it into a workshop? How do you turn an idea into what it will eventually be? Nicole: I love that question because it's somewhat of a mystery to me, but I think I'm getting close to understanding. It really is in those first few words, that first sentence, that I think, “Okay, I know which direction this is going.” For example, the other day I woke up in the morning and thought, “All right, I'm writing this poem about how man took over for God, and that's how the planet ended up being such a mess.” So I started writing it, and it was pretty lyrical at the beginning. But then I started making full sentences, and explaining things a little bit more, and I thought, “Okay, this is not a poem. It's going to be an essay.” When I start writing fiction, I pull on something a little further, a little more distant from my experience, and then I pull it back into something more character-driven. For example, in a novel I'm writing, I begin with this whole story about McDonald's and ravens, and then I pull it back into the character. If I were to diagram the sentences between a poem, the nonfiction, and the fiction, I think I'd see fundamental differences between the three. Jo: Do you work on multiple projects at the same time, or once you commit to something, is that what you finish? Personally, I have lots of little things happening, and then a moment comes and I commit to a book, and I won't stop until I've finished that book—the rest will have to wait. It's that decision moment. How does it work for you? Nicole: My process is pretty similar to yours. I have a number of ongoing projects, percolating here and there. Some days I'll think, “All right, today feels like a fiction day.” But for the most part, you're absolutely right. There's a bunch of little things I'm writing, or things I'm dabbling in, but once there's a critical mass—which I'd say is around 20,000 words or something—I'm all in, and I've got to focus on this project. Even though I think I can do whatever multitasking, really it's important to try to maintain some sort of through-line in whatever project I'm working on. If I do that with too many projects, I lose that through-line. I also worry sometimes that the projects start to sound too similar. So say I'm writing a nonfiction collection and a novel—if I go back and forth every other day, those sentence differences I'm talking about might start to collapse, and they become too similar. Then what the heck would I be writing? I don't even know. Jo: It's interesting because you span academic publishing and, I guess, trade publishing—whatever you want to call it—where more non-academics read books. I'm just finishing up a master's myself at the moment, and writing academic stuff is completely different to writing my other books. So when you're deciding on these books, are you aiming for a specific publication market—as in, you want an academic publisher, or you want a trade publisher? How do you think about publishing in the process? Nicole: As much as I once really wanted to find some ground as a scholarly and academic writer—and I really do love to write reviews of other people's books, and Writing the Hard Stuff is a textbook that relies tremendously on so many other people's books. That is really important to me because that goes back to how one both creates and thanks one's community for creating the literary world we live in—I feel like there's a smaller audience for that sort of academic writing. But it's something we should do. As generous as you are here, for example, reaching out to other people about other people's books is probably the kindest thing you can do. So I hope to continue to take time to do that and make it part of my repertoire. It's not as fun, I'd say, as the imaginative elements of writing creative nonfiction, or fiction, or poetry. That's when I really love to groove and get into that mode of, “Oh, the words are coming. Oh, I never thought about it that way.” With academic writing, I feel I sometimes write in a slightly more stilted voice. My friend Ander Monson, who teaches at the University of Arizona, has done a really great job of writing—whether it's his personal essays or his critical essays—where he maintains the same voice. He doesn't move into that super-formal academic speak. He'll literally say things like, “You know,” or, “That's a banger of a sentence,” in the middle of an academic essay, and I really admire him for that. I feel like maybe if academic writing were more receptive to people writing in their unique voices, then maybe more people would read it. Jo: Yes. One of the pieces of feedback on one of my earlier essays in my master's year was around my sentence structure—that it would be far more appropriate in a novel than in an academic essay. I was saying to my husband, “I can't believe this, but I'm just going to have to change my style.” It's very interesting. We're almost out of time, and I also wanted to ask you: you have a recent blog post on how to try to get your forthcoming book attention in 4,231 simple steps, which made me laugh. We all find book marketing a challenge, so what have you found works best for you? I should tell the listeners—there are not 4,000 steps in your blog post. Although I think people would want them. Nicole: Exactly. I stopped at 72, but I can go on. That was sort of the pre-publishing process. There have been so many great things that have happened, but a lot of them have been driven by me. I have a publicist, but he works on a lot of other books, and I have a marketing person at Bloomsbury. They have to juggle a lot. The only person who is really, really, really committed to your book is you. So I've written companion essays. I haven't had any luck publishing them, which hasn't been true in the past, so I wonder what's going on there. I'll write something for the Huffington Post or Newsweek that's tangentially related to my book. I also might just write too much in essay voice instead of popular-magazine voice. As we were just talking about, academic voice versus novelistic voice. So that might be part of the problem too. Reaching out to people who might invite me onto podcasts has been really rewarding, and very, very kind. I think the best thing I did was to put myself on book tour and to pair myself with someone in that community. I've gone on book tour before by myself, and there have been occasions where there were two to three people in the audience, which can be really disheartening. The problem wasn't so much the bookstore's fault or my book's fault—it's just that if you go to a bookstore in a town where nobody knows you, they're not going to put a lot of effort into making the date happen, unless you're super famous. So what I did was find somebody in a community—a friend of mine—who would go with me and be part of the conversation. Even if their book was a couple of years old, we'd still go and have a conversation about each of our books. This has worked tremendously well. People will come to see their friend, and then they'll be introduced to you, and they'll ask you questions and buy your book. You create new connections and new friends thanks to that friend and that place. So that's my number one recommendation for how to get the word out in the world. I also did all the social media stuff. It doesn't work as well as it used to. It's kind of a strange time. But because of my suggestion about going to bookstores with people you know… I think we're coming out of our COVID time, where we got so used to doing everything on our computers and just staying in our electronic universe. People are hungry to get out. So one thing I want to do, and haven't done yet, is throw a big party. Go to weird places where you don't even do readings—you just offer people snacks and a glass of wine and say, “Hey, here's a book if you want to buy it.” To have these more informal gatherings that bring people together because I do think there's a hankering for people to get out into the world again. Jo: And just on that—you've got these two books coming at the same time: How to Plant a Billion Trees, which is the memoir, and Writing the Hard Stuff, the how-to book for writers. When you do these events, are you choosing one or the other depending on the audience? Or are you selling both at the same time? Because they're obviously very different. Nicole: Yes, I'm definitely selling both at the same time. Although I probably push How to Plant a Billion Trees first, because most of the people I'm pairing with are also writers of nonfiction or memoir. The other thing is, I can talk about How to Plant a Billion Trees, and if people have a really deep question about, “Well, how did you write this section?” I can say, “Well, if you refer to this book, Writing the Hard Stuff, you'll see.” So it's an easier segue. I think people aren't used to going to book events for craft books. But in the interview world—where people are reviewing books or interviewing me—Writing the Hard Stuff has definitely been the primary book I've been approached to speak about because people really do want techniques. So it depends on the context as to which book gets the spotlight, but it's been really fun to be able to talk about both in tandem. I don't know if they're competing against each other or supporting each other. That's my hope, that people think, “Oh, I read this one book, I might as well read the other one.” But that's asking a lot of people, to buy two books, so I try not to overstate that hope. Jo: They are very different, and I love the idea of doing that. Absolutely. So where can people find you and your books online? Nicole: You can find me at my Substack, which is substack.nikwalk.com—N-I-K-W-A-L-K. Or my website, which is the same: nikwalk.com. I might just start going as Nik Walk in the world, so people can find me more easily. I also really love to support Bloomsbury. They have really good deals, especially on the audiobook for How to Plant a Billion Trees, and they also have good deals if you buy both books, you get free shipping. So Bloomsbury is probably the number one place to get the books, but of course they're also available on Bookshop.org and Amazon.com, and on Amazon in the UK as well. Jo: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Nicole. That was great. Nicole: Oh, it was so fun to talk with you, Joanna. Thank you again so much for this opportunity.The post Writing The Hard Stuff: Turning Difficult Subjects Into Meaningful Prose With Nicole Walker first appeared on The Creative Penn.

What if the real secret to a lasting writing career isn't talent or luck, but learning to thrive in the mess? Why are in-person events worthwhile even if the maths doesn't add up? How do you protect your creativity when the machines never sleep and the community is at one another's throats? With Mark Leslie Lefebvre In the intro, Has AI Already Killed Non-Fiction [Tim Ferriss]; 9 ways that AI would disrupt authors and the publishing industry over the next decade; Pivoting towards The Transformation Economy; and Who do you serve? This podcast is sponsored by Kobo Writing Life, which helps authors self-publish and reach readers in global markets through the Kobo eco-system. You can also subscribe to the Kobo Writing Life podcast for interviews with successful indie authors. This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn  Mark Leslie Lefebvre is the author of horror and paranormal fiction, as well as non-fiction travel and books for authors. He's also an editor, professional speaker, and the Director of Business Development at Draft2Digital. His latest book is Stark Realities: Stacked Up Lessons Every Writer Needs to Know About the Business of Writing and Publishing. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.  Show Notes Why print and in-person events are making a comeback for indie authors The case for (and against) licensing your voice clone through ElevenLabs Why we keep selling books in person when the numbers rarely add up Measuring success by creative satisfaction rather than money Being honest about author earnings and the fear of being truly seen Managing stress, divisiveness, and the noise around AI You can find Mark at MarkLeslie.ca. Transcript of the interview with Mark Leslie Lefebvre Jo: Mark Leslie Lefebvre is the author of horror and paranormal fiction, as well as non-fiction travel and books for authors. He's also an editor, professional speaker, and the Director of Business Development at Draft2Digital. His latest book is Stark Realities: Stacked Up Lessons Every Writer Needs to Know About the Business of Writing and Publishing. Welcome back to the show, Mark. Mark: Oh, hey, Jo. It's always an awesome time chatting with you. Jo: You've been on the show lots of times over the years, but the last time was in September 2024, when we talked about selling books in person. So give us a bit of an update. What does your writing and publishing business look like at the moment? How do you manage it alongside the day job and everything else you do? Mark: Oh my God. Well, sleep is—no rest for the wicked, maybe. I'll sleep when I'm dead. It's so funny, it was just this last weekend in Waterloo. I was at Waterloo Book Fest, and somebody came up to my table—another author from one of the other tables—and said, “I heard you on the The Creative Penn Podcast. And then when you mentioned something about Waterloo, I said, ‘He can't be from Waterloo.' And then when you mentioned the skeleton, I said, ‘I know where he lives.'” Jo: That's scary. Mark: So I love the fact that there are so many of your listeners all over the world, and that's usually how people know me. No matter what else I've done, it's like, “Oh, you've been on Joanna Penn's podcast.” I'll say, “Yes, I have.” You know what's really funny? The last time I was on the podcast, we were talking about A Book in Hand, which I was supposed to release that year. Jo: Yes. Mark: I just added another 5,000 words to it this morning. Jo: Wait, it's still not published? Mark: No, and it's so funny. I actually have the first 60,000 words of it with an editor right now, and I told her I'd get her the rest of it, which I thought would be another 20,000 words, by the end of June. But I think it's going to hit 100,000. Here's the weird thing that happened with this. This is trying to accumulate my life of book selling, as well as doubling down on doing in-person events in the last several years. I thought I was going to have the book done in 2024. I ran into some issues where I didn't back it up properly. It was an old version, and I accidentally overwrote the only version I had. Jo: So, for everyone listening, Mark—how many decades have you been an author and a publisher? How come you're still missing deadlines and still not backing up your work properly? Mark: Yes, this is a lesson: no matter how long you've been doing something, you can still make boneheaded errors. So if you, dear listener, have made mistakes, just know that this old guy who's been doing this since the mid-'80s still makes mistakes like that. Don't beat yourself up. I probably did something worse. Anyway, that book I thought was going to be maybe 40, 45,000 words, it's going to be bigger than Wide for the Win—close to 100,000 words. Here's a really important lesson I learned in that, Jo. I thought the book would be something. It became something else. Through my own experiences of doing more in-person events, book signings, and library event. Also in talking to awesome folks like Johnny B. Truant, Katie Cross, Todd Fahnestock, and so many other authors I know, and seeing what Ben Wolf is up to, and a whole bunch of different people who are doing in-person events. In creating case studies for how they interact specifically with a bookstore or library, or how they do in-person selling—I really think the book wasn't ready then. It's like the recipe wasn't ready. I still needed to play with some things. I do sincerely have faith, since I got it into the editorial process, that this will be the year the book actually gets released. Jo: As you said, there are some really good lessons there around sometimes the book not being quite ready. I'd bought an early version from the StoryBundle, which is how I got this book as well, actually. Mark: Yes. Jo: That's another tip for people—storybundle.com. You can go and find some great bundles there. I was also thinking, as you were talking, that maybe one of the reasons this book about in-person events has got so big is because that's a real trend in the community. It feels like indies, we've moved… Back in the day, I said, “I'm not doing print. No way.” This was the early days of digital, because print was really hard back then. So I was like, “Oh, and we've got all the advantages doing digital, so I'm just going to focus on that.” It feels like the pendulum has swung, perhaps even more with the ease of mass production of digital with AI. The focus on print and in person is getting stronger and stronger. Do you think that's happening? Mark: Oh, yes, 100%. I did print in 2004. It was really hard back then, so that's gotten easier. I think there are a few reasons. One of the reasons is, yes, digital made it so much easier for indie authors to get out there and break into the community. But the reality is that print books still outsell e-books in general—overall—despite the fact that indie authors can make six and seven figures a year from selling e-books alone on a single platform. So print has never really gone away. It was just never something indie authors attended to. They were in a different business than traditional publishers were in. And second, obviously I've got these gorgeous books that you've created on Kickstarter, because I like the beautiful books. I've never stopped buying print books. I actually buy more print books. I read more because of audiobooks and e-books, but I buy more print books, especially when I can get a nice signed copy. Then the other reason comes back, again, to your advice—something I've been following for the longest time, and you've long been saying. I do repeat this, and I try my best to offer attribution to you every time I use it: to double down on your humanity, particularly in this age of digital generation and the ability for even non-writers to leverage tools to create content. I think it's so much more important for me, as a creative who will never be able to catch up with the machines, to exploit my humanity. I mean, we both have digital voices of ourselves, right? There's a digital Mark Leslie Lefebvre voice that people can use, and I'm making money off it because people are able to license it through ElevenLabs. But when I'm there in person, so far the holograms aren't good enough to fool people. I think I'm not just selling a book to somebody; I want to create an experience where, “Oh, I'm talking to the author, and we're signing a book together, and we're taking a selfie together.” For me, there's that tactile experience that's really enriching. And it may not be something that lines my pockets as easily, because the investment is more significant. For every $10 I make, it costs me six or seven dollars, as opposed to an e-book, where the cost is amortised in the most beautiful way over millions of copies. Jo: There are a few things there. First of all, let's talk about that ElevenLabs voice licensing, because, as you say, I also have a voice clone. Bones of the Deep, the latest book, that's my voice clone. I haven't gone with the licensing, partly because you don't have control over what someone can do with it. So, for example, someone could create Nazi content, or content that I might not agree with, in my voice. So how have you got over that? Because part of me really does want to license my voice, and the other part doesn't. Mark: This is a great question, Jo, and I'm glad you asked it. It's the same reason I don't worry about people stealing my books—adding DRM onto my e-books and things like that. I may as well make some money off it, because let's be honest: you and I, our voices are out there. Thousands of hours of our voices, right? In your podcast, my podcast, in various interviews we've done over the years. The technology exists for someone to make a copy of my voice themselves anyway. The tools exist. They can do it easily, so why not do it myself and at least make money? I'm actually getting money deposited into my account. Not a lot—maybe $30, $18, something like that every week. Again, I've taken a lot of my non-fiction books that I haven't had the time to record myself, as I like to do, and I can at least load those to ElevenLabs and make my voice the default voice. But wouldn't it be great to be able to listen to my book in your voice? It would sound so much better. Because you can do that. When you listen to a book on that platform, you can choose my voice if you'd rather hear it in my voice, or you can choose Burt Reynolds' voice, or some other folks who've licensed theirs. Again, for me, the whole concept of wide publishing has always been important. It's another small revenue stream that's adding to my numerous revenue streams. So I guess that's how I've justified just licensing the voice. If someone's going to do something with my voice that I can't control, they can do it regardless of whether or not I put it out there myself. Jo: I agree with you. That could happen, and neither of us is famous enough that it's likely to happen anyway. I do quite like the idea of people using our voices, say, for other books for authors, because that would make sense—that's where we fit in the niche. I will rethink that, because I think it's interesting. I wanted to come back to print books. You said sometimes there are easier ways to line your pockets, and I think that's funny. So, getting into the book, this leapt out at me quite near the beginning: Why do we keep doing this when the maths almost never adds up? Mark: Oh, I have a perfect example of that from an event I did a couple of weekends ago in Burlington, Ontario. I think it was a $60 table fee. It was a new event. I believe I made $90 or $95 in sales. So even after the costs of printing and all that stuff, I really didn't make money. I made my table back, which is always a good thing. There were a few encounters I had with people who were really excited to find my Canadian Werewolf series of books, and just so thrilled to get started. Among the four of them, they bought one copy, but they were going to pass it amongst each other. You know what? Okay, they bought a single copy, and I was like, “Well, the e-book is permanently free online. You don't even have to buy a copy”—which is anti-selling. I just want them to read the book and enjoy it. But if they read it and pass it along and start talking about it, they could become readers for a long time. It's an eight-book series, with the ninth book coming out later this year. There was another encounter I had that day. A woman and her teenage daughter came in, and they were looking at my traditionally published books that I buy at a reduced price from a local bookstore and resell. They were looking at these true ghost story books I had, and they were pointing: “Do you have that one?” “Yes, I have this one, I have that one.” And the mother's like, “Well, she collects all your books, and she wants to make sure she has them.” We had this conversation, and she was so excited to meet me in person and to get a signed copy of the book. That experience was such a vanity moment for me as an author. We're lonely. I'm a big loser. Nobody's buying my books. We're always down on ourselves. So that investment of time and energy, in order to get that little pat on the back or that feeling of, “Wow, I really connected with someone who likes my stuff”—those moments are really precious. They're difficult to explain if you only look at the world in a financial way. I guess I'm fortunate enough that I do have enough income from numerous streams, including the consulting I do part-time, that it's okay if not every bookish endeavour leads to more money in my pocket at the end of the day. I can still have these authentic connections with people, which I think is one of the reasons I'm a storyteller. Yes, it's the stories I have to tell, but it's also putting the story into somebody else's hands and eyes and heart and mind. Jo: You're very giving like that. You have that sense about you, whereas I'm just a curmudgeon in the corner. Mark: That is not true. Jo: It is, generally. I don't do events like you do for readers. Mark: But that's because it takes a lot out of you. Jo: Yes, but that doesn't matter. Why do I write? I write for me. Mark: Ah, very good. Jo: At the end of the day—just being entirely selfish about this—when people say, “Oh, if you won the lottery, what would you do?” I'm like, “Well, I'd do pretty much what I'm doing now.” Mark: Yes, I'd just do the same. Of course, I'd write more books. Jo: I'd write more books. So this is where I'm trying to get to for people as well: measuring success in a different way. You were talking about measuring success by how that girl loved your books, and how you feel when someone says they love your books. With Bones of the Deep, this thriller I've just done, I feel like I had the benefit of that book before anyone even read it. As soon as it was finished, I made a nice proof copy from BookVault, and I held it in my hand and said, “I made this. I'm proud of the story, I wrote the story, and it's outside my head now.” I feel like I'm creatively satisfied in that moment. Then, of course, the Kickstarter was great, and I love that the books are going out around the world, but— I think the happiest I felt was that moment of finishing—that creative satisfaction of holding the book in my hand. You know what I mean? Mark: 100%, Jo. I cannot agree with you enough. I love so many aspects of writing. Yes, the connection with people is amazing. But I often say this when I'm doing my one-on-one consulting with authors: focus on the projects that mean the most to you, those passion projects. The process of writing, and the painful rewriting and editing and all the things you go through—when you finish that book, like you said, you hold it in your hands and it is a thing of beauty. It's a huge achievement. You've won. Whether or not you sell a single copy, you've won by doing it. Everything else is gravy: the sales, the money in your pocket or not, the reviews, positive or not, the people who say, “Oh my God, Bones of the Deep, thank you for writing this book. I'm so glad you introduced this into the world and into my life.” Anything beyond the creation itself, which is a pure joy—I love it so much. It's just why I get up at 5:30 every morning and write for hours before the rest of my day begins. I try to get stuff done before the rest of the world wakes up. I want to get the writing done first, when I have the most energy to give myself to the page. Then the rest of the day is kind of gravy for me too. Jo: You talk there about giving yourself to the page, but in Stark Realities— You talk about the fear of truly being seen. What do you mean by that, and how do you manage that feeling? Mark: For anyone who has written anything—fiction, non-fiction, memoir in particular, since it's a bit more closely tied to reality—it's exposing yourself to the world. I'll never forget an interview I did with Canadian science fiction author Julie E. Czerneda, who, before being a fiction writer, was writing biology textbooks, but her real passion was science fiction and fiction. When her first novel came out, she said, “It's like standing naked on the front lawn.” When you release a book, even a novel, people look at it and they're going to judge you and rate you. I remember early on, Jo—we knew each other through Twitter, I think, where we initially met, and then interacted with and finally met in person at London Book Fair. I think you and I have a very similar reaction. When people know us as positive and upbeat and out there helping authors in the community, and then they read our fiction, they go, “Well, Jo, you burned a nun alive on page one.” Or, “Mark, what kind of… they're drinking from the skulls of dead people? What the heck is going on with you two?” We are exposing parts of ourselves in our fiction and non-fiction. That's a fear I embrace, but also never get over, if that makes any sense. I write scary stories because I'm a big chicken. So maybe the entire process is just cheap therapy for me. Or not cheap, because it's an expensive pastime, isn't it? Jo: It certainly can be, but I agree. I struggle with fear of judgment still. I think it's also because we do this in public, which comes back to the financial side of things. We do a lot of this in public, and then people judge us on our author businesses too. You could look at Bones of the Deep, which was just on Kickstarter, and compare my Kickstarter to another author's Kickstarter for a fiction book, and judge one or the other person based on numbers. I feel like this is because you and I have done so much in public—for me, almost 20 years, and for you, like 40 years or whatever. Maybe 30 years. You look that old. Mark: Listen there, dearie. Get off my lawn. Jo: Yes, get off my lawn—with those skeletons you have on your lawn. Mark: Yes. They're no longer in my closet. Jo: They're not in your closet. I wonder if that also plays a part of it—the pros and cons of doing this business in public. Mark: Yes, that is a part of it. One thing I try to be very clear about, because there's so much FOMO and so much out there about people thinking that everyone else is making a million dollars from their books and “I'm the only loser who's not”—I try to be clear that I have never made more than a mid-five figures as an author from my author earnings, ever. I haven't yet hit six figures. One of the reasons I try to be transparent in sharing that is I don't want people to think that everyone else is a six- and seven-figure success story, and they're the only one who's only made $100 last year on their books. The reality is, 90 to 99% of the people who are writing and publishing are not going to earn a significant amount of money. I realise I'm also very, very lucky that I've earned this much, and it's taken a long time. I just shared this in a Substack post I posted yesterday: it was 10 years of rejections before I got $5 for my first short story that was published in '92. It wasn't until 2001 that I finally made pro rate, six cents US a word, for a short story that, ironically, Julie Czerneda bought from me back in the day. For me, I've been lucky that it's always been a long, slow slog. It's been a marathon, and I've never instantly sprinted across any dramatic finish line. I've had some really phenomenal moments—doing a book signing in a Costco, walking into Walmart and seeing my books there. Even last night at the Burlington Public Library, going, “Wow, they have eight of my books here—four of my self-published books and four of my traditionally published books, in two different sections.” I was like, “That's kind of cool.” So I've had these amazing moments as a writer, but I've never had the blockbuster—the Brandon Sanderson, or even the Dungeon Crawler Carl, Matt Dinniman, kind of moments. I still think I've had a very fortunate and lucky journey. Even if I wasn't making the money I'm making, I'd still be writing, and I'm sure you would be too. Jo: Oh, yes, for sure. I actually think the thing most of us would probably let go is the marketing. If we won the lottery, we'd carry on with all the creative stuff, the writing, the community stuff, and we'd just literally do no marketing at all. Mark: Well, yes, of course. Or potentially say, “Oh, here, ad agency, here's some money. You just run it, whatever. Let me know if it works or not. I don't care.” Jo: That's a much better idea. Mark: At least I've got the extra disposable income, so I may as well, because I'm helping the world when my books are out there. I know my books will help people. I really honestly think that as storytellers—whether it's fiction or non-fiction, we're still storytellers—what we do in writing and podcasting and all the things we do, the re-sharing on social media, is really helping connect people. I think that is one of the most profound things we can do as writers. And I mean that the writing, in and of itself, is a reward. Jo: Like you said, we met on Twitter when Twitter was what it was back in the day. I do very, very little social media now. But you just mentioned your Substack, and you also have your podcast, Stark Reflections. So how are you balancing what you put on each? I only do this podcast now. I don't even blog. I write books, obviously, and then I do the podcast. So what are you doing differently on Substack to the podcast, and what part do they play in income and marketing? Mark: Great question. I realise most people have never heard of me, or read or listened to the things I put out into the world. And I've been a longtime fan of “reduce, reuse, recycle my IP.” My podcast is not as long-running as yours, but I'm in my ninth year, and I've not missed a single Friday in the full eight years, or eight and a half by now, that I've been doing this. Every week I reflect on what I learned from an interview, or I'll reflect on something you've posted and say, “This episode is not an interview, but Jo said this last week, and I'm going to talk about it.” The podcast itself takes a lot of work. I still do all of it myself, and I know I probably shouldn't, but I like doing it, so it's one of those tasks I enjoy. I also have reflections that aren't going to come out vocally but might come out in writing. Sometimes in the morning I'm not in the mood to write the novel or the non-fiction book I'm writing, but I'm writing some tangent. I just let the creative monster go. I find that re-sharing… I might have reflected on something for a couple of minutes at the end of an interview, but I really want to expand upon it, so I write the Substack article. I try to reuse some of that content. Someone's going to enjoy seeing it on a short video clip I share on YouTube, or whatever the platform is. Someone else is going to listen to it on a podcast, wherever they listen to podcasts, and someone else is going to want to read it. It could be the same information, just shared in a slightly different way, to potentially get it out to other people. So for me, it's part of that wide publishing mentality. I'm trying not to completely duplicate the work, although I am duplicating some of it. I'll give you an example. Hey, Canadian listeners—if you have not registered for Public Lending Right in Canada, please put something in your calendar for February 2027, because the deadline's over. It was May 1st of 2026. Put it in your calendar for next year. I even had somebody at this writers' event I was at this last weekend say, “You mentioned something in a presentation you did for the Canadian Authors Association about Public Lending Right, and thank you, because now I get thousands of dollars a year from this.” So just look up Public Lending Right. I've been saying stuff about Public Lending Right for at least 10 years now. Every time I get my beautiful multi-four-figure cheque from them in February every year, I post on social media and remind authors to check it out. I know it exists in the UK, and it exists in 36 countries in the world—just not the US. Jo: Not the US. Mark: They don't have a programme like this, probably because the big publishers—and probably one of the authors' associations—think that libraries are cannibalising book sales, which is not true. It's been proven time and time again, and that lobbying has prevented it from happening. Whereas here in Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts and the Writers' Union of Canada worked hard to make this happen. Anyway, I talk about something like Public Lending Right and I feel like I must have said this so much that people are sick of it, but every single time I mention it, someone goes, “Oh my God, thanks for saying that. I never heard it.” That's a good reminder, especially for folks like you and me. We know the basics. We know what an ISBN is. We know KDP Select means you can't put the e-book on any other retailer, or even sell it on your own website. We know all these things, but it's hard for us to remember that there are folks coming to this for the very first time who've never heard it, even though we feel like, “Oh my God, I've said this till I'm blue in the face.” I think I got that from retail. When I worked in retail, I recognised that somebody's going to come in and ask for “that blue book that Reese Witherspoon was talking about,” or Oprah was talking about, or whatever. And you do your darn best to help them figure it out rather than mock them. I try to take the same approach when people ask me those questions, because I'm trying to remember what it was like when I honestly did not know the answer, and having someone take the time to help me. I've been very, very lucky that I've had a lot of people take the time to help me. I'll never forget—God rest her soul—Nancy Kilpatrick, a horror writer here from Canada who passed away a few years ago. She gave me a blurb for my very first book in 2004 because she'd acquired one of my short stories for an anthology she'd edited. I was trying to call my short story collection an anthology, and she very kindly took me aside and said, “It's not an anthology if it's a single author. An anthology is a…” Jo: I didn't know that until, like, last year. I got that wrong as well. There are lots of words like that. I want to circle back, because you didn't really answer earlier about the time management. You just mentioned YouTube, on top of Substack and all the things you do. You also have a day job at Draft2Digital—it's part-time, right? You also do part-time at the university, teaching publishing, right? You do all kinds of things. How do you manage your time with all of that? Mark: Well, I mismanage my time more than I manage it, Jo. That's the God's honest truth. Fortunately, most of the things I have that aren't scheduled—like, scheduled to do this lecture at this time, or scheduled to have this meeting at this particular time with Draft2Digital—most of my work is very flexible. I do not work a regular 9:00 to 5:00, Monday to Friday. Well, I never did. I always worked way more. But I have a very flexible schedule. Every single day is a work day, and every single day is a play day for me. So I'm very, very lucky. I do schedule in the very important things, particularly where somebody else is reliant upon me—meetings and connections and stuff like that. Then I make the time first thing in the morning to get the writing done. Everything else is not as important, and it's part of… I guess it's part of playing. You know, like the social media sharing. I don't look at social media as marketing. I just look at it as another way to connect with people, with other creatives, and with readers potentially, all six people who read my stuff. I probably could do a better job of managing my time. I've tried several times over the years to adapt processes to make it better, but I consistently default back to what I do, and so far I guess I've been getting away with it. So I was like, “Do I want to waste more time trying to come up with a process, or do I just want to roll with it?” Because so far I haven't killed myself doing it, and I've been enjoying the journey. So, if it ain't broke… Jo: I think that's the point, if it doesn't feel like it's broken. Having known you for a long time now, and we work together—obviously we co-wrote The Relaxed Author—you do work very, very differently to me. You definitely are a little bit more chaotic. I'm chaotic in some ways too. Mark: Oh, you're very generous. “A little bit chaotic.” Thanks. That was generous, Jo. Jo: You're chaotic in your work practices and scheduling and all that, which I couldn't cope with very well. Even though I feel like a part of my brain is very chaotic—the creative side, I guess, can be quite chaotic—I think I'm actually quite controlling and very scheduled in my work practices. As you say, for someone else on the outside, it might feel to me like you have too many balls in the air. But if you don't feel that, then that's the way of working that works for you. So this is another important thing, isn't it? You can't adapt to what other people say your life should look like. It's what feels good to you. Mark: Oh, for sure. One thing I know about my procrastination tendency is that panic and fear motivate me. So, a deadline—”I have to get this into a publisher by this date, I have to get this manuscript to an editor by that date”—I'm motivated by fear. And I'm afraid of everything, so I guess I'm always motivated. Jo: But I also know that when you hear the word “deadline”—and I know a lot of people who do this—the deadline means you get it in on the deadline, or the day before the deadline. To me, a deadline means I have it ready a month earlier. Mark: I love that. I've done that a few times and shocked myself. I actually had a pre-order up—with the audiobook, the print, and the e-book—a month in advance, and I didn't know what to do with myself. I was like, “Well, what am I going to do now in the next month?” Jo: Work on the next thing. Mark: But I'm so used to working on it up to the last second that I was kind of like, “What do I do?” That actually caught me by surprise, and I honestly felt weird. I was like, “I've never felt this before.” I'm really lucky. I know you have a very supportive and amazing partner, and so do I. My partner, scarily enough, is maybe a bigger procrastinator than me, so she never gives me a hard time. She supports me, and I do the same thing with her own work. I'm up all night with her at the last minute so we can get something turned in. So, fortunately, we really understand one another, and we don't give each other a hard time. We just go, “Well, got away with it again. I guess I'm not going to change my ways.” Jo: We made it. And again, that's the point. You and I could stand up in front of people, both hold up the last book we wrote, and say, “We made this,” and our processes are completely different. Our brains are completely different. We come from different countries. There are lots of things that are different, and yet we both made a book. So hopefully that encourages people. You don't have to do anything that we're telling you, or anyone else tells you. But if you want to be an author, at some point you have to produce a book. Mark: Exactly. As Brian in the classic Monty Python film gets them to say: “Yes, we are all different.” Embrace that difference. I think that's such a powerful reminder that there is no one process for getting anything done. Jo: Given that we co-wrote The Relaxed Author back in 2021—and we did that because we had another show, and we were talking, and we said, “Oh, everyone's stressed and the anxiety levels are really high, and we think there's a better path”—we co-wrote that book, which I think is still a very good book. Definitely people should get it. Interestingly, I think the stress and anxiety might actually be higher now than it was. So what do you think the main stresses are in the community now? You also see a lot with Draft2Digital, I guess, as well. Mark: Oh, for sure. Honestly, Jo, I'm so glad we wrote that book, because I actually pick it up every once in a while to remind myself of the things we tried to help others with. Again, it's therapy for me as well, so I'm so glad we did it. I think we're 10, if not 100, times more stressed. The world events and things going on, the divisiveness—not just in the world in general, in politics and everything else, but the divisiveness in the author community. The witch-hunting that happens, people trying to tear down other authors either because they're successful, or because, “Oh my God, you dared use a new technology.” All of these things are happening, and everyone's at one another's throats. I need to pick that book up and reread it. I'm a lot more stressed than I was. I'm just getting over shingles, which is… Jo: Oh. Which is actually related to stress as well, isn't it? Mark: It is, yes. I was in LA for Writers of the Future—I'm a judge for that science fiction and fantasy conference. I went right from LA, like a week in LA, which was a phenomenal experience getting to mentor the winners. And I mean, come on, it's a free trip to Hollywood, hanging out with Kevin Anderson, having beers and stuff like that. Then I came back to the Toronto Indie Author Conference, run by Tao Wong, here in Toronto. I went right from the airport—didn't even go home—straight to the hotel, because I kicked into another conference. We did a display on how to set up an in-person booth, so I ended up having to hand-bomb boxes, blocks down the street from where I was parked. My chest was really sore when I got home on the Monday, and I thought it was because I hadn't used these muscles, because I'm not in the best shape. Then I took my shirt off and went, “Oh, there's a rash there.” Liz goes, “You have shingles.” Because the pain in my chest, which I thought was the muscle, was actually underneath. I'm one of those lucky people that it's taken the full five weeks, and I'm still in pain even afterwards. So, again, public notice: if you're an older person like me, and there's a vaccine available for shingles, you may want to consider it. Jo: Yep, get it. Mark: Oh my God, it hurts. But, yes, the stress, I think, is higher—even though I didn't know I was feeling it. It was happy stress, right? I was stressed out because I'm there in Hollywood, helping people and doing some good things, and then I'm doing the same thing, interacting with some amazing authors at the Toronto Indie Author Conference. I didn't feel anxious stress. I was happy stress. Is that a thing? Jo: I think possibly… your physical body masks stress, physical stress, because you enjoy all of that stuff. Whereas someone like me, I'll feel it quicker and withdraw. Although I say that, back probably a decade ago, Jonathan would say to me, “You're going too fast, and you're going to hit the wall. And when you hit the wall, it's not going to be fun.” And I did hit the wall. Then, probably in 2021—I mean, that was when I just started going into menopause, and obviously we had the pandemic, and I wrote Pilgrimage, and I was doing all those walks, which I think really helped me. I learned a lot about maybe stopping that before it happened. Becca Syme obviously talks a lot about this too. But I find it interesting with you, because I think you're so positively happy with these events you do that it might mask your physical symptoms in a different way. That's really hard to watch out for. I'll give a tip to you and everyone else listening: schedule the calendar, and look at your calendar and go, “I can't go back-to-back-to-back. I have to put in some rest days.” Mark: Well, thank you. You know, Jo, you and Becca Syme are two of my best unpaid therapists. I appreciate that. Jo: You just don't listen, Mark. Mark: Or sometimes I do. Jo: Just coming back to the community, and the divisiveness there is primarily over AI at the moment, I think that's one of the biggest things. And the arbitrary lines as to what you're allowed to use it for and what you're not allowed to use it for, which is just kind of crazy. Obviously, you know I've opted out of that whole discussion now. How do you think we can move through this [divisiveness over AI], move on? We remember when it was trad versus indie, and then it was wide versus KU. So this will pass—it's just hard, when you're in it, to know when it might pass. Mark: Yes. I think the more generic advice—for whatever may come, whatever has come—is: why are you doing this? Why are you a writer? Heads down, focus on what gives you pleasure, and do that, because everything else is noise. All the marketing tactics and strategies, and all the people yelling at one another. Write your books. Do the things that motivate you. Do the things that give you that intrinsic reward. It's hard to ignore. I get it, it is hard to ignore. I have difficulty ignoring the haters and the yelling and the screaming that happens, but I do my best. Like this morning, when I was in the throes of my manuscript and I looked up and went, “Oh my God, I've got to shower. I'm going to be talking to Jo soon, I should comb my hair”—which I have none of. Because I was so in my book that everything else melted away. That, for me as a storyteller, as a writer, is one of the most beautiful places to be. Jo: I think you're absolutely right. I have a little thing that pops up in my calendar sometimes which says, “If you're feeling all of these things, just go create something.” The moment you refocus on creation—whatever that means to you—things change. It changes the energy. That, or go for a walk. That's my other tip. Mark: Outside. And I have to say, Jo, Pilgrimage is still one of the most profound and powerful books you've written, and you've written a lot of amazing ones. Jo: Oh, you're very sweet. Mark: That one really resonates, not just for me, but with Liz. Because one of the things we often do when we get stressed is go for a walk, ideally in nature. The vitamin N. I think there's something really profound in that, and it really helps me a lot. And again, sometimes going for a walk listening to your podcast, or an audiobook, or sometimes just attending to the environment. A tip I picked up years ago from Brooklyn author Denis Hamill was: go for a walk with your character. Listen to what they see. What do they comment on? How do they approach this environment that you've seen a million times? How do they see it? What do they notice that you don't notice? That's such an incredible experience of creativity—when you're not writing, but writing. That really helps me a lot. Jo: Oh, nice one. Okay, so your latest book is Stark Realities, but you have so many more. Where can people find you and your books and your podcast online? Mark: Jo, you can find everything you want to know about me—and stuff you don't want to know about me—over at MarkLeslie.ca. It links to all the other places from there. Jo: Brilliant. Thanks again for your time, Mark. That was great. Mark: Thanks so much, Jo. Bye-bye. The post Creative Satisfaction, In Person Print Book Sales, And Author Mindset With Mark Leslie Lefebvre first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How can horror writing help readers — and writers — work through psychological trauma? Why does cross-genre fiction take longer to find an audience, but pay off in the long run? Is running a direct sales store actually worth the inventory, postage, and learning curve? And how can SubStack work for fiction authors? With psychotherapist and award-winning author P.D. Alleva. In the intro, thoughts on why in-person conferences are still worth it, even when they are a challenge for sensitive introverts! and tips for making the best of conferences [Self-Publishing Show]. Today's show is sponsored by Draft2Digital, self-publishing with support, where you can get free formatting, free distribution to multiple stores, and a host of other benefits. Just go to www.draft2digital.com to get started. This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn  P.D. Alleva is the award-winning author of horror, sci-fi, thrillers, and fantasy books. He's also a psychotherapist. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.  Show Notes Why horror puts the human condition on display better than any other genre Emotional trauma as the silent psychological killer most people overlook The pros and challenges of cross-genre writing and finding your audience Practical lessons from running a direct store, including integration and signed-copy fulfilment How a 3 a.m. writing routine keeps the writing separate from the marketing and admin Serialising fiction on Substack, multiple newsletters, and avoiding paid subscriber promotions Why Facebook groups, TikTok Lives, and the three-to-one rule are working right now You can find P.D. at PDAlleva.com or on Substack. Transcript of the interview with P.D. Alleva Jo: P.D. Alleva is the award-winning author of horror, sci-fi, thrillers, and fantasy books. He's also a psychotherapist. So welcome, Paul. PD: Thank you very much. Thank you for having me. This is a great opportunity. I love doing interviews, and I love talking to great people. Jo: Oh, good. Well, first up— Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and being an indie author. PD: So I've been writing since I was a kid, at least second grade and more than likely even before that. I've always had that creative itch. Getting into indie author publishing, I published my first book in 2011. At the time I was also operating my own business, which took up about 24 hours of my time every single day. Then I kind of got through that and sold that in 2016, and I'm like, you know what? The time has come. I'd always written books, poetry, short stories, but never really did anything with them because I just didn't have the time. So in 2017, that's when I really came out and said, all right, the time is now. Indie publishing was doing great. The one good thing I do love about Amazon is they allowed us to come out there and start showing our craft to people. So in 2017, I just started—let's do this. Let's write full time. Let's put books out there. Let's be creative. Let's really get those juices flowing. Plus, I was getting a little bit old, and I was like, now is definitely the time to do this. Since then I've been publishing consistently, and most of my books are horror books, but I dabble. I have a sci-fi series, and I'm starting to get into psychological thrillers too. I've got a new psychological thriller that'll be published in early 2027 called Girl on a Mission. For the most part, I'm definitely into the horror genre—books, short stories, all that good fun stuff. Jo: Right, so a couple of follow-ups. You said you're a bit old. Can you give us what decade you're in at least? PD: Well, I'm 51, so born in 1971. Jo: Oh, there you go. Same age as me. PD: All right, good. See that? So we're going head-to-head there. Jo: I don't think that's old at all. Also, you mentioned you sold your business in 2016. So what was your business before? Because I think business experience is so important. PD: Agreed 100%. So I'm a psychotherapist, and I had owned a treatment centre for mental health and addiction. That was started in 2011, and in 2016 is when it sold. Since then, my wife and I started a private practice. So I still, even to this day—well, about a year and a half ago is when I stopped. I specialise in trauma, PTSD, and addiction. Trauma mostly. Most of my caseload has always been trauma, PTSD, sexual abuse, psychological abuse, war-type trauma. I was doing that mostly individually since 2016 in private practice, and I'll still go into treatment centres and see patients there too, specifically for trauma. About a year and a half ago is when I started wanting to do writing 100% full time. I thought about becoming a professor, maybe going to college, but then I wasn't sure if I wanted to get into that full time, as far as a caseload and school and everything like that. So I decided to just do group therapy, group facilitation, and I've been doing that consistently since then. It may be 15 hours a week. I do love to give back, and to me, it's more what I teach. I specialise in neuro-linguistic programming, bilateral stimulation or EMDR, hypnotherapy, science of mind concepts, psychopharmacology, biological bases of behaviour—which is pretty much how your brain works—ancient wisdom, quantum physics. I do this in a drug addiction treatment centre mostly, also mental health. And of course, just living an addictive lifestyle is traumatic, too, in and of itself. So pretty much I'm teaching them. Behaviour modification is a big part of what I'm teaching during that time. You'll see that, too, if you read my books. There's two things you can figure out from my books. You can figure out how to murder people and get away with it, and two, you can figure out how to overcome trauma as well. The whole “murder people and get away with it” comes from my upbringing. I have a very sorted past, let's put it that way. My upbringing was very different than what most people grow up in. Jo: Oh, can you give us any more than that? Now everyone's like, “Oh.” PD: “What's going on with this guy, right?” So I grew up, let's say, quote unquote, “in an Italian New York family.” Jo: Okay. All right. PD: That might give people ideas, right? Jo: That's going to give people a lot of ideas. PD: If you've ever seen the movie Goodfellas, I kind of grew up in that atmosphere, and with even some of those people too. My family had connections to those people in that movie, which I find very funny. If you watch that movie with me, you get a very different perspective on what's going on in the movie. Jo: Wow. So you're an interesting guy with an interesting background, with a very interesting backstory job as well. Some people are like, “Well, of course he's writing horror because horror is just awful and full of slasher gore and all that.” I often have to say to people who don't read horror, “Look, it's not like that.” Maybe some of it is, sure. But most of it isn't. Could you talk about how reading and writing horror can also be psychologically healthy? How do these worlds intertwine for you? PD: Well, sure. It 100% can be healthy. Especially over the last few years, there's a trend going on out there right now where people are taking their trauma and putting it into a creative process through poems, short stories, and even novels. They're taking their trauma and giving it a face, like a monster, where people are overcoming that monster within the creative process. I always say that horror is the genre that puts on display, better than any other genre out there, the human condition. Why is that? When people are in a terrifying situation, you really see who they are. You get to the heart of the matter of who that person is by putting them in these horrific but undefinable situations where it's like, what are they going to come out as? That real true personality needs to come out, and that courage comes out. That's huge in horror, and I think horror gets such a bad name. Now, I know there's the extreme horror and the splatterpunk, and that has its kind of role too in what I'm saying, but that's where horror is getting its bad reputation out there with the over-the-top type of gore. For the most part, that's a small part of the horror genre. It's a subgenre for a reason. It has its readership, and that's fine. Nothing wrong with it. I read it all the time. I find a lot of joy in it, a lot of excitement. However, for the most part, any horror novel that is not completely with the gore and stuff like splatterpunk can be seen as a psychological thriller, and a lot of psychological thrillers can be seen as a horror novel. Look at books like The Silence of the Lambs, Red Dragon. That's horrific as well, but if you read the novel, it's in there. It just gets that bad rap right now, and it's not all gore. Most horror novels that I read today are psychological horror. It's tame on the gore, and the psychological aspect is there. I always see that psychological aspect—it's like psychological trauma. Most people, even in my industry, when people are out there and you mention trauma, PTSD, they're thinking about sexual abuse, physical abuse, or war-type trauma. The silent psychological one—I once wrote an article called “Emotional Trauma: The Silent Psychological Killer.” The one that's out there is the psychological trauma, the emotional trauma that is widespread. Most people go through that, and it could even be from parent to child, and most people don't understand that that's a traumatic experience. It's like a distortion of reality that you're experiencing that then creates a belief system in your brain, and you're constantly acting out that belief system. That's where the psychological component of horror really comes out. People breaking through that psychological belief system that was created through a traumatic experience by reaching courage and coming out through a horrific situation. Jo: Yes, it really annoys me, because with romance, of course people understand that romance is a huge genre. Something like a small town sweet romance is a world away from the bully romantasy, dark, or mafia. Mafia romance is a really big thing with very dark themes. I'm like, well, how can you understand that romance is a huge genre with all these different subgenres, and not think that horror or thriller or fantasy or sci-fi all have so many different subgenres within them? I personally read a lot of supernatural horror, but rarely the slasher gore kind of stuff. So I'm really glad you said that, and hopefully more people will open up a bit more. I did also want to ask you about what you write. You write all these different things. You write standalone—I mean, often horror is standalone—but you also have some series. How do you balance it? What are the benefits of cross-genre writing, but also the challenges of it? PD: Okay. So obviously I love cross-genre writing. To me, I use fantasy to explain the supernatural elements. I blend mostly a tad of fantasy to help explain the supernatural components in my supernatural novels. When I write sci-fi, specifically sci-fi, that has the fantasy element in it too, but there's also a tad of horror in there as well. It's just who I am. When I grew up, I had a lot of different influences. I had Star Wars on one side, and then I'm watching B-rated '80s slasher films on the other side. Those two mixes just kind of followed me throughout my life, and that's why I like putting them into my novels. As I tell my patients, don't limit yourself. Never limit yourself. If you're just limiting yourself to one genre, you're missing out on so much more that's out there. So I love the blend of mixing genres. It just gets my goat each and every time. It is a challenge though. I remember when I first started getting into indie publishing, I was never big into Facebook and social media up until I started becoming an indie author. Before that, with my type of upbringing, you don't advertise yourself. You don't advertise where you're going. That's a big no-no. So I always had this aversion to social media. I'll tell you a funny story. It was the late 2000s, probably 2006. I was a full-time single father at that time, and I was living in Florida. My family—brothers and sisters-in-law—were living in New York, and my sister-in-law said, “Get a Facebook account so we can see pictures of the kids.” I said, “Oh.” I didn't want to do it, but I said, “Okay,” so I did it. And I'm thinking, looking at this Facebook thing, “How do I put pictures on here?” So I figured out how to put pictures in folders. Then I phone called her, and I'm like, “Okay, so they're on there.” And they're like, “Well, where are they?” I'm like, “I put them in these folders. You can go and look at them.” She's like, “No, you've got to post them.” That to me was like, “I'm not posting pictures of my kids.” That was a big no-no. It didn't click. When I got on there finally in 2016, 2017, I'm like, “Okay, so I need to figure out social media. As an indie author, I need to be on there, so I need to get through this aversion and get on there.” I started noticing how people are so particular with their genres. If they're reading a romance, it had to be very specific with that exact type of romance, and if you deviated from it, they're not going to like it. So that was the challenge. I was like, “All right, number one, I'm not going to dilute myself” and say, “All right, take things out of my writing or out of my novel just so I could cater to a certain type of audience.” I'm like, “I'm not going to do that.” I know with me, myself, as a reader, I'll read everything. I don't limit myself to a specific genre. I'll read psychological thrillers. I'll read romance. I've been doing that all my life. So I'm like, if there's a person like me out there—and look at this, I just met like four other people who also read cross genres—then I know that there's at least another 30,000 people, and I know that at least then there's 300,000, then there's three million people out there. So just write the books that you're writing and find your audience. Now, that takes longer. So you've got to chip away. Chip away. You're going to find readers here and there, and then that reader kind of tells a few people about you, and then you've got a few more readers. Then you keep going, and you go on these Facebook groups, and you do a whole bunch of different things, and then you gather a few more readers. Then they're telling some friends, and then you've got more. The process takes a lot longer, yes, 100% agreed, but I would say be true to yourself and you can never go wrong. Jo: Yes, I agree. I write cross-genre as well, and I've browsed your collection. Golem was the one I was like, “Ooh, yes, I like that one.” I haven't read it yet, it's on my list. I think when you're cross-genre, my people come to my store as well, and it's like, “Okay, I'm interested in lots of things, but this is the one by this author that I'm interested in.” Whereas with other authors who only write one type of thing, then I might not like any of their stuff. So I think there are definitely pros and cons and different ways into our world. I also wanted to ask you about the differences in business. Obviously you ran this treatment centre and there were physical humans on all sides, and now you've got a business as an author. So what have you learned in business from what you used to do and what you do now? PD: Okay. You're right. The treatment centre industry is very different from what I'm doing now, but it's still people. Treat those people right, have integrity. If you say you're going to do something, follow through with it. My word is my bond type of thing. That definitely has fed into the writing and publishing industry that I'm in now in a huge way. Just connecting with people is, to me, the biggest part of it. I mean, treatment centres, you've got to connect with people. When I would market the treatment centre, where would I go? I would go to hospitals, residential facilities, detoxes, and talk to them about my programme and why they should be referring clients there. It's the same thing here. Why should you be reading my books? You get there through interviews like what I'm doing here with you. Other podcasts. You get there by doing Facebook Lives, TikTok. I haven't started TikTok Lives yet, but I actually love that platform. I'm falling in love with it. IG Lives, anything like that where you're talking to people and you're making a connection with those people. Through that, I've gathered so many different types of readers who are like, “Yes, I'll give this book a shot.” And then they read it and they're like, “Hey, this is really good, and I'm going to read another book.” With my books, I have very different books. Golem is my psychological horror novel. It's my slow-burn psychological horror novel, heavily inspired by Frankenstein and the Pygmalion myth. It's my first true horror book that I published. Then there's Jigglyspot and the Zero Intellect, which is inspired by B-rated '80s horror movies and the old grindhouse movies of the '70s, and it's mind manipulation. It's just wild and bizarre. And then The Sleepy Hollow Incident is my Gothic tale—it's like a dark romance mixed in with Gothic horror. So I always try to put something for everyone that's out there. To me, when I'm writing, it's got to be about depth, psychological depth. I always refer to my books to be like peeling layers off a Texas-sized onion. The more you read, the more in-depth you get into not only the characters, but the story. It's just something that comes out of me. It's part of me. That's the way I always have to do it. I always have to put that depth in there. To me, that's good storytelling. When I grew up, I read a lot of classic literature. Yes, Edgar Allan Poe, but also Dante's Inferno, Milton's Paradise Lost, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the Brontë sisters. Keep going. Ray Bradbury, Ayn Rand, Daphne du Maurier, Shirley Jackson. Those to me are my books that I absolutely love. So there's a sweet science in today's fast-paced, social media type of world in marrying the depth of the old classic literature and the entertainment value that is required today for being an author. There's that sweet science behind it, and I love just hitting that nail on the head every time. Jo: So did you ever pitch traditional publishing, or have you thought about going that way? Because I also find that a lot of horror actually sits very close to literary. Like, I read a lot more literary horror than I do in some of the other genres. PD: Correct. So in the beginning, yes. Not in a long time. I maybe went to a couple of indie publishers, but as far as traditional, the Big Five publishers, I have an aversion to them for a big reason. I know people who have worked in that industry that have told me some pretty bad horror stories about those places. So I haven't sent anything to that type of place in a very, very long time. Maybe close to 20 years. Indie publishers, the small presses, yes, here and there, but even then, I'm always moving at a fast pace. So if I've got a book and I'm sending it out as a query letter, by the time that query letter is even read, I'm almost done publishing. I love that aspect of it. The control of my story, where I know where this character's going. And listen, I've got my beta readers, I've got my ARC readers. They're there to tell me, “Hey, maybe you should change this or change that.” Whether I take that advice or not, of course my editor too, is really up to me. I always put out the book that I know is the one I want to read. And to me, I haven't gone wrong in doing so. I know with traditional publishing, you sometimes get too many thoughts in the pot there. Let's put it that way. Jo: Okay, so coming back to being indie then. You mentioned Amazon earlier, but you have a store where you sell direct. Many authors are doing this now, but it can be a challenge. So what have you found are the pros and cons of your direct store? What's working? Any lessons there? PD: Okay. So I use a place called Big Cartel. They're the platform where the books are on. They're hosting my website, PDAlleva.com. The big challenge was actually just starting it. It was so overwhelming. How do I put this on there? At the time, I've got all these books, so how do I present them? I'm even going to be doing another revamp with it too, because I want better pictures—taking pictures of the books, stuff like that, instead of just having the covers on there. I also have a lot of shirts that I'm selling. So I think the biggest challenge is just getting on there and starting it. Then of course, you've got to learn a whole new platform, and the mechanics, and how people are going to be downloading, and how that's done on an e-book versus a print version of the book. So it's a huge learning curve that you've really got to put your focus on and give it time. What most people like in indie publishing is signed copies. It's a huge part of indie publishing, selling those signed copies. People love a signed copy, and that's primarily what my website is for. You can order signed copies from me. I also use a place called IngramSpark, and they're more like a distributor. They're used by everyone. They've been around for a very long time. Traditional publishing uses them too, and they're just distributing your novel. I'd say about a year ago, maybe two years ago, they started where you can sell your books on discount through them as well. So I have that on my website too, where you're just clicking on the book and you're pretty much going directly to their site and you're buying paperbacks and hardbacks at a discount. That's going well too. For the most part, people are definitely coming to my site because they want the signed copies. A good thing with indie publishing is limited editions, first print copies, special editions. That type of stuff really just takes off. People love to see that, especially in the indie community. You can sell them too. I go to a few different book conventions during the year, and the limited editions are there. Like I said, people love the signed copies. They love being a part of that and getting that signed copy. They treasure it, just like I treasure my books too. I'm not referring to my books that I've written, but books that I have as well. I love my e-reader, don't get me wrong, but I still prefer the physical copy—the paperback, and even more so than the paperback, the hardback. So people love those signed copies, and that's why I created the website, to sell on there for them. Jo: Yes, I mean, we're getting to a point now though where I think some people are questioning the pros and cons of it. For example, you doing the signed copies—I don't do that from my Shopify store because I don't want to hold stock and I don't want to deal with postage. So I only do it when I do a Kickstarter. I've just finished one recently, Bones of the Deep, and I'm going up to the printer, and I'm going to sign a couple of hundred copies and then they do the postage. That's the only way I'm willing to do it because of the pain of getting books to your house, signing them, getting them in the post. So how do you manage that practically? PD: Okay, so the inventory's there. I don't go and sign everything right away. I just keep the inventory. Once somebody buys the book, then I'll pull out the book, log it and all that good fun stuff, sign it, and then ship it out immediately. Here in my country, we get discounts at the United States Post Office because they're books. So they pass that shipping cost over to the reader too, so it's a little bit cheaper for shipping. I'll just take books once or twice a week over to the United States Postal Service and ship those books out. I don't sign them until I actually get that order. Jo: How many do you have in your house? It's the holding stock of all the backlist that is the problem. PD: Ooh, gotcha. All right. That's why I have a two-car garage. But here's the thing, I won't order 500 at a time. I'll order 20 at a time. Jo: Okay. Right. PD: When I see that inventory's getting low, I'll order another 20 at a time. Jo: And you get those from IngramSpark? PD: Correct. When the new one comes out, maybe at that time I'm just selling those, bringing those to conventions that I go to. Or maybe doing a sale on those books at that time to get rid of the inventory so it's not sitting around anymore. Jo: I think that's so important. Then like you mentioned, you do T-shirts or shirts. That is also really hard because of sizing. So is that all print on demand? PD: Yes. So I don't really hold the stock on the shirts. When I get an order, whatever the size is at that time, I go directly to the place and order it. I use a place called Sublimation Station that's here in Orlando. They do great all-over print T-shirts. They're fantastic. I just did one for The Sleepy Hollow Incident. So The Sleepy Hollow Incident is one long story, and it's broken up into four books. Each book has its own. The covers are fantastic. I use a lady named Cherie Foxley. She's a phenomenal cover designer. So the shirts are, like, book one is on the front of one shirt with book two on the back, and then the second shirt is book three on the cover and book four on the back. However, I can customise those. I just did a giveaway in my Facebook group and I let people know I could customise them, and she wanted book one and book four, so I just got that and sent it out to her. Now, if people go ahead and order that on the website, I can just order it right away from them, boom, and that place will get it shipped right then and there. Jo: Right, so they do the shipping. These are all sort of practical things that people need to answer because I feel like sometimes it's like, “Oh, yes, having a direct store is great,” but there's actually quite a lot of work that goes into it, isn't there? PD: There is. There's a lot of work. You're pretty much opening almost like your own brick-and-mortar store at that point. You just don't have walk-in traffic coming in—your traffic is all coming online. So there is a lot to it, but it's worth it. If you're a self-published author or even a small indie press, it's good to have. Because like I said, people love the signed copies. Jo: When you say it's worth it, is it worth it financially or just because you like to serve the customers in that way? PD: Both. Jo: Right. So it is financially worth it for you? PD: Yes. Jo: I was talking to a friend of mine and saying, are you valuing your time in terms of things like taking the books to the post office and stuff like that? Do you find it eats into your writing at all, or do you just manage it all separately? PD: No, I manage it separately. So I'm an early morning riser. I get up at 3:00 in the morning, and that's when I write my books or do editing or brainstorming. I'm about to write a new novella now called The Adam and Eve Story, which is actually based on a little-known CIA shelved book from the 1990s called The Adam and Eve Story as well. So I've been brainstorming that, and I was doing that this morning. I get up at 3:00 a.m. and I do my writing, and by the time the kids are up and by the time the wife is up, it's like 8:00 a.m. is rolling around and I'm pretty much done at that point. Then I have my days. Tuesday I'm completely working from home and I do my thing in the morning, and then the rest of the day is marketing, fulfilling orders, stuff like that. On the days when I'm going to do group facilitation, I'll of course still get up at 3:00 o'clock in the morning, and then I'll plan out the day. I've got an hour between this group and I can go ahead and do that, and I'm already there so it's not a problem. The post office is right around the corner. You kind of figure out all the logistics for yourself. There are some days, like on Monday, I don't facilitate groups until the afternoon, so I've got the whole morning to work on marketing and do other things, and fulfilment. Then of course Saturday's a big day for that too. Jo: Oh, that's good. I feel like people always need to know how to balance their time, but it sounds like you manage, because at 3:00 a.m., as you say, there's not much else to do other than write. You mentioned marketing, and you have a Substack, pdsalternativefiction.substack.com. Talk about that and serialising fiction and how Substack works. Because I feel like a load of people are jumping in but might not necessarily know how it works, especially for fiction. PD: Correct. It is becoming quite popular out there. I think the one before that was Patreon, and Patreon is pretty big for that too, kind of the same thing. I wanted to start something and just get the work out there. I was very interested when Amazon came out a few years ago with what was called Vella. They kind of started that. I was like, “This is kind of cool.” Couple chapters at a time. I'm writing the books anyway, so why don't we kick this off and see how it goes—a type of experiment. I had a lot of fun doing it. I started on October 4th, 2024. I've done four novels so far. One is still going, which is Volume 3 of my Dark Veil serie— that's a sci-fi series. I wrote three other novels. The Hypnotist, which is a thriller, heavy on the sci-fi and a tad of horror in there too. And then I wrote Girl on a Mission, which is my psychological thriller, and then Cat Fight, which is a horror novel—all within that time. I think I finished all three of those novels in January, and then the first week of February they were all pretty much done. Now what I'm doing is, I went paid recently on the Substack. It's like everything else that's out there—chip away, chip away. I fell into that hole where they say, “Hey, we can promote you and get people to sign up for your newsletter.” And I'll be honest with you, don't do it. It's not worth it. You spend money, and what happens is they're what I refer to as dead leads. They don't click. You wind up shuffling them off after three to six months, because they're just not clicking. Everybody gets a star rating, so you know—are they clicking, are they staying on, are they not? So I got rid of pretty much all of those people, and I'll never do that again. It's got to be done organically. That's why when you read my books, especially the new books, towards the end it'll say, “Sign up for my newsletter.” I do more with that newsletter too. If you're on the free tier, every month I do a monthly newsletter, which is just me talking about updates, things going on in the publishing industry, things going on with me. My daughter puts together a weekly Horror and Sci-Fi Chronicles newsletter, which gives what's going on in new releases in the industry—sci-fi, horror, books, movies, television. She does deep dives into industry tropes, historical tidbits, and a weekly quiz. I also do a monthly Terrors and Tales newsletter. I started this last year, and it was a quarterly newsletter. It's other authors who are new, upcoming, never been published before, looking to get published. It's a chance for them to be on the newsletter where they have a flash fiction story or poem or even a short story that I publish for them. It's called the Terrors and Tales newsletter. What happened is I would put out calls for submissions. And a place called Duotrope—I don't even know who these people are, but all of a sudden I got an email from them stating, “Hey, we found that you're looking for submissions, and we posted your link. We hope you don't mind.” I'm like, “No, of course I don't mind.” I got so many submissions from that one link. I'm like, “Okay.” Do I really want to deny people? I'm not like that. I want to help promote other authors. I know what it's like when you're new and upcoming, no matter what age you are, to say, “Hey, here's a platform for you to see your stuff in print.” Obviously, I read through them just to make sure they're up to a certain standard, but for the most part, if you submit, you're getting in there. With Duotrope, I'm like, I have enough here to put out one a month. So in May 2026, the first one goes out, and then I'll have one each month until December, and then who knows? In 2027 I might go back to quarterly. I might get enough submissions to just keep it going once a month. So that's the Terrors and Tales newsletter, and it usually comes out towards the end of the month—the last two weeks. I have nothing to do with it in terms of content. None of my stories are on there. None of my poems are on there. None of my flash fiction. It's all other authors, just for them to see their name in print, see their work in print, share it with their friends, and put something on their resume, and to encourage people to keep reading and keep the craft going. Jo: When you say in print, you don't mean in physical print? PD: Oh, I mean in the newsletter. I'm sorry. Jo: I think that's important, or you're going to get a lot more submissions, and you will need to do publishing contracts and all that kind of thing. I think that's the difficult thing with a Substack newsletter approach—it's difficult to know where to categorise it. Is it marketing? Is it publishing? It's all of these things, I suppose. A bit like this podcast, it's all kinds of things. In terms of Substack actually making money on its own or leading to book sales that make money, do you think it does serve that purpose? PD: I think I've gotten more book sales through it, and also ARC readers who are enjoying the books and giving reviews. As far as the paid tiers, that's kind of a little bit slow, and that's where I'm saying chip away at it. Keep it up there. Keep it going. Over time, you're going to build that type of audience where it's going to be like, “Hey, this is financially feasible for me to continue to do this.” That's the response that I'm getting out there. Jo: Yes. Before, you mentioned you were doing Facebook Lives and you're looking at TikTok, but— Is anything else working for you in book marketing? If people have a few books and they're like, “What is working for book marketing right now?”—what do you recommend? PD: Okay. For me, the thing that has made the most sense is making sure the reader knows the book is out there through some sort of social media. I've had really good success on TikTok since the beginning of this year especially. I started it about a year ago, year and a half ago, but then my father got sick and passed away, and it was a new venture and I put it off to the side. I really got the flavour going at the beginning of this year. February, March of this year. It seems to be going really well, and I've noticed an uptick in sales from just getting the videos out there and getting it in front of people's eyes. There's an event I'm going to in August called ShiverCon, which is a pretty big event. After that event, I'm going to look to see what type of inventory I have left over from the event, and I'm going to start doing TikTok Lives. I'm very comfortable being on camera. So I'm like, “Yeah, that seems like a good way to go.” I know there's a few other horror authors who are doing it and having good success with TikTok Lives as well. A guy named Jason Davis is doing really well with TikTok Lives, and a few other authors too. I'm like, “Yes, I could definitely do that.” I want to get up to a certain number of people, and I want these events. I'm going to one in July, and then ShiverCon in August. Once those are done, I'm going to have more time to do the TikTok Lives. As far as Facebook is concerned, what I've had really great success with on Facebook is being in the groups and meeting other authors. That's not always about my book per se, but whatever books I'm reading, I'm posting my reviews about those books in those groups and meeting readers. Then obviously, they always say the three-to-one rule. Post about three different books and then post about your own book, whether you're doing a sale or a new release or a re-release or whatever. I've found success through that just by interacting with readers. When they post a book, I'll comment, “Hey, I've read that book,” or, “Hey, that book looks really cool. I like the review.” Commenting on it so you start these relationships with people who are out there in these Facebook groups. I've recently started my own Facebook reader group. I kind of go with the same thing. Last night, we did a live reading for another author. I like other authors to be on there. I always like to think, what does the reader need? What do I want to see as a reader? I would love to hear live readings from authors. So I kind of learn about them, learn about the book, and get a live reading. To me, that's a good way to go. So I started that recently, and it seems to be going well. I've got a new folk horror coming out soon, and I put out a call for ARC readers and got a fantastic response from that. That kind of drives the sales anyway, because when you get those reviews, then people see it gives credibility to the book, and then other people see it, and then they're buying it too. So that comes from the groups. There's so many wheels to spin in this industry as an indie author when you're doing this, especially when you're doing 99% of it on your own. You've got to get out there. No one's going to know your book exists if you don't get out there and tell somebody about it. Jo: Brilliant. Well, tell us— Where can people find you and your books online? PD: All right. Perfect. So obviously I'm on Amazon like everyone. Most of my books are worldwide, so you'll find them in Barnes & Noble as well. And of course, if you want the signed copies or discount print books, I always lead people straight to my website, PDAlleva.com. Then, of course, if you go to my Substack, you'll get all the updates, and you'll get all the links to purchase or find out where they are on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and things like that too. Jo: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Paul. That was great. PD: Thank you very much for having me. It was great chatting with you. The post Writing Cross-Genre, Selling Direct, And Serialising On SubStack With P.D. Alleva first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Have you ever lost the joy in your creative work — that sense of fun you had when you were starting out, before the admin and the algorithms drained it away? How do mid-career creatives get it back, and what can a four-year-old teach us about play? Austin Kleon talks about productive procrastination, silly rituals, the case for paper reference books in an AI world, and how his newsletter went from a marketing cost to the day job that keeps the lights on. In the intro, Does social media still sell books? [Self-Publishing with ALLi]; Trial by algorithm [The Bookseller]; Publishing’s AI Hypocrisy Problem [The New Publishing Standard]; ALLi AI survey for authors; Brave New Bookshelf Podcast, and Pics from signing at BookVault. Today's show is sponsored by ProWritingAid, writing and editing software that goes way beyond just grammar and typo checking. With its detailed reports on how to improve your writing and integration with writing software, ProWritingAid will help you improve your book before you send it to an editor, agent or publisher. Check it out for free or get 15% off the premium edition at www.ProWritingAid.com/joanna This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn  Austin Kleon is the New York Times and international bestselling author of nonfiction books, including Steal Like an Artist, Show Your Work!, and Keep Going, as well as an artist, professional speaker, and poet. His latest book is Don't Call It Art: 10 Ways to Create Like a Kid Again. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.  Show Notes Why Austin wrote Don't Call It Art now, and what his kids taught him about creative joy Productive procrastination, silly rituals, and treating writing like Lego Comedy as a philosophical position, and giving yourself permission to be bad in private Sharing process in the algorithm era, and why your whole life is the process Bibliomancy, paper reference books, and what AI can't give you that a dictionary can Style, the Taco Bell distinctiveness rule, and how Austin's newsletter became his day job You can find Austin at AustinKleon.com. Transcript of the interview with Austin Kleon Jo: Austin Kleon is the New York Times and international bestselling author of nonfiction books, including Steal Like an Artist, Show Your Work!, and Keep Going, as well as an artist, professional speaker, and poet. His latest book is Don't Call It Art: 10 Ways to Create Like a Kid Again. So welcome back to the show, Austin. Austin: Thank you for having me back. It's nice to talk to you again. Jo: You were on the show in March 2020, and at the time, your book was Keep Going, which was prescient considering the pandemic and politics. So I wondered, why this book, Don't Call It Art, now? Was this something you see in the creative community or your own life that made you want to write this book? Austin: Keep Going is a book about what happens when the world goes crazy around you and you're still trying to do your creative work. This is a book about what happens when inside has bottomed out. Keep Going is a book about the world bottoming out, and you're worried that your own creative work is going to bottom out too. How do you keep pushing through and keep making stuff? This book, to me, is about what happens when you bottom out inside—when you've lost that love and feeling for the thing that you wanted to do, and you're just not connecting with it in the way that you used to or the way that you want to. How do you get back? How do you return to that sense of joy and wonder and fun that we have when we're starting out? And for me, it was being around my little kids that taught me how to tap into that. My kids were natural—they didn't have any creative hangups. I would spend all day talking to people who had creative hangups, and then I'd get back in the house, and I'd just be around these beings who didn't have any of them. It was really instructive. I felt like, if I could bottle the energy of my kids when they were about four years old and try to put it in a book, I think it could really help a lot of the people that I run into, and the people with the kinds of problems I hear from. Jo: You mentioned bottoming out. How do people know when they've hit that point? Austin: You just don't want to do it anymore. You're kind of like, “This just isn't giving me back what it used to.” When we start with our creative work, that's the thing that juices us. We come away from it feeling full up. I think you hit a certain point where you start to feel drained after it. Or maybe you don't feel drained by the thing itself that you're doing—maybe it's all the stuff around it, which is more often the case. For example, if you're a mid-career writer like me, who's been publishing books for 16 years now, I still really like writing. I still really like drawing. I still really like cutting and pasting and putting things together. It's the admin around the work—the emails, the meetings, the running-a-business part of it—that's super draining for me, and that stuff can start to bleed over into the creative work. So it's really important for me to make sure that I'm having some playtime, some R&D, some research and development time, to make sure it's not just all business. When you take the thing that you love and you turn it into the thing that you make a living from, you can really run into a lot of problems. Jo: I'm at 20 years, so I know exactly what you're saying, and a lot of listeners are the same. We love writing books, but it's all the stuff that goes around it. So for those of us who do this for money as well as passion, what are some practical ways to have more fun with our creativity? Austin: Something I learned from my kids is that you really are your most creative when you're supposed to be doing something else. So one of the things I use a lot in the studio is productive procrastination. Whatever I'm supposed to be working on, I start another little project, and that's my little naughty fun time. When I first come into the studio, I try to do something that I'm not supposed to be doing—something that I won't have much to show for. That could be making one of my blackout poems. That could be making a collage in my notebook. It could also be sitting here. I have a bass in the studio now, so I can practise my bass guitar. Sometimes I'll do that for the first 15 minutes just to get in that headspace of, “Hey, what's it like to do something just for yourself? Just because you want to do it?” The juice that you get from that little naughty “I'm going to do what I'm not supposed to be doing right now” thing, that carries into the rest of the day. It's like a nice start to things. Jo: Do you think that play could be something different to what we make our money with? For me, writing novels and stories is great fun in one way, but it's also what I then publish and make money on. So writing stories is more serious, I guess, than playing with Lego or something. Austin: Right. So the trick is, how can you make writing your stories like playing with Lego? That's kind of been my whole career. I hate staring at Microsoft Word and that blinking cursor, taunting you like, “Come on, what have you got?” A lot of my creative life has been about trying to make it more playful, trying to make it feel more like a game. That's how I came up with my blackout poems. I take an article from The New York Times and I black it out until it only has a few words left behind. It sort of looks like if the CIA did haiku, for some people listening. That was one little exercise. Then weirdly, that side thing that I thought was just play, just fun—that turned into my first book. So then it's, okay, what else can I mess around with and play with? I do a lot of collage work in the studio, and I rarely actually use that for any of the books. Sometimes I use it for my newsletter to illustrate the newsletter. But it's always about trying to figure out, how can I make writing a game? How can I make it more playful? There are different things that I do to make it feel more playful. One of them's really stupid. I really believe in silly rituals because I think silliness is really powerful. People talk about their daily rituals—Mason Currey has that great book, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work. When I was reading that book, I realised it was really the silly stuff that I really liked. There was, I think it was Balzac counting out coffee beans or something before he got to write. Or Steinbeck sharpening 12 pencils or something goofy like that. So one of the things I like to do before I write is that I have these cigarette pencils. They're pencils that look like cigarettes in the studio. I put one in my mouth before I start writing, and I pretend to be some old '40s writer on a typewriter. I like doing goofy stuff in the studio because I think when you do goofy stuff—stuff that you'd be embarrassed if anyone else saw it—it gets you in that playful state. Jo: It's interesting. In your book, you have a section that says, “Don't take things too seriously.” For many of us, we write memoir for example, and that is very close to us. It's like the deepest expression of what we want to say in the world. It feels very serious. So how can we hold things more lightly and not take things so seriously? Austin: For me, comedy is actually a philosophical position. What I mean by that is, I think a lot of people set out with a tragic model of creative work. They think, “Oh, I have this special gift,” or, “I have this thing that I really need to do, and I need to put it out into the world, and I need to make the world look more like I want it to look.” They have this idea that, “Through blood and sweat and tears, I'm going to see this thing through, and I'm going to push it into the world, and I'm going to have my way.” I think there's another way of working where it's more like, “I'm just a normal person trying to play with my environment, and take my experiences and put them into something interesting. So I'm going to play and use my wits, and we're going to see what we come up with.” Those really are two modes of life. The pandemic taught me that it was really when we were keeping our sense of humour, when we were having a laugh and keeping our egos in check around the house and just acknowledging how goofy we all were and how ridiculous the situation was, that seemed to be when we were really thriving. Versus, “Well, we're in this tough situation. We've got to make it into what we want it to be.” That felt really bad. But when we cruised along and we were just improvisational, when we went at things with a kind of lightness, that worked. There's a great Italo Calvino essay about lightness in Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Lightness is really underrated. Even when we're going about heavy work, having a sense of lightness and play with it just makes the work better. That's a philosophical position of mine. I aspire to comedy. I aspire to a comic outlook on life. I'm just a creature with a body who's going to die, and I'm fundamentally ridiculous. Life is pretty absurd. You just make the best of it. Jo: There's certainly some truth there. Staying on a similar theme, you have a chapter in the book on permission to be bad. Many of the listeners also have your book Show Your Work, and it shaped many of us into sharing our work in progress. It feels quite dangerous now, in a world where judgment is much louder than it maybe was when you wrote Show Your Work. So tell us a bit about permission to be bad versus should we keep some of this private? Austin: Permission to be bad is about the making part of things. It's the private part. It's permission to be bad when you're in private, when you're actually doing the work. Show Your Work is a book about what you do after you've done the work, or while you're doing the work. It was never about putting up a webcam and running a 24/7 feed. It was more like, hey, what are the ways that I can connect with the kind of audience I can build while I'm making the work itself? So the way I see permission to be bad is, you really have to give yourself permission when you're not sharing, when you're off screen, to really be as bad as you want to be. It doesn't necessarily mean quality-wise. I think it also means letting yourself write stuff that you would never say on social media. Letting yourself read stuff that you wouldn't admit you were reading on social media. Letting yourself listen to stuff. Letting yourself really be that unfiltered, unhinged, private person that you want to be. Then when it comes to sharing, you put some time in between that input time, that making time, and the sharing time, and then you share what you think is going to be useful or helpful or interesting to other people. Jo: I think you wrote that book before TikTok, and how fast people are moving. Do you think people need to slow down a bit in what they share, maybe? Austin: I don't know. I obviously had a lot more faith in social media back then. I use all the principles from Show Your Work in my newsletter. Newsletters are very much the new kind of great thing. They're doing a lot of the work that social media used to do, in that you're still able to have this direct connection with the people that you're trying to reach. The big problem with social media now is that it's all algorithmically tuned, where the people that are following you don't see the stuff that you're doing most of the time. What you have to do now, if you want the people who are following you to see your stuff on social media, is you have to make stuff that the algorithm likes. That's a whole different thing. As far as the Show Your Work principle—which is share your process as much as your product—that carries over to any platform. In my newsletter every Friday, I share a list of 10 things that were going on behind the scenes here. It might have been what I was watching on TV, what I listened to, a new pen I was trying out, or something like that. The Friday newsletter is almost always process stuff. When I talk about process, my definition is actually very broad. For a lot of people, it's drafting, editing, whatever. For me, the process is the whole life. The process is almost everything except the finished thing. A writer's life is 24/7. My friends who have real jobs really are like, “What do you do all day?” And I'm like, “Well, what do you mean?” They're like, “Well, I see you out on your bike ride.” I'm like, “Yes, when you see me out on a bike ride, I'm thinking through something half the time.” If I'm watching TV, I'm thinking, “Hey, would this be good in the newsletter?” I'm never off. My whole life—everything is copy, as Nora Ephron said. That's part of the job. It's very hard to turn off. So I see the whole life as process, and the question becomes, what little bits and pieces of that life and that process can you share with people while you're making the things that you hope to sell them later? Right now, I'm in a cycle where I'm selling this book, but all these people have showed up because I've shared my process every week for the past seven years since I put out a book. Jo: It's funny you say that. I was at the dentist yesterday, and— My dentist literally asked me, “So where do you get all your ideas?” This is a common question for all of us, right? And it just becomes so hard to explain that to people who don't walk around in the world just constantly getting ideas. Austin: I can't believe I'm going to tell this story. I was getting my vasectomy after my second kid, and I was talking to this doctor just before the operation. He said, “So what do you do for a living?” I said, “I'm a writer.” He said, “Oh, that must be cool. You get to use your brain.” And I said, “That's everything that you want your doctor to say.” I was going to say, “Please use your brain,” before he's about to cut into you. He said, “Oh, no, no. What I mean is, I know what I'm going to do every day for the next 10 years.” He knew exactly what his day was going to look like. He said, “You have to use your brain. You've got to figure out new stuff.” I was like, “Oh, that's really interesting.” That's the trade-off, right? He's got the job security. He knows what he's going to do. Every writer has a moment where they have to talk to a normal person about what you do. Jo: I was going to say, I'm married to one. Austin: Now, my wife, on the other hand, grew up the daughter of a writer, so she knows exactly what it's like. Nothing ever phases her. She's totally used to it. She's used to me staring off into space, completely checking out of a conversation. She's used to me using lines on her that I'm going to put in a piece later. She's used to the whole rigmarole. It's very handy. I've been very lucky in that sense. Jo: Coming back to the book, you talk about your use of bibliomancy for inspiration. Since we're talking about that, tell us about it. I think all the book people listening will be happy. Austin: I'm a person who still keeps a dictionary nearby—a paper dictionary. I keep a big old American Heritage. It's just a big, thick book. When I really don't have any ideas, I will turn at random to the dictionary, close my eyes, stick my finger down the page, open my eyes, and just see what I come up with. Sometimes just that act will give me an idea. I also do that with books. I'll go around the studio, pick up a book, flip to a random page, and just see what it says there, or read an old piece of marginalia that I've left in a book. I believe deeply in the power of bibliomancy, and I think it's a case for paper books. I'm one of those people that still really believes in reference books. I've started collecting more and more of them. I have an old, big dictionary that's always open on my desk, and I look up words. I learned from John McPhee, the writer, that you should look up words that you think you know. That was the first time I'd ever heard anyone say that. So I look up words that I think I know. Instead of reaching for a thesaurus when I need a different word, I actually just look up the definition of the word that I already have. That's another McPhee tip. The other thing that happened that I thought was really interesting is, I got a Roget's for the first time—a thesaurus. I don't think most people know what an actual thesaurus is. Most people think of a thesaurus as a synonym finder, and that's not actually what a thesaurus is at all. A thesaurus is more like an encyclopaedia, weirdly. You look up things based on big concepts, and then it gives you a bunch of words to look up later. It's a very strange thing. It's not what most people think it is. I have a couple of editions of Roget's in here. I like the really old Roget's from the 1900s because they actually have opposing ideas facing each other on the page. Do you have an old-school Roget's? Have you ever looked through one? Jo: I don't have one now, but I certainly grew up with them. I was literally just thinking, I wonder if there are ones for Americans and ones for British people, because so often we say different things and mean different things. I always hear Americans say, “Oh, that's a doozy,” or something, and it means the complete opposite thing here. Austin: Like if you say “fanny pack” over there. That means something very different than it means here, right? Chips or fries, that kind of stuff. So I wonder if there are different ones for different cultural references. Jo: I don't know. Austin: As people, with ChatGPT and all these LLMs and stuff, people are like, “Why would you ever pick up a paper reference book?” And I'm like, “I actually like the friction.” I like having to move in space and go over to my dictionary. I like flipping the pages. I like having to scan a page for the word I'm looking for, because— This marvellous thing happens when you're looking for the word, where you bump into all these other words. If you're a word nerd, you get to start thinking about the root of the word—oh, why is this word next to this word? Well, it's because they share the same root. Then you're going down all these fun rabbit holes. The thing that I'm trying to do as a writer and a creative person is, I'm trying to get to the thing that I didn't know I was looking for. The thing that people misunderstand about AI, I think personally, is that it's a great tool if you know what you're looking for. If you're like, “Find me this thing. I want exactly this. I want to see a picture of a dog wearing a king's costume,” or some crap like that, then it can spit that picture out for you. Or, “I want to know what happened on this day,” and whatever. It can do that. But that's not actually what I'm doing most of the time when I'm writing or making something. I start with an idea, but what really happens—the magic of writing and the magic of making stuff in general—is when you discover something that you didn't even know you were headed for. That's the real magic for me. Sometimes I have an idea and I want to articulate it for people, but more often than not, there's something that bothers me or something that I want to talk about, and I sit down and write, and I figure out what it is that I actually have to say and what I actually think. Every writer really knows this, and that's why the dictionary, stuff like that, those are ways of training you to get in that discovery mode. “Well, let me—oh, I bumped into this. I went looking for this one thing and then I ran into this other thing.” That's why I love the library. I don't know what system you use over there, but you look for one book in the Dewey Decimal System over here, and then, okay, here's all these other weird books next to it. Then you end up with three other books other than the one that you were looking for. That's the magic. To me, that's the magic of creative work, discovering what you didn't know you were looking for. That was particularly important for me when I was writing this book because we discovered that my wife has a condition called aphantasia. It's very rare in the population, about 2 to 3% of people. There's probably some people listening to this right now who are like, “What is this? Tell me.” Jo: Aphantasia actually more common in the creative industries. Austin: Yes. What it is, is that you don't see—when I say close your eyes and picture an apple, you don't actually see the apple in your head. You can think about an apple and the qualities of an apple, but you don't actually see it. Some people, and it's a matter of degree—some people like me, I can close my eyes, I can tell you what the apple looks like, I can tell you what colour it is, I can tell you where the shading is. Someone like my wife doesn't see the apple. She can tell you what an apple is. It's really interesting because she has a degree in architecture, which is known as a very visual field. But the thing you discover about aphantasia is, it doesn't keep people from becoming artists. In fact, it's the opposite. Someone like Ed Catmull, who co-founded Pixar, writes about it in his book, and so many of the great animators at Pixar are actually aphantasics. The reason is that they learned that they had to draw in order to see things. When you don't have a picture in your head of what you want something to look like, things appear in the drawing, and you find things that you couldn't even picture. A lot of writers actually are aphantasics. John Green discovered recently that he has aphantasia. It turns out that it's a superpower for writers, because if you don't have a picture in your head, then you don't have to translate that picture into words. A lot of writers talk about thinking in radio, like they have a constant narrator. My wife—she's probably going to kill me for talking about her this much—when she describes it to me, she's like, “Oh, it's like a radio in my head. I'm constantly hearing a voice, and it's a narrator.” I was like, “Holy shit, that would be really helpful to me.” I don't have anything like that in my head. I read Mrs Dalloway for the first time, and I gave it to her and I said, “You've got to read this book. I think this must be what it's like in your head.” And she said, “Oh my God, it is.” Part of the thing that I took away from that experience—this is a long-winded way of getting here—is that I take a lot of inspiration from people with this condition. Most of the people I know in the arts or the creative fields, they set out with this grand vision, and then they start working on the thing and it's nothing like what they had in their head, and they get really depressed: “This isn't what I had in mind.” Whereas if you set out without a picture in your head, and you just start manipulating things and you see what appears, that's more of the comic mode I was talking about earlier. What would happen if we just sat down with our materials and we started playing and we saw what appeared on the page? What if we started typing and saw what appeared, and then we played with that? That's the kind of joy. That's more like how kids operate. Kids are better at that. They're better at reacting to what's actually in front of them, instead of having these grandiose visions about what they're trying to achieve. Jo: Just coming back on the longevity of a creative career. Your books are very distinctive. You have a very distinctive visual style, your handwriting and the way the books are done. I wondered if another part of the ennui, perhaps, or the draining of the later career is that we get trapped into doing something that feels like it looks the same. Or we have a voice, and we're happy in that voice, but sometimes we want to do something completely different. For authors, we have different names. I write under two different names, and that helps. But equally— How do you define author voice, and do you ever feel like doing something completely different to your normal style? Austin: Style, in a lot of ways, is self-plagiarism. Style is the repeated things that we notice in people's work. Hitchcock talked about this in films. Wes Anderson is someone like that—Wes Anderson has a style. I'm sure that he gets really sick of it too sometimes, but you also can't help it in some ways. I thought a lot about this because people worry about style so much. A lot of the time, what we call style is what Adrian Tomine one time said: “Style is just the distance between what's in my head and what comes out of my hand.” I really like that definition. With this book, I was trying to think, “Okay, if I do another book in this series, how can I push things a little bit?” And then I was reading this article about Taco Bell. You guys have Taco Bell over there, don't you? Do you have Taco Bell? Jo: No. Austin: So Taco Bell, for people who don't know, is this American Mexican chain, and they have tacos and burritos and stuff like that. They're well known for making these really insane… it's so American, this company. They make a taco with a Doritos as a shell. Doritos are crisps, I guess. Jo: Yes, we have Doritos. Austin: Okay. I spent time in England, I just don't remember if I ate Doritos when I was in England. Anyway, I was reading this article about Taco Bell. It was really funny. They have an innovation kitchen at Taco Bell, and they have a rule about new products. The rule is called the distinctiveness rule, and the rule is: you can change the flavour or you can change the taste, or you can change the form, but you can't change both at the same time. I got really obsessed with this concept because I thought, “Well, this could be kind of interesting.” If you're someone who's had success and you're known for something, this presents an interesting thing. You could do a complete break and do something completely new, or you could try the distinctiveness rule. Okay, well, what if I play with this idea of taste versus form? What if I change the taste and keep the form? So the idea for Don't Call It Art was, what if I do another one of these books, but the taste is more like if my kids made it? It had the texture of kids' art, it had lots of scribbles in it, it was loose and messy. That was kind of the idea. The actual book ended up being more like the other books. It ended up looking like an Austin Kleon book, because I just can't help that. The thing you said about having multiple names that you write under, that's kind of what I do with the newsletter. I think of the newsletter as very different from the books. The newsletter is this twice-weekly thing where I can be a little bit more of myself. In the books, I'm this very helpful, happy version of myself. It's me, but it's me on my best day. I'm really helpful and interesting for you. The newsletter is still a highlight reel in a sense, but it's a little bit more of my weird everything-I'm-into. It's more of the unclipped version of me. The newsletter becomes a place where I can do a lot of the weird stuff that's much different from the books. I have these little projects going all the time. Sometimes I'll make a bunch of prints and put them online. Sometimes I'll make a bunch of zines on a topic I haven't covered in the book. Sometimes I'll do a mixtape. As someone who's interested in a lot of different forms and genres and just different modes of output, having something like a newsletter has been really creatively fruitful for me. It's kept me from getting too bottomed out with the books because the books do a certain thing for the reader, and as much as I'd love to do a book that was radically different, I also think I've been given a real gift with the form of my books, in that I kind of own the way that they feel and look. There aren't a lot of books that look like those books and feel like those books, and so I like playing with that form. It would be hard to get rid of it now. The pseudonym for me is kind of like the newsletter in a sense. The newsletter is a little bit more of where I get to be wild and wacky. Then the books are a little bit more of a chiselled thing. Jo: The books are perfect examples of the form, as you say, but it's interesting about the newsletter. You mentioned at the beginning that we can be drained by the admin around the work. For many people listening, a newsletter becomes admin. So how does the newsletter fit into your business? The books are traditionally published, they're very professional. How do you have your independent side, and how does all of that work together in your business? Austin: Thank you for asking that question. I run the whole show at the newsletter. The newsletter is just me, and then my wife edits it, and no one else is involved. I don't have an assistant. I don't have a team. It is just me, and that's why I love it. I control everything. I pick who gets in there. I pick everything. I love that. I grew up watching David Letterman over here, and Letterman had a nightly show, and I always thought that was killer. I thought, “Man, what a fun job. You have a show every night where you have a new guest, and you have all these wacky things going on.” It was like a variety show. I always thought that would be really fun, so the newsletter is my version of that. I started the newsletter in 2013, and it was just a Friday newsletter. It quickly became a list of 10 things I thought were worth sharing. I had a friend, Hugh MacLeod, who was like, “Hey, I have a newsletter. It's bigger than any conference you've ever gone to.” He was talking about South by Southwest here in Austin. He's like, “I have a newsletter now, and it's bigger than South by Southwest.” Jo: Oh, I remember him. Austin: He would say, “Every time I have a new print, I put it out, and there's a button, and then they buy it.” He was like, “You've got to get it. This newsletter thing is killer.” This was in 2011 or something. Jo: Yes, I still have his books. Blogging in Your Underwear or something. Austin: Totally. So Hugh's a whole different story, but I was just like, “Oh, I should really get a newsletter.” Letterman always had a top 10 list on his show. I just always thought a 10 list was really fun. And of course the books are lists of 10 too. So it just worked to have a weekly list of 10. It felt good, and it felt like an infinitely repeatable format. What I'm looking for as a creative person is an infinitely repeatable format that can go on and on and on and be new every time. So the list of 10 is something that people know the form of. It goes back to the Taco Bell thing. They know the form, but they're not sure what's going to go inside. They know it's going to be a burrito, but they don't know what's going to be in the burrito, and that's the exciting part. The newsletter, business-wise, was always a marketing cost for about the first eight years of its existence. I paid MailChimp to send it out. Then in about 2021, when I hadn't done a book for a while, my agent said, “You know, you should really think about doing a paid tier of your newsletter.” And this is to his credit, because he doesn't make anything off the newsletter. He said, “There's this thing called Substack now that makes that really easy.” So we moved to Substack in 2021 in October, and I started doing a Tuesday edition of the newsletter that was just for paid people. That grew enough that it's gone from a marketing cost to something that's almost—it's not quite as much as I make on my books, but it's close. And to be candid, my books sell pretty well. So suddenly the newsletter has become this really healthy income stream. The newsletter to me is actually the day job now. The newsletter is what really keeps the lights on. It's also the perfect mix. It's the day job, it's the thing that keeps income coming in on a regular basis, but it's also the thing I like to do the most. I'm not like a traditional writer who likes to just get lost in their book and take years and years and go away. I'm someone who loves to be doing a lot of different things. The newsletter is a perfect format for me. I'm talking myself into not quitting, actually. It's funny. It's gone from this thing that was a marketing cost to now it's a significant part of our income. That journey—such a bad word, journey—that trip has been very interesting. It's been really cool. But I'm also just lucky. I've been really lucky, and I think part of my thing is, I'm always just trying not to squander my luck. Jo: Well, the book is fantastic, and I know people are going to love it. And the newsletter, of course. So tell us— Where can people find you and your books and newsletter online? Austin: The easiest thing to do is to just go to AustinKleon.com, and that has links to everything—the books, the newsletter. I do actually keep an old-school blog still. I'm one of the few people that still maintains their blog and keeps it up to date. I'm hedging my bets because I think in the end everything will come back to a self-hosted website. I think in the end everyone's going to just go back to their little websites, or at least I hope so. Jo: Well, that was great, Austin. Thanks so much. Austin: Oh, thank you. The post Don’t Call It Art: Rediscovering Creative Joy With Austin Kleon first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How do you write when your heart is broken? How do you go back into the publishing business after years away, knowing it's a very different industry to the one you left? With Jami Albright. In the intro, InAudio is now distributing audiobooks to BookShop.org; The Feedback Loop that Makes Better Writers [Author Nation Podcast]; Bones of the Deep on Goodreads. This episode is sponsored by Publisher Rocket, which will help you get your book in front of more Amazon readers so you can spend less time marketing and more time writing. I use Publisher Rocket for researching book titles, categories, and keywords — for new books and for updating my backlist. Check it out at www.PublisherRocket.com This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn  Jami Albright is the bestselling author of the Brides on the Run romances and the co-host of the Wish I'd Known Then Podcast. Today we're talking about her new novel, The Summer That Changed Us. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.  Show Notes How Jami started writing fiction at 47 and waited a year before publishing her first book Why she fictionalised her sister's terminal cancer story rather than writing a memoir The difference between writing as therapy and writing for the reader Reactivating an email newsletter after almost two years of silence Going wide with a standalone women's fiction novel after years in KU and rom-com Letting go of the frantic hustle of indie publishing and redefining what success looks like You can find Jami at JamiAlbright.com. Transcript of the interview with Jami Albright Jo: Jami Albright is the bestselling author of the Brides on the Run romances and the co-host of the Wish I'd Known Then Podcast. Today we're talking about her new novel, The Summer That Changed Us. So, welcome to the show, Jami. Jami: Thank you, Joanna. I've made it. This is my first time on The Creative Penn, so I can retire tomorrow. Jo: And we were saying before the show, I really thought you had been on the show before, because over the years we've connected a lot. We met over a decade ago, didn't we? At the Smarter Artist Summit. I was like, “I'm sure you've been on the show,” and you haven't. So, yes, welcome. Jami: Thank you. You've been on our show, though. We did an interview with you a few years ago. Jo: Yes. Well, anyway, for anyone who doesn't follow your show— Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and publishing. Jami: Okay. So I am the co-host of the Wish I'd Known Then Podcast for Writers. Sara Rosett and I have been doing that podcast since January 2020. Little did we know what was coming, and it really saved me, just mentally, being able to talk to people every week. I never wrote a word of fiction until I was 47. I'd never really written anything. I have really bad grammar. I tell a lot of stories, and I would make up stories, but I'd never write them down because of the grammar thing. But my reading buddy had her birthday coming up in about three months, and I thought, “You know what? I'm going to write Jennifer a book for her birthday. She doesn't care if I have bad grammar.” I just thought it would be on brand. It was so hard. I wrote myself into a corner very fast. When I told her, she said, “Well, now you have to.” So I got Writing a Romance Novel for Dummies, I read that, and I started writing what is now Running from a Rock Star. But then my computer crashed and I lost it, and I was like, “Well, I'm not a writer.” So that was fine. Then I turned 50, and I told my family, “I think the only thing I regret is not finishing that book.” Of course they were like, “Well, you need to just do it again.” I was like, “No, I had 30,000 words.” A few weeks later my daughter came in and said, “Mom, I found this flash drive in my car. I think it has your book on it.” And it was 20,000 of the 30,000 words. So I was like, “Well, it's now or never.” So I joined Romance Writers of America and got involved in a critique group, and they absolutely kicked my butt for a good six months. I think every week they were surprised I came back, because it was so brutal. I knew I didn't know anything, and they taught me to write. Six months after I joined that first critique group, I won my first contest with the first 10 pages of that book. Then I just continued on. Three years later, I published Rock Star. I was going to publish it two years later, but I went to the Smarter Artist Summit, where I met you. I was advised by Julia Cant and Sean Platt and some other people to wait—preferably to have more books written. I had the second book written when the first one came out, but it still needed to be edited. So I waited a year, learned this business, and sold plasma to pay for my edits because I was poor. It was the best decision I ever made. Going to that conference, first of all, was the best $500 I've ever spent, and waiting that year really helped me learn this business. When I published the book, I had an email list of 1,200 people before the book ever came out. None of those things would have been set up had I published right after the Smarter Artist Summit, which is what I'd thought I would do, in the summer. So waiting gave me time to get everything set up so that when I published that book, it really took off from day one. I had 1,200 people on that newsletter list who wanted that book, because I had done a preview promo. Instead of putting out the whole book, I think I put out four chapters, and then people signed up. I don't know that that works anymore. Jo: I was going to say that. We should say to people, what was that, around 2016? Jami: 2017. Things have changed. Jo: Yes, things have changed, and I think this is so important. I had a question about this, and what they were implying was things that, like you said, we learned a decade ago. Things have changed. We'll come back to how you're doing it now, but just in terms of finishing off how you got started—those books did really well, didn't they? You had a couple of years there. How many books did you do? How did that go? Because you did have real success. Jami: Yes. From 2017 until really the beginning of 2021, if you look at my sales graph and my income, it just increased, increased, increased. 2019 was my very best year, but 2020 was only slightly lower as far as book sales and income. I only put out a book a year after the second book. The second book came out about six months after the first one, and after that it was about every nine months to a year that I put a book out. Everyone said you can't make money doing that, but I did. I think those books are very tropey. They're very hooky. That helped. I also think the timing of those books was really good. Rom-com was really coming up, and my rom-com is pretty wacky, but it's also really emotional too. If I get any critiques about them it's usually that “this book was way more emotional than I expected, and I was looking for something a little lighter.” They're just really wacky. They're rom-coms. Wacky circumstances. Small town, so there's all these small-town people. I just think it was a good time to release those. Those were good years. I miss those years. Jo: It's a good lesson, because it's not always up and to the right, is it? We're going to come back and revisit that. So then the pandemic hit, and on a more personal level, over the last few years, you've had a deeply difficult time that has led to The Summer That Changed Us, your latest book. So talk a bit about what's happened, why this book, and also why fictionalise it rather than write a memoir? I had that question. Jami: Okay. So 2021, my income was dropping, but it was still okay. I was still making more than enough that—thank God I don't have to make all the money in our household—but there was a level that I wanted to. At the end of 2021, my sister, who was the fourth of five sisters, had lived with cancer—non-smoker's lung cancer—for 10 years. She had the kind that, if you had a certain mutation, there were medications that worked amazingly well. Until they didn't, and then they put you on another class of that medication. So for 10 years, that's what she did. She missed work maybe three times in 10 years. People who met her never knew she had cancer unless they knew us. She just never acted like she had cancer. We would have to say, “Remember, you have cancer.” At the end of 2021, they ran out of that class of drugs. There were some being tested, but none had been approved. When she was diagnosed, she was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer. You don't survive very long having stage four lung cancer with no medication. So I saw the writing on the wall pretty much at the end of 2021, but of course I was very hopeful that they could do something. By May of 2022, it was clear things were not going well. In July of 2022, she got a six-to-twelve-week diagnosis. She just went in one day thinking she was about to get radiation, not knowing anything, and they were like, “No, we can't do radiation, and you should get your affairs in order because you have six to twelve weeks to live.” Jo: Oh. Jami: People who've been through it know this feeling. It's like being hit by a wrecking ball. It just knocks everything off your axis. Your whole world implodes into this one moment, this person that you love. I live four hours away from my family. They all still live in the same small town. I was in Dallas at my daughter's at the time, and they live about 30 miles outside of Dallas. So I went to my mom's, and I stayed there. I was there for almost six months, if you count the time I was back and forth, because she was not doing great but she was still okay. She had always rallied and come back. But once she got the diagnosis, I stayed. She would go home, but she would come back to my mom's during the day, because her husband worked. She was a teacher, so she was off during the summer. I was just there, and we all just took care of her. When she decided to go on hospice, she wanted to be at my mom's. She didn't want to be at home—they lived out in the country. She wanted to be at my mom's, so we set her up in the living room. We're redneck country people. We bring our crazy people in, our sick people, just out for everybody to see. She was just in the middle of the living room in her hospital bed, and the world just revolved around that hospital bed. Once that happened, once I knew at the end of 2021 that things were not going to go well—I really did not believe she would die. But she died a month after she went on hospice in October of 2022. That whole year, I was useless. I could not write. I couldn't think of anything to write. I write funny. How do you write funny when your heart's broken? I couldn't do it. After she died, I knew it would take a while. I knew it would maybe even be a year. But as the weeks turned into months and the months turned into years, I haven't written—except for her obituary—I've not written a word since she died until I started writing this book a year ago. I started it on April 19th. Jo: I mean, the stories of grief—there seems to be no way of escaping whatever it ends up being. You didn't choose your response. Your deep grief was just there, and you couldn't write. I feel like sometimes people just try and force it. It sounds like that's what you needed, and you have done that. So what then gave you the impetus to finally write—and to choose fiction? Jami: I didn't write memoir. I did think about doing a memoir, but I don't read memoir, and I don't know how to write it. I was already behind the eight ball, trying to write a book at all because it had been forever. I don't need to learn how to write something completely different. Plus, it just felt too close to write the memoir. I had been in Mexico City with my daughter, who has an event planning company, and we were there scouting locations for one of her events. Janet Margot lives in Mexico City, so I reached out, and we had dinner. We were talking, and she had had two big losses about the same time that my sister passed away. So we were talking about how difficult it is afterwards, just getting your head back into a space of being creative at all. She said, “You really should write this book. You should tell this story. It hits everything: middle-aged women dealing with middle-age things. You've got your parents that you were dealing with, and then your sister. You should write this story.” I said, “No, thank you. I lived it. I don't want to write it.” But it just wouldn't go away. I couldn't figure out how I would tell it. Whose point of view? I couldn't do it from the dying sister's point of view because I didn't think I could be authentic. I was afraid to tell it from multiple POVs because the book has a lot of characters in it. My family is gigantic—my immediate family, my sisters, husbands, nieces and nephews, my kids, my mom and dad—there are 35 of us. Almost all of those are in and out of my mom's house all the time. So I knew I couldn't do multiple point of view. One day, I was driving home to my mom's house, and it just hit me. The whole story laid out in front of me, and that's what I did. The first draft was pretty much just a retelling of what happened to us. I added some fictional elements, but I just wanted to get the story out. It was hard. I started Adderall on April 19th of 2025—I know that, because that's the day I started this book. I do call this the book that Adderall wrote, because I could sit and focus for three or four hours, which I'd never really been able to do. I would come to Starbucks and I would sit and write this book, and I would cry sitting in Starbucks, like a crazy person. People would walk by and slide a napkin onto the table and just keep walking, because I'm sitting there crying like crazy. I was so superstitious, and things were working so well, that I was afraid not to come and write at Starbucks. Staying at home, I think, would have been really hard. I would maybe have sunk into a depression had I done this at home. So I just wrote the whole book at Starbucks. After I wrote the first draft, I went back in and made it more fictional. But a lot of the book—especially her stuff—is a lot of what happened. She was just crazy. I tell a story in the book that, this is the absolute truth, this happened. She was in college, and she had convinced my younger sister to go to a honky-tonk club because they were having a Miss Honky-Tonk contest. Before she could get up on stage to compete as Miss Honky-Tonk, she got in a fight with some girl, and the girl hit her in the head with a bottle and split her head open. She was bleeding. My youngest sister was like, “We've got to go to the ER.” And she just refused, because there was a $300 cash prize for winning, and she needed it to make rent. So she borrowed a towel from the bartender, wrapped it around her head, competed with that bloody towel on her head, and won that stupid contest. That story in and of itself was my sister. Everything about her is in that story. So a lot of the stories in there happened to her in one way or another. What happens to June in the book happened to my sister. Jo: This is interesting, because the same thing memoir writers face is something perhaps you face: how much of the writing is therapy and how much is for the reader? You said you sat there crying. Absolutely, writing for therapy is very important—but when you come to edit, there might be things that your therapy side of you is like, “That's so important to me.” How do you kill your darlings when you're editing your sister's life? Jami: That was hard. I had to take out a lot of what was in the first draft, mostly the stories. Once she came home on hospice, it was just a steady stream of people coming in, and everybody had a story about her. What I found in editing was that Hope, the main character, was mostly a spectator in those scenes instead of being actively part of them. So I had to take those out, because they didn't serve the purpose of the book. I committed early on to: while I wanted to tell the story, I did not want it to be self-indulgent. I did not want it to be a therapy session that I sold to people as a story. Because of that, I think that really helped. I really did think about that as I was revising. I sent it to a developmental editor, and I don't know how great she was, but she gave me some really good advice about a couple of things. One was, “There's just not enough conflict in this book. You say that Hope and the father have this really contentious relationship, yet we don't see it. There's a little bit of it here and there, but you're not really digging into that.” It's hard, because while the rest of the world doesn't know, my family knows that this is a lot of our story. I just had to let that go and not worry about what my family thought. They had all given me permission. I'd sort of said, “I want to do this. Are you guys okay with that?” I talked to her husband, and everybody was okay with me doing it. But I couldn't worry about what they were going to think. I would repeat to myself: if they want to tell this story, they can write their own book. I'm writing what I saw and telling a fictionalised story that will hopefully honour her, but also help other people feel like they're being seen, and also be entertaining. If you're going to write a book, it needs to be somewhat entertaining. Jo: I don't think you can help yourself. You're funny. Jami: Yes. The book is really funny. I tell people that and they're like, “Hmm, really?” And I'm like, “It is really funny.” But it's also really sad. Jo: Well, I think that's the truth—to defend myself. There is a lot of humour in grief. There is death and dying, and it's a human condition. Jami: It is a human condition, yep. Jo: There's comedy in all of the human condition. That's just the way it is, right? I heard you mention on an interview, I can't remember where it was, that you feel very connected to this book, and you're worried that people judging it or giving it a bad review might feel like an insult to your sister. How are you dealing with these kinds of fears about how to separate ourselves from our books? Jami: I've been in therapy—like, literal therapy—for that, because I felt like that would be hard. So far, I've only gotten a few reviews back. They've all been good reviews. I haven't had anyone say they hate it. I just have had to separate myself. It's not personal. Reviews are never personal. People not liking your book is never personal. That's just a mindset. I've had to change my mind about that. Knowing that's a pitfall I could fall into, I really keep it top of mind. My family knows that's an issue, so they know they have to pull me out of that hole if I drop in. So that's really how I've handled it so far. We'll see. Jo: Maybe it's time as well. You're almost back to the “book is your baby” situation. As the years pass, the book almost becomes separate, doesn't it? How you feel about your first bride book is probably like, “It's not even me anymore.” Jami: Right. I learned early that your book isn't really your baby. Once you publish it, it's your product. So that has never been very hard for me. I still hate bad reviews, and I take them personally like everybody else does, if I let myself. But ultimately, this is a book that I'm putting out for entertainment. Yes, it's very personal. Yes, it means a lot to me. But if people don't like it, it isn't because they don't like my dead sister. They just don't like my writing. Jo: It's tough, but it's good to talk about, because this is something many people feel. My memoir Pilgrimage—it's not the same at all—but I was just so scared of judgment. The fear of judgment. What people would think of me. That's kind of different, but— It's this question of how it'll land. The reality is, not many people read these books anyway. Jami: Well, I have worried about how it would land, but mostly I worry about how it would land with the people I love. My mom read it last week. I was there while she was reading it. That was no fun. She laughed, but it was devastating to her. She's like, “It's great, and I hate it.” Because it is so raw and real to her still—well, to all of us. That's where I worry, how it's going to land with them. But again, I've had to let that go. I had to let it go during the writing, because if I worried about that, then I would not have told an honest story. That was another thing—I didn't want it to be self-indulgent, and I wanted it to be honest. As honest as I could make it, even to the point of making people uncomfortable. There's a line. Once you cross it, there's no getting you back after that. So I walked that line really carefully, because I did want it to be honest about how I felt, how other people I know who've been through something like this feel. Also, just relationships. Because when you're in a big family like my sisters and I—we adore each other, but we can also go toe-to-toe real fast. It can get ugly, because we know each other really well. We're also a little bit redneck, so we don't pull any punches. Your sisters are always the most honest people in your life. I wanted that to be true in this book too—both sides of that story. Jo: Let's circle back to the business stuff and some of the things we talked about, because obviously this has been a really difficult time. There was no way to deal with it in any other way, but your business has changed. You had these great few years, good sales, and then you had other priorities. So how are you rebooting the business? Lots of people end up taking a few years out for whatever reason. How are you rebooting the business to try and sell some books? Jami: To be honest, I have the remnants of a business. I have tried over the last four years to run some ads to get the Bride's books going, but here's something that's very interesting, and if somebody can tell me why this happened, I would love to hear it. These books that have sold so many books—I mean, so many books—I could not give them away. It didn't matter what I did. I changed covers, I changed blurbs, I put them on sale, I took them off sale, I ran ads. Ads wouldn't really move the needle. I know that at a certain point, when you haven't published and your books get pushed down in the algorithm, that is an uphill battle. But it was almost like, one day they just fell off, and once they started falling, I could not get them back. I just couldn't. So that I didn't make myself crazy—because also during this time, I was just trying to keep my head above water—when I would deal with my books or go into my dashboard, I would feel horrible. I was already feeling horrible, so I didn't need to feel more horrible. So I just sort of let them go after a certain point. I've now started running some Facebook ads. I have one Facebook ad that's working really well, knock on wood, right now for my first Bride's book. The problem is, this book and my Bride's books are different. The voice and the tone are the same, but they're really different in a lot of ways. They're the same in a lot of ways. This book doesn't have any sex; the other books don't have anybody dying. But some of the things are really similar. So I may have some crossover. For whatever reason, this ad is working. My book one is ranked better than it's been ranked in forever—really good. I'm not spending a ton of money to do it. So I don't know what changed. I don't know if I'll ever know. I've revised my newsletter, and that's worked well. I still have around a 35 to 40% open rate on a newsletter that I didn't send out for almost two years. I was sending it out, but then I kind of stopped, and then I started again. Jo: I was going to ask you about that, because I often get people emailing me. They're like, “I have a really old newsletter from several years ago. I haven't emailed them for years.” So what did you say in that first email? Like, “Hey, I'm back”? Jami: I mean, I'm just like, “Remember me?” It really was kind of like that. Just, “I'm back. You guys know life has happened. I'm sure you understand. If you're still here, thank you so much. I have been writing. I have this book that I think some of you will really love.” That's really how it was. From the first email, even that first email had a higher open rate. I think it was close to 45%. I had not sent out a newsletter in two years literally. Jo: People were like, “What happened?” Jami: They're like, “Oh, she didn't die. That was her sister, not her.” But I've just been really fortunate. They've been really encouraging. Every time I send one out, I get really encouraging emails back. So I've sent out about the book. The majority of my readers are KU readers because my books are in KU. But this book is going wide. One of the things I'm doing because I have been a little concerned about… Janet Margot does a lot of Amazon ads stuff and she knows a lot about Amazon. We've talked a lot about whether I should use my real name, my pen name, or come up with another name. Should I worry about my readers buying the book and messing up my Also Boughts? All of those things, because my readers are romance readers. Some of them read women's fiction, but for the most part, they're romance readers. I've decided to stick with Jami Albright and not worry about it. There are just things you can't control, so I've had to hold everything with a really open hand with this book. I am offering the book on my website. I'm selling it at $7.99—I chose a high price point, because I just feel like, to sit with the other books that I want it to sit with, I need that price point. So I'm offering it on my website, starting at the end of this week, for $5. If they're KU readers and they don't buy books, but they want the book, they can get it for $5 on my website, which I think is reasonable. Jo: Mm. Absolutely. Jami: If that's too much for them, I understand and I get it. Time, things are hard right now, and if they can't do that, it's going to be in libraries, so they can request it at their library. But right now that's the plan. Hopefully that helps with the Also Boughts a little bit too. Even though, again, I just can't worry about those things. As a gift to my readers, I want to do this for them as well—give them a discount. Jo: And obviously this is a standalone, right? This is not— Jami: Yes, it is. Jo: Again, a bit like memoir, all the book marketing we talk about in fiction is “write a series.” It's much easier. So it is difficult to market a standalone in general. And this is something that happened, so it is a standalone situation. So do you feel like you're back in terms of writing? Have you got plans for more books, or is this a business for you going forward? Do you feel like you want to re-enter this whole world? Jami: I do. I have an idea for a book similar to this one—not in the same kind of genre, I mean, of women's fiction, kind of midlife fiction stuff. I have an idea. I had nothing for months and months and months, and a couple of months ago, this idea kind of came to me. I was like, “Oh, that's not bad.” So I'm mulling it over—I do a lot of mulling—and that's the next book I think I will write. I don't know that I'll write rom-coms again. Not because I don't love them. I do, and I love my rom-coms. But I'm just different. You do not go through something like this and come out on the other side the same. I don't know that I could carry an entire rom-com through without it being even more emotional than mine are now. So for right now, I'm going to write another one of these kinds of books where it's got a lot of emotion, family dynamic, tension and dynamics. Jo: That's great. I do feel like once you've written the book that was waiting—your sister's book—then more things arrive, and it's great to hear that that is arriving for you. And of course, we change. One of the nice things about writing for the long term and building more of a name brand is that you change, and your readers either follow you or they don't, but it's your life. So I think that's a good reason to have one pen name. I obviously have two, but my fiction pen name I've written all kinds of genres under. Why else would we keep doing this? I don't want to write the same book over and over again. Jami: Right. Believe me, I've had to eat a lot of crow over the last four years, and it's tasty with ketchup. I have decided that a lot of the stuff I said is true: about you write in one genre, you give the people exactly what they want, and you give it to them over and over again. I believe all of that. I still believe those things. It's just that I don't know that I'm capable of doing that right now. Also, I'm older. I am about doing the things that bring me joy and are not a drudgery. I want to say this, because I miss the success. I miss who I thought I was during that time. I miss the recognition. I'll freely admit it. I miss being the person doing the thing that everybody said couldn't be done. “You can't make money with one book a year.” Well, watch me. And I did. I miss that. What I don't miss, and I've had to be really, really honest with myself, which has been difficult—I don't miss the anxiety that came with that. There was a lot of franticness. I think that if you are in a lot of groups, you see that franticness. I've had to step back, like I've had to step back, and then go back into these groups, you hear authors and see authors, and there's just this frantic sense that we're losing everything, and we have to hold on so tight to everything. I was like that. I checked my ads constantly. I checked my dashboard constantly. My mom used to say, “This should be fun.” I'm like, “Mom, it's a business. It's not fun.” But I recognise that I loved that so much that I held onto it so tight. I don't want to go back to that. I don't have the energy for that. Since this all happened, I've gained four more grandchildren than I had. I have six grandchildren now. I want to spend time with them. I want to spend time with my adult children. I want to spend time with my mom and dad. So I can't be frantic about my sales—are they going up, are they dropping?—and give emotionally to the people I love in my life. If the last four years have taught me anything, it is that the one thing you can never get back is time. You can never get it back, and that is so important to me right now. With this book—and one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you when we were talking about when I would do it—I wanted to do it before it came out, because I've already won. Writing this book, writing a book that honours the bravest person I've ever known and doing the second-hardest thing that I've ever had to do, is the win. That's the win. Whatever happens with this book afterwards is just what happens with this book afterwards. It doesn't change who I am, and you told me that when we were in Vegas two years ago. That conversation really changed a lot for me, because you said, “You are a successful author.” I was still trying to come up with a plan to be a successful author again, and you were like, “You are a successful author. You've had success. That makes you a successful author. You don't have to chase that.” That changed so much of my thinking. If I could leave listeners with anything, it is that we need to recognise the things we can't control and just deal with the things we can control. That's kind of how my sister lived. She could not control her cancer, but she could control how she responded to it and how she went forward. I think a lot of times, when bad things happen, we want to make sense of them. We want a reason for them. And a lot of times there's just no reason. There's no reason my sister died. There's no reason she left two kids and a husband devastated and a family that just has a giant hole in it. There's no reason for that. What defines us is not figuring out why that happened. It's what we do with that going forward. I think that's important for me to remember when I start getting caught up in all the franticness of this business. Jo: Yes. Or not, as the case may be. You can just let the book be what it is. And I do feel like these deeper books, they're more slow burn. You wrote books that ran, ran like the bride. Now we're not running like the bride. Jami: I'm tired. I don't run unless a wild animal's chasing me. Jo: Exactly. Look, we're out of time, but just tell people, if they haven't listened, a bit about your podcast, Wish I'd Known Then with Sara Rosett. Tell people what they can find over on that podcast and why you're still doing it. You've been doing it throughout the whole time. While not writing, you've still been podcasting. Jami: It absolutely saved my life. It's kept me in this business. While I haven't been publishing, I still know what's going on. I know about direct sales, I know about what's happening behind the scenes, with Facebook ads. I've kept in touch with those things because of our podcast. It's an interview podcast like yours, but we talk to people about what they wish they'd known about indie publishing. Most people have some certain thing that they've been working on or doing, and we talk to them a little bit about that too. We ask the same questions every week to every guest, and it's so interesting how different the answers are, and yet how similar they are. I think that helps when you're going through it and you're like, “God, I must be the only one feeling this way.” But you tune into a podcast, and you hear week after week, “Oh, no, there are other people feeling the same way I'm feeling, or struggling with the same things I'm struggling with.” Hopefully we give people things to shoot for and to aspire to. We have some amazing guests. They've all been really gracious and really honest. I don't know if it's the questions, or just because Sara and I are our style, but they're really honest with us when they answer the questions. Jo: It's a great show. I recommend it a lot. Jami: Thank you. Jo: Where can people find you and your books online? Jami: You can find me at JamiAlbright.com—that's J-A-M-I-Albright.com. I'm on all the socials as Jami Albright Author. My books are on Amazon right now, but this book is actually now on all the retailers. So that's where you can find me. Jo: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Jami. That was great. Jami: It was an honour. Thank you so much.The post Writing Through Grief And Rebooting an Indie Author Business With Jami Albright first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How is AI transforming accessibility for indie authors — and why should you care even if you consider yourself able-bodied? What happens when the tools designed to help people with disabilities end up making everyone's creative business better? Jeff Adams, accessibility expert and romance author, explores how AI is opening doors that were previously closed. In the intro, Spotify Audiobook Innovations; The Economics of Convention Life [The Indy Author]; Friction in your Author Business [Self-Publishing with ALLi]. Today's show is sponsored by Draft2Digital, self-publishing with support, where you can get free formatting, free distribution to multiple stores, and a host of other benefits. Just go to www.draft2digital.com to get started. This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn  Jeff Adams is the author of YA thrillers and gay romance, and the co-author of Content for Everyone, a practical guide for creative entrepreneurs to produce accessible and usable web content. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.  Show Notes How ending a long-running podcast made space for more writing — and how to know when it's time to let go of a good thing What accessibility really means for indie authors and why your digital content might be excluding part of your audience How AI agents like Claude Cowork are removing physical and cognitive barriers for authors with disabilities, chronic pain, or limited energy The culture of shame around AI use in the writing community and why blanket anti-AI statements can be ableist Practical tools including NotebookLM, ElevenReader, and ChatGPT for marketing copy, metadata management, and multimodal research Exciting futures in personalised reading, real-time translation, and AI browser agents that could change how everyone interacts online You can find Jeff at JeffAdamsWrites.com. Jeff also now has a SubStack at contentforeveryone.substack.com Transcript of the interview with Jeff Adams Jo: Jeff Adams is the author of YA thrillers and gay romance, and the co-author of Content for Everyone, a practical guide for creative entrepreneurs to produce accessible and usable web content. Welcome back to the show, Jeff. Jeff: Thanks so much, Jo. It's good to be back. Jo: It is. You were last on the show in March 2023, so over three years ago now. Give us a bit of an update on your writing and publishing business and what it looks like at the moment. Jeff: Sure. I think the biggest thing that happened is that my husband Will, who is also a writer, we ended the Big Gay Fiction Podcast at the end of 2024, after 470-something episodes. It was basically time to do that. So we both focused on writing from that point. In 2025 we had some of our biggest successes in getting writing out into the world. I refound my groove—my difficulty in writing went away finally. We talked a little bit about that back in 2023 too. Will started a new pen name and started producing again, and it was really good to be able to move in that direction. Jo: Was this the hockey romance that really hit at the right time? Jeff: You know, I wish I could have capitalised more on Heated Rivalry when it came out, but I did get hockey books out, and I think I did get to ride that wave a little bit there too. Jo: Yes, and if people don't know about that, that was a super popular streaming series. Was that based on a book? Jeff: It was, yes. Rachel Reid was the author of that book and that series that then Jacob Tierney optioned and made into what fairly turned into a global phenomenon at the end of 2025. Jo: Yes, absolutely. Although I particularly liked Red, White and Royal Blue. That was the one I liked. Not so much into hockey. But anyway, I just wanted to ask you about the Big Gay Fiction Podcast. As you say, you did hundreds of episodes over many years. You and I met over podcasting. You've had lots of connections with people. You ended it, and I know you struggled with ending it, but it sounds like it went really well for you. So maybe you could talk a bit about— How do you know when it's time to end something—a good thing rather than something bad? Does that make more space for writing, essentially? Jeff: It absolutely did make more space for writing for both of us, in particular for me because I have a day job. I balance everything on the creative side with the day job. Will and I had been talking about it for over a year. It just was like, it's really time. After nine years, getting to that 470 mark, we thought about trying to get to 10 years and we thought about, if not 10, then getting to 500 and ending on a milestone. As we looked at everything in our creative business, it was like, this is fun, we enjoy it, but we're not getting as much out of it as we might be if we were actually also writing books, which we also really want to do. It became a time thing and what was the best use of the time. We absolutely miss it occasionally. The whole Heated Rivalry thing, I would've loved to have had episodes to talk about that on, but in the long run, it was worth it. Jo: I mean, one of the things with a podcast, particularly around fiction, was that it was a marketing angle for your fiction. This show is a marketing angle mainly for my nonfiction. So what did you replace the podcast with, in terms of book marketing? Jeff: It was really stepped-up email marketing. I'd always had a list. Will started a list, of course, as he started his new pen name. So it was really turning on that, focusing on that, getting some email marketing with a Bargain Booksy and a Fussy Librarian and a BookBub occasionally to do that work. To be honest, even though we covered things in our genre that if you like what we're talking about, you should like our books, there was never as much of a connection there as you'd want there to be. Even from that book marketing angle, these other things that we can do, it's also a better spend of the money to get those types of promos than it was to continue running the show. Jo: Yes, that is interesting. I mean, obviously I think about podcasting a lot since I have this one, and I put Books and Travel on a hiatus and that was meant to help my fiction and definitely didn't help my fiction sales. But I want to bring it back again because I love doing it. Do you have this hankering sometimes? Do you think you'd ever do the podcast again? Because you are also quite into all the technical stuff and all that. Jeff: It's possible. I've toyed with the idea of doing a short accessibility podcast geared towards creatives, tilting to the same audience that Content for Everyone does. Then I come back and look at the time—is my time better served writing new fiction or perhaps starting a Substack, which I also toy with the idea of, for accessibility stuff? So it bounces around in my head to do another show, but I haven't really decided to jump on that yet. Jo: Yes, and I think that waiting is really good. As you say, you quit a big thing and you don't have to rush to fill it again. I love that you guys are writing more books. So I wanted us to talk about that up front because I know people who listen to this show—I encourage people to start podcasts if you want to, but equally it can take a lot of time. So that's fantastic. Now, you mentioned accessibility, and I feel like the word can be quite difficult for people. So let's just start with a definition. What is accessibility? Why do you care and why should we care? Jeff: So accessibility is really about making sure that whatever the thing is, whether it's something out in the physical world or in the online world, that everybody has access to it. Access to the information, access to getting into a building or being able to cross the street appropriately, whatever that is—that the accessibility of the thing is high. So that regardless of who is approaching it, they can interact with whatever the thing is. If we put that into the digital world, it's about making sure that text on a screen can be perceived by anybody, whether they're trying to read it visually or if they're trying to read it through a screen reader or through a braille monitor. Whatever that is, they need to be able to interact with it, get the information they need, do all the functions of whatever it is on the screen. Check out on Amazon, check out at their favourite e-commerce place, be able to get the products in their cart, check out, et cetera. For creatives, it's about the things that we do: the websites that we build for ourselves, the e-commerce platforms that we use, our email marketing, our social media posts. Making all of that as accessible as we can so that we're not perhaps missing a part of our audience or our prospective audience from being able to engage with our work and in turn, hopefully, buy our books and enjoy our books and become a fan. This became important to me because of my day job. I hadn't really considered this—like, I think most people don't—until I started working at UsableNet. It's going to be 15 years I've been at that company come this autumn, and I really started to see the impacts because UsableNet is all about accessibility on the digital front. I really started to learn, being a project manager for them, what all of that meant and how it impacted people who couldn't buy something online, couldn't book a hotel room, couldn't book an airline ticket. It just really became something I got passionate about. I ended up writing the book because I realised that nobody talks to creatives about this. Nobody tells the independent author what they should do to help make their digital stuff accessible so that they don't miss people. I never expected my day job to interact with my creative side so much, but this certainly has over the last few years. Jo: I mean, has it got better? Like we said, you were on here three years ago. We did talk about some of the things around EPUB formats and taking off DRM and what we need to do on our websites—labelling images, for example, and that kind of thing. Do you think accessibility has gotten better? Jeff: I think the awareness of it has improved, both within the creative community and in the broader web ecosphere, that the awareness is better. There's so much knowledge that needs to go into creating something that is accessible. Sometimes there's so much that you have to think about with colours and alt tags on images and all the little bits and pieces, if it doesn't really come to muscle memory, it's easy for it to fall off. There's a survey that's done by WebAIM every year about the top one million homepages out in the universe, and they surveyed those for just the things that an automated scan can detect, which is a small portion of overall accessibility, and the number of errors across that top million actually ticked up this year. Even though there's all these laws around the world—people get sued all the time in the US—the number of errors ticked up for the first time in a few years. So I think the awareness is up, but I think being able to take action on it and make the time to take action on it isn't where it needs to be. Jo: So last time you gave us all those tips. I'll refer people back to that and also to your book Content for Everyone, which has got loads of great stuff in. I wanted to talk to you for this show because I was sitting watching Claude Cowork—now I use Claude Code a lot more—but updating 140 titles on IngramSpark, where me clicking things and there's like 15 clicks per record on IngramSpark updates for pricing, is an absolute nightmare. I was watching the AI do the work and I realised this isn't just saving me time, it's actually saving my wrist and my arm from repetitive strain injury. That's when I thought about this accessibility thing. As you mentioned, for example being physically accessible into a building, say someone's in a wheelchair, they can't necessarily get into a building if there's no ramp. I was thinking that for many years, being an indie author, being a writer online, there's also been these physical barriers because there's a lot of plumbing and clicking for us. So I wondered, starting with an attitude around a shift in who this is opening up to— How is AI starting to help people with these accessibility issues? Jeff: Yes, there's so much opportunity around this. We should note, just to timestamp this, that we're talking on 14th April 2026, because who knows what will change, even in an hour from now. I think Cowork was one of the first things that we saw, and that's only been out since the very top of this year. Being able to do actual agentic tasks. Other things have sort of gotten there, but Cowork really opened it up. You mentioned the repetitive stress that you would've had clicking all of those forms on IngramSpark across 140 books. But there's that type of stress, chronic pain, cognitive drain for somebody who may have some cognitive disability and trying to work through that form. The cognitive energy just might drain out and maybe knock them out for several days after trying to get through that, or the tasks take them multiple days to do. Someone who has lower vision, someone who's trying to work through that form with a screen reader—all of that draws energy, draws focus. Now we've got something where, with plain language, we could say something like: here's all my pricing information, I've logged into IngramSpark, go update these books. Obviously the prompt's going to be a little more than that, but in broad terms, that's what we're going to tell it. Jo: Hmm. Jeff: And being able to have it go through and do the thing. If it gets stuck, have it come back and say, “Hey, I've got trouble with this. Please help me.” That can just free up so much of the drains that people can have—the things that can take them out of doing the part of the work that they need to do for an author business. They can go write the book through whatever process you're going to use to do that, rather than getting caught up in something like having to update all those books on IngramSpark. Jo: You mentioned writing the book there. I have this real sense of being an able-bodied indie author in terms of my computer use and my ability to write a whole book, a 70,000-word thriller that I write regularly. We're all special in some way, but I do have a reasonably normal brain where I can do this work without too much strain. It's hard work, but I can do it. I meet people who are now using AI to help them write, to help them organise their work—maybe someone has dyslexia or ADHD or cognitive issues or pain—there's just so many things that I take for granted that don't affect me. I hear from people who, at this point in time in the community, are almost shamed for using AI to write. So I wanted to bring this up to discuss it under the terms of accessibility. Do you have any thoughts on that? Jeff: I have real difficulty with people who will say anything in the broad range of, “I don't need to use this thing, and therefore you should not either.” Which is adjacent to indie anti-AI speak that there is out there. Certainly we're living right now at probably the highest point that it's ever been, where more and more there's a sentiment towards not using AI for whatever the reason is. I totally respect that people can have concerns about the environment and about energy use and water use, et cetera. Not to mention all the other things that are on the more difficult side of AI. To shame someone who may not be able to put their story out there without the use of that AI, whichever one they're using, or to shame them because they're using AI to run part of their business—updating IngramSpark, doing other things like that—I think it can come down to there being some ableism there. Ther is some privilege behind that too, where they're just like, “I don't need this, and you shouldn't have it either.” I want to give people just a sliver of an idea of what this can mean for someone who is disabled and what AI can unlock for them. There is a person on LinkedIn that I follow whose name is Hannah Desmond. She's an ADHD coach and a former software developer, and very recently she posted this on LinkedIn. This is a paraphrase of what she said, but: having something that can meet you where you are and help you bridge that gap is what I think I have found so helpful about using AI. Here's what I keep coming back to. Without that support, I wasn't more motivated or more capable. I was just stuck. That's the bit that gets lost. We've been taught that struggling is how you know you're doing it properly. So when something reduces the struggle, it can feel wrong—even when it's the thing that actually makes the work possible. Because there's a difference between avoiding thinking and being able to think at all. I think that rounds it up. She's talking about her time as a software developer, but you can apply that to any realm of AI when we're thinking about trying to shame someone for why they may be using it. We may not know that they have a disability because we don't always share that part of ourselves. So I really feel strongly about that and how we are in this culture of shame. Jo: Yes. It drives me up the wall, actually. But I will also say: you don't have to have a disability or accessibility issues in order to use AI in whatever way you personally decide is okay—talking to the listeners now. I think Orna Ross from the Alliance of Independent Authors says it well, which is you should have your own AI policy. So you personally decide where your lines are, how it helps you, what you want to keep for you, and what you want help with. I was also thinking in terms of accessibility around money. Again, for many of us, professional cover design, professional editing, professional human-level translation, these are things that are pretty pricey for many people. So again, this makes it more accessible. One of the reasons we got into the indie way and being indie authors was to try and remove the barriers to entry to people who have been excluded from the environment of publishing. So, yes, it is really hard to talk about this, and yet that's why I wanted to talk about it, because— There's so many variables for each individual and there's no situation that's the same, really, is there? Jeff: No, not at all. The things that I may need to do my work in the most efficient way possible is different from the way that you're going to work, is different than the way my husband's going to work, is different than every other person and the way that they're going to work. Which is why any kind of blanket statement about “I don't need something and therefore you shouldn't need it either” can just be so problematic, because we have no idea what someone else is going through. Either it's a permanent part of their lives or maybe it's something that is happening temporarily with them where they might need to leverage other tools. Jo: Yes. Talking about that temporary, I think I really got the first sense of this when I had COVID the first time, which was really bad. I remember I was so sick, the only thing I could do was listen to an audiobook. I couldn't think, I couldn't read. It was really probably months of not having my brain back. Then the other thing that's happened as I age, as women age, is menopause kicks in and the brain fog is a real thing. I've heard from other people too who've said having Claude or whoever, an AI tool, to help with the brain fog is so important because otherwise I just wouldn't be able to gather my thoughts. Again, as you said— Even if we don't need these things now, it's quite likely we're going to need them at some point, given ageing, given the potential for injury and disease. I mean, we don't escape this alive, do we? Jeff: Yes, that's a great point because unless we're extremely lucky as individuals, we're all likely to have some sort of a disability in our lives at some point. I know for me, as I age and my eyes get more and more tired after being in front of a screen all day for work, and then whatever creative stuff I do in the afternoon on a book—when it comes near bedtime and I do want to read, I probably want to do that with an audiobook, much more audio, especially for any long reading project. That can also be like, if I have a long document or a long article to read, I am likely to give it to ElevenReader, let it load itself up, and then listen to it, because I take the information in better than trying to follow words across a screen. Jo: Yes. Jonathan, my husband, now also listens to a lot of academic papers on ElevenReader. Most of us will know it as where we publish some audiobooks from ElevenLabs, or you can also publish other things there. So it is super useful to think about what we can do with ElevenReader. Another thing that I found really useful recently is NotebookLM. On NotebookLM, there is a free tier. You can put various things in there and then create a custom audio. So this is something I've been doing as part of research. You can put in, say, 10 YouTube videos or some PDFs or your book or whatever, and then you can create a custom audio. Then I'll go for a walk and I'll listen to the custom audio, and then I'll go back and look at the detail of what it was. It gives me the framework of whatever I'm thinking about on a broader level, and then I can come back to the details. So again, it's this multimodal approach that can help us manage our energy, I guess. Jeff: And it's all about the managing of the energy, I think, too. That is a great way to think about the accessibility of it all. You mentioned a great use there for NotebookLM. That could also be putting your book in there and having it help you build a world bible or something like that. Or building marketing materials off of that. There's a lot of things now that NotebookLM can do in terms of helping you create FAQs maybe for a newsletter or for your website, and building video stuff off of the material that it has. So there's a lot of options there, and ever-growing options that can be useful for someone to manage any number of the things that they may need in their creative business. Jo: Yes. In fact, talking about Claude, there are a lot of Claude plugins now, skills and integrations. Shopify just released a Claude plugin and many of us now have Shopify stores. I have a lot of products with a lot of different variations and the metadata. There's so much metadata. And again, I'm just so pleased now that I can work with Cowork and get it to actually update directly into Shopify. In fact, coming back, you mentioned updating alt tags earlier. That's something again that AI could help you update—the back list of your alt tags on a website. I've now got my Cowork doing EPUBs so I could finally update all my EPUBs with back matter and all of this kind of thing. So I feel like perhaps we could go beyond accessibility to talk about amplification. All the things that we didn't do because it was too tiring and we just couldn't be bothered, or it would just be way too much work, that now it's opened up as a possibility because of these tools. Jeff: Absolutely. I mean, you look at a backlist as large as yours and the things that you're now able to do. I didn't know that Claude had a Shopify plugin. So the abilities that we have now to maybe do things in the business that we hadn't before. One of the things I've been working with Claude on is rewriting my website and creating a more proper website for Will. I'm really making sure that it is not only SEO prepared but also GEO prepared, with all the metadata and all the backend code schema that it needs so that LLMs can find me, can understand what I do, can understand the books, branch out to the other areas that it needs to. Doing that through WordPress would've been so much more difficult, even with Claude, that to be able to rewrite the site in a way that is going to let me manage it better so that I will do it on a more consistent basis. Whatever that thing is, we're now able to do these things. That could be updating keywords in Amazon or making sure we're aligned across all of the sales platforms that we might be on and things like that, that Claude can do and do well. Jo: Yes, I think marketing is just the killer app really for people, isn't it? I think most authors do not enjoy marketing. I find Claude better for creative work, for strategic work, for doing work through Cowork or Code, but— ChatGPT with marketing copy is very, very good. So I've actually been using that as we record this. I've got a Kickstarter launching next week, so I've been getting it to do ad copy and social media copy and all that kind of thing. This is stuff when you have to produce—give me 20 taglines, give me 20 hooks, give me another 20 and another 20. I mean, we just cannot do it as humans, right? Jeff: Yes, I have found GPT wildly helpful. I mentioned trying to get Bargain Booksy and Fussy Librarian promos. Jo: Mm. Jeff: And you have to give it the marketing hook, and it can't just be the blurb that's on Amazon—it's got to be something fresh, and they each have slightly different requirements. Having GPT—here's the blurb, give me a dozen different options—and then I may take pieces of all of them and create one of my own. But it reworks that much faster than my brain was ever going to try to find the right thing I want to give to Bargain Booksy. Jo: Yes, you are right. Or it says write this in 300 characters or less. Jeff: Yes. Jo: I do exactly the same. That kind of transformative work can be really good. In fact, there was somebody I know who has been rampantly anti-AI for years and then said, “Would this help me? I have to do a synopsis for an agent, so I've got this 100,000-word book and it needs to be a 10-page synopsis. How would I do that with AI?” So I was encouraging her to take each chapter and ask it to summarise the chapter, and of course read through it and everything. But I mean, doing a synopsis once you've actually written a book—that can be super useful. So I think what we're saying is— There are levels of need in terms of both the author and the audience. Then there are levels of your personal use from one end of the spectrum to the other in terms of how far you want to go in every area of the business. And in that way, it's just different for everyone. Jeff: Yes, and I think getting to that mindset shift that we were talking about a little bit—it can be so easy to dip your toes in. That one author came to you and said, “Do you think it could do this?” And I think that's the beginning exploratory area for perhaps anyone. People are going to hear us talk about this and it might inspire them to go try something that we've talked about. But these things, whether it's Claude or GPT or Gemini or whichever one it is, you can come to it and say, “I'm an author, I have X, Y, Z going on in my life”—whether that's a disability, whether that's a time constraint because you have a day job and maybe you have kids and a family that need your attention—”I have these time constraints, I want to do X, Y, and Z in my business. How can you help me with that?” It's going to tell you what it can do to help you with that. I would even say, if you have the ability to have multiples of these, you could ask the same question to GPT and Claude, and they're going to give you similar answers in some instances, but they may also have different ones because of the abilities that the different platforms have around these things as well. That can help you make that mindset shift of, “Well, now I see that it can do that. Could it also do this?” And then ask it if it could do that. Because I know for me, Jo, I've taken so much from you and your journey with Cowork that it's like, “Oh, she did that. I wonder if I could do this.” And all of that piles on top of itself. Then eventually I think your brain starts to think on its own, “Oh, I have to do this task. Can Claude maybe do this for me? Let's go find out.” Jo: Yes, and if it couldn't do it for you yesterday, you never know, it might be able to do it tomorrow. Jeff: Right? Because I haven't tested yet its new ability to actually use your computer. Jo: Mm. Jeff: And I'm curious what that might open up. Because one of the things that I've seen that I wish it would do is be able to take the EPUB that's on my drive and actually put it into a platform I'm trying to upload to. Cowork on its own hasn't been able to cross that barrier, but I wonder if with computer use added to that, if it could. Like, “here's the EPUB, upload that over there,” be able to pick it from the file picker, essentially. Jo: Yes. I think, well, a little tip for everyone: I wouldn't give access to your entire file system to the AI. Jeff: That's a good point too. Jo: Yes. I have a Claude folder in my drive and it only has access there. So if you put files in that drive, it might be able to do that. But I know what you mean. I have been using it to help me publish things in German on KDP. Now I can use the browser, so you can actually do that. In terms of uploading the actual file, I know what you mean. These things will change. As we record this, again middle of April, we are almost about to get the next models being Mythos, which might be Claude 4.7 Opus, or also ChatGPT has a new model coming, and these models are getting very powerful. With every shift they can do more things. So as you say, the very first thing to do is ask it, “I want to do this—what are my options?” And some of them, for example, doing an AI-narrated audiobook, ChatGPT and Claude don't do that. You want ElevenLabs or one of the other services for that, but they can tell you what your options are. So that's one thing, but I wondered if you have any thoughts on the gaps that you are seeing. You mentioned one there around file uploads, but— What do you hope might come and some of the things that might be exciting if they arrive? Because you never know, they might be here already. Jeff: There's certainly some movement in some areas. One of the things I'll share is, in March I was at the 2026 CSUN Assistive Technology Conference—CSUN is California State University, Northridge—and they've run this conference for some 40 years now. One of the sessions I went to was from Tara Maisel—I hope I'm pronouncing her last name right. She's a senior project manager in books accessibility at Amazon, and she was doing a session specifically on readability. She had all kinds of statistics and information about what goes into making something readable. One of the things she talked about with AI was the future of personalised reading. If you think about the Kindle app, for example, there's a lot of settings you can make there—font size, colours, brightness, text spacing. There's a lot of tools in there. She was pointing out that potentially readers don't even know what they actually need for the optimised visual reading experience. She sees a world where AI can perhaps do an analysis of your reading behaviour and then help you find the optimal settings. Maybe even multiple optimal settings for, say, if you were reading in a room that had daylight versus at bedtime, and the ways you might shift it. I was almost thinking of this like when you're at the optometrist and they're like, “Which lens is better—this one or that one?” Jo: Oh, sometimes that is very hard. Jeff: Yes. It's that AI could step you through that a little bit to help you find that optimal reading experience in that moment. And then it might even notice, potentially, if you're changing something in the way that you're moving through a page, that it might flag to say, “Hey, do we need to adjust something?” Some other areas that I think are really exciting, for everyone and perhaps particularly for people who are disabled and needing the support of some assistive technology, is what we're seeing in the browsers. OpenAI's Operator has been out for quite a while now, since sometime I think autumn of last year. Perplexity Comet has been around even longer. Then we've got browser extensions from Gemini and Claude that are available, that can let you just type natural language. You know, “Please go find for me jeans in this size that are on sale on this website. Find me the best price for blue jeans on this site and this size,” and it'll just go do it. Which can certainly speed things up for people in the disabled community to find things quickly, to spend time navigating less, and maybe ending up with the AI coming back and saying, “I found these five things. Which one would you like me to buy for you?” Or, “I found this one thing that you do need and it's waiting for you in your shopping cart.” The ability for that on the horizon is an amazing jump from an accessibility point of view. But really it's one of those things that accessibility will then help everyone because we can all just shop that way, if we choose to. These are early days for these browsers and these extensions. The other side of it comes back to basic web accessibility too, because I've seen these types of activities not work so well on a site that may not actually be accessible on its own. A great example is something I ran into with Claude Cowork about a month ago. I was testing to see if it could help me navigate and get things uploaded together for a site where I wanted to upload books, knowing again that it's not going to upload the actual file, but it could fill in the metadata from my master database of metadata stuff. There were areas on the site that it actually couldn't hit the button, because the site itself was also not functional to a screen reader. So there are gaps there. It's early days, but I really see that as an interesting future that'll really help people with disabilities—but again, help everybody too, just manage time better. Jo: I know exactly what you mean there. I've done some collaborative work with Claude Code when it's like, “I can't click the button,” and I'm like, well, I'll click the button—you fill in everything else. Jeff: Exactly. Jo: It's actually quite a funny situation. But goodness, coming back to IngramSpark again—these things need APIs. We need better functions. It's funny because I think a lot of traditional publishers have these APIs or backend upload things that you can do. I'm like, well, we need to get to that with these systems. But I think things will change. Another thing that I think has also shifted is the use of voice. Voice for dictation—it used to be with dictation that you would have to say “comma,” “open quote,” “new line,” and all of that. And you'd also have to make sense. Whereas now I feel like you can just dictate a whole load of things to these AIs and then say, “Tidy that up,” and they will do a lot more than the old situation. So I think voice will also help. Also automatic translation. I don't know if you know this about X, and if you're on X anymore, but just this week they've made it multi-language. So I can read tweets by people who've posted in another language in English. I can read something from Korean or read something that someone French has posted and it gets translated. It has made a huge difference to the content I'm seeing, which is fascinating because I don't think we've ever had this kind of automatic “everything is translated into your language” situation. It's really got me thinking about how [automatic translation] might work for eBooks or other things if the rights are there. I don't know. Have you seen stuff like that? Jeff: There's so much available now with voice and the ability to not have to speak all the other stuff that went with it—comma, full stop, next line. It was a little mind-bending sometimes, trying to think about quote marks and all that stuff. And now it's so good. Different platforms do it to different degrees of ability. Even being able to speak your prompts into the very platforms themselves without having to type all of it. Chronic pain comes to mind, any kind of mobility thing—all the typing would be a drain or maybe even impossible. So the voice ability is so powerful there and unlocks more things. At the same time, those translation abilities—I believe AirPods now have the ability, if you've got the right stuff on your phone, that you could be talking to somebody, they may speak back to you in a language you don't speak, but your AirPods will give it to you in your language. Jo: Hmm. Jeff: Google has, I believe, a live captioning app that you can use. I think there's even a split screen—I don't know if that's available now or something in their future—where you could put the phone on the table and tell it who's looking at what side of the screen, and it'll put the language that I need on my side and the language the other person needs on the other. So there continues to be such a shift in how we're being able to translate stuff that really opens up communication and can open up our books to so many more people. I'm very interested to see—I haven't pulled the trigger on this yet—but how Amazon's auto-translation rolls out and how that's received in terms of the accessibility around our books and being able to put it in someone's hands who doesn't speak—I think it's only English to other languages right now—but who doesn't speak the language it was written in but wants to read that book. We could never, as indies, or really even big five publishers, wouldn't have the money to create custom translations everywhere. But if the AI can help do that and spread those books around so that everybody could have the story they want to read, I think that's such a win for the reading audience. Jo: Yes, I think it's so exciting to think what might be coming, and that's what I want to stay on the side of on the AI discussion. There's enough negativity out there and you can get that information somewhere else, but for me I want us to stay on the positive side of how this helps both the author and the reader. And hopefully the community, to create more and read more and enjoy being human more. Right? Because I find that I do get out more and listen to stuff, or I'm out walking instead of at my desk, and I mean, that's what it's about. I'm pretty excited about the future. How about you? Jeff: I am. I think there are, quite honestly, some scary things that could be out there in the future. I mean, there's been a lot of talk about what Mythos is capable of. But on the other side of it, there are all these advances. I also look back at Google and AlphaFold and what DeepMind was able to do there for science. There's more of that stuff out there, and individually for each of us, spending a little bit of time—and I do have to say, I think you need to spend time on a paid plan because the free stuff doesn't give you the idea of what these platforms are actually capable of. So if you only drop in, even briefly, to experiment on one of the $20-a-month plans and give it your situation, ask it what it can do for you, I think you'll see where, on a personal level, AI will help you unlock some things. It can help you move some things to the next level in your business that for whatever reason you haven't been able to do. You don't have to use it for everything. You may decide that it's still not for you for whatever reason, and that's fine. But I think there's so much to explore here and to let your curiosity run for a little bit to see what's possible and what you might unlock with it. Jo: Brilliant. So where can people find you and your books and everything you do online? Jeff: So pretty much everything lives at JeffAdamsWrites.com. Jo: Well, thanks so much for your time, Jeff. That was great. Jeff: I loved it, Jo. Thanks for having me..The post Accessibility And AI: How New Tools Are Opening Doors For Indie Authors With Jeff Adams first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How can you supercharge your creativity in an age when AI is reshaping everything — including how we write, edit, and market our books? What does it look like to use AI as a genuine creative partner rather than a shortcut? And could professional speaking become an income stream that complements your writing career? With James Taylor. In the intro, Audible's new royalty model; New royalty model details [ACX; Kindlepreneur]; Public Speaking for Authors, Creatives and other Introverts; Why Indie Authors Should Ignore the Market’s Mood and Focus on their Mission [Self-Publishing with ALLi]; Lichfield Cathedral; This podcast is sponsored by Kobo Writing Life, which helps authors self-publish and reach readers in global markets through the Kobo eco-system. You can also subscribe to the Kobo Writing Life podcast for interviews with successful indie authors. This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn  James Taylor is a nonfiction author, professional speaker, podcaster, and entrepreneur who helps people unlock their creative potential. He hosts the SuperCreativity Podcast and his latest book is SuperCreativity: Augmenting Human Creativity in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.  Show Notes How to define creativity and why it's becoming the most valuable skill in the age of AI The five stages of the creative process — and the stage most people skip Three types of creative purpose: play, self-expression, and legacy How James used multiple AI tools alongside human collaborators to write, edit, and market SuperCreativity Bulk book sales, industry-specific editions, and revenue models for nonfiction author-speakers Practical tips for authors who want to break into professional keynote speaking You can find James at JamesTaylor.me. Transcript of the interview with James Taylor Jo: James Taylor is a nonfiction author, professional speaker, podcaster, and entrepreneur who helps people unlock their creative potential. He hosts the SuperCreativity Podcast and his latest book is SuperCreativity: Augmenting Human Creativity in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. Welcome to the show, James. James: Well, thank you for having me as a guest. I'm looking forward to this conversation today. Jo: It's going to be really good. First up— Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and publishing. James: Well, today I'm a professional keynote speaker, so I deliver about fifty to a hundred keynotes per year in twenty-five-plus countries. Primarily I speak on creativity, innovation, and artificial intelligence. Go back into my deepest, darkest history—I actually used to manage rock stars. That was my old job. I used to be in the music industry for many, many years. I worked with members of The Rolling Stones, and for our listeners in the UK, I managed bands like Deacon Blue. Then I went to the dark side. In 2010, I moved to California to work in Silicon Valley, to work in the world of tech. That got me involved in artificial intelligence. Right about 2017, I was speaking at an event in San Francisco and someone came up to me and said, “You realise you could probably speak for a living, you could do this for a living.” So I thought, well, how does that work? And he told me. Then I embarked on the career that I have today, which is primarily as a speaker, with writing now coming a bit more to the fore. Jo: Wow, I remember Deacon Blue. James: Yes. Jo: “Dignity.” That's crazy. Very, very cool backstory there, but we'll come back to the career side of things. Let's get into super creativity, because my listeners are certainly creatives. Most of the listeners will have a book either on the way or they might even have lots of books. So we all do want to be super creative. How do you define creativity, and why is it important to keep focusing on this even if we do identify that way? James: For me, creativity is about bringing new ideas to the mind. Innovation is about bringing new ideas to the world, but without creativity, there is no innovation. So creativity is really the engine of innovation. Whether that is designing new products, new services, or creating new works of art and new books. The reason that creativity is becoming more important is because of what we're seeing right now in terms of artificial intelligence. AI is going to replace a lot of the non-creative tasks that we currently do in our jobs. If you look at things like the World Economic Forum, there was recently a study with a thousand global business leaders, and work from companies like LinkedIn—they all highlight that creativity is going to be one of the foremost important soft skills for this new future. So creativity, strangely, will actually become more important, not less important, as we go ahead. That's the creativity side. Probably for many of the listeners here, they'll consider themselves to be creative. That is not the norm. As I mentioned, I speak in about twenty-five countries a year, and if I ask the audiences—primarily corporate audiences—to put their hands up if they consider themselves to be creative, only between ten to forty per cent of the audience will raise their hands. So part of my job is to show them why they are more creative than they think they are and why we're all born with this creative potential. Then moving into the super creativity side, it's really to show them how they can augment that creativity by collaborating more deeply with other people or machines—things like artificial intelligence. So SuperCreativity, the book that I've written and the speeches I give on it, is really about how we can augment our individual creativity by collaborating more deeply with other people or artificial intelligence. For me, that's been the thing I've been fascinated by for the past few years, and probably for many of our listeners who are now using AI in their writing, their researching, and their marketing of their books, they're probably getting into this space as well. I really wanted to dive into that—both the collaboration with other people and with machines and AI. Jo: In terms of the super creativity then, do you have any practices or ideas? Before we get into collaboration, many of us authors work alone—and of course we can come back to the AI stuff in a minute—but in terms of super creativity, are there ways that we can even supercharge what we do already? Then, of course there are people listening who might not feel creative. So give us a few tips on how we can potentially change our mindset or become even more creative. James: In the book I talk about what I call the eight Ps of super creativity, which are purpose, personality, practice, people, process, place, product, and persuasion. Persuasion is really the marketing piece at the end. Probably the one that could be most useful to many listeners today is the practice piece—the practice or the process side of things. For many of us, what that usually consists of is just having some type of daily creative practice. Different people do it in different ways. Many of your listeners will know the works of people like Julia Cameron—the morning pages style of having some type of daily practice. Other people do it in slightly different ways. The process bit is really interesting. I talk about this creative process that we all have, and I talk about these five stages of the creative process. The first stage, let's say if we're writing a book, is really that preparation stage. That is usually the stage where we are trying to absorb as much information as possible about the thing that we're going to be writing about. The topic, if it's nonfiction, or going to the places, visiting the scenes that we're going to set certain things within for the book. So that preparation stage is really about absorbing as much information as possible from the outside. It's not going to look very creative. We're just absorbing at that stage. Now the mistake that a lot of people tend to make is they immediately try to jump from that preparation stage to looking to generate ideas. But what all the studies show us is we should spend a little bit of time in what we call the incubation stage. This is where it's often very useful if we've done some research, that we put things to one side for a little while, maybe a few weeks, move on to another project, think about something completely different. Your brain will continue to work in the background. Your unconscious brain will work on that content you've been absorbing. Then what often happens as a result of that is we come to this third stage, which is that insight stage—that aha moment. That happens for various different reasons and you can seed that in slightly different ways so you're more likely to get inspiration in your day-to-day work. Then as we know—as you are a writer of many, many books—many people think, “Well, that's it. I've done it. The idea for that book or that chapter has come to me.” That is really just the first five per cent of the process. The next stage is where we look at all the different ideas we have and decide which ones we want to pursue, which ones are going to make the grade. This is what we call the evaluation stage. Once we've done that, we move to that final stage, which is the elaboration stage. If it's a startup, this is when you're building your minimum viable product. As a writer, this is where you're actually doing the work, putting those words out onto the page. It's a very iterative process, so it's not necessarily linear. You'll go back and forth. Even as you're getting input from readers and audiences in that last stage, that is then giving you the material to move back to the preparation stage and think, “Oh, I wonder if this next book in this series, maybe I go in a slightly different direction with this character.” So each of those different stages, you can do different things to increase your levels of creativity. Jo: I love all of that, but can we go back to purpose? Because you mentioned that as one of the Ps and I think this is something that a lot of us need. As we are recording this in April 2026, the world is an interesting place. There are lots of things going on that have people worried. Well, we are not talking about politics, but I think one of the things that people struggle with is, what's the point in writing this story, for example, or what's the point in trying to get my words out there when things are difficult? I feel like coming back to purpose is perhaps the thing that helps people even take it into the process as you were talking about. And then of course, just from a practical angle— Is purpose about making money or reaching people? So maybe you could talk about the purpose side of things. James: Yes. So I talk about three different purposes, and it's not that there's just one that predominates, but usually there's one that maybe predominates on different projects. The first one is creativity as play. It's what we're basically, as humans, hardwired to do—this instinctive joy that we get just for creating for its own sake. There's nothing that really sits beyond that. We just have fun. We find pleasure in creating something. That could be a musician creating a piece of music, a sculptor creating a sculpture, an entrepreneur creating a new business or product or service. There's just this sense of play. One of the things I talk about in the book is this idea of being childlike, not childish. If you look at children, you see this very instinctively. If you see a three-year-old or a five-year-old, you give them some crayons and they will just naturally create. That's part of who they are and it's pretty abstract. Then what happens is they go to school and they're taught useful conventions—”this is how you should do it.” You even see their work start to change. You start to see them move from abstract paintings to more formal structures. Then you get your peer group, then you go to college or university and the world of work, and you're taught all these useful conventions. That's fine, but as adults, it is our responsibility to become what we call post-conventional, where we see these conventions as a useful signpost but we're willing to challenge them. We're willing to have a playfulness in what we do. So the first one is just this hardwired thing—creativity as play. The second one, and this is maybe for a lot of your listeners the reason that they are writers, is self-expression. It's a way of placing something out into the world. I was actually just in France recently, and I was talking to a young visual artist, a painter from Hungary, and she had to go up and give a speech. She really hated doing it. She was having to talk about her work and she was really uncomfortable. I could see the discomfort and my heart went out for her, because that is not the way she primarily expresses herself. She expresses herself through her art form, which is painting. For many of us, we might struggle to get on a stage, but we can express ourselves in the written word. We have something we want to say, a position we want to have, and we want to express that and get that out into the world. The final one is just this idea of legacy. That is not going to be for everyone. I can tell you, for me personally, legacy is not the reason that I write and do a lot of the stuff that I do. Maybe that changes—maybe as we get a bit older, we want to leave a body of work. So those are the three main purposes that we tend to see. Then you mentioned the financial side of what we do as well. This starts to come into that self-expression, because we need to be able to get people to buy our books or download our books and read our books in order to give us the ability to write new works and create new things. The financial side is an important component of it, but it is not the only one. I think there's a great question any writer should ask themselves. One of the first questions that I asked myself as a relatively new nonfiction writer is: why am I writing this book? What is the purpose of this book? For me, primarily it is a form of self-expression, and then you have to go, “Well, that's fine, but I also need it to have some type of financial basis for it.” It doesn't need to be the main driver of my income, but I need to have some type of revenue model. I'm happy to talk about revenue models, because probably the type of revenue model that I have as a writer is going to be different from other listeners. I tend to focus more on bulk selling of books rather than individual selling of books. Jo: Yes, I definitely want to come back to revenue models and business, but a few other things first. I want to circle back to collaboration, because I've certainly co-written with some humans, and I know a lot of listeners either have co-written or collaborated with other humans—and some of it works and some of it doesn't. You have some great information on human-plus-human creativity and collaboration. So maybe you could give us some tips on how we can be more effective collaborators with other humans. James: So there's a whole section about this idea of creative pairs. Often if you look at great creative work or innovative companies, very often when you strip it all back, you'll find at the core lots and lots of creative pairings. That is usually two different but complementary personalities who are willing to develop and challenge and improve each other's ideas. We think of Jobs and Wozniak in the world of business, or Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger. For authors, often that relationship is the work with their editor. There was a documentary I saw—I think it was a New Yorker documentary that came out a while ago—talking with a writer of history books about his relationship with his editor. It was a really beautiful relationship. These were two very different personalities, but what worked was the fact that they were different. A core component of having these creative pairings is a sense of trust—or what some people today would call psychological safety—that you are willing to challenge someone's ideas, but in a space of trust. The Germans have a great phrase for it. In English it translates as “someone to steal horses with,” which I love. Hopefully our listeners have that person where you can go to them and say, “I had this idea for a book or a chapter or a character,” and that person is a “yes, and.” Like, “Yes, and have you thought about doing it this way?” or “What would happen if you did this?” They stress test your ideas. They make your ideas better. For many of us, maybe it's our husbands or wives, our partners. Some of us are lucky enough to have editors. When I started rewriting this latest book, I actually had someone like that—a human, not an AI—that I worked with, especially on taking all these random thoughts and ideas I've been expressing in keynotes and putting them into more of a book form. The format and the structures that we use for telling stories in a speech are quite different from the structure that we would use for a nonfiction book. I didn't have as much experience there, so I wanted someone who could say, “Have you thought about structuring it this way?” or “This is a great story arc you might want to think about.” So I don't know, for you, who is your creative pairing? Who is your “someone to steal horses with”? Jo: Well, it's funny. I really think since the arrival of Claude Opus 4.6, it is absolutely Claude. James: Yes, yes. Jo: All the way. I mean, so we could come onto that next in terms of how AI has changed, because I do still work with a professional editor for both fiction and nonfiction, but it is very much in the “make my finished work better” stage. It is not in the exploratory phase. I find particularly the latest reasoning models to just be fantastic at this. And my Claude is not sycophantic. The Opus 4.6—I'm sure you've been using it too—it just doesn't behave in the way that a lot of people think these AIs did. They did behave like that, and now it's changed. So let's talk about that. What are your thoughts on collaborating more effectively with AI tools, especially as they become more and more powerful? As we record this, Claude Mythos has not come out, but it's certainly rumoured to arrive. I'm pretty excited. James: So because I've been doing this AI thing for a little while, it's given me the ability to experiment with things—the early versions of what many people are using today. I'll give you an example. Even before I started writing the book, I decided to write a book proposal. Even though I could pretty much sense I wanted to independently publish this book through my own publishing company, I thought it's a good practice to put it down into a proposal form, even though I don't go to a traditional publisher or a hybrid publisher. One of the things I did within that was get a sense of who my ideal readers are. I used a very early version—this was a few years ago—of an IBM AI tool, creating what we call a psychometric map of my ideal reader. This basically tells me, over about seventy-two different factors, how this person thinks, how they feel, what their value system is, very broadly for my ideal reader. I pulled in different sources. I knew the kind of magazines and books they were reading and what their general worldview was. So I created this—going one step beyond just creating your ideal reader to really understanding their psychometrics. I do this in my keynotes too. Before I ever give a keynote or an important pitch or a presentation, I use AI to analyse the psychometrics of the audience I'm going to be speaking to. This might tell me, for example, this audience values humour a little bit more, or this audience values a bit more practicality so they want actionable next steps, or this audience is going to be a little bit authority-challenging so they're going to push back. So even in those very early stages, just starting to think about the book—who was I writing this book for, what was the purpose of the book—I was using AI to understand the psychometrics of my absolutely perfect, ideal reader. I gave her a name. It was a female reader. There was someone similar to her that I already knew. Probably for some of your listeners, they do this instinctively anyway. They maybe have a person or a few different people they think of in their head. Then from that stage, because I've been delivering lots and lots of keynotes—and this may be an important distinction in the way that I have decided to write books as opposed to how other people write books—my family were all jazz musicians. The difference between a rock musician or a pop musician and a jazz musician is this: a rock or pop musician will go into the studio, create this opus, this work, and then tour that for the next two years. A jazz musician, on the other hand, goes out and performs the songs and the things from the album that they're eventually going to create hundreds of times, thousands of times, to find out what works with audiences, and then they go into the studio and record the stuff that works best. So I created a book more like a jazz musician. I'd delivered keynote versions of the book hundreds of times before I ever decided to actually write the book. So it had been stress-tested with real people to a certain extent. Then, getting into it, I thought—well, what works as a keynote is not necessarily going to work as a structure for a book. So what I did was start using ChatGPT models at that point to think about the structural edit of the book. What was the structure going to be? What was great is you can basically feed it every single keynote you've given over the years, all the notes, everything you've done, and it could start to give me something to riff with and really get into thinking about how I was going to create this. I was using it a little like that creative pairing we spoke about earlier. Then once I'd done that—so I've now got an idea of a structural edit essentially—I then go back and speak to some humans about it. “What do you think about this?” “What do you think about that?” And try some things out over dinner conversations. “I'm thinking about doing this—what do you think?” Then once I did that, I just did the thing that I really didn't want to do, but I guess you absolutely have to do: sit in a seat for multiple weeks and just get that crappy first draft done. That was just me writing, from my voice, in my way of doing things. Every so often I would use an AI to research a particular thing, but I didn't want to slow down the pace too much. I was focused on getting that word count done. Once I had the first draft, I then brought the AI back in. In this case, I was still using OpenAI at this stage, to act more like an editor. To tell me what was weak about the book. At this point I was starting to give it the overall framing. What was weak, what chapters needed to be improved. I then went back, started reworking each of the chapters, and worked chapter by chapter using that AI as a sparring partner. But once again, the AI is not really writing my words for me. It's maybe saying, “This part could be said better. You might want to think about doing it this way,” or “You are missing a really powerful case study or example here,” or at the very end of each chapter, I have actionable next steps, and “You're missing some things here.” So I've gone through that entire process of writing, and now I'm essentially at the second draft. At this point, what I'm doing is using another AI tool—Claude, in this case—to have a different perspective on it. I gave it the work. I mentioned a couple of editors that I really respect and different writers I respect and said, “I'm going to create a virtual beta readers group. Give me feedback on this now.” For someone that's listening to this, and we're recording this in April 2026, here's some good news for you. There are now a bunch of tools out there that use AI swarms, as we call them. You can basically feed it your book and it will create synthetic readers—thousands and thousands of synthetic readers that read your kind of style of book—and it will then give you feedback from these synthetic readers. Essentially, I was just doing an early version of that. So I got the feedback from the synthetic readers, the AI readers, and then reworked a little bit. Some of the stuff I just decided not to do because it didn't align with what I was trying to say in the book. Then the next stage was I had a beta reader group of about thirty human beta readers—my ideal readers. I sent the book to them, they gave me feedback. I then used AI to give me an overview report of all their feedback, and then I was able to go back into reworking the book. That's still really just draft three of the book, not the final book at this stage. But just to give everyone a sense of opening up the process: you could see how the human and machine were working together. Jo: Yes, I love that. I also often say to people who are speakers first that you can, if you have recordings of your talks or if you use your slide decks to record them as MP3s and then just use that transcript as the basis of a draft. Obviously it's not the book or a chapter, but it can actually preserve your voice—your speaking voice—which I think can be really effective for speakers. I like your multi-step process there. And then of course, if you have audience avatars in AI, that can help you design your book marketing. So take this into book marketing and how you're doing that. James: So I still decided to go old school with a human editor—a book editor that someone had recommended to me. I used that human book editor just to go through the book. At that point we're talking about style, some stylistic things that we wanted to do, and they can pick up other things as well. So I've got that book, and then I'm obviously starting to use AI to understand what tags, what kind of copy do I want to have in terms of putting it onto Amazon, putting it onto IngramSpark, and all these other platforms I want to put it out into. I'm using Claude here in particular—and with Claude, you have something called Cowork. It wasn't quite fully happening at that point, but there were early versions of it and Claude Code—to almost start working with and creating a virtual marketing team. I give it the book and then they could start thinking about: what is the marketing strategy for this book? What does the campaign look like? What are the things that we need to do? That was then starting to break it down. We're now three months out or so before the book is due to get released, and I'm starting to deploy that particular campaign. So for example, I'm on a podcast right now, and we try different versions. We have a human going out and reaching out to potential shows for me to be a guest on, but I also have an agent. There's also one going out and finding and researching podcasts and reaching out to those podcast hosts to have me as a potential guest. So they're doing some of the tactical work there at the same time. One mistake I made—and I don't know if you've experienced this as well—if I was to go back, one thing I would do differently is this: I decided to record the audiobook version after the physical book was already committed and ready to go out. Jo: Mm-hmm. James: And I noticed so many small errors or things I would change after having spent two days in a studio recording the voice for the entire book—changes I would have made. This is something other people did ask me: why are you not using ElevenLabs or an AI clone of your voice to read the script? There are some things I feel quite personal about, and my voice is one of those things. As a professional keynote speaker, I decided I wanted to keep that and have it in there. So it's going to be different for everyone which things they decide to offload to AI, which things they decide to give to a human member of their team, and what they decide to keep to themselves. Jo: Yes, I mean, I human-record my nonfiction, but I have an AI voice clone with ElevenLabs for my fiction now. But obviously, for people listening, you can't put an ElevenLabs voice-cloned audiobook on Audible, and a lot of your sales will be on Audible, especially for a book like this. So I think that's also important. I agree with you on doing the audio edit. There's always things you want to change. But as you mentioned, you're self-publishing this, so you can just go in and change your files. James: Yes, and that was the other reason, and this was part of the marketing—now we're moving into the marketing and the business model behind the book. For me, the book doesn't have to be a financial driver in its own sense. The way that I sell books, and usually people like myself—professional speakers—is we bulk sell books to our clients. Let's say I'm speaking at four different events this month. Each has about a thousand people at them. Those organisers will buy, say, a thousand copies of the book. So at the end of that month, you might have sold four thousand copies—not individual copies. Anything that sells on Amazon or in other places is almost like a positioning piece. Obviously you want people to buy the book and learn things from the book, but in terms of the distribution model, it's slightly different because I'm primarily selling through bulk sales. Now, here's a little twist you can do on this, and this is a decision I made even before we released this version of the book. I speak to lots of different industries. There was a speaker and author—I've forgotten his name now, I think he was from Florida—and what he decided to do was to write a slightly different version of his main book every year, but for a different industry. So what this allows him to do is, let's say in my case, I'm doing a version of the SuperCreativity book just for legal professionals because I speak to a lot of law firms and legal groups. I've already started working on a version of the book which is a little bit more attuned to that audience. As a speaker, it allows me to go to all these law firms and legal associations and bar associations and say, “Hey, I've just written the book on creativity and artificial intelligence for the legal industry.” That makes you a very bookable proposition for a client. And then obviously you can sell books from that as well. And that's before we get into the foreign language versions. That's just a model that happens to work pretty well for my part of the industry, but obviously it's going to be very different for other types of authors. Jo: No, I think that's great. For nonfiction authors, as you say, there are different revenue models. Your income, I guess, would be what, eighty, ninety per cent speaking revenue? Or do you have other things as well? James: Yes, primarily it's the keynote speaking, and anything that comes from the back of that. Sometimes it's boardroom advisory work that I do as well. But primarily it's the speaking side. So really the book is just the simplest form to get my ideas out and the most affordable form. Jo: Mm-hmm. James: Because the other thing is, you want as many people getting your ideas as possible, and there is no better, more affordable way of getting someone's ideas out there than in the form of a book. I think it's just the most unbelievable transmitter of knowledge—a book. That's why I love to write the book as well. A lot of my friends say, “Listen, books are old hat. You don't need to do a book any more. You can do these other things, other forms, online courses.” I've done lots of online courses in the past and membership sites and all those things, but there's just something that is great about a book—to be able to summarise your ideas at a particular point in time. It's also a great transmitter of value to other people. And it is affordable. Any book, someone can download a book on Audible or wherever they want—that's just an affordable way of absorbing that content. Jo: Yes. Well, of course we are all fans of books here. I do speak—I don't tend to do keynote speaking. I do more content speaking at conferences. For people listening, keynote speaking is where you tend to get the higher revenue. So if people listening have books already—let's say they have nonfiction books or even fiction books that could be turned somehow into different topics—if people want to get booked for speaking gigs, preferably ones that pay— How would you recommend authors think about moving into speaking if that's something they want to do? James: So obviously it's much easier for nonfiction authors to do that. I mean, I'll give you an example. I was speaking at an event last week in New York for L'Oréal, the hair care and cosmetics company. They had six different speakers. One of them was a speaker on macroeconomics and geopolitics. Another was an expert on communications. Another was an expert on AI. Another was an expert on storytelling. So you have to think: does my topic have value for that type of audience—that corporate audience? An easy way of finding that is if you just go onto any of the speaker bureau websites, type in “speaker bureaus,” look for the speaker bureaus, and then type in your topic area—emotional intelligence or whatever the topic area is—and look at the other speakers. See if there is obviously a number of speakers talking on this area. Importantly, look at how busy they are and look at their fee levels as well. I did an online summit a few years ago called the International Speakers Summit, where I interviewed a hundred and fifty of the world's best professional keynote speakers. I interviewed Sally Hogshead, who's an author and a speaker, and she said to me, “James, you're going out speaking about creativity, but if you just twisted it a little bit and spoke more in terms of innovation rather than creativity, you would earn an extra five thousand dollars per keynote.” So creativity and innovation—an extra five thousand dollars. That's just a simple thing that, as you get to understand the industry, you learn. Then once you do that, it's like any business—you have to treat it like a business, obviously. What makes someone a great storyteller on stages is not the same as what makes a great storyteller on the written word. So depending on where you're at, you might need certain training and skills development. If you are listening to this from America, there are things like the National Speakers Association, the NSA. If you're living in the UK, the Professional Speakers Association. These are great ways just to develop your skill set and learn from other professional speakers. Here's the good news, I didn't know anything about professional speaking until 2017–18, and it was only from having a conversation with someone who said, “Listen, you have some original thoughts. You can get paid to speak about this on stage.” Then I spent the next year really researching and understanding and looking at how to do it and creating a minimum viable product—a speech—that was a very short period of time, a year. Most of the listeners here have gone through that process of writing a book, which takes many, many months. So you have the stamina to do this type of work. You just need to find out where you fit. I thought I was going to be a speaker in marketing. I thought that was going to be my thing. And it turns out that's not what the market wanted from me. They wanted me to talk about creativity and artificial intelligence. So you have to listen to the market, like you have to listen to your readers. Jo: Yes, I think that's really interesting. I was also a member of the PSA here, and I learned in Australia with the NSAA as it was. James: Yes. Jo: And that thing about who you speak to—I mainly speak to author conferences, who, I just want to be frank, don't pay very well, if at all. So exactly what you said there— If you want to be a highly paid speaker, you have to pick the audience who's going to pay, as well as a topic that works with them. It is a very different thing to writing a book, I think. James: It is a different model. This is what was interesting when I interviewed those hundred and fifty professional speakers—the thing that came back loud and clear is there is a model to suit everyone. Jo: Mm. James: So the model that works for me—getting paid high fees to go and travel around the world, speaking on stages to primarily corporate audiences—that is not the only model. There is another model, which is called the “sell from the stage” model, where you maybe don't get paid anything to go and speak on the stage, or very little, but what you're doing is you're selling your consulting, your online course, your books, your other products from the back of the stage. That's another model as well. I have friends who have young families and they are writers and they don't want to schlep on planes like I do. I know one speaker in particular who never leaves his own city. He is a very successful professional speaker. He happens to live in Orlando, Florida, which is one of the busiest cities for conferences. So literally, he's home with his kids every night. He gets to do all this cool stuff he wants. He never has to step on a plane if he doesn't want to. That just shows you the range. I remember I once interviewed a person whose title was a Buddhist monk, French speaker, and author. He figured out he could live very affordably by living in Thailand. So he lives in Thailand for part of the year and he's very into meditation, mindfulness, yoga, and writing. He figured out he only had to give two keynotes per year to pay for his entire lifestyle. That was it. So that gives him a lot of freedom. He does those two corporate keynotes a year and for the rest of the year he's doing his yoga, his meditation, his writing, and surfboarding, whatever he's into as well. So you can see there's a whole range of different ways you can design that life. Jo: Yes, we talk a lot about definition of success and it's great to hear those different examples. So before we finish up, I just want to come back to your journey into the writing side, into books and self-publishing. We all understand, me and the listeners, how hard it is to write a book and also to market a book, but we've got the bug. So we wonder: how much have you got the bug? Do you plan on doing more writing, more books, or do you still want to lean more heavily into speaking? James: Primarily the income for me will still come from speaking. I remember listening to Elizabeth Gilbert once when she talked about her writing. She said she always wanted to have other things, so she never had to push onto her writing that it had to be the income stream for her. If it was successful, great, that's fantastic. So I have a little bit of a similar view to that. In terms of my own writing, I've got about five different nonfiction book ideas I'm now looking at. Some of them relate to speeches that I already do. Some don't. I'm looking at different versions of the SuperCreativity book, so there'll be other versions coming out—different industries, different languages. That gives you a few years of work. The other side that I want to develop is the fiction writing side. I'm already starting to work on a fiction book at the moment—a little bit like this idea of one for them, one for me. Jo: Mm-hmm. James: So one for them is for the corporate audience, that world that I live in, and the other one is for me, for my own creativity. My hope—and I don't know, maybe we need to speak in a year's time when I've written and published it—is that by doing the fiction side, it will make me a better storyteller on stages as well for my corporate audience. It will help me understand story arcs, slightly different ways of expressing stories, building emotion, building the anti-hero characters within a book, for example. So I'm hoping that they both feed off each other. But we will see. Jo: Yes, we will. All the best with that. So where can people find you and your books and everything you do online? James: The easiest place to go is JamesTaylor.me, and you can find the book, which is called SuperCreativity, there. Or just go to wherever you buy your books—your local independent bookstore—and get a copy of SuperCreativity. The audiobook may already be out by the time you're listening to this as well. If you want to learn a little bit more, we also have a podcast called the SuperCreativity Podcast, where I interview lots of wonderful guests talking about this area of super creativity. Jo: Well, thanks so much for your time, James. That was brilliant. James: Thank you, Joanna. Thanks for having me as a guest on the show.The post SuperCreativity And KeyNote Speaking With A Non-Fiction Book With James Taylor first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How can upgrading your verbs transform flat writing into vivid, page-turning prose? Why do so many writing problems turn out to be verb problems — and how can you fix yours? Sarah Kaufman explores the art of the verb and shares practical tips for making your writing stronger, clearer, and more alive. In the intro, writing as a caregiver and grief [Stark Reflections; The Creative Penn episode]; Beyond Bookshops — Bulk Sales, Gifting and Alternative Distribution [Self-Publishing Advice]; list of money books; London walk along SouthBank; Bones of the Deep: AI-Assisted Artisan Author webinars. Today's show is sponsored by ProWritingAid, writing and editing software that goes way beyond just grammar and typo checking. With its detailed reports on how to improve your writing and integration with writing software, ProWritingAid will help you improve your book before you send it to an editor, agent or publisher. Check it out for free or get 15% off the premium edition at www.ProWritingAid.com/joanna This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn  Sarah Kaufman is a Pulitzer Prize–winning critic, an award-winning author, and a writing teacher. Her latest book is Verb Your Enthusiasm: How to Master the Art of the Verb and Transform Your Writing. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.  Show Notes Why verbs are the most versatile and underrated tool in a writer's toolkit How to replace flat, explanatory sentences with vivid, action-driven prose The power of physical and metaphorical verbs to show emotion instead of telling it When passive voice works, and when it's hiding something Balancing beautiful language with the demands of storytelling and deadlines How to broaden your writing expertise into a sustainable portfolio career You can find Sarah at SarahLKaufman.com. Transcript of the interview with Sarah Kaufman Jo: Sarah Kaufman is a Pulitzer Prize–winning critic, an award-winning author, and a writing teacher. Her latest book is Verb Your Enthusiasm: How to Master the Art of the Verb and Transform Your Writing. Welcome to the show, Sarah. Sarah: Thank you so much. I'm delighted to be with you. Jo: This is such a great topic, but first up— Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing. Sarah: I got into writing in a backwards way, I guess. The romantic, wonderful thing about writing is the freedom that it gives you, right? That's what we all think about—this freedom to address the world. Then the practical, wonderful thing about writing is developing a focal point, which I had to do in order to write in the first place. I'll explain a little bit about that. I became a dance critic, which is what I did at the Washington Post for 27 years, to have something to write about. That was necessary because, though I've always known that I wanted to be a writer ever since earliest childhood, I just didn't really find things to write about when it came time to actually try to make a living at it. As I was approaching leaving college as an English major, I was getting very anxious about what I was actually going to do, and I didn't have this burning desire to write about any certain thing. I happened to be working as a full-time secretary at a ballet school because I had been a ballet nerd all through my youth. I knew quite a bit about doing ballet, about the steps and about the lingo, so I was a suitable candidate to work at a ballet school. I was learning so much from the teachers there—who had all been professional dancers—about the aesthetics of ballet and how you shape the steps into art and into a performance. I was getting more and more interested in dance. One day the director took me out to lunch and she said, “You should write about dance.” I had seriously never considered that before, but she knew that I was an English major, that I wanted to write. She said, “Look, you know so much,” and she really encouraged me. So I said, “Well, okay, I'll give it a go,” because I had been reading dance criticism. I just started picking it apart and seeing how critics put their reviews together, called up a local paper, took on some freelance assignments, and did a lot of freelancing for years and eventually landed at the Washington Post. So the point I want to make is that I had that thing to write about. Now I had a focal point, and my books grew out of that. The first book I wrote is The Art of Grace: On Moving Well Through Life. That was an exploration of aspects of grace stemming from physical grace, which I knew about from dancers, and looking at connections there with social grace and spiritual grace. Then this verbs book likewise grew out of my work as a dance writer because my goal in writing about dance was to capture the experience of it. I didn't want to be a scholarly type of critic, though I do love that kind of criticism and I read it and learn so much from it, but I knew that was not going to be my style. I wanted more to primarily recreate the experience for the reader, as well as then coming in with analysis of it. I was just so fascinated by the look and the feel of what I was seeing on the stage. I wanted to be able to share that with the reader. So I had to lean on verbs to capture the action, and people occasionally would say, “Oh, you're so good with verbs, Sarah,” which I thought was kind of interesting. It's like, oh, so this is a strength I had developed. I didn't really realise it. Then that, coupled with my teaching experience, is what led me to think I have some things to talk about regarding verbs. I'd like to share with the world because, as a teacher, I often see that writing issues my students have are actually verb issues. They get into a corner with a lot of explanation or clauses on top of clauses, and they get lost. Where is the point that you want to make here? What is the meaning? What is it you want me to take away from your work? Well, if we pare that back and look at the verbs and try to get some direction in the sentences, that often brings clarity. Suddenly the student will say, “I was thinking more about adjectives and nouns. I didn't realise that verbs were really something to focus on.” I thought that would be an interesting challenge to bring that out. Jo: It's so fascinating. I love how your career has emerged and that you've leaned into different things. It has a kind of dance to it itself. We're going to come back to your career, but let's start with that, because you mentioned that with many of your students you are reading their work and you think, “Oh, we can fix this with some verbs.” Let's get into that because you talk about weeding and this verb-first editing process. Most of the listeners will have some kind of writing already—either they've got a lot of books or they've got a draft in progress. This is the kind of thing we struggle with: how do we make our work stronger? Talk about why you are so obsessed with verbs some tips for making our work stronger. Sarah: Yes, I am obsessed with verbs. I will cop to that. They're so interesting and I felt like they were a little underrated as a writing tool. Verbs, as we learned in school, drive your sentence forward. They're the engine. Really, I feel like they are the secret soul of language, because they're so versatile, they're so essential. First of all, they hold it all together. They're the only part of speech that in itself is a full sentence. You can have a full sentence that's a verb. “Watch.” “Look.” “Continue.” You could go on and on. That is a full grammatical sentence. You can't do that with any other part of speech. They're so essential. The word “verb” itself comes from the Latin verbum, which means “a word.” So verbs became that name for all words. Our literary ancestors understood this—that they're really the beginning and the end as far as words go. They can add to your work when you start thinking about verbs in this way, and you start thinking about how can I elevate my writing—well, verbs are very efficient and very evocative. They can add not only clarity to your work, but a kind of elegance. They can say so much in such a little amount of space. For example, say you have something like this: “The cook was facing the dinner rush, and so she decided to put together something quick and easy so no one would know how nervous and unprepared she was.” In that sentence, I'm doing a lot of explaining and describing. I'm just explaining to you the situation, but I haven't really brought it to life much. A better way to do it might be something like this—and you can see it comes a little bit more active: “The dinner rush pressed upon her. To hide her nerves, she whisked eggs and milk into omelettes, shredded parsley with her bare hands and flung it all onto plates like Jackson Pollock splashing his canvas.” I show you what her nerves and the pressure resulted in. I show that manifesting. Or you could even shorten it and just say: “Dinner rush loomed. She whisked and whipped, chopped and dripped and masked her nerves with glistening omelettes.” There are stylistic differences there, but it's just to give an example of how you can take something that, on the face of it, sure, it makes sense—it's perfectly fine as a sentence—but it just lies there. It's flat. Maybe it's not very exciting. It doesn't really move the story forward. You can bring it to life by showing us. You show us with the action. Jo: You haven't really specifically said what a verb is in that sentence you just had around “whisked” and all of those things. Those sentences were actually quite different in a lot of the different words you used. You didn't just swap out for stronger verbs. Could you just point out what the verbs were, in case people are confused about which words are which? Sarah: Right. Great. In the first, inferior example I have: “The cook was facing the dinner rush.” So then I amended it to: “The dinner rush pressed upon her.” I'm giving the dinner rush itself a verb—”press.” It weighed on her, it pressed on her. Also, in the third example—”the dinner rush loomed”—so that's even shorter. “Loom” is a wonderful verb. I love it because it conveys a sense of threat. That's what I mean by verbs being so efficient and evocative in one word. “A storm loomed.” “The dinner rush loomed.” You convey the emotion around the whole event. “To hide her nerves, she whisked eggs and milk into omelettes, shredded parsley.” So “hide”—she's hiding her nerves rather than just saying she felt nervous. You give it a little bit more action, you give her a little bit more character by saying she's doing this to hide her nerves. Then whisking the eggs, shredding the parsley, flinging it onto plates—that shows how she's being creative and surmounting this problem, right? Instead of simply describing—”So she decided to use her expertise and create a nice dinner”—you show that in motion with things like whisking and shredding and flinging it onto plates. That's an example of how you can slide in upgraded verbs to lend a sense of energy and life. Jo: I think this idea of motion is so great, and you tie this in a lot to your work. You've written a lot about physical action, and in the book there is a chapter on physical action. I think this is so important because many authors will say, “Use the word ‘said'” without thinking about dialogue within a pattern of action. Your chef there could say something as she flung the parsley on the plate, rather than “the chef said this.” Get moving as she flung the stuff onto the plate. The action verbs are so important. Could you talk a bit more about [action verbs] and the physical action side of it? Sarah: Yes, and that's so right. When you have a scene really rolling, you don't need to do so much explaining about the way a person says something with those dialogue tags. It's very interesting. I feel like words are alive—they're living, breathing things—and the more that we let them come to life on the page, the more you can draw your reader into the story. The reader gets a sense of that life and wants to come into the story with you. You've really created a scene that your reader feels immersed in. And that's so exciting as a reader to discover. Writing about movement is part of that. Of course writing is very vast—it's hard to say, “Well, you should always write about movement.” That would be silly. If we think about movement and action and action verbs as being effective not only for the actions that we see around us, but for inner actions—the subtle feelings, thinking, non-action, but internally what's going on—that's also space for effective verbs. For churning emotions, for metaphors about fright and what that feels like in the body. Or despair. Or regret. I have a lot of examples of that in the book. It's another beautiful use of verbs where, instead of explaining what someone is feeling, you can show it through metaphorical verbs and actual physical changes—things roiling inside the body. Jo: For example, someone in their draft has “she was afraid”— How could they make that much stronger and use a lot of those things you were just talking about? Sarah: That's an excellent question. Instead of “she was afraid,” you might say something like: “She felt her chest fill with ice, freezing her lungs and choking her breath, and her heart bashed around as if to tear itself from her body.” We could get very dramatic about it, but you can play with that. What I like to encourage readers to do is open their minds and open their imaginations. When you have a pretty standard phrase like “she was afraid” or “she felt too frightened to move”—well, put yourself in that position. What does that feel like? What does that really feel like inside when you're too frightened to move? Is it an icy feeling or is it a burning? Is it a numbness? And what verbs might help with that? Is it thrashing? Is it raging? Is it paralysing? How can that type of expressiveness fill in the picture and make it palpable to the reader—what it's like to be in the room with this person? Jo: Do you recommend using a thesaurus? I try to do this myself, and I often use Power Thesaurus, which I just find so useful, because as writers, when we are writing novels or books in a similar genre, we often reach for the same words. Are you a big thesaurus user? Sarah: I am a huge thesaurus user. I have a stack of actual book-type thesauri, but I do like, as you mentioned, Power Thesaurus. I like OneLook, which is an interesting resource. I think it's OneLook.com and you can go in the other way—you can use it as a thesaurus, but you can also use it to find one verb that combines a couple of words. Like “walk clumsily,” for example. You could put that into OneLook and it would come up with lists and lists. And among them might be “hobble” and “limp” and other words to say what a weak verb plus an adverb can say. Online resources are wonderful. I like Merriam-Webster.com—that's what I rely on a lot. Cambridge too. A thesaurus is wonderful. Now, the caution with the thesaurus, however, is that I would like to urge people to be mindful about just swapping in one word for another, or one verb for another, because even though they may appear in the same groupings, there are going to be subtle differences among them. I find it fascinating to really investigate the subtle difference between, say, “limp” and “hobble” and “stumble.” Those all mean slightly different things. So the finishing tip is just to make sure the word you choose is going to be right for the context. Jo: And also perhaps the audience. I mean, you are a Pulitzer Prize–winning critic, which is amazing, and you were writing for an audience who wanted dance pieces. The audience for dancing in terms of the words you would use—I'm not really into it myself, but I would know the word “pirouette.” I imagine there's a ton of words that you would know and use in your writing that wouldn't be so relevant for a wider audience. So we have to think about the audience as well. Sarah: Yes, absolutely. We want to be very thoughtful in our choice of words. If you distilled my book down to one single message, it is to think carefully. Not in the first draft, perhaps, and certainly not when we're speaking, because we speak so spontaneously. But in writing, where you put your thoughts down and then—hopefully, if you're not under too much deadline pressure—you can come back, give it another look, shape it, refine it, and really make sure that you've chosen your words with care. I feel like that's really what writing is all about—communicating one mind to another through this magnificent medium of language. Language is intentional, and having that intention in mind about what you want to share and what you want to communicate and how you want your readers to approach your work—well, that's up to you. That's the freedom I hope to be able to present to people who check out my book: here are some ways, here are some suggestions, here are some techniques and tips for issues that can arise. Really, once you've taken these in, I hope to fire your imagination and inspire you with being able to communicate what it is that you really have inside that you want to share. Jo: I think it is a book for falling in love with the joy of words again. You did mention deadlines, though, and the pressure. Especially for those of us who write genre fiction series, which is a lot of people listening, sometimes we might feel that we don't have the time for that. Do our readers appreciate it, or do they want story first? Sometimes is it too much? Where do you come down on balancing getting story over words? How long can we spend on finding beautiful words when we are writing another 70,000-word book? Sarah: I think that's an excellent point. I think story comes first. That's probably what first drives you to your desk—telling a story. Although it may not. The realities of writing are so vast and unlimited that it's very hard to come out with rules, and I don't write about rules. I really want to give suggestions and examples and insights, but I do think that story is absolutely tops. And that's the power of verbs, in fact. They can help us tell the stories with clarity and with efficiency. I do want to make sure that I'm being clear. I'm not advocating that before you ever sit down and write, or you write one sentence, you then go back and check every single word, because that wouldn't make any sense at all. The idea is to free yourself, free your imagination. These are ways to open your imagination up that maybe you haven't thought about before. But storytelling is primary, and the way that you tell it is going to be individual to every writer. It's useful to bear in mind that there are a lot of avenues one can take in terms of creating a scene or building a character and even evoking the landscape and the atmosphere, and we can look at verbs to help us do that. Jo: One of the biggest problems, I think, especially for new writers, is the passive voice versus more active voice. Can you give some examples of passive voice? Often in editing we're told to get rid of passive voice, but of course you do need it sometimes. Sarah: Yes. There's understandably a lot of confusion about passive voice. Just to have a tiny tidbit of grammar nerdery here: the voice of a verb refers to a very specific construction. It doesn't simply mean that the writer is expressing something in a boring way or taking on a dull subject. The voice of the verb tells you how it relates to the subject of the sentence. When the subject does the action—when it's doing the verb—then you have a verb in the active voice. But when the subject of the sentence is receiving the action, then it needs a verb in the passive voice. Here's an example. If I said, “Hey, Jo, guess what? My grandmother walked on the moon.” That's active voice. “My grandmother walked on the moon”—it's interesting, right? But if I said, “Hey, Jo, guess what? The moon was walked on.” You might be left thinking, “What? What am I supposed to take away from that? Is there more to the story?” “The moon was walked on”—well, that's the passive voice construction. There's no subject who did the walking. I haven't told you, and yet the subject was actually pretty important. My grandmother was the one who walked on the moon. So that's the frustration that often comes when we read the passive voice. We don't know the full story, and we might suspect: are they hiding something? Do they not really know who did the thing? It brings up a lot of questions. Especially in official situations. The classic example is “mistakes were made.” Officials love to say that because it puts nobody on the hook. Nobody is responsible. “Mistakes were made.” Well, who were they made by? They're not telling us. I heard this just recently, by one of the representatives here. This phrase is still being used: “Mistakes were made.” I think most people understand there's a bit of obfuscation. There is something being hidden. Now, there are times when the passive voice is perfectly fine. It's not necessary to say who did the action. If you say, “Joe Blow was arrested and charged with murder,” you pretty much have the full thing there. You don't need to say, “The police arrested him. The prosecutor filed the paperwork.” It's kind of assumed. If you just want to get to the point—he was arrested and charged with murder—that's sufficient. Maybe further down in the story you'll explain the circumstances, but you don't need them right there. Or say, “Fires are still being reported throughout the region.” In a news story, that's perfectly fine. We just need to know that fires are still happening. We don't necessarily need to know who's reporting it. More details may come later in the story, but right then it's perfectly fine. In news reports, in historical situations when we're giving a history, in scientific data and scientific reports, you often see the passive voice. It can be a perfectly good and oftentimes even more efficient way to tell something, but you don't want to lean into it and overuse it because it becomes very dull. When you don't have someone doing an action, it becomes very dull. Jo: As you've mentioned the legal side of things, and I'm reading a lot of academic papers at the moment. I'm doing another master's degree, and goodness me, I feel like sometimes it's designed to turn you off. Sarah: You are exactly right. I've come to that feeling too, and especially in seeing student work, where I feel like there is so much of that in academic writing, which students are reading and digesting. It naturally comes out of them, and it's a kind of cycle that's hard to break. Jo: Do you think it's a form of hedging? “Mistakes were made”—or anything legal—you are hedging it so it can be ambiguous. Whereas a strong verb—and you mentioned “your grandmother walked on the moon”—you are really making it very clear. If you want to hedge things, then using passive voice might be more appropriate. If you want to make it stronger, the activeness is important. Sarah: Yes. And it makes such a difference. I discovered this in my own work. I would read other critics, for example, and I would think, “I feel like the piece I've just written is kind of flat. It doesn't really have the effect I want, doesn't have any zip.” I would go and read other critics—not just dance critics, but other critics. It's so useful to just read other people in any type of writing that you're doing. I advocate doing a lot of reading. I would see that the pieces that really touched me, that really inspired me, had a lot of active voice constructions. They're not turning things around passively, which I think, as a young critic, I may have been doing because I was a little bit afraid to take a stand. Jo: Mm. Sarah: I think I see that in student work, that sometimes we don't want to take a stand, and so we hedge. But writing is intentional, and readers can pick up on that hedging. If you don't intend to hedge—in many cases it can be perfectly appropriate to be fuzzy for an effect that you want, or something like that in the context—but if you are hedging and you're trying to get away with it, like you don't want anyone to notice that you don't really want to give an opinion on this matter, it's going to be very clear. So it's better to address something directly. Jo: And make it stronger. I also wanted to ask you more about the writing career, because I, perhaps like many people listening, was like, I didn't even know you could make a career as a dance critic. Now I know you are not at the Washington Post any more, and it's possible that that role no longer exists—like a lot of writing roles. How has your writing career changed over the years? Do you have these various aspects of a portfolio career? We often talk about multiple streams of income on this show and how, as writers, we can't necessarily rely on one thing. Sarah: Yes, exactly. It's true, there is no longer a dance critic at the Washington Post. The position was eliminated. It's a shame, and it's happening to critics in all fields, in all media organisations, sadly. That's where, for me at least, having that focal point was very key. A thing that I became comfortable writing about, that I could then spiral out and use the eyes and the brain that I had developed from writing about this certain focus for a while. Where can I take that? Oh, athletes. They also move. I began writing stories and pieces and essays about athletes that moved beautifully, beyond racking up statistics about winning. They were just gorgeous to look at, just so pleasurable to watch. I started writing about the body language of political candidates in debate situations and so forth. Using my focal point to then widen my lens, to mix a metaphor, I guess. Having that subject matter and then broadening it out beyond the limits of the actual subject matter, broadening it out imaginatively into where I could find other places to use this perspective. That was really key for me. Say you are writing historical fiction or you're writing thrillers. I would imagine that you would develop a kind of expertise in things that I would find very difficult. Suspense, maybe, or political or police procedure, or what exactly was the weaponry in seventeenth-century France. How can you take that expertise and use it either in an aesthetic way or an actual factual way to address other topics? I think there are so many people that would be interested in what writers who have knowledge and expertise in anything can then use to show us something that we've overlooked. Something we always thought we knew, but that really, when you look at it this way, is reminiscent of how the scabbard was used in seventeenth-century France—or whatever it is, in whatever way. People are craving a new perspective on something they've overlooked or taken for granted. And that's where writers who have a body of work, or are interested in pursuing a certain topic. That's the promise that they have. They can work towards being able to enlighten us on so many other things that maybe only have a tangential connection, but they can make that connection for us. Jo: Fantastic. Where can people find you and your books online? Sarah: I am at SarahLKaufman.com. That's my website. My books are available on any website or bookshop that you want to order them from. Verb Your Enthusiasm comes out April 28th. I am not much on social media at the moment, but I do enjoy hearing feedback from readers, and there are ways to do that on my website. Jo: Well, thanks so much for your time, Sarah. That was great. Sarah: Thank you very much. I've enjoyed it.The post Verb Your Enthusiasm: Transform Your Writing With Stronger Verbs With Sarah Kaufman first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Kickstarter has become a key part of the author business for those who want to make more money per book, connect directly with readers, and produce beautiful editions they're proud of. In this episode, I share excerpts from interviews with Oriana Leckert, Head of Publishing at Kickstarter, Russell Nohelty, and Sacha Black, alongside my own hard-won lessons from six campaigns that have now made over $140K combined. Whether you're considering your first campaign or looking to refine your process, we cover everything from overcoming your fears to rewards, fulfilment, shipping, marketing, and why I keep coming back for more. In the intro, Writing StoryBundle; Spotify Expands Audiobook Features and Printed Books; Draft2Digital Activation and Maintenance Fees; comment by Kevin McLaughlin; and Barnes & Noble Press change to Minimum Retail Price for Printed Books; AI-Assisted Artisan Author webinars. This show is supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn  Joanna Penn is an award-winning New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of thrillers, dark fantasy, short stories and travel memoir under J.F. Penn and also writes non-fiction for authors and hosts The Creative Penn Podcast. What Kickstarter is and why it works differently from a normal book launch The fears that held me back for almost a decade — and whether they were justified Starting small: Why you don't need sprayed edges and special hardbacks to run a successful campaign. Creative reward ideas beyond merch: digital rewards, experiential rewards, naming rights, and bundling your backlist Common mistakes that sink campaigns: overestimating your reach, getting shipping costs wrong, and not allowing enough time Fulfilment realities, printing timelines, and reinvesting profit into future stock Marketing your campaign: pre-launch signups, content marketing, email lists, social media scheduling, and Facebook/Meta ads My update for campaign #7, Bones of the Deep: what's changed, what I'm doing differently, and how AI tools are part of my process now Why I now love Kickstarter campaigns and how the spike income model fits a sustainable creative career You can find my Kickstarter campaign for Bones of the Deep here (until 5 May, 2026) and all my previous campaigns here. Introduction Jo: In this episode, I've included excerpts from my own previous solo show about Kickstarter, as well as excerpts from interviews with Oriana Leckert, the Head of Publishing at Kickstarter; Russell Nohelty, who has done lots of successful Kickstarter campaigns and teaches direct sales; and Sacha Black, who did a six-figure campaign last year. I've also added my updates to the end of the episode filling in any last thoughts. You can listen to the full episodes here: Kickstarter for Authors with Oriana Leckert The Mindset and Business of Selling Direct with Russell Nohelty Lessons Learned and Tips from Pilgrimage, My First Kickstarter Campaign Two Different Approaches to Selling Direct with Sacha Black and Joanna Penn What is Kickstarter, and why use it instead of a normal book launch? Here's Oriana Leckert, Head of Publishing at Kickstarter — and the numbers she shares will be higher now, as the episode is from February 2025. Oriana: Kickstarter is a crowdfunding platform. We are unique in the crowdfunding landscape for a few reasons. We are only for creative projects, so you can't use Kickstarter for medical bills, investment funding, or charitable donations. Every project has to create something new to share with the world. Jo: Have you got any numbers on how big the Kickstarter industry is now with publishing, or anything you can share around that? Oriana: Yeah, I would love to. First I'll tell you Kickstarter overall by the numbers. Since our inception, there have been 273,000 projects funded, eight and a half billion — with a “b” — billion dollars pledged, from more than 24 million backers. In publishing specifically, we've had 69,000 projects launched, 3.2 million unique backers, and over $380 million pledged to campaigns. I have lots of other stats, but a few things I'll share. The publishing category keeps growing The publishing category has grown year over year, every year since 2017, in terms of number of projects launched, number of projects successful, and the overall success rate. There has never been a dip since 2017. Another stat I really love about the publishing category: if you look at campaigns that have at least 25 backers, the overall success rate is 84%. I think that's really telling, because 25 backers is a little bit more than your mum, your best friend, the folks who are essentially obligated to support anything you do. So if you can get a little bit beyond that inner circle, your chances of succeeding on the platform are tremendously high. Backers are paying more — and waiting longer Another thing I wanted to call out — I just got some new numbers around this. The average backing amount per backer across the whole category has nearly doubled since 2020. We used to see an average backing around $40, and it's currently at $72 per backer. I think this is clearly around the trend of special and deluxe editions, but it's a great indication that backer behaviour on Kickstarter is just very different from your general book-buying public. People don't come here looking for 99-cent ebooks — the lowest bargain-basement prices. Folks are really willing to pay more because they understand this is a different kind of thing. It's not exactly a purchase. It really is supporting, bringing a strange and wonderful new thing into the world that wouldn't exist before. People are also much more forgiving about timelines. If you buy something from most online booksellers, you're expecting to have it in your hands within a couple of days. People wait months and sometimes years to get their Kickstarter rewards, and they don't mind if the creator is clear and transparent. You're also doing the work of demystifying the publishing process. Why does it take so long? Where are books printed? How long does it take them to ship via freight over the ocean? What do all these things really look like? So it's really interesting just figuring out what your backers want and will bear versus the general book-buying public out in the world. Kickstarter is not just for “desperate” authors anymore Oriana: People used to think Kickstarter was just for desperate folks who couldn't get a book deal through the traditional systems. The change has been so dramatic — people now understand that Kickstarter can be transformative for an author's career, and that it can work for traditional publishing, indie publishing, hybrid publishing, all kinds of authors. Kickstarter is really about collapsing the boundaries between a writer and their readers, a publisher and their fan base, any creative person and their audience. And there are so many benefits to doing that. You get to really thrill your backers with new and exciting rewards. You get to turn what can be a standard book release into a moment. You get to build your brand, your profile, get press, test out ambitious projects. You get to understand so much more about your audience and what they want and how you can give it to them. It's been really marvellous seeing the great success that people can have on our platform and outside of it. Why do a Kickstarter campaign? Jo: Why Kickstarter and not a usual book launch? Benefits for backers If you back a Kickstarter, you get special editions, bonus content, interesting merchandise, bundles, digital specials, print specials, early access. All of them pretty much are really cool books from creators you either already love or those you've never heard of, because you just want to see their cool stuff. I've started buying books from people I have never heard of because I think their books are really cool. Once you start supporting campaigns on Kickstarter, the algorithm will recommend campaigns for you. It's essentially a different way of shopping for great books and other products, and it's just another part of my ecosystem for how I shop. It's a form of direct sales, so you also have a closer connection with the creator. You can message them, for example, and they get it — rather than buying through an online retailer or bookstore. Benefits for creators In terms of benefits for creators, you get to know people in a more personal way through the campaign, messaging with people and connecting more than you would when selling through a retailer, when you don't know who is buying your books. As an author, you can make more money more quickly and retain a higher percentage of the royalties, rather than wait months or years to get paid and have a large percentage taken out by everyone down the chain — publishers, platforms, distributors, and retailers. Brandon Sanderson's $41 million Kickstarter was clearly the pinnacle of what can be achieved, but many authors are happy making a few thousand for their book project upfront and use campaigns multiple times during the year. Kickstarter takes 5% for their fee, although of course you have to factor in the cost of production and marketing. But even then, I make more profit on my book sales through selling ebooks and audiobooks direct, and also printing with BookVault, than I do with KDP Print or IngramSpark print on demand. Higher average order and faster payment Another way you make more money is that the average order per customer is higher with Kickstarter than sales on the usual stores. The average order on my campaign was £37.24 — that's around $45 US — which is at least four times higher than I might have made selling Pilgrimage in the usual way on the major retailers. You get paid two weeks after the campaign finishes, so the money is in your bank account much faster than if you sell on retailers. In terms of cash flow, make sure you time your campaign so you get the money before you have to pay for printing, shipping, and other significant bills. Spike income vs monthly income There are many creators who now make Kickstarter the core of their business. It's a spike income model rather than a monthly income, which most indie authors are used to. The monthly income model is fantastic — I love getting money every month — but it also has the effect of making indie authors behave as if this is a normal job: work every month, get paid every month, put out another book so you get paid in another few months' time. With the Kickstarter model, you can get a bigger chunk of money in one go, so you could potentially move to a big launch and then take more time off before ramping up to the next launch months later. And amusingly, this sounds a bit more like traditional publishing. It's just that as an indie author, when you get that amount of money, it's much bigger. So that kind of launch tempo is an attractive prospect if you think about it: if I just get this big spike of money even once a year, that's really cool. And then of course you can sell it later. What are some of the fears that might stop you? Jo: I held back from doing a Kickstarter for years — almost a decade, in fact — where I backed campaigns and resisted doing a campaign for my own books. Here are some of my fears. Prepare to face your fears Jo: This entire experience thrust me out of my comfort zone and into a new way of creating, launching, and connecting with readers. Pilgrimage is my first memoir, my first special hardback with colour photos, and my first Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign. So I had a lot to learn. The book is very personal and I bare my soul about some dark times, so that was terrifying in itself, let alone trying a new product edition and publishing platform. On the evening I clicked the launch button — and yes, you have to actually click an actual launch button — my heart was hammering out of my chest. I have not felt that nervous since probably the first time publishing on Amazon. I was afraid of failure. I was afraid of being embarrassed if my campaign didn't fund. I wrote a book on marketing — how to market a book — so I would be mortified if I had not funded. In fact, I even changed my target from £5,000 to £1,000 the night before, as I was so terrified it wouldn't fund. I was afraid of getting something terribly wrong and ending up out of pocket through issues with printing and shipping. I was afraid of letting backers down by promising something I might not be able to deliver. I was afraid I had overcommitted myself to a whole load of work I might even resent doing. I am a one-person business, and although I work with freelancers, I still do pretty much everything myself. I am a control freak — you might have noticed. So yes, there was a lot of apprehension and fear. You don't have to go huge Another fear might be the fear of failure — that you'll put up a campaign and no one will buy from you. But one answer is just to do a modest campaign. You don't have to do special hardbacks or merchandise. As Russell says: Russell: Somehow all of the teaching that we have given over the last two years has been executed in a way that makes it seem like you have to do this enormous campaign with sprayed edges and big, beautiful hardcovers and interior illustrations and vellum and all of that stuff. And I want to say first: that is absolutely not true. You don't have to do any of those things. If you look at two of the last three campaigns I've done, all I was offering was paperback books and ebooks, and then audio commentary for one of the campaigns. You can do a Kickstarter — and I often will tell people, especially if they're not an already successful author — do a campaign that is small and easy to get data on before you do something big. The direct connection is actually the point Jo: One of my resistances to this was a sort of, “Oh, I'm actually going to have to do a more higher-touch thing.” But as you say, the reframe is: oh my goodness, this is amazing, because I actually do get to connect with people. Just yesterday I sent a signed book — Pilgrimage, which I did my last Kickstarter on — and this guy was like, “I bought it for myself. Can you sign it to me, because I'm going to do the Camino in a wheelchair?” And I was just so touched. Emailing him back, I just felt, oh my goodness, I'm having a connection with this person that if they'd just bought a book on Amazon, I would not have had. So now it's almost like — it's this totally different view of my business, which is that direct-first means a much more personal way. It really is like we're in that thousand true fans moment that we first talked about 20 years ago. Were my fears realised? Jo: Just to recap, I was afraid of failure and embarrassment if I failed to fund, of getting something wrong and being out of pocket, of letting backers down, and of overcommitting myself and resenting the workload. Really, the only thing that happened was overcommitment and a lot more work than I expected. But the time I put in was also likely the reason for the campaign's success and the reason that the other things didn't happen. I had to learn a new platform and a new approach to publishing and book marketing, so it was kind of a mini degree at the same time. So yes, I will do another Kickstarter — but only for special projects that are suited to this kind of intensive campaign. Tips for campaigns In this section, Oriana shares her thoughts on rewards, and then I'll go into some more of my tips. Thinking beyond merch Oriana: The rewards are really at the heart of the Kickstarter proposition and what makes this kind of fundraising so interesting and thrilling. Basically, your process is you're inviting people on a creative journey. You're saying, “I'm going to make this cool thing. I want your support, and in exchange, you're going to get stuff, you're going to get to be part of my process.” Obviously your main reward is going to be your book, or your series, or if you're a publishing company, your season — whatever it is. That's your main tier. Then you're going to build everything else out above and below that. A lot of people think rewards means swag and merch. Which is fine, but merch can add a lot to your production costs. It's causing you to learn how to produce all kinds of things that maybe you've never done before. So that's not the only way to do it. If you're going to do some merch, I think it's nice to come up with some custom items that feel really related to the work that you're doing. If you've got a romance novel with a pivotal scene on the beach, maybe you'd make some candles that smell like the ocean. Maybe you do some kind of handkerchief that's printed with the pattern of the dress your heroine is wearing. Digital and experiential rewards Oriana: But you can really think beyond merch into digital rewards and experiential rewards. There are a lot of parts of the writing process that can be pulled out and packaged as rewards — things like notes from the field, outtakes, deleted scenes. I've had people write bloopers, as if it were a comedy movie, added new scenes or novellas, other pieces from different works that you've done. Certainly your backlist and other books you've written can all be included. We've seen people do tours of the writer's studio, things like that. Also think about what skills you have in addition to your writing. Perhaps you're excellent at marketing or social media or poetry — you can offer webinars on those sorts of things. Other kinds of ways that people can experience your creative practice. High-end and naming rewards Oriana: Then you can get into high-end, one-off, crazy rewards. One whole section of rewards I love is naming rights. We've seen all kinds — “We'll name the dragon after your dog, or after your mother-in-law. We'll name the hero after your son.” There's a LitRPG novelist named Matt Dinniman who does this really well. He writes these big-cast novels — there are dungeons, and you're in an intergalactic reality TV show with hundreds of characters. In his last campaign, for $666 he would kill you off in his next book, and for $777 he'd let you live and write a whole scene around you personally. You can also do book release parties. You can do book clubs. If you're writing children's books, you can do colouring pages or supplemental material for teachers or other educators. The sky is really the limit, and it is based on your creativity and the things that both you can make and that your audience wants. This is another opportunity — talk to them. Ask them: if I'm going to do a piece of swag, would you rather have an enamel pin or a makeup bag? If I'm going to do alternate covers, would you like the blue cover or the red cover? See what your people are interested in, and then figure out whether it's possible for you to deliver it to them. Learn about the platform from experts Jo: I've been publishing and selling books through online retailers, as well as my own store, since 2008. I know what I'm doing, but I still had a lot to learn. With Kickstarter, it's essentially a completely different ecosystem, with different rules and a different audience, so you have to learn the ropes. Even if you're super successful in other places, you might crash and burn on Kickstarter unless you understand how it works and change your approach accordingly. Start backing campaigns Jo: See how it feels to back Kickstarter campaigns and discover what draws you in as a reader and a fan of specific things. You might find projects you love outside of books — there's plenty of other projects outside of books. You can browse the publishing category to find new books, and also use the search to find things you might like. In this way, you can support fellow creators and learn how the Kickstarter site works for discoverability and marketing. Make sure you go through the Kickstarter.com resources — they have a creator pack which will give you direction on the campaign. Also, their terms of use are really important to read, as there are some assumptions you'll have because you've published on another platform that are incorrect. So do not assume you know what you're doing if this is your first campaign. Ask for feedback before launch Jo: Once you have a draft of your campaign, ask specific people to review it before it launches. You can share a preview prior to launch and get feedback on your page. This helps you refine your story and the rewards, answer any questions before the campaign goes live, and it can also help pique the interest of your audience. I asked specific people who had done Kickstarter campaigns for help at different stages of the process, and this was really useful too. Review common mistakes from other campaigns Jo: If you examine how others made mistakes, you can learn from them. The most common seem to be: Not finishing the book before the campaign Getting the financials wrong for production, shipping, and any other rewards. I know some authors who have ended up breaking even, or sometimes even out of pocket from campaigns. Don't do that. Not making the most of the story sales page and not including everything necessary, so backers don't understand and don't want to support the campaign — essentially, not being clear enough Setting unrealistic goals, like expecting to make six figures on a first campaign Not allowing enough time for everything Not seeking feedback from people who have done it before Not marketing the campaign enough Overpromising and under-delivering Poor communication with backers about the status of rewards Set aside more time than you think you need Jo: The campaign ended up being far more significant than I expected in terms of workload and time to complete. Everyone told me that beforehand, but it was still a surprise. It took time to prepare the multiple editions for the rewards. I usually produce an ebook, paperback, and a large print edition, and I narrate my own nonfiction audiobooks. But for this Kickstarter, I also wanted to do this special hardback with colour photos, a flyleaf cover and silver foil. I wanted to create a special print product I could be proud of. I'm proud of all my books in terms of the content, but the usual paperback print-on-demand books are more about the content than the true beauty of the product. For Pilgrimage: A Book of My Heart, I wanted a special edition, so I worked with Jane on the design, going through my photos from the various pilgrimages to find those that resonated with the content — for example, the cadaver tomb at Canterbury, and my Compostela from the Camino de Santiago. Once we finished, I had that proof copy rushed so we could turn around everything. And I love, love, love the hardback. It has a silken-finish cover and it feels lovely and weighty. The pictures came out well, as the paper is of a higher quality and weight to allow for colour printing. Overall, I am incredibly proud of the finished product. I even sent a copy to my mother-in-law, which I have never done before. And yes, she thinks it's good. I definitely should have allowed more time, as I spent most of the Christmas and New Year period working on the book, recording and editing the audiobook, and preparing for the campaign. I also didn't have time to prepare, record, edit, and produce the Writing Setting and Sense of Place course until after the campaign, and it was really hard to find the energy to do this afterwards. Building the campaign page Jo: It took time to build the Kickstarter campaign page, create the video, and incorporate feedback. Most authors don't write sales pages anymore. Sure, we write a sales description for the book page on the retailers, but we don't often do a whole page for multiple editions. On Kickstarter, you are basically writing a sales page for your campaign, which they call a “story.” Some of your existing audience might just click through and back the campaign without reading it, but most backers will check out the details to find answers to any questions they have. It is a very long page, and you also need a video — or you don't need one, but it's highly recommended. It's best to record the video at the last stage when everything else is done. You can still see my Kickstarter video on my campaign page, so I won't go through everything in detail. But the key aspects are: Who the campaign is aimed at Why the campaign is important to me and the book What products are available Pictures of everything — the page should be really visual — and I included the images in the video as well Sample chapters and sample audio Specifications, with weight, pages, listening time, table of contents About me, the author Stretch goals Add-ons Any questions, risks, and challenges So it's pretty long. Then the reward levels have to be set up carefully for each pledge level with shipping costs, and specific details about what's included. Eventually, I felt like my page had way too much information, but since I didn't really get many backer questions, I guess it did what it was supposed to do. I rewrote and edited that page so many times — adding and changing the order of things, responding to feedback, switching things around. But hopefully I can use that as a template for other campaigns. Marketing takes time too Jo: It took time to prepare the marketing for the campaign. I'm pretty low-key for most launches these days — I publish a book, send a few emails to my lists, announce it on the podcast, do a little social media, update my websites, and move on to the next book. So this was probably my biggest effort in terms of a launch since my first novel back in 2011. I only had a two-week campaign, so I needed to make the most of that window. I'm going to detail the marketing in a separate section, but it took a lot of time to prepare the various things and execute them, as well as keep the energy up for promotion during the campaign. Two weeks was definitely the longest I would want to do — I was really over it by the end. Delivering stretch rewards Jo: It took more time to create and deliver the extra stretch rewards I promised. Since I had pretty low expectations of funding, I set my first stretch goal at £10,000 for “Lessons Learned from Writing a Travel Memoir.” When I promised it, I thought it might be a few pages of tips, and I didn't even think we would get there. But I'm incapable of delivering something that is half done. So when we did hit £10,000, I wrote essentially a short book on the topic, which I then formatted as an ebook and recorded as an audiobook. I'm actually going to turn that into a proper book at some point, so the content will get reused. But that definitely took more time than I expected, because I hadn't prepared it in advance. The backer spreadsheet and fulfilment Jo: It took time to figure out the backer spreadsheet and check all the fulfilment details. Once you finish your campaign, you send out surveys for mailing addresses and to fulfil rewards. I also needed to turn the backer report into a printing order for BookVault, and that was nerve-wracking. The spreadsheets were different formats, and then we spot-checked the orders to make sure people got the right books based on their orders. I was petrified that some people might get the wrong book, and I checked and checked and checked — both on the spreadsheet, and then once the orders were loaded, I checked BookVault as well. I was worried I'd have to resend the right book, which would end up with me out of pocket because they'd have to do double printing and shipping. But thankfully, all the checking made everything good, and I haven't heard from anyone who got the wrong book. Following up with backers Jo: It took time to follow up on failed payments and address issues. Most backers were easy to deal with — they received the updates and Kickstarter emails, they filled in the surveys, and I didn't have any problems. But there were problems with about 5% of backers, most of which were not their fault. There were failed payments when banks thought Kickstarter might be fraud. There were missed emails because of issues with deliverability, so backers didn't receive the rewards, or they didn't fill in the survey and return their address, which meant I couldn't do the order with BookVault — I had to do it later or manually. I had to follow up with every single one of these, some of them multiple times, and I slowly reduced my list of outstanding backers. A tip: If you back a Kickstarter campaign, please log on to Kickstarter a few weeks after the campaign has finished and check for updates. It's possible that you're not receiving the emails from Kickstarter, and the creator may need details from you in order to fulfil your pledge. Tax implications Jo: It took time to figure out the tax implications. This is not legal or financial advice, and your taxes will vary by jurisdiction. Please ask your accountant how you need to treat Kickstarter or any other book-related income. Wherever you are in the world, you will need to pay tax on the income, because we all have income tax, but the complicating factor is whether you also need to consider sales tax. And this definitely differs by jurisdiction. I went to my accountant, who said we should handle it as per any other book sales. I followed my accountant's advice, which treats backers the same way as my customers who buy on Shopify. Ask a professional in your jurisdiction about taxes and finances, even if you are in the UK. I cannot answer any questions. I'm not an accountant. Closing the loop Jo: I haven't had much time to do anything else, as I felt like I couldn't start anything new until everything in the campaign was finished. As soon as the campaign window closed, I felt like I had an open loop in my brain. I desperately wanted to close it in order to say the project was done. I have now delivered all the book and course rewards, and these lessons learned are really the last part of it. I've talked before about the different kinds of energy you need as an author — starting energy, pushing-through energy, and finishing energy. Once the campaign was funded, my finishing energy kicked in and I was driven to get everything finished as soon as possible. I sent the digital rewards out within a few days of the campaign closing, and also shipped the unsigned books, ordered the print books, then went and signed them, and then recorded the course. It has been my primary focus for the last few months, and I haven't been able to do much else except the podcast, which is my weekly commitment to you. Once again, I should have blocked out the time. Bonus tip: Don't plan an international speaking and book research trip during the campaign. International shipping and fulfilment Jo: Be careful with international shipping and fulfilment of signed books or products. Shipping costs can sink your campaign if you get them wrong, so be very careful with this area. I have sold books in 175 countries, and this podcast has a listenership in 228 countries, so I really wanted to have a completely international campaign. I wanted to ship Pilgrimage in any format to any country. Originally I thought I would just charge a bit extra for the book and include shipping. But once I set the book editions up at BookVault and I had the weight and dimensions sorted, I started checking the shipping costs to different countries. For example, we lived in New Zealand for seven years — my husband is a New Zealander, so we go back — so I definitely had to sell in New Zealand. And of course the shipping to New Zealand is very, very different to the US, for example. It is crazy how much shipping costs vary. I discovered I couldn't just assume it would all wash out and I'd end up making a profit somehow. I had to be a lot more careful with the calculations. So I focused on my biggest markets, which in terms of my book sales are the US, UK, European Union, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. I added a note on the campaign to say I would add any other country for print shipping if people contacted me. As it turned out, no one asked for any other countries, so that was the best way to go in the end. If you're in a country where the shipping is outrageous — if you're willing to pay for the shipping, then that's absolutely fine. It's just that for the campaign, I had to focus. When the unexpected happens Jo: Of course, you can try to prepare for everything and then something unexpected and out of your control happens. A big spanner in the works for my campaign was the Russian hack, which took down the UK Royal Mail just before my launch. If you're not in the UK, you wouldn't have heard about this, because in some ways it's a very small issue — but it basically took down Royal Mail and a lot of shipping went into flux. It specifically hit the international side, and other shipping firms ramped up to take the slack. But it made planning for the launch difficult, as the prices were shifting and I didn't know how delivery was going to work. Even for posting in the UK it was hard, because the mail offices were getting backed up. Once again, I'm grateful for BookVault's adaptability, because I could check different addresses and shipping prices even as things changed, and they added new providers for shipping. About 95% of my shipping ended up being within an acceptable range of what I charged. So do your research, weigh and measure your items so you can get exact quotes for each. Check what kind of packaging you need. If you're doing your own shipping, you have to actually type in the shipping costs per reward and per country — it's a lot of manual setup to get it right. But this is critical, so check and double-check — and in fact, I triple- and quadruple-checked, then went to sleep, and then the next day checked again. Having spent 13 years as an IT consultant prior to this career as an author, I will always remember and have learned from the fact that something just might not be working, and then literally if you just go away, go to bed, come back the next day, it'll probably just be working. Sometimes it actually works. So yes, I did that, and every time I checked, pretty much I found something I'd typed in that didn't quite match, because you also have to retype — if you include all the books in the add-ons, you have to type it again. I didn't stop checking until the day before the launch, and then it was right. I was happy, and everything seemed to be fine. Shipping is always a moving target Jo: Revisiting this section made me laugh, because as I record this, in the week before I launch Bones of the Deep, international shipping is disrupted again — by the war in Iran, and the Strait of Hormuz being closed, which is affecting fuel prices. This underscores yet again how important it is to check your shipping. Of course, you can add shipping on later — Kickstarter allows this, as does BackerKit and other services. But as a backer, a customer of people on the platform, I hate being asked to pay shipping later. And since I hate that myself, I don't want other people to feel the same way. So just add a little buffer in, as asking people to pay an extra dollar in their pledge is not that big a deal, but you being out of pocket for every book shipped may well be. Sacha Black on pre-launch and fulfilment In an interview I did with Sacha Black, who writes as Ruby Roe, in December 2025, we talked about her issues with fulfilment. Sacha does a lot of complex printing, shipping, and custom book boxes and more. Her last campaign made over six figures, but of course it had its challenges. Here's Sacha with some of her tips, and then Oriana to close out this section with some other mistakes. Sacha: The first thing is — even before you start your Kickstarter — the pre-launch followers are critical. A lot of people think, “Well…” I guess there's a lot of loud noise about all these big numbers about how much people can make on Kickstarter, but actually a lot of it is driven by you, the author, pushing your audience to Kickstarter. You need more pre-launch followers than you think you do. Lots of people don't put enough impetus on the marketing beforehand. Almost all of our Kickstarter marketing is beforehand, because we drive so many people to that follow button. The other thing we do is early-bird pricing. We get the majority of our income on a campaign on day one. I think it was something wild, like 80% this time was on day one, so that's really important. Fulfilment takes longer than you think Sacha: The second thing is, it takes so, so very much longer than you think it does to fulfil a campaign, and you must factor in that cost. Because if it's not you fulfilling, you're paying somebody else to fulfil it. And if it is you fulfilling it, you must account for your own time in the pricing of your campaign. The other thing is that the amount of time it takes to fulfil is directly proportionate to the size of the campaign. So you do have to think about that. The other lesson we have learned is that overseas printing will drag your timelines out far longer than you think. So whatever you think it's going to take you to fulfil — add several months more onto that, and put that information in your campaign. Reinvesting profit and exclusive rewards Sacha: The last thing — if you have some profit in the Kickstarter, because not all Kickstarters are actually massively profitable. They either don't account enough for shipping, or they don't account enough in the pricing. Thankfully, ours have been profitable, but we've actually reinvested that profit back into buying more stock and more merchandise, which not everybody would want to do if they don't have a warehouse. However, we do have one. We are stockpiling merchandise and books so that we can do mystery boxes later on down the line. It's probably a year away, but we are buying extra of everything so that we have that in the warehouse. So it depends on what you want to do with your profit. For us, it was all about buying more books, basically. The other thing to think about is: what is it that you're doing that's exclusive to Kickstarter? Because you will get backers on Kickstarter who want that quirky, unique thing that they're not going to be able to get anywhere else. But what about you? You've done more Kickstarters than me — what do you think is the biggest lesson you've learned? Tiers, bundles, and AI for planning rewards Jo: Well, I think all of mine together add up to the one you just did. Although I will comment — you said something like £75 per pre-launch backer. That is obviously dependent on your tiers for the rewards, so most authors won't have that amount. My average order value, which I know is slightly different, but I don't offer things like book boxes as you have — so a lot of it will depend on the tiers. Some people will do a Kickstarter just with an ebook — just with one ebook and maybe a bundle of ebooks — so you're never going to make it up to that kind of value. So this is important too: have a look at what people offer on their different levels of Kickstarter. In fact, here's my AI tip for the day. What you can do — what I did with my Buried and the Drowned campaign recently — is, you know, I'm happy uploading my book. I uploaded it to ChatGPT and said, “Tell me, what are some ideas for the different reward tiers that I can do on Kickstarter?” And it will give you some ideas for what you can do, what kind of bundles you might want to do. So bundling your backlist is another thing you can do — as upsells, or you can just do it like I did for Blood Vintage, where I did a horror bundle of four standalone horror books in one of the upper tiers. Bundling is a good way to do it, and also upselling your backlist is a really good way to up things. And also, if you do it digitally — for ebooks and audiobooks — there's a lot less time in fulfilment. Oriana on the biggest mistakes Jo: What are some of the top mistakes you see that mean the campaign doesn't fund, or there are other issues? Oriana: Totally. I mean, the biggest mistake I think authors make — or any creator — is overestimating their ability to reach their crowd. Making sure that your ambition matches your reach is the number one most important thing to come close to guaranteeing that you will be successful. If you're an emerging writer and you're still building your audience and you don't have that many followers or subscribers out in the world, you should not try to fund a multi-volume leather-bound omnibus. Do a real honest assessment of who's in your crowd, how to find them, what percentage of them are likely to support what you're doing, and then find a project that feels realistic based on those numbers. That's really the biggest thing, conceptually. Building a strong project page Oriana: As far as tips for a project page — again, back campaigns and look at what other people are doing. A project page can be either as simple or as complicated as you want to make it. You definitely want to talk about the book: what is in it, what you're writing. Do a trope card if you want — we're seeing those all over the site. Say what kind of book it is, and the specs: page count, trim size, cover design. Obviously if you're doing a special edition, exactly what sorts of bells and whistles, with a prototype if you can. But you can be really expansive from there. What are your inspirations? Who are your collaborators? What brought you to this work? What are some of the things that make you excited about your writing practice, your timeline, your budget? What made you choose these rewards and how you're going to produce them? All those sorts of things will make backers feel both more trusting that you will do the things you're promising, and just more excited to be part of your journey. Marketing your Kickstarter campaign Let's talk about marketing. First, a snippet from Oriana, and then I'll share specifics around marketing tips — many of which are useful if you're launching in any other way. Kickstarter's algorithm rewards attention Oriana: Being on Kickstarter will help you grow your audience, but it's definitely not everything. You really do need to bring your people first. Our algorithm works on attention, so any project that's getting clicks, getting backings, getting comments — our algorithm says, “Oh, people want to look at this. We will expose it to more and more people.” That means raising it up in search results, slotting it into various of the macros and carousels around the site. Our recommendation engine powers recommended projects on the top of campaigns and at the bottom of emails. We are doing a lot to make sure that projects are being surfaced to folks who want to see them. Talk about the book while you're writing it Jo: Talk and share about the book while you're writing it, even though you might not know what it will turn into. I always share my book research and projects in progress, so this was nothing new. But Pilgrimage was years in the making, so I had years of sharing aspects of it. I've shared pictures from every pilgrimage walk on Instagram at @jfpennauthor and Facebook at J.F. Penn Author, and sometimes Facebook The Creative Penn. I've talked on this podcast about each walk, and I've done solo episodes and blog posts about each on my Books and Travel podcast and blog. I also did a poll and shared my book cover design process, and then I did an article on why I ignored target-reader feedback in the end. All this meant that many in my community — including you listening — became aware of my solo walking and also my ecclesiastical interest, my architecture interest, and you enjoyed my photos along the way if you follow me on social media. So when I announced the launch, it was the culmination of years of build-up. Use the pre-launch page early Jo: Set up the Kickstarter pre-launch page as early as possible, and keep promoting it. You can launch a pre-launch page once Kickstarter has approved your project, and you don't have to have finished everything to make it available — just complete the personal and business setup, and fill in enough detail so they can verify your identity and judge the campaign to be real and within the guidelines, and not a scam or spam campaign. I started to promote my pre-launch page, and by the time we went live, I had people signed up on launch. Those people get an email from Kickstarter. Those people were responsible for my campaign funding within the first few minutes, and then taking it to 5x the target within the first 24 hours. Then I started to email my lists, and all of this type of thing. But it was those pre-launch signups that really kick-started — see what I did there? — the whole thing. The benefit of using Kickstarter for multiple projects is that previous backers are notified of your new project. This compounds the effect over time, and is why those who use Kickstarter successfully do multiple campaigns. Kickstarter SEO and on-platform marketing Jo: Kickstarter has its own ecosystem. There's a discovery algorithm that can help you find projects you might like as a backer, and there are different ways to search, but only certain aspects appear in the search. So your title, subtitle, and your header image need to be optimised so people can find you. Your story sales page needs to be clear, with a compelling pitch. People also have to want your rewards, so marketing has to be baked into the products you're offering and who you're trying to attract. Your video doesn't need to be a professional-level product, but it does need to connect with potential backers, so take the time to make a good one. If you've never made a video before, you will need time to upskill. Kickstarter also has social media. Use #KickstarterReads and tag @KickstarterReads. If your project funds quickly and has a good trajectory, you might get picked for the “Projects We Love” badge, which also gives you better discoverability. I got that pretty fast. You can also tag Kickstarter on social media and inform them of your campaign. Content marketing Jo: Content marketing is offering something useful or interesting or inspiring or funny or entertaining for free, in order to attract your target market so they buy your book. This might be an article or blog post, video, audio, podcast, social media, whatever. For fiction, it's usually a free book or a short story or other free examples of your writing that draw people in. Content marketing is my favourite form of marketing, as it is about attraction, not interruption. It also involves creating something in the world that lasts over time, as opposed to an ephemeral spike ad or a social media post that quickly disappears. Each has its place, of course, and I use them all. This podcast is content marketing, although it now also provides direct revenue in the form of corporate advertising and Patreon support. Thank you, patrons and advertisers — and I consider this to be part of my creative body of work. My Books and Travel podcast is also content marketing. Guest appearances for the launch Jo: For this launch, I did content marketing on my own sites and shows, as well as other people's, which I arranged and recorded in advance. I've also mentioned the campaign in the introduction to every one of these shows leading up to the launch and during the launch. I was on some podcasts: Sacred Steps with Kevin Donahue, Wish I'd Known Then… For Writers with Sara Rosett and Jami Albright, Travel Writing World with Jeremy Bassetti, and Into the Woods with Holly Worton. I also did several of my own. I did one on this feed. I did another on the Books and Travel feed. I also included two chapters from the audiobook on the Books and Travel podcast. All of these took time to prepare and produce, but each is a chance for another person to hear about the book. Plus, they're evergreen, and Pilgrimage is available for everyone to buy now, so I can point people at Pilgrimage on other stores. Use a redirection URL Jo: For all my marketing, I used JFPenn.com/pilgrimage, which I can redirect using the Pretty Links plugin on WordPress and point to wherever I want it to go. Before the launch, it went to the pre-launch page; then the campaign itself; and now it goes to the book page. Once I build a special landing page, it will go there. Depending on where you're listening will depend on where it goes, but that's JFPenn.com/pilgrimage. The URL needs to be easy to say out loud for use in podcast interviews and audio-first media. Email your list multiple times Jo: Some things change in book marketing — like the emergence of new platforms like TikTok — but one thing has stayed the same for decades: if you have an email list, you can always sell books. Your email list consists of people who have opted in to hear from you, so you can email them about normal launches as well as your Kickstarter campaign. I have two email lists: one for The Creative Penn around writing, and the other around J.F. Penn for my fiction. I emailed both lists multiple times at different times in the campaign. I use ConvertKit for my email, but there are other options for authors. Use referral links for tracking Jo: Use specific referral links for different aspects of the campaign for tracking returns. Kickstarter allows you to create different tracking links so you can link revenue to specific marketing events. For example, I used one link for my Creative Penn email list, another for my J.F. Penn email list, and yet another for my Facebook advertising. You can also add the Meta pixel and Google Analytics code to the campaign, which can also help with figuring out advertising. And if you don't know what those are, don't worry — you don't have to use them. Book images and social media Jo: I initially mocked up the book using cover images on MockupShots.com, and then resized them in Canva in order to create social media images. I later did a book photo shoot with the hardback in different places to give me more marketing assets to play with — all of which I will use over time as part of ongoing marketing. I prepared and scheduled social media posts to go out every day, and I did that in advance, primarily for Twitter at @thecreativepenn, my Instagram and Facebook at J.F. Penn Author, and also Facebook at The Creative Penn. It was a lot of work, but I really enjoyed it — weirdly — and I need to do more of this for my other books, especially as with Shopify, Facebook, and Instagram link directly into my store, so I can tag books. These days social commerce is a lot smoother through mobile, so someone can see an image on social, click through, and buy immediately. I also did some quotes from the book — so I did pictures, I also did quotes — and I blatantly used our cute British Shorthair cats, Cashew and Ramen, for marketing reasons. I use Buffer to schedule my social media, but there are other tools. I also asked some friends who are travel influencers to share the book, and I sent them the hardback in advance so they could review if they liked. Thanks to Sarah Baxter and Alastair Humphreys for sharing the book, and especially a big thank you to Anna McNuff, who gave birth to twins that week and still managed to share about Pilgrimage. Backer engagement and stretch goals Jo: Let's be clear — it was not natural for me to push a book every day for two weeks. I also felt awkward about engaging with backers multiple times, let alone the wider community who I was sure was sick of my book, but I did it anyway, as it was only a short campaign of two weeks. I sent four updates during the campaign to backers, some of which are visible to the public on my Kickstarter, and then I sent updates afterwards with delivery of the rewards. Although I did resist the stretch goals, as I mentioned earlier, I went with “Notes on Writing a Travel Memoir” and the backer live Q&A. I did scramble to decide on and deliver those, as I really didn't think I would need them — which is crazy. I had such low expectations of what I might achieve. But next time I would definitely plan stretch goals in advance and in more detail. Facebook advertising Jo: I did some Facebook ads for the campaign — although I should call them Meta ads, because they're also on Instagram. I primarily aimed them at my email lists and people who follow my pages, but also some wider reach using lookalike lists and walking interests. I used a tracking link, so I know that the revenue that came in through people backing it more than paid for the ads. So I would do more of this next time. Marketing things I didn't do Jo: I didn't try to get any press or traditional media attention, mainly because I would have had to approach outlets much earlier in the process. I didn't have the hardback finished until a few weeks before the campaign, rather than a few months before, which is when pitching for press is a better idea. I also didn't collaborate with other creators on Kickstarter, even though I knew other authors doing campaigns at the same time. A couple of people asked me about cross-promotion, but their campaigns were not at all related to Pilgrimage. As with all book marketing, there is only a point to cross-promotion if you target the same readers. I had intended to do some Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube Live videos, but I struggle with live videos in general — and especially when I'm tired — so I didn't go ahead with those. I might consider more of those next time. Do a survey for everyone Jo: My tip is — do a survey for everyone. As part of a campaign I previously backed, I noticed that I didn't actually need to do a survey for the digital backers, because they could just get the rewards if I emailed through Kickstarter. And sure enough, you can just email the BookFunnel links, the course discount code, etc., through the campaign. But this was a mistake. I should have done a survey for everyone. If you do a survey, you can get the real email, as some people use a cloaked email. You can also include a checkbox asking people if they want to sign up for your email list. Respecting backer data Jo: So while you do get the email addresses of everyone who backs your campaign in your backer report, you cannot just upload them to your email provider and start emailing them about your other books. Kickstarter's terms of use include the following: When you use Kickstarter, and especially if you create a successful project, you may receive information about other users, including things like their names, email addresses, and postal addresses. This information is provided for the purpose of participating in a Kickstarter project. Don't use it for other purposes and don't abuse it. This is about data protection and privacy laws. Basically, Kickstarter is the platform in this instance, and people have signed up to receive emails from Kickstarter, but not from you. All emails about the campaign go through Kickstarter, and you don't have permission to just upload that list to your own email system and start sending more emails. They have not specifically said they want that, unless they have in a survey with opt-in — which I didn't do. Of course, there are indirect ways to attract people to sign up for your list. My book Pilgrimage includes ways to hear from me further, so some backers will go on and sign up for my free thriller ebook at JFPenn.com/free, or my Author Blueprint at TheCreativePenn.com/blueprint. You can also do updates later, for example when you have a new campaign, and in this way Kickstarter acts as a different ecosystem for email. Should you consider a Kickstarter campaign for your book? Jo: To be honest — only if you consider this to be a career you want to invest in, and a platform you want to do more than one campaign with. If you just have one book or a couple of books, or you're just starting out, or you don't want to do marketing and connect with readers, then definitely don't do a Kickstarter. It is not some magic button that will make you money — like uploading to Amazon is not a magic button that will make you money. It takes time and effort to have a successful campaign. But if you do want to build a long-term author business, then selling direct should have some part to play, and Kickstarter is a great way to make more money per book and connect with readers. It's really only the beginning of the trend of authors selling direct, so don't worry — you can learn how to do this over time. Update for Bones of the Deep, my 7th campaign in April 2026 Jo: It was interesting to revisit my lessons learned and other people's tips, and really, there are only a few things that have changed. I love doing Kickstarter campaigns now Firstly, I absolutely love doing Kickstarter campaigns. I am not nervous at all anymore, and I am just so thrilled to produce gorgeous hardback editions of my books this way. I love delivering beautiful books and new stories or nonfiction to my readers. I love doing the discovery writing webinars and the coaching, and just in general, I appreciate the opportunity to publish this way. I feel like a “real author” — with beautiful hardbacks, doing a signing, getting photos and emails from readers who receive the books. Custom printing keeps expanding In terms of other changes, over the last few years since Pilgrimage, BookVault has expanded their custom printing, so now I have custom endpapers, sprayed edges, different kinds of foil, as well as the silken paper and the ribbon and photos inside. These gorgeous editions are my personal creative reason to keep doing campaigns. I love saying “I made this!” And over time, I would love to get all my backlist into special editions. A repeatable process I'm still doing similar kinds of rewards — the book in all editions — and it's all finished so it's lower stress. Even the audiobook narration is done, so I can fulfil immediately. There's just the live discovery writing webinar to do, and stretch goal Q&A and consulting sessions. I'm also doing bundles, and all my backlist gets bundled in the add-ons, so I have a repeatable process, which makes things easier. Using AI in production I'm using more AI, specifically in the images and video. I love making book images with ChatGPT and Gemini's Nano Banana, and story images with Midjourney, and I use ElevenLabs with my voice clone for audiobooks. I fill in all the details in the AI section of the Kickstarter page, so you can go have a look at that and model it as you like. Spike income, realistic expectations I still like the spike income — but to be clear, my campaigns have varied in terms of financial success, as would be expected given they are all so different. My highest was Writing the Shadow at over £36,000 ($48,000), and my lowest was The Buried and the Drowned, a short story collection, at just under £8,000 ($10,700) — not a surprise at how different they are, given the audiences. Together my campaigns have now made £105,868 (just over $140,000), which I am very happy with. And of course, that's just the beginning, as then I put the books on my stores — JFPennBooks.com and CreativePennBooks.com — and on the usual platforms. A sustainable launch rhythm I still like the project approach — the short-term campaign focus — as I am good at sustaining marketing energy for a short period, and then I can drop off again. As I discussed with Sara Rosett last week as well, it feels sustainable for my career, unlike constant social media or ads. Lower-key marketing this time around I'm putting a lot less energy into marketing in general, relying on pre-launch signups over months of build-up as I talk about my writing process on the podcast, then emailing my lists, announcing it here, and scheduling some social media. It's pretty low-key these days, and that is a happy thing. However, for this campaign, I am planning to run some Meta ads direct to the campaign page, since I have Claude Code/Cowork to help me set them up and run them and crunch the data — and that takes the strain off considerably. More campaigns to come I will definitely be doing more Kickstarter campaigns, most likely a nonfiction one next. I am so glad I was able to get over my fears and do that first one, and I hope that encourages you to consider what might be possible for you and your book. So, if you'd like to check out my campaign for Bones of the Deep — even if you don't want the book, you can always model the sales page, or check out the book trailer — it's at JFPenn.com/bones. That link will go to the Kickstarter campaign from 20 April until early May 2026, and will then redirect. The post Kickstarter Tips for Authors: Rewards, Shipping, Marketing, and Lessons Learned first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Are you tired of the hustle-harder approach to book marketing? What if a quieter, more creative strategy could work just as well — and feel a whole lot better? How can special editions, physical letters, and library outreach bring readers to your books without the daily grind of ads and social media? Sara Rosett shares her low-key approach to marketing, direct sales, and the creative business of being an indie author. In the intro, dealing with uncertainty, and Becca Syme's Quit books; The Successful Author Mindset; Building resilience and the creative lies that writers tell themselves [Wish I'd Known Then]; On Writing – Stephen King; Big Magic – Elizabeth Gilbert; This podcast is sponsored by Kobo Writing Life, which helps authors self-publish and reach readers in global markets through the Kobo eco-system. You can also subscribe to the Kobo Writing Life podcast for interviews with successful indie authors. This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn  Sara Rosett is the USA Today bestselling author of over 30 books across 1920s mysteries, cosy mysteries, and travel mysteries, as well as nonfiction for authors. She's also the co-host of the fantastic Wish I'd Known Then podcast. In this episode: Why low-key, personality-driven marketing can be more sustainable than aggressive advertising How to pitch your books to libraries using a simple email strategy The pros and cons of special editions, physical letters, and Kickstarter campaigns Shifting from retailer-first releases to direct sales through a Shopify store Co-writing nonfiction and the power of series bundles for reader discovery Drawing creative inspiration from other industries and international storytelling trends You can find Sara at SaraRosett.com and at WishIdKnownForWriters.com Transcript of the interview Jo: Sara Rosett is the USA Today bestselling author of over 30 books across 1920s mysteries, cosy mysteries, and travel mysteries, as well as nonfiction for authors. She's also the co-host of the fantastic Wish I'd Known Then podcast. Welcome back to the show, Sara. Sara: Hi, Jo. Thanks for having me. It's great to be back. Jo: It is great to have you back. You were last on the show five years ago, around February 2021, and we talked about writing a series — and you have a great book on that. But first up, give us an update. What does your author business look like right now, and what are you up to with your writing? How Sara's author business has evolved Sara: Well, it's changed a lot. I sat down to think about this and I thought, yes, I have got into direct sales. I've done Kickstarters. I have a Shopify store now. I've really shifted from releasing first on the retailers. I don't really do that anymore. I've done some special editions, some physical things — I'm sure we'll talk about those later. Still doing the podcast with Jamie, the Wish I'd Known Then podcast, we're still doing that. I also have a Mystery Books podcast, which is an episodic podcast that comes out in seasons. I do a short season, about one a year, so I keep doing that. Writing some nonfiction. I did the trope book with Jennifer Hilt for mystery and thriller. And writing-wise, I've created a spinoff, a short spinoff in the 1920s series. I'm still loving the 1920s timeline. But I've slowed down a little bit on the releases. Busy, but good. Jo: Busy, but good. All right, we're going to get into all of those things. Although I must say I had forgotten about your Mystery Books podcast and going to seasonal. I also had my second podcast, Books and Travel, which is now on a kind of hiatus, but going to a seasonal approach is actually really interesting. Do you find that listeners come back to that podcast? The power of a seasonal podcast Sara: Yes, and it surprises me because I've always thought you have to be weekly with a podcast to gain any traction at all, which I think is the best way to do it. You can build an audience quickly then, but I just knew I couldn't sustain that. So when I set out, I started with maybe seven to ten episodes and I did them each year — each year has had a season — and I do five to ten episodes. Readers find it, and I have highlighted specific books. I think maybe they're searching for a podcast about the Thursday Murder Club or something like that. They find it that way, and I get downloads, just steady downloads throughout the year, and I don't do much. I do some Pinterest pins for that, and that's about all I do. This is one of those things — it's the kind of low-key marketing that's low threshold, but it does work. I think if your readers are looking for stuff to listen to about the topic you write about, it could be a good way to do some low-cost, long-tail marketing. I love it. I keep doing it because I love it. Jo: That's great. Low-key marketing that fits your personality Jo: As you mentioned, I really wanted to talk to you about this low-key, non-hype marketing. We've met in person a number of times, and I think we're quite similar — we're quiet, reserved. We are quite low key. I just put content out, and yes, I do some paid ads or whatever, but I just don't find the hype marketing something I want to do. I like the attraction marketing, and I feel like I do intuitive marketing. So how does your low-key marketing fit with your personality? Sara: Well, I did try some of the more promotional marketing. I tried to have a street team back when I heard authors talking about that. I thought, oh, I'll do a Street Team, and that doesn't really match with my readers. My genre — that's just not a thing that happens a lot there. So I backed off of that, and I've tried ads. Not really interested in those. I'm not really good at them, and I don't really want to get good at them. So I've searched for ways that I can find readers that don't rely on ads. I've really focused on my newsletter, and I have two of those. I have a main one that goes out to my readers who sign up in the back of the book. And then I have a New Release in Historical Mysteries newsletter that goes out about twice a month most of the time. That's just curation. I'm saying, hey, these are the new books that are out. I feel like those are easy to do. They fit with my personality, which is like, here, let me give you some information about what's going on in this genre. I do newsletters, the promo sites, the smaller promotional paid ads — I do those occasionally. I have a rotation that I go through, and I try to get a BookBub. If I can, that's great. I've just done things that are leaning into what I feel comfortable doing. Pitching books to libraries Sara: A lot of it is finding small sites where I haven't run an ad. Let me see if there's anybody who wants to sign up or get a free book through me here. I've done some BookFunnel marketing, where you can join the group promos. I like those. And I've reached out to libraries because I feel like my books appeal to libraries. They like the 1920s historicals. It's an easy way to reach people — it's attractive to libraries. So I had a list of libraries in my state, and I have an assistant who helps me out. She emailed down the list. She picked a few every week and messaged them and said, hey, this is a local author. She lives in this state. Here are some books you might enjoy from her. And I have, because of you, large print — I got into that when you started talking about large print a couple of years ago. So I have large print case laminate books that libraries like. I just do things like that, things that are not the norm. Hardly anybody is talking about marketing to libraries. But I try to do that. Sometimes I'll just think of something. I was at the library and I thought, wow, look at all these hardcover case laminate books they have in this large print section. Maybe I should try that. And then I search out and try to figure out if I can do it. Jo: And just for people who don't know, case laminate is a hardback. Sara: Yes. Jo: That's really interesting. You mentioned the libraries and the list. Was that a list you were able to buy? I remember years ago I had someone on the show who was doing that kind of thing. Or was it that your assistant had to go through and find all the libraries, find an email address, that kind of thing? Sara: I think I found it through Sisters in Crime, which is a mystery writers' organisation, and I think they had a contact list — you could get libraries and bookstores in your area. I think I started with that and then just research. And I'm sure now with AI, you could put in where you are and say, in a radius of 250 miles, what is near me? And you could probably get a great list. Jo: Absolutely. And when the assistant is emailing, is it just information about you and then saying, would you like to buy? Because you have a big backlist, and we don't want to be sending loads of expensive hardbacks to libraries unless they're actually going to buy. What's the process to actually sell to them? The library email approach Sara: I wrote up an email and introduced myself. I leaned into the “I'm local — I live in the same city or state that you're in.” Then I described my most popular series and said the first book is this. I put a link to a PDF that they can go look at. I think it's on my website, and they can go see the books. They can print that out, of course, and it has the ISBNs. I make sure they know they can order them from Ingram, and that's all I do. Then when I had a new release, we switched it up and put that at the top. But I have all the books in the series so they know it's a series. Jo: That's fantastic. I love that. Set-and-forget promotional marketing Jo: A lot of what you were talking about was newsletter, email marketing, some ads, but nothing aggressive — as in you're not monitoring it every single day. The email pushes, like a BookBub or free books, bargain books — you can book it and then it's almost set and forget, isn't it? You don't have to log in every day to check the results. Is that what you mean? Sara: Yes. And I like those because they are set and forget. You just have to remember to drop the price and then reset it on Amazon, and then they send it out to their list and hopefully you get some traffic from that. I like that much better than Facebook ads, because with ads I feel like you have to go in and monitor the comments and check on how they're doing. It's a more full-time type job. If you're doing a lot of ads, it's a couple of hours — for me anyway, because I'm not very savvy with it and I'm not as experienced. So it would take a long time to increase my knowledge there. Jo: To be fair, both of us have had many years when we could have become experts, but the fact is it doesn't suit our personalities. I am now working with Claude Code a bit more to do Amazon ads, but even then we go in once a week and Claude does a few things and then we log out again. I'm not doing this daily stuff, and I may eventually get back into doing it for Meta. But in terms of what I mean by low-key marketing — it's lower stress when you don't have to do stuff every day. And I guess what you're doing with the Mystery Books podcast, with the library pitches, with the batching — is that what you're doing? Putting aside time for marketing occasionally? Sara: Yes. And that's what I do. I'll think, oh, I haven't checked Kobo promos, so let me go check that, because I do use those too. I'm wide, so I'm trying to find things that bring my books to readers everywhere. I use the Kobo promos, I use Kobo Plus, I use Draft2Digital to get digital books into libraries. I'm always running — if they have a library sale anywhere, I sign up for it and I just do these occasional things. It's not every day, and I like doing things in phases. I like doing a special edition and working on that and then being done with that and putting that away and going back to writing or whatever. I don't mind doing promo for a little bit, but then I don't want to do it every day. A project-based approach to the author business Jo: We are similar in so many ways. I also have this project approach to life and business. If I'm writing a first draft of a new book, pretty much everything else goes out the window. Sara: Yes. Jo: Exactly. I just don't have the bandwidth. I'm not in that head space. And then, as we record this, I've got a Kickstarter coming up for Bones of the Deep and yesterday I did the book trailer, and I'll do the push for the Kickstarter and then I'm just going to stop. Sara: Well, the positive way to look at that is it's focus, right? We can focus for two weeks or a month or whatever — two months doing a Kickstarter or whatever — and then we're done with it, and then we move on. Jo: That just seems more sustainable to me. I didn't like doing everything every day or every single week. Sara: Me either. I like switching it up, and I do enjoy the different phases of writing. I like the research and then I like doing the — well, I don't like the drafting that much, but once I get a draft done, I like the editing. And then when it comes time to promote it or do a special edition or whatever, I enjoy that part. Finding whatever I'm going to use for the interior photos and stuff — just things like that. I enjoy each phase and I like switching it out. Jo: I think that's really good. Some people think this writer's life is you write new words every single day and you manage your ads every single day. That seems to be what some people do, but that's certainly not us, is it? Sara: No. And that's great if you want to do that. I just don't want to. And I think we've come to the point now where each person can do this as they want. Hopefully people don't feel the pressure to meet these self-imposed deadlines or parameters that don't exist. There's no rules for writing or publishing. You can do whatever you want. Social media — or not Jo: Let's just mention social media then. What are you doing for that? Sara: Not much! Jo: Nor me! Sara: I'm dabbling in Pinterest because I think that could have the longer tail. I do a little Instagram, but that is about it. And I really considered just leaving it altogether. I'm never on Facebook. We were talking earlier about saying no, and I don't want to join any more Facebook groups. I don't care what information they have. I figure I'll hear about it on a podcast if it's great. I think social media has changed so much. In the beginning, it was great — you could find readers. Now it's just much harder to connect with readers there. I want to have a presence so that if people go look for me, they'll find my books and hopefully find a link to download a free book and read it or an audiobook and listen to it. Then they can get on my newsletter and connect with me there. That's my philosophy. Jo: I think so too. I am on Instagram @jfpennauthor in that I do post pictures there, and even very recently I've discovered how to do a reel, which is just hilarious — I'm only about seven years late. But I don't check my DMs, so if anyone messaged me on Instagram or Facebook, I'm just not getting them. Sara: I know. And I feel like there's so many places people can connect with you. I put up a post on Facebook and said, I'm not going to be here much anymore. If you're looking for me, you can find me on Instagram maybe, or sign up for my newsletter to really stay in touch. Jo: I think that's what we have to do. But our idea of this project-based approach to the author life and the author business doesn't suit social media, because the people who are really good on social media are on it multiple times a day, creating content multiple times a day. It just suits some people and not others. Sara: I do things and I take pictures and think, oh, I'll put this on Instagram. And then I don't ever do it. One time we went on a road trip and I took a bunch of paperbacks and dropped them off in the free little libraries. I took a picture at each one and I never posted those ever. I ran across them years later and thought, oh yeah, I did it but I didn't post it on social media. That's just not my thing. Special editions and physical design Jo: Although you did just say that you like doing the art and the photos, and you've done some beautiful special editions. You've done letters, you do a lot of physical design for your books. So talk about that — why you're doing that, why it's fun, and the pros and cons, because it can be a time suck and a money suck. Sara: Yeah. I think you have to figure out where your gauge is for that, because you can go all in and do everything for the special editions. I've come to the conclusion I'm going to survey my readers before I do another one and say, what do you really like about them? Because I do mine and release them on my Shopify store first — is it just that you're getting it first, or do you like all the bells and whistles? I enjoy doing the endpages and the ribbon, and I've done character art for them. But since my books are set in the 1920s, there's a lot of photos from that time period that are available. In Deposit Photos, you can go in and search for those. The last two books I did, I used photos that I thought captured what the characters would look like. That was a lot of fun to find and just include photos instead of character art. And it was a lot faster than waiting for character art too. The pros are that it's fun and you get to do things you don't normally get to do — finding beautiful illustrations for the endpages, doing the sprayed edges, just making it really special. Storytelling through letters Sara: I enjoy doing things that you can't do on Amazon. You just can't do letters on Amazon. With both Kickstarters, you could get three physical letters in the mail. They were a story told through letters, and they had art. The first one was black and white, and then the second set was colour. Since then, I've done colour, and it's a challenge to write those because it's a totally different type of writing. It's a 1,000 to 1,500 word little snippet, and where you end is important so that readers will be looking for the next one. Including art — whether it was a map, illustrations of what the view looks like, what the house looks like. Not that I illustrated it — I had somebody else help me do that. It's fun to think about how stories can be told in different ways. I love novels, but 70,000 words is a lot of words. That's a big project. Sometimes it's nicer to have a shorter project. The letters were shorter and a shorter time investment. I enjoyed them for that. For the cons — it's just a longer ramp up to get it going. If you want to do a special edition or letters or book boxes or anything like that, just estimate how much time you think you need and then multiply by three or five, because it's going to take so much longer than you think. Would you agree with that, with your special editions? Jo: Yeah. Although I think now I've got a process for it. Although, I did my book trailer for Bones of the Deep yesterday, and it reminded me — the book trailer is 30 seconds, and it took me nearly ten hours! Sara: I do believe that though. I completely believe it. Jo: Because I'm a bit of a control freak. I love working with Midjourney. I say I think I'm a control freak — of course I am. We all are as indie authors. But I'm a very visual author, and you sound like you are as well. I see the book, and if I'm generating pictures of the characters or the ship or what happens in the storm or whatever, then it needs to look like what's in my head. So I end up generating and generating, and then I did music and then — yeah, it's very creative, but it takes a heck of a long time. From Kickstarter to Shopify store Jo: Coming back to your letters and your Kickstarters — I did go check. It's been a while since you've done those. Have you changed to using your Shopify store, and will you do another Kickstarter? Sara: I may do another Kickstarter. I do feel like I found new readers on Kickstarter. That's a pro definitely — people will see your work that maybe would never see it on Amazon. It's a much smaller pool to stand out in. Whereas on Amazon there are thousands and millions of books, on Kickstarter there might be five historical mysteries or two at that moment. So it's easier to stand out. I'll probably do another Kickstarter, but to me it was difficult with the prep that went into it. Then the launch, and the launch kind of stressed me out. I know we talked to you on our podcast before your first Kickstarter and you were a little stressed, so I'm not as stressed as I would be with the first one. But it is a lot to prepare, and I do feel some pressure that I want this one to do well. And then the fulfilment — I like to do things in phases, so I felt like it was hard for me to move on to anything else while I was waiting for the books to arrive, because I didn't feel done with that until I had sent out the books. It just seemed like it took quite a bit of time. So with my next release, I thought, I'm going to launch this on my Shopify store and see how it does. I still did the special edition and I still did a lot of the things I learned to do with Kickstarter, like emailing my list a little more often and highlighting these special things. And coordinating with a couple of other authors in my genre to say, hey, I have a book out and it's a special edition — you might be interested. And then share their stuff when their book comes out. The first one I did, I had the book sent to me. I signed them, packed them, and sent them out. But the second one, I said, to save time and money, we were just going to do a digital signature. I had them shipped directly from Book Vault to the reader, and that just helped simplify things so much. Launching on my store, I didn't see quite as many sales or bring in quite as much money as I did on Kickstarter, but it took a lot less time. I feel that was a good trade-off. It simplified the time it took to do it, so I was able to get back to writing more quickly. The second one I launched on my store as well. I've done the spinoff series on my store — it's a three-book series — and I'll probably do the third book on my store too. Then maybe when I go back to my original 1920s series, which is the one that does the best and is my most popular, I may go back to Kickstarter with that one. I think it's nice to have the choice to launch on my store or Kickstarter. I can choose — do I have enough time to do it the way I want to on Kickstarter? Scarcity, direct sales, and training readers Jo: I feel like launching on my store, there's less of a time pressure. We don't really have scarcity in our business, and the only way to make it scarce is to have a limited-time offer. Which to me, Kickstarter by its very nature is a limited-time offer. Obviously it's easier for me because I'm near BookVault, so I go up there and physically sign the books, and I like doing that occasionally. But I hear you with the direct store, and I also presume it trains people to buy from your store. So how has your revenue shifted from the big stores like Amazon, Kobo, to Shopify, Kickstarter, direct sales? Sara: It's shifted a lot. I do the Shopify store just like I do everything else — in phases. I'm like, hey, I have a new release. Go buy it at my store. And I have a lot of sales. I also launched a third set of letters last year around October, leading into November. I said, you can get this series of letters — two a month all year in 2026. Go to my store, sign up for it, buy it there. They'll be launching in December. I push it, I talk about it. I do a podcast about the letters or the special edition on Mystery Books podcast. I ran a couple of ads, got the word out, saw some sales, got everything done, and then it just kind of tapers off. What I need to do is continue to market it, especially to my list — hey, did you know I've got these bundles? Did you know you can get bundles of paperbacks or audiobooks over here from me at a discount? I need to work that into my newsletter strategy. It's kind of like I use it in phases. I still have books on all the retailers and still promote those and link to them. But that's not my focus now. If I'm going to send traffic anywhere, I'm going to send it to my store. My mindset is more on direct sales and the special things I can do — the special editions, the unique things they can only get from me. I'll still do a BookBub if I can get one, and push that to the retailers. The smaller newsletter sites — I use those to reach readers there. But my focus is definitely on the special editions and doing things on my store that you can't get anywhere else. Beyond ebook, audiobook, and paperback Jo: A lot of people, new authors particularly, are thinking about ebook, audiobook, paperback. And all of those you can get anywhere — for both our books, you can get them in those formats anywhere. And large print as well. I have large print paperback, and I actually remember, it was probably five years ago when you were here and you mentioned large print hardback. And I was like, oh yeah, I should do that. Of course, I never did. You can't do everything. Sara: You can't do everything. Jo: You can't. But I think you probably can do a large print hardback on Amazon now with KDP Print — you can do hardback — but none of them are as good quality as the printing we get elsewhere. Also, as you say, all those special things — you actually can't sell them on Amazon. People can sell them secondhand or whatever, but you just can't do that. So I think that's the creative fun of having your own store or doing Kickstarters or selling direct — just all the other fun things that satisfy us creatively too. Because it's not all about the readers, is it? Sara: Right, because we want to be enjoying what we're doing. We don't want it to be a slog. Jo: What's the fun in that?! How long Sara has been an indie author Jo: Just remind us how long you've been doing this now. Sara: My first book came out in 2006. It was traditionally published, and I had a series of ten books with a traditional publisher. Then as that one was getting near the end, I was experimenting with indie — was a hybrid for a while. Then I went all indie pretty much. Jo: In what year? Sara: That was probably — I think my first indie book came out in 2012. So for a while I was trying to do indie and a traditionally published book, and that was very — I felt like I was torn in all kinds of different directions. I thought it was going to be so much simpler just to do this all myself. Maybe not, but — Jo: Pros and cons, as we said. Co-writing the Mystery and Thriller Trope Thesaurus Jo: One of the things you've done recently is co-written a Mystery and Thriller Trope Thesaurus with Jennifer Hilt, who's been on this show as well as your show. Tell us about co-writing, because I don't think you've done much co-writing. Sara: No, I hadn't. That was the first co-written book I'd ever done. And it was a great experience. Jennifer Hilt made it so easy. She has several books in this Trope Thesaurus series, so she had a format and we just used her format. We took the tropes and divided them up. She took half and I took half, and we went off and wrote on our own and came back together and then we would trade. It was really easy. I don't know that this is the way co-writing usually goes, but we did have a contract and we started out with all the normal things — a plan and a contract. We had to decide who was going to coordinate everything for the cover and the copy editing and all that. When we got done, we used Draft2Digital and did the payment splitting, which made that part easy. It's been a great experience, and I think it's just because Jennifer has done this before and she's really easy to work with. I highly recommend co-writing if you can find somebody like Jennifer who's already done it and can take you through the system. Jo: I think that's the point — if you have someone like Jennifer who has a layout, it's a bit like the For Dummies series. I had an opportunity to do something with them at one point, and it's so formulaic in terms of doing it, and then you're filling it in. Clearly Jennifer's managing that really well. The co-writing I've done with various people has been pros and cons, but it's not been in an established series. I love that you say that, but just to warn people — that might not be your experience. Sara: Yes. And I think it's so much about personality and how you work together, how you each write, and your deadlines. If you try to set a really close deadline — we pushed our deadline out. We had planned to do a Kickstarter with the launch of the trope book, and then she ended up moving and I had a bunch of stuff going on. We were like, you know what, that's fine. We won't do a Kickstarter. And it was okay. You just have to figure out how it's going to go. And if you have someone that's flexible when you need to be flexible, that's so important. Jo: Adjusting is the reality of life, isn't it? And I feel like the Trope Thesaurus — it's not going to necessarily have a spike sale and then disappear. It is an evergreen book, right? Sara: Yes. People will find it when they find the series. It's not something that has to be pushed during a certain time period and then we're done. It's a long-term, evergreen type book. The role of series and bundles Jo: Talking of series, you've obviously got multiple series. People should definitely go look — you've got great branding and your series are so clear. What part do series and bundles play in marketing in general, and in your direct sales? Sara: I like to bundle them for my direct store because I figure I need something special about my store — a reason for people to go there. They can get the books on Amazon and Audible and Spotify and all these places, so why would they go to my store? I've really leaned into bundles for the store, so they can get a three-book audiobook bundle or the whole series in pretty much all my series. They can do the paperback bundling. I've done a paperback starter series bundle where they can get each book one in my first three series bundled together through Book Vault. I thought I really need to do that with the audiobooks. That's on my list — to create a starter audiobook bundle. Bundles do well on Kobo. They draw readers in over there. And for the rare times I can get a BookBub, I think bundles seem to appeal to BookBub. If I'm going to pitch something, it seems like they like bundles. Readers like them too. Part of it is the convenience. You've got the whole series together and you can just read one after another. You don't have to go find it and figure out what order they're in. Jo: They do. And I love offering bundles in the Kickstarter as add-ons and on my Shopify stores as well. Because I'm always surprised — somebody's just found me and then they order the 13 ARKANE thriller paperback bundle, and I'm like, okay, wow. That just feels like a win. Sara: Yes. I love to see those come in and you think, oh, I wonder how they found me. Why they would dive in with the seven-book series. That's fantastic. Jo: It is interesting. With the paperbacks and the shipping, you drop some money for a complete print series. And then obviously it's usually a bit less on things like audio and ebook bundles, but it's still a real commitment. So yeah, everybody, we love bundles. Sara: We do. What Sara is excited about next Jo: I wanted to come back to the podcast, Wish I'd Known Then, which is brilliant. I often refer to it on this show. Hopefully we share quite a few listeners, and you and Jamie talk about industry changes, personal things. Given all the stuff that's going on, what are you excited about? What are you experimenting with? What changes are you seeing that you're enjoying? Sara: We appreciate the shout-out. Every time you give us a shout-out — and I do think we share a readership. I think you are our most frequently mentioned other podcast. We are always referring to you on Wish I'd Known Then. What I'm looking forward to is — I like seeing what other businesses or industries are doing and seeing if I can apply that to writing and books. That's how I came up with the letter idea. I saw some people doing that. I found out later there were some mystery-related mystery letter subscriptions, but I didn't know about them and they weren't well known. I thought, oh, I could try that. So I'm looking forward to doing more creative things that we haven't had the opportunity to do, but now we are going to have the tech and the fulfilment to do. Merch could be fun. I haven't ever delved into that. Translations — I didn't even mention translations earlier. I've done a couple of languages in my historical series, and I think it's really interesting the options we have now in translation. The books could go into so many more languages, so much easier. So I'm looking into that. Just reaching out and trying some of these new things that are on the horizon. You're much more futurist than I am. I'm much more about looking back at the past and going, oh, that was cool. Maybe we can do something similar, but different now. Finding creative inspiration from other industries Jo: That's interesting. How are you finding out that information about what other industries are doing? Because the curation of the information stream is hard for all of us. Sara: I don't know. I seem to run across things. I'm always reading and browsing online and seeing what people are talking about. I did see a post years ago about a company that was doing special edges — limited-edition special edges. When I saw that, I thought, oh, I wonder if I could do that. And I hand-stamped snowflakes on a Christmas book. Jo: Oh, I remember that. I actually bought a stamp. I got a (skull) stamp made. Sara: Oh, awesome. Jo: I never used it! Sara: Well, it's a lot of work. It takes time. But they're very special. Each one is unique, just like a snowflake. Each book has all these different types of snowflakes and ink colours on it. I'll see something and think, oh, I wonder if I could do that. And then I'm always consuming really quirky media. I'm into Asian dramas — Korean dramas, Japanese dramas — and I'm seeing trends over there for storytelling. The vertical dramas they're putting out, super short. I just wonder what that's going to turn into in the future. I'm not a video person, but in the future I think there could be short little videos that we could make of our books. That would be just crazy. I don't know that I would have the skills to do that, but we might be able to hire somebody to do that for us. Korean dramas and new storytelling trends Jo: There are lots of AI apps that are already helping with that. I do love making book trailers. And I have also thought about my short stories particularly — turning them into short videos. I've written a few screenplays, so I'm also thinking about that kind of visual-sized content. I also watch a lot of Korean shows. Sara: Oh, do you? Jo: I love Korean shows. Sara: Oh, we have to talk later. Jo: They're very good. I also like the Korean sports stuff and the cooking stuff, and they're just so good at hooking you in. Sara: Yes, they are. Jo: They are so good. Sara: They're really good at blending genres. And I've noticed with their storytelling, they're doing a lot of these stories they call isekai stories, where the main character falls into a story. I heard somebody talking about it, saying they think that's popular because we're so familiar with media entertainment — we kind of know where the story's going. So that's a new way. If your character falls into a fictional mystery and knows who the bad guy is and is trying to prevent a death or something, that's a completely different story than just a straight mystery. Jo: That's interesting. In a way, the LitRPG genre where the character goes into a game, or the character is in a game — I suppose it's got some relationship to that. But I think K-Pop Demon Hunters is like the most successful film and music and all of this kind of thing. It's clearly coming to more Western audiences. Sara: Yes. It's becoming much more mainstream than it used to be, I think. Jo: That's really interesting given that you're mainly a historical author. Are we going to get 1920s Korea? Sara: Oh, maybe. That's an interesting time period. Maybe my character needs to travel there. Jo: You have a travel series, don't you? Sara: Yes. I have a modern, cosy kind of travel series, and then in my 1920s series, it takes place mostly in England, but I have a spinoff with a character who's gone to Egypt, and I have three books set in Egypt. Jo: Well, you never know. Sara: I know. Maybe they need to travel. Jo: I love it. Okay, where can people find you and your books and your podcasts online? Sara: Thanks for having me. This has been so much fun. You can find me at SaraRosett.com. My store is SaraRosettBooks.com. You can find the podcast with Jamie and me, Wish I'd Known Then — it's everywhere, Apple, Spotify. We're even on Substack now. Yeah, that's where everything is. Jo: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Sara. That was great. Sara: Thank you.The post Special Editions, Seasonal Podcasts, and the Art of Low-Key Book Marketing with Sara Rosett first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How can you improve your self-editing process? How can you find and work with professional editors and beta readers? How do you know when editing is done and the book is finished? With Joanna Penn In the intro, Poetry craft and business [The Indy Author Podcast]; A Mouthful of Air; How to get your book featured in local media without a publicist [Written Word Media]; thoughts on faith and code; Wild Dark Shore – Charlotte McConaghy; Bones of the Deep – J.F. Penn. Today's show is sponsored by ProWritingAid, writing and editing software that goes way beyond just grammar and typo checking. With its detailed reports on how to improve your writing and integration with writing software, ProWritingAid will help you improve your book before you send it to an editor, agent or publisher. Check it out for free or get 15% off the premium edition at www.ProWritingAid.com/joanna This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn  Joanna Penn is an award-winning New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of thrillers, dark fantasy, short stories and travel memoir under J.F.Penn and also writes non-fiction for authors. Overview of the editing process Self-editing How to find and work with a professional editor. My list is at www.TheCreativePenn.com/editors Beta readers, specialist readers, and sensitivity readers When is the book finished? These chapters are excerpted from How to Write a Novel: From Idea to Book by Joanna Penn, available direct or on all the usual stores. Overview of the editing process “Books aren’t written. They’re rewritten.” —Michael Crichton Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles is a classic of English literature. I studied it at school and the scene at Stonehenge still haunts me. Hardy’s Jude the Obscure influenced my decision to go to university in Oxford, a city Hardy called Christminster. His novels are still held in great esteem, which is why it’s so wonderful to see his hand-edited pages in the British Library in London, displayed in the Treasures collection. You can visit them in person or view them online. Thomas Hardy's edited manuscript of ‘Tess of the D'Urbevilles, one of England's greatest writers While his handwriting is a scrawl, it’s evident from the pages just how much editing Hardy did on this version of the manuscript. There are lines struck through, whole paragraphs crossed out, arrows moving sections around, words and sentences rewritten, and comments in the margins. Even the title is changed from A Daughter of the D’Urbervilles to Tess of the D’Urbervilles as we know it today. Those edited pages gave me hope when I saw them for the first time as a new fiction author. Not that I thought I could write a classic of English literature, but that I could learn to edit my way to a better story. There are several stages in the editing process, which I’ll outline here and then expand on in subsequent chapters. As you progress in your craft, you won’t need every stage every time, so assess with each book what kind of editing you need along the way. Self-editing The self-editing stage is your chance to improve your manuscript before anyone else sees it. For some authors, this stage might mean rewriting the entire draft. For others, it involves restructuring, adding or deleting scenes, doing line edits, and more. Developmental or structural edit An editor reads your manuscript and gives feedback on specific aspects, character, plot, story structure, and anything else pertinent to improving the novel. It is sometimes described as a manuscript critique. You will receive a report, usually ten to fifteen pages, with notes on your novel, which you can then use in another round of self-editing. While this is not always necessary, it can be a valuable step and something I appreciated particularly for my first novel when I had so much to learn. Copyediting and line editing This is the classic ‘red pen’ edit where you can expect comments and changes all over your manuscript. This edit focuses on anything that enhances the writing quality, including word choice and phrasing issues, as well as grammar, and more. Some editors split this edit into two, and there are differences between what this edit is called between countries. For some editors, a copyedit includes only attention to grammar and correctness, while a line edit focuses on improving and elevating sentences. Be clear about your expectations and that of your editor upfront. You will usually receive an MS Word document with Track Changes on as well as a style guide or style sheet and other notes, which you can then use to make revisions during another self-edit. This is the most expensive part of the process, as editors usually charge per 1,000 words based on the type of edit you want. If you need to cut your story down by 20K, then do it before you send your manuscript for a line edit! Beta readers, specialist readers, and/or sensitivity readers Some authors use different types of readers as part of their editing process. Beta readers are often part of the author’s community and are certainly fans of the genre. They read to help the author pick up any issues pre-publication. Specialist readers are those with knowledge about a topic included in the story. For example, a vulcanologist read specific chapters of Risen Gods to check that the details about volcanic eruptions were correct. Sensitivity readers check for stereotypes, biases, problematic language, and other diversity issues. You will usually receive comments or an email with page numbers or chapter numbers, or sometimes an MS Word document with Track Changes, which you then use to make revisions. Many readers provide services for the love of helping their favorite author with a novel and a mention in the acknowledgments, but there are some paid services for specialist and sensitivity readers. Proofreading Proofreading is the final check of the manuscript pre-publication for any typos or issues that might have been introduced in the editorial process. For print books, this can include a review of the print proof with formatting. You should only fix the last tiny changes at this point. Don’t make any major changes this close to publication or you may introduce entirely new errors. Do you need an editor if you intend to get an agent and a traditional publisher? You will go through an editorial process with your agent and publisher. But if you want the best chance of getting to that stage in the first place, it might also be worth working with an editor before you submit your manuscript to an agent. Look for an editor who will help you with your query letter and synopsis as part of their edit. Self-editing I love this part of the process! My self-edit is where I wrangle the chaos of the first draft into something worth reading. I have my block of marble and now I can shape it into my sculpture. The mindset shift from writer to editor, from author to reader In the idea, planning, discovery, and first-draft writing phase, it’s all about you, the writer. You turn the ideas in your head into words that you understand, characters that come alive for you, and a plot that you’re engaged with. In that first rush of creativity, you can banish critical voice and ignore any nagging doubts. But now you need to switch heads. That’s how I prefer to think about it, but you might consider it as changing hats or changing jobs. Anything to help you move from the creative, anything goes, first-draft writer to the more critical editor. There is one overriding consideration in this shift. As Jeffery Deaver says, “The reader is god.” With the editing process, you need to turn your story from something you understand into something a reader will enjoy. Writing is telepathy. It connects minds across time and space. You are reading these words and the meaning flows from my brain into your brain — but only if I craft the book well enough. The same is true of your novel. Yes, of course, you want to double down on your creative choices and make sure you achieve everything you want to with your story. But you also need to keep the reader in mind as you edit because the book is ultimately for them. Will your story have the desired effect on the reader? What might help improve their experience? How can you make sure that they are not bored or confused or jolted out of the story? What will make them read on and, at the end, close the novel with a sigh of satisfaction? My self-editing process At the end of the first draft, I print out my manuscript with two pages to each A4 page, so it looks more like a book. I put it in a folder and leave it to rest. You need fresh eyes for your edit and this ‘resting’ gives you some emotional distance. In On Writing, Stephen King suggests leaving a manuscript to rest for at least six weeks. While that is a great idea if you have the time, most authors work to deadline, whether externally set or their own timetable. Many authors — including me — are also impatient! I love this first self-edit, and as I’m still crafting the story as a discovery writer, I usually rest the manuscript for a week or two. I schedule blocks of time for editing in my Google calendar and (when not in pandemic times) I go to a café when it opens first thing in the morning. I put on my BOSE noise-cancelling headphones and edit by hand with a black ballpoint pen from page one to the end. I usually manage ten to twenty pages per editing session of a couple of hours each, but it will depend on the amount of restructuring I need to do. I scribble notes in the margins, draw arrows to move paragraphs around, write extra material on the back of pages, or add where I need to write more later. I change words, rewrite and delete lines, and pick up any issues around lack of sensory detail, character problems, and more. You can see an example of a page below: Some pages end up a mass of black; others are relatively clean. But in this first hand edit, no page goes untouched as I hone my manuscript into something closer to my creative goal. You can edit on a computer or a tablet, or whatever else works for you, but at least change the font or the spacing, or something to make it a different experience to reading the first draft. Most writers have a tendency to either overwrite or underwrite, and so will either need to cut words or add words at this stage. I’m in the latter camp so I usually have to add scenes or deepen characters or theme at this point. Once I have hand-edited the whole manuscript end-to-end, I make the changes in my Scrivener project. I change the color of the flags along the way and, as ever, I back up the session. I also use ProWritingAid at the sentence level to fix up things I missed, because we all miss things! When all the changes have been made, I print the complete manuscript again, and read end-to-end and edit as before. This time, it’s usually a lot cleaner and there may only be a few things to fix in each chapter. Once I’m finished, I’ll update the Scrivener project once more and then decide whether it needs a third pass. Mostly, two full end-to-end hand edits are enough for me these days, but sometimes I’ll do a third or go through specific chapters one more time. This messy editing process is fun for me and it’s hugely satisfying to see my story come to life. What to focus on in the self-edit Some authors will go through the manuscript multiple times, focusing on different elements with each pass using the aspects covered in Part 3 and Part 4. For example, they’ll do an edit based on character and dialogue, followed by another pass for plot, then theme, and so on. Personally, I try to keep the reader in mind and focus on the story as a coherent whole. That’s just how my mind works. I jump from fixing a plot issue to deepening a character to adding foreshadowing and so on as I read and edit. I’m confident that my editor will find a lot of the smaller things that I might miss, so I concentrate on trying to achieve my creative vision with the story. You will find your own way of figuring out your process. It’s much better to jump in and have a go at editing rather than trying to work out the best way before you have something to work through. Lost the plot? Try reverse outlining If you’re a discovery writer like me and you’re struggling with the edit and you feel you have lost the plot (which definitely happens sometimes!) then consider a reverse outline as part of your editorial process. Go through the manuscript and write a few lines per scene. Include character, plot points, conflict, setting, open questions and hooks, and any other notes. This will help you step back and hopefully see the entire story from a high level. Then you can dive back into rewriting each chapter. Read the book out loud or use a text-to-speech reader to do it for you Many authors read their book aloud end-to-end, which is a helpful step once you’ve been through any major rewrites. There are also plenty of text-to-speech tools that can help, for example, Natural Reader or Speechify, and some are built into devices or applications. MS Word includes a Read Aloud tool in the Review tab. This will also help you edit for audio as you’ll hear issues you can’t see on the page. Editing for audio Audiobooks are a huge growth market and many readers will listen to your book rather than read it, so it’s a good idea to consider editing with audio in mind at this stage. Here are some tips. Watch out for repeated sounds.  The editorial process will usually catch repeated written words, but similar sounding words can hit the same audio note in narration. You might not notice them in the text, as they are spelled differently. The words ‘you,’ ‘blue,’ ‘tattoo,’ and ‘interview’ all start and end with different letters. They look different on the page, but they strike the same audio note when read aloud. In the same way, repetition can work if you have a point to make, but sometimes it jars the listener if it is overused. A classic recommendation for writing dialogue is to use ‘said’ with a character name rather than other words like ‘uttered’ or ‘pronounced.’ This is because ‘said’ disappears for the reader on the written page. But with audio, the repetition of a word is highly noticeable, and repeated sounds can dominate a passage. Rewrite with synonyms for ‘said,’ or use action to make it clear who the speaker is without resorting to dialogue tags, as described in chapter 3.5. Contractions — or the lack of them — can also become more obvious in audio. “I am not going to the park,” might be spoken as “I’m not going to the park.” When we type dialogue, it is often more formal than the way someone speaks, so check if you can contract it in your edit. Accents can be an issue with fiction narration. There are plenty of narrators who do a ‘straight read,’ but if there are accents within dialogue, make it clear where the character comes from. Make sure the narrator knows about the accent choice upfront, otherwise you might not like it in the finished audio. Remember my friend whose novel had an Irish character narrated like a comedy leprechaun instead of the soft lilt she had in mind? Don’t confuse the reader.  If you have a lot of characters appearing in a chapter and no clear character tags, you might lose the listener in the detail.  When reading on paper or a screen, your reader can quickly flick back and see that George was the butler and Angus was the dog, but that’s harder to do when listening to an audiobook. Make sure it’s clear who is who. You may have to remind listeners occasionally by adding character tags. For example, ‘Angus ran alongside the canal’ could become ‘Angus, the golden cocker spaniel, ran alongside the canal.’ For more on audiobooks, check out my book, Audio for Authors: Audiobooks, Podcasting and Voice Technologies. How many drafts do you need? The word ‘draft’ means different things to different authors. Some only apply this term to a complete rewrite end-to-end, while others will shift paragraphs around, change some lines, add a new scene, and call that a new draft. Nora Roberts said in a blog post on her writing craft,  I work on a three-draft method. This works for me. It’s not the right way/wrong way. There is no right or wrong for a process that works for any individual writer. Anyone who claims there is only one way, or that’s the wrong way, is a stupid, arrogant bullshitter. That’s my considered opinion. I love Nora’s no-nonsense approach and she is right that there is no single correct process. You have to find your own. But beware of comparing what you call a draft to what another writer calls a draft. It may be something completely different. Use editing software Once I’ve finished my hand edits and updated the Scrivener project, I use ProWritingAid on the manuscript. It integrates with Scrivener, so I open my project and go through each chapter. ProWritingAid picks up passive voice, repetitive words, commas and typos, suggests rephrasing, and even picks up culturally problematic language. Yes, these are the type of things that an editor will pick up, but I want to hand over a manuscript that is as clean as possible so my editor can focus on other issues. I don’t make all the suggested changes, but it certainly helps improve my writing, and I learn as I go through. You can even create your own style guide so you spell things the same way throughout. This is also a good chance to check typos according to the version of English you want to use (or any other language). I’m English and based in the UK, but when I published my first novel, I received complaints about typos from my readers, who were mainly in the USA. These were not typos, they were just British spelling! I decided to use US English in my books because US readers complain about UK spelling, but non-US readers will rarely complain about US spelling because they are used to it. You can set ProWritingAid to the type of English you want to use, and if you specify this later, your editor can pick up on word usage rather than typos, for example, using the term ‘flashlight’ instead of ‘torch.’ You can find ProWritingAid at:  www.TheCreativePenn.com/prowritingaid You can find my tutorial on how to use ProWritingAid at: www.TheCreativePenn.com/prowritingaidtutorial  When is your self-edit finished? You will be utterly sick of your manuscript by the end of the self-editing process. You have read your words so many times you can’t see them clearly anymore. You are so over the whole thing that you want to forget the book altogether. If you don’t feel this way, you probably haven’t self-edited enough! When you really feel you can’t do any more, it’s time to work with a professional editor. If you are putting off the end of self-editing, then remember that nothing is ever perfect. You can edit forever if you keep obsessing over changes and going over and over the same material. If your self-edit goes on too long, consider whether perfectionism is holding you back. Set a completion date and hold yourself to it. How to find and work with a professional editor If you want your book to be the best it can be, then working with a professional editor is the next step. An editor’s job is to take your manuscript and help you improve it through structural changes and story development, line edits, suggestions for new material or sentence refinement, and so much more. Different kinds of editors can help you in different ways from constructing the overarching story to eliminating the final typo. In my experience, good professional editors are well worth the investment as they help improve your book and your craft, especially in the initial stages of your writing journey. They have read so many early-stage manuscripts that they understand the most common problems and know how to help you fix them. Some experienced authors only use proofreaders for their novels, but personally, I still work with a professional editor on every book and I learn something every time. I am a super-fan of editors! How to find a professional editor Consolidation in the traditional publishing industry over the last decade has resulted in many more editors working as freelancers, so authors have a wealth of professionals available for hire in every genre. You can find lists of approved editors through author organizations. The Alliance of Independent Authors has a list of Partner Members, many of whom are editors. You can also use author marketplace Reedsy. Many editors use content marketing to find clients — for example, blogging about editing tips, writing books on editing, or appearing on podcasts. I have had lots of editors on The Creative Penn Podcast over the years, so you can listen and see if they resonate with you. Most authors credit their editors and proofreaders in the acknowledgments of their books, and many authors happily share recommendations on social media in various author communities. If you enjoy a certain novel, it might be worth reaching out to that editor, as you know they are a specialist in the genre. Check out my list of editors at: www.TheCreativePenn.com/editors How to assess whether an editor is right for you I frequently get emails from writers asking me to recommend an editor for their book. But finding an editor is like dating. You have to do it for yourself, and it’s likely that you will try a few before you find your perfect match. You may also change editors over your writing life as your craft develops and your needs shift, and that’s completely normal too. Make sure the editor has experience in and enjoys your genre. You don’t want a literary historical fiction editor working on your YA paranormal romance or your hard sci-fi adventure. Ensure that the editor has testimonials from happy clients, and check directly with a named author if you have doubts. Some editors will offer a sample edit for one chapter. This helps both parties decide whether working together is appropriate. The editor can assess what level your manuscript is at, and you can decide whether their editorial style is right for you. How to work with an editor When you engage an editor, you will receive a contract with a timeline and a price for the work. You agree to deliver the manuscript on a particular date and will usually pay a deposit, especially if this is the first time you’re working together. The editor agrees to deliver the edits back on a certain date and also to keep your manuscript in confidence. You can avoid issues later by communicating expectations up front, so if you have questions about the editing process, ask before you sign a contract. Many editors are booked months in advance, so once you know your schedule, contact them early and book a slot. Update them if your timings change. Most allow minor slippage, but since editors plan their work around contractual dates, it’s important to be timely with delivery. As a discovery writer, I only book my editor when I am sure of my dates. Submit your manuscript and, once the edit is complete, you will receive whatever has been agreed. That might be a structural report, line edit, or proofread manuscript, along with a style sheet. It’s usually in the form of an MS Word document by email. Some editors may offer a call to discuss, but I have never spoken to an editor as part of my process. It has never been necessary. It’s all about the words on the page. If you want a call and it is not specified, then include it in the contract up front along with anything else you’re concerned about. I consider my editors to be an important part of my team. They help me turn my manuscripts into books that readers love, and I rely on them as part of my business. This is a two-way relationship, and you need to behave as professionally as the editor should. If you find an editor you love working with, pay them quickly and respect their time, and you will hopefully have a long-term business relationship that benefits you both. How does it feel to go through an edit? It’s probably going to hurt, especially in the beginning, when your craft is in its early stages. You need fresh eyes on your work, especially at the beginning of your author career. You need feedback to improve. When I received notes back on my structural edit for my first novel, I didn’t open the email for ten days. I was so scared of what it would say because my novel meant so much to me, and yet I knew it had problems. Of course it did, it was my first novel! So I let the email sit in my inbox until I was ready to face it, and like many things, the fear was worse than the actual event. Even many years and many books later, I still don’t open emails from my editor until I am mentally ready to face criticism. Because that’s what it feels like. It is not the editor’s job to pat you on the back and say, ‘Well done, this is perfect.’ Their job is to help you make it the best book it can be. They are experts and have honed their advice over many manuscripts, so they can spot an issue a mile off. When you receive that email from your editor, particularly if it’s your first book, make sure you are well rested and in a positive frame of mind. Set aside a good amount of time and read through the comments and the manuscript as a whole. If you have an emotional reaction, do not email back immediately! Let the feedback sit with you for a few days, and you will find it easier to see what might need to change. Once you’re ready, go through the manuscript and work through each change. Don’t just click Accept All on the Track Changes version for a line edit. This takes time, but it’s well worth it because you will learn with every step and you’ll be able to spot your common issues in the future, and hopefully fix them next time. You also need to examine every suggestion to see if you want to make the change. Do you need to make every change that an editor suggests? No, you don’t.  You are the author, so your creative vision is the most important thing. But try to get some distance and assess whether the change truly serves the book, or if you’re just having an emotional response. Remember what Jeffery Deaver said: “The reader is god.” Consider each editorial suggestion on its own merit. Does it help take the story in the direction you want it to? Will it improve the reader’s experience? What if my editor wants me to change everything? Perhaps they are not the right editor for you. The editor should not fundamentally change your story or alter your creative vision. Their job is to help you shape your manuscript into a better version of itself, and retain your voice and ideas while at the same time improving it for the reader. This is a skillful balancing act, which is why experienced editors are so highly sought after. How long will the editing process take? This will depend on the type of writer you are in terms of the first draft. If you outline in great detail and spend time up front making the first draft the best it can be, then editing might take less time than for a discovery writer who only figures out the book after the first draft. The more books you’ve written, the more you understand how to shape a novel, the more you can write a clean draft, so editing speeds up. That doesn’t mean it gets easier to write a book, but it does mean you know how to find and fix issues. It will also depend on the length of the book. A 50,000-word romance with one protagonist will be a faster edit than a 150,000-word sprawling fantasy with multiple point-of-view characters. It will also depend on your experience, so don’t compare your editing time to someone who has written a lot of books. Give editing the time it needs. You want your book to be the best it can be. But also remember Parkinson’s Law, which I discussed in chapter 4.7 on writing the first draft: “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” This law also applies to editing. Set your deadline and schedule your editing time accordingly. Don’t book a professional editor until you’ve been through at least your self-editing process, as it may take longer than you think. How much does an editor cost? This will depend on the type of edit, your genre and word count, how experienced you are as a writer, and how much experience the editor has. Editors usually quote a range on their website and you can also email and ask for a more detailed quote based on your manuscript length and sample. Every dollar I have spent on editing has been worth it as an investment in my writing craft and the quality of my finished novels. Although my requirements are different now, I continue to use editors and proofreaders for all my books. The more eyes on your novel before publication, the better it will be on launch. What if you have a tight budget? When I started out as a writer, I had a day job and I saved up for the editorial process. It was an investment in my craft and a possible future creative career. If you already have or intend to set up a business as a writer, then you can offset the cost of editors against any profits. But when you’re starting out, you can’t necessarily see that far ahead. If you’re on a tight budget, then find or set up a writer’s group with others in your genre and work through one another’s manuscripts. You might also have other skills you can barter for editing services, but remember that bartering is subject to tax in many jurisdictions, so don’t assume that it is ‘free.’ What if my editor steals my ideas or my manuscript? This is a common concern of new writers who think that editors might run away with their book and make millions with their idea. But don’t worry, editors are professionals. They work within a contractual framework that protects both parties. So make sure you are happy with the contract before you sign it. If you are really worried, you can register your copyright before you send the manuscript to anyone else. While it is not legally necessary to register copyright — it exists the moment the work is created — there are registration companies in every country that can provide peace of mind. Just search for ‘copyright registration’ within your territory. Will I need different editors when I’m further along in my writing journey? Yes, as your craft and experience improves, you will likely work with different editors. You might also choose to use a new editor for a different genre, or work with recommended professionals to take your craft to the next level. Resources: • My list of recommended editors: www.TheCreativePenn.com/editors • Alliance of Independent Authors — www.TheCreativePenn.com/alliance • The following editing associations offer directories and job posting services: The Editorial Freelancers Association (US), the Chartered Institute for Editing and Proofreading (UK), the Institute for Professional Editors (Australia and New Zealand), and Editors Canada. Beta readers, specialist readers, and sensitivity readers Professional editors approach your manuscript with a critical eye based on their knowledge of language, story structure, and genre. But sometimes, it’s a good idea to gain perspective from readers who are not experts on sentence structure or grammar, but comment on the story itself, and their experience of reading it as a whole. Beta readers Beta readers are a trusted group of people who evaluate your book from a reader’s perspective before publication. The term comes from the software industry, where early versions are tested in beta before being released to the public. While there are some paid beta reader services, many authors find people from their existing readership, or from among genre fans in the writing community. Authors usually thank their beta readers in their acknowledgments. Specialist readers Specialist readers are experts on a particular topic who read with their expertise in mind. This might be a police officer who checks a crime novel, or a physicist who reads for a science-fiction author. Sensitivity readers Sensitivity readers check for cultural and diversity issues, lack of or clichéd representation, and insensitive, inauthentic, or uninformed language, characters, or situations. This type of feedback can help an author before publication, and can be particularly useful if you are tackling more controversial topics. It can also be valuable when reviewing older manuscripts if you want to republish a new edition, as gendered language has changed, as well as the need for representation, diversity, and inclusivity. While some criticize sensitivity reading as a step toward censorship, most authors want to make their books the best they can be, and ensure the reader experience is excellent, whatever the genre. Being a fiction writer is also about empathy — with our characters and with our readers — so improving our ability to write about diverse characters is important. However, authors cannot be experts on what it’s like to experience every race or religion, every body type or disability or mental health issue, or understand every country or culture. Feedback from different kinds of readers can help us write better stories, and it is the author’s choice whether to implement suggestions in the final manuscript. Do you need all of these types of readers? No. You don’t need any of them, or you can choose to use some of them for different books, depending on the need. It’s up to you (and your agent or publisher if you choose to go that route). At what stage in the editorial process should you use these types of readers? The book should be as close to the final version as possible. These people are reading with fresh eyes; if they read again later, they can never approach the story with such an open mind. Most authors will send the manuscript to a select group of readers after the main editorial revisions, but before the proofread. Some authors with more developed careers even use their team of beta readers instead of editors at different stages of the process. What should you provide to readers? Provide the manuscript in the format the reader prefers. This could be an MS Word document or PDF. Many established authors use Bookfunnel, which allows you to create a version that can be read on any reading device or phone. Specialist readers and sensitivity readers have their specific expertise, but for more general beta readers, you need to provide some direction as to what you expect. For example: Did you skip over anything? Did anything bore you? Was anything confusing? Did you have to reread any parts? What did you like? Was there anything you hated or objected to or had a problem with? How long should you give them to read? Allow at least two weeks for readers to assess and provide feedback. Be clear on the timeline when you send them the book.. Do you need to make all the changes they suggest? No, and if you try to, you will end up straying from your creative goal, messing up your author voice, and likely pleasing no one! Keep your number of early readers small and specific to what you want to achieve. Assess each comment and suggestion on its own merit and decide whether or not to make the change. Be confident in your creative vision and beware writing by committee, which becomes a problem if you ask too many people for feedback. Only you can decide what you want for your novel. Resources: • The Reedsy marketplace includes different kinds of editors, beta readers, and sensitivity readers — www.TheCreativePenn.com/reedsy • Directory of sensitivity readers — www.writingdiversely.com/directory • Editors of Color — editorsofcolor.com When is the book finished? “I have not yet found words to truly convey the intensity of this remembered rapture—that moment of exquisite joy when necessary words come together and the work is complete, finished, ready to be read.” —bell hooks,Remembered Rapture You can edit a book forever if you want to. Every time you read it, you will find things to change. Every time you hire another editor, they will find more. If you work with beta readers, they will also offer opinions. Your novel will never be finished — until you decide it is. Nothing is ever perfect. Even if you hire three separate editors and use multiple proofreaders, you will still find a typo or an error in the published novel. Pick up any bestselling book from a traditional publisher, and you will still find an issue somewhere. It happens to everyone. Look at any prize-winning or bestselling book on Amazon and check the reviews. The more popular the book, the more issues people will find with it. There will never be a novel that satisfies everyone, and that’s fine. Of course, you must make sure your book is the best it can be, but set boundaries for yourself so you do eventually finish. Have you self-edited your manuscript? Have you worked with a professional editor, or at least worked through the manuscript with other writers to improve it? Have you used editing tools and/or a proofreader? Have you set a deadline to move into the publishing process so you are not editing forever? If you have been through this rigorous editorial process and you still feel the itch to edit again, be honest with yourself. Is another round of changes really going to make a substantial difference to this book? Would it be better to work on the next novel instead of constantly reworking this one? Are you struggling with fear of judgment, fear of failure, procrastination, or other mindset issues that you need to work on instead of editing? Check out my book The Successful Author Mindset if you think this might be the case. Strive for excellence, do your best, and then release your book out into the world. “Set a limit on revisions, set a limit on drafts, set a time limit… The book will never be perfect.” —Kristine Kathryn Rusch, The Pursuit of Perfection and How it Harms Writers These chapters are excerpted from How to Write a Novel: From Idea to Book by Joanna Penn, available direct or on all the usual stores. The post Editing a Novel: Self-Editing, And How To Work With A Professional Editor With Joanna Penn first appeared on The Creative Penn.

What if the source of your best writing isn't something you control — but something you learn to collaborate with? How can ancient ideas about the muse, the daimon, and creative genius transform the way you approach your work? And what might happen if you stopped fighting the silence and let it become your greatest creative ally? With Matt Cardin, author of Writing at the Wellspring. In the intro, thoughts on bookstores and Toppings; 20 ways authors can signal humanity and build reader trust [Wish I'd Known Then]; Learning from Silence – Pico Iyer; ProWritingAid spring sale; Bones of the Deep – J.F. Penn. Today's show is sponsored by Draft2Digital, self-publishing with support, where you can get free formatting, free distribution to multiple stores, and a host of other benefits. Just go to www.draft2digital.com to get started. This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn  Matt Cardin is the multi-award-nominated author of eight books at the convergence of horror, religion, and creativity. His latest book is Writing at the Wellspring: Tapping the Source of Your Inner Genius, which is fantastic. I actually blurbed it as follows: “A guide for writers who welcome the dark and hunger for meaning. . . . If the page is a threshold, this book will show you how to cross.” You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.  Show Notes How Matt balances a full-time academic career with his creative writing life The ancient concept of the genius, the muse, and the daimon, and why creativity is about collaboration with something beyond yourself Why the silences that come into our creative lives, including writer's block and inertia, might actually be gifts rather than obstacles The stages of the creative process Living into the dark, and embracing uncertainty How Substack and blogging can organically grow into books You can find Matt at MattCardin.com or www.livingdark.net. Transcript of the interview with Matt Cardin Joanna: Matt Cardin is the multi-award-nominated author of eight books at the convergence of horror, religion, and creativity. His latest book is Writing at the Wellspring: Tapping the Source of Your Inner Genius, which is fantastic. I actually blurbed it as follows: “A guide for writers who welcome the dark and hunger for meaning. . . . If the page is a threshold, this book will show you how to cross.” It is a great book. So welcome to the show, Matt. Matt: Well, thank you, Jo. It's really a pleasure to be here, especially since, as you and I were briefly acknowledging before we started recording, we have overlapping interests to a great degree. So it's really great to make official contact with you. Joanna: Indeed. So, first up, before we get into the book itself— Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing. Matt: Well, I'm one of those people whose story is probably typical in some ways, in that I really wanted to do it from the time I was a child. My father was a great writer, although he was an attorney. He wasn't a professional writer. Something about books and reading when I was a child really seriously enchanted me. I was very frustrated when I was so young—and I vividly remember this—that I couldn't read, because I loved the books that were read to me. I craved being able to read them for myself. So as soon as I gained that ability in school, it was off to the races, so to speak, and for some reason, a desire to tell stories myself came along with that. Being a “writer” was one of the earliest life desires, job or career desires, that I expressed. I was one of those young people really into fantasy, horror, and science fiction. So I was reading a lot of it and trying to emulate it and write a lot of it. There was a cinematic component—I was a movie fanatic as well. I won a local Authors' Guild short story writing contest when I was a senior in high school and began trying to write stories seriously in college. Then my interest in horror and religion became dominant over time, and that's what I ended up writing about. Joanna: Has your interest turned into paid work? That's the other thing, because there's an interest and then there's making writing more of your income and your business. Matt: Right. Well, actually, although I have made and do make money from my writing, it has always, always, always remained on the side. My main career, as far as my moneymaking life, first started off in video and media production, which is formally what I got my undergraduate college degree in. Then I switched into education. I taught high school for some years, and then now for the past, good Lord, 18 years, I have been in higher education. First as English faculty who also taught some religion courses, and then now for the past several years in the administration. I'm Vice President of Academic Affairs at a college. My writing has been something that I pursued as an avocation. As far as earning money from it, that didn't happen even with my first publication, which happened on the internet in 1998, I believe, with a horror story titled “Teeth.” It was just free—I didn't get paid. That led to paid publication of that story three or four years later, when it appeared as my very first print publication in a Lovecraftian horror anthology from Del Rey titled The Children of Cthulhu. It appeared as the final story, and that was the first time I had received a paycheck. It was a professional per-word rate. Since then I've had several books published and more stories and essays and that kind of thing. I've had income sometimes from writing and sometimes I haven't. My first book came out of that story. I attended the World Horror Convention in 2001, actually before that Lovecraftian anthology was published, but it had been placed. At the World Horror Convention, which was in Seattle that year, I met one of the two editors of that book, and that led to me having my first short story collection, Divinations of the Deep, which was not for much money, but it attracted a lot of good attention and some good reviews. So it's been like that all along. I mean, I've made a couple of runs at saying I would love to just be an author, as it were, but that doesn't seem to be in the cards for me. And honestly, I'm glad it's not. I have made the most money from some academic editing projects that I've done. I created and edited a two-volume encyclopedia of the history of horror literature, for instance, for a big academic publisher. Those are work-for-hire projects that I get paid for. Making money on my own creative vision and my own creative work has been intermittent. It really has proven over time that not having my primary creative, spiritual, and philosophical drive hooked to what I earn my bread by has been a blessing. I don't want to take this thing I love and make it be how I have to grind to earn my money. I want to keep it in a protected space. That has been spontaneously what's happened with my writing career. Joanna: Yes. I think as you say, there are a lot of benefits of that, especially where you are writing at this convergence of horror, religion, and creativity. Your writing is very deep. I would say it's on the edge of academic. I don't want to say it's completely academic, because a lot of people will find that difficult. But I think Writing at the Wellspring goes very deep while still being open to non-academic readers. As you say, I think if you had wanted to make a living with your books, you would've had to have gone in at a lighter level, perhaps. Do you think that makes sense? Matt: Yes, I know what you mean. I want to specify, I know that neither you nor I are saying anything about this as any kind of criticism or condescension to anyone who does make their living as a writer. I mean, I believe you do. Joanna: Yes, exactly. Matt: And that's fine. There really are people who have had significant commercial success from books or other things they've written that don't appear to be making huge concessions to being commercial. You can make a living as a writer, I think, and really follow your muse and not feel like you have to pander or cater or cheapen it. Then there are people who have perfectly happily decided to commercialise their work and tune it in whatever way is currently popular. That's fine. Every writer, every creative person should do what is right for him or her, in my opinion. In my particular case, I think what you said is right. I do think that I might have needed to change some things, to back off, to word them differently. Whenever I've tried to exert deliberate control like that, it just turns out that it's not something that my creative spirit wants to do. I don't really feel like I'm in contact with the work anymore. I'm fine with that. I don't think I'm doing a sweet lemons type thing. It really is the way it just needs to be. If it ever proves that me doing it strictly the way I want to do it, going however deep I want regardless of trying to appeal to a paying readership—if it turns out that at some point aligns with boatloads of money coming in, that's fine. That's perfectly fine. I'd be open to that. Joanna: Yes. Matt: I would be open to that. Joanna: You mentioned muse there, and with Writing at the Wellspring, the subtitle is “Tapping the Source of Your Inner Genius.” So I think this is a good place to talk about it. As you mentioned, you are leaning into your muse and your inner genius, and you use other terms—daemon or daimon. I think sometimes people find the word “genius” particularly very difficult because it has the connotation of brilliance in some form. So how can people think about this? How can we lean into this [genius] side of ourselves? Matt: Honestly, one thing that I would suggest people do is I would refer them to the TED Talk that Elizabeth Gilbert gave some years ago—was it 2009, 2010, 2011? It's one of the more popular TED Talks. Elizabeth Gilbert spoke about. I think it's sometimes given the title “Your Elusive Creative Genius” or something like that. Her whole talk is about the way in her own creative life, and as she recommends to others, it has been very important for her to seize on the older model that we're talking about. The most clear articulation of it is that it used to be the case—and we're talking about in ancient Western history, back to the Romans and even earlier to the Greeks—that genius was not something that you identified a person as being. It was something that a person had. And I would also say importantly, maybe had them too. In ancient Roman culture surrounding art and poetry and that kind of thing, the genius was the spirit that might, say, live in an artist's studio and would provide the same service to that artist as the Greek muses provided to someone who was writing epic poetry or history or something like that. That understanding of it has continued in various ways down through history. But there was a fateful transition as Western culture went through what we commonly call the Enlightenment and the Renaissance as well. This was where the term “genius,” while it didn't lose all those connotations of being an inspiring spirit—something that a person both has and maybe has hold of them—did become internalised to the point where we speak of people as being geniuses., which is exactly what you're talking about. I agree, some people listening to this probably have some reservations about this. They don't want to call themselves a genius because we tend to mean that's a super brilliant person, some kind of prodigy who is possessed of amazing artistic, creative, or intellectual skills. Again, that is the result of a cultural, philosophical, psychological, historical transition that occurred several centuries ago. And you still see the older meaning of it being attached sometimes. You think of people who we call geniuses being touched by something. Well, the older version—where you think of the genius, which in the way I use it in this book and also in my first book on creativity, A Course in Demonic Creativity—the genius is equivalent to the muse, which is equivalent to that other figure that you mentioned, the daemon or the daimon. It refers to a separate—what seems for all the world to be a separate—centre of intelligence or entity or influence. The thing that gives you both your creative drive and also your ideas, and serves as the source of what comes to you naturally to write. It's more than just ideas. When you talk about the ancient Greek daimon, there was a whole well-developed tradition of that in ancient Greek philosophy and religion. A daimon was, in one famous sense, a spirit that you were born with, that the gods had given you. It was like your double, your higher self. It was the thing that represented your character, your interests, the blueprint and the outline that your life was supposed to follow. There are great books written about that. There's a book by the psychologist James Hillman titled The Soul's Code. A lot of people have read it. It lays out the daimon theory and gives it application to modern instances. The idea is that everybody has a genius or has a muse or has a daimon. For writers, my recommendation is to say, whether you believe it or not, whether you take it as a metaphor—which is fine—or whether you want to get somewhat mystical and delve into the idea that maybe there's really a spirit or something, it doesn't matter. Productively, with practical, measurable results, you can learn to relate to your creative impulse as if you are collaborating internally with someone else. It's the centre of why you're interested in writing what you want to write, why you want to write the way you want to write, and even the types of things that unfold in the course of your career—both your creative career and the rest of your life, in the mould of the ancient daimon. I have found that to be a vein of great power and meaning in my own life. I do it exactly the way I'm describing. I don't actually believe it, but I don't disbelieve it. I find that in experience, it really doesn't matter. It works and it may as well be true. Joanna: I mean, obviously the book has a whole load of ways we can tap into that, but I did like that you talk about stillness and silence, because I feel like that is actually increasingly difficult as authors. Obviously it's noisy online and we're meant to be doing things like social media or interacting with people online. And then the world is just noisy. The news is noisy. There's lots of things. How can we use this idea of stillness and silence? Also, any other ways we can practically tap into this side? Matt: Sure. One thing that wanted to say itself in this book was some things I had been thinking and feeling about silence for a long time. As you say, it can be difficult these days to find what feels like the silence that we need to even get our work done. We're talking about the muse or the genius. How can we even hear it when it seems like the clamour of all the pulls that we have on our outward attention has become truly a cacophony? We have opted for this in many ways through our engagement with social media or other things, but in other ways seems like it's been thrust upon us. What I want to point out, that has been of extreme importance to me, is that many silences come into our lives as creatives that we resist. It's not just that we can't find the silence and the space that we feel like we need so as not to drown out our creativity. It's that we have unwanted silences come in, like writer's block. Or even if it doesn't feel like a block, just inertia. Just stasis. I don't know about you, but I have many, many times found myself grappling with what, for all the world, feels like a totally natural, organic sense of wanting to slip into complete inertia, just total stillness. And that feels like it has been in conflict with my creative drive. It's like I have this residual desire and also a sense of duty that I really should be writing. Maybe I have an idea in mind and I'm just not working on it. Or maybe I'm in the middle of a project and I feel like I'm abandoning it. Or maybe nothing's coming up, but I feel like it should be. I'm pushing myself, but there's a division in me where I also just want to leave it alone. Whether that means actually just sitting there silently at my writing table or in meditation, or maybe just going about regular daily life and forgetting about trying to fulfil this creative calling. I really think there's a vein of gold to be tapped in the silences that come to all of us. Because as I said, that can be in the middle of daily activity. We have this kind of franticness, some of us, about our creativity. We get wrapped up in it. We feel bound to it. The thing that so much of the time we want to think is a gift—we're proud of it, we cherish it, we like our writing—also becomes a burden. This fantasy of just chucking it all, of just saying, “I would love to be free of it. It's like something that's weighing me down. I'm sorry that I roped myself into it. I would love to just sink into complete silence.” This sort of meditative thing, or just muteness—hey, that is valid to hear. That's valid to heed when it comes up. I mean, sometimes we have gotten ourselves into situations where we have external responsibilities and deadlines, and it's important to try and honour those and not be a bad person on the level of just fulfilling practical obligations. It's also important to recognise you've got silence offering itself to you in all kinds of ways. The more important silence is paradoxically the one that we so often resist if we're creative people and feel like we have to be making. The more important silence is not whether or not your outward conditions seem like they're a clamour and they're chaotic and they're distracting and they're full of pressure. It's that inner silence. So I recommend paying attention to when it comes up. And for practical ways—they are endless. Take advantage of early mornings. A lot of people have found great value in getting up earlier than they are used to and making a practice of that, and either just meditating or free writing. Maybe using, for example, Julia Cameron's famous practice of morning pages, which has been valuable to me sometimes. Or doing things like—as I've said about the muse and the genius and the daimon—personify your unconscious mind and maybe write down a dialogue between yourself and your creative spirit, whether about your current project or just about your life and your creativity as a whole. There are various tricks to get in touch with this unconscious part of you, and I really am convinced out of practical personal experience that it's not necessary to have outer silence and outer spaciousness when you can find it within yourself. You can find it through some of these exercises for getting in alignment with what your creativity wants to do. You can get in touch with it if you're paying attention to what you might not recognise as a gift—offering it to yourself. If things go quiet and you think, “Oh no, I should be doing something”—why not let that be a place where things can germinate? Why not let that be the silence that you might not be able to find on the outside? Joanna: Yes, and I'm feeling guilty here because of course we are producing a podcast episode for people to listen to. I find personally that one of the places I can find silence is when I walk. It's not obviously silent outside, but I am definitely guilty of always listening to podcasts, often at very fast speed as well. Sometimes when I go for a walk, I just deliberately do not listen to anything—don't listen to an audiobook, don't listen to a podcast—and a lot comes up there. I have my phone with me, and when I get back from those walks and jot down things that come up in my mind, I will have so many notes of things that have come up in my brain during the walk. It's really difficult, isn't it? Because I know you also love input. You do a lot of research. As I said, your books have a lot of research in them, and so we both like doing the research. But also I definitely find that has to be balanced with the time for letting it come out again in some form, with that mental silence. You also talk about being uncomfortable, and I feel like sometimes that silence can be uncomfortable as well. Matt: Yes, it can be. There's no telling what might come up when you are faced with silence. Again, it's one of those things—even the outer kind that we think we crave. Sometimes it's a bit frightening when it comes up, which is why we try to fill it with things, like this podcast episode for example. There's a threshold that you can notice you cross sometimes, where what was a natural desire to connect with something that you heard about and found interesting becomes a bit frantic. Where now, really, what might be good is if you shut off—didn't go for the next podcast episode or didn't go for the next click to the website—if you just shut the browser and just sat there and did something else. You're kind of, with a little desperateness, trying to fill the void. What you described about needing to get quiet and let things happen—yes. I love reading and research, but the classic stages of the creative process—first codified, I think, by Graham Wallas, if I remember correctly—they still work. It's really good sometimes to have a model and understand how it works. You have what's sometimes called the preparation stage. All the input, all the research, all the brainstorming, all that kind of thing. Then the incubation stage can be vastly important. That can get frightening, both because the silence seems somehow threatening, like something about you is going to be exposed. Or maybe that you're going to lose the thread of whatever it was and it's never going to come out. But really, if you just stop and let your muse, let your genius do its thing, let your unconscious do its thing, it will suggest itself again. It will come up on its own. Ideas will come back. You'll realise, “Oh, I didn't know what I was going to do with that character. I didn't know how these ideas were going to come together. I didn't even know what this idea for a story, a book, or an essay was going to be.” It comes back up, and with you working with it, it shows what it wanted to be all along. This whole thing about doing the preparation and then allowing it to incubate and germinate and then sprout when it wants to, that still works. Part of the reason that we're scared of the silence, I'm convinced, is because each of us operates in our psychological selves as a closed system. It's like we each comprise our own cosmos, so to speak. I know you know that I have worked in horror literature, the literature of cosmic fear. In cosmic horror, as laid out by the likes of Lovecraft and others, the basic effect has been analysed as constituting a disturbance of the universe. That's the horror of cosmic horror—the world is transformed into this nightmarish thing in a cosmic horror story, where there's a haunting, threatening presence that's out of the ordinary and it's somehow bound up with the narrator's interior world. Life reveals itself as supernaturally or ontologically something nightmarish—there are awful forces that are about to erupt all the time. And whether anybody's into cosmic horror or not, I think it's pretty accurate to say that we each constitute our own world, our own cosmos. A lot of the noise that we make—the mental noise and the complications we introduce into our own lives—is, usually unconsciously, trying to stave off confrontation with the otherness that is outside the barrier of our personal sense of self. The weird thing is that that otherness is actually in us, and in fact, we can approach it in the figure of the daemon or the daimon or the muse. So creativity is fraught. You're dealing with something that you might want to think, “Oh, this is great, it's going to be the source of my ideas, it's going to fulfil my creativity.” Well, yes, but it is frightening to think about the fact of something about yourself being beyond yourself and perhaps being out of your conscious control and somehow guiding your destiny. A lot of people have trouble getting along with their own unconscious, which is another way to put it. There's a horror, a fear, a dread effect that comes when we feel like we are out of control. We all face that ultimately—when it comes to our death, for example. There are some spiritual traditions that talk about dying before you die, that being basically the way to enlightenment in those traditions. Recognising and coming to terms with the fact that this thing that is you, that you call yourself, is transitory. It is only there by being enclosed within and swamped from without by this thing that is not you, which is a sort of void to which you'll return. In the book, I deal with some of that, and I talk about it from a non-dual spiritual viewpoint, because ultimately for me, these creative questions have become inseparable from spiritual questions. Joanna: Yes. And obviously people know about my book Writing the Shadow, which is how we really connected around this Jungian idea of the shadow and the darkness. I agree with you—there's some really interesting things at the juxtaposition of all of these topics, which we could talk about for a long time. I do want to ask you around your idea of “living into the dark.” Because I feel like you do take things beyond just the writing into this idea of living into it. So maybe talk a bit about that. And obviously synchronicity, which is a Jungian psychology concept. Matt: Living into the dark is the thing that forms the overarching ethos or perspective for me of all this. I got the term from “writing into the dark,” which actually comes from the American science fiction and fantasy author Dean Wesley Smith. He wrote a book titled Writing Into the Dark, subtitled “Writing Without an Outline.” It's a great book. I recommend it to anyone. It is about forsaking and foregoing the felt need to outline writing in advance and trusting your creative mind to be able to make up a story in real time. That draws on the deep nature of storytelling to come out right. Therefore you write into the dark, as if you're walking down a road where you have a lantern and you can only see one step ahead. You haven't mapped out the territory. It was a great metaphor. I had already been thinking in that direction about life and about creativity for some time when I first came across that book. I devoured it and recognised it described how I had already been writing anyway, which is one reason it was so powerful for me. Then it edged out into a broader understanding for me that I had also been coming up with, that I just ended up calling “living into the dark.” None of us knows where anything is going, that much is obvious. But living into the dark goes farther than that, to embrace this understanding. I think of this in connection with what so many people, either personally or because of jobs they have where they're required to think like this. I think of this in terms of the famous five-year plan that so many of us want to draw up. There's nothing wrong with a five-year plan or a ten-year plan or a one-year plan. You can come up with that for practical purposes and try and chart where you're going, but we too often forget that that's just a fantasy exercise. We are not actually thinking into the future, nor are we ever actually thinking into the past. Remembering the past, predicting or projecting the future—both are events that are happening right now, in this moment, which is always now. It's no less now than it was when you and I first started this conversation. Past and future are projections—mental projections right now. And everything is unfolding in the present in real time, which effectively means what's going to come next is coming out of—well, we don't know where it's coming out of. Darkness. Living into the dark is living with full-on contact with, and awareness of, and embrace of this fact that we don't know what's coming up. That encompasses all of life and all of creativity. That same darkness, if it's helpful for you to take on this emotional tenor—which it is for me—can relate to the darkness in cosmic horror fiction, or to some of the rich traditions of darkness, like in Daoism with the yin contrasted with yang. Yin is the dark, moon, feminine aspect of things—the receptive source of the universe. This idea of living into the dark, of just accepting that we're all on this journey on a path where we can only see one step ahead, even if that far, has been meaningful to me. It's been meaningful to my creativity, and I recommend it to anybody to whom it appeals. It takes a lot of pressure off. I think that's a guiding meta-theme for me—trying to take the pressure off us from trying to control things that can't be controlled, and more stepping into that flow of understanding: what's going to come to me is going to come to me, and my posture toward it, whether I align with it or not, is what's going to determine my experience of it. You mentioned synchronicity. It's interesting. It's verifiable. I know a lot of people have verified it for themselves. Maybe some people listening to this have too. It's verifiable that when you really get in tune with this present-moment thing and get in tune with your creativity—and you can tell when you're aligned and not, when you feel blocked or when you feel resistance or not—when these things align on their own sometimes, strange coincidences do happen. Jung talked about synchronicity as an acausal connecting principle. That was probably due to the fact that the psyche is not separate from the fabric of the world that gives rise to it, so that we might have subjective things—impressions, fantasies, dreams—that we rather uncannily see mirrored in objective events. Like the famous thing that clarified and coalesced that for him: a psychotherapy session with a patient who was describing a dream she'd been having about a scarab beetle. Then he heard a tapping at the window of his office and he went there and opened it, and there was a European beetle—a kind of scarab beetle, much like the Egyptian scarab—that was there. He held it up and said to the woman, “Is this your beetle? Here is your beetle.” It just blew her mind. It opened new levels of the therapy that she was receiving. Those kinds of things happen. I've had them happen. Joanna: Me too. Matt: If you're a long-time writer or reader, you're familiar with the library genie—the library daemon, we sometimes refer to it as—the book that, just at the moment you think of it and realise, “Oh yes…” You're doing your study, and it doesn't have to be a library, it could be on the web or whatever. You finally realise what it is that you need, what you've been looking for, and in some cases it literally falls off the shelf onto someone's head. What do you make of those when they happen? At the very least, it rattles your cage. You might enter a state of suspended judgement about whether we really are living in a kind of magical cosmos full of real correspondences. It's a bit like the daimon or the muse: is it a metaphor? Is it just an interpretation, or is it something real? Probably the best place is one of profoundly, actively embraced agnosticism, and just take it for what it is. Joanna: Yes, and leaning more into your intuition. I think you definitely demonstrate that in the book as well, really exploring a lot of very interesting topics. Now, we are almost out of time, but you do have a Substack, The Living Dark, where you publish essays, and you've also got all kinds of really interesting books. I want people to go have a look at some of the other stuff you've written, especially if you enjoy horror and religion and all of that kind of thing. So just to ask, how do you decide when something is an essay on The Living Dark, and how do you decide when you are going to put it in a book or in some other way? I feel like a lot of authors are thinking about Substack but don't necessarily know what to put on it. I think I first connected with you on your Substack, where I was like, “Oh, this guy's writing interesting, weird stuff.” How do you use Substack as opposed to writing for your books? Matt: Sure. Let me answer by first talking about what happened previously with that first book on creativity that I mentioned, A Course in Demonic Creativity. I had all kinds of thoughts and ideas coming up, seeded over many years of practice and reading about the daimon and the daemon and the genius and the muse. In 2009 I founded a blog—it was just a WordPress blog—and I titled it Daemon Muse. I attended to it for two to three years. A lot of people ended up reading it. I really did not have any plans, not even any back-burner plans, of taking the material that I published in posts there about this way of creativity and making it a book. I did realise about a year and a half in that essentially I had a book I had already written in those posts. So it took some work, and I spent six months making it all into a coherent book. By the way, that book was only ever published as a PDF, which is still free on my website, MattCardin.com—although plans for the first-ever print edition of it are in motion right now. That was published in 2011. When I went to Substack and started my newsletter there in 2022—and by the way, it wasn't originally called The Living Dark; my first title was “Living Into the Dark,” and then I changed it about a year, year and a half in—I kind of am doing the same thing. It's been a while since I took anything and thought, “I'm writing a book with it.” I write what comes to me to write. You know how Substack Notes is Substack's own version of social media, kind of like Twitter used to be or like X kind of is now. It happens all the time that I write things that just stay in contact with people as a Substack Note—some short thing. And then I realise I wanted to say more about that. Or you have what happened just this morning. Three or four hours before you and I were talking, I started writing a Substack Note and it got so long I realised I had something that could be a post to The Living Dark. So I switched over and finished it that way. The book Writing at the Wellspring came together after I had written things for a couple of years at The Living Dark and realised that I could trace a path through about a third of the posts that I had ever published there, and had the makings of a book. So that, plus other material from earlier in my life—there are things from my private journals from years ago in Writing at the Wellspring—plus some new material, ended up turning into that book. So I'm not thinking about the difference, is what I'm saying. I find writing at my Living Dark newsletter to be a needful and enjoyable creative outlet, partly because I have some 3,800 readers now and it feels good to be in contact with them and to have that audience and to know that there's that eye on what I'm writing. That's partly because I just have the freedom to work it out to my satisfaction and publish it there. I'm already halfway forming another book that will be of a different focus, to come from things that I have published there. So for me, there's an organic relationship between Substack writing, or any kind of blogging, and the writing of books. If people haven't thought about that, they might want to consider it. If you have one already or if you're thinking of starting a blog on Substack or anywhere else, maybe you have things that can guide you to a book that already exists and you just haven't realised it. Joanna: So where can people find you and your books and everything you do online? Matt: Well, The Living Dark that we're talking about is at www.livingdark.net—and it does require the three Ws at the beginning to get there. Then my author website is MattCardin.com, and you can go to the books page there to get a link to all the books I've published and read about them. Joanna: Great. Well, thanks so much for your time, Matt. That was fantastic. Matt: Thank you, Jo. I really appreciate the invitation.The post Writing At The Wellspring: Tapping The Source Of Your Inner Genius With Matt Cardin first appeared on The Creative Penn.

What does it take to write strong sentences? How do you keep writing when the world feels dark? How do you push past self-doubt, build a sustainable writing practice, and trust that your voice is enough? Anne Lamott and Neal Allen share decades of hard-won wisdom from their new book, Good Writing. In the intro, Hachette cancels allegedly AI-written book [The New Publishing Standard]; How Pangram works; Publishing industry insights from Macmillan's CEO [David Perell Podcast]; Photos from Notre Dame and Saint Chapelle; The Black Church; Bones of the Deep coming in April. Today's show is sponsored by ProWritingAid, writing and editing software that goes way beyond just grammar and typo checking. With its detailed reports on how to improve your writing and integration with writing software, ProWritingAid will help you improve your book before you send it to an editor, agent or publisher. Check it out for free or get 15% off the premium edition at www.ProWritingAid.com/joanna This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn  Neal Allen is a spiritual coach, former journalist, and author of non-fiction and flash fiction. Anne Lamott is the New York Times bestselling author of memoir, spiritual and creative non-fiction, and literary fiction, including Bird by Bird: Instructions on Writing and Life, which many authors, including me, count as one of the best books on writing out there. Neal and Anne are also married, and their first book together is Good Writing: 36 Ways to Improve Your Sentences You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.  Show Notes Why strong verbs are rule number one How Anne and Neal's contrasting styles created a unique call-and-response writing guide Practical advice on finding and trusting your authentic voice across genres Why award-winning novelists typically write for only 90 minutes a day — and what that means for your writing practice How to keep writing during dark and discouraging times without giving up The uncomfortable truth about publication, longevity, and why nobody cares if you write You can find Neal at ShapesOfTruth.com and Anne on Substack. Transcript of the interview with Neal Allen and Anne Lamott Neal Allen is a spiritual coach, former journalist, and author of non-fiction and flash fiction. Anne Lamott is the New York Times bestselling author of memoir, spiritual and creative non-fiction, and literary fiction, including Bird by Bird: Instructions on Writing and Life, which many authors, including me, count as one of the best books on writing out there. Neal and Anne are also married, and their first book together is Good Writing: 36 Ways to Improve Your Sentences Jo: Welcome to the show, Neal and Anne. Anne: Thank you so much, Jo. We're happy to be here. Neal: Hi, Jo. Jo: Let us get straight into the book with rule one, which is use strong verbs. How can we implement that practically in our manuscripts when most of us don't start with the verb? We're thinking of story or we're thinking of message? Neal: Throughout the book, it's pointed out that these are rules for second drafts, right? So you've put it down. You've already got your story down, you've already got your piece down—your email, your text, it doesn't matter what. Then you stop, you pause, you go back to the beginning and you go sentence by sentence and look at them. Anne: I'd like to add that there's a lot in the book, usually on my end of the conversation, that has to do with really using these rules anywhere and everywhere. Whether you're writing a memoir or a grant proposal, I believe these rules apply to getting everything written at any time, in any phase of the work because, from Bird by Bird, I'm all about taking short assignments and writing really godawful first drafts. What is fun about writing is to have spewed out something on the page and then to get to go back right then and just start cleaning it up a bit, straightening it out, probably inevitably shortening it. One place to start is to notice how weak our verbs are. If I say “Jo walked towards us across the lawn,” it doesn't give the reader very much information. But if I say “Jo lurched towards us across the lawn,” or “Jo raced towards us across the lawn,” then right away you've improved the sentence with really two or three quick thoughts about what you actually meant with that verb and a better one. So it really applies to every level and stage of writing, but Neal's right—this is really about going back over your work sentence by sentence and seeing if you can make it stronger and cleaner and clearer. The reason it's rule one is to write strong verbs. Neal: A nice thing about strong verbs is that they often preclude the need for an adjective or an adverb, right? If I say “I trudged,” it's shorter than saying “I walked slowly and depressed.” Jo: Absolutely, and how you answered that question is kind of how the book works, right? Because Neal does an outline of the rule, and then Anne comes in and comments. Maybe you could talk a bit about that process. You are both strong characters, obviously you've been writing a long time. Talk a bit about how you made the book and how that worked as a couple as well. Neal: I'd had these rules collected for a number of years and I had them on my website. When I met Anne, she liked them and would hand them out when she was doing writing sessions. I was intrigued at some point a few years ago and looked around to see whether there was a list like mine out there. I noticed that all the other lists I saw were much shorter. Hemingway had his four rules for rewriting. Elmore Leonard, his eight, which are wonderful. Margaret Atwood has 10. The longest I saw was Martin Amis had, depending on what year it was, 14, 15 or 16—he'd go back and forth with a couple of them. I had 30-some and I wondered, well, 30-some might be enough for a book. I didn't want to write a scolding book like on grammar. I didn't want it to be academic or written like “I'm the expert, I know.” I'll just let my mind range. I'll explain the rule and then let my mind go where it went. Which, by the way, is one of the rules—show then tell. Not “show, don't tell.” It's show, then tell. Let your mind riff after you've explained something to the reader or shown something to the reader. So I wrote the book. It was too short to be published, and I showed it to Anne and I asked her, “What do I do with this?” Anne: I said, “Hey, I know something about writing, Bub,” and I asked if I could contribute my thoughts and retorts and examples and prompts to each of his rules. We were just off and running because his stuff was so solid. Mine is more maybe welcoming and giving encouragement and hope to writers because writing's hard. It's still hard for me. This is my 21st book and I'm only a third of it. Writing's hard, and what we hope is that our conversation can help people understand: a) it's hard for everybody, and b) it'll work if you just keep your butt in the chair and do the best you can, and then go back one day at a time and try to make it a little bit better. Neal: It turned out to be pretty serendipitous because just naturally I'm more of an explainer and Annie is more driving toward catharsis. So the call and response is always: I set out the rule, I explain the rule, and Annie drives it toward catharsis and usefulness. Jo: In some chapters you do disagree in some form. How did that work in the process of writing? Anne: Usually I disagree because Neal might be using words that are too big, or it might be a little bit elitist, I would think. Or of course I would point out that he's completely overeducated, whereas I'm a dropout and so I have a much plainer, more welcoming version of the rules. All of the rules are so strong, but I would feel that the way he explained it was beyond me. So I would come in and try to explain what Neal had been explaining. It was actually really funny and fun. We do come from really different directions. Neal is an explainer. He's like an ATM of information, and I am the class den mother who brings in treats and party favours on everybody's birthday. My message is always: you can really, really do this, I promise, trust me. But you start where you are, you get your butt in the chair, and then Neal comes along and says what has worked for him. He was a journalist forever, so he writes in a very different way than I write. It just turned out that the two of us together kind of make a whole. People have asked us if there were a lot of conflicts or if we really objected to the other person's take. I can tell you, Jo, there wasn't a day when we had only conflict. We were just laughing and we were excited because one of us would remember a great example from literature. We came to believe that these two very distinct voices would form one voice of encouragement for any writer. Jo: That brings us to rule number eight, which is trust your voice. I feel like this is easier when you've been writing a while. We're told to find our voice, but I remember as an early writer when I read Bird by Bird and other books and I was like, “How on earth do I find my voice?” Maybe you could talk about this more for early stage writer. How do you find and trust that voice? Neal: Boy, that is a halt for almost all of us. This follows from any intellectual pursuit that requires lots of practice and repetitions. Malcolm Gladwell's great statement, or discovery, or restatement from somebody else who discovered it, that the human brain requires 10,000 hours of repetitions before something can be allowed to just flow without thought. Flow as if intuitive rather than thinking. I don't think that's any different in writing than it is in basketball or football or anything else—sports, creative pursuits, everyday pursuits. There's just a lot of repetitions required. Some people have the experience that I did, where you're just going along getting better and better, doing it over and over again, learning this, learning that, adding in this, adding in that, moving toward a goal of virtuosity or whatever. And all of a sudden, bang, one day, it all works and your voice emerges. Other people don't have that experience, don't have that one day that it happened or that feeling that it suddenly happened. For some people it takes less than 10,000 hours, but for most people it is a hell of a lot of repetitions. Anne: I think for me, the most important aspect to finding your own voice is noticing how desperately you don't think your voice is good enough and that you want to write like somebody else. I always mention that when I was coming up, at about 20, I wanted to sound like Isabel Allende because I loved her work so much. Or Ann Beattie, who was writing those wonderful short stories in the New Yorker. Or Salinger, who I'd started reading probably at 10 years old. I had to come to the understanding that I can't tell my stories and my truth and my version of life—which is really what writing is—in somebody else's voice. Unless it's a kind of advanced writing exercise to write in the voice of an alcoholic billionaire in Spain. For most of us, it's about finding out that our voice is what people want to hear. It's hard to believe, but it is absolutely true. If you have a story to tell me, Jo, I just want you to tell me your story. I don't want you to try to sound like Virginia Woolf or Margaret Drabble. I want you to be Jo. If it's the written version you're sending me, I can probably go through and help you maintain your voice while making the writing stronger by following certain really basic rules. But spiritually and psychologically, this is just about the most important rule of all because that's why we're here. That's why we are on this side of eternity—to discover who we are and why we're here. Part of that is discovering who, deep down, when all the layers are peeled away, we are, and then how to communicate that to a reader. Without trying to sound more impressive or more brilliant or more ironic than we actually are, our voice is good enough. It's hard to believe. Our voice is what we want you to tell us your stories in. Neal: I distinctly remember the day I found my voice, for odd reasons. I just can remember it, and the first thing I did when this story felt like it had written itself to me was look at it and go, “Crap. That doesn't sound like Faulkner.” Jo: It sounded like you. Anne: Or bad Faulkner. Jo: Do you think we have to find our voice maybe multiple times, depending on genre? For example, I recognised that feeling with one of my novels. It was novel number five. I was like, “Oh, that's my voice.” But then it took me a lot longer to find that in memoir because, well, I think memoir is super hard. Do you think we have to go through these 10,000 hours in different genres? Neal: Not for me. I don't think any differently about how I'm entering into a business letter, a text, a novel, a self-help book, or any of the things that I do. I feel like I just have to turn this switch and let it go, and I can trust myself. So that's interesting. I can imagine you could develop a second voice. I haven't ever needed to. Anne: I would agree that I write my novels and my nonfiction really from a kind of central bus station deep inside of me. One of our rules is write the hard things—write about life and death and loss and grief and relationships and getting old and being here during these incredibly cold, dark times. Because the reader, i.e. me, is just desperate for truth and for real. I started out wanting to sound like John Updike or sound like a New York glitterati male writer, and I can't tell you what is really real in somebody else's voice. I disagree with Malcolm Gladwell. I think it's 10 hours—a little bit different there. But when I'm writing autobiographical spiritual pieces or my novels, I have to kind of settle myself down, like gentling a horse, and find that bus station inside of myself where I'm observing and I'm tugging on the sleeve of the person sitting next to me and saying, “I just saw something really interesting. Do you have a minute?” That's really what writing is. I just saw something or thought of something or imagined something or remembered something really interesting. Do you have a minute? If I'm talking to the person next to me, I'm not going to try to sound like Laurence Olivier or anybody else. I'm just going to tell them my story. The best four or five word great quote is from our screenwriter friend, Randy Mayem Singer, and she said: “Tell me a story. Make me care.” Those six words really transcend all genres. It's just: I can tell you a story my way if you're interested. Got a minute? Jo: You mentioned that, really interesting, you said, “I need to settle myself down,” particularly in these dark times. This is not a political show, and obviously we're all from different countries here and we all have different views of what difficult times are, but we all go through them. When big things in the world make us feel like perhaps what we are doing is not so important, how do we get through that? That “shouldn't I go do something more important than writing a story” feeling? Neal: Everybody is encouraged to be a political scientist nowadays, or to be an ethicist or to be a moralist as their job, and that's kind of ridiculous, right? We've been handed our role. By the time you're 30, you've been handed your role in the world, and that's your productive role. You have certain citizenship requirements, which might include voting or marching or watching the news every day. That's not the rest of your day unless you actually work in parliament as an aide or doing some kind of social policy work. I am not going to let the external world ruin my day. I'm going to keep that to a certain number of minutes of my day that is appropriate to my role in the world. I am perfectly productive in the world. I have lots of things that I do. I work hard. Everybody works hard. There are no lazy people in this world any more—civilisation's too difficult. You want lazy? Go back to 300,000 years of tribal life, where as soon as you had fulfilled your last need for calories for the day, you made it back to camp slowly so you didn't burn calories, and lulled from about 10:00 AM to 2:00 PM. The rest of the day you reclined so you weren't burning calories and gossiped with your fellow tribespeople. None of us is like that now. I'm perfectly productive without having to say I should be more productive and more concerned about the foibles of the species. Anne: Neal does something with his clients, with whom he does this work on taming the inner critic. It's about having them make a list of what they do every day. Rain or shine or catastrophe or peace or war or whatever, you just do it. I wake up, I pray, I put my glasses on. I get a little bit of work done every day. I meditate for 15 minutes every day. I get outside every day because that is the most nourishing, spiritual reset button I can get to. I catch up with my friends. We have a grandson here. We hang out with him. I do certain things every day, and one of them is I get a little bit of work done. Of course what I'd rather do is just stay glued to CNN and have my tiny opinions on every single thing that is happening and how things would be better if they followed my always excellent advice. Instead, what I do is I will meditate for 50 minutes a day and it won't be really beautiful and inspiring—it'll be like a monkey at the mall who's over-caffeinated. I will also get outside. I don't know if I'll get a really good long walk with 10,000 steps in, but I will get outside and I will pay attention. I will breathe in fresh air. I will have moments of wonder. I will also sit down, and I will be doing it after we talk. I'm going to get my own writing done for the day. I really recommend that to writing students: write down what you do every day. And in it, figure out at least one pod—a 45-minute pod—where you can get a little bit of writing done. Something that may serve the writers in your audience is that I make long lists and I encourage all beginning writers to make long lists of every memory and thought and idea that they've had. But mostly memories, often starting very young. Thinking about early holidays and school are great prompts. Make a list of 25 memories you have that you've told people over the years that are meaningful to you. If you remember them, they're meaningful. You may think that they're meaningful because of this or that, but you sit down and you write about them for 45 minutes and you're going to discover that there was a kernel of insight, or even healing, in them that you hadn't known when you set out to write them. I taught writing forever at this bookstore called Book Passage in Marin. We would spend a part of every hour having the writers, the students, explain to me why they weren't getting any writing done, and they were excellent ideas. Any excuse your listeners have about why they're not getting any writing done—believe me, it's a good excuse and I've heard it 10 times. If you are committed to writing, you have to meet us halfway, and that means that you set aside 45 minutes or an hour and a half or whatever you can give me to get a little bit of writing done. Get one passage written—the first or eighth thing on the list of really important memories that you've carried in your pocket all these years. Neal: The typical amount of time that a Booker Prize winner, or a National Book Award winner here in America, spends writing—a novelist—is one to two hours in the morning, getting 45 minutes to an hour and a half of work done, a thousand to 1,500 words. And then they stop. The reason they stop is it's really brain-consuming. To do this is hard work, and it's intellectually vigorous. High-end programmers can work two and a half hours on average before they have to stop because they've used up their brain energy—the blood going to the brain and expending calories and whatever is going on in there. It's not a long time. It's just repetitive time. The Booker Prize winners, they typically work six days a week, not five days a week. An hour and a half a day is about the mean. About 1,200 words is about the mean. Jo: It's interesting because you mentioned what's stopping people from writing, and you also mentioned it's hard work. One of the things I've heard a lot recently is: “This is really hard. I thought writing was meant to be this romantic myth where I would sit down and things would stream into my brain and it would be easy. And if it's not easy and fun, then maybe it's wrong for me.” So maybe you could explain more about the hardness and why hard is still good. Hard doesn't mean it's a bad thing. Neal: The interesting thing about writers is that they are really interested in very complex thinking about sentences. A few things distinguish a writer from a subject matter expert or a plotter—who either writes plots and is interested in the movement of plots, or who is a subject matter expert in something and either novelises it or writes nonfiction. It's that a writer is first concerned about the puzzle of a sentence, second concerned about the flow of a paragraph really, and only thirdly concerned about the subject matter. I don't care what the subject matter is. What I want to concentrate on ultimately is the sentence. And getting a sentence to look right in context requires building sentences upon sentences upon sentences. It's more like painting than it is like writing in that sense. If you look at a painter, once they've put one brushstroke down—and usually it takes them a while to figure out what that brushstroke is, how big it is, how wide it is, how thick it is, how grainy it is—then the second brushstroke becomes a puzzle based on what they just did with the first brushstroke and the remaining canvas. A writer thinks that way about each sentence and realises that each sentence has layers of information in it—diction, colour, rhythm, harmony, melody, plot, all sorts of things are happening. How many of those are taken care of in that sentence? Well, that becomes the interest. It's hard in the sense that to be virtuosic at it, to be really good at it, requires a lot of study and a lot of mistakes. Most of the mistakes are getting rid of clichés and finding your way past them, and that's a long, long process. This isn't something that can be just picked up because you have a talent. You were told at a certain time you were a talented writer, so you can just pick it up. As soon as you get into it, you see that the sentences are demanding a heck of a lot of work. Anne: I would add that I don't find it all that fun and easy—I never find it fun and easy. I've been doing this professionally for 52 years now, since I was 20, when I worked at a magazine. I think that's an illusion. So much of becoming a writer is unlearning what you thought it meant and how it would go. That you would sit alone like Bartleby the Scrivener, hunched over working on your ledger. That was not true at all, because a lot of our book, Good Writing, has to do with the collaboration between you and a writing partner, a writing group or a writing collective, and eventually an editor. It's not about that lonely, hunched-over romantic, Wuthering Heights sense of seriousness. And it's also not giddy. It's not Walt Disney. It's just very real. It's one human sitting down at the desk with paper or at the keyboard, and it is just trying, one day at a time, to write what's on your heart, what's on your mind, what's on your scribbled notes, what you're trying to transcribe from this little bit of a flicker of an idea about something that you've always meant to tell on paper. And then writing it. Some parts of the day's work will be pulling teeth. The secret of writing—and I write about this a lot in Bird by Bird, I write a lot about it in Good Writing—is you just don't give up. Because you wanted to be a writer when you grew up. What that means is that you write a little bit every day and you read about writing. You read good books on writing. You read Stephen King. You read William Zinsser. You read all the Paris Review interviews of writers at work. You enter into the writing life because it's a calling, like a monk to a monastery. You've gotten into the water, it's a little cold at first, and you stay in it. And it starts to be something that is so fulfilling, if maybe not fun. It's fulfilling. You will feel this rare excitement that you're doing what you have put off for so long, or that you're re-entering it in a new way with a different sense of commitment and maybe a little bit more wisdom and probably a lot more stories to tell. Jo: I did want to ask Anne, because coming back to Bird by Bird, many writers listening will have read it. I've also read over the years about your son and your faith. These are really personal things that you have shared. It feels like we live in this age of judgement and cancellation, and writing what you call our truths can be very difficult. People are afraid. What would you say to them? And obviously also rule 33 is “write hard stuff”, so I guess that gets into it too. How do we do this? Anne: A lot of people don't have the calling to write personal stuff or autobiographical stuff or stuff about spiritual or emotional or psychological healing. They want to write about England in the 1300s. I've always told my writing students to write what they would love to come upon, because then they're creating it. If they love to read historical romances, or they love to read journals—I have to say, I read every single journal of Virginia Woolf's in my early twenties, and I read every single volume of her letters in my early twenties. It was thrilling to be in that intimate, umbilical connection to a writer that I loved so much, and into the world of Bloomsbury, and into the world of England between the wars. People may not want to write like I write, and I would assume they don't. My calling is that I love to write about real life and I use my immediate experiences of daily living and my family and my husband and our animals and my nation and my recovery and my church. All of that is the stuff that I love to come upon in other people's work, and so I write it. Neal writes differently. He is a journalist and a novelist, and he is writing a lot in a much more sociological way than I am. He is writing with this font of knowledge about socioeconomic and historical understanding of the world. Yet he's just raggedy old Neal Allen, but he loves to come upon different stuff than I love to come upon. Does that answer your question? Neal: I think one thing to notice is that the whole bully-victim cycle that we are promoting and living in now—and it's a cycle because if somebody claims that they have been bullied, then their only defence is to become a bully themselves. The victims become the bullies. It just gets worse and worse. It's the old revenge story. What I've noticed when I think about it is the authors who I respect the most tend to be humanists. Humanists tend not to be cancelled, and I've never felt a great danger. Of course, I watch my words in certain ways that are fashionable—you can't use this word any more, and all of that. But in terms of ideas, humanists embrace the world in a funny, different kind of way than people who chase after conflict, chase after separation of people from each other, tribalism, all of that. When I look back, my heroes were always humanists. Some of them might be cancelled now, but just for the weirdest reasons—like Henry Miller or Mark Twain might be cancelled for very strange reasons. These are absolute humanists who love everybody in the world in a certain kind of odd way. Virginia Woolf is the most incredible humanist in the world. She's not going to be cancelled. Jo: She cancelled herself. Neal: There we go. Jo: As we come towards the end, I do want to return to something—you've both talked about calling and you've been handed your role, and this sort of “we are writers now.” Both of you have had great longevity in the career, and I've been doing this now 20 years. I've noticed so many people who leave the writing life, so I wondered what tips you had on making it long term. How do we do this long term, assuming we are feeling a calling? People have to balance the money side, they're balancing book marketing, which is always a nightmare for all of us, and the writing. Any tips for longevity? Neal: I have no idea. I have lived outside of the writing life, just kind of using it as a secondary skill, for half of my life. I left journalism because it didn't pay well enough to support a family of six. I moved into the corporate world. I loved the corporate world. I didn't have any problem with it, but it wasn't the writing world. When I came out of the corporate world, I first went into “tame your inner critic” sessions with people—executive coaching, other kinds of coaching. Only lately, only in the last 10 years, have I really resumed my writing career. I think maintaining a writing career, like anything in the arts, is incredibly difficult financially. It just will be. Annie will tell you—you were, what, 15 years into your career before you had your first home office? Anne: Yes. Neal: Right. Anne: More than that. I was 20 years in before I had a door I could close to keep the Huns out—i.e. my child. Here's the thing: nobody cares if you write, if you hate it, or if you've given up. It might be that you would find your creative soul, your imaginative, creative life force at ecstatic dancing on Saturdays in the town park, which we offer here in our tiny town. It might be that you're a painter. My best friend started painting several years ago and she's incredible. If you want to write, the horrible thing is that you just have to keep setting aside a pod. I keep using the word pod because that's how I get any work done at all—an hour. Now, Neal and I can both tell you, and Neal alluded to this: you set aside an hour and that will give you maybe 40 minutes of actual writing. And we'll give the Booker Prize winners 40 minutes of actual writing. You have two hours and that gives you an hour and 15 minutes. That's how it works. If you care and if you long to be a writer, to immerse yourself in the writing life—I hate to sound like a Nike ad, and I don't know if you have this in England—but you just do it. One thing that gets in everybody's way is this fantasy of getting published and how if they get published, it will be like the world has stamped “validated” on their parking ticket and their self-esteem will now be much, much better and more consistently excellent than it ever was before. We can tell you: we've got this book that's out, brand new, and it makes you much more insecure and much more anxious than you were before it got published. Because how's it going to do? Is it going to get reviewed? There are very, very few places reviewing books any more. Carol Shields, who wrote an incredible book 30 years ago called The Stone Diaries. She was teaching large, large writing retreats, a thousand people at a time, and she would tell them that five to 10 of them will be published. Getting published means that you get your book out and you have one week to make it. You have one week in the bookstores for it to get noticed. And there are 180,000 hardback books published in America every year in general interest. So you write a novel that's about a small town. You have great dreams that it's going to be an Oprah book and that this is going to happen and it will lead to a second contract, and then you can start investing in diamonds or buy a set of fish forks. It doesn't happen. My first book that made any money at all for me was my fifth book. It was a journal of my son's first year called Operating Instructions, and it was the first time that I didn't have to have a second job. I was 38, and I had been writing—and writing full time—since I was 20 and publishing since I was 26. If the carrot that is enticing you to get any new work done is publication and finding an agent and getting published, it's not going to happen for you. I can just promise you that. If your dream is to become a writer and to become a member of the writing community and to write—and it will be discouraging—but if you want to write, you just keep pushing back your sleeves. You don't get up. You sit down and you keep your butt in the chair. If your work is really good, it may get published. If your work is excellent, it may not. But that can't be what gets you to commit to being a writer when you grow up. Jo: Fantastic. So where can people find Good Writing and all your books and everything you both do online? Neal: On March 17th the book comes out. You can get it online, anywhere online. It's published by Penguin Avery. March 17th, it gets released. Anne: As we said, it'll be in the bookstores for a while. Neal: It'll be in the bookstores in America. You might have to go online in Great Britain at first. Jo: Oh yes, it's definitely there. And what about your websites as well? Anne: I don't have a website. Neal: I have a modest website at ShapesOfTruth.com. That tells you about my other books also. Anne: I'm at Substack, Anne Lamott. I'm on Facebook, Anne Lamott. I'm kind of all over the place. But this is kind of terrifying: 80% of books bought in America are bought at Amazon on cell phones. Jo: Yes, absolutely. Actually, I was going to ask—have you recorded the audiobook as a pair? Anne: Yes, we have. It's available if you go—I hate to always be plugging Amazon, but it's so easy. If you go to Amazon, it'll give you a choice of hardback or audio or Kindle. Neal: And if you don't want to go to Amazon and want to find another place to buy it that you feel more comfortable with, go to Penguin Random House and just put in “Good Writing, Anne Lamott.” I think it'll take you to a splash page that gives you a choice of a half dozen online places to order it. Jo: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much, both of you, for your time. This has been brilliant. Anne: Oh, Jo, thank you. Pleasure and an honour. Thank you for having us. Neal: Thank you, Jo. As you can see, we really get turned on talking about this! Anne: Yes, we do.The post Strong Verbs And Hard Truths. Good Writing With Anne Lamott and Neal Allen first appeared on The Creative Penn.

What makes a character so compelling that readers will forgive almost anything about the plot? How do you move beyond vague flaws and generic descriptions to create people who feel pulled from real life? In this solo episode, I share 15 actionable tips for writing deep characters, curated from past interviews on the podcast. In the intro, thoughts from London Book Fair [Instagram reel @jfpennauthor; Publishing Perspectives; Audible; Spotify]; Insights from a 7-figure author business [BookBub]. This show is supported by my Patrons. Join my Community and get articles, discounts, and extra audio and video tutorials on writing craft, author business, and AI tools, at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn  This episode has been created from previous episodes of The Creative Penn Podcast, curated by Joanna Penn, as well as chapters from How to Write a Novel: From Idea to Book. Links to the individual episodes are included in the transcript below. In this episode: Master the ‘Believe, Care, Invest' trifecta, how to hook readers on the very first page Define the Dramatic Question: Who is your character when the chips are down? Absolute specificity. Why “she's controlling” isn't good enough Understand the Heroine's Journey, strength through connection, not solo action Use ‘Metaphor Families' to anchor dialogue and give every character a distinctive voice Find the Diagnostic Detail, the moments that prove a character is real Writing pain onto the page without writing memoir Write diverse characters as real people, not stereotypes or plot devices Give your protagonist a morally neutral ‘hero' status. Compelling beats likeable. Build vibrant side characters for series longevity and spin-off potential Use voice as a rhythmic tool Link character and plot until they're inseparable Why discovery writers can write out of order and still build deep character Find the sensory details that make characters live and breathe More help with how to write fiction here, or in my book, How to Write a Novel. Writing Characters: 15 Tips for Writing Deep Character in Your Fiction In today’s episode, I’m sharing fifteen tips for writing deep characters, synthesised from some of the most insightful interviews on The Creative Penn Podcast over the past few years, combined with what I’ve learned across more than forty books of my own. I’ll be referencing episodes with Matt Bird, Will Storr, Gail Carriger, Barbara Nickless, and Sarah Elisabeth Sawyer. I’ll also draw on my own book, How to Write a Novel, which covers these fundamentals in detail. Whether you’re writing your first novel or your fiftieth, whether you’re a plotter or a discovery writer like me, these tips will help you create characters that readers believe in, care about, and invest in—and keep coming back for more. Let’s get into it. 1. Master the ‘Believe, Care, Invest’ Trifecta When I spoke with Matt Bird on episode 624, he laid out the three things you need to achieve on the very first page of your book or in the first ten minutes of a film. He calls it “Believe, Care, and Invest.” First, the reader must believe the character is a real person, somehow proving they are not a cardboard imitation of a human being, not just a generic type walking through a generic plot. Second, the reader must care about the character’s circumstances. And third, the reader must invest in the character’s ability to solve the story’s central problem. Matt used The Hunger Games as his primary example, and it’s brilliant. On the very first page, we believe Katniss’s voice. Suzanne Collins writes in first person with a staccato rhythm—lots of periods, short declarative sentences—that immediately grounds us in a survivalist mentality. We care because Katniss is starving. She’s protecting her little sister. And we invest because she is out there bow hunting, which Matt pointed out is one of the most badass things a character can do. She even kills a lynx two pages in and sells the pelt. We invest in her resourcefulness and grit before the plot has even begun. Matt was very clear that this has nothing to do with the character being “likable.” He said his subtitle, Writing a Hero Anyone Will Love, doesn’t mean the character has to be a good person. He described “hero” as both gender-neutral and morally neutral. A hero can be totally evil or totally good. What matters is that we believe, care, and invest. He demonstrated this beautifully by breaking down the first ten minutes of WeCrashed, where the characters of Adam and Rebekah Neumann are absolutely not likable, but we are completely hooked. Adam steals his neighbour’s Chinese food through a carefully orchestrated con involving an imaginary beer. It’s not admirable behaviour, but the tradecraft involved, as Matt put it—using a term from spy movies—makes us invest in him. We see a character trying to solve the big problem of his life, which is that he’s poor and wants to be rich, and we want to see if he can pull it off. Actionable step: Go to the first page of your current work in progress. Does it achieve all three? Does the reader believe this is a real person with a distinctive voice? Do they care about the character’s circumstances? And do they invest in the character’s ability to handle what’s coming? If even one of those three is missing, that’s your revision priority. 2. Define the Dramatic Question: Who Are They Really? Will Storr, author of The Science of Storytelling, came on episode 490 and gave one of the most powerful frameworks I’ve ever heard for character-driven fiction. He explained that the human brain evolved language primarily to swap social information—in other words, to gossip. We are wired to monitor other people, to ask the question: who is this person when the chips are down? That’s what Will calls the Dramatic Question, and it’s what he believes lies at the heart of all compelling storytelling. It’s not a question about plot. It’s a question about the character’s soul. And every scene in your novel should force the character to answer it. His example of Lawrence of Arabia is unforgettable. The Dramatic Question for the entire film is: who are you, Lawrence? Are you ordinary or are you extraordinary? At the beginning, Lawrence is a cocky, rebellious young soldier who believes his rebelliousness makes him superior. Every iconic scene in that three-hour film tests that belief. Sometimes Lawrence acts as though he truly is extraordinary—leading the Arabs into battle, being hailed as a god—and sometimes the world strips him bare and he sees himself as ordinary. Because it’s a tragedy, he never overcomes his flaw. He doubles down on his belief that he’s extraordinary until he becomes monstrous, culminating in that iconic scene where he lifts a bloody dagger and sees his own reflection with horror. Will also used Jaws to demonstrate how this works in a pure action thriller. Brody’s dramatic question is simple: are you going to be old Brody who is terrified of the water, or new Brody who can overcome that fear? Every scene where the shark appears is really asking that question. And the last moment of the film isn’t the shark blowing up. It’s Brody swimming back through the water, saying he used to be scared of the water and he can’t imagine why. Actionable step: Write down the Dramatic Question for your protagonist in a single sentence. Is it “Are you ordinary or extraordinary?” or “Are you brave enough to love again?” or “Will you sacrifice your principles for survival?” If you can’t answer this with specificity, your character might still be a sketch rather than a person. 3. Get rid of Vague Flaws, and use Absolute Specificity This was one of Will Storr’s most important points. He said that vague thinking about characters is really the enemy. When he teaches workshops and asks writers to describe their character’s flaw, most of them say something like “they’re very controlling.” And Will’s response is: that’s not good enough. Everyone is controlling. How are they controlling? What’s the specific mechanism? He gave the example of a profile he read of Theresa May during the UK’s Brexit chaos. Someone who knew her said that Theresa May’s problem was that she always thinks she’s the only adult in every room she goes into. Will said that stopped him in his tracks because it’s so precise. If you define a character with that level of specificity, you can take them and put them in any genre, any situation—a spaceship, a Victorian drawing room, a school playground—and you will know exactly how they’re going to behave. The same applies to Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, as Will described it: a man who believes absolutely in capitalistic success and the idea that when you die, you’re going to be weighed on a scale, just as God weighs you for sin, but now you’re weighed for success. That’s not a vague flaw. That’s a worldview you can drop into any story and watch it combust. Will made another counterintuitive point that I found really valuable: writers often think that piling on multiple traits will create a complex character, but the opposite is true. Starting with one highly specific flaw and running it through the demands of a relentless plot is what generates complexity. You end up with a far more nuanced, original character than if you’d started with a laundry list of vague attributes. Actionable step: Take your protagonist’s flaw and pressure-test it. Is it specific enough that you could place this character in any situation and predict their behaviour? If you’re stuck at “she’s stubborn” or “he’s insecure,” keep pushing. What kind of stubborn? What kind of insecure? Find the diagnostic sentence—the Theresa May level of precision. 4. Understand the Heroine’s Journey: Strength Through Connection Gail Carriger came on episode 550 to discuss her nonfiction book, The Heroine’s Journey, and it completely reframed how I think about some of my own fiction. Gail explained that the core difference between the Hero’s Journey and the Heroine’s Journey comes down to how strength and victory are defined. The Hero’s Journey is about strength through solo action. The hero must be continually isolated to get stronger. He goes out of civilisation, faces strife alone, and achieves victory through physical prowess and self-actualisation. The Heroine’s Journey is the opposite. The heroine achieves her goals by activating a network. She’s a delegator, a general. She identifies where she can’t do something alone, finds the people who can help, and portions out the work for mutual gain. Gail put it simply: the heroine is very good at asking for help, which our culture tends to devalue but which is actually a powerful form of strength. Crucially, Gail stressed that gender is irrelevant to which journey you’re writing. Her go-to examples are striking: the recent Wonder Woman film is practically a beat-for-beat hero’s journey—Gilgamesh on screen, as Gail described it. Meanwhile, Harry Potter, both the first book and the series as a whole, is a classic heroine’s journey. Harry’s power comes from his network—Dumbledore’s Army, the Order of the Phoenix, his friendships with Ron and Hermione. He doesn’t defeat Voldemort alone. He defeats Voldemort because of love and connection. This distinction has real practical consequences for writers. If you’re writing a hero’s journey and you hit writer’s block, Gail said, the solution is usually to isolate your hero further and pile on more strife. But if you’re writing a heroine’s journey, the solution is probably to throw a new character into the scene—someone who has advice to offer or a skill the heroine lacks. The actual solutions to writer’s block are different depending on which narrative you’re writing. As I reflected on my own work, I realised that my ARKANE thriller protagonist, Morgan Sierra, follows a hero’s journey—she’s a solo operative, a lone wolf like Jack Reacher or James Bond. But my Mapwalker fantasy series follows a heroine’s journey, with Sienna and her group of friends working together. I hadn’t consciously chosen those paths; the stories led me there. But understanding the framework helps me write more intentionally now. Actionable step: Identify which journey your protagonist is on. Does your character gain strength by being alone (hero) or by building connections (heroine)? This will inform every plot decision you make, from how they face obstacles to how your story ends. 5. Use ‘Metaphor Families’ to Anchor Dialogue and Voice One of the most practical techniques Matt Bird shared on episode 624 is the idea of assigning each character a “metaphor family”—a specific well of language that they draw from. This gives each character a distinctive voice that goes beyond accent or dialect. Matt explained how in The Wire, one of the most beloved TV shows of all time, every character has a different metaphor family. What struck him was that Omar, this iconic character, never utters a single curse word in the entire series. His metaphor family is pirate. He talks about parlays, uses language that feels like it belongs in Pirates of the Caribbean, and it creates this incredible ironic counterpoint against his urban setting. It tells us immediately that this is a character who sees himself in a tradition of people that doesn’t match his immediate surroundings. Matt also referenced the UK version of The Office, where Gareth works at a paper company but aspires to the military. So all of his language is drawn from a military metaphor family. He doesn’t talk about filing and photocopying; he talks about tactics and discipline and being on the front line. This tells us that the character has a life and dreams beyond the immediate scene—and it’s the gap between aspiration and reality that makes him both funny and believable. He pointed out that a metaphor family sometimes comes from a character’s background, but it’s often more interesting when it comes from their aspirations. What does your character want to be? What world do they fantasise about inhabiting? That’s where their language should come from. In Star Wars, Obi-Wan Kenobi is a spiritual hermit, but his metaphor family is military. He uses the language of generals and commanders, and that ironic counterpoint is part of what makes him feel so rich. Actionable step: Assign each of your main characters a metaphor family. It could be based on their job, their background, or—more interestingly—their secret aspirations. Then go through your dialogue and make sure each character is consistently drawing from that well of language. If two characters sound the same when you strip away the dialogue tags, this is the fix. 6. Find the Diagnostic Detail: The Diagonal Toast Avoid clichéd character tags—the random scar, the eye patch, the mysterious limp—unless they serve a deep narrative purpose. Matt Bird on episode 624 was very funny about this: he pointed out that Nick Fury, Odin, and eventually Thor all have eye patches in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Eye patches are done, he said. You cannot do eye patches anymore. Instead, look for what I’m calling the “diagonal toast” detail, after a scene Matt described from Captain Marvel. In the film, Captain Marvel is trying to determine whether Nick Fury is who he says he is. She asks him to prove he isn’t a shapeshifting alien. Fury shares biographical details—his history, his mother—but then she pushes further and says, name one more thing you couldn’t possibly have made up about yourself. And Fury says: if toast is cut diagonally, I can’t eat it. Matt said that detail is gold for a writer because it feels pulled from a real life. You can pull it from your own life and gift it to your characters, and the reader can tell it’s not manufactured. He gave another example from The Sopranos: Tony Soprano’s mother won’t answer the phone after dark. The show’s creator, David Chase, confirmed on the DVD commentary that this came from his own mother, who genuinely would not answer the phone after dark and couldn’t explain why. Matt’s practical advice was to keep a journal. Write down the strange, specific things that people do or say. Mine your own life for those hyper-specific details. You just need one per book. In my own writing, I’ve used this approach. In my ARKANE thrillers, my character Morgan Sierra has always been Angelina Jolie in my mind—specifically Jolie in Lara Croft or Mr and Mrs Smith. And Blake Daniel in my crime thriller series was based on Jesse Williams from Grey’s Anatomy. I paste pictures of actors into my Scrivener projects. It helps with visuals, but also with the sense of the character, their energy and physicality. But visual details only take you so far. It’s the behavioural quirks—the diagonal toast moments—that make a character feel genuinely alive. That said, physical character tags can work brilliantly when they serve the story. As I discuss in How to Write a Novel, Robert Galbraith’s Cormoran Strike is an amputee, and his pain and the physical challenges of his prosthesis are a key part of every story—it’s not a cosmetic detail, it’s woven into the action and the character’s psychology. My character Blake Daniel always wears gloves to cover the scars on his hands, which provides an angle into his wounded past as well as a visual cue for the reader. And of course, Harry Potter’s lightning-shaped scar isn’t just a mark—it’s a direct connection to his nemesis and the mythology of the entire series. The rule of thumb is: if the tag tells us something about the character’s interior life or connects to the plot, it’s earning its place. If it’s just there to make the character visually distinctive, it’s probably a crutch. Game of Thrones takes character tags further with the family houses, each with their own mottos and sigils. The Starks say “Winter is coming” and their sigil is a dire wolf. Those aren’t just labels—they’re worldview made visible. Actionable step: Start a “diagonal toast” notebook. Every time you notice something strange and specific about someone’s behaviour—something that feels too real to be made up—write it down. Then gift it to a character who needs more texture. 7. Displace Your Own Trauma into the Work Barbara Nickless shared something deeply personal on episode 732 that fundamentally changed how I think about putting pain onto the page. While starting At First Light, the first book in her Dr. Evan Wilding series, she lost her son to epilepsy—something called SUDEP, Sudden Unexplained Death in Epilepsy. One day he was there, and the next day he was gone. Barbara said that writing helped her cope with the trauma, that doing a deep dive into Old English literature and the Viking Age for the book’s research became a lifeline. But here’s what’s important: she didn’t give Dr. Evan Wilding her exact trauma. Evan Wilding is four feet five inches, and Barbara described how he has to walk through a world that won’t adjust to him. That’s its own form of learning to cope when circumstances are beyond your control. She displaced her genuine grief into the character’s different but parallel struggle. When I asked her about the difference between writing for therapy and writing for an audience, she drew on her experience teaching creative writing to veterans through a collaboration between the US Department of Defense and the National Endowment for the Arts. She said she’s found that she can pour her heartache into her characters and process it through them, even when writing professionally, and that the genuine emotion is what touches readers. We’ve all been through our own losses and griefs, so seeing how a character copes can be deeply meaningful. I’ve always found that putting my own pain onto the page is the most direct way to connect with a reader’s soul. My character Morgan Sierra’s musings on religion and the supernatural are often my own. Her restlessness, her fascination with the darker edges of faith—those come from me. But her Krav Maga fighting skills and her ability to kill the bad guys are definitely her own. That gap between what’s mine and what’s hers is where the fiction lives. Barbara also said something on that episode that I wrote down and stuck on my wall. She said the act of producing itself is a balm to the soul. I’ve been thinking about that ever since. On my own wall, I have “Measure your life by what you create.” Different words, same truth. Actionable step: If you’re carrying something heavy—grief, anger, fear, regret—consider how you might displace it into a character’s different but emotionally parallel struggle. Don’t copy your exact situation; transform it. The emotion will be genuine, and the reader will feel it. 8. Write Diverse Characters as Real People When I spoke with Sarah Elisabeth Sawyer on episode 673—Sarah is Choctaw and a historical fiction author honoured by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian—she offered a perspective that every fiction writer needs to hear. The key message was to move away from stereotypes. Don’t write your American Indian character as the “Wise Guide” who exists solely to dispense mystic wisdom to the white protagonist. Don’t limit diverse characters to historical settings, as though they only exist in the past. Place them in normal, contemporary roles. Your spaceship captain, your forensic scientist, your small-town baker—any of them can be American Indian, or Nigerian, or Japanese, and their heritage should be a lived-in part of their identity, not the sole reason they exist in the story. I write international thrillers and dark fantasy, and my fiction is populated with characters from all over the world. I have a multi-cultural family and I’ve lived in many places and travelled widely, so I’ve met, worked with, and had relationships with people from different cultures. I find story ideas through travel, and if I set my books in a certain place, then the story is naturally populated with the people who live there. As I discuss in my book, How to Write a Novel, the world is a diverse place, so your fiction needs to be populated with all kinds of people. If I only populated my fiction with characters like me, they would be boring novels. There are many dimensions of difference—race, nationality, sex, age, body type, ability, religion, gender, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, class, culture, education level—and even then, don’t assume that similar types of people think the same way. Some authors worry they will make mistakes. We live in a time of outrage, and some authors have been criticised for writing outside their own experience. So is it too dangerous to try? Of course not. The media amplifies outliers, and most authors include diverse characters in every book without causing offence because they work hard to get it right. It’s about awareness, research, and intent. Actionable step: Audit the cast of your current work in progress. Have you written a mono-cultural perspective for all of them? If so, consider who could bring a different background, perspective, or set of cultural specifics to the story. Not as a token addition, but as a real person with a real life. 9. Respect Tribal and Cultural Specificity Sarah Elisabeth Sawyer on episode 673 was emphatic about one thing: never treat diverse groups as monolithic. If you’re writing a Native American character, you must research the specific nation. Choctaw is not Navajo, just as British is not French. Sarah described the distinct cultural markers of the Choctaw people—the diamond pattern you’ll see on traditional shirts and dresses, which represents the diamondback rattlesnake. They have distinct dances and songs. She said that if she saw someone in traditional dress at a distance, she would know whether they were Choctaw based on what they were wearing. She encouraged writers who want to write specifically about a nation to get to know those people. Go to events, go to a powwow, learn about the individual culture. She noted that a big misconception is that American Indians exist only in the past—she stressed that they are still here, still living their cultures, and fiction should reflect that present reality. I took a similar approach when writing Destroyer of Worlds, which is set mostly in India. I read books about Hindu myth, watched documentaries about the sadhus, and had one of my Indian readers from Mumbai check my cultural references. For Risen Gods, set in New Zealand with a young Maori protagonist, I studied books about Maori mythology and fiction by Maori authors, and had a male Maori reader check for cultural issues. Research is simply an act of empathy. The practical takeaway is this: if you’re going to include a character from a specific cultural background, do the work. Use specific cultural details rather than generic signifiers. Sarah talked about how even she fell into stereotypes when she was first writing, until her mother pointed them out. If someone from within a culture can fall into those traps, the rest of us certainly can. Do the research, try your best, ask for help, and apologise if you need to. Actionable step: If you’re writing a character from a specific culture, identify three to five sensory or behavioural details that are particular to that culture—not the generic version, but the real, researched, lived-in version. Consider hiring a sensitivity reader from that community to check your work. 10. Give Your Protagonist a Morally Neutral ‘Hero’ Status Matt Bird was clear about this on episode 624: the word “hero” simply means the protagonist, the person we follow through the story. It’s a functional role, not a moral label. We don’t have to like them. We don’t even have to root for their goals in a moral sense. We just have to find them compelling enough to invest our attention in their problem-solving. Think of Succession, where every member of the Roy family is varying degrees of awful, and yet the show was utterly compelling. Or WeCrashed, where Adam Neumann is a narcissistic con artist, but we can’t look away because he’s trying to solve the enormous problem of building an empire from nothing, and the tradecraft he employs is fascinating. As I wrote in How to Write a Novel, readers must want to spend time with your characters. They don’t have to be lovable or even likable—that will depend on your genre and story choices—but they have to be captivating enough that we want to spend time with them. A character who is trying to solve a massive problem will naturally draw investment from the audience, even if we wouldn’t want to have tea with them. Will Storr extended this idea by pointing out that the audience will actually root for a character to solve their problem even if the audience doesn’t actually want the character’s goal to be achieved in the real world. We don’t really want more billionaires, but we invested in Adam Neumann’s rise because that was the problem the story posed, and our brains are wired to invest in problem-solving. This connects to something deeper: what does your character want, and why? As I explore in How to Write a Novel, desire operates on multiple levels. Take a character like Phil, who joins the military during wartime. On the surface, she wants to serve her country. But she also wants to escape her dead-end town and learn new skills. Deeper still, her father and grandfather served, and by joining up, she hopes to finally earn their respect. And perhaps deepest of all, her father died on a mission under mysterious circumstances, and she wants to find out what happened from the inside. That layering of motivation is what turns a flat character into a three-dimensional one. The audience doesn’t need to be told all of this explicitly. It can emerge through action, dialogue, and the choices the character makes under pressure. But you, the writer, need to know it. You need to know what your character really wants deep down, because that desire—more than any external plot device—is what drives the story forward. And your antagonist needs the same depth. They also want something, often diametrically opposed to your protagonist, and they need a reason that makes sense to them. In my ARKANE thriller Tree of Life, my antagonist is the heiress of a Brazilian mining empire who wants to restore the Earth to its original state to atone for the destruction caused by her father’s company. She’s part of a radical ecological group who believe the only way to restore Nature is to end all human life. It’s extreme, but in an era of climate change, it’s a motivation readers can understand—even if they disagree with the solution. Actionable step: If you’re struggling to make a morally grey character work, make sure their problem is big enough and their methods are specific and interesting enough that we invest in the how, even if we’re ambivalent about the what. 11. Build Vibrant Side Characters Gail Carriger made a point on episode 550 that was equal parts craft advice and business strategy. In a Heroine’s Journey model, side characters aren’t just fodder to be killed off to motivate the hero. They form a network. And because you don’t have to kill them—unlike in a hero’s journey, where allies are often betrayed or removed so the hero can be further isolated—you can pick up those side characters and give them their own books. Gail said this creates a really voracious reader base. You write one series with vivid side characters, and then readers fall in love with those side characters and want their stories. So you write spin-offs. The romance genre does this brilliantly—think of the Bridgerton books, where each sibling gets their own novel. The side character in one book becomes the protagonist in the next. Barbara Nickless experienced this firsthand with her Dr. Evan Wilding series. She has River Wilding, Evan’s adventurous brother, and Diana, the axe-throwing research assistant, and her editor has already expressed interest in a spin-off series with those characters. Barbara described creating characters she wants to spend time with, or characters who give her nightmares but also intrigue her. That’s the dual test: are they interesting enough for you to write, and interesting enough for readers to demand more? As I wrote in How to Write a Novel, characters that span series can deepen the reader’s relationship with them as you expand their backstory into new plots. Readers will remember the character more than the plot or the book title, and look forward to the next instalment because they want more time with those people. British crime author Angela Marsons described it as readers feeling like returning to her characters is like putting on a pair of old slippers. Actionable step: Look at your supporting cast. Is there a side character who is vivid enough to carry their own story? If not, what could you add—a specific hobby, a distinct voice, a compelling backstory—that would make readers want more of them? 12. Use Voice as a Rhythmic Tool Voice is one of the most important elements of novel writing, and Matt Bird helped me think about it in a technical, mechanical way that I found really useful. He pointed out that the ratio of periods to commas defines a character’s internal reality. A staccato rhythm—lots of periods, short sentences—suggests a character who is certain, grounded, or perhaps survivalist and traumatised. Katniss in The Hunger Games has a period-heavy voice. She’s in survival mode. She doesn’t have time for complexity or qualification. A flowing, comma-heavy style suggests someone more academic, more nuanced, or possibly more scattered and manipulative. The character who qualifies everything, who adds sub-clauses and digressions, is a different kind of person from the character who speaks in declarations. This is something you can actually measure. Pull up a passage of your character’s dialogue or internal monologue and count the periods versus the commas. If the rhythm doesn’t match who the character is supposed to be, you’ve found a mismatch you can fix. Sentence length is the heartbeat of your character’s persona. And voice extends beyond rhythm to the words themselves. As I discussed in the metaphor families tip, each character should draw from a distinctive well of language. But voice also encompasses their relationship to silence. Some characters talk around the thing they mean; others say it straight. Some are self-deprecating; others are blunt to the point of rudeness. All of these choices are character choices, not just style choices. I find it useful to read my dialogue aloud—and not just to check for naturalness, but to hear whether each character sounds distinct. If you could swap dialogue lines between two characters and nobody would notice, you have a voice problem. One practical test: cover the dialogue tags and see if you can tell who’s speaking from the words alone. Actionable step: Choose a key passage from your protagonist’s point of view and read it aloud. Does the rhythm match the character? A soldier under fire should not sound like a philosophy professor at a wine tasting. Adjust the ratio of periods to commas until the voice feels right. 13. Link Character and Plot Until They’re Inseparable Will Storr made the case on episode 490 that the number one problem he sees in the writing he encounters—in workshops, in submissions, even in published books—is that the characters and the plots are unconnected. There’s a story happening, and there are people in it, but the story isn’t a product of who those people are. He said a story should be like life. In our lives, the plots are intimately connected to who we are as characters. The goals we pursue, the obstacles we face, the same problems that keep recurring—these are products of our personalities, our flaws, our specific ways of being in the world. His framework is that your plot should be designed specifically to plot against your character. You’ve got a character with a particular flaw; the plot exists to test that flaw over and over until the character either transforms or doubles down and explodes. Jaws is the perfect example. Brody is afraid of water. A shark shows up in the coastal town he’s responsible for protecting. The entire plot is engineered to force him to confront the one thing he cannot face. Will pointed out that the whole plot of Jaws is structured around Brody’s flaw. It begins with the shark arriving, the midpoint is when Brody finally gets the courage to go into the water, and the very final scene isn’t the shark blowing up—it’s Brody swimming back through the water. Even a film that’s ninety-eight percent action is, at its core, structured around a character with a character flaw. This is the standard I aspire to in my own work, even in my action-heavy thrillers. The external plot should be a mirror of the internal struggle. When those two are aligned, the story becomes irresistible. Will also made an important point about series fiction, which is where most commercial authors live. I asked him how this works when your character can’t be transformed at the end of every book because there has to be a next book. His answer was elegant: you don’t cure them. Episodic TV characters like Fleabag or David Brent or Basil Fawlty never truly change—and the fact that they don’t change is actually the source of the comedy. But every episode throws a new story event at them that tests and exposes their flaw. You just keep throwing story events at them again and again. That’s a soap opera, a sitcom, and a book series. As I wrote in How to Write a Novel, character flaws are aspects of personality that affect the person so much that facing and overcoming them becomes central to the plot. In Jaws, the protagonist Brody is afraid of the water, but he has to overcome that flaw to destroy the killer shark and save the town. But remember, your characters should feel like real people, so never define them purely by their flaws. The character addicted to painkillers might also be a brilliant and successful female lawyer who gets up at four in the morning to work out at the gym, likes eighties music, and volunteers at the local dog shelter at weekends. Character wounds are different from flaws. They’re formed from life experience and are part of your character’s backstory—traumatic events that happened before the events of your novel but shape the character’s reactions in the present. In my ARKANE thrillers, Morgan Sierra’s husband Elian died in her arms during a military operation. This happened before the series begins, but her memories of it recur when she faces a firefight, and she struggles to find happiness again for fear of losing someone she loves once more. And then there’s the perennial advice: show, don’t tell. Most writers have heard this so many times that it’s easy to nod and then promptly write scenes that tell rather than show. Basically, you need to reveal your character through action and dialogue, rather than explanation. In my thriller Day of the Vikings, Morgan Sierra fights a Neo-Viking in the halls of the British Museum and brings him down with Krav Maga. That fight scene isn’t just about showing action. It opens up questions about her backstory, demonstrates character, and moves the plot forward. Telling would be something like: “Morgan was an expert in Krav Maga.” Showing is the reader discovering it through the scene itself. Actionable step: Look at the main plot events of your novel. For each major turning point, ask: does this scene specifically test my protagonist’s flaw? If not, can you redesign the scene so that it does? The tighter the connection between character and plot, the more powerful the story. 14. The ‘Maestra’ Approach: Write Out of Order If you’re a discovery writer like me, you may feel like the deep character work I’ve been describing sounds more suited to plotters. But Barbara Nickless gave me a beautiful metaphor on episode 732 that reframes it entirely. Barbara described her evolving writing process as being like a maestra standing in front of an orchestra. Sometimes you bring in the horns—a certain theme—and sometimes you bring in the strings—a certain character—and sometimes you turn to the soloist. It’s a more organic and jumping-around process than linear writing, and Barbara said she’s only recently given herself permission to work this way. When I told her that I use Scrivener to write in scenes out of order and then drag and drop them into a structure later, she was genuinely intrigued. And this is how I’ve always worked. I’ll see the story in my mind like a movie trailer—flashes of the big emotional scenes, the pivotal confrontations, the moments of revelation—and I write those first. I don’t know how they hang together until quite late in the process. Then I’ll move scenes around, print the whole thing out, and figure out the connective tissue. The point is that discovery writers can absolutely build deep characters. Sometimes writing the big emotional scenes first is how you discover who the character is before you fill in the rest. You don’t need a twenty-page character worksheet or a 200-page outline like Jeffery Deaver. You need to be willing to follow the character into the unknown and trust that the structure will emerge. As Barbara said, she writes to know what she’s thinking. That’s the discovery writer’s credo. And I would add: I write to know who my characters are. Actionable step: If you’re stuck on your current chapter, skip it. Write the scene that’s burning in your imagination, even if it’s from the middle or the end. That scene might be the key to unlocking who your character really is. 15. Use Research to Help with Empathy Research shouldn’t just be about factual accuracy—it’s a tool for finding the sensory details that create empathy. Barbara Nickless described research as almost an excuse to explore things that fascinate her, and I feel exactly the same way. I would go so far as to say that writing is an excuse for me to explore the things that interest me. Barbara and I both travel for our stories. For her Dr. Evan Wilding books, she did deep research into Old English literature and the Viking Age. For my thriller End of Days, I transcribed hours of video from Appalachian snake-handling churches on YouTube to understand the worldview of the worshippers, because my antagonist was brought up in that tradition. I couldn’t just make that up. I had to hear their language, feel their conviction, understand why they would hold venomous serpents as an act of faith. Barbara also mentioned getting to Israel and the West Bank for research, and I’ve been to both places too. Finding that one specific sensory detail—the smell of a particular location, the specific way an expert handles a tool, the sound of a particular kind of music—makes the character’s life feel lived-in. It’s the difference between a character who is described as living in a place and a character who inhabits it. As I wrote in How to Write a Novel, don’t write what you know. Write what you want to learn about. I love research. It’s part of why I’m an author in the first place. I take any excuse to dive into a world different from my own. Research using books, films, podcasts, and travel, and focus particularly on sources produced by people from the worldview you want to understand. Actionable step: For your next piece of character research, go beyond reading. Watch a documentary, visit a location, talk to someone who lives the experience. Find one sensory detail—a smell, a sound, a texture—that you couldn’t have invented. That detail will make your character feel real. Bonus: Measure Your Life by What You Create In an age of AI and a tsunami of content, your ultimate brand protection is the quality of your human creation. Barbara Nickless said that the act of producing itself is a balm to the soul, and I believe that with every fibre of my being. Don’t be afraid to take that step back, like I did with my deadlifting. Take the time to master these deeper craft skills. It might feel like you’re slowing down or going backwards by not chasing the latest marketing trend, but it’s the only way to step forward into a sustainable, high-quality career. Your characters are your signature. No AI can replicate the specificity of your lived experience, the emotional truth of your displaced trauma, or the sensory details you’ve gathered from a life of curiosity and travel. Those are yours. Pour them into your characters, and they will resonate for years to come. Actionable Takeaway: Identify the Dramatic Question for your current protagonist. Can you state it in a single sentence with the kind of specificity Will Storr described? Is it as clear as “Are you ordinary or extraordinary?” or “Are you the only adult in the room?” If you can’t answer it with that kind of precision, your character might still be a sketch. Give them a diagonal toast moment today. Find the one hyper-specific detail that proves they are not an imitation of life. And then ask yourself: does your plot test your character’s flaw in every major scene? If you can align those two things—a precisely defined character and a plot that exists to test them—you will have a story that readers cannot put down. References and Deep Dives The episodes I’ve referenced today are all available with full transcripts at TheCreativePenn.com: Episode 732 — Facing Fears, and Writing Unique Characters with Barbara Nickless Episode 673 — Writing Choctaw Characters and Diversity in Fiction with Sarah Elisabeth Sawyer Episode 624 — Writing Characters with Matt Bird Episode 550 — The Heroine’s Journey with Gail Carriger Episode 490 — How Character Flaws Shape Story with Will Storr Books mentioned: The Secrets of Character: Writing a Hero Anyone Will Love by Matt Bird The Science of Storytelling by Will Storr The Heroine’s Journey by Gail Carriger How to Write a Novel: From Idea to Book by Joanna Penn You can find all my books for authors at CreativePennBooks.com and my fiction and memoir at JFPennBooks.com Happy writing! How was this episode created? This episode was initiated created by NotebookLM based on YouTube videos of the episodes linked above from YouTube/TheCreativePenn, plus my text chapters on character from How to Write a Novel. NotebookLM created a blog post from the material and then I expanded it and fact checked it with Claude.ai 4.6 Opus, and then I used my voice clone at ElevenLabs to narrate it. The post Writing Characters: 15 Actionable Tips For Writing Deep Character first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How do you capture something as enormous and personal as the feeling of “home” in a book? How can you navigate the chaotic discovery period in writing something new? With Roz Morris. In the intro, KU vs Wide [Written Word Media]; Podcasts Overtake Radio, book marketing implications [The New Publishing Standard]; Tips for podcast guests; The Vatican embraces AI for translation, but not for sermons [National Catholic Reporter]; NotebookLM; Self-Publishing in German; Bones of the Deep. This episode is sponsored by Publisher Rocket, which will help you get your book in front of more Amazon readers so you can spend less time marketing and more time writing. I use Publisher Rocket for researching book titles, categories, and keywords — for new books and for updating my backlist. Check it out at www.PublisherRocket.com This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn  Roz Morris is an award-nominated literary fiction author, memoirist, and previously a bestselling ghostwriter. She writes writing craft books for authors under the Nail Your Novel brand, and is also an editor, speaker, and writing coach. Her latest travel memoir is Turn Right at the Rainbow: A Diary of House-Hunting, Happenstance & Home. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.  Show Notes How being an indie author has evolved over 15 years, from ebooks-only to special editions, multi-voice audiobooks and tools to help with everything Why “home” is such a powerful emotional theme and how to turn personal experiences into universal memoir Practical craft tips on show-don't-tell, writing about real people, and finding the right book title The chaotic discovery writing phase — why some books take seven years and why that's okay Building a newsletter sustainably by finding your authentic voice (and the power of a good pet story) Low-key book marketing strategies for memoir, including Roz's community-driven “home” collage campaign You can find Roz at RozMorris.org. Transcript of the interview with Roz Morris JOANNA: Roz Morris is an award-nominated literary fiction author, memoirist, and previously a bestselling ghostwriter. She writes writing craft books for authors under the Nail Your Novel brand, and is also an editor, speaker, and writing coach. Her latest travel memoir is Turn Right at the Rainbow: A Diary of House-Hunting, Happenstance & Home. Welcome back to the show, Roz. ROZ: Hi, Jo. It's so lovely to be back. I love that we managed to catch up every now and again on what we're doing. We've been doing this for so long. JOANNA: In fact, if people don't know, the first time you came on this show was 2011, which is 15 years. ROZ: I know! JOANNA: It is so crazy. I guess we should say, we do know each other in person, in real life, but realistically we mainly catch up when you come on the podcast. ROZ: Yes, we do, and by following what we're doing around the web. So I read your newsletters, you read mine. JOANNA: Exactly. So good to return. You write all kinds of different things, but let's first take a look back. The first time you were on was 2011, 15 years ago. You've spanned traditional and indie, you've seen a lot. You know a lot of people in publishing as well. What are the key things you think have shifted over the years, and why do you still choose indie for your work? ROZ: Well, lots of things have shifted. Some things are more difficult now, some things are a lot easier. We were lucky to be in right at the start and we learned the ropes and managed to make a lot of contacts with people. Now it's much more difficult to get your work out there and noticed by readers. You have to be more knowledgeable about things like marketing and promotions. But that said, there are now much better tools for doing all this. Some really smart people have put their brains to work about how authors can get their work to the right readers, and there's also a lot more understanding of how that can be done in the modern world. Everything is now much more niche-driven, isn't it? People know exactly what kind of thriller they like or what kind of memoir they like. In the old days it was probably just, “Well, you like thrillers,” and that could be absolutely loads of things. Now we can find far better who might like our work. The tools we have are astonishing. To start with, in about 2011, we could only really produce ebooks and paperbacks. That was it. Anything else, you'd have to get a print run that would be quite expensive. Now we can get amazing, beautiful special editions made. We can do audiobooks, multi-voice audiobooks. We can do ebooks with all sorts of enhancements. We can even make apps if we want to. There's absolutely loads that creators can do now that they couldn't before, so it's still a very exciting world. JOANNA: When we first met, there was still a lot of negativity here in the UK around indie authors or self-publishing. That does feel like it's shifted. Do you think that stigma around self-publishing has changed? ROZ: I think it has really changed, yes. To start with, we were regarded as a bit of the Wild West. We were just tramping in and making our mark in places that we hadn't been invited into. Now it's changed entirely. I think we've managed to convince people that we have the same quality standards. Readers don't mind—I don't think the readers ever minded, actually, so long as the book looked right, felt right, read right. It's much easier now. It's much more of a level playing field. We can prove ourselves. In fact, we don't necessarily have to prove ourselves anymore. We just go and find readers. JOANNA: Yes, I feel like that. I have nothing to prove. I just get on with my work and writing our books and putting them out there. We've got our own audiences now. I guess I always think of it as perhaps not a shadow industry, but almost a parallel industry. You have spanned a lot of traditional publishing and you still do editing work. You know a lot of trad pub authors too. Do you still actively choose indie for a particular reason? ROZ: I do. I really like building my own body of work, and I'm now experienced enough to know what I do well, what I need advice with, and help with. I mean, we don't do all this completely by ourselves, do we? We bring in experts who will give us the right feedback if we're doing a new genre or a genre that's new to us. I choose indie because I like the control. Because I began in traditional publishing—I was making books for other people—I just learned all the trades and how to do everything to a professional standard. I love being able to apply that to my own work. I also love the way I can decide what I'm going to write next. If I was traditionally published, I would have to do something that fitted with whatever the publisher would want of me, and that isn't necessarily where my muse is taking me or what I've become interested in. I think creative humans evolve throughout their lives. They become interested in different things, different themes, different ways of expressing themselves. I began by thinking I would just write novels, and now I've found myself writing memoirs as well. That shift would have been difficult if someone else was having to make me fit into their marketing plans or what their imprint was known for. But because I've built my own audience, I can just bring them with me and say, “You might like this. It's still me. I'm just doing something different.” JOANNA: I like that phrase: “creative humans.” That's what we are. As you say, I never thought I would write a memoir, and then I wrote Pilgrimage, and I think there's probably another one on its way. We do these different things over time. Let's get into this new book, Turn Right at the Rainbow. It's about the idea of home. I've talked a lot about home on my Books And Travel Podcast, but not so much here. Why is home such an emotional topic, for both positive and negative reasons? Why did you want to explore it? ROZ: I think home is so emotional because it grows around you and it grows on you very slowly without you really realising it. As you are not looking, you suddenly realise, “Oh, it means such a lot.” I love to play this mind game with myself—if you compare what your street looks like to you now and how it looked the first time you set eyes on it, it's a world of difference. There are so many emotional layers that build up just because of the amount of time we spend in a place. It's like a relationship, a very slow-growing friendship. And as you say, sometimes it can be negative as well. I became really fascinated with this because we decided to move house and we'd lived in the same house for about 30 years, which is a lot of time. It had seen a lot of us—a lot of our lives, a lot of big decisions, a lot of good times, a lot of difficult times. I felt that was all somehow encapsulated in the place. I know that readers of certain horror or even spiritual fiction will have this feeling that a place contains emotions and pasts and all sorts of vibes that just stay in there. When we were going around looking at a house to buy, I was thinking, “How do we even know how we will feel about it?” We're moving out of somewhere that has immense amounts of feelings and associations, and we're trying to judge whether somewhere else will feel right. It just seemed like we were making a decision of cosmic proportions. It comes down so much to chance as well. You're not only just deciding, “Okay, I'd like to buy that one,” and pressing a button like on eBay and you've won it. It doesn't happen like that. There are lots of middle steps. The other person's got to agree to sell to you, not do the dirty on you and sell to someone else. You've got all sorts of machinations going on that you have no idea about. And you only have what's on offer—you only get an opportunity to buy a place because someone else has decided to let it go. All this seemed like immense amounts of chance, of dice rolling. I thought, yet we end up in these places and they mean so much to us. It just blew my mind. I thought, “I've got to write about this.” JOANNA: It's really interesting, isn't it? I really only started using the word “home” after the pandemic and living here in Bath. We had luckily just bought a house before then, and I'd never really considered anywhere to be a home. I've talked about this idea of third culture kids—people who grow up between cultures and don't feel like there's a home anywhere. I was really interested in your book because there's so much about the functional things that have to happen when you move house or look for a house, and often people aren't thinking about it as deeply as you are. So did you start working on the memoir as you went to see places, or was it something you thought about when you were leaving? Was it a “moving towards” kind of memoir or a “sad nostalgia” memoir? ROZ: Well, it could have been very sad and nostalgic because I do like to write really emotional things, and they're not necessarily for sharing with everybody, but I was very interested in the emotions of it. I started keeping diaries. Some of them were just diaries I'd write down, some of them were emails I'd send to friends who were saying, “How's it going?” And then I'd find I was just writing pieces rather than emails, and it built up really. JOANNA: It's interesting, you said you write emotional things. We mentioned nostalgia, and obviously there are memories in the home, but it's very easy to say a word like “nostalgia” and everyone thinks that means different things. One of the important things about writing is to be very specific rather than general. Can you give us some tips about how we can turn big emotions into specific written things that bring it alive for our readers? ROZ: It's really interesting that you mention nostalgia, because what we have to be careful of is not writing just for ourselves. It starts with us—our feelings about something, our responses, our curiosities—but we then have to let other people in. There's nothing more boring than reading something that's just a memoir manuscript that doesn't reach out to anyone in any way. It's like looking through their holiday snaps. What you have to do is somehow find something bigger in there that will allow everyone to connect and think, “Oh, this is about me too,” or “I've thought this too.” As I said, we start with things that feel powerful and important for us, and I think we don't necessarily need to go looking for them. They emerge the more deeply we think about what we're writing. We find they're building. Certainly for me, it's what pulls me back to an idea, thinking, “There's something in this idea that's really talking to me now. What is it?” Often I'll need to go for walks and things to let the logical mind turn off and ideas start coming in. But I'll find that something is building and it seems to become more and more something that will speak to others rather than just to me. That's one way of doing it—by listening to your intuition and delving more and more until you find something that seems worth saying to other people. But you could do it another way. If you decided you wanted to write a book about home, and you'd already got your big theme, you could then think, “Well, how will I make this into something manageable?” So you start with something big and build it into smaller-scale things that can be related to. You might look at ideas of homes—situations of people who have lost their home, like the kind of displacement we see at the moment. Or we might look at another aspect, such as people who sell homes and what they must feel like being these go-betweens between worlds, between people who are doing these immense changes in their lives. Or we might think of an ecological angle—the planet Earth and what we're doing to it, or our place in the cosmos. We might start with a thing we want to write about and then find, “How are we going to treat it?” That usually comes down to what appeals to us. It might be the ecological side. It might be the story of a few estate agents who are trying to sell homes for people. Or it might be like mine—just a personal story of trying to move house. From that, we can create something that will have a wider resonance as well as starting with something that's personally interesting to you. The big emotions will come out of that wider resonance. JOANNA: Trying to go deeper on that— It's the “show, don't tell” idea, isn't it? If you'd said, “I felt very sad about leaving my house” or “I felt very sad about the prospect of leaving my house,” that is not a whole book. ROZ: Yes. It's why you felt sad, how you felt sad, what it made you think of. That's a very good point about “show, don't tell,” which is a fundamental writing technique. It basically tells people exactly how you feel about a particular thing, which is not the same as the way anyone else would feel about it—but still, curiously, it can be universal and something that we can all tap into. Funnily enough, by being very specific, by saying, “I realised when we'd signed the contract to sell the house that it wasn't ours anymore, and it had been, and I felt like I was betraying it,” that starts to get really personal. People might think, “Yes, I felt like that too,” or “I hadn't thought you'd feel like that, but I can understand it.” Those specifics are what really let people into the journey that you're taking them on. JOANNA: And isn't this one of the challenges, that we're not even going to use a word like “sad,” basically. ROZ: Yes. It's like, who was it who said, “Don't tell me if they got wet—tell me how it felt to get wet in that particular situation.” Then the reader will think, “Oh yes, they got wet,” but they'll also have had an experience that took them somewhere interesting. JOANNA: Yes. Show me the raindrops on the umbrella and the splashing through the puddles. I think this is so important with big emotions. Also, when we say nostalgia—we've talked before about Stranger Things and Kate Bush and the way Stranger Things used songs and nostalgia. Oh, I was watching Derry Girls—have you seen Derry Girls? ROZ: No, I haven't yet. JOANNA: Oh, it's brilliant. It's so good. It's pretty old now, but it's a nineties soundtrack and I'm watching going, “Oh, they got this so right.” They just got it right with the songs. You feel nostalgic because you feel an emotion that is linked to that music. It makes you feel a certain way, but everyone feels these things in different ways. I think that is a challenge of fiction, and also memoir. Certainly with memoir and fiction, this is so important. ROZ: Yes, and I was just thinking with self-help books, it's even important there because self-help books have to show they understand how the reader is feeling. JOANNA: Yes, and sometimes you use anecdotes to do that. Another challenge with memoir—in this book, you're going round having a look at places, and they're real places and there are real people. This can be difficult. What are things that people need to be wary of if using real people in real places? Do you need permissions for things? ROZ: That book was particularly tricky because, as you said, I was going around real places and talking about real people. With most of them, they're not identifiable. Even though I was specific about particular aspects of particular houses, it would be very hard for anyone to know where those houses were. I think possibly the only way you would recognise it is if that happened to be your own house. The people, similarly—there's a lot about estate agents and other professionals. They were all real incidents and real things that happened, but no one is identifiable. A very important thing about writing a book like this is you're always going to have antagonists, because you have to have people who you're finding difficult, people who are making life a bit difficult for you. You have to present them in a way that understands what it's like to be them as well. If you're writing a book where your purpose is to expose wrongdoing or injustices, then you might be more forthright about just saying, “This is wrong, the way this person behaved was wrong.” You might identify villains if that's appropriate, although you'd have to be very careful legally. This kind of book is more nuanced. The antagonists were simply people who were trying to do the right thing for them. You have to understand what it's like to be them. Quite a lot of the time, I found that the real story was how ill-equipped I sometimes felt to deal with people who were maybe covering something up, or maybe not, but just not expressing themselves very clearly. Estate agents who had an agenda, and I was thinking, “Who are they acting for? Are they acting for me, or are they acting for someone else that we don't even know about?” There's a fair bit of conflict in the book, but it comes from people being people and doing what they have to do. I just wanted to find a good house in an area that was nice, a house I could trust and rely on, for a price that was right. The people who were selling to me just wanted to sell the house no matter what because that was what they needed to do. You always have to understand what the other person's point of view is. Often in this kind of memoir, even though you might be getting very frustrated, it's best to also see a bit of a ridiculous side to yourself—when you're getting grumpy, for instance. It's all just humans being humans in a situation where ultimately you're going to end up doing a life-changing and important thing. I found there's quite a lot of humour in that. We were shuffling things around and, as I said, we were eventually going to be making a cosmic change that would affect the place we called home. I found that quite amusing in a lot of ways. I think you've got to be very levelheaded about this, particularly about writing about other people. Sometimes you do have to ask for permission. I didn't have to do that very much in this book. There were people I wrote about who are actually friends, who would recognise themselves and their stories. I checked that they didn't mind me quoting particular things, and they were all fine with that. In my previous memoir, Not Quite Lost, I actually wrote about a group of people who were completely identifiable. They would definitely have known who they were, and other people would have known who they were. There was no hiding them. They were the people near Brighton who were cryonicists—preserving dead bodies, freezing them, in the hope that they could be revived at a much later date when science had solved the problem that killed them. I went to visit this group of cryonicists, and I'd written a diary about it at the time. Then I followed up when I was writing the book to find out what happened to them. I thought, I've simply got to contact them and tell them I'm going to write this. “I'll send it to you, you give me your comments,” and I did. They gave me some good comments and said, “Oh, please don't put that,” or “Let me clarify this.” Everything was fine. So there I did actually seek them out and check that what I was going to write was okay. JOANNA: Yes, in that situation, there can't be many cryonicists in that area. ROZ: They really were identifiable. JOANNA: There's probably only one group! But this is really interesting, because obviously memoir is a personal thing. You're curating who you are as well in the book, and your husband. I think it's interesting, because I had the problem of “Am I giving away too much about myself?” Do you feel like with everything you've written, you've already given away everything about yourself by now? Are you just completely relaxed about being personal, for yourself and for your husband? ROZ: I think I have become more relaxed about it. My first memoir wasn't nearly as personal as yours was. You were going to some quite difficult places. With Turn Right at the Rainbow, I was approaching some darker places, actually, and I had to consider how much to reveal and how much not to. But I found once I started writing, the honesty just took over. I thought, “This is fine. I have read plenty of books that have done this, and I've loved them. I've loved getting to know someone on that deeper level.” It was just something I took my example from—other writers I'd enjoyed. JOANNA: Yes. I think that's definitely the way memoir has to happen, because it can be very hard to know how to structure it. Let's come to the title. Turn Right at the Rainbow. Really great title, and obviously a subtitle which is important as well for theme. Talk about where the title came from and also the challenges of titling books of any genre. You've had some other great titles for your novels—at least titles I've thought, “Oh yes, that's perfect.” Titling can be really hard. ROZ: Oh, thank you for that. Yes, it is hard. Ever Rest, which was the title of my last novel, just came to me early on. I was very lucky with that. It fitted the themes and it fitted what was going on, but it was just a bolt from the blue. I found that also with Turn Right at the Rainbow, it was an accident. It slipped out. I was going to call it something else, and then this incident happened. “Turn Right at the Rainbow” is actually one of the stories in the book. I call it the title track, as if it's an album. We were going somewhere in the car and the sat nav said, “Turn right at the rainbow.” And Dave and I just fell about, “What did it just say?!” It also seemed to really sum up the journey we were on. We were looking for rainbows and pots of gold and completely at the mercy of chance. It just stayed with me. It seemed the right thing. I wrote the piece first and then I kept thinking, “Well, this sounds like a good title.” Dave said it sounded like a good title. And then a friend of mine who does a lot of beta reading for me said, “Oh, that is the title, isn't it?” When several people tell you that's the title, you've got to take notice. But how we find these things is more difficult, as you said. You just work and work at it, beating your head against the wall. I find they always come to me when I'm not looking. It really helps to do something like exercise, which will put you in a bit of a different mind state. Do you find this as well? JOANNA: Yes, I often like a title earlier on that then changes as the book goes. I mean, we're both discovery writers really, although you do reverse outlines and other things. You have a chaotic discovery phase. I feel like when I'm in that phase, it might be called something, and then I often find that's not what it ends up being, because the book has actually changed in the process. ROZ: Yes, very much. That's part of how we realise what we should be writing. I do have working titles and then something might come along and say, “This seems actually like what you should call it and what you've been working towards, what you've been discovering about it.” I think a good title has a real sense of emotional frisson as well. With memoir, it's easier because we can add a subtitle to explain what we mean. With fiction, it's more difficult. We've got to really hope that it all comes through those few words, and that's a bit harder. JOANNA: Let's talk about your next book. On your website it says it might be a novel, it might be narrative nonfiction, and you have a working title of Four. I wondered if you'd talk a bit more about this chaotic discovery writing phase when we just don't know what's coming. I feel like you and I have been doing this long enough—you longer than me—so maybe we're okay with it. But newer writers might find this stage really difficult. Where's the fun in it? Why is it so difficult? And how can people deal with it? ROZ: You've summed that up really well. It's fun and it's difficult, and I still find it difficult even after all these years. I have to remind myself, looking back at where Ever Rest started, because that was a particularly difficult one. It took me seven years to work out what to do with it, and I wrote three other books in the meantime. It just comes together in the end. What I find is that something takes root in my mind and it collects things. The title you just picked out there—the book with working title of Four—it's now two books. One possibly another memoir and one possibly fiction. It's evolving all the time. I'm just collecting what seems to go with it for now and thinking, “That belongs with it somehow. I don't yet know how, but my intuition is that the two work well together.” There's a harmony there that I see. In the very early stages, that's what I find something is. Then I might get a more concrete idea, say a piece of story or a character, and I'll have the feeling that they really fit together. Once I've got something concrete like that, I can start doing more active research to pursue the idea. But in the beginning, they're all just little twinkles in the eye and you just have to let them develop. If you want to get started on something because you feel you want to get started and you don't feel happy if you're not working on something, you could do a far more active kind of discovery. Writing lists. Lists are great for this. I find lists of what you don't want it to be are just as helpful as what you do want it to be because that certainly narrows down a lot and helps you make good choices. You've got a lot of choices to make at the beginning of a book. You've got to decide: What's it going to be about? What isn't it going to be about? What kind of characters am I interested in? What kind of situations am I interested in? What doesn't interest me about this situation? Very important—saves you a lot of time. What does interest me? If you can start by doing that kind of thing, you will find that you start gathering stuff that gets attracted to it. It's almost like the world starts giving it to you. This is discovery writing, but it's also chivvying it along a bit and getting going. It does work. Joanna: I like the idea of listing what you don't want it to be. I think that's very useful because often writers, especially in the early stages—or even not, I still struggle with this—it's knowing what genre it might actually be. With Bones of the Deep, which is my next thriller, it was originally going to be horror and I was writing it, and then I realised one of the big differences between horror and thriller is the ending and how character arcs are resolved and the way things are written. I was just like, “Do you know what? I actually feel like this is more thriller than horror,” and that really shaped the direction. Even though so much of it was the same, it shaped a lot about the book. It's always hard talking about this stuff without giving spoilers, but I think deciding, “Okay, this is not a horror,” actually helped me find my way back to thriller. ROZ: Yes, I do know what you mean. That makes perfect sense to me, with no spoilers either. It's so interesting how a very broad-strokes picture like that can still be very helpful. Just trying to make something a bit different from the way you've been envisaging it can lead to massive breakthroughs. “Oh no, it's not a thriller—I don't have to be aiming for that kind of effect.” Or try changing the tone a little bit and see if that just makes you happier with what you're making, more comfortable with it. JOANNA: You mentioned the seven years that Ever Rest took. We should say the title is in two words—”Ever” and “Rest”—but it is also about Everest the mountain in many ways. That's why it's such a perfect title. If that took seven years and you were doing all this other stuff and writing other books along the way, how do you keep your research under control? How do you do that? I still use Scrivener projects as my main research place. How do you do your research and organisation? ROZ: A lot of scraps of paper. My desk is massive. It used to be a dining table with leaves in it. It's spread out to its fullest length, and it's got heaps of little pieces of paper. I know what's on them all, and there are different areas, different zones. I'm very much a paper writer because I like the tangibility of it. I also like the creativity of taking a piece of paper and tearing it into an odd shape and writing a note on that. It seems as sort of profound and lucky as the idea. I really like that. I do make text files and keep notes that way. Once something is starting to get to a phase where it's becoming serious, it will then be a folder with various files that discuss different aspects of it. I do a lot of discussing with myself while writing, and I don't necessarily look at it all again. The writing of it clarifies something or allows me to put something aside and say, “No, that doesn't quite belong.” Gradually I start to look at things, look at what I've gathered, and think, “How does this fit with this?” And it helps to look away as well. As I said with finding titles, sometimes the right thing is in your subconscious and it's waiting to just sail in if you look at it in a different way. There's a lot to be said for working on several ideas, not looking at some of them for a while, then going back and thinking, “Oh, I know what to do with this now.” JOANNA: Yes. My Writing the Shadow, I was talking about that when we met, and that definitely took about a decade. ROZ: Yes. JOANNA: I kept having to come back to that, and sometimes we're just not ready. Even as experienced writers, we're not ready for a particular book. With Bones of the Deep, I did the trip that it's based on in 1999. Since I became a writer, I've thought I have to use that trip in some way, and I never found the right way to use it. I came at it a couple of times and it just never sat right with me. Then something on this master's course I'm doing around human remains and indigenous cultures just suddenly all clicked. You can't really rush that, can you? ROZ: You absolutely can't. It's something you develop a sense for, the more you do—whether something's ready or whether you should just let it think about itself for a while whilst you work on something else. It really helps to have something else to work on because I panic a bit if I don't have something creative to do. I just have to create, I have to make things, particularly in writing. But I also like doing various little arty things as well. I need to always have something to be writing about or exploring in words. Sometimes a book isn't ready for that intense pressure of being properly written. So it helps to have several things that I can play with and then pick one and go, “Okay, now I'm going to really perform this on the page.” JOANNA: Do you find that nonfiction—because you have some craft books as well—do you find the nonfiction side is quite different? Can you almost just go and write a nonfiction book or work on someone else's project? Does that use a different kind of creativity? ROZ: Yes, it does. Creativity where you're trying to explain something to creative people is totally different from creativity where you're trying to involve them in emotions and a journey and nuances of meaning. They're very different, but they're still fun. So, yes, I am an editor as well, and that feeds my creativity in various unexpected ways. I'll see what someone has done and think, “Oh, that's very interesting that they did that.” It can make me think in different ways—different shapes for stories, different kinds of characters to have. It really opens your eyes, working with other creative people. JOANNA: I wanted to return to what you said at the beginning, that it is more difficult these days to get our work noticed. There's certainly a challenge in writing a travel memoir about home. What are you doing to market this book? What have you learned about book marketing for memoir in particular that might help other people? ROZ: Partly I realised it was quite a natural progression for me because in my newsletter I always write a couple of little pieces. I think they're called “life writing.” Just little things that have happened to me. That's sort of like memoir, creative nonfiction, personal essays. I was quite naturally writing that sort of thing to my newsletter readers, and I realised that was already good preparation for the kind of way that I would write in a memoir. As for the actual campaign, I actually came up with an idea which quite surprised me because I didn't think I was good at that. I'm making a collage of the word “home” written in lots of different handwriting, on lots of different things, in lots of different languages. I'm getting people to contribute these and send them to me, and I'm building them into a series of collages that's just got the word “home” everywhere. People have been contributing them by sending them by email or on Facebook Messenger, and I've been putting them up on my social platforms. They look stunning. It's amazing. People are writing the word “home” on a post-it or sticking it to a picture of their radiator. Someone wrote it in snow on her car when we had snow. Someone wrote it on a pottery shard she found in her drive when she bought the house. She thought it was mysterious. There are all these lovely stories that people are telling me as well. I'm making them into little artworks and putting them up every day as the book comes to launch. It's so much fun, and it also has a deeper purpose because it shows how home is different for all of us and how it builds as uniquely as our handwriting. Our handwriting has a story. I should do a book about that! JOANNA: That's a weird one. Handwriting always gets me, although it'd be interesting these days because so many people don't handwrite things anymore. You can probably tell the age of someone by how well-developed their handwriting is. ROZ: Except mine has just withered. I can barely write for more than a few minutes. JOANNA: Oh, I know what you mean. Your hand gets really tired. ROZ: We used to write three-hour exams. How did we do that? JOANNA: I really don't know. JOANNA: Just coming back on that. You mentioned mainly you're doing your newsletter and connecting with your own community. You've done podcasts with me and with other people. But I feel like in the indie community, the whole “you must build your newsletter” thing is described as something quite frantic. How have you built a newsletter in a sustainable manner? ROZ: I've built it by finding what suited me. To start with I thought, “What will I put in it? News, obviously.” But I wasn't doing that much that was newsworthy. Then I began to examine what news could actually be. The turning point really happened when I wrote the first memoir, Not Quite Lost: Travels Without a Sense of Direction. I thought, “I have to explain to people why I'm writing a memoir,” because it seemed like a very audacious thing to do—”Read about me!” I thought I had to explain myself. So I told the story of how I came to think about writing such an audacious book. I just found a natural way to tell stories about what I was doing creatively. I thought, “I like this. I like writing a newsletter like this.” And it's not all me, me, me. It's “I'm discovering this and it makes me think this,” and it just seems to be generally about life, about little questions that we might all face. From then, I found I really enjoyed writing a newsletter because I felt I had something to say. I couldn't put lists of where I was speaking, what I was teaching, what special offers I had, because that wasn't really how my creative life worked. Once I found something I could sustainably write about every month, it really helped. Oh, it also helps to have a pet, by the way. JOANNA: Yes, you have a horse! ROZ: I've got a horse. People absolutely love hearing the stories about my ongoing relationship with this horse. Even if they're not horsey, they write to me and say, “We just love your horse.” It helps to have a human interest thing going on like that. So that works for me. Everyone's got different things that will work for them. But for me, it builds just a sense of connection, human connection. I'm human, making things. JOANNA: In terms of actually getting people signed up—has it literally just been over time? People have read your book, signed up from the link at the back? Have you ever done any specific growth marketing around your newsletter? ROZ: I tried a little bit of growth marketing. I have a freebie version of one of my Nail Your Novel books and I put that on a promotion site. I got lots of newsletter signups, but they sort of dwindled away. When I get unsubscribes, it's usually from that list, because it wasn't really what they came for. They just came for a free book of writing tips. While I do writing tips on my blog—I'm still doing those—it wasn't really what my newsletter was about. What I found was that that wasn't going to get people who were going to be interested long-term in what I was writing about in my newsletter. Whatever you do, I found, has got to be true to what you are actually giving them. JOANNA: Yes, I think that's really key. I make sure I email once every couple of weeks. And you welcome the unsubscribes. You have to welcome them because those people are not right for you and they're not interested in what you're doing. At the end of the day, we're still trying to sell books. As much as you're enjoying the connection with your audience, you are still trying to sell Turn Right at the Rainbow and your other books, right? ROZ: Absolutely, yes. And as you say, someone who decides, “No, not for me anymore,” and that's good. There are still people who you are right for. JOANNA: Mm-hmm. ROZ: I do market my newsletter in a very low-key way. I make a graphic every month for the newsletter, it's like a magazine cover. “What's in it?” And I put that around all my social media. I change my Facebook page header so it's got that on it, my Bluesky header. People can see what it's like, what the vibe is, and they know where to find it if they're interested. I find that kind of low-key approach works quite well for what I'm offering. It's got to be true to what you offer. JOANNA: Yes, and true for a long-term career, I think. When I first met you and your husband Dave, it was like, “Oh, here are some people who are in this writing business, have already been in it for a while.” And both of you are still here. I just feel like— You have to do it in a sustainable way, whether it's writing or marketing or any of this. The only way to do it is to, as you said, live as a creative human and not make it all frantic and “must be now.” ROZ: Yes. I mean, I do have to-do lists that are quite long for every week, but I've learned to pace myself. I've learned how often I can write a good blog post. I could churn out blog posts that were far more frequent, but they wouldn't be as good. They wouldn't be as properly thought through. In the old days with blogs, you had an advantage if you were blogging very frequently, I think you got more noticed by Google because you were constantly putting up fresh content. But if that's not sustainable for you, it's not going to do you any good. Now there's so much content around that it's probably fine to post once a month if that is what you're going to do and how you're going to present the best of yourself. I see a lot on Substack—I've recently started Substack as well—I see people writing every other day. I think they're good, that's interesting, but I don't have time to read it. I would love to have the time, but I don't. So there's actually no sin in only posting once a month—one newsletter a month, one blog post a month, one Substack a month. That's plenty. People will still find that enough if they get you. JOANNA: Fantastic. So where can people find you and your books and everything you do online? ROZ: My website is probably the easiest place, RozMorris.org. JOANNA: Brilliant. Well, thank you so much for your time, Roz. As ever, that was great. ROZ: Thank you, Jo.The post Writing Emotion, Discovery Writing, And Slow Sustainable Book Marketing With Roz Morris first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How do you build a creative life that spans music, writing, film, and spiritual practice? Alicia Jo Rabins talks about weaving multiple creative strands into a sustainable career and why the best advice for any creator might simply be: just make the thing. In the intro, backlist promotion strategy [Written Word Media]; Successful author business [Novel Marketing Podcast]; Alliance of Independent Authors Indie Author Bookstore; Bones of the Deep – J.F. Penn This podcast is sponsored by Kobo Writing Life, which helps authors self-publish and reach readers in global markets through the Kobo eco-system. You can also subscribe to the Kobo Writing Life podcast for interviews with successful indie authors. This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn  Alicia Jo Rabins is an award-winning writer, musician, performer, as well as a Torah teacher and ritualist. She's the creator of Girls In Trouble, a feminist indie-folk song cycle about biblical women, and the award-winning film, A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff. Her latest book is a memoir, When We Are Born We Forget Everything. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights, and the full transcript is below.  Show Notes Building a sustainable multi-disciplinary creative career through teaching, performance, grants, and donations Trusting instinct in the early generative stages of creativity and separating generation from editing Adapting and reimagining religious and cultural source material through music, writing, and performance The challenges of transitioning from poetry to long-form prose memoir, including choosing a lens for your story Making an independent film on a shoestring budget without waiting for Hollywood's permission Finding your creative voice and building confidence by leaning into vulnerability and returning to the practice of making You can find Alicia at AliciaJo.com. Transcript of the interview with Alicia Jo Rabins Joanna: Alicia Jo Rabins is an award-winning writer, musician, performer, as well as a Torah teacher and ritualist. She's the creator of Girls In Trouble, a feminist indie-folk song cycle about biblical women, and the award-winning film, A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff. Her latest book is a memoir, When We Are Born We Forget Everything. So welcome to the show, Alicia. Alicia: Thank you so much. I'm delighted to be here. Joanna: There is so much we could talk about. But first up— Tell us a bit more about you and how you've woven so many strands of creativity into your life and career. Alicia: Yes, well, I am a maximalist. What happened in terms of my early life is that I started writing on my own, just extremely young. I'm one of those people who always loved writing, always processed the world and managed my emotions and came to understand myself through writing. So from a very young age, I felt really committed to writing. Then I had the good fortune that my mother saw a talk show about the Suzuki method of learning violin—when you start really young and learn by ear, which is modelled after language learning. It's so much less intellectual and much more instinctual, learning by copying. She was like, that looks like a cool thing. I was three years old at the time and she found out that there was a little local branch of our music conservatory that had a Suzuki violin programme. So when I was three and a half, getting close to four, she took me down and I started playing an extremely tiny violin. Joanna: Oh, cute! Alicia: Yes, and because it was part of this conservatory that was downtown, and we were just starting at the suburban branch where we lived, there was this path that I was able to follow. As I got more and more interested in violin, I could continue basically up through the conservatory level during high school. So I had a really fantastic music education without any pressure, without any expectations or professional goals. I just kept taking these classes and one thing led to another. I grew up being very immersed in both creative writing and music, and I think just having the gift of those two parts of my brain trained and stimulated and delighted so young really changed my brain in some ways. I'll always see the world through this creative lens, which I think I'm also just set up to do personally. Then the last step of my multi-practice career is that in college I got very interested in Jewish spirituality. I'm Jewish, but I didn't grow up very religious. I didn't grow up in a Jewish community really. So I knew some basics, but not a ton. In college I started to study it and also informally learned from other people I met. I ended up going on a pretty intense spiritual quest, going to Jerusalem and immersing myself after college for two years in traditional Jewish study and practice. So that became the third strand of the braid that had already been started with music and writing. Torah study, spiritual study, and teaching became the third, and they all interweave. The last thing I'll say is that because I work in both words and music, and naturally performance because of music, it began to branch a little bit into plays, theatre, and film, just because that's where the intersection of words, performance, and music is. So that's really what brought me into that, as opposed to any specific desire to work in film. It all happened very organically. Joanna: I love this. This is so cool. We are going to circle back to a lot of this, but I have to ask you— What about work for money at any point? How did this turn into more than just hobbies and lifestyle? Alicia: Yes, absolutely. Well, I'm very fortunate that I did not graduate college with loans because my parents were able to pay for college. That was a big privilege that I just want to name, because in the States that's often not the case. So that allowed me to need to support myself, but not also pay loans, which was a real gift. What happened was I went straight from college to that school in Jerusalem, and there I was on loans and scholarship, so I didn't have to worry yet about supporting myself. Then when I came back to the States, I actually found on Craigslist a job teaching remedial Hebrew. It was essentially teaching kids at a Jewish elementary school who either had learning differences or had just entered the school late and needed to be in a different Hebrew class than the other kids in their grade. That was my first experience of really teaching, and I just absolutely fell in love with it. Although in the end, my passion is much more for teaching the text and rituals and the wrestling with the concepts, as opposed to teaching language. So all these years, while doing performance and writing and all these things, I have been teaching Jewish studies. That has essentially supported me, I would say, between 50 and 70 per cent. Then the rest has been paid gigs as a musician, whether as a front person leading a project or as what we call a sideman, playing in someone else's band. Sometimes doing theatre performances, sometimes teaching workshops. That's how I've cobbled it together. I have not had a full-time job all these years and I have supported myself through both earned income and also grants and donations. I've really tried to cultivate a little bit of a donor base, and I took some workshops early on about how to welcome donations. So I definitely try to always welcome that as well. Joanna: That is so interesting that you took a workshop on how to welcome donations. Way back in, I think 2013, I said on this show, I just don't know if I can accept people giving to support the show. Then someone on the podcast challenged me and said, but people want to support creatives. That's when I started Patreon in 2014. It was when The Art of Asking by Amanda Palmer came out and— It was this realisation that people do want to support people. So I love that you said that. Alicia: It's not easy. It's still not easy for me, and I have to grit my teeth every time I even put in my end-of-year newsletter. I just say, just a reminder that part of what makes this possible is your generous donations, and I'm so grateful to you. It's not easy. I think some people enjoy fundraising. I certainly don't instinctively enjoy it, but I have learned to think of it exactly the way that you're saying. I mean, I love donating to support other people's projects. Sometimes it's the highlight of my day. If I'm having a bad day and someone asks for help, either to feed a family or to complete a creative project, I just feel like, okay, at least I can give $36 or $25 and feel like I did something positive in the last hour, even if my project is going terribly and I'm in a fight with my kid or something. So I have to keep in mind that it is actually a privilege to give as well as a privilege to receive. Joanna: Absolutely. So let's get back into your various creative projects. The first thing I wanted to ask you, because you do have so many different formats and forms of your creativity—how do you know when an idea that comes to you should be a song, or something you want to do as a performance, or written, or a film? Tell us a bit about your creative process. Because a lot of your projects are also longer-term. Alicia: Yes. It's funny, I love planning and in some ways I'm an extreme planner. I really drive people in my family bonkers with planning, like family vacations a year in advance. In terms of my creativity, I'm very planful towards goals, but in that early generative state, I am actually pure instinct. I don't think I ever sit down and say, “I have this idea, which genre would it match with?” It's more like I sit on my bed and pick up my guitar, which is where I love to do songwriting, just sitting on my bed cross-legged, and I pick up my guitar and something starts coming out. Then I just work with that kernel. So it's very nebulous at first, very innate, and I just follow that creative spirit. Often I don't even know what a project is, sometimes if it's a larger project, until a year or two in. Once things emerge and take shape, then my planning brain and my strategy brain can jump on it and say, “Okay, we need three more songs to fill out the album, and we need to plan the fundraising and the scheduling.” Then I might take more of an outside-in approach. At the beginning it's just all instinct. Joanna: So if you pick up your guitar, does that mean it always starts in music and then goes into writing? Or is that you only pick up a guitar if it's going to be musical? Alicia: I think I'm responding to what's inside me. It's almost like a need, as opposed to, “I'm going to sit down and work.” I mean, obviously I sit down and work a lot, but I think in that early stage of anything, it's more like my fingers are itching to play something, and so I sit down and pick up my guitar. Sometimes nothing comes out and sometimes the kernel of a song comes out. Or I'm at a café, and I often like to write when I'm feeling a little bit discombobulated, just to go into the complexity of things or use challenging emotions as fuel. I really do use it as a—I don't know if therapeutic is the word, but I think it maybe is. I write often, as I always have, as I said before, to understand what I'm thinking. Like Joan Didion said—to process difficult emotions, to let go of stuck places. So I think I create almost more out of a sense of just what I need in the moment. Sometimes it's just for fun. Sometimes picking up a guitar, I just have a moment so I sit down and mess around. Sometimes it's to help me struggle with something. It doesn't always start in music. That was a random example. I might sit down to write because I have an hour and I think, I haven't written in a while. Or I do have an informal daily writing thing where I'll try to generate one loose draft of something a day, even if it's only ten pages. I mean, sorry, ten words. Joanna: I was going to say! Alicia: No, no. Ten words. I'm sorry. It's often poetry, so it feels like a lot when it's ten words. I'll just sit down with no pressure, no goal, no intention to make anything specific. Just open the floodgates and see what comes out. That's where every single project of mine has started. Joanna: Yes, I do love that. Obviously, I'm a discovery writer and intuitive, same as you. I think very much this idea of, especially when you said you feel discombobulated, that's when you write. I almost feel like I need that. I'm not someone who writes every day. I don't do ten lines or whatever. It's that I'll feel that sense of pressure building up into “this is going to be something.” I will really only write or journal when that spills over into— “I now need to write and figure out what this is.” Alicia: Yes. It's almost a form of hunger. It feels to me similar to when you eat a great meal and then you're good for a while. You're not really thinking of it, and then it builds up, like you said, and then there's a need—at least the first half of creativity. I really separate my generation and my editing. So my generative practice is all openness, no critique, just this maybe therapeutic, maybe curious, wandering and seeing what happens. Then once I have a draft, my incisive editing mind is welcome back in, which has been shut out from that early process. So that's a really different experience. Those early stages of creativity are almost out of need more than obligation. Joanna: Well, just staying with that generative practice. Obviously you've mentioned your study of and practice of Jewish tradition and Jewish spirituality. Steven Pressfield in his books has talked about his prayer to the muse, and I've got on my wall here—I don't talk about this very often, actually — I have a muse picture, a painting of what I think of as a muse spirit in some form. So do you have any spiritual practices around your generative practice and that phase of coming up with ideas? Alicia: I love that question, and I wish I had a beautiful, intentional answer. My answer is no. I think I experience creativity as its own spiritual practice itself. I do love individual prayer and meditation and things like that, but for me those are more to address my specifically spiritual health and happiness and connectedness. I'm just a dive-in kind of person. As a musician, I have friends who have elaborate backstage rituals. I have to do certain things to take care of my voice, but even that, it's mostly vocal rest as opposed to actively doing things. There's a bit of an on/off switch for me. Joanna: That's interesting. Well, I do want to ask you about one of your projects, this collaboration with a high school on a musical performance, I Was a Desert: Songs of the Matriarchs, and also your Girls in Trouble songs about women in the Torah. On your website, I had a look at the school, the high school, and the musical performance. It was extraordinary. I was watching you in the school there and it's just such extraordinary work. It very much inspired me—not to do it myself, but it was just so wonderful. I do urge people to go to your website and just watch a few minutes of it. I'm inspired by elements of religion, Christian and Jewish, but I wondered if you've come up against any issues with adaptation—respecting your heritage but also reinventing it. How has this gone for you. Any advice for people who want to incorporate aspects of religion they love but are worried about responses? Alicia: Well, I have to say, coming from the Jewish tradition, that is a core practice of Judaism—reinterpreting our texts and traditions, wrestling with them, arguing with them, reimagining them. I don't know if you're familiar with Midrash, but just in case some of your listeners aren't sure I'll explain it. There's essentially an ancient form of fanfic called Midrash, which was the ancient rabbis, and we still do it today, taking a biblical story that seems to have some kind of gap or inconsistency or question in it and writing a story to fill that gap or recast the story in an interestingly different light. So we have this whole body of literature over thousands of years that are these alternate or added-on adventures, side quests of the biblical characters. What I'm doing from a Jewish perspective is very much in line with a traditional way of interacting with text. I've certainly never gotten any pushback, especially as I work in progressive Jewish communities. I think if I were in an extremely fundamentalist community, there would be a lot of different issues around gender and things like that. The interpretive process, even in those communities, is part of how we show respect for the text. When I was working with the high school—and I just want to call out the choir director, Ethan Chen, who has an incredible project where he brings in a different artist every two years to work with the choir, and they tend to have a different cultural focus each time. He invited me specifically to integrate my songwriting about biblical women with his amazing high school choir. I was really worried at first because most of them are not Jewish—very few of them, if any. I wanted to respect their spiritual paths and their religious heritages and not impose mine on them. So I spent a lot of time at the beginning saying, this project has religious source material, but essentially it is a creative reinterpretive project. I am not coming to you to bring the religious material to you. I'm coming to take the shared Hebrew Bible myths and then reinterpret those myths through a lens of how they might reflect our own personal struggles, because that's always my approach to these ancient stories. I wanted to really make that clear to the students. It was such a joy to work with them. Joanna: It's such an interesting project. Also, I find with musicians in general this idea of performance. You've written this thing—or this thing specifically with the school—and it doesn't exist again, right? You're not selling CDs of that, I presume. Whereas compared to a book, when we write a book, we can sell it forever. It doesn't exist as a performance generally for an author of a memoir or a novel. It carries on existing. So how does that feel, the performance idea versus the longer-lasting thing? I mean, I guess the video's there, but the performance itself happened. Alicia: I do know what you mean. Absolutely. We did, for that reason, record it professionally. We had the sound person record it and mix it, so it is available to stream. I'm not selling CDs, but it's out there on all the streaming services, if people want to listen. I do also have the scores, so if a choir wanted to sing it. The main point that you're making is so true. I think there's actually something very sacred about live performance—that we're all in the moment together and then the moment is over. I love the artefacts of the writing life. I love writing books. I love buying and reading books and having them around, and there's piles of them everywhere in this room I'm standing in. I feel like being on stage, or even teaching, is a very spiritual practice for me, because it's in some ways the most in-the-moment I ever am. The only thing that matters is what's happening right then in that room. It's fleeting as it goes. I'm working with the energy in the room while we're there. It's different every time because I'm different, the atmosphere is different, the people are different. There's no way to plan it. The kind of micro precision that we all try to bring to our editing—you can't do that. You can practice all you want and you should, but in the moment, who knows? A string breaks or there's loud sound coming from the other room. It is just one of those things. I love being reminded over and over again of the truth that we really don't control what happens. The best that we can do is ride it, surf it, be in it, appreciate it, and then let it go. Joanna: I think maybe I get a glimpse of that when I speak professionally, but I'm far more in control in that situation than I guess you were with—I don't know how many—was it a hundred kids in that choir? It looked pretty big. Alicia: It was amazing. It was 130 kids. Yes. Joanna: 130 kids! I mean, it was magic listening to it. And yes, of course, showing my age there with buying a CD, aren't I? Alicia: Well, I do still sell some CDs of Girls in Trouble on tour, because I have a bunch of them and people still buy them. I'm always so grateful because it was an easier life for touring musicians when we could just bring CDs. Now we have to be very creative about our merch. Joanna: Yes, that's a good point because people are like, “Oh yes, I'll scan your QR code and stream it,” but you might not get the money for that for ages, and it might just be five cents or whatever. Alicia: Streaming is terrible for live musicians. I mean, I don't know if you know the site Bandcamp, but it's essentially self-publishing for musicians. Bandcamp is a great way around that, and a lot of independent musicians use it because that's a place you can upload your music and people can pay $8 for an album. They can stream it on there if they want, or they can download it and have it. But, yes, it's hard out there for touring musicians. Joanna: Yes, for sure. Well, let's come to the book then. Your memoir, When We Are Born We Forget Everything. Tell us about some of the challenges of a book as opposed to these other types of performances. Alicia: Well, I come out of poetry, so that was my first love. That's what I majored in in college. That's what my MFA is in. Poetry is famously short, and I'm not one of those long-form poets. I have been trained for many years to think in terms of a one-page arc, if at all. Arc isn't even really a word that we use in poetry. So to write a full-length prose book was really an incredible education. Writing it basically took ten years from writing to publication, so probably seven years of writing and editing. I felt like there was an MFA-equivalent process in the number of classes I took, books I read, and work that went into it. So that was one of my main joys and challenges, really learning on the job to write long-form prose coming out of poetry. How to keep the engine going, how to think about ending one chapter in a way that leaves you with some torque or momentum so that you want to go into the next chapter. How many characters is too many? Who gets names and who doesn't? Some of these things that are probably pretty basic for fiction writers were all very new to me. That was a big part of my process. Then, of course, poets don't usually have agents. So once it was done, I began to query agents. It was the normal sort of 39 rejections and then one agent who really understood what I was trying to do. She's incredible, and she was able to sell the book. The longevity of just working on something for that long—I have a lot of joy in that longevity—but it does sometimes feel like, is this ever going to happen, or am I on a fool's errand? Joanna: I guess, again, the difference with performance is you have a date for the performance and it's done then. I suppose once you get a contract, then for sure it has to be done. But memoir in particular, you do have to set boundaries, because of course your life continues, doesn't it? So what were the challenges in curating what went into the book? Because many people listening know memoir is very challenging in terms of how personal it can be. Alicia: Yes, and one thing I think is so fascinating about memoir is choosing which lens to put on your story, on your own story. I heard early on that the difference between autobiography and memoir is that autobiography tries to give a really comprehensive view of a life, and memoir is choosing one lens and telling the story of a life through that lens, which is such a beautiful creative concept. I knew early on that I wanted this to be primarily a spiritual memoir, and also somewhat of an artistic memoir, because my creativity and my spirituality are so intertwined. It started off being spiritual, and also about my musical life, and also about my writing life. In the end, I edited out the part about my writing life, because writing about writing was just too navel-gazing. So there's nothing in there about me coming of age as a writer, which used to be in there, but that whole thing got taken out. Now it's spiritual and musical. For me, it really helped to start with those focuses, because I knew there may be things that were hugely important in my life, absolutely foundational, that were not really going to be either mentioned or gone deeply into in the book. For example, my husband teases me a lot about how few pages and words he gets. He's very important in my life, but I actually met him when I was 29, and this book really mainly takes place in the years leading up to that. There's a little bit of winding down in the first few years of my thirties, but this is not a book about my life with him. He is mentioned in it. That story is in there. Having those kinds of limitations around the canvas—there's a quote, I forget if it was Miranda July, but somebody said something like, basically when you put a limitation on your project, that's when it starts to be a work of art. Whatever it is, if you say, “I'm taking this canvas and I'm using these colours,” that's when it really begins, that initial limitation. That was very helpful. Joanna: It's also the beauty of memoir, because of course you can write different memoirs at different times. You can write something about your writing life. You can write something else about your marriage and your family later on. That doesn't all have to be in one book. I think that's actually something I found interesting. And I would also say in my memoir, Pilgrimage, my husband is barely mentioned either. Alicia: Does he tease you too? Joanna: No, I think he's grateful. He is grateful for the privacy. Alicia: That's why I keep saying, you should be grateful! Joanna: Yes. You really should. Like, maybe stop talking now. Alicia: Yes, exactly. I know. Marriage, memoir—those words should strike fear into his heart. Joanna: They definitely should. But let's just come back. When I look at your career— You just seem such an independent creative, and so I wondered why you decided to work with a traditional publisher instead of being an independent. How are you finding it as someone who's not in charge of everything? Alicia: It's a great question. The origin story for this memoir is that I was actually reading poetry at a writing conference called Bread Loaf in the States. This was 16 years ago or something. I was giving a poetry reading and afterwards an agent, not my agent, came up to me and said, you know, you have a voice. You should try writing nonfiction because you could probably sell it. Back to your question about how I support myself, I am always really hustling to make a living. It's not like I have some separate well-paying job and the writing has no pressure on it. So my ears kind of perked up. I thought, wait, getting paid for writing? Because poetry is literally not in the world. It's just not a concept for poets. That's not why we write and it's not a possibility. So a little light turned on in my brain. I thought, wow, that could be a really interesting element to add to my income stream, and it would be flexible and it would be meaningful. For a few years I thought, what nonfiction could I write? And I came up with the idea of writing a book about biblical women from a more scholarly perspective, because I teach that material and I've studied it. I went to speak to another agent and she said, well, you could do that, but if you actually want to sell a book, it's going to have to be more of a trade book. So if you don't want an academic press, which wouldn't pay very much, you would have to have some kind of memoir-like stories in there to just sweeten it so it doesn't feel academic. So then I began writing a little bit of spiritual memoir. I thought, okay, well, I'll write about a few moments. Then once I started writing, I couldn't stop. The floodgates really opened. That's how it ended up being a spiritual memoir with interwoven stories of biblical women. It became a hybrid in that sense. I knew from the beginning that this project—for all my saying earlier that I never plan anything and only work on instinct, I was thinking as I said that, that cannot be true. This time, I actually thought, what if, instead of coming from this pure, heart-focused place of poetry, I began writing with the intention of potentially selling a book? The way my fiction writer friends talked about selling their books. So that was always in my mind. I knew I would continue writing poetry, continue publishing with small presses, continue putting my own music out there independently, but this was a bit of an experiment. What if I try to interface with the publishing world, in part for financial sustainability? And because I had a full draft before I queried, I never felt like anyone was telling me what to write. I can't imagine personally selling a book on proposal, because I do need that full capacity to just swerve, change directions, be responsive to what the project is teaching me. I can't imagine promising that I'll write something, because I never know what I'll write. But writing at least a very solid draft first, I'm always delighted to get notes and make polish and rewrite and make things better. I took care of that freedom in the first seven years of writing and then I interfaced with the agent and publisher. Joanna: I was going to say, given that it's taken you seven to ten years to do this and I can't imagine that you're suddenly a multimillionaire from this book. It probably hasn't fulfilled the hourly rate that perhaps you were thinking of in terms of being paid for your work. I think some people think that everyone's going to end up with the massive book deal that pays for the rest of their life. I guess this book does just fit into the rest of your portfolio career. Alicia: Yes. One of the benefits of these long arcs that I like to work on is, one of them—and probably the primary one—is that the project gets to unfold on its own time. I don't think I could have rushed it if I wanted. The other is that it never really stopped me from doing any of my other work. Joanna: Mm-hmm. Alicia: So it's not like, oh, I gave up months of my life and all I got was this advance or something. It's like, I was living my life and then when I had a little bit of writing time—and I will say, it impacted my poetry. I haven't written as much poetry because I was working on this. So it wasn't like I just added it on top of everything I was already doing, but it was a pleasure to just switch to prose for a while. It was just woven into my life. I appreciated having this side project where no one was waiting for it. There were no deadlines, there was no stress around it, because I always have performances to promote and due dates for all kinds of work. It was just this really lovely arena of slow growth and play. When I wanted a reader, I could do a swap with a writer friend, but no one was ever waiting for it on deadline. So there's actually a lot of pleasure in that. Then I will say, I think I've made more from selling this than my poetry. Probably close to ten times more than I've ever made from any of my poetry. So on a poetry scale, it's certainly not going to pay for my life, but it actually does make a true financial difference in a way that much of my other work is a little more bit by bit by bit. It's actually a different scale. Joanna: Well, that's really good. I'm glad to hear that. I also want to ask you, because you've done so many things, and— I'm fascinated by your independent film, A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff. I have only watched the trailer. You are in it, you wrote it, directed it, and it's also obviously got other people in, and it's fascinating. It's about this particular point in history. I've written quite a lot of screenplay adaptations of my novels, and I've had some various amounts of interest, but the whole film industry to me is just a complete nightmare, far bigger nightmare than the book industry. So I wonder if you could maybe talk about this, because it just seems like you made a film, which is so cool. Alicia: Oh yes, thank you. Joanna: And it won awards, yes, we should say. Alicia: Did we win awards? Yes. It really, for an extremely low-budget indie film, went far further than my team and I could ever have imagined. I will say I never intended to make a film. Like most of the best things in my life, it really happened by accident. When I was living in New York— I lived there for many years—the 2008 financial collapse happened and I happened to have an arts grant that gave a bunch of artists workspace, studio space, in essentially an abandoned building in the financial district. It was an empty floor of a building. The floor had been left by the previous tenant, and there's a nonprofit that takes unused real estate in the financial district and lets artists work in it for a while. So I was on Wall Street, which was very rare for me, but for this year I was working on Wall Street. Even though I was working on poems, the financial collapse happened around me, and I did get inspired by that to create a one-woman show, which was more of a theatre show. That was already a huge leap for me because I had no real theatre experience, but it was experimental and growing out of my poetry practice and my music. It was a musical one-woman show about the financial collapse from a spiritual perspective, apparently. So I performed that. I documented it, and then a friend who lives in Portland, Oregon, where I now live, said, “I'm a theatre producer, I'd like to produce it here.” So then I rewrote it and did a run here in Portland of that show. Essentially, I started to tour it a little bit, but I got tired of it. It was too much work and it never really paid very much, and I thought, this is impacting my life negatively. I just want to do a really good documentation of the show. So I wanted to hire a theatre documentarian to just document the show so that it didn't disappear, like you were saying before about live performance. But one of the people I talked to actually ended up being an artistic filmmaker, as opposed to a documentarian. She watched the archival footage, just a single camera of the show, and said, “I don't think you should do this again and film it with three cameras. I think you should make it into a feature film. And in fact, I think maybe I should direct it, because there's all this music in it and I also direct music videos.” We had this kind of mind meld. Joanna: Mm. Alicia: I never intended to make a film, but she is a visionary director and I had this piece of IP essentially, and all the music and the writing. We adapted it together. We did it here in Portland. We did all the fundraising ourselves. We did not interface with Hollywood really. I think that would be, I just can't imagine. I love Hollywood, but I'm not really connected, and I can't imagine waiting for someone to give us permission or a green light to make this. It was experimental and indie, so we just really did it on the cheap. We had an amazing producer who helped us figure out how to do it with the budget that we had. We worked really hard fundraising, crowdfunding, asking for donations, having parties to raise money, and then we just did it and put it out there. I think my main advice—and I hear this a lot on screenwriting podcasts—is just make the thing. Make something, as opposed to trying to get permission to make something. Because unless you're already in that system, it's going to be really hard to get permission to make it. Once you make something, that leads to something else, which leads to something else. So even if it's a very short thing, or even if it's filmed on your phone, just actually make the thing. That turned out to be the right thing for us. Joanna: Yes, I mean, I feel like that is what underpins us as independent creatives in general. As an independent author, I feel the same way. I'm never asking permission to put a book in the world. No, thank you. Alicia: Exactly. We have a vision and we do it. It's harder in some ways, but that liberation of being able to really fully create our vision without having to compromise it or wait for permission, I think it's such a beautiful thing. Joanna: Well, we're almost out of time, but I do want to ask you about creative confidence. Alicia: Hmm. Joanna: I feel I'm getting a lot of sense about this at the moment, with all the AI stuff that's happening. When you've been creating a long time, like you and I have, we know our voice and we can lean into our voice. We are creatively confident. We'll fail a lot, but we'll just push on and try things and see what happens. Newer creators are struggling with this kind of confidence. How do I know what is my voice? How do I know what I like? How do I lean into this? So give us some thoughts about how to find your voice and how to find that creative confidence if you don't feel you have it. Alicia: I love that. One thing I will say is that I always think whatever is arising is powerful material to create from. So if a lack of confidence is arising, that's a really powerful feeling to directly explore and not just try to ignore. Although sometimes one has to just ignore those feelings. But to actually explore that feeling, because AI can't have that, right? AI can't really feel a crisis of confidence, and humans can. So that's a gift that we have, those kinds of sensitivities. I think to go really deep into whatever is arising, including the sense that we don't have the right to be creating, or we're not good enough, or whatever it is. Then I always do come back to a quote. I think it might have been John Berryman, but I'm forgetting which poet said it. A younger poet said, “How will I ever know if I'm any good?” And this famous poet said something like—I'm paraphrasing—”You'll never know if you're any good. If you have to know, don't write.” That has been really liberating to me, actually. It sounds a little harsh, but it's been really liberating to just let go of a sense of “good enough.” There is no good enough. The great writers never know if they're good enough. Coming back to this idea of just making without permission—the practice of doing the thing is being a writer. Caring and trying to improve our craft, that's the best that we can have. There's never going to be a moment where we're like, yes, I've nailed this. I am truly a hundred per cent a writer and I have found my voice. Everything's always changing anyway. I would say, either go into those feelings or let those feelings be there. Give them a little tea. Tell them, okay, you're welcome to be here, but you don't get to drive the boat. And then return to the practice of making. Joanna: Absolutely. Great. So where can people find you and your books and everything you do online? Alicia: Everything is on my website, which is AliciaJo.com, and also on Instagram at @ohaliciajo. I'd love to say hello to anyone who's interested in similar topics. Joanna: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Alicia. That was great. Alicia: Thank you. I love your podcast. I'm so grateful for all that you've given the writing world, Jo.The post Creative Confidence, Portfolio Careers, And Making Without Permission with Alicia Jo Rabins first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How can trauma become a catalyst for creative transformation? What lessons can indie authors learn from the music industry's turbulent journey through technological disruption? With Jack Williamson. In the intro, Why recipes for publishing success don’t work and what to do instead [Self-Publishing with ALLi Podcast]; Why your book isn’t selling: metadata [Novel Marketing Podcast]; Creating a successful author business [Fantasy Writers Toolshed Podcast]; Bones of the Deep – J.F. Penn. Today's show is sponsored by ProWritingAid, writing and editing software that goes way beyond just grammar and typo checking. With its detailed reports on how to improve your writing and integration with writing software, ProWritingAid will help you improve your book before you send it to an editor, agent or publisher. Check it out for free or get 15% off the premium edition at www.ProWritingAid.com/joanna This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn  Jack Williamson is a psychotherapist, coach, and bestselling author who spent nearly two decades as a music industry executive. He's the founder of Music & You, his latest nonfiction book is Maybe You're The Problem, and he also writes romance under A.B. Jackson. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.  Show Notes Finding post-traumatic growth and meaning after bereavement, and using tragedy as a catalyst for creative transformation Why your superpower can also be your Achilles heel, and how indie authors can overcome shiny object syndrome Three key lessons from the music industry: embracing change, thinking creatively about marketing, and managing pressure for better creativity The A, B, C technique for PR interviews and why marketing is storytelling through different mediums How to deal with judgment and shame around AI in the author community by understanding where people sit on the opinion-belief-conviction continuum Three AI developments coming from music to publishing: training clauses in contracts, one-click genre adaptation, and licensed AI-generated video adaptations You can find Jack at JackWilliamson.co.uk and his fiction work at ABJackson.com. Transcript of the interview with Jack Williamson Jo: Jack Williamson is a psychotherapist, coach, and bestselling author who spent nearly two decades as a music industry executive. He's the founder of Music & You, his latest nonfiction book is Maybe You're The Problem, and he also writes romance under A.B. Jackson. Welcome to the show. Jack: Thank you so much for having me, Jo. It's a real honour to be on your podcast after listening all of these years. Jo: I'm excited to talk to you. We have a lot to get into, but first up— Tell us a bit more about you and why get into writing books after years of working in music. Jack: I began my career at the turn of the millennium, basically, and I worked for George Michael and Mariah Carey's publicist, which I'm sure you can imagine was quite the introduction to the corporate world. From there I went on to do domestic and international marketing for a load of massive artists at Universal, so the equivalent of the top five publishers in the publishing world that we all work in. Then from there I had a bit of a challenge. In December 2015, I lost my brother, unfortunately to suicide. For any listener or any person that's gone through a traumatic event, it can really make you reassess everything, make you question life, make you question your purpose. When I went through that, I was thinking, well, what do I want to do? What do I want out of life? So I went on this journey for practically the next ten years. I retrained to be a psychotherapist. I created a bucket list—a list of all the things that I thought maybe my brother would've wanted to do but didn't do. One of the things was scatter his ashes at the Seven Wonders of the world. Then one of the items on my bucket list was to write a book. The pandemic hit. It was a challenge for all of us, as you've spoken about so much on this wonderful podcast. I thought, well, why not? Why not write this book that I've wanted to write? I didn't know when I was going to do it because I was always so busy, and then the pandemic happened and so I wrote a book. From there, listening to your wonderful podcast, I've learned so much and been to so many conferences and learned along the way. So now I've written five books and released three. Jo: That's fantastic. I mean, regular listeners to the show know that I talk about death and grief and all of this kind of thing, and it's interesting that you took your brother's ashes to the Seven Wonders of the world. Death can obviously be a very bad, negative thing for those left behind, but it seems like you were able to reframe your brother's experience and turn that into something more positive for your life rather than spiralling into something bad. So if people listening are feeling like something happens, whether it's that or other things— How can we reframe these seemingly life-ending situations in a more positive way? Jack: It is very hard and there's no one way to do it. I think as you always say, I never want to tell people what to do or what to think. I want to show them how to think and how they can approach things differently or from a different perspective. I can only speak from my journey, but we call it in therapeutic language, post-traumatic growth. It is, how do you define it so it doesn't define you? Because often when you have a bereavement of a loved one, a family member, it can be very traumatic, but how can you take meaning and find meaning in it? There's a beautiful book called Man's Search for Meaning, and the name of the author escapes me right now, but he says— Jo: Viktor Frankl. Jack: Yes. Everyone quotes it as one of their favourite books, and one of my favourite lines is, “Man can take everything away from you, apart from the ability to choose one thought over the other.” I think it's so true because we can make that choice to choose what to think. So in those moments when we are feeling bad, when we're feeling down, we want to honour our feelings, but we don't necessarily want to become them. We want to process that, work through, get the support system that we need. But again, try to find meaning, try to find purpose, try to understand what is going on, and then pay it forward. Irrespective of your belief system, we all yearn for purpose. We all yearn for being connected to something bigger than ourselves. If we can find that through bereavement maybe, or through a traumatic incident, then hopefully we can come through the other side and have that post-traumatic growth. Jo: I love that phrase, post-traumatic growth. That's so good. Obviously people think about post-traumatic anything as like PTSD—people immediately think a sort of stress disorder, like it's something that makes things even worse. I like that you reframed it in that way. Obviously I think the other thing is you took specific action. You didn't just think about it. You travelled, you retrained, you wrote books. So I think also it's not just thinking. In fact, thinking about things can sometimes make it worse if you think for too long, whereas taking an action I think can be very strong as well. Jack: Ultimately we are human beings as opposed to human doings, but actually being a human doing from time to time can be really helpful. Actually taking steps forward, doing things differently, using it as a platform to move forward and to do things that maybe you didn't before. When you are confronted with death, it can actually make you question your own mortality and actually question, am I just coasting along? Am I stuck in a rut? Could I be doing something differently? One of the things that bereavement, does is it holds a mirror up to ourselves and it makes us question, well, what do we want from our life? Are we here to procreate? Are we here to make a difference? Some of us can't procreate, or some of us choose not to procreate, but we can all make a difference. And it's, how do we do that? Where do we do that? When do we do that? Jo: That's interesting. I was thinking today about service and gratitude. I'm doing this Master's and I was reading some theology stuff today, and service and gratitude, I think if you are within a religious tradition, are a normal part of that kind of religious life. Whether it's service to God and gratitude to God, or service and gratitude to others. I was thinking that these two things, service and gratitude, can actually really help reframe things as well. Who can we serve? As authors, we're serving our readers and our community. What can we be grateful about? That's often our readers and our community as well. So I don't know, that helped me today—thinking about how we can reframe things, especially in the world we're in now where there's a lot of anger and grief and all kinds of things. Jack: That's what we've got to look at. We are here to serve. Again, that can take different shapes, different forms. Some of us work in the service industry. I provide a service as a psychotherapist, you serve your listeners with knowledge and information that you gather and dispense through the research you do or the guests you have on. We serve readers of the different genres that we write in. It's what ways can we serve, how can we serve? Again, I think we all, if we can and when we can, should pay it forward. Someone said this to me once in the music industry: be careful who you meet on the way up and how you treat them on the way up, because invariably you'll meet them on the way down. So if you can pay forward that kindness, if you can be kind, considerate, and treat people how you want to be treated, that is going to pay dividends in the long run. It may not come off straight away, but invariably it will come back to you in some way, shape, or form in a different way. Jo: I've often talked about social karma and karma in the Hindu sense—the things that you do come back to you in some other form. Possibly in another life, which I don't believe. In terms of, I guess, you didn't know what was going to happen to your brother, and so you make the most of the life that we have at the moment because things change and you just don't know how things are going to change. You talk about this in your book, Maybe You're The Problem, which is quite a confronting title. So just talk about your book, Maybe You're The Problem, and why you wrote that. Put it into context with the author community and why that might be useful. Jack: Thank you for flagging my book. I intentionally crossed out “maybe” on the merchandise I did as well, because in essence, we are our own problem. We can get in the way, and it's what happened to us when we grew up wasn't our fault, but what we do with it is our responsibility. We may have grown up in a certain period or a climate. We didn't necessarily choose to do that, but what we do with that as a result is up to us. So we can stay in our victimhood and we can blame our parents, or we can blame the generation we are in, or we can blame the city, the location—however, that is relinquishing your power. That is staying in a victim mindset rather than a survivor or a thriver mindset. So it's about how can we look at the different areas in our life. Whether that is conflict, whether that is imposter syndrome, whether that is the generation we're born into. We try to understand how that has shaped us and how we may be getting in our own way to stop us from growing, to stop us from expanding, and to see where our blind spots are, our limitations are, and how that may impact us. There's so much going on in the moment in the world, whether that is in the digital realm, whether that is in the geo-climate that we're in at the moment. Again, that's going to bring up a lot for us. How can we find solutions to those problems for us so that we continue to move forward rather than be restricted and hindered by them? Jo: Alright. Well let's get into some more specifics. You have been in the author community now for a while. You go to conferences and you are in the podcast community and all this kind of thing. What specific issues have you seen in the author community? Maybe around some of the things you've mentioned, or other things? How might we be able to deal with those? Jack: With authors, I think it is such a wonderful and unique industry that I have an honour and privilege of being a part of now. One of the main things I've learned is just how creative people are. Coming from a creative industry like the music industry, there is a lot of neurodivergence in the creative industries and in the author community. Whether that is autism, whether that is ADHD—that is a real asset to have as a superpower, but it can be an Achilles heel. So it's understanding—and I know that there is an overexposure of people labelling themselves as ADHD—but on the flip side to that, it's how can we look at what's going on for us? For ADHD, for example, there's a thing called shiny object syndrome. You've talked about this in the past, Joanna, where it's like a new thing comes along, be it TikTok, be it Substack, be it bespoke books, be it Shopify, et cetera. We can rush and quickly be like, “oh, let me do this, let me do that,” before we actually take the time to realise, is this right for me? Does this fit my author business? Does this fit where I'm at in my author journey? I think sometimes as authors, we need to not cave in to that shiny object syndrome and take a step back and think to ourselves, how does this serve me? How does this serve my career? How does this work for me if I'm looking at this as a career? If you're looking at it as a hobby, obviously it's a different lens to look through, but that's something that I would often make sure that we look at. One of the other things that really comes up is that in order for any of us to address our fears and anxieties, we need to make sure that we feel psychologically safe and to put ourselves in spaces and places where we feel seen, heard, and understood, which can help address some of the issues that I've just mentioned. Being in that emotionally regulated state when we are with someone we know and trust—so taking someone to a conference, taking someone to a space or a place where you feel that you can be seen, heard, and understood—can help us and allow us to embrace things that we perceive to be scary. That may be finding an author group, finding an online space where you can actually air and share your thoughts, your feelings, where you don't feel that you are being judged. Often it can be quite a judgmental space and place in the online world. So it's just finding your tribe and finding places where you can actually lean into that. So there'd be two things. Jo: I like the idea of the superpower and the Achilles heel because I also feel this when we are writing fiction. Our characters have strengths, but your fatal flaw is often related to your strength. Jack: Yes. Jo: For example, I know I am independent. One of the reasons I'm an independent author is because I'm super independent. But one of my greatest fears is being dependent. So I do lots of things to avoid being dependent on other people, which can lead me to almost damage myself by not asking for help or by trying to make sure that I control everything so I never have to ask anyone else to do something. I'm coming to terms with this as I get older. I feel like this is something we start to hit—I mean, as a woman after menopause—is this feeling of I might have to be dependent on people when I'm older. It's so interesting thinking about this and thinking— My independence is my strength. How can it also be my weakness? So what do you think about that? You're going to psychotherapist me now. Jack: I definitely won't, but it's interesting. Just talking about that, we all have wounds and we all have the shadow, as you've even written about in one of your books. And it's how that can come from a childhood wound where it's like we seek help and it's not given to us. So we create a belief system where I have to do everything myself because no one will help me. Or we may have rejection sensitivity, so we reject ourselves before others can reject us. So it's actually about trying, where we can, to honour our truths, honour that we may want to be independent, for example, but then realising that success leaves clues. I always say that if you are independent—and I definitely align a hundred percent with you, Joanna—I've had to work really hard myself in personal therapy and in business and life to realise that no human is an island and we can't all do this on our own. Yes, it's amazing with the AI agents now that can help us in a business capacity, but having those relationships that we can tap into—like you mentioned all of the people that you tap into—it's so important to have those. I always say that it's important to have three mentors: one person that's ahead of you (for me, that would be Katie Cross because she's someone that I find is an amazing author and we speak at least once a month); people that are at the same level as you that you can go on the journey together with (and I have an author group for that); and then someone that is perceived to be behind you or in a younger generation than you, because you can learn as much from them as they can learn from you. If you can actually tap into those people whilst honouring your independence, then it feels like you can still go on your own journey, but you can tap in and tap out as and when needed. Sacha Black will give you amazing insights, other people like Honor will give you amazing insights, but you can also provide that for them. So there's that safety of being able to do it on your own. But on the flip side, you still have those people that you can tap into as and when necessary as a sounding board, as information on how they were successful, and go from there. Jo: No, I like that. If you're new to the show, Sacha Black and Honor Raconteur have been on the show and they are indeed some of my best friends. So I appreciate that. I really like the idea of the three mentor idea. I just want to add to that because I do think people misunderstand the word mentor sometimes. You mentioned you speak to Katie Cross, but I've found that a lot of the mentors that I've had who are ahead of me have often been books. We mentioned the Viktor Frankl book, and if people don't know, he was Jewish and in the concentration camps and survived that. So it's a real survivor story. But to me, books have been mostly my mentors in terms of people who are ahead of me. We don't always need to speak to or be friends with our mentors. I think that's important too, right? Because I just get emails a lot that say, “Will you be my mentor?” And I don't think that's the point. Jack: Oh, I a hundred percent agree with you. If you don't have access to those mentors—like Oprah Winfrey is one of the people that I perceive as a mentor—I listen to podcasts, I read her books, I watch interviews. There is a way to absorb and acquire that information, and it doesn't have to be a direct relationship with them. It is someone that you can gain the knowledge and wisdom that they've imparted in whatever form you may consume it. Which is why I think it is important to have those three levels: that one that is above you that may be out of reach in terms of a human connection, but you can still access; then the people at the same level as you that you can have those relationships and grow with; and again, that one behind that you can help pave the way for them, but also learn from them as well. So a hundred percent agree that that mentor that you are looking for that may be ahead of you doesn't necessarily need to be someone that is in a real-world relationship. Jo: So let's just circle back to your music industry experience. You mentioned being on the sort of marketing team for some really big names in music, and I mean, it's kind of a sexy job really. It just sounds pretty cool, but of course the music industry has just as many challenges as publishing. What did you learn from working in the music industry that you think might be particularly useful for authors? Jack: The perception of reality was definitely a lot different. It does look sexy and glamorous, but the reality is similar to going to conferences. It's pretty much flight, hotel, and dark rooms with terrible air conditioning that you spend a lot of time in. So sorry to burst the illusion. But I mean, it does have its moments as well. There is so much I've learned over the years and there's probably three things that stand out the most. The first one was I entered the industry right at the height of the music industry. In 2000, 2001. That was when Napster really exploded and it decimated the music industry. It wiped half the value in the space of four years. Then the music industry was trying to shut it down, throwing legal, throwing everything at it, but it was like whack-a-mole. As soon as one went down such as Napster, ten others popped up like Kazaa. So you saw that the old guard wasn't willing to embrace change. They weren't willing to adapt. They assumed that people wanted the formats of CDs, vinyls, cassettes, and they were wrong. Yes, people wanted music, but they actually wanted the music. They didn't care about the format, they just wanted the access. So that was one of the really interesting things that I learned, because I was like, you have to embrace change. You can't ignore it. You can't push it away, push it aside, because it's coming whether you like it or not. I think thankfully the music industry has learned as AI's coming, because now you have to embrace it. There's a lot of legal issues that have been going on at the moment with rights, which you've covered about the Anthropic case and so on. It's such a challenge, and I just think that's the first one. The second one I learned was back in 2018. There was an artist I worked on called Freya Ridings. At that time I was working at an independent record label rather than one of the big three major record labels. She had great songs and we were up against one of the biggest periods of the year and trying to make noise. At the time, Love Island was the biggest TV show on, and everyone wanted to be on it in terms of getting their music synced in the scenes. We were just like, we are never going to compete. So we thought, we need to be clever here. We need to think differently. What we did is we found out what island the show was being recorded on, and we geo-targeted our ads just to that island because we knew the sync team were going to be on there. So we just went hard as nails, advertised relentlessly, and we knew that the sync people would then see the adverts. As a result of that, Freya got the sync. It became the biggest song that season on Love Island, back when it was popular. As a result of that, we built from there. We were like, right, we can't compete with the majors. We have to think differently. We need to do things differently. We need to be creative. It wasn't an easy pathway. That year there were only two other songs that were independent that reached the top 10. So we ended up becoming a third and the biggest song that year. The reason I'm saying that is we can't compete with the major publishers. But the beauty of the independent author community is because we have smaller budgets—most of us, not all of us, but most of us—we have to think differently. We have to make our bang for our buck go a lot further. So it's actually— How can we stay creative? How can we think differently? What can we do differently? So that would be the second thing. Then the third main lesson that I learned, and this is more on the creative side, is that pressure can often work against you, both in a business sense, but especially creativity. I've seen so many artists over the years have imposed deadlines on them to hand in their albums, and it's impacted the quality of their output. Once it's handed in, the stress and the pressure is off, and then you realise that actually those artists end up creating the best material that they have, and then they rush to put it on. Whether that's Mariah Carey's “We Belong Together,” Adele with her song “Hello,” Taylor Swift did the same with “Shake It Off”—they're just three examples. The reason is that pressure keeps us in our beta brainwave state, which is our rational, logical mind. For those of us that are authors that are writing fiction, or even if we are creating stories in our nonfiction work to deliver a point, we need to be in that creative mindset. So we need to be in the alpha and the gamma brain state. Because our body works on 90-minute cycles known as our ultradian rhythm, we need to make sure that we honour our cycle and work with that. If we go past that, our creativity and our productivity is going to go down between 60% and 40% respectively. So as authors, it's important—one, to apply the right amount of pressure; two, to work in breaks; and three, to know what kind of perspective we're looking at. Do we need to be rational and logical, or do we need to be creative? And then adjust the sails accordingly. Jo: That's all fantastic. I want to come back on the marketing thing first—around what you did with the strategic marketing there and the targeted ads to that island. That's just genius. I feel like a lot of us, myself included, we struggle to think creatively about marketing because it's not our natural state. Of course, you've done a lot of marketing, so maybe it comes more naturally to you. I think half the time we don't even use the word creative around marketing, when you're not a marketeer. What are some ways that we can break through our blocks around marketing and try to be more creative around that? Jack: I would challenge a lot of authors on that presumption, because as authors we're in essence storytellers, and to tell a story is creative. There's a great quote: “One death is a tragedy. A thousand deaths is a statistic.” If you can create a story, a compelling narrative about a death in the news, it's going to pull at the heartstrings of people. It's going to really resonate and get with them. Whereas if you are just quoting statistics, most people switch off because they become desensitised to it. So I think because we can tell stories, and that's the essence of what we do, it's how can we tell our story through the medium of social media? How can we tell a story through our creative ads that we then put out onto Facebook or TikTok or whatever platform that we're putting them out—BookBub, et cetera? How can we create a narrative that garners the attention? If we are looking at local media or traditional media, how can we do that? How can we get people to buy in to what we're selling? So it's about having different angles. For me with my new romance book, Stolen Moments, one of the stories I had that really has helped me get some coverage and PR is we recorded the songs next door to the Rolling Stones. Now that was very fortunate timing, very fortunate. But everyone's like, “Oh my God, you recorded next door to the Rolling Stones?” So it's like, well, how can you bring in these creative nuggets that help you to find a story? Again, marketing is in essence telling a story, albeit through different mediums and forms. So it's just how can you package that into a marketable product depending on the platform in which you're putting it out on. Jo: I think that's actually hilarious, by the way, because what you hit on there, as someone with a background in marketing, your story about “we recorded an album for the book next door to the Rolling Stones”—it's got nothing to do with the romance. Jack: Oh, the romance is that the pop star in the book writes and records songs. Jo: Yes, I realised that. But the fact is— For doing things like PR, it's the story behind the story. They don't care that you've written a romance. Jack: Yes. Jo: They're far more interested in you, the author, and other things. So I think what you just described there was a kind of PR hook that most of us don't even think about. Jack: I'm sure a lot of authors already know this, so it's a good reminder, and if you don't, it's great. It's called the A, B, C technique. When you get asked a question, you Answer the question. So that's A. You Build a bridge, and then you go to C, which is Covering one of your points. So whenever you get asked a question, have a list of things you want to get across in an interview. Then just make sure that you find that bridge between whatever the question is to cover off one of your points, and that's how you can do it. Because yes, you may be selling a story, like I said, about writing the songs, but then you can bridge it into actually covering and promoting whatever it is you're promoting. So I think that's always quite helpful to remember. Jo: Well, that's a good tip for things like coming on podcasts as well. I've had people on who don't do what you just mentioned and will just try and shoehorn things in in a more deliberate fashion, whereas other people, as you have just done with your romance there, bring it in while answering a question that actually helps other people. So I think that's the kind of thing we need to think about in marketing. Okay, so then let's come back to the embracing change, and as you mentioned, the AI stuff that's going on. I feel like there's so many “stories” around AI right now. There's a lot of stories being told on both sides—on the positive side, on the negative side—that people believe and buy into and may or may not be true. There's obviously a lot of anger. There's, I think, grief—a big thing that people might not even realise that they have. Can you talk about how authors might deal with what's coming up around the technological change around AI, and any of your personal thoughts as well? Jack: I was thinking about this a lot recently. I mean, I guess everyone is in their own ways and forms. One of the things that came up for me is we have genre expectations and we have generation expectations. When we look at genres, you will have different expectations from different genres. For romance, they want a happily ever after or a happy for now. For cosy mysteries, they expect the crime to be solved. So we as authors make sure we endeavour to meet those expectations. The challenge is that if we are looking at AI, we are all in our own generations. We might be in slightly different generations, but there are going to be different generation expectations from the Alpha generation that's coming up and the Beta generation that's just about to start this year or next year because they're going to come into the world where they don't know any different to AI. So they will have a different expectation than us. It will just be normal that there will be AI agents. It will just be normal that there are AI narrators. It will be normalised that AI will assist authors or assist everyone in doing their jobs. So again, it is a grieving period because we can long for what was, we can yearn for things that worked for us that no longer work for us—whether it's Facebook groups, whether it's the Kindle Rush. We can mourn the loss of that, but that's not coming back. I mean, sometimes there may be a resurgence, but essentially, we've got to embrace the change. We've got to understand that it's coming and it's going to bring up a lot of different emotions because you may have been beholden to one thing and you may be like, yes, I've now got my TikTok lives, and then all of a sudden TikTok goes away. I know Adam, when he was talking about it, he'll just find another platform. But there'll be a lot of people that are beholden to it and then they're like, what do I do now? So again, it's never survival of the fittest—it's survival of the most adaptable. I always use this metaphor where there are three people on three different boats. A storm comes. And the first, the optimist, is like, “Oh, it'll pass,” and does nothing. The pessimist complains about the storm and does nothing. But the realist will adjust the sails and use the storm to find its way to the other side, to get through. It's not going to be easy, but they're actually taking change and making change to get to where they need to go, rather than just expecting or complaining. I get it. We are not, and I hate the expression, “we're all in the same boat.” I call bleep on that. I'm not going to swear. We're not all in the same boat. We're all in the same storm, but different people are going through different things. For some, they can adjust and adapt really quickly like a speedboat. For others, they may be like Jack and Rose in the Titanic on that terrible prop where they're clinging to dear life and trying to get through the storm. So it's about how do I navigate this upcoming storm? What can I do within my control to get through the storm? For some it may be easier because they have the resources, or for some of us that love learning, it's easy to embrace change. For others that have a fear mindset and it's like, “Oh, something new, it's scary, I don't want to embrace it”—you are going to take longer. So you may not be the speedboat, but at some point we are going to have to embrace that change. Otherwise we're going to get left behind. So you need to look at that. Jo: The storm metaphor is interesting, and being in different boats. I feel I do struggle. I struggle with people who suddenly seem to be discovering the storm. I've been talking about AI now since 2016. That's a decade. Jack: Yes. Jo: Even ChatGPT has been around more than three years, and people come to me now and they're talking about stories that they've seen in the media that are just old now. Things have moved on so much. I feel like maybe I was on my boat and I looked through my telescope and I saw the storm. I've been talking about the storm and I've had my own moments of being in the middle of the storm. Now I definitely do struggle with people who just seem to have arrived without any knowledge of it before. I oscillate between being an optimist and a realist. I think I'm somewhere between the two, probably. But I think what is driving me a little crazy in the author community right now is judgment and shame. There are people who are judging other people, and there's shame felt by AI-curious or AI-positive people. So I want to help the people who feel shame in some way for trying new technology, but they still feel attacked. Then those people judge other authors for their choices to use technology. So how do you think we can deal with judgment and shame in the community? Which is a form of conflict, I guess. Jack: Of course. I think with that, there's another great PR quote: “If it bleeds, it leads.” Especially in this digital age, there's a lot of clickbait. So the more polarising, the more emotion-evoking the headline, the more likely you are to engage with that content—whether that is reading it or whether that's posting or retweeting, or whatever format you are consuming it on. So unfortunately, media has now become so much more polarising. It's dividing us rather than uniting us. So people are going to have stronger positions. There's so much even within this to look at. One is, you have to work out where people are on the continuum. Do they have an opinion on AI? Do they have a belief? Or do they have a conviction? Now you're not going to move someone that has a conviction about something, so it's not worth even engaging with them because they're immovable. Like they say, you shouldn't talk about sports, politics, and religion. There are certain subjects that may not be worth talking about, especially if they have a conviction. Because they may not even be able to agree to disagree. They may not be willing or able to hear you. So first and foremost, it's about understanding, well, where are those people sitting on the continuum of AI? Are they curious? Do they have an opinion, but they're open to hearing other opinions? Do they have a belief that could be changed or evolved if they find more information? That's where I think it is. It's not necessarily our jobs—even though you do an amazing job of it, Joanna—but a lot of people are undereducated on these issues or these new technologies. So in some cases it's just a case of a lack of education or them being undereducated. Hopefully in time they will become more and more educated. But again, it's how long is a piece of string? Will people catch up? Will they stay behind? Are they fearful? I guess because of social media, because of the media, as they say, if you can evoke fear in people, you can control them. You can control their perspectives. You can control their minds. So that's where we see it—a lot of people are operating from a fear mindset. So then that's when they project their vitriol in certain cases. If people want to believe a certain thing, that's their choice. I'm not here to tell people what to think. Like I said earlier, it's more about how to think. But I would just encourage people to find people that align with you. Do a sense test, like a litmus test, to find where they sit on the continuum and engage with those people that are open and have opinions or beliefs. But shy away or just avoid people that have convictions that maybe are the polar opposite of yours. Jo: It's funny, isn't it? We seem to be in a phase of history when I feel like you should be able to disagree with people and still be friends. Although, as you mentioned, there's certain members of my family where we just stay on topics of TV shows and movies or music, or what books are you reading? Like, we don't go anywhere near politics. So I do think that might be a rule also with the AI stuff. As you said, find a community, and there are plenty of AI-positive spaces now for people who do want to talk about this kind of stuff. I also think that, I don't know whether this is a tipping point this year, but certainly— I know people who are in bigger corporates where the message is now, “You need to embrace this stuff. It is now part of your job to learn how to use these AI tools.” So if that starts coming into people's day jobs, and also people who have, I don't know, kids at school or people at university who are embracing this more—I mean, maybe it is a generational thing. Jack: Yes. Look, there were so many people that were resistant to working from home, or corporations that were, and then the pandemic forced it. Now everyone's embraced it in some way, shape, or form. I mean, there are people that don't, but the majority of people—when something's forced on you, you have to adapt. So again, if those things are implemented in corporations, then you're going to see it. I'm seeing so many amazing new things in AI that have been implemented in the music industry that we'll see in the publishing industry coming down the road. That will scare a lot of people, but again, we have to embrace those things because they're coming and there's going to be an expectation—especially from the younger generations—that these things are available. So again, it's not first past the post, but if you can be ahead of the wave or at least on the wave, then you are going to reap the rewards. If you are behind the wave, you're going to get left behind. So that's my opinion. I'm not trying to encourage anyone to see from my lens, but at the same time, I do think that we need to be thinking differently. We need to always embrace change where we can, as we can, at the pace that we can. Jo: You mentioned there AI things coming down the road in the music industry. And now everyone's going, wait, what is coming? So tell us— What do you see ahead that you think might also shift into the author world? Jack: There are three things that I've seen. Two that have been implemented and one that's been talked about and worked on at the moment. The first, and this will be quite scary for people, is that major record labels—so think the major publishers on our side—they're all now putting clauses in their contracts that require the artists that sign with them to allow their works to be trained by their own AI models. So that is something that is now actually happening in record labels. I wouldn't be surprised, although I don't have insight into it, if Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, et cetera, are potentially doing the same with authors that sign to them. So that's going to become more standardised. So that is on the major side. But then on the creative side, there are two things that really excite me. The music AI platforms that we're hearing about, the stories that we've seen in the press, and it's the fact that with a click of a button, you can recreate a song into a different genre. I find it so fascinating because if you think about that—turning a pop song into a country song or a rap song into a dance song—the possibilities that we have as authors with our books, if we wish to do so, are amazing. I just think, for example, with your ARKANE series, Joanna, imagine clicking a button and just with one click you can take Morgan Sierra and turn her into a romantic lead in a romance book. Jo: See, it's so funny because I personally just can't imagine that because it's not something I would write. But I guess one example in the romance genre itself is I know plenty of romance authors who write a clean and a spicy version of the same story, right? It is already happening in that way. It's just not a one-click. Jack: Well, I think you can also look at it another way. I think one of the most famous examples is Twilight. With Twilight and Stephenie Meyer, if she had the foresight—and I'm not saying she didn't, just to clarify—but fan fiction is such a massive sub-genre of works. And obviously from Twilight came 50 Shades of Gray. Imagine if she had the licensing rights like the NFTs, where she could have made money off of every sale. So that you could then, through works that you create and give licence, earn a percentage of every release, every sale, every consumption unit of your works. There are just so many possibilities where you can create, adapt, have spinoffs that can then build out your world. Obviously, there may need to be an approval process in there for continuity and quality control because you want to make sure you're doing that, but I think that has such massive potential in publishing if we wish to do so. Or like I said, change characters. Like Robert Langdon's character in Dan Brown's books—no longer being the kind of thriller, but maybe being a killer instead. There's so many possibilities. It's just, again, how to think, not what to think—how to think differently and how we can use that. So that's the second of three. Jo: Oh, before you move on, you did mention NFTs and I've actually been reading about this again. So I'm usually five years early. That's the general rule. I started talking about NFTs in mid-2021, and obviously there was a crypto crash, it goes up and down, blah, blah, blah. But forget the crypto side—on the blockchain side, digital originality, and exactly what you said about saying like, where did this originate? This is now coming back in the AI world. It could be that I really was five years early. So amusingly—and I'm going to link to it in the notes because I did a “Why NFTs Are Exciting for Authors” solo episode, I think in 2022—it may be that the resurgence will happen in the next year, and all those people who said I was completely wrong, that this may be coming back. Digital originality I think is what we're talking about there. But so, okay, so what was the other thing? Jack: So the third one is the one that I'm most excited about, but I think will be the most scary for people. Obviously consumption changes and formats change. Like I said, in music I've seen it all the time—whether it's vinyl to cassettes, to CDs, to downloads, to streaming. Again, there's different consumption of the same format, and we see that with books as well, obviously—hardbacks, paperbacks, eBooks, audiobooks. Now with the rise of AI, AI narration has made audiobooks so much more accessible for people. I know that there are issues with certain people not wanting to do it, or certain platforms not allowing AI narration to be uploaded unless it's their own. The next step is what I'm most excited about. What I'm seeing now in the music industry is people licensing their image to then recreate that as music videos because music videos are so expensive. One of my friends just shot a music video for two million pounds. I don't think many authors would ever wish to spend that. If you can license your image and use AI to create a three-minute music video that looks epic and just as real as humanly possible, imagine if those artists—or if we go a step further, those actors—license their image to then be used to adapt our books into a TV series or a film. So that then we are in a position where that is another format of consumption alongside an audiobook, a paperback, an eBook, hardcover, special edition, and so on and so forth. It potentially has the opportunity to open us up to a whole new world. Because yes, there are adaptations of books that we're seeing at the moment, but for those of us that are trying to get our content into different formats, this can be a new pathway. I'm going to make a prediction here myself, Joanna. Jo: Mm-hmm. Jack: I would say in the next five to ten years, there will be a platform akin to a Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney Plus, Apple Plus, where you can license the rights to an image of an actor or an actress. Then with the technology—and you may need people to help you adapt your book into a TV series or a film—that can then be consumed. I just think the possibilities are endless. I mean, again, I think of your character and I'm like, oh, what would it be if Angelina Jolie licensed her image and you could have her play the lead character in your ARKANE series? I mean, again, the possibilities potentially are endless here. Jo: Well, and on that, if people think this won't happen—1776, I don't know if you've seen this, it's just being teased at the moment. Darren Aronofsky has made an American revolutionary story all with AI. So this is being talked about at the moment. It's on YouTube at the moment. The AI video is just extraordinary already, so I totally agree with you. I think things are going to be quite weird for a while, and it will take a while to get used to. You mentioned coming into the music industry in 2000, 2001—I started my work before the internet, and then the internet came along and lots of things changed. I mean, anyone who's older than 40, 45-ish can remember what work was like without the internet. Now we are moving into a time where it'll be like, what was it like before AI? And I think we'll look back and go like, why the hell did we do that kind of thing? So it is a changing world, but yes, exciting times, right? I think the other thing that's happening right now, even to me, is that things are moving so fast. You can almost feel like a kind of whiplash with how much is changing. How do we deal with the fast pace of change while still trying to anchor ourselves in our writing practice and not going crazy? Jack: Again, it's that everything everywhere all at once—you can get lost and discombobulated. I always say be the tortoise, not the hare—because you don't want to fly and die. You want pace and grace. Everyone will have a different pace. For some marathon runners, they can run a five-minute mile, some can run an eight-minute mile, some can run a twelve-minute mile. It's about finding the pace that works for you. Every one of us have different commitments. Every one of us have different ways we view the industry—some as a hobby, some as a business. So it's about honouring your needs, your commitment. Some of us, as you've had people on the podcast, some people are carers. They have to care. Some people are parents. Some people don't have those commitments and so can devote more time and then actually learn more, change more as a result. So again, it's about finding your groove, finding your rhythm, honouring that, and again, showing up consistently. Because motivation may get you started, but it's habit and discipline that sees you through. Keep that discipline, keep that pace and grace. Be consistent in what you can do. And know where you're at. Don't compare and despair, because again, if you look at someone else, they may be ahead of you, but the race is only with yourself in the end. So you've got to just focus on where you are at and am I in a better place than I was yesterday? Am I working on my business as well as in my business? How am I doing that? When am I doing that? And what am I doing that for? If you can be asking yourself those questions and making sure you're staying true to yourself and not burning out, making sure that you are honouring your other commitments, then I think you are going at the pace that feels right for you. Jo: Brilliant. Jo: Where can people find you and your books and everything you do online? Jack: Thank you so much for having me on, Joanna, today. You can find me on JackWilliamson.co.uk for all my nonfiction books and therapy work. Then for my fiction work, it is ABJackson.com, or ABJacksonAuthor on Instagram and TikTok. Jo: Well, thanks so much for your time, Jack. That was great. Jack: Thank you so much. The post Post-Traumatic Growth, Creative Marketing, And Dealing With Change with Jack Williamson first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How do you stay audacious in a world that's noisier and more saturated than ever? How might the idea of creative rhythm change the way you write? Lara Bianca Pilcher gives her tips from a multi-passionate creative career. In the intro, becoming a better writer by being a better reader [The Indy Author]; How indie authors can market literary fiction [Self-Publishing with ALLi]; Viktor Wynd’s Museum of Curiosities; Seneca’s On the Shortness of Life; All Men are Mortal – Simone de Beauvoir; Surface Detail — Iain M. Banks; Bones of the Deep – J.F. Penn. This episode is sponsored by Publisher Rocket, which will help you get your book in front of more Amazon readers so you can spend less time marketing and more time writing. I use Publisher Rocket for researching book titles, categories, and keywords — for new books and for updating my backlist. Check it out at www.PublisherRocket.com This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn  Lara Bianca Pilcher is the author of Audacious Artistry: Reclaim Your Creative Identity and Thrive in a Saturated World. She's also a performing artist and actor, life and creativity coach, and the host of the Healthy Wealthy Wise Artist podcast. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.  Show Notes Why self-doubt is a normal biological response — and how audacity means showing up anyway The difference between creative rhythm and rigid discipline, and why it matters for writers How to navigate a saturated world with intentional presence on social media Practical strategies for building a platform as a nonfiction author, including batch content creation The concept of a “parallel career” and why designing your life around your art beats waiting for a big break Getting your creative rhythm back after crisis or burnout through small, gentle steps You can find Lara at LaraBiancaPilcher.com. Transcript of the interview with Lara Bianca Pilcher Lara Bianca Pilcher is the author of Audacious Artistry: Reclaim Your Creative Identity and Thrive in a Saturated World. She's also a performing artist and actor, life and creativity coach, and the host of the Healthy Wealthy Wise Artist podcast. Welcome, Lara. Lara: Thank you for having me, Jo. Jo: It's exciting to talk to you today. First up— Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing. Lara: I'm going to call myself a greedy creative, because I started as a dancer, singer, and actress in musical theatre, which ultimately led me to London, the West End, and I was pursuing that in highly competitive performance circles. A lot of my future works come from that kind of place. But when I moved to America—which I did after my season in London and a little stint back in Australia, then to Atlanta, Georgia—I had a visa problem where I couldn't work legally, and it went on for about six months. Because I feel this urge to create, as so many of your listeners probably relate to, I was not okay with that. So that's actually where I started writing, in the quietness, with the limits and the restrictions. I've got two children and a husband, and they would go off to school and work and I'd be home thinking, ha. In that quietness, I just began to write. I love thinking of creativity as a mansion with many rooms, and you get to pick your rooms. I decided, okay, well the dance, acting, singing door is shut right now—I'm going to go into the writing room. So I did. Jo: I have had a few physical creatives on the show. Obviously one of your big rooms in your mansion is a physical room where you are actually performing and moving your body. I feel like this is something that those of us whose biggest area of creativity is writing really struggle with—the physical side. How do you think that physical practice of creativity has helped you in writing, which can be quite constrictive in that way? Lara: It's so good that you asked this because I feel what it trained me to do is ignore noise and show up. I don't like the word discipline—most of us get a bit uncomfortable with it, it's not a nice word. What being a dancer did was teach me the practice of what I like to call a rhythm, a creative rhythm, rather than a discipline, because rhythm ebbs and flows and works more with who we are as creatives, with the way creativity works in our body. That taught me: go to the barre over and over again—at the ballet barre, I'm talking about, not the pub. Go there over and over again. Warm up, do the work, show up when you don't feel like it. thaT naturally pivoted over to writing, so they're incredibly linked in the way that creativity works in our body. Jo: Do you find that you need to do physical practice still in order to get your creativity moving? I'm not a dancer. I do like to shake it around a bit, I guess. But I mainly walk. If I need to get my creativity going, I will walk. If people are stuck, do you think doing something physical is a good idea? Lara: It is, because the way that our body and our nervous system works—without going into too much boring science, although some people probably find it fascinating—is that when we shake off that lethargic feeling and we get blood flowing in our body, we naturally feel more awake. Often when you're walking or you're doing something like dance, your brain is not thinking about all of the big problems. You might be listening to music, taking in inspiration, taking in sunshine, taking in nature, getting those endorphins going, and that naturally leads to the brain being able to psychologically show up more as a creative. However, there are days, if I'm honest, where I wake up and the last thing I want to do is move. I want to be in a little blanket in the corner of the room with a hot cocoa or a coffee and just keep to myself. Those aren't always the most creative days, but sometimes I need that in my creative rhythm, and that's okay too. Jo: I agree. I don't like the word discipline, but as a dancer you certainly would've had to do that. I can't imagine how competitive it must be. I guess this is another thing about a career in dance or the physical arts. Does it age out? Is it really an ageist industry? Whereas I feel like with writing, it isn't so much about what your body can do anymore. Lara: That is true. There is a very real marketplace, a very real industry, and I'm careful because there's two sides to this coin. There is the fact that as we get older, our body has trouble keeping up at that level. There's more injuries, that sort of thing. There are some fit women performing in their sixties and seventies on Broadway that have been doing it for years, and they are fine. They'll probably say it's harder for some of them. Also, absolutely, I think there does feel in the professional sense like there can be a cap. A lot of casting in acting and in that world feels like there's fewer and fewer roles, particularly for women as we get older, but people are in that space all the time. There's a Broadway dancer I know who is 57, who's still trying to make it on Broadway and really open about that, and I think that's beautiful. So I'm careful with putting limits, because I think there are always outliers that step outside and go, “Hey, I'm not listening to that.” I think there's an audience for every age if you want there to be and you make the effort. But at the same time, yes, there is a reality in the industry. Totally. Jo: Obviously this show is not for dancers. I think it was more framing it as we are lucky in the writing industry, especially in the independent author community, because you can be any age. You can be writing on your deathbed. Most people don't have a clue what authors look like. Lara: I love that, actually. It's probably one of the reasons I maybe subconsciously went into writing, because I'm like, I want to still create and I'm getting older. It's fun. Jo: That's freeing. Lara: So freeing. It's a wonderful room in the mansion to stay in until the day I die, if I must put it that way. Jo: I also loved you mentioning that Broadway dancer. A lot of listeners write fiction—I write fiction as well as nonfiction—and it immediately makes me want to write her story. The story of a 57-year-old still trying to make it on Broadway. There's just so much in that story, and I feel like that's the other thing we can do: writing about the communities we come from, especially at different ages. Let's get into your book, Audacious Artistry. I want to start on this word audacity. You say audacity is the courage to take bold, intentional risks, even in the face of uncertainty. I read it and I was like, I love the sentiment, but I also know most authors are just full of self-doubt. Bold and audacious. These are difficult words. So what can you say to authors around those big words? Lara: Well, first of all, that self-doubt—a lot of us don't even know what it is in our body. We just feel it and go, ugh, and we read it as a lack of confidence. It's not that. It's actually natural. We all get it. What it is, is our body's natural ability to perceive threat and keep us safe. So we're like, oh, I don't know the outcome. Oh, I don't know if I'm going to get signed. Oh, I don't know if my work's going to matter. And we read that as self-doubt—”I don't have what it takes” and those sorts of things. That's where I say no. The reframe, as a coach, I would say, is that it's normal. Self-doubt is normal. Everyone has it. But audacity is saying, I have it, but I'm going to show up in the world anyway. There is this thing of believing, even in the doubt, that I have something to say. I like to think of it as a metaphor of a massive feasting table at Christmas, and there's heaps of different dishes. We get to bring a dish to the table rather than think we're going to bring the whole table. The audacity to say, “Hey, I have something to say and I'm going to put my dish on the table.” Jo: I feel like the “I have something to say” can also be really difficult for people, because, for example, you mentioned you have kids. Many people are like, I want to share this thing that happened to me with my kids, or a secret I learned, or a tip I think will help people. But there's so many people who've already done that before. When we feel like we have something to say but other people have said it before, how do you address that? Lara: I think everything I say, someone has already said, and I'm okay with that. But they haven't said it like me. They haven't said it in my exact way. They haven't written the sentence exactly the way—that's probably too narrow a point of view in terms of the sentence—maybe the story or the chapter. They haven't written it exactly like me, with my perspective, my point of view, my life experience, my lived experience. It matters. People have very short memories. You think of the last thing you watched on Netflix and most of us can't remember what happened. We'll watch the season again. So I think it's okay to be saying the same things as others, but recognise that the way you say it, your point of view, your stories, your metaphors, your incredible way of putting a sentence togethes, it still matters in that noise. Jo: I think you also talk in the book about rediscovering the joy of creation, as in you are doing it for you. One of the themes that I emphasise is the transformation that happens within you when you write a book. Forget all the people who might read it or not read it. Even just what transforms in you when you write is important enough to make it worthwhile. Lara: It really, really is. For me, talking about rediscovering the joy of creation is important because I've lost it at times in my career, both as a performing artist and as an author, in a different kind of way. When we get so caught up in the industry and the noise and the trends, it's easy to just feel overwhelmed. Overwhelm is made up of a lot of emotions like fear and sadness and grief and all sorts of things. A lot of us don't realise that that's what overwhelm is. When we start to go, “Hey, I'm losing my voice in all this noise because comparison is taking over and I'm feeling all that self-doubt,” it can feel just crazy. So for me, rediscovering the joy of creation is vital to survival as an author, as an artist. A classic example, if you don't mind me sharing my author story really quickly, is that when I first wrote the first version of my book, I was writing very much for me, not realising it. This is hindsight. My first version was a little more self-indulgent. I like to think of it like an arrowhead. I was trying to say too much. The concept was good enough that I got picked up by a literary agent and worked with an editor through that for an entire year. At the end of that time, they dropped me. I felt like, through that time, I learned a lot. It was wonderful. Their reason for dropping me was saying, “I don't think we have enough of a unique point of view to really sell this.” That was hard. I lay on my bed, stared at the ceiling, felt grief. The reality is it's so competitive. What happened for me in that year is that I was trying to please. If you're a new author, this is really important. You are so desperately trying to please the editor, trying to do all the right things, that you can easily lose your joy and your unique point of view because you are trying to show up for what you think they all need and want. What cut through the noise for me is I got off that bed after my three hours of grief—it was probably longer, to be fair—but I booked myself a writing coach. I went back to the drawing board. I threw a lot of the book away. I took some good concepts out that I already knew were good from the editor, then I rewrote the entire thing. It's completely different to the first version. That's the book that got a traditional publishing deal. That book was my unique point of view. That book was my belief, from that grief, that I still have something to say. Instead of trusting what the literary agent and the editor were giving me in those red marks all over that first version, I was like, this is what I want to say. That became the arrowhead that's cut into the industry, rather than the semi-trailer truck that I was trying to bulldoze in with no clear point of view. So rediscovering the joy of creation is very much about coming back to you. Why do I write? What do I want to say? That unique point of view will cut through the noise a lot of the time. I don't want to speak in absolutes, but a lot of the time it will cut through the noise better than you trying to please the industry. Jo: I can't remember who said it, but somebody talked about how you've got your stone, and your stone is rough and it has random colours and all this. Then you start polishing the stone, which you have to do to a point. But if you keep polishing the stone, it looks like every other stone. What's the point? That fits with what you were saying about trying to please everyone, you end up pleasing no one. I also think the reality of what you just said about the book is a lot of people's experience with writing in general. Certainly for me, I don't write in order. I chuck out a lot. I'm a discovery writer. People think you sit down and start A and finish Z, and that's it. It's kind of messy, isn't it? Was that the same in your physical creative life? Lara: Yes. Everything's a mess. In the book I actually talk about learning to embrace the cringe, because we all want to show up perfect. Just as you shared, we think, because we read perfect and look at perfect or near-perfect work—that's debatable all the time—we want to arrive there, and I guess that's natural. But what we don't often see on social media or other places is the mess. I love the behind the scenes of films. I want to see the messy creative process. The reality is we have to learn to embrace the messy cringe because that's completely normal. My first version was so messy, and it's about being able to refine it and recognise that that is normal. So yes, embrace it. That's my quote for the day. Embrace the cringe, show up messy. It's all right. Jo: You mentioned the social media, and the subtitle of the book mentions a “saturated world.” The other problem is there are millions of books out there now. AI is generating more content than humans do, and it is extremely hard to break through. How are we to deal with this saturated world? When do we join in and when do we step away? Lara: I think it's really important not to have black and white thinking about it, because trust me, every day I meet an artist that will say, “I hate that I have to show up online.” To be honest with you, there's a big part of me that does also. But the saturation of the world is something that I recognise, and for me, it's like I'm in the world but not of it. That saturation can cause so much overwhelm and nervous system threat and comparison. What I've personally decided to do is have intentional showing up. That looks like checking in intentionally with a design, not a randomness, and then checking out. When push comes to shove, at the end of the day, I really believe that what sells books is people's trust in us as a person. They might go through an airport and not know us at all and pick up the book because it's a bestseller and they just trust the reputation, but so much of what I'm finding as an artist is that personal relationship, that personal trust. Whether that's through people knowing you via your podcast or people meeting you in a room. Especially in nonfiction, I think that's really big. Intentional presence from a place where we've regulated ourselves, being aware that it's saturated, but my job's not to be focused on the saturation. My job is to find my unique voice and say I have something to bring. Be intentional with that. Shoot your arrow, and then step out of the noise, because it's just overwhelming if you choose to live there and scroll without any intentionality at all. Jo: So how do people do that intentionality in a practical way around, first of all, choosing a platform, and then secondly, how they create content and share content and engage? What are some actual practical tips for intentionality? Lara: I can only speak from my experience, but I'm going to be honest, every single application I sent asked for my platform stats. Every single one. Platform stats as in how many followers, how many people listening to your podcast, how many people are reading your blog. That came up in every single literary agent application. So I would be a fool today to say you've got to ignore that, because that's just the brass tacks, unless you're already like a famous footballer or something. Raising and building a platform of my own audience has been a part of why I was able to get a publishing deal. In doing that, I've learned a lot of hard lessons. Embrace the cringe with marketing and social media as well, because it's its own beast. Algorithms are not what I worry about. They're not going to do the creativity for you. What social media's great at is saying, “Hey, I'm here”—it's awareness. It's not where I sell stuff. It's where I say, I'm here, this is what I'm doing, and people become aware of me and I can build that relationship. People do sell through social media, but it's more about awareness statistically. I am on a lot of platforms, but not all of them work for every author or every style of book. I've done a lot of training. I've really had to upskill in this space and get good at it. I've put myself through courses because I feel like, yes, we can ignore it if we want to, but for me it's an intentional opting in because the data shows that it's been a big part of being able to get published. That's overwhelming to hear for some people. They don't want to hear that. But that's kind of the world that we are in, isn't it? Jo: I think the main point is that you can't do everything and you shouldn't even try to do everything. The best thing to do is pick a couple of things, or pick one thing, and focus on that. For example, I barely ever do video, so I definitely don't do TikTok. I don't do any kind of video stuff. But I have this podcast. Audio is my happy place, and as you said, long-form audio builds trust. That is one way you can sell, but it's also very slow—very, very slow to build an audio platform. Then I guess my main social media would be Instagram, but I don't engage a lot there. So do you have one or two main things that you do, and any thoughts on using those for book marketing? Lara: I do a lot of cross-posting. I am on Instagram and I do a lot of creation there, and I'm super intentional about this. I actually do 30 days at a time, and then it's like my intentional opt-in. I'll create over about two days, edit and plan. It's really, really planned—shoot everything, edit everything, put it all together, and then upload everything. That will be 30 days' worth. Then I back myself right out of there, because I don't want to stay in that space. I want to be in the creative space, but I do put those two days a month aside to do that on Instagram. Then I tweak things for YouTube and what works on LinkedIn, which is completely different to Instagram. As I'm designing my content, I have in mind that this one will go over here and this one can go on here, because different platforms push different things. I am on Threads, but Threads is not statistically where you sell books, it's just awareness. Pinterest I don't think has been very good for my type of work, to be honest. For others it might. It's a search engine, it's where people go to get a recipe. I don't necessarily feel like that's the best place, this is just my point of view. For someone else it might be brilliant if you're doing a cookbook or something like that. I am on a lot of platforms. My podcast, however, I feel is where I'm having the most success, and also my blog. Those things as a writer are very fulfilling. I've pushed growing a platform really hard, and I am on probably almost every platform except for TikTok, but I'm very intentional with each one. Jo: I guess the other thing is the business model. The fiction business model is very, very different to nonfiction. You've got a book, but your higher-cost and higher-value offerings are things that a certain number of people come through to you and pay you more money than the price of a book. Could talk about how the book leads into different parts of your business? Because some people are like, “Am I going to make a living wage from book sales of a nonfiction book?” And usually people have multiple streams of income. Lara: I think it's smart to have multiple streams of income. A lot of people, as you would know, would say that a book is a funnel. For those who haven't heard of it, a way that people come into your bigger offerings. They don't have to be, but very much I do see it that way. It's also credibility. When you have a published book, there's a sense of credibility. I do have other things. I have courses, I have coaching, I have a lot of things that I call my parallel career that chug alongside my artist work and actually help stabilise that freelance income. Having a book is brilliant for that. I think it's a wonderful way to get out there in the world. No matter what's happening in all the online stuff, when you're on an aeroplane, so often someone still wants to read a book. When you're on the beach, they don't want to be there with a laptop. If you're on the sand, you want to be reading a beautiful paper book. The smell of it, the visceral experience of it. Books aren't going anywhere, to me. I still feel like there are always going to be people that want to pick it up and dig in and learn so much of your entire life experience quickly. Jo: We all love books here. I think it's important, as you do talk about career design and you mentioned there the parallel career—I get a lot of questions from people. They may just be writing their first book and they want to get to the point of making money so they could leave their day job or whatever. But it takes time, doesn't it? So how can we be more strategic about this sort of career design? Lara: For me, this has been a big one because lived experience here is that I know artists in many different areas, whether they're Broadway performers or music artists. Some of them are on almost everything I watch on TV. I'm like, oh, they're that guy again. I know that actor is on almost everything. I'll apply this over to writers. The reality is that these high-end performers that I see all the time showing up, even on Broadway in lead roles, all have another thing that they do, because they can still have, even at the highest level, six months between a contract. Applying that over to writing is the same thing, in that books and the money from them will ebb and flow. What so often artists are taught—and authors fit into this—is that we ultimately want art to make us money. So often that becomes “may my art rescue me from this horrible life that I'm living,” and we don't design the life around the art. We hope, hope, hope that our art will provide. I think it's a beautiful hope and a valid one. Some people do get that. I'm all for hoping our art will be our main source of income. But the reality is for the majority of people, they have something else. What I see over and over again is these audacious dreams, which are wonderful, and everything pointing towards them in terms of work. But then I'll see the actor in Hollywood that has a café job and I'm like, how long are you going to just work at that café job? They're like, “Well, I'm goint to get a big break and then everything's going to change.” I think we can think the same way. My big break will come, I'll get the publishing deal, and then everything will change. The reframe in our thinking is: what if we looked at this differently? Instead of side hustle, fallback career, instead of “my day job,” we say parallel career. How do I design a life that supports my art? And if I get to live off my art, wonderful. For me, that's looked like teaching and directing musical theatre. It's looked like being able to coach other artists. It's looked like writing and being able to pivot my creativity in the seasons where I've needed to. All of that is still creativity and energising, and all of it feeds the great big passion I have to show up in the world as an artist. None of it is actually pulling me away or draining me. I mean, you have bad days, of course, but it's not draining my art. When we are in this way of thinking—one day, one day, one day—we are not designing intentionally. What does it look like to maybe upskill and train in something that would be more energising for my parallel career that will chug alongside us as an artist? We all hope our art can totally 100% provide for us, which is the dream and a wonderful dream, and one that I still have. Jo: It's hard, isn't it? Because I also think that, personally, I need a lot of input in order to create. I call myself more of a binge writer. I just finished the edits on my next novel and I worked really hard on that. Now I won't be writing fiction for, I don't know, maybe six months or something, because now I need to input for the next one. I have friends who will write 10,000 words a day because they don't need that. They have something internal, or they're just writing a different kind of book that doesn't need that. Your book is a result of years of experience, and you can't write another book like that every year. You just can't, because you don't have enough new stuff to put in a book like that every single year. I feel like that's the other thing. People don't anticipate the input time and the time it takes for the ideas to come together. It is not just the production of the book. Lara: That's completely true. It goes back to this metaphor that creativity in the body is not a machine, it's a rhythm. I like to say rhythm over consistency, which allows us to say, “Hey, I'm going to be all in.” I was all in on writing. I went into a vortex for days on end, weeks on end, months and probably years on end. But even within that, there were ebbs and flows of input versus “I can't go near it today.” Recognising that that's actually normal is fine. There are those people that are outliers, and they will be out of that box. A lot of people will push that as the only way. “I am going to write every morning at 10am regardless.” That can work for some people, and that's wonderful. For those of us who don't like that—and I'm one of those people, that's not me as an artist—I accept the rhythm of creativity and that sometimes I need to do something completely different to feed my soul. I'm a big believer that a lot of creative block is because we need an adventure. We need to go out and see some art. To do good art, you've got to see good art, read good art, get outside, do something else for the input so that we have the inspiration to get out of the block. I know a screenwriter who was writing a really hard scene of a daughter's death—her mum's death. It's not easy to just write that in your living room when you've never gone through it. So she took herself out—I mean, it sounds morbid, but as a writer you'll understand the visceral nature of this—and sat at somebody's tombstone that day and just let that inform her mind and her heart. She was able to write a really powerful scene because she got out of the house and allowed herself to do something different. All that to say that creativity, the natural process, is an in-and-out thing. It ebbs and flows as a rhythm. People are different, and that's fine. But it is a rhythm in the way it works scientifically in the body. Jo: On graveyards—we love graveyards around here. Lara: I was like, sorry everyone, this isn't very nice. Jo: Oh, no. People are well used to it on this show. Let's come back to rhythm. When you are in a good rhythm, or when your body's warmed up and you are in the flow and everything's great, that feels good. But what if some people listening have found their rhythm is broken in some way, or it's come to a stop? That can be a real problem, getting moving again if you stop for too long. What are some ways we can get that rhythm back into something that feels right again? Lara: First of all, for people going through that, it's because our body actually will prioritise survival when we're going through crisis or too much stress. Creativity in the brain will go, well, that's not in that survival nature. When we are going through change—like me moving countries—it would disconnect us a lot from not only ourselves and our sense of identity, but creativity ultimately reconnects you back into life. I feel like to be at our optimum creative self, once we get through the crisis and the stress, is to gently nudge ourselves back in by little micro things. Whether it's “I'm just going to have the rhythm of writing one sentence a day.” As we do that, those little baby steps build momentum and allow us to come back in. Creativity is a life force. It's not about production, it's actually how we get to any unique contribution we're going to bring to the world. As we start to nudge ourselves back in, there's healing in that and there's joy in that. Then momentum comes. I know momentum comes from those little steps, rather than the overwhelming “I've got to write a novel this week” mindset. It's not going to happen, most of the time, when we are nudging our way back in. Little baby steps, kindness with ourselves. Staying connected to yourself through change or through crisis is one of the kindest things we can offer ourselves, and allowing ourselves to come into that rhythm—like that musical song of coming back in with maybe one line of the song instead of the entire masterpiece, which hopefully it will be one day. Jo: I was also thinking of the dancing world again, and one thing that is very different with writers is that so much of what we do is alone. In a lot of the performance art space, there's a lot more collaboration and groups of people creating things together. Is that something you've kept hold of, this kind of collaborative energy? How do you think we can bring that collaborative energy more into writing? Lara: Writing is very much alone. Obviously some people, depending on the project, will write in groups, but generally speaking, it's alone. For me, what that looks like is going out. I do this, and I know for some writers this is like, I don't want to go and talk to people. There are a lot of introverts in writing, as you are aware. I do go to creative mixers. I do get out there. I'm planning right now my book launch with a local bookstore, one in Australia and one here in America. Those things are scary, but I know that it matters to say I'm not in this alone. I want to bring my friends in. I want to have others part of this journey. I want to say, hey, I did this. And of course, I want to sell books. That's important too. It's so easy to hide, because it's scary to get out there and be with others. Yet I know that after a creative mixer or a meetup with all different artists, no matter their discipline, I feel very energised by that. Writers will come, dancers will come, filmmakers will come. It's that creative force that really energises my work. Of course, you can always meet with other writers. There's one person I know that runs this thing where all they do is they all get on Zoom together and they all write. Their audio's off, but they're just writing. It's just the feeling of, we're all writing but we're doing it together. It's a discipline for them, but because there's a room of creatives all on Zoom, they're like, I'm here, I've showed up, there's others. There's a sense of accountability. I think that's beautiful. I personally don't want to work that way, but some people do, and I think that's gorgeous too. Jo: Whatever sustains you. I think one of the important things is to realise you are not alone. I get really confused when people say this now. They're like, “Writing's such a lonely life, how do you manage?” I'm like, it is so not lonely. Lara: Yes. Jo: I'm sure you do too. Especially as a podcaster, a lot of people want to have conversations. We are having a conversation today, so that fulfils my conversation quota for the day. Lara: Exactly. Real human connection. It matters. Jo: Exactly. So maybe there's a tip for people. I'm an introvert, so this actually does fulfil it. It's still one-on-one, it's still you and me one-on-one, which is good for introverts. But it's going out to a lot more people at some point who will listen in to our conversation. There are some ways to do this. It's really interesting hearing your thoughts. Tell people where they can find you and your books and your podcast online. Lara: The book is called Audacious Artistry: Reclaim Your Creative Identity and Thrive in a Saturated World, and it's everywhere. The easiest thing to do would be to visit my website, LaraBiancaPilcher.com/book, and you'll find all the links there. My podcast is called Healthy Wealthy Wise Artist, and it's on all the podcast platforms. I do short coaching for artists on a lot of the things we've been talking about today. Jo: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Lara. That was great. Lara: Thank you.The post Audacious Artistry: Reclaiming Your Creative Identity And Thriving In A Saturated World With Lara Bianca Pilcher first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How do you juggle multiple book projects, a university teaching role, Kickstarter campaigns, and rock albums—all without burning out? What does it take to build a writing career that spans decades, through industry upheavals and personal setbacks? Kevin J. Anderson shares hard-won lessons from his 40+ year career writing over 190 books. In the intro, Draft2Digital partners with Bookshop.org for ebooks; Spotify announces PageMatch and print partnership with Bookshop.org; Eleven Audiobooks; Indie author non-fiction books Kickstarter; Bones of the Deep – J.F. Penn This podcast is sponsored by Kobo Writing Life, which helps authors self-publish and reach readers in global markets through the Kobo eco-system. You can also subscribe to the Kobo Writing Life podcast for interviews with successful indie authors. This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn  Kevin J. Anderson is the multi-award-winning and internationally bestselling author of over 190 books across different genres, with over 24 million copies in print across 34 languages. He's also the director of publishing at Western Colorado University, as well as a publisher at WordFire Press, an editor and rock album lyricist, and he's co-written Dune books and worked on the recent Dune movies and TV show. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights, and the full transcript is below.  Show Notes Managing multiple projects at different stages to maximise productivity without burning out Building financial buffers and multiple income streams for a sustainable long-term career Adapting when life disrupts your creative process, from illness to injury Lessons learned from transitioning between traditional publishing, indie, and Kickstarter Why realistic expectations and continuously reinventing yourself are essential for longevity The hands-on publishing master's program at Western Colorado University You can find Kevin at WordFire.com and buy his books direct at WordFireShop.com. Transcript of Interview with Kevin J. Anderson Jo: Kevin J. Anderson is the multi award-winning and internationally bestselling author of over 190 books across different genres, with over 24 million copies in print across 34 languages. He's also the Director of Publishing at Western Colorado University, as well as a publisher at WordFire Press, an editor, a rock album lyricist, and he's co-written Dune books and worked on the recent Dune movies and TV show. Welcome back to the show, Kevin. Kevin: Well, thanks, Joanna. I always love being on the show. Jo: And we're probably on like 200 books and like 50 million copies in print. I mean, how hard is it to keep up with all that? Kevin: Well, it was one of those where we actually did have to do a list because my wife was like, we really should know the exact number. And I said, well, who can keep track because that one went out of print and that's an omnibus. So does it count as something else? Well, she counted them. But that was a while ago and I didn't keep track, so… Jo: Right. Kevin: I'm busy and I like to write. That's how I've had a long-term career. It's because I don't hate what I'm doing. I've got the best job in the world. I love it. Jo: So that is where I wanted to start. You've been on the show multiple times. People can go back and have a listen to some of the other things we've talked about. I did want to talk to you today about managing multiple priorities. You are a director of publishing at Western Colorado University. I am currently doing a full-time master's degree as well as writing a novel, doing this podcast, my Patreon, all the admin of running a business, and I feel like I'm busy. Then I look at what you do and I'm like, this is crazy. People listening are also busy. We're all busy, right. But I feel like it can't just be writing and one job—you do so much. So how do you manage your time, juggle priorities, your calendar, and all that? Kevin: I do it brilliantly. Is that the answer you want? I do it brilliantly. It is all different things. If I were just working on one project at a time, like, okay, I'm going to start a new novel today and I've got nothing else on my plate. Well, that would take me however long to do the research and the plot. I'm a full-on plotter outliner, so it would take me all the while to do—say it's a medieval fantasy set during the Crusades. Well, then I'd have to spend months reading about the Crusades and researching them and maybe doing some travel. Then get to the point where I know the characters enough that I can outline the book and then I start writing the book, and then I start editing the book, which is a part that I hate. I love doing the writing, I hate doing the editing. Then you edit a whole bunch. To me, there are parts of that that are like going to the dentist—I don't like it—and other parts of it are fun. So by having numerous different projects at different stages, all of which require different skill sets or different levels of intensity— I can be constantly switching from one thing to another and basically be working at a hundred percent capacity on everything all the time. And I love doing this. So I'll be maybe writing a presentation, which is what I was doing before we got on this call this morning, because I'm giving a new keynote presentation at Superstars, which is in a couple of weeks. That's another thing that was on our list—I helped run Superstars. I founded that 15 years ago and it's been going on. So I'll be giving that talk. Then we just started classes for my publishing grad students last week. So I'm running those classes, which meant I had to write all of the classes before they started, and I did that. I've got a Kickstarter that will launch in about a month. I'm getting the cover art for that new book and I've got to write up the Kickstarter campaign. And I have to write the book. I like to have the book at least drafted before I run a Kickstarter for it. So I'm working on that. A Kickstarter pre-launch page should be up a month before the Kickstarter launches, and the Kickstarter has to launch in early March, so that means early February I have to get the pre-launch page up. So there's all these dominoes. One thing has to go before the next thing can go. During the semester break between fall semester—we had about a month off—I had a book for Blackstone Publishing and Weird Tales Presents that I had to write, and I had plotted it and I thought if I don't get this written during the break, I'm going to get distracted and I won't finish it. So I just buckled down and I wrote the 80,000-word book during the month of break. This is like Little House on the Prairie with dinosaurs. It's an Amish community that wants to go to simpler times. So they go back to the Pleistocene era where they're setting up farms and the brontosaurus gets into the cornfield all the time. Jo: That sounds like a lot of fun. Kevin: That's fun. So with the grad students that I have every week, we do all kinds of lectures. Just to reassure people, I am not at all an academic. I could not stand my English classes where you had to write papers analysing this and that. My grad program is all hands-on, pragmatic. You actually learn how to be a publisher when you go through it. You learn how to design covers, you learn how to lay things out, you learn how to edit, you learn how to do fonts. One of the things that I do among the lectures every week or every other week, I just give them something that I call the real world updates. Like, okay, this is the stuff that I, Kevin, am working on in my real world career because the academic career isn't like the real world. So I just go listing about, oh, I designed these covers this week, and I wrote the draft of this dinosaur homestead book, and then I did two comic scripts, and then I had to edit two comic scripts. We just released my third rock album that's based on my fantasy trilogy. And I have to write a keynote speech for Superstars. And I was on Joanna Penn's podcast. And here's what I'm doing. Sometimes it's a little scary because I read it and I go, holy crap, I did a lot of stuff this week. Jo: So I manage everything on Google Calendar. Do you have systems for managing all this? Because you also have external publishers, you have actual dates when things actually have to happen. Do you manage that yourself or does Rebecca, your wife and business partner, do that? How do you manage your calendar? Kevin: Well, Rebecca does most of the business stuff, like right now we have to do a bunch of taxes stuff because it's the new year and things. She does that and I do the social interaction and the creating and the writing and stuff. My assistant Marie Whittaker, she's a big project management person and she's got all these apps on how to do project managing and all these sorts of things. She tried to teach me how to use these apps, but it takes so much time and organisation to fill the damn things out. So it's all in my head. I just sort of know what I have to do. I just put it together and work on it and just sort of know this thing happens next and this thing happens next. I guess one of the ways is when I was in college, I put myself through the university by being a waiter and a bartender. As a waiter and a bartender, you have to juggle a million different things at once. This guy wants a beer and that lady wants a martini, and that person needs to pay, and this person's dinner is up on the hot shelf so you've got to deliver it before it gets cold. It's like I learned how to do millions of things and keep them all organised, and that's the way it worked. And I've kept that as a skill all the way through and it has done me good, I think. Jo: I think that there is a difference between people's brains, right? So I'm pretty chaotic in terms of my creative process. I'm not a plotter like you. I'm pretty chaotic, basically. But I come across— Kevin: I've met you. Yes. Jo: I know. But I'm also extremely organised and I plan everything. That's part of, I think, being an introvert and part of dealing with the anxiety of the world is having a plan or a schedule. So I think the first thing to say to people listening is they don't have to be like you, and they don't have to be like me. It's kind of a personal thing. I guess one thing that goes beyond both of us is, earlier you said you basically work at a hundred percent capacity. So let's say there's somebody listening and they're like, well, I'm at a hundred percent capacity too, and it might be kids, it might be a day job, as well as writing and all that. And then something happens, right? You mentioned the real world. I seem to remember that you broke your leg or something. Kevin: Yes. Jo: And the world comes crashing down through all your plans, whether they're written or in your head. So how do you deal with a buffer of something happening, or you're sick, or Rebecca's sick, or the cat needs to go to the vet? Real life—how do you deal with that? Kevin: Well, that really does cause problems. We had, in fact, just recently—so I'm always working at, well, let's be realistic, like 95% of Kevin capacity. Well, my wife, who does some of the stuff here around the house and she does the business things, she just went through 15 days of the worst crippling migraine string that she's had in 30 years. So she was curled up in a foetal position on the bed for 15 days and she couldn't do any of her normal things. I mean, even unloading the dishwasher and stuff like that. So if I'm at 95% capacity and suddenly I have to pick up an extra 50%, that causes real problems. So I drink lots of coffee, and I get less sleep, and you try to bring in some help. I mean, we have Rebecca's assistant and the assistant has a 20-year-old daughter who came in to help us do some of the dishes and laundry and housework stuff. You mentioned before, it was a year ago. I always go out hiking and mountain climbing and that's where I write. I dictate. I have a digital recorder that I go off of, and that's how I'm so productive. I go out, I walk in the forest and I come home with 5,000 words done in a couple of hours, and I always do that. That's how I write. Well, I was out on a mountain and I fell off the mountain and I broke my ankle and had to limp a mile back to my car. So that sort of put a damper on me hiking. I had a book that I had to write and I couldn't go walking while I was dictating it. It has been a very long time since I had to sit at a keyboard and create chapters that way. Jo: Mm-hmm. Kevin: And my brain doesn't really work like that. It works in an audio—I speak this stuff instead. So I ended up training myself because I had a big boot on my foot. I would sit on the back porch and I would look out at the mountains here in Colorado and I would put my foot up on another chair and I'd sit in the lawn chair and I'd kind of close my eyes and I would dictate my chapters that way. It was not as effective, but it was plan B. So that's how I got it done. I did want to mention something. When I'm telling the students this every week—this is what I did and here's the million different things—one of the students just yesterday made a comment that she summarised what I'm doing and it kind of crystallised things for me. She said that to get so much done requires, and I'm quoting now, “a balance of planning, sprinting, and being flexible, while also making incremental forward progress to keep everything moving together.” So there's short-term projects like fires and emergencies that have to be done. You've got to keep moving forward on the novel, which is a long-term project, but that short story is due in a week. So I've got to spend some time doing that one. Like I said, this Kickstarter's coming up, so I have to put in the order for the cover art, because the cover art needs to be done so I can put it on the pre-launch page for the Kickstarter. It is a balance of the long-term projects and the short-term projects. And I'm a workaholic, I guess, and you are too. Jo: Yes. Kevin: You totally are. Yes. Jo: I get that you're a workaholic, but as you said before, you enjoy it too. So you enjoy doing all these things. It's just sometimes life just gets in the way, as you said. One of the other things that I think is interesting—so sometimes physical stuff gets in the way, but in your many decades now of the successful author business, there's also the business side. You've had massive success with some of your books, and I'm sure that some of them have just kind of shrivelled into nothing. There have been good years and bad years. So how do we, as people who want a long-term career, think about making sure we have a buffer in the business for bad years and then making the most of good years? Kevin: Well, that's one thing—to realise that if you're having a great year, you might not always have a great year. That's kind of like the rockstar mentality—I've got a big hit now, so I'm always going to have a big hit. So I buy mansions and jets, and then of course the next album flops. So when you do have a good year, you plan for the long term. You set money aside. You build up plan B and you do other things. I have long been a big advocate for making sure that you have multiple income streams. You don't just write romantic epic fantasies and that's all you do. That might be what makes your money now, but the reading taste could change next year. They might want something entirely different. So while one thing is really riding high, make sure that you're planting a bunch of other stuff, because that might be the thing that goes really, really well the next year. I made my big stuff back in the early nineties—that was when I started writing for Star Wars and X-Files, and that's when I had my New York Times bestselling run. I had 11 New York Times bestsellers in one year, and I was selling like millions of copies. Now, to be honest, when you have a Star Wars bestseller, George Lucas keeps almost all of that. You don't keep that much of it. But little bits add up when you're selling millions of copies. So it opened a lot of doors for me. So I kept writing my own books and I built up my own fans who liked the Star Wars books and they read some of my other things. If you were a bestselling trad author, you could keep writing the same kind of book and they would keep throwing big advances at you. It was great. And then that whole world changed and they stopped paying those big advances, and paperback, mass market paperback books just kind of went away. A lot of people probably remember that there was a time for almost every movie that came out, every big movie that came out, you could go into the store and buy a paperback book of it—whether it was an Avengers movie or a Star Trek movie or whatever, there was a paperback book. I did a bunch of those and that was really good work. They would pay me like $15,000 to take the script and turn it into a book, and it was done in three weeks. They don't do that anymore. I remember I was on a panel at some point, like, what would you tell your younger self? What advice would you give your younger self? I remember when I was in the nineties, I was turning down all kinds of stuff because I had too many book projects and I was never going to quit writing. I was a bestselling author, so I had it made. Well, never, ever assume you have it made because the world changes under you. They might not like what you're doing or publishing goes in a completely different direction. So I always try to keep my radar up and look at new things coming up. I still write some novels for trad publishers. This dinosaur homestead one is for Blackstone and Weird Tales. They're a trad publisher. I still publish all kinds of stuff as an indie for WordFire Press. I'm reissuing a bunch of my trad books that I got the rights back and now they're getting brand new life as I run Kickstarters. One of my favourite series is “Dan Shamble, Zombie P.I.” It's like the Addams Family meets The Naked Gun. It's very funny. It's a private detective who solves crimes with monsters and mummies and werewolves and things. I sold the first one to a trad publisher, and actually, they bought three. I said, okay, these are fast, they're fun, they're like 65,000 words. You laugh all the way through it, and you want the next one right away. So let's get these out like every six months, which is like lightning speed for trad publishing. They just didn't think that was a good idea. They brought them out a year and a half apart. It was impossible to build up momentum that way. They wanted to drop the series after the third book, and I just begged them—please give it one more chance. So they bought one more book for half as much money and they brought it out again a year and a half later. And also, it was a trad paperback at $15. And the ebook was—Joanna, can you guess what their ebook was priced at? Jo: $15. Kevin: $15. And they said, gee, your ebook sales are disappointing. I said, well, no, duh. I mean, I am jumping around—I'm going like, but you should have brought these out six months apart. You should have had the ebook, like the first one at $4. Jo: But you're still working with traditional publishers, Kevin? Kevin: I'm still working with them on some, and I'm a hybrid. There are some projects that I feel are better served as trad books, like the big Dune books and stuff. I want those all over the place and they can cash in on the movie momentum and stuff. But I got the rights back to the Dan Shamble stuff. The fans kept wanting me to do more, and so I published a couple of story collections and they did fine. But I was making way more money writing Dune books and things. Then they wanted a new novel. So I went, oh, okay. I did a new novel, which I just published at WordFire. But again, it did okay, but it wasn't great. I thought, well, I better just focus on writing these big ticket things. But I really liked writing Dan Shamble. Somebody suggested, well, if the fans want it so much, why don't you run a Kickstarter? I had never run a Kickstarter before, and I kind of had this wrong attitude. I thought Kickstarters were for, “I'm a starving author, please give me money.” And that's not it at all. It's like, hey, if you're a fan, why don't you join the VIP club and you get the books faster than anybody else? So I ran a Kickstarter for my first Dan Shamble book, and it made three times what the trad publisher was paying me. And I went, oh, I kind of like this model. So I have since done like four other Dan Shamble novels through Kickstarters, made way more money that way. And we just sold—we can't give any details yet—but we have just sold it. It will be a TV show. There's a European studio that is developing it as a TV show, and I'm writing the pilot and I will be the executive producer. Jo: Fantastic. Kevin: So I kept that zombie detective alive because I loved it so much. Jo: And it's going to be all over the place years later, I guess. Just in terms of—given I've been in this now, I guess 2008 really was when I got into indie—and over the time I've been doing this, I've seen people rise and then disappear. A lot of people have disappeared. There are reasons, burnout or maybe they were just done. Kevin: Yes. Jo: But in terms of the people that you've seen, the characteristics, I guess, of people who don't make it versus people who do make it for years. And we are not saying that everyone should be a writer for decades at all. Some people do just have maybe one or two books. What do you think are the characteristics of those people who do make it long-term? Kevin: Well, I think it's realistic expectations. Like, again, this was trad, but my first book I sold for $4,000, and I thought, well, that's just $4,000, but we're going to sell book club rights, and we're goingn to sell foreign rights, and it's going to be optioned for movies. And the $4,000 will be like, that's just the start. I was planning out all this extra money coming from it, and it didn't even earn its $4,000 advance back and nothing else happened with it. Well, it has since, because I've since reissued it myself, pushed it and I made more money that way. But it's a slow burn. You build your career. You start building your fan base and then your next one will sell maybe better than the first one did. Then you keep writing it, and then you make connections, and then you get more readers and you learn how to expand your stuff better. You've got to prepare for the long haul. I would suggest that if you publish your very first book on KU, don't quit your day job the next day. Not everybody can or should be a full-time writer. We here in America need to have something that pays our health insurance. That is one of the big reasons why I am running this graduate program at Western Colorado University—because as a university professor, I get wonderful healthcare. I'm teaching something that I love, and I'm frankly doing a very good job at it because our graduates—something like 60% of them are now working as writers or publishers or working in the publishing world. So that's another thing. I guess what I do when I'm working on it is I kind of always say yes to the stuff that's coming in. If an opportunity comes—hey, would you like a graphic novel on this?—and I go, yes, I'd love to do that. Could you write a short story for this anthology? Sure, I'd love to do that. I always say yes, and I get overloaded sometimes. But I learned my lesson. It was quite a few years ago where I was really busy. I had all kinds of book deadlines and I was turning down books that they were offering me. Again, this was trad—book contracts that had big advances on them. And anthology editors were asking me. I was really busy and everybody was nagging me—Kevin, you work too hard. And my wife Rebecca was saying, Kevin, you work too hard. So I thought, I had it made. I had all these bestsellers, everything was going on. So I thought, alright, I've got a lot of books under contract. I'll just take a sabbatical. I'll say no for a year. I'll just catch up. I'll finish all these things that I've got. I'll just take a breather and finish things. So for that year, anybody who asked me—hey, do you want to do this book project?—well, I'd love to, but I'm just saying no. And would you do this short story for an anthology? Well, I'd love to, but not right now. Thanks. And I just kind of put them off. So I had a year where I could catch up and catch my breath and finish the stuff. And after that, I went, okay, I am back in the game again. Let's start taking these book offers. And nothing. Just crickets. And I went, well, okay. Well, you were always asking before—where are all these book deals that you kept offering me? Oh, we gave them to somebody else. Jo: This is really difficult though, because on the one hand—well, first of all, it's difficult because I wanted to take a bit of a break. So I'm doing this full-time master's and you are also teaching people in a master's program, right. So I have had to say no to a lot of things in order to do this course. And I imagine the people on your course would have to do the same thing. There's a lot of rewards, but they're different rewards and it kind of represents almost a midlife pivot for many of us. So how do we balance that then—the stepping away with what might lead us into something new? I mean, obviously this is a big deal. I presume most of the people on your course, they're older like me. People have to give stuff up to do this kind of thing. So how do we manage saying yes and saying no? Kevin: Well, I hate to say this, but you just have to drink more coffee and work harder for that time. Yes, you can say no to some things. My thing was I kind of shut the door and I just said, I'm just going to take a break and I'm going to relax. I could have pushed my capacity and taken some things so that I wasn't completely off the game board. One of the things I talk about is to avoid burnout. If you want a long-term career, and if you're working at 120% of your capacity, then you're going to burn out. I actually want to mention something. Johnny B. Truant just has a new book out called The Artisan Author. I think you've had him on the show, have you? Jo: Yes, absolutely. Kevin: He says a whole bunch of the stuff in there that I've been saying for a long time. He's analysing these rapid release authors that are a book every three weeks. And they're writing every three weeks, every four weeks, and that's their business model. I'm just like, you can't do that for any length of time. I mean, I'm a prolific writer. I can't write that fast. That's a recipe for burnout, I think. I love everything that I'm doing, and even with this graduate program that I'm teaching, I love teaching it. I mean, I'm talking about subjects that I love, because I love publishing. I love writing. I love cover design. I love marketing. I love setting up your newsletters. I mean, this isn't like taking an engineering course for me. This is something that I really, really love doing. And quite honestly, it comes across with the students. They're all fired up too because they see how much I love doing it and they love doing it. One of the projects that they do—we get a grant from Draft2Digital every year for $5,000 so that we do an anthology, an original anthology that we pay professional rates for. So they put out their call for submissions. This year it was Into the Deep Dark Woods. And we commissioned a couple stories for it, but otherwise it was open to submissions. And because we're paying professional rates, they get a lot of submissions. I have 12 students in the program right now. They got 998 stories in that they had to read. Jo: Wow. Kevin: They were broken up into teams so they could go through it, but that's just overwhelming. They had to read, whatever that turns out to be, 50 stories a week that come in. Then they write the rejections, and then they argue over which ones they're going to accept, and then they send the contracts, and then they edit them. And they really love it. I guess that's the most important thing about a career—you've got to have an attitude that you love what you're doing. If you don't love this, please find a more stable career, because this is not something you would recommend for the faint of heart. Jo: Yes, indeed. I guess one of the other considerations, even if we love it, the industry can shift. Obviously you mentioned the nineties there—things were very different in the nineties in many, many ways. Especially, let's say, pre-internet times, and when trad pub was really the only way forward. But you mentioned the rapid release, the sort of book every month. Let's say we are now entering a time where AI is bringing positives and negatives in the same way that the internet brought positives and negatives. We're not going to talk about using it, but what is definitely happening is a change. Industry-wise—for example, people can do a book a day if they want to generate books. That is now possible. There are translations, you know. Our KDP dashboard in America, you have a button now to translate everything into Spanish if you want. You can do another button that makes it an audiobook. So we are definitely entering a time of challenge, but if you look back over your career, there have been many times of challenge. So is this time different? Or do you face the same challenges every time things shift? Kevin: It's always different. I've always had to take a breath and step back and then reinvent myself and come back as something else. One of the things with a long-term career is you can't have a long-term career being the hot new thing. You can start out that way—like, this is the brand new author and he gets a big boost as the best first novel or something like that—but that doesn't work for 20 years. I mean, you've got to do something else. If you're the sexy young actress, well, you don't have a 50-year career as the sexy young actress. One of the ones I'm loving right now is Linda Hamilton, who was the sexy young actress in Terminator, and then a little more mature in the TV show Beauty and the Beast, where she was this huge star. Then she's just come back now. I think she's in her mid-fifties. She's in Stranger Things and she was in Resident Alien and she's now this tough military lady who's getting parts all over the place. She's reinvented herself. So I like to say that for my career, I've crashed and burned and resurrected myself. You might as well call me the Doctor because I've just come back in so many different ways. You can't teach an old dog new tricks, but— If you want to stay around, no matter how old of a dog you are, you've got to learn new tricks. And you've got to keep learning, and you've got to keep trying new things. I started doing indie publishing probably around the time you did—2009, something like that. I was in one of these great positions where I was a trad author and I had a dozen books that I wrote that were all out of print. I got the rights back to them because back then they let books go out of print and they gave the rights back without a fight. So I suddenly found myself with like 12 titles that I could just put up. I went, oh, okay, let's try this. I was kind of blown away that that first novel that they paid me $4,000 for that never even earned it back—well, I just put it up on Kindle and within one year I made more than $4,000. I went, I like this, I've got to figure this out. That's how I launched WordFire Press. Then I learned how to do everything. I mean, back in those days, you could do a pretty clunky job and people would still buy it. Then I learned how to do it better. Jo: That time is gone. Kevin: Yes. I learned how to do it better, and then I learned how to market it. Then I learned how to do print on demand books. Then I learned how to do box sets and different kinds of marketing. I dove headfirst into my newsletter to build my fan base because I had all the Star Wars stuff and X-Files stuff and later it was the Dune stuff. I had this huge fan base, but I wanted that fan base to read the Kevin Anderson books, the Dan Shamble books and everything. The only way to get that is if you give them a personal touch to say, hey buddy, if you liked that one, try this one. And the way to do that is you have to have access to them. So I started doing social media stuff before most people were doing social media stuff. I killed it on MySpace. I can tell you that. I had a newsletter that we literally printed on paper and we stuck mailing labels on. It went out to 1,200 people that we put in the mailbox. Jo: Now you're doing that again with Kickstarter, I guess. But I guess for people listening, what are you learning now? How are you reinventing yourself now in this new phase we are entering? Kevin: Well, I guess the new thing that I'm doing now is expanding my Kickstarters into more. So last year, the biggest Kickstarter that I've ever had, I ran last year. It was this epic fantasy trilogy that I had trad published and I got the rights back. They had only published it in trade paperback. So, yes, I reissued the books in nice new hardcovers, but I also upped the game to do these fancy bespoke editions with leather embossed covers and end papers and tipped in ribbons and slip cases and all kinds of stuff and building that. I did three rock albums as companions to it, and just building that kind of fan base that will support that. Then I started a Patreon last year, which isn't as big as yours. I wish my Patreon would get bigger, but I'm pushing it and I'm still working on that. So it's trying new things. Because if I had really devoted myself and continued to keep my MySpace page up to date, I would be wasting my time. You have to figure out new things. Part of me is disappointed because I really liked in the nineties where they just kept throwing book contracts at me with big advances. And I wrote the book and sent it in and they did all the work. But that went away and I didn't want to go away. So I had to learn how to do it different. After a good extended career, one of the things you do is you pay it forward. I mentor a lot of writers and that evolved into me creating this master's program in publishing. I can gush about it because to my knowledge, it is the only master's degree that really focuses on indie publishing and new model publishing instead of just teaching you how to get a job as an assistant editor in Manhattan for one of the Big Five publishers. Jo: It's certainly a lot more practical than my master's in death. Kevin: Well, that's an acquired taste, I think. When they hired me to do this—and as I said earlier, I'm not an academic—and I said if I'm going to teach this, it's a one year program. They get done with it in one year. It's all online except for one week in person in the summer. They're going to learn how to do things. They're not going to get esoteric, analysing this poem for something. When they graduate from this program, they walk out with this anthology that they edited, that their name is on. The other project that they do is they reissue a really fancy, fine edition of some classic work, whether it's H.G. Wells or Jules Verne or something. They choose a book that they want to bring back and they do it all from start to finish. They come out of it—rather than just theoretical learning—they know how to do things. Surprise, I've been around in the business a long time, so I know everybody who works in the business. So the heads of publishing houses and the head of Draft2Digital or Audible—and we've got Blackstone Audio coming on in a couple weeks. We've got the head of Kickstarter coming on as guest speakers. I have all kinds of guest speakers. Joanna, I think you're coming on— Jo: I'm coming on as well, I think. Kevin: You're coming on as a guest speaker. It's just like they really get plugged in. I'm in my seventh cohort now and I just love doing it. The students love it and we've got a pretty high success rate. So there's your plug. We are open for applications now. It starts in July. And my own website is WordFire.com, and there's a section on there on the graduate program if anybody wants to take a look at it. Again, not everybody needs to have a master's degree to be an indie publisher, but there is something to be said for having all of this stuff put into an organised fashion so that you learn how to do all the things. It also gives you a resource and a support system so that they come out of it knowing a whole lot of people. Jo: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Kevin. That was great. Kevin: Thanks. It's a great show. The post Managing Multiple Projects And The Art of the Long-Term Author Career with Kevin J. Anderson first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How can indie authors raise their game through academic-style rigour? How might AI tools fit into a thoughtful research process without replacing the joy of discovery? Melissa Addey explores the intersection of scholarly discipline, creative writing, and the practical realities of building an author career. In the intro, mystery and thriller tropes [Wish I'd Known Then]; The differences between trad and indie in 2026 [Productive Indie Fiction Writer]; Five phases of an author business [Becca Syme]; Bones of the Deep – J.F. Penn; Today's show is sponsored by Bookfunnel, the essential tool for your author business. Whether it’s delivering your reader magnet, sending out advanced copies of your book, handing out ebooks at a conference, or fulfilling your digital sales to readers, BookFunnel does it all. Check it out at bookfunnel.com/thecreativepenn This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn  Melissa Addey is an award-winning historical fiction author with a PhD in creative writing from the University of Surrey. She was the Leverhulme Trust Writer in Residence at the British Library, and now works as campaigns lead for the Alliance of Independent Authors. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.  Show Notes Making the leap from a corporate career to full-time writing with a young family Why Melissa pursued a PhD in creative writing and how it fuelled her author business What indie authors can learn from academic rigour when researching historical fiction The problems with academic publishing—pricing, accessibility, and creative restrictions Organising research notes, avoiding accidental plagiarism, and knowing when to stop researching Using AI tools effectively as part of the research process without losing your unique voice You can find Melissa at MelissaAddey.com. Transcript of the interview with Melissa Addey JOANNA: Melissa Addey is an award-winning historical fiction author with a PhD in creative writing from the University of Surrey. She was the Leverhulme Trust Writer in Residence at the British Library, and now works as campaigns lead for the Alliance of Independent Authors. Welcome back to the show, Melissa. MELISSA: Hello. Thank you for having me. JOANNA: It's great to have you back. You were on almost a decade ago, in December 2016, talking about merchandising for authors. That is really a long time ago. So tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and self-publishing. MELISSA: I had a regular job in business and I was writing on the side. I did a couple of writing courses, and then I started trying to get published, and that took seven years of jumping through hoops. There didn't seem to be much progress. At some point, I very nearly had a small publisher, but we clashed over the cover because there was a really quite hideous suggestion that was not going to work. I think by that point I was really tired of jumping through hoops, really trying to play the game traditional publishing-wise. I just went, you know what? I've had enough now. I've done everything that was asked of me and it's still not working. I'll just go my own way. I think at the time that would've been 2015-ish. Suddenly, self-publishing was around more. I could see people and hear people talking about it, and I thought, okay, let's read everything there is to know about this. I had a little baby at the time and I would literally print off stuff during the day to read—probably loads of your stuff—and read it at two o'clock in the morning breastfeeding babies. Then I'd go, okay, I think I understand that bit now, I'll understand the next bit, and so on. So I got into self-publishing and I really, really enjoyed it. I've been doing it ever since. I'm now up to 20 books in the last 10 or 11 years. As you say, I did the creative writing PhD along the way, working with ALLi and doing workshops for others—mixing and matching lots of different things. I really enjoy it. JOANNA: You mentioned you had a job before in business. Are you full-time in all these roles that you're doing now, or do you still have that job? MELISSA: No, I'm full-time now. I only do writing-related things. I left that in 2015, so I took a jump. I was on maternity leave and I started applying for jobs to go back to, and I suddenly felt like, oh, I really don't want to. I want to do the writing. I thought, I've got about one year's worth of savings. I could try and do the jump. I remember saying to my husband, “Do you think it would be possible if I tried to do the jump? Would that be okay?” There was this very long pause while he thought about it. But the longer the pause went on, the more I was thinking, ooh, he didn't say no, that is out of the question, financially we can't do that. I thought, ooh, it's going to work. So I did the jump. JOANNA: That's great. I did something similar and took a massive pay cut and downsized and everything back in the day. Having a supportive partner is so important. The other thing I did—and I wonder if you did too—I said to Jonathan, my husband, if within a year this is not going in a positive direction, then I'll get another job. How long did you think you would leave it before you just gave up? And how did that go? Because that beginning is so difficult, especially with a new baby. MELISSA: I thought, well, I'm at home anyway, so I do have more time than if I was in a full-time job. The baby sleeps sometimes—if you're lucky—so there are little gaps where you could really get into it. I had a year of savings/maternity pay going on, so I thought I've got a year. And the funny thing that happened was within a few months, I went back to my husband and I was like, I don't understand. I said, all these doors are opening—they weren't massive, but they were doors opening. I said, but I've wanted to be a writer for a long time and none of these doors have opened before. He said, “Well, it's because you really committed. It's because you jumped. And when you jump, sometimes the universe is on board and goes, yes, all right then, and opens some doors for you.” It really felt like that. Even little things—like Mslexia (a writing magazine) gave me a little slot to do an online writer-in-residence thing. Just little doors opened that felt like you were getting a nod, like, yes, come on then, try. Then the PhD was part of that. I applied to do that and it came with a studentship, which meant I had three years of funding coming in. That was one of the biggest creative gifts that's ever been given to me—three years of knowing you've got enough money coming in that you can just try and make it work. By the time that finished, the royalties had taken over from the studentship. That was such a gift. JOANNA: A couple of things there. I've got to ask about that funding. You're saying it was a gift, but that money didn't just magically appear. You worked really hard to get that funding, I presume. MELISSA: I did, yes. You do have to do the work for it, just to be clear. My sister had done a PhD in an entirely different subject. She said, “You should do a PhD in creative writing.” I said, “That'd be ridiculous. Nobody is going to fund that. Who's going to fund that?” She said, “Oh, they might. Try.” So I tried, and the deadline was something stupid like two weeks away. I tried and I got shortlisted, but I didn't get it. I thought, ah, but I got shortlisted with only two weeks to try. I'll try again next year then. So then I tried again the next year and that's when I got it. It does take work. You have to put in quite a lot of effort to make your case. But it's a very joyful thing if you get one. JOANNA: So let's go to the bigger question: why do a PhD in creative writing? Let's be clear to everyone—you don't need even a bachelor's degree to be a successful author. Stephen King is a great example of someone who isn't particularly educated in terms of degrees. He talks about writing his first book while working at a laundry. You can be very successful with no formal education. So why did you want to do a PhD? What drew you to academic research? MELISSA: Absolutely. I would briefly say, I often meet people who feel they must do a qualification before they're allowed to write. I say, do it if you'd like to, but you don't have to. You could just practise the writing. I fully agree with that. It was a combination of things. I do actually like studying. I do actually enjoy the research—that's why I do historical research. I like that kind of work. So that's one element. Another element was the funding. I thought, if I get that funding, I've got three years to build up a back catalogue of books, to build up the writing. It will give me more time. So that was a very practical financial issue. Also, children. My children were very little. I had a three-year-old and a baby, and everybody went, “Are you insane? Doing a PhD with a three-year-old and a baby?” But the thing about three-year-olds and babies is they're quite intellectually boring. Emotionally, very engaging—on a number of levels, good, bad, whatever—but they're not very intellectually stimulating. You're at home all day with two small children who think that hide and seek is the highlight of intellectual difficulty because they've hidden behind the curtains and they're shuffling and giggling. I felt I needed something else. I needed something for me that would be interesting. I've always enjoyed passing on knowledge. I've always enjoyed teaching people, workshops, in whatever field I was in. I thought, if I want to do that for writing at some point, it will sound more important if I've done a PhD. Not that you need that to explain how to do writing to someone if you do a lot of writing. But there were all these different elements that came together. JOANNA: So to summarise: you enjoy the research, it's an intellectual challenge, you've got the funding, and there is something around authority. In terms of a PhD—and just for listeners, I'm doing a master's at the moment in death, religion, and culture. MELISSA: Your topic sounds fascinating. JOANNA: It is interesting because, same as you, I enjoy research. Both of us love research as part of our fiction process and our nonfiction. I'm also enjoying the intellectual challenge, and I've also considered this idea of authority in an age of AI when it is increasingly easy to generate books—let's just say it, it's easy to generate books. So I was like, well, how do I look at this in a more authoritative way? I wanted to talk to you because even just a few months back into it—and I haven't done an academic qualification for like two decades—it struck me that the academic rigour is so different. What lessons can indie authors learn from this kind of academic rigour? What do you think of in terms of the rigour and what can we learn? MELISSA: I think there are a number of things. First of all, really making sure that you are going to the quality sources for things—the original sources, the high-quality versions of things. Not secondhand, but going back to those primary sources. Not “somebody said that somebody said something.” Well, let's go back to the original. Have a look at that, because you get a lot from that. I think you immerse yourself more deeply. Someone can tell you, “This is how they spoke in the 1800s.” If you go and read something that was written in the 1800s, you get a better sense of that than just reading a dictionary of slang that's been collated for you by somebody else. So I think that immerses you more deeply. Really sticking with that till you've found interesting things that spark creativity in you. I've seen people say, “I used to do all the historical research. Nowadays I just fact-check. I write what I want to write and I fact-check.” I think, well, that's okay, but you won't find the weird little things. I tend to call it “the footnotes of history.” You won't find the weird little things that really make something come alive, that really make a time and a place come alive. I've got a scene in one of my Regency romances—which actually I think are less full of historical emphasis than some of my other work—where a man gives a woman a gift. It's supposed to be a romantic gift and maybe slightly sensual. He could have given her a fan and I could have fact-checked and gone, “Are there fans? Yes, there are fans. Do they have pretty romantic poems on them? Yes, they do. Okay, that'll do.” Actually, if you go round and do more research than that, you discover they had things like ribbons that held up your stockings, on which they wrote quite smutty things in embroidery. That's a much more sexy and interesting gift to give in that scene. But you don't find that unless you go doing a bit of research. If I just fact-check, I'm not going to find that because it would never have occurred to me to fact-check it in the first place. JOANNA: I totally agree with you. One of the wonderful things about research—and I also like going to places—is you might be somewhere and see something that gives you an idea you never, ever would have found in a book or any other way. I used to call it “the serendipity of the stacks” in the physical library. You go looking for a particular book and then you're in that part of the shelf and you find several other books that you never would have looked for. I think it's encouraging people, as you're saying, but I also think you have to love it. MELISSA: Yes. I think some people find it a bit of a grind, or they're frightened by it and they think, “Have I done enough?” JOANNA: Mm-hmm. MELISSA: I get asked that a lot when I talk about writing historical fiction. People go, “But when do I stop? How do I know it's enough? How do I know there wasn't another book that would have been the book? Everyone will go, ‘Oh, how did you not read such-and-such?'” I always say there are two ways of finding out when you can stop. One is when you get to the bibliographies, you look through and you go, “Yep, read that, read that, read that. Nah, I know that one's not really what I wanted.” You're familiar with those bibliographies in a way that at the beginning you're not. At the beginning, every single bibliography, you haven't read any of it. So that's quite a good way of knowing when to stop. The other way is: can you write ordinary, everyday life? I don't start writing a book till I can write everyday life in that historical era without notes. I will obviously have notes if I'm doing a wedding or a funeral or a really specific battle or something. Everyday life, I need to be able to just write that out of my own head. You need to be confident enough to do that. JOANNA: One of the other problems I've heard from academics—people who've really come out of academia and want to write something more pop, even if it's pop nonfiction or fiction—they're also really struggling. It is a different game, isn't it? For people who might be immersed in academia, how can they release themselves into doing something like self-publishing? Because there's still a lot of stigma within academia. MELISSA: You're going to get me on the academic publishing rant now. I think academic publishing is horrendous. Academics are very badly treated. I know quite a lot of academics and they have to do all the work. Nobody's helping them with indexing or anything like that. The publisher will say things like, “Well, could you just cut 10,000 words out of that?” Just because of size. Out of somebody's argument that they're making over a whole work. No consideration for that. The royalties are basically zilch. I've seen people's royalty statements come in, and the way they price the books is insane. They'll price a book at 70 pounds. I actually want that book for my research and I'm hesitating because I can't be buying all of them at that price. That's ridiculous. I've got people who are friends or family who bring out a book, and I'm like, well, I would gladly buy your book and read it. It's priced crazy. It's priced only for institutions. I think actually, if academia was written a little more clearly and open to the lay person—which if you are good at your work, you should be able to do—and priced a bit more in line with other books, that would maybe open up people to reading more academia. You wouldn't have to make it “pop” as you say. I quite like pop nonfiction. But I don't think there would have to be such a gulf between those two. I think you could make academic work more readable generally. I read someone's thesis recently and they'd made a point at the beginning of saying—I can't remember who it was—that so-and-so academic's point of view was that it should be readable and they should be writing accordingly. I thought, wow, I really admired her for doing that. Next time I'm doing something like that, I should be putting that at the front as well. But the fact that she had to explain that at the beginning… It wasn't like words of one syllable throughout the whole thing. I thought it was a very quality piece of writing, but it was perfectly readable to someone who didn't know about the topic. JOANNA: I might have to get that name from you because I've got an essay on the Philosophy of Death. And as you can imagine, there's a heck of a lot of big words. MELISSA: I know. I've done a PhD, but I still used to tense up a little bit thinking they're going to pounce on me. They're going to say that I didn't talk academic enough, I didn't sound fancy enough. That's not what it should be about, really. In a way, you are locking people out of knowledge, and given that most academics are paid for by public funds, that knowledge really ought to be a little more publicly accessible. JOANNA: I agree on the book price. I'm also buying books for my course that aren't in the library. Some of them might be 70 pounds for the ebook, let alone the print book. What that means is that I end up looking for secondhand books, when of course the money doesn't go to the author or the publisher. The other thing that happens is it encourages piracy. There are people who openly talk about using pirate sites for academic works because it's just too expensive. If I'm buying 20 books for my home library, I can't be spending that kind of money. Why is it so bad? Why is it not being reinvented, especially as we have done with indie authors for the wider genres? Has this at all moved into academia? MELISSA: I think within academia there's a fear because there's the peer reviews and it must be proven to be absolutely correct and agreed upon by everybody. I get that. You don't want some complete rubbish in there. I do think there's space to come up with a different system where you could say, “So-and-so is professor of whatever at such-and-such a university. I imagine what they have to say might be interesting and well-researched.” You could have some sort of kite mark. You could have something that then allows for self-publishing to take over a bit. I do just think their system is really, really poor. They get really reined in on what they're allowed to write about. Alison Baverstock, who is a professor now at Kingston University and does stuff about publishing and master's programmes, started writing about self-publishing because she thought it was really interesting. This was way back. JOANNA: I remember. I did one of those surveys. MELISSA: She got told in no uncertain terms, “Do not write about this. You will ruin your career.” She stuck with it. She was right to stick with it. But she was told by senior academics, “Do not write about self-publishing. You're just embarrassing yourself. It's just vanity press.” They weren't even being allowed to write about really quite interesting phenomena that were happening. Just from a historical point of view, that was a really interesting rise of self-publishing, and she was being told not to write about it. JOANNA: It's funny, that delay as well. I'm looking to maybe do my thesis on how AI is impacting death and the death industry. And yet it's such a fast-moving thing. MELISSA: Yes. JOANNA: Sometimes it can take a year, two years or more to get a paper through the process. MELISSA: Oh, yes. It moves really, really fast. Like you say, by the time it comes out, people are going, “Huh? That's really old.” And you'll be going, “No, it's literally two years.” But yes, very, very slow. JOANNA: Let's come back to how we can help other people who might not want to be doing academic-level stuff. One of the things I've found is organising notes, sources, references. How do you manage that? Any tips for people? They might not need to do footnotes for their historical novel, but they might want to organise their research. What are your thoughts? MELISSA: I used to do great big enormous box files and print vast quantities of stuff. Each box file would be labelled according to servant life, or food, or seasons, or whatever. I've tried various different things. I'm moving more and more now towards a combination of books on the shelf, which I do like, and papers and other materials that are stored on my computer. They'll be classified according to different parts of daily life, essentially. Because when you write historical fiction, you have to basically build the whole world again for that era. You have to have everything that happens in daily life, everything that happens on special events, all of those things. So I'll have it organised by those sorts of topics. I'll read it and go through it until I'm comfortable with daily life. Then special things—I'll have special notes on that that can talk me through how you run a funeral or a wedding or whatever, because that's quite complicated to just remember in your head. MELISSA: I always do historical notes at the end. They really matter to me. When I read historical fiction, I really like to read that from the author. I'll say, “Right, these things are true”—especially things that I think people will go, “She made that up. That is not true.” I'll go, “No, no, these are true.” These other things I've fudged a little, or I've moved the timeline a bit to make the story work better. I try to be fairly clear about what I did to make it into a story, but also what is accurate, because I want people to get excited about that timeline. Occasionally if there's been a book that was really important, I'll mention it in there because I don't want to have a proper bibliography, but I do want to highlight certain books. If you got excited by this novel, you could go off and read that book and it would take you into the nonfiction side of it. JOANNA: I'm similar with my author's notes. I've just done the author's note for Bones of the Deep, which has some merfolk in it, and I've got a book on Merpeople. It's awesome. It's just a brilliant book. I'm like, this has to go in. You could question whether that is really nonfiction or something else. But I think that's really important. Just to be more practical: when you're actually writing, what tools do you use? I use Scrivener and I keep all my research there. I'm using EndNote for academic stuff. MELISSA: I've always just stuck to Word. I did get Scrivener and played with it for a while, but I felt like I've already got a way of doing it, so I'll just carry on with that. So I mostly just do Word. I have a lot of notes, so I'll have notepads that have got my notes on specific things, and they'll have page numbers that go back to specific books in case I need to go and double-check that again. You mentioned citations, and that's fascinating to me. Do you know the story about Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner? It won the Pulitzer. It's a novel, but he used 10% of that novel—and it's a fairly slim novel—10% of it is actually letters written by somebody else, written by a woman before his time. He includes those and works with them in the story. He mentioned her very briefly, like, “Oh, and thanks to the relatives of so-and-so.” Very brief. He got accused of plagiarism for using that much of it by another part of her family who hadn't agreed to it. I've always thought it's because he didn't give enough credence to her. He didn't give her enough importance. If he'd said, “This was the woman who wrote this stuff. It's fascinating. I loved it. I wanted to creatively respond and engage with it”—I think that wouldn't have happened at all. That's why I think it's quite important when there are really big, important elements that you're using to acknowledge those. JOANNA: That's part of the academic rigour too— You can barely have a few of your own thoughts without referring to somebody else's work and crediting them. What's so interesting to me in the research process is, okay, I think this, but in order to say it, I'm going to have to go find someone else who thought this first and wrote a paper on it. MELISSA: I think you would love a PhD. When you've done a master's, go and do a PhD as well. Because it was the first time in academia that I genuinely felt I was allowed my own thoughts and to invent stuff of my own. I could go, “Oh no, I've invented this theory and it's this.” I didn't have to constantly go, “As somebody else said, as somebody else said.” I was like, no, no. This is me. I said this thing. I wasn't allowed to in my master's, and I found it annoying. I remember thinking, but I'm trying to have original thoughts here. I'm trying to bring something new to it. In a PhD, you're allowed to do that because you're supposed to be contributing to knowledge. You're supposed to be bringing a new thing into the world. That was a glorious thing to finally be allowed to do. JOANNA: I must say I couldn't help myself with that. I've definitely put my own opinion. But a part of why I mention it is the academic rigour—it's actually quite good practice to see who else has had these thoughts before. Speed is one of the biggest issues in the indie author community. Some of the stuff you were talking about—finding original sources, going to primary sources, the top-quality stuff, finding the weird little things—all of that takes more time than, for example, just running a deep research report on Gemini or Claude or ChatGPT. You can do both. You can use that as a starting point, which I definitely do. But then the point is to go back and read the original stuff. On this timeframe— Why do you think research is worth doing? It's important for academic reasons, but personal growth as well. MELISSA: Yes, I think there's a joy to be had in the research. When I go and stand in a location, by that point I'm not measuring things and taking photos—I've done all of that online. I'm literally standing there feeling what it is to be there. What does it smell like? What does it feel like? Does it feel very enclosed or very open? Is it a peaceful place or a horrible place? That sensory research becomes very important. All of the book research before that should lead you into the sensory research, which is then also a joy to do. There's great pleasure in it. As you say, it slows things down. What I tend to say to people if they want to speed things up again is: write in a series. Because once you've done all of that research and you just write one book and then walk away, that's a lot. That really slows you down. If you then go, “Okay, well now I'm going to write four books, five books, six books, still in that place and time”—obviously each book will need a little more research, but it won't need that level of starting-from-scratch research. That can help in terms of speeding it back up again. Recently I wrote some Regency romances to see what that was like. I'd done all my basic research, and then I thought, right, now I want to write a historical novel which could have been Victorian or could have been Regency. It had an openness to it. I thought, well, I've just done all the research for Regency, so I'll stick with that era. Why go and do a whole other piece of research when I've only written three books in it so far? I'll just take that era and work with that. So there are places to make up the time again a bit. But I do think there's a joy in it as well. JOANNA: I just want to come back to the plagiarism thing. I discovered that you can plagiarise yourself in academia, which is quite interesting. For example, my books How to Write a Novel and How to Write Nonfiction—they're aimed at different audiences. They have lots of chapters that are different, but there's a chapter on dictation. I thought, why would I need to write the same chapter again? I'm just going to put the same chapter in. It's the same process. Then I only recently learned that you can plagiarise yourself. I did not credit myself for that original chapter. MELISSA: How dare you not credit yourself! JOANNA: But can you talk a bit about that? Where are the lines here? I'm never going to credit myself. I think that's frankly ridiculous. MELISSA: No, that's silly. I mean, it depends what you're doing. In your case, that completely makes sense. It would be really peculiar of you to sit down and write a whole new chapter desperately trying not to copy what you'd said in a chapter about exactly the same topic. That doesn't make any sense. JOANNA: I guess more in the wider sense. Earlier you mentioned you keep notes and you put page numbers by them. I think the point is with research, a lot of people worry about accidental plagiarism. You write a load of notes on a book and then it just goes into your brain. Perhaps you didn't quote people properly. It's definitely more of an issue in nonfiction. You have to keep really careful notes. Sometimes I'm copying out a quote and I'll just naturally maybe rewrite that quote because the way they've put it didn't make sense, or I use a contraction or something. It's just the care in note-taking and then citing people. MELISSA: Yes. When I talk to people about nonfiction, I always say, you're basically joining a conversation. I mean, you are in fiction as well, but not as obviously. I say, well, why don't you read the conversation first? Find out what the conversation is in your area at the moment, and then what is it that you're bringing that's different? The most likely reason for you to end up writing something similar to someone else is that you haven't understood what the conversation was, and you need to be bringing your own thing to it. Then even if you're talking about the same topic, you might talk about it in a different way, and that takes you away from plagiarism because you're bringing your own view to it and your own direction to it. JOANNA: It's an interesting one. I think it's just the care. Taking more care is what I would like people to do. So let's talk about AI because AI tools can be incredible. I do deep research reports with Gemini and Claude and ChatGPT as a sort of “give me an overview and tell me some good places to start.” The university I'm with has a very hard line, which is: AI can be used as part of a research process, but not for writing. What are your thoughts on AI usage and tools? How can people balance that? MELISSA: Well, I'm very much a newbie compared to you. I follow you—the only person that describes how to use it with any sense at all, step by step. I'm very new to it, but I'm going to go back to the olden days. Sometimes I say to people, when I'm talking about how I do historical research, I start with Wikipedia. They look horrified. I'm like, no. That's where you have to get the overview from. I want an overview of how you dress in ancient Rome. I need a quick snapshot of that. Then I can go off and figure out the details of that more accurately and with more detail. I think AI is probably extremely good for that—getting the big picture of something and going, okay, this is what the field's looking like at the moment. These are the areas I'm going to need to burrow down into. It's doing that work for you quickly so that you're then in a position to pick up from that point. It gets you off to a quicker start and perhaps points you in the direction of the right people to start with. I'm trying to write a PhD proposal at the moment because I'm an idiot and want to do a second one. With that, I really did think, actually, AI should write this. Because the original concept is mine. I know nothing about it—why would I know anything about it? I haven't started researching it. This is where AI should go, “Well, in this field, there are these people. They've done these things.” Then you could quickly check that nobody's covered your thing. It would actually speed up all of that bit, which I think would be perfectly reasonable because you don't know anything about it yet. You're not an expert. You have the original idea, and then after that, then you should go off and do your own research and the in-depth quality of it. I think for a lot of things that waste authors' time—if you're applying for a grant or a writer-in-residence or things like that—it's a lot of time wasting filling in long, boring forms. “Could you make an artist statement and a something and a blah?” You're like, yes, yes, I could spend all day at my desk doing that. There's a moment where you start thinking, could you not just allow the AI to do this or much of it? JOANNA: Yes. Or at least, in that case, I'd say one of the very useful things is doing deep searches. As you were mentioning earlier about getting the funding—if I was to consider a PhD, which the thought has crossed my mind—I would use AI tools to do searches for potential sources of funding and that kind of research. In fact, I found this course at Winchester because I asked ChatGPT. It knows a lot about me because I chat with it all the time. I was talking about hitting 50 and these are the things I'm really interested in and what courses might interest me. Then it found it for me. That was quite amazing in itself. I'd encourage people to consider using it for part of the research process. But then all the papers it cites or whatever—then you have to go download those, go read them, do that work yourself. MELISSA: Yes, because that's when you bring your viewpoint to something. You and I could read the exact same paper and choose very different parts of it to write about and think about, because we're coming at it from different points of view and different journeys that we're trying to explore. That's where you need the individual to come in. It wouldn't be good enough to just have a generic overview from AI that we both try and slot into our work, because we would want something different from it. JOANNA: I kind of laugh when people say, “Oh, I can tell when it's AI.” I'm like, you might be able to tell when it's AI writing if nobody has taken that personal spin, but that's not the way we use it. If you're using it that way, that's not how those of us who are independent thinkers are using it. We're strong enough in our thoughts that we're using it as a tool. You're a confident person—intellectually and creatively confident—but I feel like some people maybe don't have that. Some people are not strong enough to resist what an AI might suggest. Any thoughts on that? MELISSA: Yes. When I first tried using AI with very little guidance from anyone, it just felt easy but very wooden and not very related to me. Then I've done webinars with you, and that was really useful—to watch somebody actually live doing the batting back and forth. That became a lot more interesting because I really like bouncing ideas and messing around with things and brainstorming, essentially, but with somebody else involved that's batting stuff back to you. “What does that look like?” “No, I didn't mean that at all.” “How about what does this look like?” “Oh no, no, not like that.” “Oh yes, a bit like that, but a bit more like whatever.” I remember doing that and talking to someone about it, going, “Oh, that's really quite an interesting use of it.” And they said, “Why don't you use a person?” I said, “Well, because who am I going to call at 8:30 in the morning on a Thursday and go, ‘Look, I want to spend two hours batting back and forth ideas, but I don't want you to talk about your stuff at all. Just my stuff. And you have to only think about my stuff for two hours. And you have to be very well versed in my stuff as well. Could you just do that?'” Who's going to do that for you? JOANNA: I totally agree with you. Before Christmas, I was doing a paper. It was an art history thing. We had to pick a piece of art or writing and talk about Christian ideas of hell and how it emerged. I was writing this essay and going back and forth with Claude at the time. My husband came in and saw the fresco I was writing about. He said, “No one's going to talk to you about this. Nobody.” MELISSA: Yes, exactly. JOANNA: Nobody cares. MELISSA: Exactly. Nobody cares as much as you. And they're not prepared to do that at 8:30 on a Thursday morning. They've got other stuff to do. JOANNA: It's great to hear because I feel like we're now at the point where these tools are genuinely super useful for independent work. I hope that more people might try that. JOANNA: Okay, we're almost out of time. Where can people find you and your books online? Also, tell us a bit about the types of books you have. MELISSA: I mostly write historical fiction. As I say, I've wandered my way through history—I'm a travelling minstrel. I've done ancient Rome, medieval Morocco, 18th century China, and I'm into Regency England now. So that's a bit closer to home for once. I'm at MelissaAddey.com and you can go and have a bit of a browse and download a free novel if you want. Try me out. JOANNA: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Melissa. MELISSA: That was great. Thank you. It was fun. The post Research Like An Academic, Write Like an Indie With Melissa Addey first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Could live selling be the next big opportunity for indie authors? Adam Beswick shares how organic marketing, live streaming, and direct sales are transforming his author career—and how other writers can do the same. In the intro, book marketing principles [Self-Publishing with ALLi]; Interview with Tobi Lutke, the CEO and co-founder of Shopify [David Senra]; The Writer's Mind Survey; Bones of the Deep – J.F. Penn; Alliance of Independent Authors Indie Author Lab. Today's show is sponsored by ProWritingAid, writing and editing software that goes way beyond just grammar and typo checking. With its detailed reports on how to improve your writing and integration with writing software, ProWritingAid will help you improve your book before you send it to an editor, agent or publisher. Check it out for free or get 15% off the premium edition at www.ProWritingAid.com/joanna This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn  Adam Beswick is a bestselling fantasy author and an expert in TikTok marketing for authors, as well as a former NHS mental health nurse. Adam went full-time as an indie author in 2023 and now runs AP Beswick Publications. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.  Show Notes How Adam scaled from garden office to warehouse, with his wife leaving her engineering career to join the business Why organic marketing (free video content) beats paid ads for testing what resonates with readers The power of live selling: earning £3,500 in one Christmas live stream through TikTok shop Mystery book bags: a gamified approach to selling that keeps customers coming back Building an email list of actual buyers through direct sales versus relying on platform algorithms Why human connection matters more than ever in the age of AI-generated content You can find Adam at APBeswickPublications.com and on TikTok as @a.p_beswick_publications. Transcript of interview with Adam Beswick Jo: Adam Beswick is a bestselling fantasy author and an expert in TikTok marketing for authors, as well as a former NHS mental health nurse. Adam went full-time as an indie author in 2023 and now runs AP Beswick Publications. Welcome back to the show, Adam. Adam: Hi there, and thank you for having me back. Jo: Oh, I'm super excited to talk to you today. Now, you were last on the show in May 2024, so just under two years, and you had gone full-time as an author the year before that. So just tell us— What's changed for you in the last couple of years? What does your author business look like now? Adam: That is terrifying to hear that it was that long ago, because it genuinely feels like it was a couple of months ago. Things have certainly been turbocharged since we last spoke. Last time we spoke I had a big focus on going into direct sales, and I think if I recall correctly, we were just about to release a book by Alexis Brooke, which was the first book in a series that we had worked with another author on, which was the first time we were doing that. Since then, we now have six authors on our books, with a range of full agreements or print-only deals. With that focus of direct selling, we have expanded our TikTok shop. In 2024, I stepped back from TikTok shop just because of constraints around my own time. We took TikTok shop seriously again in 2025 and scaled up to a six-figure revenue stream throughout 2025, effectively starting from scratch. That means we have had to go from having an office pod in the garden, to my wife now has left her career as a structural engineer to join the business because there was too much for me to manage. We went from this small office space, to now we have the biggest office space in our office block because we organise our own print runs and do all our distribution worldwide from what we call “AP HQ.” Jo: And you don't print books, but you have a warehouse. Adam: Yes, we have a warehouse. We work with different printers to order books in. We print quite large scale—well, large scale to me—volumes of books. Then we have them ordered to here, and then we will sign them all and distribute everything from here. Jo: Sarah, your wife, being a structural engineer—it seems like she would be a real help in organising a business of warehousing and all of that. Has that been great [working with your wife]? Because I worked with my husband for a while and we decided to stop doing that. Adam: Well, we're still married, so I'm taking that as a win! And funnily enough, we don't actually fall out so much at work. When we do, it's more about me being quite chaotic with how I work, but also I can at times be quite inflexible about how I want things to be done. But what Sarah's fantastic at is the organisation, the analytics. She runs all the logistical side of things. When we moved into the bigger office space, she insisted on us having different offices. She's literally shoved me on the other side of the building. So I'm out the way—I can just come in and write, come and do my bit to sign the books, and then she can just get on with organising the orders and getting those packed and sent out to readers. She manages all the tracking, the customs—all the stuff that would really bog me down. I wouldn't say she necessarily enjoys it when she's getting some cranky emails from people whose books might have gone missing or have been held up at customs, but she's really good at that side. She's really helped bring systems in place to make sure the fulfilment side is as smooth as possible. Jo: I think this is so important, and I want everyone to hear you on this. Because at heart, you are the creative, you are a writer, and sure you are building this business, but I feel like one of the biggest mistakes that creative-first authors make is not getting somebody else to help them. It doesn't have to be a spouse, right? It can also be another professional person. Sacha Black's got various people working for her. I think you just can't do it alone, right? Adam: Absolutely not. I would have drowned long before now. When Sarah joined the team, I was at a position where I'd said to her, “Look, I need to look at bringing someone in because I'm drowning.” It was only then she took a look at where her career was, and she'd done everything she wanted to do. She was a senior engineer. She'd completed all the big projects. I mean, this is a woman who's designed football stands across the UK and some of the biggest barn conversions and school conversions and things like that. She'd done everything professionally that she'd wanted to and was perhaps losing that passion that she once had. So she said she was interested, and we said, “Look, why don't you come and spend a bit of time working with me within the business, see whether it works for you, see if we can find an area that works for you—not you working for the business, the business working for you—that we maintain that work-life balance.” And then if it didn't work, we were in a position where we could set her up to start working for herself as an engineer again, but under her own terms. Then we just went from strength to strength. We made it through the first year. I think we made it through the first year without any arguments, and she's now been full-time in the business for two years. Jo: I think that's great. Really good to hear that. Because when I met you, probably in Seville I think it was, I was like, “You are going to hit some difficulty,” because I could see that if you were going to scale as fast as you were aiming to— There are problems of scale, right? There's a reason why lots of us don't want a bloomin' warehouse. Adam: Yes, absolutely. I think it's twofold. I am an author at heart—that's my passion—but I'm also a businessman and a creative from a marketing point of view. I always see writing as the passion. The business side and the creating of content—that's the work. So I never see writing as work. When I was a nurse, I was the nurse that was always put on the wards where no one else wanted to work because that's where I thrived. I thrive in the chaos. Put me with people who had really challenging behaviour or were really unwell and needed that really intense support, displayed quite often problematic behaviours, and I would thrive in those environments because I'd always like to prove that you can get the best out of anyone. I very much work in that manner now. The more chaotic, the more pressure-charged the situation is, the better I thrive in that. If I was just sat writing a book and that was it, I'd probably get less done because I'd get bored and I wouldn't feel like I was challenging myself. As you said, the flip side of that is that risk of burnout is very, very real, and I have come very, very close. But as a former mental health nurse, I am very good at spotting my own signs of when I'm not taking good care of myself. And if I don't, Sarah sure as hell does. Jo: I think that's great. Really good to hear. Okay, so you talked there about creating the content as work, and— You have driven your success, I would say, almost entirely with TikTok. Would that be right? Adam: Well, no, I'd come back and touch on that just to say it isn't just TikTok. I would say definitely organic marketing, but not just TikTok. I'm always quick to pivot if something isn't working or if there's a dip in sales. I'm always looking at how we can—not necessarily keep growing—but it's about sustaining what you've built so that we can carry on doing this. If the business stops earning money, I can't keep doing what I love doing, and me and my wife can't keep supporting our family with a stable income, which is what we have now. I would say TikTok is what started it all, but I did the same as having all my books on Amazon, which is why I switched to doing wide and direct sales: I didn't want all my eggs in one basket. I was always exploring what platforms I can use to best utilise organic marketing, to the point where my author TikTok channel is probably my third lowest avenue for directing traffic to my store at the moment. I have a separate channel for my TikTok shop, which generates great traffic, but that's a separate thing because I treat my TikTok shop as a separate audience. That only goes out to a UK audience, whereas my main TikTok channel goes out to a worldwide audience. Jo: Okay. So we are going to get into TikTok, and I do want to talk about that, but you said TikTok Shop UK and— Then you mentioned organic marketing. What do you mean by that? Adam: When I say organic marketing, I mean marketing your books in a way that is not a detriment to your bank balance. To break that down further: you can be paying for, say for example, you set up a Facebook ad and you are paying five pounds a day just for a testing phase for an ad that potentially isn't going to work. You potentially have to run 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 ads at five pounds a day to find one ad that works, that will make your book profitable. There's a lot of testing, a lot of money that goes into that. With organic marketing, it's using video marketing or slideshows or carousels on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook—wherever you want to put it—to find the content that does resonate with your readers, that generates sales, and it doesn't cost you anything. I can create a video on TikTok, put it out there, and it reaches three, four hundred people. That hasn't cost me any money at all. Those three, four hundred people have seen my content. That's not TikTok's job for that to generate sales. That's my job to convert those views into sales. If it doesn't, I just need to look at the content and say, “Well, that hasn't hit my audience, or if it has, it hasn't resonated. What do I need to do with my content to make it resonate and then transition into sales?” Once you find something that works, it's just a case of rinse and repeat. Keep tweaking it, keep changing or using variants of that content that's working to generate sales. If you manage to do that consistently, you've already got content that you know works. So when you've built up consistent sales and you are perhaps earning a few thousand pounds a month—it could be five figures a month—you've then got a pool of money that you've generated. You can use that then to invest into paid ads, using the content you've already created organically and tested organically for what your audience is going to interact with. Jo: Okay. I think because I'm old school from the old days, we would've called that content marketing. But I feel like the difference of what you are doing and what TikTok—I think the type of behaviour TikTok has driven is the actual sales, the conversion into sales. So for example, this interview, right? My podcast is content marketing. It puts our words out in the world and some people find us, and some people buy stuff from us. So it's content marketing, but it's not the way you are analysing content that actually drives sales. Based on that content, there's no way of tracking any sales that come from this interview. We are just never going to know. I think that's the big difference between what you are doing with content versus what I and many other, I guess, older creators have done, which is— We put stuff out there for free, hope that some people might find us, and some of those people might buy. It's quite different. Adam: I would still argue that it is organic marketing, because you've got a podcast that people don't have to pay to listen to, that they get enjoyment from, and the byproduct of that is you generate some income passively through that. If you think of your podcast as one product and your video content is the same—these social media platforms—you don't just post your podcast on one platform. You will utilise as many platforms as you can, unless you have a brand agreement where a platform is paying you to solely use their platform because you or yourself are the driver for the audience there. I would say a podcast is a form of organic marketing. I could start a podcast about video marketing. I could start a podcast about reading. The idea being you build up an audience and then when you drop in those releases, that audience then goes and buys that product. For example, if you've got a self-help book coming out, if you drop that into your podcast, chances are you're going to get a lot more sales from your audience that are here to listen to you as the inspirational storyteller that you are from a business point of view than what you would if you announced that you had a new crime novel coming out or a horror story you've written. Your audience within here is generally an author audience who are looking to refine their craft—whether that be the writing or the selling of the books or living the dream of being a full-time author. I think it's more a terminology thing. Jo: Well, let's talk about why I wanted to talk to you. A friend of ours told me that you are doing really well with live sales. This was just before Christmas, I think. And I was like, “Live sales? What does that even mean?” Then I saw that Kim Kardashian was doing live sales on TikTok and did this “Kim's Must Have” thing, and Snoop Dogg was there, and it was this massive event where they were selling. I was like, “Oh, it's like TV sales—the TV sales channel where you show things and then people buy immediately.” And I was like, “Wait, is Adam like the Kim Kardashian of the indie author?” So tell us about this live sale thing. Adam: Well, I've not got that far to say that I have the Kim Kardashian status! What it is, is that I'm passionate about learning, but also sharing what's working for me so that other authors can succeed—without what I'm sharing being stuck behind a paywall. It is a big gripe of mine that you get all these courses and all these things you can do and everything has to be behind a paywall. If I've got the time, I'll just share. Hence why we were in Vegas doing the presentations for Indie Author Nation, which I think had you been in my talk, Jo, you would've heard me talking about the live selling. Jo: Oh, I missed it. I'll have to get the replay. Adam: I only covered a short section of it, but what I actually said within that talk is, for me, live selling is going to be the next big thing. If you are not live selling your books at the moment, and you are not paying attention to it, start paying attention to it. I started paying attention about six months ago, and I have seen constant growth to a point where I've had to post less content because doing one live stream a week was making more money than me posting content and burning myself out every single day for the TikTok shop. I did a live stream at the beginning of Christmas, for example. A bit of prep work went into it. We had a whole Christmas set, and within that one live stream we generated three and a half thousand pounds of organic book sales. Jo: Wow. Adam: Obviously that isn't something that happened overnight. That took me doing a regular Friday stream from September all the way through to December to build up to that moment. In fact, I think that was Black Friday, sorry, where we did that. But what I looked at was, “Right, I haven't got the bandwidth because of all the plates I was spinning to go live five days a week. However, I can commit to a Friday morning.” I can commit to a Friday morning because that is the day when Sarah isn't in the office, and it's my day to pack the orders. So I've already got the orders to pack, so I thought I'll go live whilst I'm packing the orders and just hang out and chat. I slowly started to find that on average I was earning between three to four hundred pounds doing that, packing orders that I already had to pack. I've just found a way to monetise it and engage with a new audience whilst doing that. The thing that's key is it is a new audience. You have people who like to consume their content through short-form content or long-form content. Then you have people who like to consume content with human interaction on a live, and it's a completely different ballgame. What TikTok is enabling us to do—on other platforms I am looking at other platforms for live selling—you can engage with an audience, but because on TikTok you can upload your products, people can buy the products direct whilst you are live on that platform. For that, you will pay a small fee to TikTok, which is absolutely worth it. That's part of the reason we've been able to scale to having a six-figure business within TikTok shop itself as one revenue stream. Jo: Okay. So a few things. You mentioned there the integration with TikTok shop. As I've said many times, I'm not on TikTok—I am on Instagram—and on Instagram you can incorporate your Meta catalogue to Shopify. Do you think the same principle applies to Instagram or YouTube as well? I think YouTube has an integration with Shopify. Do you think the same thing would work that way? Adam: I think it's possible. Yes, absolutely. As long as people can click and buy that product from whatever content they are watching—but usually what it will have to do is redirect them to your store, and you've still got all the conversion metrics that have to kick in. They have to be happy with the shipping, they have to be happy with the product description and stuff like that. With TikTok shop, it's very much a one-stop shop. People click on the product, they can still be watching the video, click to buy something, and not leave the stream. Jo: So the stream's on, and then let's say you are packing one of your books— Does that product link just pop up and then people can buy that book as you are packing it? Adam: So we've got lots and lots of products on our store now. I always have a product link that has all our products listed, and I always keep all of the bundles towards the top because they generate more income than a single book sale. What will happen is I can showcase a book, I'll tap the screen to show what product it is that I'm packing, and then I'll just talk about it. If people want it, they just click that product link and they can buy it straight away. What people get a lot of enjoyment from—which I never expected in a million years—is watching people pack their order there and then. As an author, we're not just selling a generic product. We're selling a book that we have written, that we have put our heart and soul into. People love that. It's a way of letting them into a bit of you, giving them a bit of information, talking to them, showing them how human you are. If you're on that live stream being an absolute arse and not very nice, people aren't going to buy your books. But if you're being welcoming, you're chatting, you're talking to everyone, you're interacting, you're showcasing books they probably will. What we do is if someone orders on the live stream, we throw some extra stuff in, so they don't just get the books, they'll get some art prints included, they'll get some bookmarks thrown in, and we've got merch that we'll throw in as a little thank you. Now it's all stuff that is low cost to us, because actually we're acquiring a customer in that moment. I've got people who come onto every single Friday live stream that I do now. They have bought every single product in our catalogue and they are harassing me for when the next release is out because they want more, before they even know what that is. They want it because it's being produced by us—because of our brand. With the lives, what I found is the branding has become really important. We're at a stage where we're being asked—because I'm quite well known for wearing beanie hats on live streams or video content—people are like, “When are you going to release some beanie hats?” Now and again, Sarah will drop some AP branded merch. It'll be beer coasters with the AP logo on, or a tote bag with the AP logo on. It's not stuff that we sell at this stage—we give them away. The more money people spend, the more stuff we put in. And people are like, “No, no, you need to add these to the store because we want to buy them.” The brand itself is growing, not just the book sales. It's becoming better known. We've got Pacificon in April, and there's so many people on that live stream that have bought tickets to meet us in person at this conference in April, which is amazing. There's so much going on. With TikTok shop, it only works in the country where you are based, so it only goes out to a UK audience, which is why I keep it separate from my main channel. That means we're tapping into a completely new audience, because up until last year, I'd always targeted America—that's where my biggest readership was. Jo: Wow. There's so much to this. Okay. First of all, most people are not going to have their own warehouse. Most people are not going to be packing live. So for authors who are selling on, let's just say Amazon, can live sales still work for them? Could they still go live at a regular time every week and talk about a book and see if that drives sales, even if it's at Amazon? Adam: Yes, absolutely. I would test that because ultimately you're creating a brand, you're putting yourself out there, and you're consistently showing up. You can have people that have never heard of you just stumble across your live and think, “What are they doing there?” They're a bit curious, so they might ask some questions, they might not. They might see some other interactions. There's a million and one things you can do on that live to generate conversation. I've done it where I've had 150 books to sign, so I've just lined up the books, stood in front of the camera, switched the camera on while I'm signing the books, and just chatted away to people without any product links. People will come back and be like, “Oh, I've just been to your store and bought through your series,” and stuff like that. So absolutely that can work. The key is putting in the work and setting it up. I started out by getting five copies of one book, signing them, and selling them on TikTok shop. I sold them in a day, and then that built up to effectively what we have now. That got my eyes open for direct selling. When I was working with BookVault and they were integrated with my store, orders came to me, but then they went to BookVault—they printed and distributed. Then we got to a point scaling-wise where we thought, “If we want to take this to the next level, we need to take on distribution ourselves,” because the profit lines are better, the margins are bigger. That's why we started doing it ourselves, but only once we'd had a proven track record of sales spanning 18 months to two years and had the confidence. It was actually with myself and Sacha that we set up at the same time and egged each other on. I think I was just a tiny bit ahead of her with setting up a warehouse. And then as you've seen, Sacha's gone from strength to strength. It doesn't come without its trigger warnings in the sense of it isn't an easy thing to do. I think you have to have a certain skill set for live selling. You have to have a certain mindset for the physicality that comes with it. When we've had a delivery of two and a half thousand books and we've got to bring them up to the first floor where the office is—I don't have a massive team of people. It's myself and Sarah, and every now and again we get my dad in to help us because he's retired now. We'll give him a bottle of wine as a thank you. Jo: You need to give him some more wine, I think! Adam: Yes! But you've gotta be able to roll your sleeves up and do the work. I think if you've got the work ethic and that drive to succeed, then absolutely anyone can do it. There's nothing special about my books in that sense. I've got a group called Novel Gains where I've actually started a monthly challenge yesterday, and we've got nearly two and a half thousand people in the group now. The group has never been more active because it's really energised and charged. People have seen the success stories, and people are going on lives who never thought it would work for them. Lee Mountford put a post up yesterday on the first day of this challenge just to say, “Look, a year ago I was where you were when Adam did the last challenge. I thought I can't do organic marketing, I can't get myself on camera.” Organic marketing and live selling is now equating to 50% of his income. Jo: And he doesn't have a warehouse. Adam: Well, he scaled up to it now, so he's got two lockups because he scaled up. He started off small, then he thought, “Right, I'm going to go for it.” He ordered a print run of a few of his books—I think 300 copies of three books. Bundled them up, sold them out within a few months. Then he's just scaled from there because he's seen by creating the content, by doing the lives, that it's just creating a revenue stream that he wasn't tapping into. Last January when we did the challenge, he was really engaged throughout the process. He was really analytical with the results he was getting. But he didn't stop after 30 days when that challenge finished. He went away behind the scenes for the next 11 months and has continued to grow. He is absolutely thriving now. Him and his wife—a husband and wife team—his wife is also an author, and they've now added her spicy books to their TikTok shop. They're just selling straight away because he's built up the audience. He's built up that connection. Jo: I think that's great. And I love hearing this because I built my business on what I've called content marketing—you're calling it organic marketing. So I think it's really good to know that it's still possible; it's just a different kind. Now I just wanna get some specifics. One— Where can people find your Novel Gains stuff? Adam: So Novel Gains is an online community on Facebook. As I said, there's no website, there's no fancy website, there's no paid course or anything. It is just people holding themselves accountable and listening to my ramblings every now and again when I try and share pills of wisdom to try and motivate and inspire. I also ask other successful authors to drop their story about organic marketing on there, to again get people fired up and show what can be achieved. Jo: Okay. That's on Facebook. So then let's talk about the setup. I think a lot of the time I get concerned about video because I think everything has to be on my phone. How are you setting this up technically so you can get filmed and also see comments and all of this kind of stuff? Adam: Just with my phone. Jo: It is just on your phone? Adam: Yes. I don't use any fancy camera tricks or anything. I literally just settle my phone and hit record when I'm doing it. Jo: But you set it up on a tripod or something? Adam: Yes. So I'll have a tripod. I don't do any fancy lighting or anything like that because I want the content to seem as real as possible. I'll set up the camera at an angle that shows whatever task I'm doing. For example, if I'm packing orders, I can see the screen so I can see the comments as they're coming up. It's close enough to me to interact. At Christmas, we did have a bit of a setup—it did look like a QVC channel, I'm not going to lie! I was at the back. There was a table in front of me with products on. We had mystery book bags. We had a Christmas tree. We had a big banner behind me. The camera was on the other side of the room, but I just had my laptop next to me that was logged into TikTok, so I was watching the live stream so I could see any comments coming up. Jo: Yes, that's the thing. So you can have a different screen with the comments. Because that's what I'm concerned about—it might just be the eyesight thing, but I'm like, I just can't literally do everything on the phone. Adam: TikTok has a studio—TikTok Studio—that you can download, and you can get all your data and analytics in there for your live streams. At the moment, I'll just tap the screen to add a new product or pin a new product. You can do all that from your computer on this studio where you can say, “Right, I'm showcasing this product now,” click on it and it'll come up onto the live stream. You just have to link the two together. Jo: I'm really thinking about this. Partly this is great because my other concern with TikTok and all these video channels is how much can be done by AI now. TikTok has its own AI generation stuff. A lot of it's amazing. I'm not saying it's bad quality, I'm saying it's amazing quality, but— What AI can't do is the live stuff. You just can't—I mean, I imagine you can fake it, but you can't fake it. Adam: Well, you'd be surprised. I've seen live streams where it's like an avatar on the screen and there is someone talking and then the avatar moving in live as that person's talking. Jo: Right? Adam: I've seen that where it's animals, I've seen it where it's like a 3D person. There's a really popular stream at the minute that is just a cartoon cat on the stream. Whenever you send a gift, it starts singing whoever sent it—it gets a name—and that's a system that someone has somehow set up. I have no idea how they've set it up, but they're literally not doing it. That can run 24 hours a day. There's always hundreds and hundreds of people on it sending gifts to hear this cat sing with an AI voice their name. Yes, AI will work and it will work for different things. But I think with us and with our books, people want that human connection more than ever because of AI. Use that to your advantage. Jo: Okay. So the other thing I like about this idea is you are doing these live sales and then you are looking at the amount you've sold. But are you making changes to it? Or are you only tweaking the content on your prerecorded stuff? Your live is so natural. How are you going to change it up, I guess? Adam: I am always testing what is working, what's not working. For example, I'm a big nerd at heart and I collect Pokémon cards. Now that I'm older, I can afford some of the more rare stuff, and me and my daughter have a lot of enjoyment collecting Pokémon cards together. We follow channels, we watch stuff on YouTube, and I was looking at what streamers do with Pokémon cards and how they sell like mystery products on an app or whatnot. I was like, “How can I apply this to books?” And I came up with the idea of doing mystery book bags. People pay 20 pounds, they get some goodies—some carefully curated goodies, as we say, that “Mrs. B” has put together. On stream, I never give the audience Sarah's name. It's always “Mrs. B.” So Mrs. B has built up her own brand within the stream—they go feral when she comes on camera to say hi! Then there's some goodies in there. That could be some tote socks, a tote bag, cup holders, page holders, metal pins, things like that. Then inside that, I'll pull out a thing that will say what book they're getting from our product catalogue. What I make clear is that could be anything from our product catalogue. So that could be a single book, it could be six books, it could be a three-book bundle. There's all sorts that people can get. It could be a deluxe special edition. People love that, and they tend to buy it because there's so much choice and they might be struggling with, “Right, I don't know what to get.” So they think, “You know what? I'll buy one of them mystery book bags.” I only do them when I'm live. I've done streams where the camera's on me. I've done top-down streams where you can only see my hands and these mystery book bags. Every time someone orders one, I'm just opening it live and showcasing what product they get from the stream. People love it to the point where every stream I do, they're like, “When are you doing the next mystery book bags? When are you doing the next ones?” Jo: So if we were on live now and I click to buy, you see the order with my name and you just write “Jo” on it, and then you put it in a pile? Adam: So you print labels there and then, which I'll do. Exactly. If I'm live packing them—I'm not going to lie—when I'm set up properly, I don't have time to pack them because the orders are coming in that thick and fast. All I do is have a Post-it note next to me, and I'll write down their username, then I'll stick that onto their order. I'll collect everything, showcase what they're getting, the extra goodies that they're getting with their order, and then I'll stick the Post-it on and put that to one side. To put that into context as something that works through testing different things: we started off doing 60 book bags—30 of them were spicy book bags, 30 were general fantasy which had my books and a couple of our authors that haven't got spice in their books—and the aim was to sell them within a month. We sold them within one stream. 60 book bags at 20 pounds a pop. What that also generated is people then buying other products while we're doing it. It also meant that I'd do it all on a Friday, and we'd come in on a Monday and start the week with 40, 50, 60 orders to pack regardless of what's coming from the Shopify store. The level of orders is honestly obscene, but we've continuously learned how best to manage this. We learned that actually, if you showcase the orders, stick a Post-it on, when we print the shipping labels, it takes us five minutes to just put all the shipping labels with everyone's orders. Then we can just fire through packing everything up because everything's already bundled together. It literally just needs putting in a box. Jo: Okay. So there's so much we could talk about, but hopefully people will look into this more. So I went to go watch a video—I thought, “Oh, well, I'll just go watch Adam do this. I'm sure there's a recording”—and then I couldn't find one. So tell me about that. Does [the live recording] just disappear or what? Adam: Yes, it does. It's live for a reason. You can download it afterwards if you want, and then you've got content to repurpose. In fact, you're giving me an idea. I've done a live today—I could download that clip that's an hour and 20 minutes long. Some of it, I'm just rambling, but some of it's got some content that I could absolutely use because I'm engaging with people. I've showcased books throughout it because I've been packing orders. I had an hour window before this podcast and I had a handful of orders to pack. So I just jumped on a live and I made like 250 pounds while doing a job that I would already be having to do. I could download that video, put it in OpusClip, and that will then generate short-form content for me of the meaningful interaction through that, based on the parameters that I give it. So that's absolutely something you could do. In fact, I'm probably going to do it now that you've given me the idea. Jo: Because even if it was on another channel, like you could put that one on YouTube. Adam: Yes. Wherever you want. It doesn't have a watermark on it. Jo: And what did you say? OpusClip? Adam: OpusClip, yes. If you do long-form content of any kind, you can put that in and then it'll pull out meaningful content. Loads of like 20, 30 short-form content video clips that you can use. It's a brilliant piece of software if you use it the right way. Jo: Okay. Well I want you to repurpose that because I want to watch you in action, but I'm not going to turn up for your live—although now I'm like, “Oh, I really must.” So does that also mean—you said it's UK only because the TikTok shop is linked to the UK— So people in America can't even see it? Adam: So sometimes they do pop in, but again, that's why I have a separate channel for my main author account. When I go live on that, anyone from around the world can come in. But if I've got shoppable links in, chances are the algorithm is just going to put that out to a UK audience because that's where TikTok will then make money. If I want to hit my US audience, I'll jump on Instagram because that's where I've got my biggest following. So I'll jump on Instagram and go live over there at a time that I know will be appropriate for Americans. Jo: Okay. We could talk forever, but I do have just a question about TikTok itself. All of these platforms seem to follow a way of things where at the beginning it's much easier to get reach. It is truly organic. It's really amazing. Then they start putting on various brakes—like Facebook added groups, and then you couldn't reach people in your groups. And then you had to pay to play. Then in the US of course, we've got a sale that has been signed. Who knows what will happen there. What are your thoughts on how TikTok has changed? What might go on this year, and how are you preparing? Adam: So, I think as a businessman and an author who wants to reach readers, I use the platforms for what I can get out of them without having to spend a stupid amount of money. If those platforms stop working for me, I'll stop using them and find one that does. With organic reach on TikTok, I think you'll always have a level of that. Is it harder now? Yes. Does that mean it's not achievable? Absolutely not. If your content isn't reaching people, or you're not getting the engagement that you want, or you find fulfilling, you need to look at yourself and the content you are putting out. You are in control of that. There's elements of this takeover in America—again, I've got zero control over that, so I'm not going to lose any sleep over it. I'll focus on areas that are making a difference. As I said, TikTok isn't the biggest earner for my business. My author channel's been absolutely dead for a good six months or so. But that means I get stagnant with the content I'm creating. So the challenge I'm doing at the minute, I'm taking part to create fresh content every day to recharge myself. I've got Instagram and Facebook that generate high volumes of traffic every single day. And usually if they stop, TikTok starts to work. Any algorithm changes—things will change when it changes hands in America—but primarily it still wants to make money. It's a business. If anything, it might make it harder for us to reach America because it will want to focus on reaching an American audience for the people that are buying TikTok shop. But they want it because they want the TikTok shop because of the amount of money that it is generating. It's gone from a small amount of people making money to large volumes of businesses across the entire USA—like over here now—that are reaching an audience that previously you had to have deep pockets to reach, to get your business set up. Now you've got all these businesses popping up that are starting from scratch because they're reaching people. They've got a product that's marketable, that people want to enjoy. They want to be part of that growth. I think that will still happen. It might just be a few of the parameters change, like Facebook does all the time. Jo: Things will always change. That is key. We should also say by selling direct, you've built presumably a very big email list of buyers as well. Adam: Yes. I've actually got a trophy that Shopify sent me because we hit 10,000 sales—10,000 customers. I think we're nearing 16,000 sales on there now. We've got all that customer data. We don't get that on TikTok. We haven't got the customer data. Jo: Ah, that's interesting. Okay. How do you not though? Oh, because—did they ship it? Adam: So if you link it with your Shopify and you do all your shipping direct, the customer data has to come to your Shopify, otherwise you can't ship. When TikTok ship it for you—so I print the shipping labels, but they organise the couriers—all the customer data's blotted out. It's like redacted, so you don't see it. Jo: Ah, see that is in itself a cheeky move. Adam: Yes. But if it's linked to your Shopify, you get all that data and your Shopify is your store. So your Shopify will keep that data. They kept affecting how I extracted the shipping labels and stuff like that, and just kept making life really difficult. So I've just switched it back. I think Sarah has found an app that works really well for correlating the two. Jo: Yes, but this is a really big deal. We carp on about it all the time, but— If you sell direct and you do get the customer data, you are building an email list of actual buyers as opposed to freebie seekers. Which a lot of people have. Adam: Absolutely, and that's the same for you. If you send poor products out or your customer has a poor experience, they're not going to come back and order from you again. If your customer has a really good experience and opens the products and sees all this extra care that's gone in and all the books are signed, then they've not had to pay extra. There was a Kickstarter—I'm not going to name which author it was—but it was an author whose book I was quite excited to back. They had these special editions they'd done, but you had to buy a special edition for an extra 30 quid if you wanted it signed. I was like, “Absolutely not.” If these people are putting their hands in their pockets for these deluxe special editions, and if you're a big name author, it's certainly not them that have anything to do with it. They just have other companies do it all for them. Whereas with us, you are creating everything. Our way of saying thank you to everyone is by signing the book. Jo: I love that you're still so enthusiastic about it and that it seems to be going really well. So we're almost out of time, but just quickly— Tell people a bit more about the books that they can find in your stores and where people can find them. Adam: Yes. So we publish predominantly fantasy, and we have moved into the spicy fantasy world. We have a few series there. You can check out APBeswickPublications.com where you will see our full product catalogue and all of my books. On TikTok shop, we are under a.p_beswick_publications. That's the best place to see where I go live—short-form content. I'll post spicy books on there, but on lives, I showcase everything. I also have fantasy.books.uk, where that's where you'll see the videos or product links for the non-spicy fantasy books. Jo: And what time do you go live in the UK? Adam: So I go live 8:00 AM every Friday morning. Jo: Wow. Okay. I might even have to check that out. This has been so great, Adam. Thanks so much for your time. Adam: Well, thank you for having me.The post Selling Books Live On Social Media With Adam Beswick first appeared on The Creative Penn.

What if the most transformative thing you can do for your writing craft and author business is to face what you fear? How can you can find gold in your Shadow in the year ahead? In this episode, I share chapters from Writing the Shadow: Turn Your Inner Darkness Into Words. In the intro, curated book boxes from Bridgerton's Julia Quinn; Google's agentic shopping, and powering Apple's Siri; ChatGPT Ads; and Claude CoWork. Balancing Certainty and Uncertainty [MoonShots with Tony Robbins]; and three trends for authors with me and Orna Ross [Self-Publishing with ALLi Podcast]; plus, Bones of the Deep, Business for Authors, and Indie Author Lab. This show is supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn  Joanna Penn writes non-fiction for authors and is an award-winning, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of thrillers, dark fantasy, and memoir as J.F. Penn. She’s also an award-winning podcaster, creative entrepreneur, and international professional speaker. What is the Shadow? The ‘creative wound' and the Shadow in writing The Shadow in traditional publishing The Shadow in self-publishing or being an indie author The Shadow in work The Shadow in money You can find Writing the Shadow in all formats on all stores, as well as special edition, workbook and bundles at www.TheCreativePenn.com/shadowbook Writing the Shadow: Turn Your Inner Darkness Into Words The following chapters are excerpted from Writing the Shadow: Turn Your Inner Darkness Into Words by Joanna Penn. Introduction. What is the Shadow? “How can I be substantial if I do not cast a shadow? I must have a dark side also if I am to be whole.” —C.G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul We all have a Shadow side and it is the work of a lifetime to recognise what lies within and spin that base material into gold.  Think of it as a seedling in a little pot that you’re given when you’re young. It’s a bit misshapen and weird, not something you would display in your living room, so you place it in a dark corner of the basement.  You don’t look at it for years. You almost forget about it.  Then one day you notice tendrils of something wild poking up through the floorboards. They’re ugly and don’t fit with your Scandi-minimalist interior design. You chop the tendrils away and pour weedkiller on what’s left, trying to hide the fact that they were ever there.  But the creeping stems keep coming.  At some point, you know you have to go down there and face the wild thing your seedling has become.  When you eventually pluck up enough courage to go down into the basement, you discover that the plant has wound its roots deep into the foundations of your home. Its vines weave in and out of the cracks in the walls, and it has beautiful flowers and strange fruit.  It holds your world together.  Perhaps you don’t need to destroy the wild tendrils. Perhaps you can let them wind up into the light and allow their rich beauty to weave through your home. It will change the look you have so carefully cultivated, but maybe that’s just what the place needs. The Shadow in psychology Carl Gustav Jung was a Swiss psychologist and the founder of analytical psychology. He described the Shadow as an unconscious aspect of the human personality, those parts of us that don’t match up to what is expected of us by family and society, or to our own ideals. The Shadow is not necessarily evil or illegal or immoral, although of course it can be. It’s also not necessarily caused by trauma, abuse, or any other severely damaging event, although again, it can be. It depends on the individual.  What is in your Shadow is based on your life and your experiences, as well as your culture and society, so it will be different for everyone.  Psychologist Connie Zweig, in The Inner Work of Age, explains, “The Shadow is that part of us that lies beneath or behind the light of awareness. It contains our rejected, unacceptable traits and feelings. It contains our hidden gifts and talents that have remained unexpressed or unlived. As Jung put it, the essence of the Shadow is pure gold.” To further illustrate the concept, Robert Bly, in A Little Book on the Human Shadow,uses the following metaphor: “When we are young, we carry behind us an invisible bag, into which we stuff any feelings, thoughts, or behaviours that bring disapproval or loss of love—anger, tears, neediness, laziness. By the time we go to school, our bags are already a mile long.  In high school, our peer groups pressure us to stuff the bags with even more—individuality, sexuality, spontaneity, different opinions. We spend our life until we’re twenty deciding which parts of ourselves to put into the bag and we spend the rest of our lives trying to get them out again.” As authors, we can use what’s in the ‘bag’ to enrich our writing — but only if we can access it. My intention with this book is to help you venture into your Shadow and bring some of what’s hidden into the light and into your words. I’ll reveal aspects of my Shadow in these pages but ultimately, this book is about you. Your Shadow is unique. There may be elements we share, but much will be different. Each chapter has questions for you to consider that may help you explore at least the edges of your Shadow, but it’s not easy. As Jung said, “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular.” But take heart, Creative. You don’t need courage when things are easy. You need it when you know what you face will be difficult, but you do it anyway. We are authors. We know how to do hard things. We turn ideas into books. We manifest thoughts into ink on paper.  We change lives with our writing. First, our own, then other people’s. It’s worth the effort to delve into Shadow, so I hope you will join me on the journey. The creative wound and the Shadow in writing “Whatever pain you can’t get rid of, make it your creative offering.” —Susan Cain, Bittersweet  The more we long for something, the more extreme our desire, the more likely it is to have a Shadow side. For those of us who love books, the author life may well be a long-held dream and thus, it is filled with Shadow.  Books have long been objects of desire, power, and authority. They hold a mythic status in our lives. We escaped into stories as children; we studied books at school and college; we read them now for escape and entertainment, education and inspiration. We collect beautiful books to put on our shelves. We go to them for solace and answers to the deepest questions of life.  Writers are similarly held in high esteem. They shape culture, win literary prizes, give important speeches, and are quoted in the mainstream media. Their books are on the shelves in libraries and bookstores. Writers are revered, held up as rare, talented creatures made separate from us by their brilliance and insight. For bibliophile children, books were everything and to write one was a cherished dream. To become an author? Well, that would mean we might be someone special, someone worthy. Perhaps when you were young, you thought the dream of being a writer was possible — then you told someone about it. That’s probably when you heard the first criticism of such a ridiculous idea, the first laughter, the first dismissal. So you abandoned the dream, pushed the idea of being a writer into the Shadow, and got on with your life. Or if it wasn’t then, it came later, when you actually put pen to paper and someone — a parent, teacher, partner, or friend, perhaps even a literary agent or publisher, someone whose opinion you valued — told you it was worthless. Here are some things you might have heard: Writing is a hobby. Get a real job. You’re not good enough. You don’t have any writing talent. You don’t have enough education. You don’t know what you’re doing. Your writing is derivative / unoriginal / boring / useless / doesn’t make sense. The genre you write in is dead / worthless / unacceptable / morally wrong / frivolous / useless.  Who do you think you are? No one would want to read what you write. You can’t even use proper grammar, so how could you write a whole book? You’re wasting your time. You’ll never make it as a writer. You shouldn’t write those things (or even think about those things). Why don’t you write something nice? Insert other derogatory comment here! Mark Pierce describes the effect of this experience in his book The Creative Wound, which “occurs when an event, or someone’s actions or words, pierce you, causing a kind of rift in your soul. A comment—even offhand and unintentional—is enough to cause one.” He goes on to say that such words can inflict “damage to the core of who we are as creators. It is an attack on our artistic identity, resulting in us believing that whatever we make is somehow tainted or invalid, because shame has convinced us there is something intrinsically tainted or invalid about ourselves.” As adults, we might brush off such wounds, belittling them as unimportant in the grand scheme of things. We might even find ourselves saying the same words to other people. After all, it’s easier to criticise than to create.  But if you picture your younger self, bright eyed as you lose yourself in your favourite book, perhaps you might catch a glimpse of what you longed for before your dreams were dashed on the rocks of other people’s reality. As Mark Pierce goes on to say, “A Creative Wound has the power to delay our pursuits—sometimes for years—and it can even derail our lives completely… Anything that makes us feel ashamed of ourselves or our work can render us incapable of the self-expression we yearn for.” This is certainly what happened to me, and it took decades to unwind.  Your creative wounds will differ to mine but perhaps my experience will help you explore your own. To be clear, your Shadow may not reside in elements of horror as mine do, but hopefully you can use my example to consider where your creative wounds might lie.  “You shouldn’t write things like that.” It happened at secondary school around 1986 or 1987, so I would have been around eleven or twelve years old. English was one of my favourite subjects and the room we had our lessons in looked out onto a vibrant garden. I loved going to that class because it was all about books, and they were always my favourite things. One day, we were asked to write a story. I can’t remember the specifics of what the teacher asked us to write, but I fictionalised a recurring nightmare. I stood in a dark room.  On one side, my mum and my brother, Rod, were tied up next to a cauldron of boiling oil, ready to be thrown in. On the other side, my dad and my little sister, Lucy, were threatened with decapitation by men with machetes. I had to choose who would die. I always woke up, my heart pounding, before I had to choose.  Looking back now, it clearly represented an internal conflict about having to pick sides between the two halves of my family. Not an unexpected issue from a child of divorce.  Perhaps these days, I might have been sent to the school counsellor, but it was the eighties and I don’t think we even had such a thing. Even so, the meaning of the story isn’t the point. It was the reaction to it that left scars. “You shouldn’t write things like that,” my teacher said, and I still remember her look of disappointment, even disgust.  Certainly judgment. She said my writing was too dark. It wasn’t a proper story. It wasn’t appropriate for the class. As if horrible things never happened in stories — or in life.  As if literature could not include dark tales. As if the only acceptable writing was the kind she approved of. We were taught The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie that year, which says a lot about the type of writing considered appropriate.  Or perhaps the issue stemmed from the school motto, “So hateth she derknesse,” from Chaucer’s The Legend of Good Women: “For fear of night, so she hates the darkness.” I had won a scholarship to a private girls’ school, and their mission was to turn us all into proper young ladies. Horror was never on the curriculum. Perhaps if my teacher had encouraged me to write my darkness back then, my nightmares would have dissolved on the page.  Perhaps if we had studied Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or H.P. Lovecraft stories, or Bram Stoker’s Dracula, I could have embraced the darker side of literature earlier in my life. My need to push darker thoughts into my Shadow was compounded by my (wonderful) mum’s best intentions. We were brought up on the principles of The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale and she tried to shield me and my brother from anything harmful or horrible. We weren’t allowed to watch TV much, and even the British school drama Grange Hill was deemed inappropriate. So much of what I’ve achieved is because my mum instilled in me a “can do” attitude that anything is possible. I’m so grateful to her for that. (I love you, Mum!) But all that happy positivity, my desire to please her, to be a good girl, to make my teachers proud, and to be acceptable to society, meant that I pushed my darker thoughts into Shadow.  They were inappropriate. They were taboo. They must be repressed, kept secret, and I must be outwardly happy and positive at all times. You cannot hold back the darkness “The night is dark and full of terrors.” —George R.R. Martin, A Storm of Swords It turned out that horror was on the curriculum, much of it in the form of educational films we watched during lessons. In English Literature, we watched Romeo drink poison and Juliet stab herself in Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet.  In Religious Studies, we watched Jesus beaten, tortured, and crucified in The Greatest Story Ever Told, and learned of the variety of gruesome ways that Christian saints were martyred. In Classical Civilisation, we watched gladiators slaughter each other in Spartacus.  In Sex Education at the peak of the AIDS crisis in the mid-’80s, we were told of the many ways we could get infected and die. In History, we studied the Holocaust with images of skeletal bodies thrown into mass graves, medical experiments on humans, and grainy videos of marching soldiers giving the Nazi salute. One of my first overseas school field trips was to the World War I battlegrounds of Flanders Fields in Belgium, where we studied the inhuman conditions of the trenches, walked through mass graves, and read war poetry by candlelight. As John McCrae wrote: We are the Dead. Short days agoWe lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,Loved and were loved, and now we lie, In Flanders fields. Did the teachers not realise how deeply a sensitive teenager might feel the darkness of that place? Or have I always been unusual in that places of blood echo deep inside me? And the horrors kept coming.  We lived in Bristol, England back then and I learned at school how the city had been part of the slave trade, its wealth built on the backs of people stolen from their homes, sold, and worked to death in the colonies. I had been at school for a year in Malawi, Africa and imagined the Black people I knew drowning, being beaten, and dying on those ships. In my teenage years, the news was filled with ethnic cleansing, mass rape, and massacres during the Balkan wars, and images of bodies hacked apart during the Rwandan genocide. Evil committed by humans against other humans was not a historical aberration. I’m lucky and I certainly acknowledge my privilege. Nothing terrible or horrifying has happened to me — but bad things certainly happen to others. I wasn’t bullied or abused. I wasn’t raped or beaten or tortured. But you don’t have to go through things to be afraid of them, and for your imagination to conjure the possibility of them.  My mum doesn’t read my fiction now as it gives her nightmares (Sorry, Mum!). I know she worries that somehow she’s responsible for my darkness, but I’ve had a safe and (mostly) happy life, for which I’m truly grateful.  But the world is not an entirely safe and happy place, and for a sensitive child with a vivid imagination, the world is dark and scary.  It can be brutal and violent, and bad things happen, even to good people.  No parent can shield their child from the reality of the world. They can only help them do their best to live in it, develop resilience, and find ways to deal with whatever comes. Story has always been a way that humans have used to learn how to live and deal with difficult times. The best authors, the ones that readers adore and can’t get enough of, write their darkness into story to channel their experience, and help others who fear the same. In an interview on writing the Shadow on The Creative Penn Podcast, Michaelbrent Collings shared how he incorporated a personally devastating experience into his writing:  “My wife and I lost a child years back, and that became the root of one of my most terrifying books, Apparition. It’s not terrifying because it’s the greatest book of all time, but just the concept that there’s this thing out there… like a demon, and it consumes the blood and fear of the children, and then it withdraws and consumes the madness of the parents… I wrote that in large measure as a way of working through what I was experiencing.” I’ve learned much from Michaelbrent. I’ve read many of his (excellent) books and he’s been on my podcast multiple times talking about his depression and mental health issues, as well as difficulties in his author career. Writing darkness is not in Michaelbrent’s Shadow and only he can say what lies there for him. But from his example, and from that of other authors, I too learned how to write my Shadow into my books. Twenty-three years after that English lesson, in November 2009, I did NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, and wrote five thousand words of what eventually became Stone of Fire, my first novel. In the initial chapter, I burned a nun alive on the ghats of Varanasi on the banks of the Ganges River. I had watched the bodies burn by night on pyres from a boat bobbing in the current a few years before, and the image was still crystal clear in my mind. The only way to deal with how it made me feel about death was to write about it — and since then, I’ve never stopped writing. Returning to the nightmare from my school days, I’ve never had to choose between the two halves of my family, but the threat of losing them remains a theme in my fiction. In my ARKANE thriller series, Morgan Sierra will do anything to save her sister and her niece. Their safety drives her to continue to fight against evil.  Our deepest fears emerge in our writing, and that’s the safest place for them. I wish I’d been taught how to turn my nightmares into words back at school, but at least now I’ve learned to write my Shadow onto the page. I wish the same for you. The Shadow in traditional publishing If becoming an author is your dream, then publishing a book is deeply entwined with that. But as Mark Pierce says in The Creative Wound, “We feel pain the most where it matters the most… Desire highlights whatever we consider to be truly significant.” There is a lot of desire around publishing for those of us who love books! It can give you: Validation that your writing is good enough Status and credibility Acceptance by an industry held in esteem  The potential of financial reward and critical acclaim Support from a team of professionals who know how to make fantastic books A sense of belonging to an elite community Pride in achieving a long-held goal, resulting in a confidence boost and self-esteem Although not guaranteed, traditional publishing can give you all these things and more, but as with everything, there is a potential Shadow side.  Denying it risks the potential of being disillusioned, disappointed, and even damaged. But remember, forewarned is forearmed, as the saying goes. Preparation can help you avoid potential issues and help you feel less alone if you encounter them.  The myth of success… and the reality of experience There is a pervasive myth of success in the traditional publishing industry, perpetuated by media reporting on brand name and breakout authors, those few outliers whose experience is almost impossible to replicate.  Because of such examples, many new traditionally published authors think that their first book will hit the top of the bestseller charts or win an award, as well as make them a million dollars — or at least a big chunk of cash. They will be able to leave their job, write in a beautiful house overlooking the ocean, and swan around the world attending conferences, while writing more bestselling books. It will be a charmed life.  But that is not the reality.  Perhaps it never was.  Even so, the life of a traditionally published author represents a mythic career with the truth hidden behind a veil of obscurity. In April 2023, The Bookseller in the UK reported that “more than half of authors (54%) responding to a survey on their experiences of publishing their debut book have said the process negatively affected their mental health. Though views were mixed, just 22%… described a positive experience overall… Among the majority who said they had a negative experience of debut publication, anxiety, stress, depression and ‘lowered’ self-esteem were cited, with lack of support, guidance or clear and professional communication from their publisher among the factors that contributed.” Many authors who have negative experiences around publishing will push them into the Shadow with denial or self-blame, preferring to keep the dream alive. They won’t talk about things in public as this may negatively affect their careers, but private discussions are often held in the corners of writing conferences or social media groups online.  Some of the issues are as follows: Repeated rejection by agents and publishers may lead to the author thinking they are not good enough as a writer, which can lead to feeling unworthy as a person. If an author gets a deal, the amount of advance and the name and status of the publisher compared to others create a hierarchy that impacts self-esteem. A deal for a book may be much lower than an author might have been expecting, with low or no advance, and the resulting experience with the publisher beneath expectations. The launch process may be disappointing, and the book may appear without fanfare, with few sales and no bestseller chart position.  In The Bookseller report, one author described her launch day as  “a total wasteland… You have expectations about what publication day will be like, but in reality, nothing really happens.” The book may receive negative reviews by critics or readers or more publicly on social media, which can make an author feel attacked. The book might not sell as well as expected, and the author may feel like it’s their fault. Commercial success can sometimes feel tied to self-worth and an author can’t help but compare their sales to others, with resulting embarrassment or shame. The communication from the publisher may be less than expected. One author in The Bookseller report said,  “I was shocked by the lack of clarity and shared information and the cynicism that underlies the superficial charm of this industry.” There is often more of a focus on debut authors in publishing houses, so those who have been writing and publishing in the midlist for years can feel ignored and undervalued. In The Bookseller report, 48 percent of authors reported “their publisher supported them for less than a year,” with one saying,  “I got no support and felt like a commodity, like the team had moved on completely to the next book.” If an author is not successful enough, the next deal may be lower than the last, less effort is made with marketing, and they may be let go.  In The Bookseller report, “six authors—debut and otherwise—cited being dropped by their publisher, some with no explanation.” Even if everything goes well and an author is considered successful by others, they may experience imposter syndrome, feeling like a fraud when speaking at conferences or doing book signings. And the list goes on …  All these things can lead to feelings of shame, inadequacy, and embarrassment; loss of status in the eyes of peers; and a sense of failure if a publishing career is not successful enough.  The author feels like it’s their fault, like they weren’t good enough — although, of course, the reality is that the conditions were not right at the time. A failure of a book is not a failure of the person, but it can certainly feel like it!  When you acknowledge the Shadow, it loses its power Despite all the potential negatives of traditional publishing, if you know what could happen, you can mitigate them. You can prepare yourself for various scenarios and protect yourself from potential fall-out.  It’s clear from The Bookseller report that too many authors have unrealistic expectations of the industry. But publishers are businesses, not charities.  It’s not their job to make you feel good as an author. It’s their job to sell books and pay you. The best thing they can do is to continue to be a viable business so they can keep putting books on the shelves and keep paying authors, staff, and company shareholders.  When you license your creative work to a publisher, you’re giving up control of your intellectual property in exchange for money and status.  Bring your fears and issues out of the Shadow, acknowledge them, and deal with them early, so they do not get pushed down and re-emerge later in blame and bitterness. Educate yourself on the business of publishing. Be clear on what you want to achieve with any deal. Empower yourself as an author, take responsibility for your career, and you will have a much better experience. The Shadow in self-publishing or being an indie author Self-publishing, or being an independent (indie) author, can be a fantastic, pro-active choice for getting your book into the world. Holding your first book in your hand and saying “I made this” is pretty exciting, and even after more than forty books, I still get excited about seeing ideas in my head turn into a physical product in the world.  Self-publishing can give an author:  Creative control over what to write, editorial and cover design choices, when and how often to publish, and how to market Empowerment over your author career and the ability to make choices that impact success without asking for permission Ownership and control of intellectual property assets, resulting in increased opportunity around licensing and new markets Independence and the potential for recurring income for the long term Autonomy and flexibility around timelines, publishing options, and the ability to easily pivot into new genres and business models Validation based on positive reader reviews and money earned Personal growth and learning through the acquisition of new skills, resulting in a boost in confidence and self-esteem A sense of belonging to an active and vibrant community of indie authors around the world Being an indie author can give you all this and more, but once again, there is a Shadow side and preparation can help you navigate potential issues.   The myth of success… and the reality of experience As with traditional publishing, the indie author world has perpetuated a myth of success in the example of the breakout indie author like E.L. James with Fifty Shades of Grey, Hugh Howey with Wool, or Andy Weir with The Martian. The emphasis on financial success is also fuelled online by authors who share screenshots showing six-figure months or seven-figure years, without sharing marketing costs and other outgoings, or the amount of time spent on the business.  Yes, these can inspire some, but it can also make others feel inadequate and potentially lead to bad choices about how to publish and market based on comparison.  The indie author world is full of just as much ego and a desire for status and money as traditional publishing.  This is not a surprise!  Most authors, regardless of publishing choices, are a mix of massive ego and chronic self-doubt. We are human, so the same issues will re-occur. A different publishing method doesn’t cure all ills. Some of the issues are as follows: You learn everything you need to know about writing and editing, only to find that you need to learn a whole new set of skills in order to self-publish and market your book. This can take a lot of time and effort you did not expect, and things change all the time so you have to keep learning. Being in control of every aspect of the publishing process, from writing to cover design to marketing, can be overwhelming, leading to indecision, perfectionism, stress, and even burnout as you try to do all the things.  You try to find people to help, but building your team is a challenge, and working with others has its own difficulties.  People say negative things about self-publishing that may arouse feelings of embarrassment or shame. These might be little niggles, but they needle you, nonetheless. You wonder whether you made the right choice. You struggle with self-doubt and if you go to an event with traditional published authors, you compare yourself to them and feel like an imposter.  Are you good enough to be an author if a traditional publisher hasn’t chosen you?  Is it just vanity to self-publish?  Are your books unworthy?  Even though you worked with a professional editor, you still get one-star reviews and you hate criticism from readers. You wonder whether you’re wasting your time. You might be ripped off by an author services company who promise the world, only to leave you with a pile of printed books in your garage and no way to sell them.  When you finally publish your book, it languishes at the bottom of the charts while other authors hit the top of the list over and over, raking in the cash while you are left out of pocket.  You don’t admit to over-spending on marketing as it makes you ashamed.  You resist book marketing and make critical comments about writers who embrace it. You believe that quality rises to the top and if a book is good enough, people will buy it anyway. This can lead to disappointment and disillusionment when you launch your book and it doesn’t sell many copies because nobody knows about it.  You try to do what everyone advises, but you still can’t make decent money as an author.  You’re jealous of other authors’ success and put it down to them ‘selling out’ or writing things you can’t or ‘using AI’ or ‘using a ghostwriter’ or having a specific business model you consider impossible to replicate. And the list goes on…  When you acknowledge the Shadow, it loses its power Being in control of your books and your author career is a double-edged sword.  Traditionally published authors can criticise their publishers or agents or the marketing team or the bookstores or the media, but indie authors have to take responsibility for it all.  Sure, we can blame ‘the algorithms’ or social media platforms, or criticise other authors for having more experience or more money to invest in marketing, or attribute their success to writing in a more popular genre — but we also know there are always people who do well regardless of the challenges. Once more, we’re back to acknowledging and integrating the Shadow side of our choices. We are flawed humans. There will always be good times and bad, and difficulties to offset the high points. This too shall pass, as the old saying goes. I know that being an indie author has plenty of Shadow. I’ve been doing this since 2008 and despite the hard times, I’m still here.  I’m still writing. I’m still publishing.  This life is not for everyone, but it’s my choice. You must make yours. The Shadow in work You work hard. You make a living. Nothing wrong with that attitude, right? It’s what we’re taught from an early age and, like so much of life, it’s not a problem until it goes to extremes. Not achieving what you want to? Work harder. Can’t get ahead? Work harder. Not making a good enough living? Work harder. People who don’t work hard are lazy. They don’t deserve handouts or benefits. People who don’t work hard aren’t useful, so they are not valued members of our culture and community. But what about the old or the sick, the mentally ill, or those with disabilities? What about children? What about the unemployed? The under-employed? What about those who are — or will be — displaced by technology, those called “the useless class” by historian Yuval Noah Harari in his book Homo Deus? What if we become one of these in the future? Who am I if I cannot work? The Shadow side of my attitude to work became clear when I caught COVID in the summer of 2021.  I was the sickest I’d ever been. I spent two weeks in bed unable to even think properly, and six weeks after that, I was barely able to work more than an hour a day before lying in the dark and waiting for my energy to return. I was limited in what I could do for another six months after that. At times, I wondered if I would ever get better. Jonathan kept urging me to be patient and rest.  But I don’t know how to rest. I know how to work and how to sleep. I can do ‘active rest,’ which usually involves walking a long way or traveling somewhere interesting, but those require a stronger mind and body than I had during those months. It struck me that even if I recovered from the virus, I had glimpsed my future self.  One day, I will be weak in body and mind.  If I’m lucky, that will be many years away and hopefully for a short time before I die — but it will happen.  I am an animal. I will die. My body and mind will pass on and I will be no more. Before then I will be weak.  Before then, I will be useless.  Before then, I will be a burden.  I will not be able to work… But who am I if I cannot work? What is the point of me? I can’t answer these questions right now, because although I recognise them as part of my Shadow, I’ve not progressed far enough to have dealt with them entirely. My months of COVID gave me some much-needed empathy for those who cannot work, even if they want to. We need to reframe what work is as a society, and value humans for different things, especially as technology changes what work even means. That starts with each of us. “Illness, affliction of body and soul, can be life-altering. It has the potential to reveal the most fundamental conflict of the human condition: the tension between our infinite, glorious dreams and desires and our limited, vulnerable, decaying physicality.” —Connie Zweig, The Inner Work of Age: Shifting from Role to Soul The Shadow in money In the Greek myth, King Midas was a wealthy ruler who loved gold above all else. His palace was adorned with golden sculptures and furniture, and he took immense pleasure in his riches. Yet, despite his vast wealth, he yearned for more. After doing a favour for Dionysus, the god of wine and revelry, Midas was granted a single wish. Intoxicated by greed, he wished that everything he touched would turn to gold — and it was so. At first, it was a lot of fun.  Midas turned everything else in his palace to gold, even the trees and stones of his estate. After a morning of turning things to gold, he fancied a spot of lunch. But when he tried to eat, the food and drink turned to gold in his mouth. He became thirsty and hungry — and increasingly desperate. As he sat in despair on his golden throne, his beloved young daughter ran to comfort him. For a moment, he forgot his wish — and as she wrapped her arms around him and kissed his cheek, she turned into a golden statue, frozen in precious metal.  King Midas cried out to the gods to forgive him, to reverse the wish.  He renounced his greed and gave away all his wealth, and his daughter was returned to life. The moral of the story: Wealth and greed are bad. In Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, Ebenezer Scrooge is described as a “squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner.” He’s wealthy but does not share, considering Christmas spending to be frivolous and giving to charity to be worthless. He’s saved by a confrontation with his lonely future and becomes a generous man and benefactor of the poor. Wealth is good if you share it with others. The gospel of Matthew, chapter 25: 14-30, tells the parable of the bags of gold, in which a rich man goes on a journey and entrusts his servants with varying amounts of gold. On his return, the servants who multiplied the gold through their efforts and investments are rewarded, while the one who merely returned the gold with no interest is punished:  “For whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them.” Making money is good, making more money is even better. If you can’t make any money, you don’t deserve to have any. Within the same gospel, in Matthew 19:24, Jesus encounters a wealthy man and tells him to sell all his possessions and give the money to the poor, which the man is unable to do. Jesus says,  “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” Wealth is bad. Give it all away and you’ll go to heaven. With all these contradictory messages, no wonder we’re so conflicted about money! How do you think and feel about money? While money is mostly tied to our work, it’s far more than just a transactional object for most people. It’s loaded with complex symbolism and judgment handed down by family, religion, and culture. You are likely to find elements of Shadow by examining your attitudes around money.  Consider which of the following statements resonate with you or write your own. Money stresses me out. I don’t want to talk about it or think about it. Some people hoard money, so there is inequality. Rich people are bad and we should take away their wealth and give it to the poor.  I can never make enough money to pay the bills, or to give my family what I want to provide. Money doesn’t grow on trees.  It’s wasteful to spend money as you might need it later, so I’m frugal and don’t spend money unless absolutely necessary. It is better and more ethical to be poor than to be rich. I want more money. I read books and watch TV shows about rich people because I want to live like that. Sometimes I spend too much on things for a glimpse of what that might be like.  I buy lottery tickets and dream of winning all that money.  I’m jealous of people who have money. I want more of it and I resent those who have it. I’m no good with money. I don’t like to look at my bank statement or credit card statement. I live off my overdraft and I’m in debt. I will never earn enough to get out of debt and start saving, so I don’t think too much about it. I don’t know enough about money. Talking about it makes me feel stupid, so I just ignore it. People like me aren’t educated about money.  I need to make more money. If I can make lots of money, then people will look up to me. If I make lots of money, I will be secure, nothing can touch me, I will be safe.  I never want to be poor. I would be ashamed to be poor. I will never go on benefits. My net worth is my self worth. Money is good. We have the best standard of living in history because of the increase in wealth over time. Even the richest kings of the past didn’t have what many middle-class people have today in terms of access to food, water, technology, healthcare, education, and more. The richest people give the most money to the poor through taxation and charity, as well as through building companies that employ people and invent new things. The very richest give away much of their fortunes. They provide far more benefit to the world than the poor.  I love money. Money loves me. Money comes easily and quickly to me. I attract money in multiple streams of income. It flows to me in so many ways. I spend money. I invest money. I give money. I’m happy and grateful for all that I receive. The Shadow around money for authors in particular Many writers and other creatives have issues around money and wealth. How often have you heard the following, and which do you agree with? You can’t make money with your writing. You’ll be a poor author in a garret, a starving artist.  You can’t write ‘good quality’ books and make money. If you make money writing, you’re a hack, you’re selling out. You are less worthy than someone who writes only for the Muse. Your books are commercial, not artistic. If you spend money on marketing, then your books are clearly not good enough to sell on their own. My agent / publisher / accountant / partner deals with the money side. I like to focus on the creative side of things. My money story Note: This is not financial or investment advice. Please talk to a professional about your situation. I’ve had money issues over the years — haven’t we all! But I have been through a (long) process to bring money out of my Shadow and into the light. There will always be more to discover, but hopefully my money story will help you, or at least give you an opportunity to reflect. Like most people, I didn’t grow up with a lot of money. My parents started out as teachers, but later my mum — who I lived with, along with my brother — became a change management consultant, moving to the USA and earning a lot more. I’m grateful that she moved into business because her example changed the way I saw money and provided some valuable lessons. (1) You can change your circumstances by learning more and then applying that to leverage opportunity into a new job or career Mum taught English at a school in Bristol when we moved back from Malawi, Africa, in the mid ’80s but I remember how stressful it was for her, and how little money she made. She wanted a better future for us all, so she took a year out to do a master’s degree in management. In the same way, when I wanted to change careers and leave consulting to become an author, I spent time and money learning about the writing craft and the business of publishing. I still invest a considerable chunk on continuous learning, as this industry changes all the time. (2) You might have to downsize in order to leap forward The year my mum did her degree, we lived in the attic of another family’s house; we ate a lot of one-pot casserole and our treat was having a Yorkie bar on the walk back from the museum.  We wore hand-me-down clothes, and I remember one day at school when another girl said I was wearing her dress. I denied it, of course, but there in back of the dress was her name tag. I still remember her name and I can still feel that flush of shame and embarrassment. I was determined to never feel like that again. But what I didn’t realize at the time was that I was also learning the power of downsizing. Mum got her degree and then a new job in management in Bristol. She bought a house, and we settled for a few years. I had lots of different jobs as a teenager. My favourite was working in the delicatessen because we got a free lunch made from delicious produce. After I finished A-levels, I went to the University of Oxford, and my mum and brother moved to the USA for further opportunities. I’ve downsized multiple times over the years, taking a step back in order to take a step forward. The biggest was in 2010 when I decided to leave consulting. Jonathan and I sold our three-bedroom house and investments in Brisbane, Australia, and rented a one-bedroom flat in London, so we could be debt-free and live on less while I built up a new career. It was a decade before we bought another house. (3) Comparison can be deadly: there will always be people with more money than you Oxford was an education in many ways and relevant to this chapter is how much I didn’t know about things people with money took for granted. I learned about formal hall and wine pairings, and how to make a perfect gin and tonic. I ate smoked salmon for the first time. I learned how to fit in with people who had a lot more money than I did, and I definitely wanted to have money of my own to play with. (4) Income is not wealth You can earn lots but have nothing to show for it after years of working. I learned this in my first few years of IT consulting after university. I earned a great salary and then went contracting, earning even more money at a daily rate. I had a wonderful time. I traveled, ate and drank and generally made merry, but I always had to go back to the day job when the money ran out. I couldn’t work out how I could ever stop this cycle. Then I read Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki, a book I still recommend, especially if you’re from a family that values academic over financial education. I learned how to escape the rat race by building and/or accumulating assets that pay even when you’re not working. It was a revelation! The ‘poor dad’ in the book is a university professor. He knows so much about so many things, but he ends up poor as he did not educate himself about money. The ‘rich dad’ has little formal education, but he knows about money and wealth because he learned about it, as we can do at any stage in our lives.  (5) Not all investments suit every person, so find the right one for you Once I discovered the world of investing, I read all the books and did courses and in-person events. I joined communities and I up-skilled big time. Of course, I made mistakes and learned lots along the way.  I tried property investing and renovated a couple of houses for rental (with more practical partners and skilled contractors). But while I could see that property investing might work for some people, I did not care enough about the details to make it work for me, and it was certainly not passive income. I tried other things.  My first husband was a boat skipper and scuba diving instructor, so we started a charter. With the variable costs of fuel, the vagaries of New Zealand weather — and our divorce — it didn’t last long! From all these experiments, I learned I wanted to run a business, but it needed to be online and not based on a physical location, physical premises, or other people.  That was 2006, around the time that blogging started taking off and it became possible to make a living online. I could see the potential and a year later, the iPhone and the Amazon Kindle launched, which became the basis of my business as an author.  (6) Boring, automatic saving and investing works best Between 2007 and 2011, I contracted in Australia, where they have compulsory superannuation contributions, meaning you have to save and invest a percentage of your salary or self-employed income.  I’d never done that before, because I didn’t understand it. I’d ploughed all my excess income into property or the business instead. But in Australia I didn’t notice the money going out because it was automatic. I chose a particular fund and it auto-invested every month. The pot grew pretty fast since I didn’t touch it, and years later, it’s still growing.  I discovered the power of compound interest and time in the market, both of which are super boring. This type of investing is not a get rich quick scheme. It’s a slow process of automatically putting money into boring investments and doing that month in, month out, year in, year out, automatically for decades while you get on with your life.  I still do this. I earn money as an author entrepreneur and I put a percentage of that into boring investments automatically every month. I also have a small amount which is for fun and higher risk investments, but mostly I’m a conservative, risk-averse investor planning ahead for the future. This is not financial advice, so I’m not giving any specifics. I have a list of recommended money books at www.TheCreativePenn.com/moneybooks if you want to learn more. Learning from the Shadow When I look back, my Shadow side around money eventually drove me to learn more and resulted in a better outcome (so far!). I was ashamed of being poor when I had to wear hand-me-down clothes at school. That drove a fear of not having any money, which partially explains my workaholism. I was embarrassed at Oxford because I didn’t know how to behave in certain settings, and I wanted to be like the rich people I saw there.  I spent too much money in my early years as a consultant because I wanted to experience a “rich” life and didn’t understand saving and investing would lead to better things in the future.  I invested too much in the wrong things because I didn’t know myself well enough and I was trying to get rich quick so I could leave my job and ‘be happy.’ But eventually, I discovered that I could grow my net worth with boring, long-term investments while doing a job I loved as an author entrepreneur.  My only regret is that I didn’t discover this earlier and put a percentage of my income into investments as soon as I started work. It took several decades to get started, but at least I did (eventually) start.  My money story isn’t over yet, and I keep learning new things, but hopefully my experience will help you reflect on your own and avoid the issue if it’s still in Shadow. These chapters are excerpted from Writing the Shadow: Turn Your Inner Darkness Into Words by Joanna Penn  The post Writing The Shadow: The Creative Wound, Publishing, And Money, With Joanna Penn first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How can you build iconic characters that your readers want to keep coming back to? How can you be the kind of creator that readers trust, even without social media? With Claire Taylor In the intro, Dan Brown talks writing and publishing [Tetragrammaton]; Design Rules That Make or Break a Book [Self-Publishing Advice]; Amazon’s DRM change [Kindlepreneur]; Show me the money [Rachael Herron]; AI bible translation [Wycliffe, Pope Leo tweet]. Plus, Business for Authors 24 Jan webinar, and Bones of the Deep. Today's show is sponsored by Bookfunnel, the essential tool for your author business. Whether it’s delivering your reader magnet, sending out advanced copies of your book, handing out ebooks at a conference, or fulfilling your digital sales to readers, BookFunnel does it all. Check it out at bookfunnel.com/thecreativepenn This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn  Claire Taylor is a humour and mystery author, the owner of FFS Media, and a certified Enneagram coach. She teaches authors to write stronger stories and build sustainable careers at LiberatedWriter.com, and her book is Write Iconic Characters: Unlocking the Core Motivations that Fuel Unforgettable Stories. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights, and the full transcript is below.  Show Notes Why Claire left social media and how she still markets her books and services What the Enneagram is and how core fears and desires shape character motivation Using Enneagram types (including Wednesday Addams as an example) to write iconic characters Creating rich conflict and relationships by pairing different Enneagram types on the page Coping with rapid change, AI, and fear in the author community in 2026 Building a trustworthy, human author brand through honesty, transparency, and vulnerability You can find Claire at LiberatedWriter.com, FFS.media, or on Substack as The Liberated Writer. Transcript of the interview with Claire Taylor Joanna: Claire Taylor is a humour and mystery author, the owner of FFS Media, and a certified Enneagram coach. She teaches authors to write stronger stories and build sustainable careers at LiberatedWriter.com, and her book is Write Iconic Characters: Unlocking the Core Motivations that Fuel Unforgettable Stories. So, welcome back to the show, Claire. Claire: Thank you so much for having me back. I'm excited to be here. Joanna: It's great to have you back on the show. It was March 2024 when you were last on, so almost two years now as this goes out. Give us a bit of an update. How has your writing craft and your author business changed in that time? Claire: One of the things I've been focusing on with my own fiction craft is deconstructing the rules of how a story “should” be. That's been a sort of hobby focus of mine. All the story structure books aren't law, right? That's why there are so many of them. They're all suggestions, frameworks. They're all trying to quantify humans’ innate ability to understand a story. So I'm trying to remember more that I already know what a story is, deep down. My job as an author is to keep the reader's attention from start to finish and leave them feeling the way I hope they’ll feel at the end. That’s been my focus on the craft side. On the author business side, I've made some big shifts. I left social media earlier this year, and I've been looking more towards one-on-one coaching and networking. I did a craft-based Kickstarter, and I’d been focusing a lot on “career, career, career”—very business-minded—and now I'm creating more content again, especially around using the Enneagram for writing craft. So there’s been a lot of transition since 2024 for me. Joanna: I think it's so important—and obviously we're going to get into your book in more detail—but I do think it's important for people to hear about our pivots and transitions. I haven't spoken to you for a while, but I actually started a master's degree a few months back. I'm doing a full-time master's alongside everything else I do. So I've kind of put down book writing for the moment, and I'm doing essay writing and academic writing instead. It's quite different, as you can imagine. It sounds like what you’re doing is different too. One thing I know will have perked up people’s ears is: “I left social media.” Tell us a bit more about that. Claire: This was a move that I could feel coming for a while. I didn’t like what social media did to my attention. Even when I wasn’t on it, there was almost a hangover from having been on it. My attention didn’t feel as sharp and focused as it used to be, back before social media became what it is now. So I started asking myself some questions: What is lost if I leave? What is gained if I leave? And what is social media actually doing for me today? Because sometimes we hold on to what it used to do for us, and we keep trying to squeeze more and more of that out of it. But it has changed so much. There are almost no places with sufficient organic reach anymore. It’s all pay-to-play, and the cost of pay-to-play keeps going up. I looked at the numbers for my business. My Kickstarter was a great place to analyse that because they track so many traffic sources so clearly. I could see exactly how much I was getting from social media when I advertised and promoted my projects there. Then I asked: can I let that go in order to get my attention back and make my life feel more settled? And I decided: yes, I can. That’s worth more to me. Joanna: There are some things money can’t buy. Sometimes it really isn’t about the money. I like your question: what is lost and what is gained? You also said it’s all pay-to-play and there’s no organic reach. I do think there is some organic reach for some people who don’t pay, but those people are very good at playing the game of whatever the platform wants. So, TikTok for example—you might not have to pay money yet, but you do have to play their game. You have to pay with your time instead of money. I agree with you. I don’t think there’s anywhere you can literally just post something and know it will reliably reach the people who follow you. Claire: Right. Exactly. TikTok currently, if you really play the game, will sometimes “pick” you, right? But that “pick me” energy is not really my jam. And we can see the trend—this “organic” thing doesn’t last. It's organic for now. You can play the game for now, but TikTok would be crazy not to change things so they make more money. So eventually everything becomes pay-to-play. TikTok is fun, but for me it’s addictive. I took it off my phone years ago because I would do the infinite scroll. There’s so much candy there. Then I’d wake up the next morning and notice my mood just wasn’t where I wanted it to be. My energy was low. I really saw a correlation between how much I scrolled and how flat I felt afterwards. So I realised: I’m not the person to pay-to-play or to play the game here. I’m not even convinced that the pay-to-play on certain social media networks is being tracked in a reliable, accountable way anymore. Who is holding them accountable for those numbers? You can sort of see correlation in your sales, but still, I just became more and more sceptical. In the end, it just wasn’t for me. My life is so much better on a daily basis without it. That’s definitely a decision I have not regretted for a second. Joanna: I’m sorry to keep on about this, but I think this is great because this is going out in January 2026, and there will be lots of people examining their relationship with social media. It’s one of those things we all examine every year, pretty much. The other thing I’d add is that you are a very self-aware person. You spend a lot of time thinking about these things and noticing your own behaviour and energy. Stopping and thinking is such an important part of it. But let’s tackle the big question: one of the reasons people don’t want to come off social media is that they’re afraid they don’t know how else to market. How are you marketing if you’re not using social media? Claire: I didn’t leave social media overnight. Over time, I’ve been adjusting and transitioning, preparing my business and myself mentally and emotionally for probably about a year. I still market to my email list. That has always been important to my business. I’ve also started a Substack that fits how my brain works. Substack is interesting. Some people might consider it a form of social media—it has that new reading feed—but it feels much more like blogging to me. It’s blogging where you can be discovered, which is lovely. I’ve been doing more long-form content there. You get access to all the emails of your subscribers, which is crucial to me. I don’t want to build on something I can’t take with me. So I’ve been doing more long-form content, and that seems to keep my core audience with me. I’ve got plenty of people subscribed; people continue to come back, work with me, and tell their friends. Word of mouth has always been the way my business markets best, because it’s hard to describe the benefits of what I do in a quick, catchy way. It needs context. So I’m leaning even more on that. Then I’m also shifting my fiction book selling more local. Joanna: In person? Claire: Yes. In person and local. Networking and just telling more people that I’m an author. Connecting more deeply with my existing email lists and communities and selling that way. Joanna: I think at the end of the day it does come back to the email list. I think this is one of the benefits of selling direct to people through Shopify or Payhip or whatever, or locally, because you can build your email list. Every person you bring into your own ecosystem, you get their data and you can stay in touch. Whereas all the things we did for years to get people to go to Amazon, we didn’t get their emails and details. It’s so interesting where we are right now in the author business. Okay, we’ll come back to some of these things, but let’s get into the book and what you do. Obviously what underpins the book is the Enneagram. Just remind us what the Enneagram is, why you incorporate it into so much of your work, and why you find it resonates so much. Claire: The Enneagram is a framework that describes patterns of thoughts, feelings, and actions that tend to arise from nine different core motivations. Those core motivations are made up of a fear–desire pair. So, for instance, there’s the fear of lacking worth and the desire to be worthy. That pair is the Type Three core motivation. If you’re a Type Three, sometimes called “The Achiever,” that’s your fundamental driver. What we fear and desire above all the other fears and desires determines where our attention goes. And attention is something authors benefit greatly from understanding. We have to keep people’s attention, so we want to understand our own attention and how to cultivate it. The things our attention goes to build our understanding of ourselves and the world. Being intentional about that, and paying attention to what your characters pay attention to—and what your readers are paying attention to—is hugely beneficial. It can give you a real leg up. That’s why I focus on the Enneagram. I find it very useful at that core level. You can build a lot of other things on top of it with your characters: their backstory, personal histories, little quirks—all of that can be built off the Enneagram foundation. Why I like the Enneagram more than other frameworks like MBTI or the Big Five is that it not only shows us how our fears are confining us—that’s really what it’s charting—but it also shows us a path towards liberation from those fears. That’s where the Enneagram really shines: the growth path, the freedom from the confines of our own personality. It offers that to anyone who wants to study and discover it. A lot of the authors I work with say things like, “I’m just so sick of my own stuff.” And I get it. We all get sick of running into the same patterns over and over again. We can get sick of our personality! The Enneagram is a really good tool for figuring out what’s going on and how to try something new, because often we can’t even see that there are other options. We have this particular lens we’re looking through. That’s why I like to play with it, and why I find it so useful. Joanna: That’s really interesting. It sounds like you have a lot of mature authors—and when I say “mature,” I mean authors with a lot of books under their belt, not necessarily age. There are different problems at different stages of the author career, and the problem you just described—“I’m getting sick of my stuff”—sounds like a mature author issue. What are some of the other issues you see in the community that are quite common amongst indie authors? Claire: One that comes up a lot, especially early on, is: “Am I doing this right?” That’s a big question. People say, “I don’t know if I’m doing this right. I’m going to mess it up. This person told me this was the way to do things, but I don’t think I can do it this way. Am I doomed?” That’s the fear. A lot of what I help people with is seeing that there isn’t a single “right” way to do this. There’s a way that’s going to feel more aligned to you, and there are millions of ways to approach an author career because we’re all constructing it as we go. You were there in the early days. We were all just making this up as we went along. Joanna: Exactly. There was a time when ebooks were PDFs, there wasn’t even a Kindle, and there was no iPhone. We were literally just making it up. Claire: Right. Exactly. That spirit of “we’re all making it up” is important. Some of us have come up with frameworks that work for us, and then we tell other people about them—“Here’s a process; try this process”—but that doesn’t mean it’s the process. Understanding what motivates you—those core motivations—helps you see where you’re going to bump into advice that’s not right for you, and how to start making decisions that fit your attention, your life, your desires in this author role. Early on we do a lot of that work. Then there are the authors who started a while ago and have a bunch of books. They hit a point where they say, “I’ve changed so much since I started writing. I need to figure out how to adjust my career.” Joanna: Tell us more about that, because I think that’s you and me. How do we deal with that? Claire: Well, crying helps. Joanna: That is true! There’s always a bit of crying involved in reinvention. From my perspective, my brand has always been built around me. People are still here—I know some people listening who have been with the podcast since I started it in 2009—and I’ve always been me. Even though I’ve done loads of different things and changed along the way, at heart I’m still me. I’m really glad I built a personal brand around who I am, rather than around one genre or a single topic. How about you? How do you see it? Claire: I’m the same. I just can’t stick with something that doesn’t feel right for me anymore. I’ll start to rebel against it. There’s also that “good girl” part of me that wants to do things the way they’re supposed to be done and keep everybody happy. I have to keep an eye on her, because she’ll default to “this is the way it should be done,” and then I end up constricted. As we advance through our careers, positioning around what motivates us and what we love, and allowing ourselves to understand that it’s okay to change—even though it’s painful—is crucial. It’s actually destructive not to change over time. We end up forfeiting so many things that make life worth living if we don’t allow ourselves to grow and change. We end up in this tiny box. People sometimes say the Enneagram is very restrictive. “It’s only nine types, you’re putting me in a box.” It’s like: no. These are the boxes we’ve put ourselves in. Then we use the Enneagram to figure out how to get out of the box. As we start to see the box we’ve put ourselves in with our personality—“that’s me, that’s not me”—we realise how much movement we actually have, how many options we have, while still being ourselves. Joanna: So many options. This kind of brings us into your book, because part of the personal brand thing is being real and having different facets. Your book is Write Iconic Characters, and presumably these are characters that people want to read more about. It uses the Enneagram to construct these better characters. So first up— What’s your definition of an iconic character, as opposed to any old character? And how can we use the Enneagram to construct one? Claire: An iconic character, in my imagination, is one that really sticks with us after we've finished the story. They become a reference point. We’ll say, “This person is kind of like that character,” or “This situation feels like that character would handle it this way.” It could be our friends, our enemies, someone we meet on the bus—whoever it is might remind us of this character. So they really get lodged in our psyche. An iconic character feels true to some fundamental part of the human condition, even if they’re not strictly human. So, all the alien romance people listening, don’t worry—you’re still in! These characters take on a life of their own. With an iconic character, we may hear them talking to us after the book is done, because we’ve tapped into that essential part of them. They can become almost archetypal—something we go back to over and over again in our minds, both as writers and as readers. Joanna: How can we use the Enneagram to construct an iconic character? I’m asking this as a discovery writer who struggles to construct anything beforehand. It’s more that I write stuff and then something emerges. But I have definitely not had a hit series with an iconic character, so I’m willing to give your approach a try. Claire: It works with whatever your process is. If you’re a discovery writer, start with that spark of a character in your head. If there’s a character who’s just a glimmer—maybe you know a few things about them—just keep writing. At some point you’ll probably recognise, “Okay, it’s time to go deeper in understanding this character and create a cohesive thread to pull all of this together.” That’s where the Enneagram becomes useful. You can put on your armchair psychologist hat and ask: which of the nine core fears seems like it might be driving the parts of their personality that are emerging? Thankfully, we intuitively recognise the nine types. When we start gathering bits for a new character, we tend to pull from essentially the same constellation of personality, even if we don’t realise it. For instance, you might say, “This character is bold and adventurous,” and that’s all you know. You’re probably not going to also add, “and they’re incredibly shy,” because “bold and adventurous” plus “incredibly shy” doesn’t really fit our intuitive understanding of people. We know that instinctively. So, you’ve got “bold and adventurous.” You write that to a certain point, and then you get to a place where you think, “I don’t really know them deeply.” That’s when you can go back to the nine core fears and start ruling some out quite quickly. In the book, I have descriptions for each of them. You can read the character descriptions, read about the motivations, and start to say, “It’s definitely not these five types. I can rule those out.” If they’re bold and adventurous, maybe the core fear is being trapped in deprivation and pain, or being harmed and controlled. Those correspond to Type Seven (“The Enthusiast”) and Type Eight (“The Challenger”), respectively. So you might say, “Okay, maybe they’re a Seven or an Eight.” From there, if you can pin down a type, you can read more about it and get ideas. You can understand the next big decision point. If they’re a Type Seven, what’s going to motivate them? They’ll do whatever keeps them from being trapped in pain and deprivation, and they’ll be seeking satisfaction or new experiences in some way, because that’s the core desire that goes with that fear. So now, you’re asking: “How do I get them to get on the spaceship and leave Earth?” Well, you could offer them some adventure, because they’re bold and adventurous. I have a character who’s a Seven, and she gets on a spaceship and takes off because her boyfriend just proposed—and the idea of being trapped in marriage feels like: “Nope. Whatever is on this spaceship, I’m out of here.” You can play with that once you identify a type. You can go as deep with that type as you want, or you can just work with the core fear and the basic desire. There’s no “better or worse”—it’s whatever you feel comfortable with and whatever you need for the story. Joanna: In the book, you go into all the Enneagram types in detail, but you also have a specific example: Wednesday Addams. She’s one of my favourites. People listening have either seen the current series or they have something in mind from the old-school Addams Family. Can you talk about [Wednesday Addams] as an example? Claire: Doing those deep dives was some of the most fun research for this book. I told my husband, John, “Don’t bother me. I need to sit and binge-watch Wednesday again—with my notebook this time.” Online, people were guessing: “Oh, she’s maybe this type, maybe that type.” As soon as I started watching properly with the Enneagram in mind, I thought: “Oh, this is a Type Eight, this is the Challenger.” One of the first things we hear from her is that she considers emotions to be weakness. Immediately, you can cross out a bunch of types from that. When we’re looking at weak/strong language—that lens of “strength” versus “weakness”—we tend to look towards Eights, because they often sort the world in those terms. They’re concerned about being harmed or controlled, so they feel they need to be strong and powerful. That gave me a strong hint in that direction. If we look at the inciting incident—which is a great place to identify what really triggers a character, because it has to be powerful enough to launch the story—Wednesday finds her little brother Pugsley stuffed in a locker. She says, “Who did this?” because she believes she’s the only one who gets to bully him. That’s a very stereotypical Type Eight thing. The unhealthy Eight can dip into being a bit of a bully because they’re focused on power and power dynamics. But the Eight also says, “These are my people. I protect them. If you’re one of my people, you’re under my protection.” So there’s that protection/control paradox. Then she goes and—spoiler—throws a bag of piranhas into the pool to attack the boys who hurt him. That’s like: okay, this is probably an Eight. Then she has control wrested from her when she’s sent to the new school. That’s a big trigger for an Eight: to not have autonomy, to not have control. She acts out pretty much immediately, tries to push people away, and establishes dominance. One of the first things she does is challenge the popular girl to a fencing match. That’s very Eight behaviour: “I’m going to go in, figure out where I sit in this power structure, and try to get into a position of power straight away.” That’s how the story starts, and in the book I go into a lot more analysis. At one point she’s attacked by this mysterious thing and is narrowly saved from a monster. Her reaction afterwards is: “I would have rather saved myself.” That’s another strong Eight moment. The Eight does not like to be saved by anyone else. It’s: “No, I wanted to be strong enough to do that.” Her story arc is also very Eight-flavoured: she starts off walled-off, “I can do it myself,” which can sometimes look like the self-sufficiency of the Five, but for her it’s about always being in a power position and in control of herself. She has to learn to rely more on other people if she wants to protect the people she cares about. Protecting the innocent and protecting “her people” is a big priority for the Eight. Joanna: Let’s say we’ve identified our main character and protagonist. One of the important things in any book, especially in a series, is conflict—both internal and external. Can we use the Enneagram to work out what would be the best other character, or characters, to give us more conflict? Claire: The character dynamics are complex, and all types are going to have both commonalities and conflict between them. That works really well for fiction. But depending on how much conflict you need, there are certain type pairings that are especially good for it. If you have a protagonist who’s an Eight, they’re going to generate conflict everywhere because it doesn’t really bother them. They’re okay wading into conflict. If you ask an Eight, “Do you like conflict?” they’ll often say, “Well, sometimes it’s not great,” but to everyone else it looks like they come in like a wrecking ball. The Eight tends to go for what they want. They don’t see the point in waiting. They think, “I want it, I’m going to go and get it.” That makes them feel strong and powerful. So it’s easy to create external and internal conflict with an Eight and other types. But the nature of the conflict is going to be different depending on who you pair them with. Let’s say you have this Eight and you pair them with a Type One, “The Reformer,” whose core fear is being bad or corrupt, and who wants to be good and have integrity. The Reformer wants morality. They can get a little preachy; they can become a bit of a zealot when they’re more unhealthy. A One and an Eight will have a very particular kind of conflict because the One says, “Let’s do what’s right,” and the Eight says, “Let’s do what gets me what I want and puts me in the power position.” They may absolutely get along if they’re taking on injustice. Ones and Eights will team up if they both see the same thing as unjust. They’ll both take it on together. But then they may reach a point in the story where the choice is between doing the thing that is “right”—maybe self-sacrificing or moral—versus doing the thing that will exact retribution or secure a power-up. That’s where the conflict between a One and an Eight shows up. You can grab any two types and they’ll have unique conflict. I’m actually working on a project on Kickstarter that’s all about character dynamics and relationships—Write Iconic Relationships is the next project—and I go deeper into this there. Joanna: I was wondering about that, because I did a day-thing recently with colour palettes and interior design—which is not usually my thing—so I was really challenging myself. We did this colour wheel, and they were talking about how the opposite colour on the wheel is the one that goes with it in an interesting way. I thought— Maybe there’s something in the Enneagram where it’s like a wheel, and the type opposite is the one that clashes or fits in a certain way. Is that a thing? Claire: There is a lot of that kind of contrast. The Enneagram is usually depicted in a circle, one through nine, and there are strong contrasts between types that are right next to each other, as well as interesting lines that connect them. For example, we’ve been talking about the Eight, and right next to Eight is Nine, “The Peacemaker.” Eights and Nines can look like opposites in certain ways. The Nine is conflict-avoidant, and the Eight tends to think you get what you want by pushing into conflict if necessary. Then you’ve got Four, “The Individualist,” which is very emotional, artistic, heart-centred, and Five, “The Investigator,” which you’re familiar with—very head-centred and analytical, thinking-based. The Four and the Five can clash a bit: the head and the heart. So, yes, there are interesting contrasts right next to each other on the wheel. Each type also has its own conflict style. We’re going into the weeds a bit here, but it’s fascinating to play with. There’s one conflict style—the avoidant conflict style, sometimes called the “positive outlook” group—and it’s actually hard to get those types into an enemies-to-lovers romance because they don’t really want to be enemies. That’s Types Two, Seven, and Nine. So depending on the trope you’re writing, some type pairings are more frictional than others. There are all these different dynamics you can explore, and I can’t wait to dig into them more for everyone in the relationships book. Joanna: The Enneagram is just one of many tools people can use to figure out themselves as well as their characters. Maybe that’s something people want to look at this year. You’ve got this book, you’ve got other resources that go into it, and there’s also a lot of information out there if people want to explore it more deeply. Let’s pull back out to the bigger picture, because as this goes out in January 2026, I think there is a real fear of change in the community right now. Is that something you’ve seen? What are your thoughts for authors on how they can navigate the year ahead? Claire: Yes, there has been a lot of fear. The rate of change of things online has felt very rapid. The rate of change in the broader world—politically, socially—has also felt scary to a lot of people. It can be really helpful to look at your own personal life and anchor yourself in what hasn’t changed and what feels universal. From there you can start to say, “Okay, I can do this. I’m safe enough to be creative. I can find creative ways to work within this new environment.” You can choose to engage with AI. You can choose to opt out. It’s totally your choice, and there is no inherent virtue in either one. I think that’s important to say. Sometimes people who are anti-AI—not just uninterested but actively antagonistic—go after people who like it. And sometimes people who like AI can be antagonistic towards people who don’t want to use it. But actually, you get to choose what you’re comfortable with. One of the things I see emerging for authors in 2026, regardless of what tools you’re using or how you feel about them, is this question of trustworthiness. I think there’s a big need for that. With the increased number of images and videos that are AI-generated—which a lot of people who’ve been on the internet for a while can still recognise as AI and say, “Yeah, that’s AI”—but that may not be obvious for long. Right now some of us can tell, but a lot of people can’t, and that’s only going to get murkier. There’s a rising mistrust of our own senses online lately. We’re starting to wonder, “Can I believe what I’m seeing and hearing?” And I think that sense of mistrust will increase. As an author in that environment, it’s really worth focusing on: how do I build trust with my readers? That doesn’t mean you never use AI. It might simply mean you disclose, to whatever extent feels right for you, how you use it. There are things like authenticity, honesty, vulnerability, humility, integrity, transparency, reliability—all of those are ingredients in this recipe of trustworthiness that we need to look at for ourselves. If there’s one piece of hard inner work authors can do for 2026, I think it’s asking: “Where have I not been trustworthy to my readers?” Then taking that hard, sometimes painful look at what comes up, and asking how you can adjust. What do you need to change? What new practices do you need to create that will increase trustworthiness? I really think that’s the thing that’s starting to erode online. If you can work on it now, you can hold onto your readers through whatever comes next. Joanna: What’s one concrete thing people could do in that direction [to increase trustworthiness]? Claire: I would say disclosing if you use AI is a really good start—or at least disclosing how you use it specifically. I know that can lead to drama when you do it because people have strong opinions, but trustworthiness comes at the cost of courage and honesty. Transparency is another ingredient we could all use more of. If transparency around AI is a hard “absolutely not” for you—if you’re thinking, “Nope, Claire, you can get lost with that”—then authenticity is another route. Let your messy self be visible, because people still want some human in the mix. Being authentically messy and vulnerable with your audience helps. If you can’t be reliable and put the book out on time, at least share what’s going on in your life. Staying connected in that way builds trust. Readers will think, “Okay, I see why you didn’t hit that deadline.” But if you’re always promising books—“It’s going to be out on this day,” and then, “Oh, I had to push it back,” and that happens again and again—that does erode the trustworthiness of your brand. So, looking at those things and asking, “How am I cultivating trust, and how am I breaking it?” is hard work. There are definitely ways I look at my own business and think, “That’s not a very trustworthy thing I’m doing.” Then I need to sit down, get real with myself, and see how I can improve that. Joanna: Always improving is good. Coming back to the personal brand piece, and to being vulnerable and putting ourselves out there: you and I have both got used to that over years of doing it and practising. There are people listening who have never put their photo online, or their voice online, or done a video. They might not use their photo on the back of their book or on their website. They might use an avatar. They might use a pen name. They might be afraid of having anything about themselves online. That’s where I think there is a concern, because as much as I love a lot of the AI stuff, I don’t love the idea of everything being hidden behind anonymous pen names and faceless brands. As you said, being vulnerable in some way and being recognisably human really matters. I’d say: double down on being human. I think that’s really important. Do you have any words of courage for people who feel, “I just can’t. I don’t want to put myself out there”? Claire: There are definitely legitimate reasons some people wouldn’t want to be visible. There are safety reasons, cultural reasons, family reasons—all sorts of factors. There are also a lot of authors who simply haven’t practised the muscle of vulnerability. You build that muscle a little bit at a time. It does open you up to criticism, and some people are just not at a phase of life where they can cope with that. That’s okay. If fear is the main reason—if you’re hiding because you’re scared of being judged—I do encourage you to step out, gently. This may be my personal soapbox, but I don’t think life is meant to be spent hiding. Things may happen. Not everyone will like you. That’s part of being alive. When you invite in hiding, it doesn’t just stay in one corner. That constricted feeling tends to spread into other areas of your life. A lot of the time, people I work with don’t want to disclose their pen names because they’re worried their parents won’t approve, and then we have to unpack that. You don’t have to do what your parents want you to do. You’re an adult now, right? If the issue is, “They’ll cut me out of the will,” we can talk about that too. That’s a deeper, more practical conversation. But if it’s just that they won’t approve, you have more freedom than you think. You also don’t have to plaster your picture everywhere. Even if you’re not comfortable showing your face, you can still communicate who you are and what matters to you in other ways—through your stories, through your email list, through how you talk to readers. Let your authentic self be expressed in some way. It’s scary, but the reward is freedom. Joanna: Absolutely. Lots to explore in 2026. Tell people where they can find you and your books and everything you do online. Claire: LiberatedWriter.com is where all of my stuff lives, except my fiction, which I don’t think people here are necessarily as interested in. If you do want to find my fiction, FFS Media is where that lives. Then I’m on Substack as well. I write long pieces there. If you want to subscribe, it’s The Liberated Writer on Substack. Joanna: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Claire. That was great. Claire: Thanks so much for having me.The post Leaving Social Media, Writing Iconic Characters, and Building Trust With Claire Taylor first appeared on The Creative Penn.

What does 2026 hold for indie authors and the publishing industry? I give my thoughts on trends and predictions for the year ahead. In the intro, Quitting the right stuff; how to edit your author business in 2026; Is SubStack Good for Indie Authors?; Business for Authors webinars. If you'd like to join my community and support the show every month, you'll get access to my growing list of Patron videos and audio on all aspects of the author business — for the price of a black coffee (or two) a month. Join us at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn. Joanna Penn writes non-fiction for authors and is an award-winning, New York Times and USA Today bestselling thriller author as J.F. Penn. She’s also an award-winning podcaster, creative entrepreneur, and international professional speaker. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.  (1) More indie authors will sell direct through Shopify, Kickstarter, and local in-person events (2) AI-powered search will start to shift elements of book discoverability (3) The start of Agentic Commerce (4) AI-assisted audiobook narration will go mainstream (5) AI-assisted translation will start to take off beyond the early adopters (6) AI video becomes ubiquitous. ‘Live selling’ becomes the next trend in social sales. (7) AI will create, run, and optimise ads without the need for human intervention (8) 1000 True Fans becomes more important than ever You can find all my books as J.F. Penn and Joanna Penn on your favourite online store in all the usual formats, or order from your local library or bookstore. You can also buy direct from me at CreativePennBooks.com and JFPennBooks.com. I'm not really active on social media, but you can always see my photos at Instagram @jfpennauthor. 2026 Trends and Predictions for Indie Authors and Book Publishing  (1) More indie authors will sell direct through Shopify, Kickstarter, and local in-person events —  and more companies like BookVault will offer even more beautiful physical books and products to support this. This trend will not be a surprise to most of you! Selling direct has been a trend for the last few years, but in 2026, it will continue to grow as a way that independent authors become even more independent.   The recent Written Word Media survey from Dec 2025 noted that 30% of authors surveyed are selling direct already and 30% say they plan to start in 2026. Among authors earning over $10,000 per month, roughly half sell direct.  In my opinion, selling direct is an advanced author strategy, meaning that you have multiple books and you understand book marketing and have an email list already or some guaranteed way to reach readers. In fact, Kindlepreneur reports that 66% of authors selling direct have more than 5 books, and 46% have more than 10 books.  Of course, you can start with the something small, like a table at a local event with a limited number of books for sale, but if you want to consistently sell direct for years to come, you need to consider all the business aspects. Selling direct is not a silver bullet.  It’s much harder work to sell direct than it is to just upload an ebook to Amazon, whether you choose a Kickstarter campaign, or Shopify/Payhip or other online stores, or regular in-person sales at events/conferences/fairs.  You need a business mindset and business practices, for example, you need to pay upfront for setup as well as ongoing management, and bulk printing in some cases. You need to manage taxes and cashflow. You need to be a lot more proactive about marketing, as you won’t sell anything if you don’t bring readers to your books/products.  But selling direct also brings advantages. It sets you apart from the bulk of digital only authors who still only upload ebooks to Amazon, or maybe add a print on demand book, and in an era of AI rapid creation, that number is growing all the time. If you sell direct, you get your customer data and you can reach those customers next time, through your email list. If you don’t know who bought your books and don’t have a guaranteed way to reach them, you will more easily be disrupted when things change — and they always change eventually. Kindlepreneur notes that “45% of the successful direct selling authors had over 1,000 subscribers on their email lists,” with “a clear, positive correlation between email list size and monthly direct sales income — with authors having an email list of over 15,000 subscribers earning 20X more than authors with email lists under 100 subscribers.”  Selling direct means faster money, sometimes the same day or the same week in many cases, or a few weeks after a campaign finishes, as with Kickstarter.  And remember, you don’t have to sell all your formats directly. You can keep your ebooks in KU, do whatever you like with audiobooks, and just have premium print products direct, or start with a very basic Kickstarter campaign, or a table at a local fair.  Lots more tips for Shopify and Kickstarter at https://www.thecreativepenn.com/selldirectresources/  I also recommend the Novel Marketing Podcast on The Shopify Trap: Why authors keep losing money as it is a great counterpoint to my positive endorsement of selling direct on Shopify!  Among other things, Thomas notes that a fixed monthly fee for a store doesn’t match how most authors make money from books which is more in spikes, the complexity and hassle eats time and can cost more money if you pay for help, and it can reduce sales on Amazon and weaken your ranking. Basically, if you haven’t figured out marketing direct to your store, it can hurt you.All true for some authors, for some genres, and for some people’s lifestyle.  But for authors who don’t want to be on the hamster wheel of the Amazon algorithm and who want more diversity and control in income, as well as the incredible creative benefits of what you can do selling direct, then I would say, consider your options in 2025, even if that is trying out a low-financial-goal Kickstarter campaign, or selling some print books at a local fair.  Interestingly, traditional publishers are also experimenting with direct sales. Kate Elton, the new CEO of Harper Collins notes in The Bookseller’s 2026 trend article, “we are seeing global success with responsive, reader-driven publishing, subscription boxes and TikTok Shop and – crucially – developing strategies that are founded on a comprehensive understanding of the reader.”  She also notes, “AI enables us to dramatically change the way we interact with and grow audiences. The opportunities are genuinely exciting – finding new ways to help readers discover books they will love, innovating in the ways we market and reach audiences, building new channels and adapting to new methods of consuming content.” (2) AI-powered search will start to shift elements of book discoverability From LinkedIn’s 2026 Big Ideas: “Generative engine optimization (GEO) is set to replace search engine optimization (SEO) as the way brands get discovered in the year ahead. As consumers turn to AI chatbots, agentic workflows and answer engines, appearing prominently in generative outputs will matter more than ranking in search engines.”  Google has been rolling out AI Mode with its AI Overviews and is beginning to push it within Google.com itself in some countries, which means the start of a fundamental change in how people discover content online. I first posted about GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) and AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) in 2023, and it's going to change how readers find books. For years, we've talked about the long tail of search. Now, with AI-powered search, that tail is getting even longer and more nuanced. AI can understand complex, conversational queries that traditional search engines struggled with. Someone might ask, “What's a good thriller set in a small town with a female protagonist who's a journalist investigating a cold case?” and get highly specific recommendations. This means your book metadata, your website content, and your online presence need to be more detailed and conversational. AI search engines understand context in ways that go far beyond simple keywords. The authors who win in this new landscape will be those who create rich, authentic content about their books and themselves, not just promotional copy. As economist Tyler Cowen has said, “Consider the AIs as part of your audience. Because they are already reading your words and listening to your voice.” We’re in the ‘organic’ traffic phase right now, where these AI engines are surfacing content for ‘free,’ but paid ads are inevitably on the way, and even rumoured to be coming this year to ChatGPT.  By the end of 2026, I expect some authors and publishers to be paying for AI traffic, rather than blocking and protesting them.  For now, I recommend checking that your author name/s and your books are surfaced when you search on ChatGPT.com  as well as Google.com AI Mode (powered by Gemini). You want to make sure your work comes up in some way. I found that Joanna Penn and J.F. Penn searches brought up my Shopify stores, my website, podcast, Instagram, LinkedIn, and even my Patreon page, but did not bring up links to Amazon. If you only have an author presence on Amazon, does it appear in AI search at all? Do you need to improve anything about what the AI search brings up?  Traditional publishers are also looking at this, with PublishersWeekly doing webinars on various aspects of AI in early 2026, including sessions on GEO and how book sales are changing, AI agents, and book marketing.  In a 2026 predictions article on The Bookseller, the CEO of Bloomsbury Publishing noted, “The boundaries of artificial intelligence will become clearer, enabling publishers to harness its benefits while seeking to safeguard the intellectual property rights of authors, illustrators and publishers.” “AI will be deeply embedded in our workflows, automating tasks such as metadata tagging, freeing teams to focus on creativity and strategy. Challenges will persist. Generative AI threatens traditional web traffic and ad revenue models, making metadata optimisation and SEO critical for visibility as we adjust to this new reality online.” (3) The start of Agentic Commerce AI researches what you want to buy and may even buy on your behalf. Plus, I predict that Amazon does a commerce deal with OpenAI for shopping within ChatGPT by the end of 2026. In September 2025, ChatGPT launched Instant Checkout and the Agentic Commerce Protocol, which will enable bots to buy on websites in the background if authorised by the human with the credit card. VISA is getting on board with this, so is PayPal, with no doubt more payment options to come. In the USA, ChatGPT Plus, Pro, and Free users can now buy directly from US Etsy sellers inside the chat interface, with over a million Shopify merchants coming soon. Shopify and OpenAI have also announced a partnership to bring commerce to ChatGPT. I am insanely excited about this as it could represent the first time we have been able to more easily find and surface books in a much more nuanced way than the 7 keywords and 3 categories we have relied on for so long! I’ve been using ChatGPT for at least the last year to find fiction and non-fiction books as I find the Amazon interface is ‘polluted’ by ads. I’ve discovered fascinating books from authors I’ve never heard of, most in very long tail areas. For example, Slashed Beauties by A. Rushby, recommended by ChatGPT as I am interested in medical anatomy and anatomical Venuses, and The Macabre by Kosoko Jackson, recommended as I like art history and the supernatural. I don’t think I would have found either of these within a nuanced discussion with ChatGPT. Even without these direct purchase integrations, ChatGPT now has Shopping Research, which I have found links directly to my Shopify store when I search for my books specifically.   Walmart has partnered with OpenAI to create AI-first shopping experiences, and you have to wonder what Amazon might be doing? In Nov 2025, Amazon signed a “strategic partnership” with OpenAI, and even though it's focused on the technical side of AI, those two companies in a room together might also be working on other plans … I’m calling it for 2026. I think Amazon will sign a commerce agreement with OpenAI sometime before the end of the year. This will enable at least recommendation and shopping links into Amazon stores (presumably using an OpenAI affiliate link), or perhaps even Instant Checkout with ChatGPT for Amazon. It will also enable a new marketing angle, especially if paid ads arrive in ChatGPT, perhaps even integrating with Amazon Ads in some way as part of any possible agreement, since ads are such a good revenue stream for Amazon anyway.  The line between discovery, engagement, and purchase is collapsing. Someone could be having a conversation with an AI about what to read next, and within that same conversation, purchase a bookwithout ever leaving the chat interface. This already happens within TikTok and social commerce clearly works for many authors. It’s possible that the next development for book discoverability and sales might be within AI chats.  This will likely stratify the already fragmented book eco-system even more. Some readers will continue to live only within the Amazon ecosystem and (maybe) use their Rufus chatbot to buy, and others will be much wider in their exploration of how to find and discover books (and other products and services). If you haven’t tried it yet, try ChatGPT.com Shopping Research for a book. You can do this on the free tier. Use the drop down in the main chat box and select Shopping Research. It doesn't have to be for your book. It can be any book or product, for example, our microwave died just before Christmas so I used it to find a new one. But do a really nuanced search with multiple requirements. Go far beyond what you would search for on Amazon. In the results, notice that (at the time of writing) it does not generally link to Amazon, but to independent sites and stores. As above, I think this will change by the end of 2026, as some kind of commerce deal with Amazon seems inevitable. (4) AI-assisted audiobook narration will go mainstream I've been talking about AI narration of audiobooks since 2019, and over the years, I’ve tried various different options. In 2025, the technology reached a level of emotional nuance that made it much easier to create satisfying fiction audio as well as non-fiction. It also super-charges accessibility, making audio available in more languages and more accents than ever before. Of course, human narration remains the gold standard, but the cost makes it prohibitive for many authors, and indeed many small traditional publishers, for all books. If it costs $2000 – $10,000 to create an audiobook, you have to sell a lot to make a profit, and the dominance of subscription models have made it harder to recoup the costs.  Famous narrators and voice artists who have an audience may still be worth investing in, as well as premium production, but require an even higher upfront cost and therefore higher sales and streams in return. AI voice/audio models are continuing to improve, and even as this goes out, there are rumours on TechCrunch that OpenAI’s new device, designed by Jony Ive who designed the iPhone, will be audio first and OpenAI are improving their voice models even more in preparation for that launch.  In 2026, I think AI-narrated audio will go mainstream with far-reaching adoption across publishing and the indie author world in many different languages and accents. This will mean a further stratification of audiobooks, with high quality, high production, high cost human narrated audio for a small percentage of books, and then mass market, affordable AI-narrated audio for the rest. AI-narrated audiobooks will make audio ubiquitous, and just as (almost) every print book has an ebook format, in 2026, they will also have an audio format. I straddle both these worlds, as I am still a human audiobook narrator for my own work. I human-narrated Successful Self-Publishing Fourth Edition (free audiobook) and The Buried and the Drowned, my short story collection.  I also use AI narration for some books. ElevenLabs remains my preferred service and in 2025, I used my J.F. Penn voice clone for Death Valley and also Blood Vintage, while using a male voice for Catacomb.  I clearly label my AI-narration in the sales description and also on the cover, which I think is important, although it is not always required by the various services.  You can distribute ElevenLabs narrated audiobooks on Spotify, Kobo Writing Life, YouTube, ElevenReader, and of course your own store if you use Shopify with Bookfunnel. There are many other services springing up all the time, so make sure you check the rights you have over the finished audio, as well as where you can sell and distribute the final files. If they are just using ElevenLabs models in the back-end, then why not just do that directly? (Most services will be using someone's model in the back-end, since most companies do not train their own models.) Of course, you can use Amazon’s own narration.  While Amazon originally launched Audible audiobooks with Virtual Voice (AVV) in November 2023, it was rolled out to more authors and territories in 2025. If your book is eligible, the option to create an audiobook will appear on your KDP dashboard. With just a few clicks, you can create an audiobook from a range of voices and accents, and publish it on Amazon and Audible. However, the files are not yours. They are exclusive to Amazon and you cannot use them on other platforms or sell them direct yourself. But they are also free, so of course, many authors, especially those in KU, will use this option. I have done some for my mum's sweet romance books as Penny Appleton and I will likely use them for my books in translation when the option becomes available. Traditional publishers are experimenting with AI-assisted audiobook narration as well.  MacMillan is selling digital audiobooks read by AI directly on their store. PublishersWeekly reports that PRH Audio “has experimented with artificial voice in specific instances, such as entrepreneur Ely Callaway’s posthumous memoir The Unconquerable Game,” when an “authorized voice replica” was created for the audiobook. The article also notes that PRH Audio “embrace artificial intelligence across business operations—my entire department [PRH Audio] is using AI for business applications.” And while indie authors can’t use AI voices on ACX right now, Audible have over 100 voices available to selected publishing partnerships, as reported by The Guardian with “two options for publishers wishing to make use of the technology: “Audible-managed” production, or “self-service” whereby publishers produce their own audiobooks with the help of Audible’s AI technology.” In 2026, it’s likely that more traditional publishers — as well as indie authors — will get their backlist into audio with AI narration. (5) AI-assisted translation will start to take off beyond the early adopters Over the years, I've done translation deals with traditional publishers in different languages (German, French, Spanish, Korean, Italian) for some fiction and non-fiction books. But of course, to get these kinds of deals, you have to be proactive about pitching, or work with an agent for foreign rights only, and those are few and far between! There are also lots of languages and territories worldwide, and most deals are for the bigger markets, leaving a LOT of blue water for books in translation, even if you have licensed some of the bigger markets. I did my first partially AI-translated books in 2019 when I used Deepl.com for the first draft and then worked with a German editor to do 3 non-fiction books in German. While the first draft was cheap, the editing was pretty expensive, so I stopped after only doing a couple. I have made the money back now, but it took years. In 2025, AI Translation began to take off with ScribeShadow, GlobeScribe.ai, and more recently, in November 2025, Kindle Translate boosting the number of translated books available. Kindle Translate is (currently) only available to US authors for English into Spanish and also German into English, but in 2026, this will likely roll out to more languages and more authors, making it easier than ever to produce translations for free. Of course, once again, the gold standard is human translation, or at least human-edited translations, but the cost is prohibitive even just for proof-reading, and if there is a cheap or even free option, like Kindle Translate, then of course, authors are going to try it. If the translation gets bad reviews, they can just un-publish. There are many anecdotal stories of indie success in 2025 with AI-translated genre fiction sales (in series) in under-served markets like Italian, French, and Spanish, as well as more mainstream adoption in German. I was around in the Kindle gold-rush days of 2009-2012 and the AI-translation energy right now feels like that. There are hardly any Kindle ebooks in many of these languages compared to how many there are in English, so inevitably, the rush is on to fill the void, especially in genres that are under-served by traditional publishers in those markets. Yes, some of these AI translated books will be ‘AI-slop,' but readers are not stupid. Those books will get bad reviews and thus will sink to the bottom of the store, never to be seen again.  The AI translation models are also improving rapidly, and Amazon's Kindle Translate may improve faster than most, for books specifically, since they will be able to get feedback in terms of page reads.  Amazon is also a major investor in Anthropic, which makes Claude.ai, widely considered the best quality for creative writing and translation, so it's likely that is used somewhere in the mix. Some traditional publishers are also experimenting with AI-assisted translation, with Harlequin France reportedly using AI translation and human proofreaders, as reported by the European Council of Literary Translators’ Associations in December 2025.  Academic publisher Taylor and Francis is also using AI for book translation, noting: “Following a program of rigorous testing, Taylor & Francis has announced plans to use AI translation tools to publish books that would otherwise be unavailable to English-language readers, bringing the latest knowledge to a vastly expanded readership.” “Until now, the time and resources required to translate books has meant that the majority remained accessible only to those who could read them in the original language. Books that were translated often only became available after a significant delay. Today, with the development of sophisticated AI translation tools, it has become possible to make these important texts available to a broad readership at speed, without compromising on accuracy.” (6) AI video becomes ubiquitous. ‘Live selling’ becomes the next trend in social sales. In 2025, short form AI-generated video became very high quality. OpenAI released Sora 2, and YouTube announced new Shorts creation tools with Veo 3, which you can also use directly within Gemini. There are tons of different AI video apps now, including those within the social media sites themselves. There is more video than ever and it’s much easier to create. I am not a fan of short form video! I don't make it and I don't consume it, but I do love making book trailers for my Kickstarter campaigns and for adding to my book pages and using on social media. I made a trailer for The Buried and the Drowned using Midjourney for images and then animation of those images, and Canva to put them together along with ElevenLabs to generate the music. But despite the AI tools getting so much easier to use, you still have to prompt them with exactly what you want. I can’t just upload my book and say, “Make a book trailer,” or “Make a short film.”  This may change with generative video ads, which are likely to become more common in 2026, as video turns specifically commercial.  Video ads may even be generated specifically for the user, with an audience of one, maybe even holding your book in their hands (using something like Cameos on Sora), in the same way that some AI-powered clothing stores do virtual try-ons.  This might also up-end the way we discover and buy things, as the AI for eCommerce and Amazon Sellers newsletter says about OpenAI’s Sora app, “OpenAI isn't just trying to build a TikTok competitor. They're building a complete reimagining of how we discover and buy things …” “The combination of ChatGPT's research capabilities and Sora's potential for emotional manipulation—I mean, “engagement”—could create something we've never seen before: an AI ecosystem that might eventually guide you through every type of purchase, from the most considered to the most impulsive.” In 2026, there will be A LOT more AI-generated video, but that also leads to the human trend of more live video.  While you can use an AI avatar that looks and sounds like you using tools like HeyGen or Synthesia, live video has all the imperfect human elements that make it stand-out, plus the scarcity element which leads to the purchase decision within a countdown period. Live video is nothing new in terms of brand building and content in general, but it seems that live events primarily for direct sales might be a thing in 2026. Kim Kardashian hosted Kimsmas Live in December 2025 with a 45 minute live shopping event with special guests, described as entertainment but designed to be a sales extravaganza.  Indie authors are doing a similar thing on TikTok with their books, so this is a trend to watch in 2026, especially if you feel that live selling might fit with your personality and author business goals. It’s certainly not for everyone, but I suspect it will suit a different kind of creator to those who prefer ‘no face’ video, or no video at all! On other aspects of the human side of social media, Adam Mosseri the CEO of Instagram put a post on Threads called Authenticity after Abundance. He said,  “Everything that made creators matter—the ability to be real, to connect, to have a voice that couldn’t be faked—is now suddenly accessible to anyone with the right tools.” “Deepfakes are getting better and better. AI is generating photographs and videos indistinguishable from captured media. The feeds are starting to fill up with synthetic everything. And in that world, here’s what I think happens.Creators matter more.”  It’s a long article so just to pick a few things from it:  “We like to talk about “AI slop,” but there is a lot of amazing AI content … we are going to start to see more and more realistic AI content.”  I’ve talked to my Patreon Community about this ‘tsunami of excellence’ as these tools are just getting better and better and the word ‘slop’ can also be applied to purely human output, too. If you think that AI content is ‘worse’ than wholly human content, in 2026, you are wrong. It is now very very good, especially in the hands of people who can drive the AI tools. Back to Adam’s post:  “Authenticity is fast becoming a scarce resource, …The creators who succeed will be those who figure out how to maintain their authenticity [even when it can be simulated] …” “The bar is going to shift from “can you create?” to “can you make something that only you could create?” He talks about how the personal content on Instagram now is: “unpolished; it’s blurry photos and shaky videos of people’s daily experiences … flattering imagery is cheap to produce and boring to consume. People want content that feels real… Savvy creators are going to lean into explicitly unproduced and unflattering images of themselves. In a world where everything can be perfected, imperfection becomes a signal. Rawness isn’t just aesthetic preference anymore—it’s proof. It’s defensive. A way of saying: this is real because it’s imperfect.” While I partially love this, and I really hope it’s true, as in I hope we don’t need to look good for the camera anymore I would also challenge Adam on this, because pretty much every woman I know on social media has been sent sexual messages, and/or told they are ugly and/or fat when posting anything unflattering. I’ve certainly had both even for the same content, but I don’t expect Adam has been the target for such posting! But I get his point.  He goes on:“Labeling content as authentic or AI-generated is only part of the solution though. We, as an industry, are going to need to surface much more context about not only the media on our platforms, but the accounts that are sharing it in order for people to be able to make informed decisions about what to believe. Where is the account? When was it created? What else have they posted?”  This is exactly what I’ve been saying for a while under my double down on being human focus. I use my Instagram @jfpennauthor as evidence of humanity, not as a sales channel. You can do both of course, but increasingly, you need to make sure your accounts at places have longevity and trust, even by the platforms themselves.  Adam finishes: “In a world of infinite abundance and infinite doubt, the creators who can maintain trust and signal authenticity—by being real, transparent, and consistent—will stand out.” For other marketing trends for 2026, I recommend publicist Kathleen Schmidt’s SubStack which is mostly focused on traditional publishing but still interesting for indies. In her 2026 article, she notes:   “We have reached a social media saturation point where going viral can be meaningless and should not be the goal; authenticity and creativity should. She also says, “In-person events are important again,” and, “Social media marketing takes a nosedive… we have reached a saturation point … What publishers must figure out is how to make their social media campaigns stand out. If they remain somewhat uninspired, the money spent on social ads won’t convert into book sales.” I think this is part of the rise of live selling as above, which can stand out above more ‘produced’ videos.  Kathleen also talks about AI usage. “AI can help lighten the burden of publicity and marketing.” “A lot of AI tools are coming to market to lessen the load: they can write pitches, create media lists for you, send pitches for you, and more. I know the industry is grappling with all things AI, but some of these tools are huge time savers and may help a book more than hurt it.” On that note …  (7) AI will create, run, and optimise ads without the need for human intervention Many authors will be very happy about this as marketing is often the bane of our author business lives! As I noted in my 2026 goals, I would love to outsource more marketing tasks to AI. I want an “AI book marketing assistant” where I can upload a book and specify a budget and say, ‘Go market this,’ then the AI will action the marketing, without me having to cobble together workflows between systems. Of course, it will present plans for me to approve but it will do the work itself on the various platforms and monitor and optimize things for me. I really hope 2026 is the year this becomes possible, because we are on the edge of it already in some areas.   Amazon Ads launched a new agentic AI tool in September 2025 that creates professional-quality ads.  I’ve also been working with Claude in Chrome browser to help me analyse my Amazon Ad data and suggest which keywords/products to turn off and what to put more budget into. I’ll do a Patreon video on that soon.  Meta announced it will enable AI ad creation by the end of 2026 for Facebook and Instagram. For authors who find ad creation overwhelming or time-consuming, this could be a game-changer. Of course, you will still need a budget! (8) 1000 True Fans becomes more important than ever Lots of authors and publishers are moaning about the difficulty of reaching readers in an era of ‘AI slop’ but there is no shortage of excellent content created by humans, or humans using AI tools.  As ever, our competition is less about other authors, or even authors using AI-assisted creation, we’re competing against everything else that jostles for people’s attention, and the volume of that is also growing exponentially.  I’ve never been a fan of rapid release, and have said for years that you can’t keep up with the pace of the machines. So play a different game.  As Kevin Kelly wrote in 2008, If you have 1000 true fans, (also known as super fans), “you can make a living — if you are content to make a living but not a fortune.” [Kevin Kelly was on this show in 2023 talking about Excellent Advice for Living.] Many authors and the publishing industry are stuck in the old model of aiming to sell huge volumes of books at a low profit margin to a massive number of readers, many of them releasing ever faster to try and keep the algorithms moving. But the maths can work for the smaller audience of more invested readers and fans. If you only make $2 profit on an ebook, you need to sell 500 ebooks to make $1000, and then do it again next month. Or you can have a small community like my patreon.com/thecreativepenn where people pay $2 (or more) a month, so even a small revenue per person results in a better outcome over the year, as it is consistent monthly income with no advertising.  But what if you could make $20 profit per book?  That is entirely possible if you’re producing high quality hardbacks on Kickstarter, or bundle deals of audiobooks, or whole series of ebooks. You would only need to sell to 50 people to make $1000. What about $100 profit per sale, which you can do with a small course or live event?  You only need 10 people to make $1000, and this in-person focus also amplifies trust and fosters human connection.  I’ve found the intimacy of my live Patreon Office Hours and also my webinars have been rewarding personally, but also financially, and are far more memorable — and potentially transformative — than a pre-recorded video or even another book. From the LinkedIn 2026 Big Ideas article: “In an AI-optimized world, intentional human connection will become the ultimate luxury.”  The 1000 True Fans model is about serving a smaller, more personal audience with higher value products (and maybe services if that’s your thing). As ever, its about niche and where you fit in the long long long long long tail. It’s also about trust. Because there is definitely a shortage of that in so many areas, and as Adam Mosseri of Instagram has said, trust will be increasingly important.  Trust takes time to build, but if you focus on serving your audience consistently, and delivering a high quality, and being authentic, this emerges as part of being human. In an echo of what happened when online commerce first took off, we are back to talking about trust. Back in 2010, I read Trust Agents: by Julien Smith and Chris Brogan, which clearly needs a comeback. There was a 10th anniversary edition published in 2020, so that’s worth a read/listen.  Chris Brogan was also on this show in 2017 when we talked about finding and serving your niche for the long term. That interview is still relevant, here’s a quick excerpt, where I have (lightly edited) his response to my question on this topic back in 2017: Jo: The principle of know, like, and trust, why is that still important or perhaps even more important these days? Chris: There are a few things that at play there, Joanna. One is that the same tools that make it so easy for any of us to start and run a business also allow certain elements to decide whether or not they want to do something dubious. And with all new technologies that come, you know, there's nothing unique about these new technologies. In the 1800s, anyone could put anything in a bottle and sell it to you and say, this is gonna cure everything. Cancer — gone. And the bottle could have nothing in. You know, it could be Kool-Aid. And so, the idea of trying to understand what's behind the business though, one beautiful thing that's come is that we can see in much more dimensions who we're dealing with. We can understand better who's the face behind the brand.  I really want people to try their best to be a lot clearer on what they stand for or what they say. And I don't really mean a tagline. I mean, humans don't really talk like that. They don't throw some sentence out as often as they can that you remember them for that phrase.  But I would say that, we have so many media available to us — the plural of mediums — where we can be more of ourselves. And I think that there's a great opportunity to share the ‘you’ behind the scenes, and some people get immediately terrified about this, ‘Ah, the last thing I want is for people to know more about me,’ but I think we have such an opportunity.  We have such an opportunity to voice our thoughts on something, to talk about the story that goes behind the product. We were all raised on overly produced material, but I think we don't want that anymore. We really want clarity, brevity, simplicity. We want the ability for what we feel is connection and then access.  And so I think it's vital that we connect and show people our accessibility, not so that they can pester us with strange questions, but more so that you can say, this person stands with their product and their service and this person believes these things, and I feel something when I hear them and I wanna be part of that.” That’s from Chris Brogan’s interview here in 2017, and he is still blogging and speaking at writing at ChrisBrogan.com and I’m going to re-listen to the audiobook of Trust Agents again myself as I think it’s more relevant than ever.  The original quote comes from Bob Burg in his 1994 book, Endless Referrals, “All things being equal, people will do business with, and refer business to, those people they know, like and trust.” That still applies, and absolutely fits with the 1000 True Fans model of aiming to serve a smaller audience. As Kevin Kelly says in 1000 True Fans, “Instead of trying to reach the narrow and unlikely peaks of platinum bestseller hits, blockbusters, and celebrity status, you can aim for direct connection with a thousand true fans.” “On your way, no matter how many fans you actually succeed in gaining, you’ll be surrounded not by faddish infatuation, but by genuine and true appreciation. It’s a much saner destiny to hope for. And you are much more likely to actually arrive there.” In 2026, I hope that more authors (including me!) let go of ego goals and vanity metrics like ranking, gross sales (income before you take away costs), subscribers, followers, and likes, and consider important business numbers like profit (which is the money you have after costs like marketing are taken out), as well as number of true fans — and also lifestyle elements like number of weekends off, or days spent enjoying life and not just working!  OK, that’s my list of trends and predictions for 2026. Let me know what you think in the comments. Do you agree? Am I wrong? What have I missed? The post 2026 Trends And Predictions For Indie Authors And The Book Publishing Industry with Joanna Penn first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Happy New Year 2026! I love January and the opportunity to start afresh. I know it’s arbitrary in some ways, but I measure my life by what I create, and I also measure it in years. At the beginning of each year, I publish an article (and podcast episode) here, which helps keep me accountable. If you’d like to share your goals, please add them in the comments below.  2026 is a transitional year as I will finish my Masters degree and continue the slow pivot that I started in December 2023 after 15 years as an author entrepreneur. Just to recap that, it was: From digitally-focused to creating beautiful physical books; From high-volume, low cost to premium products with higher Average Order Value; From retailer-centric to direct first; and From distance to presence, and From creating alone to the AI-Assisted Artisan Author. I’ve definitely stepped partially into all of those, and 2026 will continue in that same direction, but I also have an additional angle for Joanna Penn and The Creative Penn that I am excited about.   If you'd like to join my community and support the show every month, you'll get access to my growing list of Patron videos and audio on all aspects of the author business — for the price of a black coffee (or two) a month. Join us at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn. Joanna Penn writes non-fiction for authors and is an award-winning, New York Times and USA Today bestselling thriller author as J.F. Penn. She’s also an award-winning podcaster, creative entrepreneur, and international professional speaker. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.  Leaning into the Transformation Economy  The Creative Penn Podcast and my Patreon Community Webinars and live events Finish my Masters in Death, Religion, and Culture Bones of the Deep — J.F. Penn Add merch to CreativePennBooks.com and JFPennBooks.com  How to Write, Publish, and Market Short Stories and Short Story Collections — Joanna Penn Other possible books Experiment more with AI translation  Ideally outsource more marketing to AI, but do more marketing anyway Double down on being human, health and travel  You can find all my books as J.F. Penn and Joanna Penn on your favourite online store in all the usual formats, or order from your local library or bookstore. You can also buy direct from me at CreativePennBooks.com and JFPennBooks.com. I'm not really active on social media, but you can always see my photos at Instagram @jfpennauthor. Leaning into the Transformation Economy  I’ve struggled with my identity as Joanna Penn and my Creative Penn brand for a few years now. When I started TheCreativePenn.com in 2008, the term ‘indie author’ was new and self-publishing was considered ‘vanity press’ and a sure way to damage your author career, rather than a conscious creative and business choice.  It was the early days of the Kindle and iPhone (both launched in 2007), and podcasting and social media were also relatively new. While US authors could publish on KDP, the only option for international authors was Smashwords and the market for ebooks was tiny. Print-on-demand and digital audio were also just emerging as viable options.  While it was the early era of blogging, there were very few blogs and barely any podcasts talking about self-publishing, so when I started TheCreativePenn.com in late 2008 and the podcast in March 2009, it was a new area. For several years, it was like howling into the wind. Barely any audience. Barely any traffic, and certainly very little income.  But I loved the freedom and the speed at which I could learn things and put them into practice. Consume and produce. That has always been my focus. I met people on Twitter and interviewed them for my show, and over those early years I met many of the people I consider dear friends even now.  Since self-publishing was a relatively unexplored niche in those early years, I slowly found an audience and built up a reputation. I also started to make more money both as an author, and as a creative entrepreneur. Over the years since, pretty much everything has changed for indie authors and we have had more and more opportunity every year. I’ve shared everything I’ve learned along the way, and it’s been a wonderful time.  But as self-publishing became more popular and more authors saw more success (which is FANTASTIC!), other voices joined the chorus and now, there are many thousands of authors of all different levels with all kinds of different experiences sharing their tips through articles, books, podcasting, and social media.  I started to wonder whether my perspective was useful anymore.  On top of the human competition, in November 2022, ChatGPT launched, and it became clear that prescriptive non-fiction and ‘how to’ information could very easily be delivered by the AI tools, with the added benefit of personalisation. You can ask Chat or Claude or Gemini how you can self-publish your particular book and they will help you step by step through the process of any site. You can share your screen or upload screenshots and it can help with what fields to fill in (very useful with translations!), as well as writing sales descriptions, researching keywords, and offering marketing help targeted to your book and your niche, and tailored to your voice.  Once again, I questioned what value I could offer the indie author community, and I’ve pulled back over the last few years as I’ve been noodling around this.  But over the last few weeks, a penny has dropped. Here’s my thinking in case it also helps you. Firstly, I want to be useful to people. I want to help.   In my early days of speaking professionally, from 2005-ish, I wanted to be the British (introvert) Tony Robbins, someone who inspired people to change, to achieve things they didn’t think they could. Writing a book is one of those things. Making a living from your writing is another. So I leaned into the self-help and how-to niche. But now that is now clearly commoditised. But recently, I realised that my message has always been one of transformation, and in the following four areas.  From someone who doesn’t think they are creative but who desperately wants to write a book, to someone who holds their first book in their hand and proudly says, ‘I made this.’ The New Author. From someone who has no confidence in their author voice, who wonders if they have anything to say, to someone who writes their story and transforms their own life, as well as other people’s. The Confident Author. From an author with one or a handful of books who doesn’t know much about business, to a successful author with a growing business heading towards their first six figure year. The Author-Entrepreneur. And finally, from a tech-phobic, fearful author who worries that AI makes it pointless to create anything and will steal all the jobs, to a confident AI-assisted creative who uses AI tools to enhance and amplify their message and their income. The AI-Assisted Artisan Author. These are four transformations I have been through myself, and with my work as Joanna Penn/The Creative Penn, I want to help you through them as well. So in 2026, I am repositioning myself as part of The Transformation Economy. What does this mean? There is a book out in February, The Transformation Economy by B. Joseph Pine II, who is also the author of The Experience Economy, which drove a lot of the last decade’s shift in business models. I have the book on pre-order, but in the meantime, I am doing the following. I will revamp TheCreativePenn.com with ‘transformation’ as the key frame and add pathways through my extensive material, rather than just categories of how to do things.  I’ve already added navigation pages for The New Author, The Confident Author, The Author-Entrepreneur, and The AI-Assisted Artisan Author, and I will be adding to those over time.  My content is basically the same, as I have always covered these topics, but the framing is now different. The intent is different.  The Creative Penn Podcast will lean more heavily into transformation, rather than just information — And will focus on the first three of the categories above, the more creative, mindset and business things.  My Patreon will continue to cover all those things, and that’s also where I post most of my AI-specific content, so if you’re interested in The AI-Assisted Artisan Author transformation path, come on over to patreon.com/thecreativepenn  I have more non-fiction books for authors coming, and lots more ideas now I am leaning into this angle.  I’ll also continue to do webinars on specific topics in 2026, and also add speaking back in 2027. It’s harder to think about transformation when it comes to fiction, but it’s also really important since fiction books in particular are highly commodified, and will become even more so with the high production speeds.  Yes, all readers have a few favourite authors but most will also read a ton of other books without knowing or caring who the author is.  Fiction can be transformational. Reader’s aren’t buying a ‘book.’ They’re buying a way to escape, to feel deeply, to experience things they never could in real life. A book can transform a day from ‘meh’ into ‘fantastic!’ My J.F. Penn fiction is mostly inspired by places, so my stories transport you into an adventure somewhere wonderful, and they all offer a deeper side of transformative contemplation of ‘memento mori’ if you choose to read them in that way.  They also have elements of gothic and death culture that I am going to lean into with some merch in 2026, so more of an identity thing than just book sales. I’m not quite sure what this means yet, but no doubt it will emerge. I’ll also shape my JFPennBooks.com site into more transformative paths, rather than just genre lists, as part of this shift.  My memoir Pilgrimage always reflected a transformation, both reflecting my own midlife shift but I’ve also heard from many who it has inspired to walk alone, or to travel on pilgrimage themselves.  Of course, transformation is not just for our readers or the people we serve as part of our businesses. It’s also for us.  One of the reasons why we are writers is because this is how we think. This is how we figure out our lives. This is how we get the stories and ideas out of our heads and into the world.  Writing and creating are transformative for us, too. That is part of the point, and a great element of why we do this, and why we love this. Which is why I don’t really understand the attraction of purely AI-generated books. There’s no fun in that for me, and there’s no transformation, either. Of course, I LOVE using Chat and Claude and Gemini Thinking models as my brainstorming partners, my research buddies, my marketing assistants, and as daily tools to keep me sparkly. I smiled as I wrote that (and yes, I human-wrote this!) because sparkly is how I feel when I work with these tools.  Programmers use the term ‘vibe coding’ which is going back and forth and collaborating together, sparking off each other. Perhaps that I am doing is ‘vibe creation.’ I feel it as almost an effervescence, a fun experience that has me laughing out loud sometimes. I am more creative, I am more in flow. I am more ‘me’ now I can create and think at a speed way faster than ever before. My mind has always worked at speed and my fingers are fast on the keys but working in this way makes me feel like I create in the high performance zone far more often.  I intend to lean more into that in 2026 as part of my own transformation (and of course, I share my experiences mainly in the Community at patreon.com/thecreativepenn ). [Note, I pay for access to all models, and currently use ChatGPT 5.2 Thinking, Claude Opus 4.5, and Gemini 3 Pro).  So that’s the big shift this year, and the idea of the Transformation Economy will underpin everything else in terms of my content.  The Creative Penn Podcast and my Patreon Community The Creative Penn Podcast continues in 2026, although I am intending to reduce my interviews to once every two weeks, with my intro and other content in between. We’ll see how that goes as I am already finding some fascinating people to talk to!  Thank you for your comments, your pictures, and also for sharing the episodes that resonate with you with the wider community. Your reviews are also super useful wherever you are listening to this, so please leave a review wherever you’re listening this as it helps with discovery.  Thanks also to everyone in my Patreon Community, which I really enjoy, especially as we have doubled down on being human through more live office hours. I will do more of those in 2026 and the first one of the year will blearily UK time so Aussies and Kiwis can come. I also share new content almost every week, either an article, a video or an audio episode around writing craft, author business, and lots on different use cases for AI tools.  If you join the Patreon, start on the Collections tab where you will find all the backlist content to explore. It’s less than the price of a coffee a month so if you get value from the show, and you want more, come on over and join us at patreon.com/thecreativepenn My Books and Travel Podcast is on hiatus for interviews, since the Masters is taking up the time I would have had for that. However I plan to post some solo episodes in 2026, and I also post travel articles there, like my visits to Gothic cathedrals and city breaks and things like that. Check it out at https://www.booksandtravel.page/blog/  Webinars and live events  Along with my Patreon office hours, I’m enjoying the immediacy and energy of live webinars and they work with my focus on transformation, as well as on ‘doubling down on being human’ in an age of AI, so I will be doing more this year. The first is on Business for Authors, coming on 10 and 24 January, which is aimed at helping you transform your author business in 2026, or if you’re just getting started, then transform into someone who has even a small clue about business in general!Details at TheCreativePenn.com/live and Patrons get 25% off. In terms of live in-person events, it looks like I will be speaking at the Alliance of Independent Authors event at the London Book Fair in March, and I’ll attend the Self-Publishing Show Live in June, although I won’t be speaking. There might be other things that emerge, but in general, I’m not doing much speaking in 2026 because I need to …  Finish my Masters in Death, Religion, and Culture  This represents a lot of work as I am doing the course full-time. I should be finished in September, and much of the middle of the year will be focused on a dissertation. I’m planning on doing something around AI and death, so that will no doubt lead into some fiction at a later stage! Talking of fiction …  Bones of the Deep — J.F. Penn The Masters is pretty serious, as is academic research and writing in general, and I found myself desperate to write a rollicking fun story over the holiday break between terms.  I’ve talked about this ‘tall-ship’ story for a while and now I’m committing to it.  Back in 1999, I sailed on the tall-ship Soren Larsen from Fiji to Vanuatu, one of the three trips that shaped my life.   It was the first time I’d been to the South Pacific, the first time I sailed blue water (with no land in sight), and I kept a journal and drew maps of the trip. It also helped me a make a decision to leave the UK and I headed for Australia nine months later in early 2000, and ended up being away 11 years in Australia and New Zealand.  I came home to visit of course, but only moved back to the UK in 2011, so that trip was memorable and pivotal in many ways and has stuck in my mind.  The story is based on that crossing, but of course, as J.F. Penn my imagination turns it into essentially a ‘locked room,’ there is no escape out there, especially if the danger comes from the sea. Another strand of the story comes from a recent academic essay for my Masters, when I wrote about the changes in museum ethics around human remains and medical specimens i.e. body parts in jars, and how some remains have been repatriated to the indigenous peoples they were stolen from. I’ve also talked before about how I love ‘merfolk’ horror like Into the Drowning Deep by Mira Grant, All the Murmuring Bones by A.G. Slatter, and Merfolk by Jeremy Bates. These are no smiling fantasy mermaids and mermen. They are predators. What might happen if the remains of a mer-saint were stolen from the deep, and what might happen to the ship that the remains are being transported in, and the people on board?  I’m about a third in, and I am having great fun! It will actually be a thriller, with a supernatural edge, rather than horror, and it is called Bones of the Deep, and it will be out on Kickstarter in April, and everywhere by the summer.  You can check out the Kickstarter pre-launch page with photos from my 1999 trip, the cover for the book, and the sales description at JFPenn.com/bones  Add merch to CreativePennBooks.com and JFPennBooks.com  I’ve dipped my toe into merch a number of times and then removed the products, but now I’m clear on my message of transformation, I want to revisit this. My books remain core for both sites, but for CreativePennBooks, I also want to add other products with what are essentially affirmations — ‘Creative,’ ‘I am creative, I am an author,’ and variants of the poster I have had on my wall for years, ‘Measure your life by what you create.’ This is the affirmation I had in my wallet for years! For JFPennBooks, the items will be gothic/memento mori/skull-related. Everything will be print-on-demand. I will not be shipping anything myself, so I’m working with my designer Jane on this and then need to order test samples, and then get them added to the store. Likely mid-year at this rate! How to Write, Publish, and Market Short Stories and Short Story Collections — Joanna Penn I have a draft of this already which I expanded from the transcript of a webinar I did on this topic as part of The Buried and the Drowned campaign.  It turns out I’ve learned a lot about this over the years, and also on how to make a collection, so I will get that out at some point this year. I won’t do a Kickstarter for it, but I will do direct sales for at least a month and include a special edition, workbook, and bundles on my store first before putting it wide. I will also human-narrate that audiobook.  Other possible books  I’m an intuitive creative and discovery writer, so I don’t plan out what I will write in a year. The books tend to emerge and then I pick the next one that feels the most important. After the ones above, there are a few candidates.  Crown of Thorns, ARKANE thriller #14. Regular readers and listeners will know how much I love religious relics, and it’s about time for a big one! I have a trip to Paris planned in the spring, as the Crown of Thorns is at Notre Dame, and I have some other locations to visit. My ARKANE thrillers always emerge from in-person travels, so I am looking forward to that. Maybe late 2026, maybe 2027.   AI + religion technothriller/short stories. I already have some ideas sketched out for this and my Masters thesis will be something around AI, religion, and death, so I expect something will emerge from all that study and academic writing. Not sure what, but it will be interesting! The Gothic Cathedral Book. I have tens of thousands of words written, and lots of research and photos and thoughts. But it is still in the creative chaos phase (which I love!) and as yet has not emerged into anything coherent. Perhaps it will in 2026, and the plan is to re-focus on it after my Masters dissertation.  I feel like the Masters study and the academic research process will make this an even better book, But I am holding my plans for this lightly, as it feels like another ‘big’ book for me, like my ‘shadow book’ (which became Writing the Shadow) and took more than a decade to write!  How to be Creative. I have also written bits and bobs on this over many years, but it feels like it is re-emerging as part of my focus on transformation. Probably unlikely for 2026 but now back on the list …  Experiment more with AI translation  AI-assisted translation has been around for years now in various forms, and I have experimented with some of the services, as well as working with human narrators and editors in different languages, as well as licensing books in translation. But when Amazon launched Kindle Translate in November 2025, it made me think that AI-assisted translation will become a lot more popular in 2026. AI audiobook narration became good enough for many audiobooks in 2025, and it seems like AI-translation will be the same in 2026.   Yes, of course, human translation is still the gold standard, as is human narration, and that would be the primary choice for all of us — if it was affordable. But frankly, it’s not affordable for most indie authors, and indeed many small publishers. Many books don’t get an audiobook edition and most books don’t get translated into every language.  It costs thousands per book for a human translator, and so it is a premium option. I have only ever made a small profit on the books that I paid for with human translators and it took years, and while I have a few nice translation deals on some books, I’m planning to experiment more with AI translation in 2026. More languages, more markets, more opportunities to reach readers. More on this in the next episode when I’ll cover trends for 2026. Ideally outsource more marketing to AI, but do more marketing anyway You have to reach readers somehow, and you have to pay for book marketing with your time and/or your money. Those authors killing it on TikTok pay with their time, and those leaning heavily on ads are paying with money. Most of us do a bit of both.  There is no passive income from books, and even a backlist has to be marketed if you want to see any return. But I, like most authors, am not excited about book marketing. I’d rather be working on new books, or thinking about the ramifications of the changes ahead and writing or talking about that in my Patreon Community or here on the podcast. However, my book sales income remains about the same even as I (slowly) produce more books, so I need to do more book marketing in 2026. I said that last year of course, and didn’t do much more than I did in 2024, so here I am again promising to do a better job!   Every year, I hope to have my “AI book marketing assistant” up and running, and maybe this will be the year it happens. My measure is to be able to upload a book and specify a budget and say, ‘Go market this,’ and then the AI will action the marketing, without me having to cobble together workflows between systems. Of course, it will present plans for me to approve but it will do the work itself on the various platforms and monitor and optimize things for me.  We have something like that already with Amazon auto-ads, but that is specific to Amazon Advertising and only works with certain books in certain genres. I have auto-ads running for a couple of non-fiction books, but not for any fiction.  I’d also ideally like more sales on my direct stores, JFPennBooks.com and CreativePennBooks.com which means a different kind of marketing.  Perhaps this will happen through ChatGPT shopping or other AI-assisted e-commerce, which should be increasing in 2026. More on that in trends for the year to come in the next show.  Double down on being human, health and travel  I have a lot of plans for travel both for book research and also holidays with Jonathan but he has to finish his MBA and then we have some family things that take priority, so I am not sure where or when yet, but it will happen! Paris will definitely happen as part of the research for Crown of Thorns, hopefully in the spring. I’ve been to Paris many times as it’s just across the Channel and we can go by train but it’s always wonderful to visit again. Health-wise, I’ll continue with powerlifting and weight training twice a week as well as walking every day. It’s my happy place! What about you?  If you’d like to share your goals for 2026, please add them in the comments below — and remember, I’m a full-time author entrepreneur so my goals are substantial. Don’t worry if yours are as simple as ‘Finish the first draft of my book,’ as that still takes a lot of work and commitment!  All the best for 2026 — let’s get into it! The post My 2026 Creative And Business Goals With Joanna Penn first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Another year ends, and once more, it's time to reflect on our creative goals. I hope you can take the time to review your goals and you're welcome to leave a comment below about how the year went. Did you achieve everything you wanted to? Let me know in the comments. It's always interesting looking back at my goals from a year ago, because I don't even look at them in the months between, so sometimes it's a real surprise how much they've changed! You can read my 2025 goals here and I go through how things went below.  In the intro, Written Word Media 2025 Indie Author Survey Results, TikTok deal goes through [BBC]; 2025 review [Wish I'd Known Then; Two Authors], Kickstarter year in review; Plus, Anthropic settlement, the continued rise of AI-narrated audiobooks, and thinking/reasoning models (plus my 2019 AI disruption episode). My Bones of the Deep thriller, pics here, and Business for Authors webinars, coming soon. If you'd like to join my community and support the show every month, you'll get access to my growing list of Patron videos and audio on all aspects of the author business — for the price of a black coffee (or two) a month. Join us at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn. Joanna Penn writes non-fiction for authors and is an award-winning, New York Times and USA Today bestselling thriller author as J.F. Penn. She’s also an award-winning podcaster, creative entrepreneur, and international professional speaker. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.  J.F. Penn books — Death Valley, The Buried and the Drowned, Blood Vintage Joanna Penn books — Successful Self-Publishing, 4th Edition The Creative Penn Podcast and my community on Patreon/thecreativepenn Unexpected addition: Masters in Death, Religion and Culture at the University of Winchester Book marketing. Not quite a fail but definitely lacklustre. Reflections on my 50th year Double down on being human. Travel and health.  You can find all my books as J.F. Penn and Joanna Penn on your favourite online store in all the usual formats, or order from your local library or bookstore. You can also buy direct from me at CreativePennBooks.com and JFPennBooks.com. I'm not really active on social media, but you can always see my photos at Instagram @jfpennauthor. J.F. Penn — Death Valley. A Thriller.  This was my ‘desert’ book, partially inspired by visiting Death Valley, California in 2024. It’s a stand-alone, high stakes survival thriller, with no supernatural elements, although there are ancient bones and a hidden crypt, as it wouldn’t be me otherwise!  The Kickstarter campaign in April had 231 Backers pledging £10,794 (~US$14,400) and the hardback is a gorgeous foiled edition with custom end papers and research photos as well as a ribbon. As an AI-Assisted Artisan Author, I used AI tools to help with the creative and business processes, including the background image of the cover design, the custom end papers, and the Death Valley book trailer, which I made with Midjourney and Runway ML. The audiobook is also narrated by my J.F. Penn voice clone, which took a while to get used to, but now I love it! You can listen to a sample here. I published Death Valley wide a few months later over the summer, so it is now out on all platforms.  J.F. Penn — Blood Vintage. A Folk Horror Novel, and Catacomb audiobook  I did a Kickstarter for the hardback edition of Blood Vintage in late 2024, and then in 2025, worked with a US agent to see if we could get a deal for it. That didn’t happen, and although there were some nice rejections, mostly it was silence, and the waiting around really was a pain in the proverbial.  So, after a year on submission, I published Blood Vintage wide, so it’s available everywhere now. My voice clone narrated the audiobook, listen to a sample here.  I also finally produced the audiobook for Catacomb, which is a stand-alone thriller inspired by the movie Taken and the legend of Beowulf set in the catacombs under Edinburgh. I used a male voice from ElevenLabs, and you can listen to a sample here. The book is also available everywhere in all formats. J.F. Penn — The Buried and the Drowned Short Story Collection One of my goals for 2025 was to get my existing short stories into print, mainly because they exist only as digital ebook and audiobook files, which in a way, feels like they almost don’t exist!  Plus, I wanted to write an extra two exclusive stories and launch the special edition collection on Kickstarter Collection and then publish wide. I wrote the two stories, The Black Church, inspired by my Iceland trip in March, and also Between Two Breaths, inspired by an experience scuba diving at the Poor Knights Islands in New Zealand almost two decades ago.  There are personal author’s notes accompanying every story, so it’s part-short story fiction, part-memoir, and I human-narrated the audiobook.  I achieved this goal with a Kickstarter in September, 2025, with 206 Backers pledging almost £8000 (~US$10,600) for the various editions. I also did my first patterned sprayed edges and I love the hardback. It has head and tail bands which make the hardback really strong, gorgeous paper, foiling, a ribbon, colour photos, and custom end papers. The Buried and the Drowned is now out everywhere in all editions. As ever, if you enjoy the stories, a review would be much appreciated!  Joanna Penn Books for Authors Early in the year, How to Write Non-Fiction Second Edition launched wide as I only sold it through my store in 2024, so it’s available everywhere in all formats including a special hardback and workbook at CreativePennBooks.com. While I didn't write it in 2025, I made the money on it this year, which is important! I also unexpectedly wrote the Fourth Edition of Successful Self-Publishing, mainly because I saw so much misinformation and hype around selling direct, and I also wanted to write about how many options there are for indie authors now. The ebook and audiobook (narrated by human me) are free on my store, CreativePennBooks.com and also available in print, in all the usual places. If you haven’t revisited options for indie authors for a while, please have a read/listen, as the industry moves fast! All my fiction and non-fiction audiobooks are now on YouTube After an inspiring episode with Derek Slaton, I put all my audiobooks and short stories on YouTube. Firstly, my non-fiction channel is monetised so I get some income from that. It’s not much, but it’s something.  More importantly, it’s marketing for my books, and many audiobook listeners go on to buy other editions especially non-fiction listeners who will often buy print as well. I’m one of those listeners! It’s also doubling down on being human, since I human narrate most of my audiobooks, including almost all of my non-fiction, as well as the memoir, and short stories. This helps bring people into my ecosystem and they may listen to the podcast as well and end up buying other books or joining the Patreon. Finally, in an age of generative AI assisted search recommendations, I want my books and content inside Gemini, which is Google’s AI. I want my books surfaced in recommendations and YouTube is owned by Google, and their AI overviews often point to videos. Only you can decide what you want to do with your audiobooks, but if you want to listen to mine, they are on YouTube @thecreativepenn for non-fiction or YouTube @jfpennauthor for fiction and memoir. The Creative Penn Podcast and my Patreon Community   It’s been another full year of The Creative Penn Podcast and this is episode 842, which is kind of crazy. If you don’t know the back story, I started podcasting in March 2009 on a sporadic schedule and then went to weekly about a decade ago in 2015 when I committed to making it a core part of my author business.  Thanks to our wonderful corporate sponsors for the year, all services I personally use and recommend — ProWritingAid, Draft2Digital, Kobo Writing Life, Bookfunnel, Written Word Media, Publisher Rocket and Atticus.  It’s also been a fantastic year inside my Patreon Community at patreon.com/thecreativepenn so thanks to all Patrons!  I love the community we have as I am able to share my unfiltered thoughts in a way that I have stopped doing in the wider community. Even a tiny paywall makes a big difference in keeping out the haters. I’ve done monthly audio Q&As which are extra solo shows answering patron questions. I’ve also done several live office hours on video, and shared content every week on AI tools, writing and author business tips. Patrons also get discounts on my webinars. I did two webinars on The AI-Assisted Artisan Author, which I am planning to run again sometime in 2026 as they were a lot of fun and so much continues to change. If you get value from the show and you want more, come on over and join us at patreon.com/thecreativepenn We have almost 1400 paying members now which is wonderful. Thanks for being part of the Community!   Unexpected goal of the year: Masters in Death, Religion and Culture at the University of Winchester During the summer as I did my gothic research, I realised that I was feeling quite jaded about the publishing world and sick of the drama in the author community over AI. My top 5 Clifton Strengths are Learner, Intellection, Strategic, Input, and Futuristic — and I needed more Input and Learning. I usually get that from travel and book research, but I wasn’t getting enough of that since Jonathan is busy finishing his MBA.  So I decided to lean into the learning and asked ChatGPT to research some courses I could do that would suit me. It found the Masters in Death, Religion and Culture at the University of Winchester, which I could do full-time and online.  It would be a year of reading quite different things, writing academic essays which is something I haven’t done for decades, and hanging out with a new group of people who were just as fascinated with macabre topics as I am.  I started in September and have now finished the first term, tackling topics around thanatology and death studies, hell and the afterlife in the Christian tradition, and the ethics of using human remains to inspire fiction, amongst other interesting things.  It was a challenge to get back into the style of academic essay writing, but I’m enjoying the rigour of the research and the citations, which is something that the indie author community needs more of, a topic I will revisit in 2026. I have found the topics fascinating, and the degree is a great way to expand my mind in a new direction, and distract me from the dramas of the author community. I’ll be back into it in mid-January and will finish in September 2026. Book marketing. Not quite a fail but definitely lacklustre. I said I would “Do a monthly book marketing plan and organise paid ad campaigns per month for revolving first books in series and my main earners.” I didn’t do this! I also said I would organise my Shopify stores, CreativePennBooks.com and JFPennBooks.com into more collections to make it easier for readers to find things they might want to buy.  While I did change the theme of CreativePennBooks.com over to Impulse to make it easier to find collections, I haven’t done much to reorganise or add new pathways through the books. I’m rolling this part of the goal into 2026.  I said I would reinvigorate my content marketing for JFPenn, and make more of BooksAndTravel.page with links back to my stores, and do fiction specific content marketing with the aim of surfacing more in the LLMs as generative search expands. I did a number of episodes on Books and Travel in 2025, but once I started the Masters, I had to leave that aside, and although I have started some extra content on JFPennBooks.com, I am not overly enthusiastic about it! I also said I would “Leverage AI tools to achieve more as a one-person business.” I use AI tools (mainly ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini) every day for different things but as ever, I am pretty scatter gun about what I do. I lean into intuition and I love research so I am more likely to ask the AI tools to do a deep research report on south Pacific merfolk mythology, or how gothic architecture impacted sacred music, or geology and deep time, rather than asking for marketing hooks.   I intended to use more AI for book marketing, but as ever, I was too optimistic about the timeline of what might be possible. There’s lots you can do with prompting, finessing things and then posting on various platforms, but I’m not interested in spending time doing that.  My gold standard for an AI assistant is to feed it the finished book and then say, “Here’s a budget. Go market this,” and not have to connect lots of things together into some Frankenstein-workflow. That’s not available yet. Maybe in 2026 …  Of course, I still do book marketing. I have to in order to sell any books and make money from book sales. We all have to do some kind of book marketing! I have my Kickstarter launches which I put effort into, as well as consistent backlist sales fed by the podcast, and my email newsletter (my combined list is around 60K). I have auto campaigns running on Amazon Ads, and I have used Written Word Media campaigns as well as BookBub throughout the year. This is basically the minimum, so as usual, must do better! I’m pretty sure I’m not the only author saying this! However, my business has multiple streams of income, and I have the podcast sponsorship revenue as well as the Patreon, plus sporadic webinars, which add to my bottom line and don’t require paid advertising at all.  Reflections on my 50th year I woke up on my 50th birthday in March in Iceland, by the Black Church of Budir out on the Skaefellsnes peninsula. As seals played in the sea and we walked in the snow over the ancient lava field under the gaze of the volcano that inspired Jules Verne Journey to the Centre of the Earth, and my short story, The Black Church, which you can find in my collection, The Buried and the Drowned.  On that trip, we also saw the northern lights and had a memorable trip that marked a real shift for me. I’ve been told by lots of people that 50 is a ‘proper’ birthday, as in one of those that makes you stop and reconsider things, and it has indeed been that, although I have also found the last few years of perimenopause to be a large part of the change as well. A big shift is around priorities and not caring so much what other people think, which is a relief in many ways. Also, I don’t have the patience to do things that I don’t think are worth doing for the longer term, and I am appreciating a quieter life. I’d rather lie in a sunbeam and read with Cashew and Noisette next to me then create marketing assets or spend time on social media. I’d rather go for a walk with Jonathan than go to a conference or networking event. In my Pilgrimage memoir, I quote an anonymous source, “Pilgrim, pass by that which you do not love.” It’s a powerful message, and I take it to mean, stop listening to people who tell you what is important. Listen to yourself more and only pay attention to that which you feel drawn to explore. On pilgrimage, it might be turning away from the supposedly important shrine of a saint to go and sit in nature and feel closer to God that way.  In our author lives, it might be turning away from the things that just feel wrong for us, and leaning into what is enjoyable, that which feels worthwhile, that which we want to keep doing for the long term. Let’s face it, as always, that is the writing, the thinking, the imagination.  As ever, I have this mantra on my wall: “Measure your life by what you create.” It’s the creation side of things that we love and that’s what we need to remember when everything else gets a little much. Many authors left social media in 2025, and while I haven’t left it altogether, I don’t use it much. I post pictures proving I am human on Instagram @jfpennauthor which automatically post to Facebook. I barely check my pages on Facebook though. I’m also still on X with a carefully curated feed that I mainly use to learn new cool AI things which I share with my Patreon Community.  Double down on being human. Travel and health.  Yes, I am a human author, and yes, I continue to age! When you've been publishing a while, you need to update your author photos periodically and I finally had a photoshoot I loved with Betty Bhandari Photography, which means I can add the new pics to my websites and the back of my books. Are you up to date with your author photos? (or at least within a decade of the last photoshoot?!) Here are a few of the pictures on Instagram @jfpennauthor. Healthwise, I gave up calisthenics as it was too much on top of the powerlifting and the amount of walking I do. I did another British Powerlifting competition in September in the M2 category (based on age) and 63kgs category (based on weight). Deadlift: 95kgs. Squat: 60kgs. BenchPress: 37.5kgs. While this is less overall than last year, I also weigh less, so I’m actually stronger based on lift to body weight percentage. I have also done a few pull-ups in the last week with no band, which I am thrilled with! On the travel side, Iceland was the big trip, and I also had a weekend in Berlin for the film festival, where I met up with a producer and a director around an adaptation of my Day of the Vikings thriller. That didn’t pan out, as most of these things don’t, but I certainly learned a lot about the industry — and why it doesn’t suit me! Once again, I dipped my toe into screenwriting and then ran away, as has happened multiple times over the years. When will I learn? …  Over the summer of 2025, I visited lots of gothic cathedrals including Lichfield, Rochester, Durham, York, and revisiting Canterbury, as part of my book research for the Gothic Cathedral book. I have tens of thousands of words on this project, but it isn’t ready yet, so this is carried over into 2026 as it might happen then, depending on the Masters. I spoke at Author Nation in Las Vegas in November 2025, and before it started, I visited (Lower) Antelope Canyon, one of the places on my bucket list, and it did not disappoint. What a special place and no doubt it will appear in a story at some point! How did your 2025 go? I hope your 2025 had some wonderful times as well as no doubt some challenges — and that you have time for reflection as the year turns once more.  Let me know in the comments whether you achieved your creative goals and any other reflections you'd like to share.The post Review Of My 2025 Creative And Business Goals With Joanna Penn first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How can you be more relaxed about your writing process? What are some specific ways to take the pressure off your art and help you enjoy the creative journey? With Joanna Penn and Mark Leslie Lefebvre. In the intro, Spotify 2025 audiobook trends; Audible + BookTok; NonFiction Authors Guide to SubStack; OpenAI and Disney agreement on Sora; India AI licensing; Business for Authors January webinars; Mark and Jo over the years Mark Leslie LeFebvre is the author of horror and paranormal fiction, as well as nonfiction books for authors. He's also an editor, professional speaker, and the Director of Business Development at Draft2Digital. Joanna Penn writes non-fiction for authors and is an award-winning, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of thrillers, dark fantasy, and memoir as J.F. Penn. She’s also an award-winning podcaster, creative entrepreneur, and international professional speaker. Mark and Jo co-wrote The Relaxed Author in 2021. You can listen to us talk about the process here. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights, and the full transcript is below.  Show Notes Why the ‘relaxed' author Write what you love Write at your own pace Write in a series (if you want to) Schedule time to fill the creative well and for rest and relaxation Improve your writing process — but only if it fits with your lifestyle You can find The Relaxed Author: Take the Pressure Off Your Art and Enjoy the Creative Journey on CreativePennBooks.com as well as on your favorite online store or audiobook platform, or order in your library or bookstore. You can find Mark Leslie Lefebvre and his books and podcast at Stark Reflections.ca Why the ‘relaxed' author? Joanna: The definition of relaxed is “free from tension and anxiety,” from the Latin laxus, meaning loose, and to be honest, I am not a relaxed or laid-back person in the broader sense.  Back in my teens, my nickname at school was Highly Stressed. I’m a Type A personality, driven by deadlines and achieving goals. I love to work and I burned out multiple times in my previous career as an IT consultant.  If we go away on a trip, I pack the schedule with back-to-back cultural things like museums and art galleries to help my book research. Or we go on adventure holidays with a clear goal, like cycling down the South-West coast of India. I can’t even go for a long walk without training for another ultra-marathon! So I am not a relaxed person — but I am a relaxed author. If I wanted to spend most of my time doing something that made me miserable, I would go back to my old day job in consulting. I was paid well and worked fewer hours overall. But I measure my life by what I create, and if I am not working on a creative project, I am not able to truly relax in my downtime. There are always more things I want to learn and write about, always more stories to be told and knowledge to share. I don’t want to kill my writing life by over-stressing or burning out as an author. I write what I love and follow my Muse into projects that feel right. I know how to publish and market books well enough to reach readers and make some money. I have many different income streams through my books, podcast and website.  Of course, I still have my creative and business challenges as well as mindset issues, just like any writer. That never goes away. But after a decade as a full-time author entrepreneur, I have a mature creative business and I’ve relaxed into the way I do things.  I love to write, but I also want a full and happy, healthy life. I’m still learning and improving as the industry shifts — and I change, too. I still have ambitious creative and financial goals, but I am going about them in a more relaxed way and in this book, I’ll share some of my experiences and tips in the hope that you can discover your relaxed path, too. Mark: One of the most fundamental things you can do in your writing life is look at how you want to spend your time. I think back to the concept of: ‘You're often a reflection of the people you spend the most time with.’ Therefore, typically, your best friend, or perhaps your partner, is often a person you love spending time with. Because there’s something inherently special about spending time with this person who resonates in a meaningful way, and you feel more yourself because you're with them. In many ways, writing, or the path that you are on as a writer, is almost like being on a journey with an invisible partner. You are you. But you are also the writer you. And there’s the two of you traveling down the road of life together. And so that same question arises. What kind of writer-self do you want to spend all your time with? Do you want to spend all your time with a partner that is constantly stressed out or constantly trying to reach deadlines based on somebody else's prescription of what success is?  Or would you rather spend time with a partner who pauses to take a contemplative look at your own life, your own comfort, your own passion and the things that you are willing to commit to? Someone who allows that all to happen in a way that feels natural and comfortable to you. I’m a fan of the latter, of course, because then you can focus on the things you're passionate about and the things you're hopeful about rather than the things you're fearful about and those that bring anxiety and stress into your life. To me, that’s part of being a relaxed author. That underlying acceptance before you start to plan things out. If the writing life is a marathon, not a sprint, then pacing, not rushing, may be the key. We have both seen burnout in the author community. People who have pushed themselves too hard and just couldn’t keep up with the impossible pace they set for themselves. At times, indie authors would wear that stress, that anxiety, that rush to produce more and more, as a badge of honor. It’s fine to be proud of the hard work that you do. It’s fine to be proud of pushing yourself to always do better, and be better. But when you push too far — beyond your limits — you can ultimately do yourself more harm than good. Everyone has their own unique pace—something that they are comfortable with—and one key is to experiment until you find that pace, and you can settle in for the long run. There’s no looking over your shoulder at the other writers. There’s no panicking about the ones outpacing you. You’re in this with yourself. And, of course, with those readers who are anticipating those clearly communicated milestones of your releases.  I think that what we both want for authors is to see them reaching those milestones at their own paces, in their own comfort, delighting in the fact their readers are there cheering them on. Because we’ll be silently cheering them along as well, knowing that they’ve set a pace, making relaxed author lifestyle choices, that will benefit them in the long run. “I’m glad you're writing this book. I know I'm not the only author who wants peace, moments of joy, and to enjoy the journey. Indie publishing is a luxury that I remember not having, I don't want to lose my sense of gratitude.” —Anonymous author from our survey Write what you love Joanna: The pandemic has taught us that life really is short. Memento mori — remember, you will die.  What is the point of spending precious time writing books you don’t want to write?  If we only have a limited amount of time and only have a limited number of books that we can write in a lifetime, then we need to choose to write the books that we love. If I wanted a job doing something I don’t enjoy, then I would have remained in my stressful old career as an IT consultant — when I certainly wasn’t relaxed! Taking that further, if you try to write things you don't love, then you're going to have to read what you don't love as well, which will take more time. I love writing thrillers because that’s what I love to read. Back when I was miserable in my day job, I would go to the bookstore at lunchtime and buy thrillers. I would read them on the train to and from work and during the lunch break. Anything for a few minutes of escape. That’s the same feeling I try to give my readers now. I know the genre inside and out. If I had to write something else, I would have to read and learn that other genre and spend time doing things I don't love. In fact, I don't even know how you can read things you don't enjoy. I only give books a few pages and if they don’t resonate, I stop reading. Life really is too short.  You also need to run your own race and travel your own journey. If you try to write in a genre you are not immersed in, you will always be looking sideways at what other authors are doing, and that can cause comparisonitis — when you compare yourself to others, most often in an unfavorable way. Definitely not relaxing! Writing something you love has many intrinsic rewards other than sales. Writing is a career for many of us, but it's a passion first, and you don't want to feel like you've wasted your time on words you don’t care about. “Write what you know” is terrible advice for a long-term career as at some point, you will run out of what you know. It should be “write what you want to learn about.” When I want to learn about a topic, I write a book on it because that feeds my curiosity and I love book research, it’s how I enjoy spending my time, especially when I travel, which is also part of how I relax.  If you write what you love and make it part of your lifestyle, you will be a far more relaxed author. Mark: It’s common that writers are drawn into storytelling from some combination of passion, curiosity, and unrelenting interest. We probably read or saw something that inspired us, and we wanted to express those ideas or the resulting perspectives that percolated in our hearts and minds. Or we read something and thought, “Wow, I could do this; but I would have come at it differently or I would approach the situation or subject matter with my own flair.” So, we get into writing with passion and desire for storytelling. And then sometimes along the way, we recognize the critical value of having to become an entrepreneur, to understand the business of writing and publishing. And part of understanding that aspect of being an author is writing to market, and understanding shifts and trends in the industry, and adjusting to those ebbs and flows of the tide. But sometimes, we lose sight of the passion that drew us to writing in the first place. And so, writing the things that you love can be a beacon to keep you on course. I love the concept of “Do something that you love, and you'll never work a day in your life.” And that's true in some regard because I've always felt that way for almost my entire adult life. I've been very lucky. But at the same time, I work extremely hard at what I love. Some days are harder than others, and some things are really difficult, frustrating and challenging; but at the end of the day, I have the feeling of satisfaction that I spent my time doing something I believe in. I've been a bookseller my entire life even though I don't sell books in brick-and-mortar bookstores anymore—that act of physically putting books in people's hands. But to this day, what I do is virtually putting books in people's hands, both as an author and as an industry representative who is passionate about the book business. I was drawn to that world via my passion for writing. And that’s what continues to compel me forward. I tried to leave the corporate world to write full time in 2018 but realized there was an intrinsic satisfaction to working in that realm, to embracing and sharing my insights and knowledge from that arena to help other writers. And I couldn’t give that up. For me, the whole core, the whole essence of why I get up in the morning has to do with storytelling, creative inspiration, and wanting to inspire and inform other people to be the best that they can be in the business of writing and publishing. And that’s what keeps me going when the days are hard. Passion as the inspiration to keep going There are always going to be days that aren’t easy.  There will be unexpected barriers that hit you as a writer. You’ll face that mid-novel slump or realize that you have to scrap an entire scene or even plotline, and feel like going back and re-starting is just too much. You might find the research required to be overwhelming or too difficult.  There’ll be days when the words don’t flow, or the inspiration that initially struck you seems to have abandoned you for greener pastures. Whatever it is, some unexpected frustration can create what can appear to be an insurmountable block. And, when that happens, if it's a project you don't love, you're more likely to let those barriers get in your way and stop you. But if it's a project that you're passionate about, and you’re writing what you love, that alone can be what greases the wheels and helps reduce that friction to keep you going. At the end of the day, writing what you love can be a honing, grounding, and centering beacon that allows you to want to wake up in the morning and enjoy the process as much as possible even when the hard work comes along. “For me, relaxation comes from writing what I know and love and trusting the emergent process. As a discovery writer, I experience great joy when the story, characters and dialogue simply emerge in their own time and their own way. It feels wonderful.” — Valerie Andrews “Writing makes me a relaxed author. Just getting lost in a story of my own creation, discovering new places and learning what makes my characters tick is the best way I know of relaxing. Even the tricky parts, when I have no idea where I am going next, have a special kind of charm.” – Imogen Clark Write at your own pace Mark: Writing at your own pace will help you be a more relaxed author because you’re not stressing out by trying to keep up with someone else. Of course, we all struggle with comparing ourselves to others. Take a quick look around and you can always find someone who has written more books than you. Nora Roberts, traditionally published author, writes a book a month. Lindsey Buroker, fantasy indie author, writes a book a month of over 100,000 words. If you compare yourself to someone else and you try to write at their pace, that is not going to be your relaxed schedule. On the other hand, if you compare yourself to Donna Tartt, who writes one book every decade, you might feel like some speed-demon crushing that word count and mastering rapid release. Looking at what others are doing could result in you thinking you're really slow or you could think that you're super-fast. What does that kind of comparison actually get you? I remember going to see a talk by Canadian literary author Farley Mowat when I was a young budding writer. I’ll never forget one thing he said from that stage: “Any book that takes you less than four years to write is not a real book.” Young teenage Mark was devastated, hurt and disappointed to hear him say that because my favorite author at the time, Piers Anthony, was writing and publishing two to three novels a year. I loved his stuff, and his fantasy and science fiction had been an important inspiration in my writing at that time. (The personal notes I add to the end of my stories and novels came from enjoying his so much). That focus on there being only a single way, a single pace to write, ended up preventing me from enjoying the books I had already been loving because I was doing that comparisonitis Joanna talks about, but as a reader. I took someone else’s perspective too much to heart and I let that ruin a good thing that had brought me personal joy and pleasure. It works the same way as a writer. Because we have likely developed a pattern, or a way that works for us that is our own. We all have a pace that we comfortably walk; a way we prefer to drive. A pattern or style of how and when and what we prefer to eat. We all have our own unique comfort food. There are these patterns that we're comfortable with, and potentially because they are natural to us. If you try to force yourself to write at a pace that's not natural to you, things can go south in your writing and your mental health. And I’m not suggesting any particular pace, except for the one that’s most natural and comfortable to you. If writing fast is something that you're passionate about, and you're good at it, and it's something you naturally do, why would you stop yourself from doing that? Just like if you're a slow writer and you're trying to write fast: why are you doing that to yourself? There’s a common pop song line used by numerous bands over the years that exhorts you to “shake what you got.” I like to think the same thing applies here. And do it with pride and conviction. Because what you got is unique and awesome. Own it, and shake it with pride. You have a way you write and a word count per writing session that works for you. And along with that, you likely know what time you can assign to writing because of other commitments like family time, leisure time, and work (assuming you’re not a full-time writer). Simple math can provide you with a way to determine how long it will take to get your first draft written. So, your path and plans are clear. And you simply take the approach that aligns with your writer DNA. Understanding what that pace is for you helps alleviate an incredible amount of stress that you do not need to thrust upon yourself. Because if you're not going to be able to enjoy it while you're doing it, what's the point? Your pace might change project to project While your pace can change over time, your pace can also change project to project. And sometimes the time actually spent writing can be a smaller portion of the larger work involved. I was on a panel at a conference once and someone asked me how long it took to write my non-fiction book of ghost stories, Haunted Hamilton. “About four days,” I responded. And while that’s true — I crafted the first draft over four long and exhausting days writing as much as sixteen hours each day — the reality was I had been doing research for months. But the pen didn’t actually hit the paper until just a few days before my deadline to turn the book over to my editor. That was for a non-fiction book; but I’ve found I do similar things with fiction. I noodle over concepts and ideas for months before I actually commit words to the page. The reason this comes to mind is that I think it’s important to recognize the way that I write is I first spend a lot of time in my head to understand and chew on things. And then by the time it comes to actually getting the words onto the paper, I've already done much of the pre-writing mentally. It's sometimes not fair when you’re comparing yourself to someone else to look at how long they physically spend in front of a keyboard hammering on that word count, because they might have spent a significantly longer amount of a longer time either outlining or conceptualizing the story in their mind or in their heart before they sat down to write. So that's part of the pace, too. Because sometimes, if we only look at the time spent at the ‘writer’s desk,’ we fool ourselves when we think that we're a slow writer or a fast writer. Joanna:  Your pace will change over your career My first novel took 14 months and now I can write a first draft in about six weeks because I have more experience. It's also more relaxing for me to write a book now than it was in the beginning, because I didn't know what I was doing back then.  Your pace will change per project I have a non-fiction work in progress, my Shadow Book (working title), which I have started several times. I have about 30,000 words but as I write this, I have backed away from it because I’m (still) not ready. There’s a lot more research and thinking I need to do. Similarly, some people take years writing a memoir or a book with such emotional or personal depth that it needs more to bring it to life. Your pace will also shift depending on where you are in the arc of life Perhaps you have young kids right now, or you have a health issue, or you’re caring for someone who is ill. Perhaps you have a demanding day job so you have less time to write. Perhaps you really need extended time away from writing, or just a holiday. Or maybe there’s a global pandemic and frankly, you’re too stressed to write! The key to pacing in a book is variability — and that’s true of life, too. Write at the pace that works for you and don’t be afraid to change it as you need to over time. “I think the biggest thing for me is reminding myself that I'm in this to write. Sometimes I can get caught up in all the moving pieces of editing and publishing and marketing, but the longer I go without writing, or only writing because I have to get the next thing done instead of for enjoyment, the more stressed and anxious I become. But if I make time to fit in what I truly love, which is the process of writing without putting pressure on myself to meet a deadline, or to be perfect, or to meet somebody else's expectations — that's when I become truly relaxed.” – Ariele Sieling  Write in a series (if you want to) Joanna: I have some stand-alone books but most of them are in series, both for non-fiction and for my fiction as J.F. Penn. It’s how I like to read and write. As we draft this book, I’m also writing book 12 in my ARKANE series, Tomb of Relics. It’s relaxing because I know my characters, I know my world; I know the structure of how an ARKANE story goes. I know what to put in it to please my readers. I have already done the work to set up the series world and the main characters and now all I need is a plot and an antagonist.  It’s also quicker to write and edit because I’ve done it before. Of course, you need to put in the work initially so the series comes together, but once you’ve set that all up, each subsequent book is easier. You can also be more relaxed because you already have an audience who will (hopefully) buy the book because they bought the others. You will know approximately how many sales you’ll get on launch and there will be people ready to review. Writing in a non-fiction series is also a really good idea because you know your audience and you can offer them more books, products and services that will help them within a niche. While they might not be sequential, they should be around the same topic, for example, this is part of my Books for Authors series. Financially, it makes sense to have a series as you will earn more revenue per customer as they will (hopefully) buy more than one book. It’s also easier and more relaxing to market as you can set one book to free or a limited time discount and drive sales through to other books in the series. Essentially, writing a book in a series makes it easier to fulfill both creative and financial goals. However, if you love to read and write stand-alone books, and some genres suit stand-alones better than series anyway, then, of course, go with what works for you!  Mark: I like to equate this to no matter where you travel in the world, if you find a McDonald's you pretty much know what's on the menu and you know what to expect. When you write in a series, it's like returning to hang out with old friends. You know their backstory; you know their history so you can easily fall into a new conversation about something and not have to get caught up on understanding what you have in common. So that's an enormous benefit of relaxing into something like, “Oh, I’m sitting down over coffee, chatting with some old friends. They’re telling me a new story about something that happened to them. I know who they are, I know what they're made out of.” And this new plot, this new situation, they may have new goals, they may have new ways they’re going to grow as characters, but they're still the same people that we know and love. And that's a huge benefit that I only discovered recently because I'm only right now working on book four in my Canadian Werewolf series. Prior to that, I had three different novels that were all the first book in a series with no book two. And it was stressful for me. Writing anything seemed to take forever. I was causing myself anxiety by jumping around and writing new works as opposed to realizing I could go visit a locale I'm familiar and comfortable with. And I can see new things in the same locale just like sometimes you can see new things and people you know and love already, especially when you introduce something new into the world and you see how they react to it. For me, there's nothing more wonderful than that sort of homecoming. It's like a nostalgic feeling when you do that. I’ve seen a repeated pattern where writers spend years writing their first book. I started A Canadian Werewolf in New York in 2006 and I did not publish it until ten years later, after finishing it in 2015. (FYI, that wasn’t my first novel. I had written three and published one of them prior to that). That first novel can take so long because you're learning.  You’re learning about your characters, about the craft, about the practice of writing, about the processes that you’re testing along the way. And if you are working on your first book and it’s taking longer than planned, please don’t beat yourself up for that. It’s a process. Sometimes that process takes more time. I sometimes wonder if this is related to our perception of time as we age. When you're 10 years old, a day compared to your lifetime is a significant amount of time, and thinking about a year later is considering a time that is one-tenth of your life. When you have a few more decades or more under your belt, that year is a smaller part of the whole. If you’re 30, a year is only one-thirtieth of your life. A much smaller piece. Just having written more books, particularly in a series, removes the pressure of that one book to represent all of you as a writer.  I had initial anxiety at writing the second book in my Canadian Werewolf series. Book two was more terrifying in some ways than book one because finally, after all this time, I had something good that I didn’t want to ruin. Should I leave well enough alone? But I was asked to write a short story to a theme in an anthology, and using my main character from that first novel allowed me to discover I could have fun spending more time with these characters and this world. And I also realized that people wanted to read more about these characters. I didn't just want to write about them, but other people wanted to read about them too. And that makes the process so much easier to keep going with them. So one of the other benefits that helps to relax me as a writer working on a series is I have a better understanding of who my audience is, and who my readers are, and who will want this, and who will appreciate it. So I know what worked, I know what resonated with them, and I know I can give them that next thing. I have discovered that writing in a series is a far more relaxed way of understanding your target audience better. Because it's not just a single shot in the dark, it's a consistent on-going stream. Let me reflect on a bit of a caveat, because I’m not suggesting sticking to only a single series or universe. As writers, we have plenty of ideas and inspirations, and it’s okay to embrace some of the other ones that come to us. When I think about the Canadian rock trio, Rush, a band that produced 19 studio albums and toured for 40 years, I acknowledge a very consistent band over the decades. And yet, they weren't the same band that they were when they started playing together, even though it was the same three guys since Neil Peart joined Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson. They changed what they wrote about, what they sang about, themes, styles, approaches to making music, all of this. They adapted and changed their style at least a dozen times over the course of their career. No album was exactly like the previous album, and they experimented, and they tried things. But there was a consistency of the audience that went along with them. And as writers, we can potentially have that same thing where we know there are going to be people who will follow us. Think about Stephen King, a writer who has been writing in many different subjects and genres. And yet there's a core group of people who will enjoy everything he writes, and he has that Constant Reader he always keeps in mind. And so, when we write in a series, we're thinking about that constant reader in a more relaxed way because that constant reader, like our characters, like our worlds, like our universes, is like we're just returning to a comfortable, cozy spot where we're just going to hang out with some good friends for a bit. Or, as the contemplative Rush song Time Stand Still expresses, the simple comfort and desire of spending some quality time having a drink with a friend. Schedule time to fill the creative well and for rest and relaxation Mark: What we do as writers is quite cerebral, so we need to give ourselves mental breaks in the same way we need to sleep regularly. Our bodies require sleep. And it's not just physical rest for our bodies to regenerate, it's for our minds to regenerate. We need that to stay sane, to stay alive, to stay healthy. The reality for us as creatives is that we're writing all the time, whether or not we're in front of a keyboard or have a pen in our hand. We’re always writing, continually sucking the marrow from the things that are happening around us, even when we're not consciously aware of it. And sometimes when we are more consciously aware of it, that awareness can feel forced. It can feel stressful. When you give yourself the time to just let go, to just relax, wonderful things can happen. And they can come naturally, never feeling that urgent sense of pressure. Downtime, for me, is making space for those magic moments to happen. I was recently listening to Episode 556 of The Creative Penn podcast where Joanna talked about the serendipity of those moments when you're traveling and you're going to a museum and you see something. And you're not consciously there to research for a book, but you see something that just makes a connection for you. And you would not have had that for your writing had you not given yourself the time to just be doing and enjoying something else. And so, whenever I need to resolve an issue or a problem in a project I’m writing, which can cause stress, I will do other things. I will go for a run or walk the dogs, wash the dishes or clean the house. Or I’ll put on some music and sing and dance like nobody is watching or listening—and thank goodness for that, because that might cause them needless anxiety. The key is, I will do something different that allows my mind to just let go. And somewhere in the subconscious, usually the answer comes to me. Those non-cerebral activities can be very restorative. Yesterday, my partner Liz and I met her daughter at the park. And while we quietly waited, the two of us wordlessly enjoyed the sights and sounds of people walking by, the river in the background, the wind blowing through the leaves in the trees above us. That moment wasn't a purposeful, “Hey, we're going to chill and relax.” But we found about five minutes of restorative calm in the day.  A brief, but powerful ‘Ah’ moment. And when I got back to writing this morning, I drew upon some of the imagery from those few minutes. I didn't realize at the time I was experiencing the moment yesterday that I was going to incorporate some of that imagery in today's writing session. And that's the serendipity that just flows very naturally in those scheduled and even unscheduled moments of relaxation. Joanna: I separate this into two aspects because I’m good at one and terrible at the other!  I schedule time to fill the creative well as often as possible. This is something that Julia Cameron advises in The Artist's Way, and I find it an essential part of my creative practice. Essentially, you can’t create from an empty mind. You have to actively seek out ways to spark ideas. International travel is a huge part of my fiction inspiration, in particular. This has been impossible during the pandemic and has definitely impacted my writing. I also go to exhibitions and art galleries, as well as read books, watch films and documentaries. If I don't fill my creative well, then I feel empty, like I will never have another idea, that perhaps my writing life is over. Some people call that writer's block but I know that feeling now. It just means I haven’t filled my creative well and I need to schedule time to do that so I can create again.  Consume and produce. That’s the balance you need in order to keep the creative well filled and the words flowing. In terms of scheduling time to relax instead of doing book research, I find this difficult because I love to work. My husband says that I'm like a little sports car that goes really, really fast and doesn't stop until it hits a wall. I operate at a high productivity level and then I crash! But the restrictions of the pandemic have helped me learn more about relaxation, after much initial frustration. I have walked in nature and lain in the garden in the hammock and recently, we went to the seaside for the first time in 18 months. I lay on the stones and watched the waves. I was the most relaxed I’ve been in a long time. I didn't look at my phone. I wasn't listening to a podcast or an audiobook. We weren't talking. We were just being there in nature and relaxing.  Authors are always thinking and feeling because everything feeds our work somehow. But we have to have both aspects — active time to fill the creative well and passive time to rest and relax. “I go for lots of walks and hikes in the woods. These help me work out the kinks in my plots, and also to feel more relaxed! (Exercise is an added benefit!)” –T.W. Piperbrook Improve your writing process — but only if it fits with your lifestyle Joanna: A lot of stress can occur in writing if we try to change or improve our process too far beyond our natural way of doing things.  For example, trying to be a detailed plotter with a spreadsheet when you’re really a discovery writer, or trying to dictate 5,000 words per hour when you find it easier to hand write slowly into a journal. Productivity tips from other writers can really help you tweak your personal process, but only if they work for you — and I say this as someone who has a book on Productivity for Authors! Of course, it’s a good idea to improve things, but once you try something, analyze whether it works for you — either with data or just how you feel. If it works, great. Adopt it into your process. If it doesn’t work, then discard it. For example, I wrote my first novel in Microsoft Word. When I discovered Scrivener, I changed my process and never looked back because it made my life so much easier. I don’t write in order and Scrivener made it easier to move things around. I also discovered that it was easier for me to get into my first draft writing and creating when I was away from the desk I use for business, podcasting, and marketing tasks. I started to write in a local cafe and later on in a co-working space. During the pandemic lockdown, I used specific playlists to create a form of separation as I couldn’t physically go somewhere else. Editing is an important part of the writing process but you have to find what works for you, which will also change over time. Some are authors are more relaxed with a messy first draft, then rounds of rewrites while working with multiple editors. Others do one careful draft and then use a proofreader to check the finished book. There are as many ways to write as there are writers.  A relaxed author chooses the process that works in the most effective way for them and makes the book the best it can be. Mark: When it comes to process, there are times when you're doing something that feels natural, versus times when you're learning a new skill. Consciously and purposefully learning new skills can be stressful; particularly because it’s something we often put so much emphasis or importance upon. But when you adapt on-going learning as a normal part of your life, a natural part of who and what you are, that stress can flow away. I'm always about learning new skills; but over time I’ve learned how to absorb learning into my everyday processes. I'm a pantser, or discovery writer, or whatever term we can apply that makes us feel better about it. And every time I've tried to stringently outline a book, it has been a stressful experience and I’ve not been satisfied with the process or the result.  Perhaps I satisfied the part of me that thought I wanted to be more like other writers, but I didn't satisfy the creative person in me. I was denying that flow that has worked for me. I did, of course, naturally introduce a few new learnings into my attempts to outline; so I stuck with those elements that worked, and abandoned the elements that weren’t working, or were causing me stress. The thought of self-improvement often comes with images of blood, sweat, and tears. It doesn't have to. You don't have to bleed to do this; it can be something that you do at your own pace. You can do it in a way that you're comfortable with so it's causing you no stress, but allowing you to learn and grow and improve. And if it doesn't work but you force yourself to keep doing it because a famous writer or a six-figure author said, “this is the way to do it,” you create pressure. And when you don’t do it that way, you can think of yourself as a failure as opposed to thinking of it as, “No, this is just the way that I do things.” When you accept how you do things, if they result in effectively getting things done and feeling good about it at the same time, you have less resistance, you have less friction, you have less tension.  Constantly learning, adapting, and evolving is good. But forcing ourselves to try to be or do something that we are not or that doesn't work for us, that causes needless anxiety. “I think a large part of it comes down to reminding myself WHY I write. This can mean looking back at positive reviews, so I can see how much joy others get from my writing, or even just writing something brand new for the sake of exploring an idea. Writing something just for me, rather than for an audience, reminds me how much I enjoy writing, which helps me to unwind a bit and approach my projects with more playfulness.” – Icy Sedgwick You can find The Relaxed Author: Take the Pressure Off Your Art and Enjoy the Creative Journey on CreativePennBooks.com as well as on your favorite online store or audiobook platform, or order in your library or bookstore. The post The Relaxed Author Writing Tips With Joanna Penn and Mark Leslie Lefebvre first appeared on The Creative Penn.

What does it really take to build a multi-six-figure author business with no advertising? Is running your own warehouse really necessary for direct sales success — or is there a simpler path using print-on-demand that works just as well? In this conversation, Sacha Black and I compare our very different approaches to selling direct, from print on demand to pallets of books, and explore why the right model depends entirely on who you are and what your goals are for your author business. In the intro, Memoir Examples and interviews [Reedsy, The Creative Penn memoir tips]; Written Word Media annual indie author survey results; Successful Self-Publishing Fourth Edition; Business for Authors webinars; Into the Drowning Deep by Mira Grant; Camino Portuguese Coastal on My Camino Podcast; Creating while Caring Community with Donn King; The Buried and the Drowned by J.F. Penn Today's show is sponsored by Bookfunnel, the essential tool for your author business. Whether it’s delivering your reader magnet, sending out advanced copies of your book, handing out ebooks at a conference, or fulfilling your digital sales to readers, BookFunnel does it all. Check it out at bookfunnel.com/thecreativepenn This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn  Sacha Black is the author of YA and non-fiction for authors and previously hosted The Rebel Author Podcast. As Ruby Roe, she is a multi-six-figure author of sapphic romantasy. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights, and the full transcript is below.  Show Notes Two models for selling direct: print on demand vs running your own warehouse. Plus, check out Sacha's solo Rebel Author episode about the details of the warehouse. Cashflow management Kickstarter lessons: pre-launch followers, fulfillment time, and realistic timelines How Sacha built a multi-six-figure business through TikTok with zero ad spend Matching your business model to your personality and skill set Building resilience: staff salaries, SOPs, and planning for when things change You can find Ruby at RubyRoe.co.uk and on TikTok @rubyroeauthor and on Instagram @sachablackauthor Transcript of the interview Joanna: Sacha Black is the author of YA and nonfiction for authors, and previously hosted the Rebel Author podcast. As Ruby Roe, she is a multi-six-figure author of sapphic romance. So welcome back to the show, Sacha. Sacha: Hello. Thank you for having me. It's always a pleasure to be here. Joanna: I'm excited to talk to you today. Now, just for context, for everybody listening, Sacha has a solo episode on her Rebel Author podcast, last week as we record this, which goes into specific lessons around the warehouse in more detail, including financials. So we are going to come at this from a slightly different angle in our discussion today, which is really about two different ways of doing selling direct. I want us to start though, Sacha, in case people don't know your background, in case they've missed out. Can you just give us a quick recap of your indie author journey, because you haven't just come out of nowhere and jumped into this business and done incredibly well? Sacha's Indie Author Journey Sacha: No, I really haven't. Okay. So 2013, I started writing. So 12 years ago I started writing with the intention to publish, because I was writing before, but not with the intention. 2017 I first self-published and then two years after that, in 2019, I quit the day job. But let me be clear, it wasn't because I was rolling in self-published royalties or commissions or whatever you want to call them. I was barely scraping by. And so those are what I like to call my hustle years because I mean, I still hustle, but it was a different kind. It was grind and hustle. So I did a lot of freelance work. I did a lot of VA work for other authors. I did speaking, I was podcasting, teaching courses, and so on and so forth. 2022, in the summer, I made a realisation that I'd created another job for myself rather than a business that I wanted to grow and thrive in and was loving life and all of that stuff. And so I took a huge risk and I slowed down everything, and I do mean everything. I slowed down the speaking, I slowed down the courses, I slowed down the nonfiction, and — I poured everything into writing what became the first Ruby Roe book. I published that in February 2023. In August/September 2023, I stopped all freelance work. And to be clear, at that point, I also wasn't entirely sure if I was going to be able to pay my bills with Ruby, but I could see that she had the potential there and I was making enough to scrape by. And there's nothing if not a little bit of pressure to make you work hard. So that is when I stopped the freelance. And then in November 2023, so two months later, I started TikTok in earnest. And then a month after that, December the eighth, I went viral. And then what's relevant to this is that two days after that, on December the 10th, I had whipped up my minimum viable Shopify, and that went live. Then roll on, I did more of the same, published more Ruby Roe books. I made a big change to my Shopify. So at that point it was still print on demand Shopify, and then February 2025, I took control and took the reins and rented a warehouse and started fulfilling distribution myself. The Ten-Year Overnight Success Joanna: So great. So really good for people to realise that 2013, you started writing with the intention, like, seriously, I want this to be what I do. And it was 2019 when you quit the day job, but really it was 2023 when you actually started making decent money, right? Sacha: Almost like we all need 10 years. Joanna: Yeah. I mean, it definitely takes time. So I wanted just to set that scene there. And also that you did at least a year of print on demand Shopify before getting your own warehouse. Sacha: Yeah, maybe 14 months. Joanna: Yeah, 14 months. Okay. So we are going to revisit some of these, but I also just want as context, what was your day job so people know? Sacha: So I was a project manager in a local government, quite corporate, quite conservative place. And I played the villain. It was great. I would helicopter into departments and fix them up and look at processes that were failing and restructure things and bring in new software and bits and bobs like that. The Importance of Business Skills Joanna: Yeah. So I think that's important too, because your job was fixing things and looking at processes, and I feel like that is a lot of what you've done and we'll revisit that. Sacha: How did I not realise that?! Joanna: I thought you did know that. No. Well, oh my goodness. And let's just put my business background in context. I'm sure most people have heard it before, but I was an IT consultant for about 13 years, but much of my job was going into businesses and doing process mapping and then doing software to fix that. And also I worked, I'm not an accountant, but I worked in financial accounting departments. So I think this is really important context for people to realise that learning the craft is one thing, but learning business is a completely different game, right? Sacha: Oh, it is. I have learnt — it's wild because I always feel like there's no way you can learn more than in your first year of publishing because everything is brand new. But I genuinely feel like this past 18 months I have learnt as much, if not more, because of the business, because of money, because of all of the other legal regulation type changes in the last 18 months. It's just been exhausting in terms of learning. It's great, but also it is a lot to learn. There is just so much to business. Joanna's Attempts to Talk Sacha Out of the Warehouse Joanna: So that's one thing. Now, I also want to say for context, when you decided to start a warehouse, how much effort did I put into trying to persuade you not to do this? Sacha: Oh my goodness, me. I mean a lot. There were probably two dinners, several coffees, a Zoom. It was like, don't do it. Don't do it. You got me halfway there. So for everybody listening, I went big and I was like, oh, I'm going to buy shipping containers and convert them and put them on a plot of land and all of this stuff. And Joanna very sensibly turned around and was like, hmm, why don't you rent somewhere that you can bail out of if it doesn't work? And I was like, oh yeah, that does sound like a good idea. Joanna: Try it, try it before you really commit. Okay. So let's just again take a step back because the whole point of doing this discussion for me is because you are doing really well and it is amazing what you are doing and what some other people are doing with warehouses. But I also sell direct and in the same way as you used to, which is I use Bookfunnel for ebooks and audiobooks and I use BookVault for print on demand books, and people can also use Lulu. That's another option for people. So you don't have to do direct sales in the way that you've done it. And part of the reason to do this episode was to show people that there are gradations of selling direct. Why Sell Direct? Joanna: But I wanted to go back to the basics around this. Why might people consider selling direct, even in a really simple way, for example, just ebooks from their website, or what might be reasons to sell direct rather than just sending everything to Amazon or other stores? Sacha: I think, well, first of all, it depends on what you want as a business model. For me, I have a similar background to you in that I was very vulnerable when I was in corporate because of redundancies, and so that bred a bit of control freakness inside me. And having control of my customers was really important to me. We don't get any data from Amazon or Kobo really, or anywhere, even though all of these distributors are incredible for us in our careers. We don't actually have direct access to readers, and you do with Shopify. You know everything about your reader, and that is priceless. Because once you have that data and you have delivered a product, a book, merchandise, something that that reader values and appreciates, you can then sell to them again and again and again. I have some readers who have been on my website who have spent almost four figures now. I mean, that is just — one person's done that and I have thousands of people who are coming to the website on a regular basis. So definitely that control and access to readers is a huge reason for doing it. Customising the Reader Relationship Sacha: And also I think that you can, depending on how you do this model, there are ways to do some of the things I'm going to talk about digitally as well. But for me, I really like the physical aspect of it. We are able to customise the relationship with our customers. We can give them more because we are in control of delivery. And so by that I mean we could give art prints, which lots of my readers really value. We can do — you could send those digitally if you wanted to, but we can add in extra freebies like our romance pop sockets, that makes them feel like they are part of my reader group. They're part of a community. It creates this belonging. So I think there is just so much more that you can do when you are in control of that relationship and in control of the access to it. Joanna: Yeah. And on that, I mean, one of the reasons we can do really cool print books — and again, we're going to come back to print on demand, but I use print on demand. You don't have to buy pallets of books as Sacha does. You can just do print on demand. Obviously the financials are different, but I can still do foiling and custom end papers and ribbons and all this with print on demand through BookVault custom printing and bespoke printing. The Speed of Money Joanna: But also, I think the other thing with the money — I don't know if you even remember this, because it's very different when you are selling direct — you can set up your system so you get paid like every single day, right? Or every week? Sacha: Yes. Joanna: So the money is faster because with Amazon, with any of these other systems, it can take 30, 60, 90 days for the money to get to you. So faster money, you are in more control of the money. And you can also do a lot more things like bundling and like you mentioned, much higher value that you could offer, but you can also make higher income. Average order value per customer because you have so many things, right? So that speed of money is very different. Sacha: It is, but it's also very dangerous. I know we might talk about cashflow more later, but— Joanna: Let's talk about it now. Managing Cashflow With Multiple Bank Accounts Sacha: Okay, cool. So one of the things that I think is the most valuable thing that I've ever done is, someone who is really clever told me that you're allowed more than one business account. Joanna: Just to be clear, bank accounts? Sacha: Yes, sorry. Yeah. Bank accounts. And one of my banks in particular enables you to have mini banks inside it, mini pots they call it. And what I do with pre-orders is I treat it a bit like Amazon. So that money will come in — you know, I do get paid daily pretty much — but I then siphon it off every week into a pot. So let's just say I've got one book on pre-order. Every week the team tells me how much we've got in pre-orders for that one product and all the shipping money, and I put it into an account and I leave it there. And I do not touch it unless it is to pay for the print run of that book or to pay for the shipping. Because one of the benefits of coming direct to me is that I promise to ship all pre-orders early, so we have to pay the shipping costs before necessarily Amazon might pay for its shipping costs because they only release on the actual release day. But that has enabled me to have a little savings scheme, but also guarantee that I can pay for the print run in advance because I haven't accidentally spent that money on something else or invested it. I've kept it aside and it also helps you track numbers as well, so you know how well that pre-order is doing financially. Understanding Cashflow as an Author Joanna: Yeah. And this cashflow, if people don't really know it, is the difference between when money comes in and when it goes out. So another example, common to many authors, is paying for advertising. So for example, if you run some ads one month, you're going to have to pay, let's say Facebook or BookBub or whoever, that month. You might not get the money from the sale of those books if it's from a store until two months later. In that case, the cash flows the other way. The money is sitting with the store, sitting on Amazon until they pay you later. This idea of cashflow is so important for authors to think about. Another, I guess even more basic example is you are writing your first book and you pay for an editor. Money goes out of your bank account and then hopefully you're going to sell some books, but that might take, let's say six months, and then some money will come back into your bank account. I think this understanding cashflow is so important at a small level because as it gets bigger and bigger — and you are doing these very big print runs now, aren't you? Talk a bit about that. The Risks of Print Runs Sacha: Yeah. So one of the things I was going to say, one of the benefits of your sell direct model is that you don't have to deal with mistakes like this one. So in my recent book, Architecti, that we launched at the end of September, we did a print run of a thousand books, maybe about 3,000 pounds, something like that, 2,000 pounds. And basically we ended up selling all thousand and more. So the pre-orders breached a thousand and we didn't have enough books. But what made that worse is that 20% of the books that arrived were damaged because there had been massive rain. So we then had to do a second print run, which is bad for two reasons. The first reason is that one, that space, two, the time it's going to take to get to you — it's not instant, it's not printed on demand. But also three, I then had to spend the same amount of money again. And actually if we had ordered 2,000 originally, we would've saved a bit more money on it per book. So you don't — if you are doing selling direct with a print on demand model, the number of pre-orders you get is irrelevant because they'll just keep printing, and you just get charged per copy. So there are benefits and disadvantages to doing it each way. Obviously, I'm getting a cheaper price per copy printed, but not if I mess up the order numbers. Is Running a Warehouse Just Another Job? Joanna: So I'm going to come back on something you said earlier, which was in 2022 you said, “I realised I made a job for myself.” Sacha: Yeah. Joanna: And I mean, I've been to your store. You obviously have people to help you. But one of my reservations about this kind of model is that even if you have people to help you, taking on physical book — even though you are not printing them yourself, you're still shipping them all and you're signing them all. And to me it feels like a job. So maybe talk about why you have continued — you have pretty much decided to continue with your warehouse. So why is this not a job? What makes this fun for you? The Joy of Physical Product Creation Sacha: I wish that listeners could see my face because I'm literally glittering. I love it. I literally love it. I love us being able to create cool and wacky things. We can make a decision and we can create that physical product really quickly. We can do all of these quirky things. We can experiment. We can do book boxes. So first of all, it's the creativity in the physical product creation. I had no idea how much I love physical product creation, but there is something extremely satisfying about us coming up with an idea that's so integrated in the book. So for example, one of my characters uses, has a coin, a yes/no coin. She's an assassin and she flips it to decide whether or not she's going to assassinate somebody. We've actually designed and had that coin made, and it's my favourite item in the warehouse. It's such a small little thing, but I love it. And so there is a lot of joy that I derive from us being able to create these items. Sending Book Mail and Building Community Sacha: I think the second thing is I really love book mail. There is no better gift somebody can give me than a book. And so I do get a lot of satisfaction from knowing we're sending out lots and lots of book presents to people and we get to add more to it. So some of the promises that we make are: I sign every book and we give gifts. We have character art and, like I've mentioned before, pop sockets and all these kinds of things. And I get tagged daily in unboxings and stories and things like this where people are like, oh my gosh, I didn't realise I was going to get this, this, and this. And I just — it's like crack to me. I get high off of it. So I can't — this is not for everybody. This is a logistical nightmare. There are so many problems inherent in this business model. I love it. Discovering a Love of Team Building Sacha: And I think the other thing, which is very much not for a lot of authors — I did not realise that I actually really like having a team. And that has been a recent realisation. I really was told that I'm not a team player when I was in corporate, that I work alone, all of this nonsense. And I believed that and taken it on. But finding the right team, the right people who love the jobs that they do inside your business and they're all as passionate as you, is just life changing. And so that also helps me continue because I have a really great team. Joanna: I do have to ask you, what is a pop socket? Sacha: It's a little round disc that has a mechanism that you can pull out and then you — and it has a sticky command strip back and you can pop it on the back of your phone or on the back of a Kindle and it helps you to hold it. I don't know how else to describe it. It just helps you to hold the device easier. Joanna: Okay. I'm sure I wasn't the only one who was confused. I'm like, why are you doing electrical socket products? Know What Kind of Person You Are Joanna: But I think this actually does demonstrate another point, and I hope people listening — I hope you can sort of — why we are doing this partly is to help you figure out what kind of person you are as well. Because I can't think of anything worse than having lots of little boxes! And I've been in Sacha's thing and there's all these little stickers and there's lots of boxes of little things that they put in people's packages, which make people happy. And I'm like, oh, I just don't like packages of things. And I mean, you geek out on packaging, don't you as well? Sacha: Oh my goodness. Yeah. One of the first things I did when we got the warehouse was I actually went to a packaging expo in Birmingham. It was like this giant conference place and I just nerded out there. It was so fun. And one of the things that I'm booked to do is an advent calendar. And that was what drove me there in the first place. I was looking for a manufacturer that could create an advent calendar for us. I have two. I'm not — I have two advent calendars this year because I love them so much. But yeah, the other thing that I was going to say to you is I often think that as adults, we can find what we're supposed to do rooted in our childhood. And I was talking the other day and someone said to me, what toy do you remember from your youth? And I was like, oh yeah. The only one that I can remember is that I had a sticker maker. I like — that makes sense. You do like stickers. And I do. Yeah. Digital Minimalism vs Physical Products Joanna: Yeah, I do. And I think this is so important because I love books. I buy a lot of books. I love books, but I also get rid of a lot of books. I know people hate this, but I will just get rid of bags and bags of books. So I value books more for what's inside them than the physical product as such. I mean, I have some big expensive, beautiful books, but mostly I want what's in them. So it's really interesting to me. And I think there's a big difference between us is just how much you like all that stuff. So if you are listening, if you are like a digital minimalist and you don't want to have stuff around your house, you definitely don't want a warehouse. You don't want all the shipping bits and bobs. You are not interested in all that. Or even if you are, you can still do a lot of this print on demand. Then I think that's just so important, isn't it? I mean, did you look at the print on demand merch? Did you find anything you liked? The Draw of Customisation Sacha: Yeah, we did, but I think for me it was that customisation. We are now moving towards — I've just put an order in this morning for 10,000 customised boxes. We've got our own branding on them. We've got a little naughty, cheeky message when they flip up the flap. And it's little things like that that you can't — you know, we wouldn't have control over what was sent. So much of what I wanted, and some of the reasons for me doing it, is that I wanted to be able to sign the books. I was being asked on a daily basis if people could buy signed books from me, and it was driving me bonkers not being able to say yes. But also being able to send a website mailing list sign-up in the box, or being able to give them a discount in the box. I mean, I know you do that, but yeah, there was just a lot more customisation and things that we could do if we were controlling the shipping. Also, I wanted to pack the boxes, the books better. So we wanted to be able to bubble wrap things or we wanted to be able to waterproof things because we had various different issues with deliveries and so we wanted a bit more control over that. So yeah, there were just so many reasons for us to do it. Print on Demand Is Still Fantastic Sacha: Look, don't get me wrong, if I suddenly wanted to go off travelling for a year, then maybe I would shut down the warehouse and go back to print on demand. I think print on demand is fantastic. I did it for 14 months before I decided to open a warehouse. It is the foundation of most authors' models. So it's fantastic. I just want to do more. Joanna: Yeah. You want to do more of it. Life Stage Matters Joanna: We should also, I also wanted to mention your life stage. Because when we did talk about it, your son is just going to secondary school, so we knew that you would be in the same area, right? Sacha: Yeah. Joanna: Because I said to you, you can't just do this and — well, you can, you could ditch it all. But the better decision is to do this for a certain number of years. If you're going to do it, it needs time, right? So you are at that point in your life. Sacha: Yeah, absolutely. We — I mean, we are going to move house, I think, but not that far away. We'll still be in reachable distance of the warehouse. And yeah, the staying power is so important because it's also about raising awareness. You have to train readers to come to you. You have to show them why it's beneficial for them to order directly from you. Growing the Business Year Over Year Sacha: And then you also have to be able to iterate and add more products. Like you were talking earlier about increasing that average order value. And that does come from having more products, but more products does create other issues like space, which may or may not be suffering issues with now. But yeah, so for example, 2024, which was the first real year, I did about 73 and a half thousand British pounds. And then this year, where — as we record this, it's actually the 1st of December — and I'm on 232,000. So from year one to year two, it's a huge difference. And that I do think is about the number of products and the number of things that we have on there. Joanna: And the number of customers. I guess you've also grown your customer base as well. And one of the rules, I guess, in inverted commas, of publishing is that the money is in the backlist. And every time you add to your backlist and every launch, you are selling a lot more of your backlist as well. So I think as time goes on, yeah, you get more books. Kickstarter as an Alternative Joanna: But let's also talk about Kickstarter because I do signed books for my Kickstarters and to me the Kickstarter is like a short-term ability to do the things you are doing regularly. So for example, if you want to do book boxes, you could just do them for a Kickstarter. You don't have to run a warehouse and do it every single day. For example, your last Kickstarter for Ruby Roe made around 150,000 US dollars, which is amazing. Like really fantastic. So just maybe talk about that, any lessons from the Kickstarter specifically, because I feel like most people, for most people listening, they are far more likely to do a Kickstarter than they are to start a warehouse. Pre-Launch Followers Are Critical Sacha: Yeah, so the first thing is even before you start your Kickstarter, the pre-launch follow accounts are critical. So a lot of people think — well, I guess there's a lot of loud noise about all these big numbers about how much people can make on Kickstarter, but actually a lot of it is driven by you, the author, pushing your audience to Kickstarter. So we actually have a formula now. Somebody more intelligent gave this to me, but essentially, based on my own personal campaign data — so this wouldn't necessarily be the same for other people — but based on my campaign data, each pre-launch follower is worth 75 pounds. And then we add on seven grand, for example. So on campaign three, which was the most recent one, I had 1,501 pre-launch followers. And when you times that by 75 and you add on seven grand, it makes more or less exactly what we made on the campaign. And the same formula can be applied to the others. So you need more pre-launch followers than you think you do. And lots of people don't put enough impetus on the marketing beforehand. Almost all of our Kickstarter marketing is beforehand because we drive so many people to that follow button. Early Bird Pricing and Fulfillment Time Sacha: And then the other thing that we do is that we do early bird pricing. So we get the majority of our income on a campaign on day one. I think it was something wild, like 80% this time was on day one, so that's really important. The second thing is it takes so, so very much longer than you think it does to fulfil a campaign, and you must factor in that cost. Because if it's not you fulfilling, you are paying somebody else to fulfil it. And if it is you fulfilling it, you must account for your own time in the pricing of your campaign. And the other thing is that the amount of time it takes to fulfil is directly proportionate to the size of the campaign. That's one thing I did not even compute — the fact that we went from about 56,000 British pounds up to double that, and the time was exponentially more than double. So you do have to think about that. Overseas Printing and Timelines Sacha: The other lesson that we have learned is that overseas printing will drag your timelines out far longer than you think it does. So whatever you think it's going to take you to fulfil, add several months more onto that and put that information in your campaign. And thankfully, we are now only going to be a month delayed, whereas lots of campaigns get up to a year delayed because they don't consider that. Reinvesting Kickstarter Profits Sacha: And then the last thing I think, which was really key for us, is that if you have some profit in the Kickstarter — because not all Kickstarters are actually massively profitable because they either don't account enough for shipping or they don't account enough in the pricing. Thankfully, ours have been profitable, but we've actually reinvested that profit back into buying more stock and more merchandise, which not everybody would want to do if they don't have a warehouse. However, we are stockpiling merchandise and books so that we can do mystery boxes later on down the line. It's probably a year away, but we are buying extra of everything so that we have that in the warehouse. So yeah, depending on what you want to do with your profit, for us it was all about buying more books, basically. Offering Something Exclusive Sacha: I think the other thing to think about is what is it that you are doing that's exclusive to Kickstarter? Because you will get backers on Kickstarter who want that quirky, unique thing that they're not going to be able to get anywhere else. But what about you? Because you've done more Kickstarters than me. What do you think is the biggest lesson you've learned? Reward Tiers and Bundling Joanna: Oh, well I think all of mine together add up to the one you just did. Although I will comment on — you said something like 75 pounds per pre-launch backer. That is obviously dependent on your tiers for the rewards, so most authors won't have that amount. So my average order value, which I know is slightly different, but I don't offer things like book boxes like you have. So a lot of it will depend on the tiers. Some people will do a Kickstarter just with an ebook, just with one ebook and maybe a bundle of ebooks. So you are never going to make it up to that kind of value. So I think this is important too, is have a look at what people offer on their different levels of Kickstarter. And in fact, here's my AI tip for the day. What you can do — what I did with my Buried and the Drowned campaign recently — is I uploaded my book to ChatGPT and said, tell me, what are some ideas for the different reward tiers that I can do on Kickstarter? And it will give you some ideas for what you can do, what kind of bundles you might want to do. So I think bundling your backlist is another thing you can do as upsells, or you can just, for example, for me, when I did Blood Vintage, I did a horror bundle when it was four standalone horror books in one of the upper tiers. So I think bundling is a good way. Also upselling your backlist is a really good way to up things. And also if you do it digitally, so for ebooks and audiobooks, there's a lot less time in fulfillment. Focus on Digital Products Too Joanna: So again, yours — well, you make things hard, but also more fun according to you, because most of it's physical, right? In fact, this is one of the things you haven't done so well, really, is concentrate on the digital side of things. Is that something you are thinking about now? Sacha: Yeah, it is. I mean, we do have our books digitally on the website. So the last — I only had one series in Kindle Unlimited, and I took those out in January. But so we do have all of the digital products on the website, and the novellas that we do, we have in all formats because I narrate the audio for them. So that is something that we're looking at. And since somebody very smart told me to have upsell apps on my website, we now have a full “get the everything bundle” in physical and digital and we are now selling them as well. Surprising. Definitely not you. So yeah, we are looking at it and that's something that we could look at next year as well for advertising because I haven't really done any advertising. I think I've spent about 200 pounds in ads in the last four months or something. It's very, very low level. So that is a way to make a huge amount of profit because the cost is so low. So your return, if you're doing a 40 or 50 pound bundle of ebooks and you are spending, I don't know, four pounds in advertising to get that sale, your return on that investment is enormous for ads. So that is something that we are looking at for next year, but it just hasn't been something that we've done a huge amount of. A Multi-Six-Figure Author With No Ads Joanna: Yeah. Well, just quoting from your solo episode where you say, “I don't have any advertising costs, customers are from my mailing list, TikTok and Instagram.” Now, being as you are a multi-six-figure author with no ads, this is mostly unthinkable for many authors. And so I wonder if, maybe talk about that. How do you think you have done that and can other people potentially emulate it, or do you think it's luck? It's Not Luck, It's Skill Set Sacha: Do you know, this is okay. So I don't think it's luck. I don't believe in luck. I get quite aggressive about people flinging luck around. I know some people are huge supporters of luck. I'm like, no. Do I think anybody can do it? Do you know, I swing so hard on this. Sometimes I say yes, and sometimes I think no. And I think the brutal truth of it is that I know where my skill set lies and I lean extremely heavily into it. So what do I mean by that? TikTok and Instagram are both very visual mediums. It is video footage. It is static images. I am extremely comfortable on camera. I am an ex-theatre kid. I was on TV as a kid. I did voiceover work when I was younger. This is my wheelhouse. So acting a bit like a tit on TikTok on a video, I am very comfortable at doing that, and I think that is reflected in the results. Consistency Without Burnout Sacha: And the other part of it is because I am comfortable at doing it, I enjoy it. It makes me laugh. And therefore it feels easy. And I think because it feels easy, I can do it over and over and over again without burning out. I started posting on TikTok on November the 19th, 2023, and I have posted three times a day every day since. Every single day without stopping, and I do not feel burnt out. And I definitely feel like that is because it's easy for me because I am good at it. Reading the Algorithm Sacha: The other thing that I think goes in here is that I'm very good at reading what's working. So sorry to talk Clifton Strengths, but my number one Clifton Strength is competition. And one of the skills that has is understanding the market. We're very good at having a wide view. So not only do I read the market on Amazon or in bookstores or wherever I can, it's the same skill set but applied to the algorithm. So I am very good at dissecting viral videos and understanding what made it work, in the same way somebody that spends 20,000 pounds a month on Facebook advertising is very good at doing analytics and looking at those numbers. I am useless at that. I just can't do it. I just get complete shutdown. My brain just says no, and I'm incapable of running ads. That's why I don't do it. Not Everyone Can Do This Sacha: So can anybody do this? Maybe. If you are comfortable on camera, if you enjoy it. It's like we've got a mutual friend, Adam Beswick. We call him the QVC Book Bitch because he is a phenomenon on live videos on TikTok and Instagram and wherever he can sell. Anything on those lives. It is astonishing to watch the sales pop in as he's on these lives. I can't think of anything worse. I will do a live, but I'll be signing books and having a good old chitchat. Not like it's — like that hand selling. Another author, Willow Winters, has done like 18 in-person events this year. I literally die on the inside hearing that. But that's what works for them and that's what's helping grow their business models. So ah, honestly, no. I actually don't think anybody can do what I've done. I think if you have a similar skill set to me, then yes you can. But no, and I know that I don't want to crush anybody listening. Do you like social media? I like social media. Do you like being on camera? Then yeah, you can do it. But if you don't, then I just think it's a waste of your time. Find out what you are good at, find out where your skill set is, and then lean in very, very hard. Writing to Your Strengths and Passion Joanna: I also think, because let's be brutal, you had books before and they didn't sell like this. Sacha: Yep. Joanna: So I also think that you leaned into — yes, of course, sapphic romance is a big sub-genre, but you love it. And also it's your lived experience with the sapphic sub-genre. This is not you chasing a trend, right? I think that's important too because too many people are like, oh, well maybe this is the latest trend. And is TikTok a trend? And then try and force them together, whereas I feel like you haven't done that. Sacha: No, and actually I spoke to lots of people who were very knowledgeable on the market and they all said, don't do it. And the reason for this is that there were no adult lesbian sapphic romance books that were selling when I looked at the market and decided that this was what I wanted to write. And I was like, cool, I'm going to do it then. And rightly so, everyone was like, well, there's no evidence to suggest that this is going to make any money. You are taking a huge risk. And I was like, yeah, but I will. I knew from the outset before I even put a word to the page how I was going to market it. And I think that feeling of coming home is what I — I created a home for myself in my books and that is why it's just felt so easy to market. Lean Into What You're Good At Sacha: It's like you, with your podcasting. Nobody can get anywhere near your podcast because you are so good at it. You've got such a history. You are so natural with your podcasting that you are just unbeatable, you know? So it's a natural way for you to market it. Joanna: Many have tried, but no, you're right. It's because I like this. And what's so funny — I'm sure I've mentioned it on the show — but I did call you one day and say, okay, all right, show me how to do this TikTok thing. And you spent like two hours on the phone with me and then I basically said no. Okay. I almost tried and then I just went, no, this is definitely not for me. And I think that this has to be one of the most important things as an author. Maybe some people listening are just geeking out over packaging like you are, and maybe they're the people who might look at this potential business model. Whereas some people are like me and don't want to go anywhere near it. And then other people like you want to do video and maybe other people like me want to do audio. So yeah, it's so important to find, well, like you said, what does not work for you? What is fun for you and when are you having a good time? Because otherwise you would have a job. Like to me, it looks like a job, you having a warehouse. But to you, it's not the same as when you were grinding it out back in 2022. Packing Videos Are Peak Content Sacha: Completely. And I think if you look at my social media feeds, they are disproportionately full of packing videos, which I think tells you something. Joanna: Oh dear. I just literally — I'm just like, oh my, if I never see any more packaging, I'll be happy. Sacha: Yeah. That's good. The One Time Sacha Nearly Burnt It All Down Sacha: I have to say, there was one moment where I doubted everything. And that was at the end — but basically, in about, of really poor timing. I ended up having to fulfil every single pre-order of my latest release and hand packing about a thousand books in two weeks. And I nearly burnt it all to the ground. Joanna: Because you didn't have enough staffing, right? And your mum was sick or something? Sacha: Yeah, exactly that. And I had to do it all by myself, and I was alone in the warehouse and it was just horrendous. So never again. But hey, I learned the lessons and now I'm like, yay, let's do it again. Things Change: Building Resilience Into Your Business Joanna: Yeah. And make sure there's more staffing. Yes, I've talked a lot on this show — things change, right? Things change. And in fact, the episode that just went out today as we record this with Jennifer Probst, which she talked about hitting massive bestseller lists and doing just incredibly well, and then it just dropped off and she had to pivot and change things. And I'm not like Debbie Downer, but I do say things will change. So what are you putting in place to make sure, for example, TikTok finally does disappear or get banned, or that sapphic romance suddenly drops off a cliff? What are you doing to make sure that you can keep going in the future? Managing Cash Flow and Salaries Sacha: Yeah, so I think there's a few things. The first big one is managing cash flow and ensuring that I have three to six months' worth of staff salaries, for want of a better word, in an account. So if the worst thing happens and sales drop off — because I am responsible for other people's income now — that I'm not about to shaft a load of people. So that really helps give you that risk reassurance. Mailing Lists and Marketing Funnels Sacha: The second thing is making sure that we are cultivating our mailing lists, making sure that we are putting in infrastructure, like things like upsell apps. And, okay, so here's a ridiculous lesson that I learned in 2025: an automation sequence, an onboarding automation sequence, is not what people mean when they say you need a marketing funnel. I learned this in Vegas. A marketing funnel will sell your products to your existing readers. So when a customer signs up to your mailing list because they've purchased something, they will be tagged and then your email flow system will then send them a 5% discount on this, or “did you know you could bundle up and get blah?” So putting that kind of stuff in place will mean that we can take more advantage of the customers that we've already got. Standard Operating Procedures Sacha: It's also things like organisational knowledge. My team is big enough now that there are things in my business I don't know how to do. That's quite daunting for somebody who is a control freak. So I visited Vegas in 2025 and I sat in a session all on — this sounds so sexy — but standard operating procedures. And now I've given my team the job of creating a process instruction manual on how they do each of their tasks so that if anybody's sick, somebody else can pick it up. If somebody leaves, we've got that infrastructure in place. And even things down to things like passwords — who, if I unfortunately got hit by a car, who can access my Amazon account? Stuff like that, unfortunately. Joanna: Yeah, I know. Well, I mean, that would be tragic, wouldn't it? Sacha: But it's stuff like that. Building Longer Timelines Sacha: But then also more day-to-day things is putting in infrastructure that pulls me out. So looking more at staffing responsibilities for staffing so that I don't always have to be there, and creating longer timelines. That is probably the most important thing that we can do because we've got a book box launching next summer. And we both had the realisation — I say we, me and my operations manager — had the realisation that actually we ought to be commissioning the cover and the artwork now because of how long those processes take. So I'm a little bit shortsighted on timelines, I think. So putting a bit more rigour in what we do and when. We now have a team-wide heat map where we know when the warehouse is going to be really, really full, when staff are off, when deliveries are coming, and that's projected out a year in advance. So lots and lots of things that are changing. And then I guess also eventually we will do advertising as well. But that is a few months down the line. Personal Financial Resilience Sacha: And then on the more personal side, it's looking at things like not just how you keep the business running, but how do you keep yourself running? How do you make sure that, let's say you have a bad sales month, but you still have to pay your team? How are you going to get paid? So I, as well as having put staff salaries away, I also have my own salary. I've got a few months of my own salary put away. And then investing as well. I know, I am not a financial advisor, but I do invest money. I serve money that I pay myself. You can also do things like having investment vehicles inside your business if you want to deal with extra cash. And then I am taking advice from my accountant and my financial advisor on do I put more money into my pension — because did I say that I also have a pension? So I invest in my future as well. Or do I set up another company and have a property portfolio? Or how do I essentially make the money that is inside the business make more money rather than reinvesting it, spending it, and reinvesting it on things that don't become assets or don't become money generating? What can I do with the cash that's inside the company in order to then make it make more for the long term? Because then if you do have a down six months or worse, a down year, for example, you've got enough cash and equity inside the business to cover you during those lower months or years or weeks — or hopefully just a day. Different Business Models for Different Authors Joanna: Yes, of course. And we all hope it just carries on up and to the right, but sometimes it doesn't work that way. So it's really great that you are doing all those things. And I think what's lovely and why we started off with you giving us that potted history was it hasn't always been this way. So if you are listening to this and you are like, well, I've only got one ebook for sale on Amazon, well that might be all you ever want to do, which is fine. Or you can come to where my business model is, which is mostly even — I use print on demand, but it's mostly digital. It's mostly online. It's got no packaging that I deal with. Or you can go even further like Sacha and Adam Beswick and Willow Winters. But because that is being talked about a lot in the community, that's why we wanted to do this — to really show you that there's different people doing different things and you need to choose what's best for you. What Are You Excited About for 2026? Joanna: But just as we finish, just tell us what are you excited about for 2026? Sacha: Oh my goodness me. I am excited to iterate my craft. And this is completely not related to the warehouse, but I have gotten myself into a position where I get to play with words again. So I'm really excited for the things that I'm going to write. But also in terms of the warehouse, we've got the new packaging, so getting to see those on social media. We are also looking at things like book boxes. So we are doing a set of three book boxes and these are going to be new and bigger and better than anything that we've done before. And custom tailored. Oh, without giving too much away, but items that go inside and also the artwork. I love working with artists and commissioning different art projects. But yeah, basically more of the same, hopefully world domination. Joanna: World domination. Fantastic. So basically more creativity. Sacha: Yeah. Joanna: And also a bigger business. Because I know you are ambitious and I love that. I think it's really good for people to be ambitious. Joanna: Oh, I do have another question. Do you have more sympathy for traditional publishing at this point? Sacha: How dare you? Unfortunately, yeah. I really have learnt the hard way why traditional publishers need the timelines that they need. This latest release was probably the biggest that — so this latest release, which was called Architecting, is the reason that I did the podcast episode, because I learned so many lessons. And in particular about timelines and how tight things get, and it's just not realistic when you are doing this physical business. So that's another thing if you are listening and you are like, oh no, no, no, I like the immediacy of being able to finish, get it back from the editor and hit publish — this ain't for you, honey. This is not for you. Joanna: Yeah. No, that's fantastic. Where to Find Sacha and Ruby Roe Joanna: So where can people find you and your books online? Sacha: For the Ruby Empire, it's RubyRoe.co.uk and RubyRoeAuthor on TikTok if you'd like to see me dancing like a wally. And then Instagram, I'm back as @SachaBlackAuthor on Instagram. Joanna: Brilliant. Thanks so much for your time, Sacha. That was great. Sacha: Thank you for having me.The post Two Different Approaches To Selling Books Direct With Sacha Black And Joanna Penn first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Why do some romance authors build decades-long careers while others vanish after one breakout book? What really separates a throwaway pen name and rapid release strategy from a legacy brand and a body of work you’re proud of? How can you diversify with trad, indie, non-fiction, and Kickstarter without burning out—or selling out your creative freedom? With Jennifer Probst. In the intro, digital ebook signing [BookFunnel]; how to check terms and conditions; Business for Authors 2026 webinars; Music industry and AI music [BBC; The New Publishing Standard]; The Golden Age of Weird. This podcast is sponsored by Kobo Writing Life, which helps authors self-publish and reach readers in global markets through the Kobo eco-system. You can also subscribe to the Kobo Writing Life podcast for interviews with successful indie authors. This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn  Jennifer Probst is a New York Times, USA Today, and Wall Street Journal bestselling author of over 60 books across different kinds of romance as well as non-fiction for writers. Her latest book is Write Free. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights, and the full transcript is below.  Show Notes How Jennifer started writing at age 12, fell in love with romance, and persisted through decades of rejection A breakout success — and what happened when it moved to a traditional publisher Traditional vs indie publishing, diversification, and building a long-term, legacy-focused writing career Rapid-release pen names vs slow-burn author brands, and why Jennifer chooses quality and longevity Inspirational non-fiction for writers (Write Naked, Write True, Write Free) Using Kickstarter for special editions, re-releases, courses, and what she’s learned from both successes and mistakes – plus what “writing free” really means in practice How can you ‘write free'? You can find Jennifer at JenniferProbst.com. Transcript of interview with Jennifer Probst Jo: Jennifer Probst is a New York Times, USA Today, and Wall Street Journal bestselling author of over 60 books across different kinds of romance as well as non-fiction for writers. Her latest book is Write Free. So welcome, Jennifer. Jennifer: Thanks so much, Joanna. I am kind of fangirling. I'm really excited to be on The Creative Penn podcast. It's kind of a bucket list. Jo: Aw, that's exciting. I reached out to you after your recent Kickstarter, and we are going to come back to that in a minute. First up, take us back in time. Tell us a bit more about how you got into writing and publishing. Jennifer: This one is easy for me. I am one of those rarities. I think that I knew when I was seven that I was going to write. I just didn't know what I was going to write. At 12 years old, and now this will kind of date me in dinosaur era here, there was no internet, no information on how to be a writer, no connections out there. The only game in town was Writer’s Digest. I would go to my library and pore over Writer’s Digest to learn how to be a writer. At 12 years old, all I knew was, “Oh, if I want to be a famous writer, I have to write a book.” So I literally sat down at 12 and wrote my first young adult romance. Of course, I was the star, as we all are when we're young, and I have not stopped since. I always knew, since my dad came home from a library with a box of romance novels and got in trouble with my mum and said, basically, “She's reading everything anyway, just let her read these,” I was gone. From that moment on, I knew that my entire life was going to be about that. So for me, it wasn't the writing. I have written non-stop since I was 12 years old. For me, it was more about making this a career where I can make money, because I think there was a good 30 years where I wrote without a penny to my name. So it was more of a different journey for me. It was more about trying to find my way in the writing world, where everybody said it should be just a hobby, and I believed that it should be something more. Jo: I was literally just going back in my head there to the library I used to go to on my way home from school. Similar, probably early teens, maybe age 14. Going to that section and… I think it was Shirley Conran. Was that Lace? Yes, Lace books. That's literally how we all learned about sex back in the day. Jennifer: All from books. You didn't need parents, you didn't need friends. Amazing. Jo: Oh, those were the days. That must have been the eighties, right? Jennifer: It was the eighties. Yes. Seventies, eighties, but mostly right around in the eighties. Oh, it was so… Jo: I got lost about then because I was reminiscing. I was also the same one in the library, and people didn't really see what you were reading in the corner of the library. So I think that's quite funny. Tell us how you got into being an indie. Jennifer: What had happened is I had this manuscript and it had been shopped around New York for agents and for a bunch of publishers. I kept getting the same exact thing: “I love your voice.” I mean, Joanna, when you talk about papering your wall with rejections, I lived that. The only thing I can say is that when I got my first rejection, I looked at it as a rite of passage that created me as a writer, rather than taking the perspective that it meant I failed. To me, perspective is a really big thing in this career, how you look at things. So that really helped me. But after you get like 75 of them, you're like, “I don't know how much longer I can take of this.” What happened is, it was an interesting story, because I had gone to an RWA conference and I had shopped this everywhere, this book that I just kept coming back to. I kept saying, “I feel like this book could be big.” There was an indie publisher there. They had just started out, it was an indie publisher called Entangled. A lot of my friends were like, “What about Entangled? Why don't you try more digital things or more indie publishers coming up rather than the big traditional ones?” Lo and behold, I sent it out. They loved the book. They decided, in February of 2012, to launch it. It was their big debut. They were kind of competing with Harlequin, but it was going to be a new digital line. It was this new cutting-edge thing. The book went crazy. It went viral. The book was called The Marriage Bargain, and it put me on the map. All of a sudden I was inundated with agents, and the traditional publishers came knocking and they wanted to buy the series. It was everywhere. Then it hit USA Today, and then it spent 26 weeks on The New York Times. Everybody was like, “Wow, you're this overnight sensation.” And I'm like, “Not really!” That was kind of my leeway into everything. We ended up selling that series to Simon & Schuster because that was the smart move for then, because it kind of blew up and an indie publisher at that time knew it was a lot to take on. From then on, my goal was always to do both: to have a traditional contract, to work with indie publishers, and to do my own self-pub. I felt, even back then, the more diversified I am, the more control I have. If one bucket goes bad, I have two other buckets. Jo: Yes, I mean, I always say multiple streams of income. It's so surprising to me that people think that whatever it is that hits big is going to continue. So you obviously experienced there a massive high point, but it doesn't continue. You had all those weeks that were amazing, but then it drops off, right? Jennifer: Oh my goodness, yes. Great story about what happened. So 26 weeks on The New York Times, and it was selling like hotcakes. Then Simon & Schuster took it over and they bumped the price to their usual ebook price, which was, what, $12.99 or something? So it's going from $2.99. The day that they did it, I slid off all the bestseller lists. They were gone, and I lost a lot of control too. With indies, you have a little bit more control. But again, that kind of funnels me into a completely different kind of setup. Traditional is very different from indie. What you touched on, I think, is the biggest thing in the industry right now. When things are hot, it feels like forever. I learned a valuable lesson: it doesn't continue. It just doesn't. Maybe someone like Danielle Steel or some of the other big ones never had to pivot, but I feel like in romance it's very fluid. You have genres hitting big, you have niches hitting big, authors hitting big. Yes, I see some of them stay. I see Emily Henry still staying—maybe that will never pause—but I think for the majority, they find themselves saying, “Okay, that's done now. What's next?” It can either hit or not hit. Does that make sense to you? Do you feel the same? Jo: Yes, and I guess it's not just about the book. It's more about the tactic. You mentioned genres, and they do switch a lot in romance, a lot faster than other genres. In terms of how we do marketing… Now, as we record this, TikTok is still a thing, and we can see maybe generative AI search coming on the horizon and agentic buying. A decade ago it might have been different, more Facebook ads or whatever. Then before that it might have been something else. So there's always things changing along the way. Jennifer: Yes, there definitely is. It is a very oversaturated market. They talk about, I don't know, 2010 to 2016 maybe, as the gold rush, because that was where you could make a lot of money as an indie. Then we saw the total fallout of so many different things. I feel like I've gone through so many ups and downs in the industry. I do love it because the longer you're around, the more you learn how to pivot. If you want this career, you learn how to write differently or do whatever you need to do to keep going, in different aspects, with the changes. To me, that makes the industry exciting. Again, perspective is a big thing. But I have had to take a year to kind of rebuild when I was out of contract with a lot of things. I've had to say, “Okay, what do you see on the horizon now? Where is the new foundation? Where do you wanna restart?” Sometimes it takes a year or two of, “Maybe I won't be making big income and I cut back,” but then you're back in it, because it takes a while to write a few new books, or write under a pen name, or however you want to pivot your way back into the industry. Or, like you were saying, diversifying. I did a lot of non-fiction stuff because that's a big calling for me, so I put that into the primary for a while. I think it's important for authors to maybe not just have one thing. When that one thing goes away, you're scrambling. It's good to have a couple of different things like, “Well, okay, this genre is dead or this thing is dead or this isn't making money. Let me go to this for a little while until I see new things on the horizon.” Jo: Yes. There's a couple of things I want to come back to. You mentioned a pen name there, and one of the things I'm seeing a lot right now—I mean, it's always gone on, but it seems to be on overdrive—is people doing rapid-release, throwaway pen names. So there’s a new sub-genre, they write the books really fast, they put them up under whatever pen name, and then when that goes away, they ditch that pen name altogether. Versus growing a name brand more slowly, like I think you and I have done. Under my J.F. Penn fiction brand, I put lots of different sub-genres. What are your thoughts on this throwaway pen name versus growing a name brand more slowly? Jennifer: Well, okay, the first thing I'm goign to say is: if that lights people up, if you love the idea of rapid release and just kind of shedding your skin and going on to the next one, I say go for it. As long as you're not pumping it out with AI so it's a complete AI book, but that's a different topic. I'm not saying using AI tools; I mean a completely AI-written book. That's the difference. If we're talking about an author going in and, every four weeks, writing a book and stuff like that, I do eventually think that anything in life that disturbs you, you're going to burn out eventually. That is a limited-time kind of thing, I believe. I don't know how long you can keep doing that and create decent enough books or make a living on it. But again, I really try not to judge, because I am very open to: if that gives you joy and that's working and it brings your family money, go for it. I have always wanted to be a writer for the long term. I want my work to be my legacy. I don't just pump out books. Every single book is my history. It's a marking of what I thought, what I put out in the world, what my beliefs are, what my story is. It marks different things, and I'm very proud of that. So I want a legacy of quality. As I got older, in my twenties and thirties, I was able to write books a lot faster. Then I had a family with two kids and I had to slow down a little bit. I also think life sometimes drives your career, and that's okay. If you're taking care of a sick parent or there's illness or whatever, maybe you need to slow down. I like the idea of a long-term backlist supporting me when I need to take a back seat and not do frontlist things. So that's how I feel. I will always say: choose a long, organic-growth type of career that will be there for you, where your backlist can support you. I also don't want to trash people who do it differently. If that is how you can do it, if you can write a book in a month and keep doing it and keep it quality, go for it. Jo: I do have the word “legacy” on my board next to me, but I also have “create a body of work I'm proud of.” I have that next to me, and I have “Have you made art today?” So I think about these things too. As you say, people feel differently about work, and I will do other work to make faster cash rather than do that with books. But as we said, that's all good. Interestingly, you mentioned non-fiction there. Write Free is your latest one, but you've got some other writing books. So maybe— Talk about the difference between non-fiction book income and marketing compared to fiction, and why you added that in. Jennifer: Yes, it's completely different. I mean, it's two new dinosaurs. I came to writing non-fiction in a very strange way. Literally, I woke up on New Year’s Day and I was on a romance book deadline. I could not do it. I'll tell you, my brain was filled with passages of teaching writing, of things I wanted to share in my writing career. Because again, I've been writing since I was 12, I've been a non-stop writer for over 30 years. I got to my computer and I wrote like three chapters of Write Naked (which was the first book). It was just pouring out of me. So I contacted my agent and I said, “Look, I don't know, this is what I want to do. I want to write this non-fiction book.” She's like, “What are you talking about? You're a romance author. You're on a romance deadline. What do you want me to do with this?” She was so confused. I said, “Yes, how do you write a non-fiction book proposal?” And she was just like, “This is not good, Jen. What are you doing?” Anyway, the funny story was, she said, “Just send me chapters.” I mean, God bless her, she's this wonderful agent, but I know she didn't get it. So I sent her like four chapters of what I was writing and she called me. I'll never forget it. She called me on the phone and she goes, “This is some of the best stuff I have ever read in my life. It's raw and it's truthful, and we've got to find a publisher for this.” And I was like, “Yay.” What happened was, I believe this was one of the most beautiful full circles in my life: Writer’s Digest actually made me an offer. It was not about the money. I found that non-fiction for me had a much lower advance and a different type of sales. For me, when I was a kid, that is exactly what I was reading in the library, Writer’s Digest. I would save my allowance to get the magazine. I would say to myself, “One day, maybe I will have a book with Writer’s Digest.” So for me, it was one of the biggest full-circle moments. I will never forget it. Being published by them was amazing. Then I thought I was one-and-done, but the book just completely touched so many writers. I have never gotten so many emails: “Thank you for saying the truth,” or “Thank you for being vulnerable.” Right before it published, I had a panic attack. I told my husband, “Now everybody's going to know that I am a mess and I'm not fabulous and the world is going to know my craziness.” By being vulnerable about the career, and also that it was specifically for romance authors, it caused a bond. I think it caused some trust. I had been writing about writing for years. After that, I thought it was one-and-done. Then two or three years later I was like, “No, I have more to say.” So I leaned into my non-fiction. It also gives my fiction brain a rest, because when you're doing non-fiction, you're using a different part of your brain. It's a way for me to cleanse my palate. I gather more experiences about what I want to share, and then that goes into the next book. Jo: Yes, I also use the phrase “palate cleanser” for non-fiction versus fiction. I feel like you write one and then you feel like, “Oh, I really need to write the other now.” Jennifer: Yes! Isn't it wonderful? I love that. I love having the two brains and just giving one a break and totally leaning into it. Again, it's another way of income. It's another way. I also believe that this industry has given me so much that it is automatic that I want to give back. I just want to give as much as possible back because I'm so passionate about writing and the industry field. Jo: Well, interestingly though, Writer’s Digest—the publisher who published that magazine and other things—went bankrupt in 2019. You've been in publishing a long time. It is not uncommon for publishers to go out of business or to get bought. Things happen with publishers, right? Jennifer: Yes. Jo: So what then happened? Jennifer: So Penguin Random House bought it. All the Writer’s Digest authors did not know what they were going to do. Then Penguin Random House bought it and kept Writer’s Digest completely separate, as an imprint under the umbrella. So Writer’s Digest really hasn't changed. They still have the magazine, they still have books. So it ended up being okay. But what I did do is—because I sold Write Naked and I have no regrets about that, it was the best thing for me to do, to go that route—the second and the third books were self-published. I decided I'm going to self-publish. That way I have the rights for audio, I have the rights for myself, I can do a whole bunch of different things. So Write True, the second one, was self-published. Writers Inspiring Writers I paired up with somebody, so we self-published that. And Write Free, my newest one, is self-published. So I've decided to go that route now with my non-fiction. Jo: Well, as I said, I noticed your Kickstarter. I don't write romance, so I'm not really in that community. I had kind of heard your name before, but then I bought the book and joined the Kickstarter. Then I discovered that you've been doing so much and I was like, “Oh, how, why haven't we connected before?” It's very cool. So tell us about the Kickstarters you've done and what you know, because you've done, I think, a fiction one as well. What are your thoughts and tips around Kickstarter? Jennifer: Yes. When I was taking that year, I found myself kind of… let's just say fired from a lot of different publishers at the time. That was okay because I had contracts that ran out, and when I looked to see, “Okay, do we want to go back?” it just wasn't looking good. I was like, “Well, I don't want to spend a year if I'm not gonna be making the money anyway.” So I looked at the landscape and I said, “It's time to really pull in and do a lot more things on my own, but I've got to build foundations.” Kickstarter was one of them. I took a course with Russell Nohelty and Monica Leonelle. They did a big course for Kickstarter, and they were really the ones going around to all the conferences and basically saying, “Hey guys, you're missing out on a lot of publishing opportunities here,” because Kickstarter publishing was getting good. I took the course because I like to dive into things, but I also want to know the foundation of it. I want to know what I'm doing. I'm not one to just wing it when it comes to tech. So what happened is, the first one, I had rights coming back from a book. After 10 years, my rights came back. It was an older book and I said, “You know what? I am going to dip my foot in and see what kind of base I can grow there. What can I do?” I was going to get a new cover, add new scenes, re-release it anyway, right? So I said, “Let's do a Kickstarter for it, because then I can get paid for all of that work.” It worked out so fantastically. It made just enough for my goal. I knew I didn't want to make a killing; I knew I wanted to make a fund. I made my $5,000, which I thought was wonderful, and I was able to re-release it with a new cover, a large print hardback, and I added some scenes. I did a 10-year anniversary re-release for my fans. So I made it very fan-friendly, grew my audience, and I was like, “This was great.” The next year, I did something completely different. I was doing Kindle Vella back in the day. That was where you dropped a chapter at a time. I said, “I want to do this completely different kind of thing.” It was very not my brand at all. It was very reality TV-ish: young college students living in the city, very sexy, very angsty, love triangles, messy—everything I was not known for. Again, I was like, “I'm not doing a pen name because this is just me,” and I funnelled my audience. I said, “What I'm going to do is I'm going to start doing a chapter a week through Kindle Vella and make money there. Then when it's done, I'm going to bundle it all up and make a book out of it.” So I did a year of Kindle Vella. It was the best decision I made because I just did two chapters a week, which I was able to do. By one year I had like 180,000 words. I had two to three books in there. I did it as a hardback deluxe—the only place you could get it in print. Then Vella closed, or at least it went way down. So I was like, “Great, I'm going to do this Kickstarter for this entire new thing.” I partnered with a company that helps with special editions, because that was a whole other… oh Joanna, that was a whole other thing you have to go into. Getting the books, getting the art, getting the swag. I felt like I needed some help for that. Again, I went in, I funded. I did not make a killing on that, but that was okay. I learned some things that I would have changed with my Kickstarter and I also built a new audience for that. I had a lot of extra books that I then sold in my store, and it was another place to make money. The third Kickstarter I used specifically because I had always wanted to do a writing course. I go all over the world, I do keynotes, I do workshops, I've done books, and I wanted to reach new writers, but I don't travel a lot anymore. So I came up with the concept that I was going to do my very first course, and it was going to be very personal, kind of like me talking to them almost like in a keynote, like you're in a room with me. I gathered a whole bunch of stuff and I used Kickstarter to help me A) fund it and B) make myself do it, because it was two years in the making and I always had, “Oh, I've got this other thing to do,” you know how we do that, right? We have big projects. So I used Kickstarter as a deadline and I decided to launch it in the summer. In addition to that, I took years of my posts from all over. I copied and pasted, did new posts, and I created Write Free, which was a very personal, essay-driven book. I took it all together. I took a couple of months to do this, filmed the course, and the Kickstarter did better than I had ever imagined. I got quadruple what I wanted, and it literally financed all the video editing, the books, everything that I needed, plus extra. I feel like I'm growing in Kickstarter. I hope I'm not ranting. I'm trying to go over things that can help people. Jo: Oh no, that is super useful. Jennifer: So you don't have to go all in and say, “If it doesn't fund it's over,” or “I need to make $20,000.” There are people making so much money, and there are people that will do a project a year or two projects a year and just get enough to fund a new thing that they want to do. So that's how I've done it. Jo: I've done quite a few now, and my non-fiction ones have been a lot bigger—I have a big audience there—and my fiction have been all over the place. What I like about Kickstarter is that you can do these different things. We can do these special editions. I've just done a sprayed-edge short story collection. Short story collections are not the biggest genre. Jennifer: Yes. I love short stories too. I've always wanted to do an anthology of all my short stories. Jo: There you go. Jennifer: Yes, I love that for your Kickstarter. Love it. Jo: When I turned 50 earlier this year, I realised the thing that isn't in print is my short stories. They are out there digitally, and that's why I wanted to do it. I feel like Kickstarter is a really good way to do these creative projects. As you say, you don't have to make a ton of money, but at the end of the day, the definition of success for us, I think for both of us, is just being able to continue doing this, right? Jennifer: Absolutely. This is funding a creative full-time career, and every single thing that you do with your content is like a funnel. The more funnels that you have, the bigger your base. Especially if you love it. It would be different if I was struggling and thinking, “Do I get an editor job?” I would hate being an editor. But if you look at something else like, “Oh yes, I could do this and that would light me up, like doing a course—wow, that sounds amazing,” then that's different. It's kind of finding your alternates that also light you up. Jo: Hmm. So were there any mistakes in your Kickstarters that you think are worth sharing? In case people are thinking about it. Jennifer: Oh my God, yes. So many. One big thing was that I felt like I was a failure if I didn't make a certain amount of money because my name is pretty well known. It's not like I'm brand new and looking. One of the big things was that I could not understand and I felt like I was banging my head against the wall about why my newsletter subscribers wouldn't support the Kickstarter. I'm like, “Why aren't you doing this? I'm supposed to have thousands of people that just back.” Your expectations can really mess with you. Then I started to learn, “Oh my God, my newsletter audience wants nothing to do with my Kickstarter.” Maybe I had a handful. So then I learned that I needed longer tails, like putting it up for pre-order way ahead of time, and also that you can't just announce it in your newsletter and feel like everybody's going to go there. You need to find your streams, your Kickstarter audience, which includes ads. I had never done ads either and I didn't know how to do that, so I did that all wrong. I joined the Facebook group for Kickstarter authors. I didn't do that for the first one and then I learned about it. You share backer updates, so every time you go into your audience with a backer update, there's this whole community where you can share with like-minded people with their projects, and you post it under your updates. It does cross-networking and sharing with a lot of authors in their newsletters. For the Write Free one, I leaned into my networking a lot, using my connections. I used other authors' newsletters and people in the industry to share my Kickstarter. That was better for me than just relying on my own fanbase. So definitely more networking, more sharing, getting it out on different platforms rather than just doing your own narrow channel. Because a lot of the time, you think your audience will follow you into certain things and they don't, and that needs to be okay. The other thing was the time and the backend. I think a lot of authors can get super excited about swag. I love that, but I learned that I could have pulled back a little bit and been smarter with my financials. I did things I was passionate about, but I probably spent much more money on swag than I needed to. So looking at different aspects to make it more efficient. I think each time you do one, you learn what works best. As usual, I try to be patient with myself. I don't get mad at myself for trying things and failing. I think failing is spectacular because I learn something. I know: do I want to do this again? Do I want to do it differently? If we weren't so afraid of failingqu “in public”, I think we would do more things. I'm not saying I never think, “Oh my God, that was so embarrassing, I barely funded and this person is getting a hundred thousand.” We're human. We compare. I have my own reset that I do, but I really try to say, “But no, for me, maybe I'll do this, and if it doesn't work, that's okay.” Jo: I really like that you shared about the email list there because I feel like too many people have spent years driving people to Kindle or KU, and they have built an email list of readers who like a particular format at a particular price. Then we are saying, “Oh, now come over here and buy a beautiful hardback that's like ten times the price.” And we're surprised when nobody does it. Is that what happened? Jennifer: Exactly. Also, that list was for a non-fiction project. So I had to funnel where my writers were in my newsletter, and I have mostly readers. So I was like, “Okay…” But I think you're exactly right. First of all, it's the platform. When you ask anybody to go off a platform, whether it's buy direct at your Shopify store or go to Kickstarter, you are going to lose the majority right there. People are like, “No, I want to click a button from your newsletter and go to a site that I know.” So you've got that, and you've got to train them. That can take some time. Then you've got this project where people are like, “I don't understand.” Even my mum was like, “I would love to support you, honey, but what the heck is this? Where's the buy button and where's my book?” My women's fiction books tend to have some older readers who are like, “Hell no, I don't know what this is.” So you have to know your audience. If it's not translating, train them. I did a couple of videos where I said, “Look, I want to show you how easy this is,” and I showed them directly how to go in and how to back. I did that with Kindle Vella too. I did a video from my newsletter and on social: “Hey, do you not know how to read this chapter? Here's how.” Sometimes there's a barrier. Like you said, Joanna, if I have a majority that just want sexy contemporary, and I'm dropping angsty, cheating, forbidden love, they're like, “Oh no, that's not for me.” So you have to know whether there's a crossover. I go into my business with that already baked into my expectations. I don't go in thinking I'm going to make a killing. Then I'm more surprised when it does well, and then I can build it. Jo: Yes, exactly. Also if you are, like both of us, writing across genres, then you are always going to split your audience. People do not necessarily buy everything because they have their preferences. So I think that's great. Now we are almost out of time, but this latest book is Write Free. I wondered if you would maybe say— What does Write Free mean to you, and what might it help the listeners with? Jennifer: Write Free is an extremely personal book for me, and the title was really important because it goes with Write Naked, Write True, and Write Free. These are the ways that I believe a writer should always show up to the page. Freedom is being able to write your truth in whatever day that is. You're going to be a different writer when you're young and maybe hormonal and passionate and having love affairs. You're going to write differently when you're a mum with kids in nappies. You're going to write differently when you are maybe in your forties and you're killing your career. Your perspective changes, your life changes. Write Free is literally a collection of essays all through my 30 years of life. It's very personal. There are essays like, “I'm writing my 53rd book right now,” and essays like, “My kids are in front of SpongeBob and I'm trying to write right now,” and “I got another rejection letter and I don't know how to survive.” It is literally an imprint of essays that you can dip in and dip out of. It's easy, short, inspirational, and it's just me showing up for my writing life. That's what I wish for everybody: that they can show up for their writing life in the best way that they can at the time, because that changes all the time. Jo: We can say “write free” because we've got a lot of experience at writing. I feel like when I started writing—I was an IT consultant—I literally couldn't write anything creative. I didn't believe I could. There'll be people listening who are just like, “Well, Jennifer, I can't write free. I'm not free. My mind is shackled by all these expectations and everything.” How can they release that and aim for more freedom? Jennifer: I love that question so much. The thing is, I've spent so many years working on that part. That doesn't come overnight. I think sometimes when you have more clarification of, “Okay, this is really limiting me,” then when you can see where something is limiting you, at least you can look for answers. My answers came in the form of meditation. Meditation is a very big thing in my life. Changing my perspective. Learning life mottos to help me deal with those kinds of limitations. Learning that when I write a sex scene, I can't care about my elderly aunt who tells my mother, “Dear God, she ruined the family name.” It is your responsibility to figure out where these limitations are, and then slowly see how you can remove them. I've been in therapy. I have read hundreds of self-help books. I take meditation courses. I take workshop courses. I've done CliftonStrengths with Becca Syme. I don't even know if that's therapy, but it feels like therapy to me as a writer. Knowing my personality traits. I've done Enneagram work with Claire Taylor, which has been huge. The more you know yourself and how your brain is showing up for yourself, the more you can grab tools to use. I wish I could say, “Yes, if everybody meditates 30 minutes a day, you're going to have all blocks removed,” but it's so personal that it's a trick question. If everybody started today and said, “Where is my biggest limitation?” and be real with yourself, there are answers out there. You just have to go slowly and find them, and then the writing more free will come. I hope that wasn't one of those woo-woo answers, but I really do believe it. Jo: I agree. It just takes time. Like our writing career, it just takes time. Keep working on it, keep writing. Jennifer: Yes. And bravery, right? A lot of bravery. Just show up for yourself however you can. If “write free” feels too big, journal for yourself and put it in a locked drawer. Any kind of writing, I think, is therapeutic too. Jo: Brilliant. So where can people find you and your books and everything you do online? Jennifer: The best place to go is my website. I treat it like my home. It's www.JenniferProbst.com. There is so much on it. Not just books, not just free content and free stories. There's an entire section just for writers. There are videos on there. There are a lot of resources. I keep it up to date and it is the place where you can find me. Of course I'm everywhere on social media as Author Jennifer Probst. You can find me anywhere. I always tell everybody: I answer my messages, I answer my emails. That is really important to me. So if you heard this podcast and you want to reach out on anything, please do. I will answer. Jo: Fantastic. Well, thanks so much for your time, Jennifer. That was great. Jennifer: Thanks for having me, Joanna.The post Writing Free: Romance Author Jennifer Probst On A Long-Term Author Career first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How can you write science-based fiction without info-dumping your research? How can you use AI tools in a creative way, while still focusing on a human-first approach? Why is adapting to the fast pace of change so difficult and how can we make the most of this time? Jamie Metzl talks about Superconvergence and more. In the intro, How to avoid author scams [Written Word Media]; Spotify vs Audible audiobook strategy [The New Publishing Standard]; Thoughts on Author Nation and why constraints are important in your author life [Self-Publishing with ALLi]; Alchemical History And Beautiful Architecture: Prague with Lisa M Lilly on my Books and Travel Podcast. Today's show is sponsored by Draft2Digital, self-publishing with support, where you can get free formatting, free distribution to multiple stores, and a host of other benefits. Just go to www.draft2digital.com to get started. This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn  Jamie Metzl is a technology futurist, professional speaker, entrepreneur, and the author of sci-fi thrillers and futurist nonfiction books, including the revised and updated edition of Superconvergence: How the Genetics, Biotech, and AI Revolutions Will Transform Our Lives, Work, and World. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.  Show Notes How personal history shaped Jamie's fiction writing Writing science-based fiction without info-dumping The super convergence of three revolutions (genetics, biotech, AI) and why we need to understand them holistically Using fiction to explore the human side of genetic engineering, life extension, and robotics Collaborating with GPT-5 as a named co-author How to be a first-rate human rather than a second-rate machine You can find Jamie at JamieMetzl.com. Transcript of interview with Jamie Metzl Jo: Jamie Metzl is a technology futurist, professional speaker, entrepreneur, and the author of sci-fi thrillers and futurist nonfiction books, including the revised and updated edition of Superconvergence: How the Genetics, Biotech, and AI Revolutions Will Transform Our Lives, Work, and World. So welcome, Jamie. Jamie: Thank you so much, Jo. Very happy to be here with you. Jo: There is so much we could talk about, but let's start with you telling us a bit more about you and how you got into writing. From History PhD to First Novel Jamie: Well, I think like a lot of writers, I didn't know I was a writer. I was just a kid who loved writing. Actually, just last week I was going through a bunch of boxes from my parents' house and I found my autobiography, which I wrote when I was nine years old. So I've been writing my whole life and loving it. It was always something that was very important to me. When I finished my DPhil, my PhD at Oxford, and my dissertation came out, it just got scooped up by Macmillan in like two minutes. And I thought, “God, that was easy.” That got me started thinking about writing books. I wanted to write a novel based on the same historical period – my PhD was in Southeast Asian history – and I wanted to write a historical novel set in the same period as my dissertation, because I felt like the dissertation had missed the human element of the story I was telling, which was related to the Cambodian genocide and its aftermath. So I wrote what became my first novel, and I thought, “Wow, now I'm a writer.” I thought, “All right, I've already published one book. I'm gonna get this other book out into the world.” And then I ran into the brick wall of: it's really hard to be a writer. It's almost easier to write something than to get it published. I had to learn a ton, and it took nine years from when I started writing that first novel, The Depths of the Sea, to when it finally came out. But it was such a positive experience, especially to have something so personal to me as that story. I'd lived in Cambodia for two years, I’d worked on the Thai-Cambodian border, and I'm the child of a Holocaust survivor. So there was a whole lot that was very emotional for me. That set a pattern for the rest of my life as a writer, at least where, in my nonfiction books, I'm thinking about whatever the issues are that are most important to me. Whether it was that historical book, which was my first book, or Hacking Darwin on the future of human genetic engineering, which was my last book, or Superconvergence, which, as you mentioned in the intro, is my current book. But in every one of those stories, the human element is so deep and so profound. You can get at some of that in nonfiction, but I've also loved exploring those issues in deeper ways in my fiction. So in my more recent novels, Genesis Code and Eternal Sonata, I've looked at the human side of the story of genetic engineering and human life extension. And now my agent has just submitted my new novel, Virtuoso, about the intersection of AI, robotics, and classical music. With all of this, who knows what's the real difference between fiction and nonfiction? We're all humans trying to figure things out on many different levels. Shifting from History to Future Tech Jo: I knew that you were a polymath, someone who's interested in so many things, but the music angle with robotics and AI is fascinating. I do just want to ask you, because I was also at Oxford – what college were you at? Jamie: I was in St. Antony's. Jo: I was at Mansfield, so we were in that slightly smaller, less famous college group, if people don't know. Jamie: You know, but we're small but proud. Jo: Exactly. That's fantastic. You mentioned that you were on the historical side of things at the beginning and now you've moved into technology and also science, because this book Superconvergence has a lot of science. So how did you go from history and the past into science and the future? Biology and Seeing the Future Coming Jamie: It's a great question. I'll start at the end and then back up. A few years ago I was speaking at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which is one of the big scientific labs here in the United States. I was a guest of the director and I was speaking to their 300 top scientists. I said to them, “I'm here to speak with you about the future of biology at the invitation of your director, and I'm really excited. But if you hear something wrong, please raise your hand and let me know, because I'm entirely self-taught. The last biology course I took was in 11th grade of high school in Kansas City.” Of course I wouldn't say that if I didn't have a lot of confidence in my process. But in many ways I'm self-taught in the sciences. As you know, Jo, and as all of your listeners know, the foundation of everything is curiosity and then a disciplined process for learning. Even our greatest super-specialists in the world now – whatever their background – the world is changing so fast that if anyone says, “Oh, I have a PhD in physics/chemistry/biology from 30 years ago,” the exact topic they learned 30 years ago is less significant than their process for continuous learning. More specifically, in the 1990s I was working on the National Security Council for President Clinton, which is the president’s foreign policy staff. My then boss and now close friend, Richard Clarke – who became famous as the guy who had tragically predicted 9/11 – used to say that the key to efficacy in Washington and in life is to try to solve problems that other people can't see. For me, almost 30 years ago, I felt to my bones that this intersection of what we now call AI and the nascent genetics revolution and the nascent biotechnology revolution was going to have profound implications for humanity. So I just started obsessively educating myself. When I was ready, I started writing obscure national security articles. Those got a decent amount of attention, so I was invited to testify before the United States Congress. I was speaking out a lot, saying, “Hey, this is a really important story. A lot of people are missing it. Here are the things we should be thinking about for the future.” I wasn't getting the kind of traction that I wanted. I mentioned before that my first book had been this dry Oxford PhD dissertation, and that had led to my first novel. So I thought, why don't I try the same approach again – writing novels to tell this story about the genetics, biotech, and what later became known popularly as the AI revolution? That led to my two near-term sci-fi novels, Genesis Code and Eternal Sonata. On my book tours for those novels, when I explained the underlying science to people in my way, as someone who taught myself, I could see in their eyes that they were recognizing not just that something big was happening, but that they could understand it and feel like they were part of that story. That's what led me to write Hacking Darwin, as I mentioned. That book really unlocked a lot of things. I had essentially predicted the CRISPR babies that were born in China before it happened – down to the specific gene I thought would be targeted, which in fact was the case. After that book was published, Dr. Tedros, the Director-General of the World Health Organization, invited me to join the WHO Expert Advisory Committee on Human Genome Editing, which I did. It was a really great experience and got me thinking a lot about the upside of this revolution and the downside. The Birth of Superconvergence Jamie: I get a lot of wonderful invitations to speak, and I have two basic rules for speaking: Never use notes. Never ever. Never stand behind a podium. Never ever. Because of that, when I speak, my talks tend to migrate. I’d be speaking with people about the genetics revolution as it applied to humans, and I'd say, “Well, this is just a little piece of a much bigger story.” The bigger story is that after nearly four billion years of life on Earth, our one species has the increasing ability to engineer novel intelligence and re-engineer life. The big question for us, and frankly for the world, is whether we're going to be able to use that almost godlike superpower wisely. As that idea got bigger and bigger, it became this inevitable force. You write so many books, Jo, that I think it's second nature for you. Every time I finish a book, I think, “Wow, that was really hard. I'm never doing that again.” And then the books creep up on you. They call to you. At some point you say, “All right, now I'm going to do it.” So that was my current book, Superconvergence. Like everything, every journey you take a step, and that step inspires another step and another. That's why writing and living creatively is such a wonderfully exciting thing – there's always more to learn and always great opportunities to push ourselves in new ways. Balancing Deep Research with Good Storytelling Jo: Yeah, absolutely. I love that you've followed your curiosity and then done this disciplined process for learning. I completely understand that. But one of the big issues with people like us who love the research – and having read your Superconvergence, I know how deeply you go into this and how deeply you care that it's correct – is that with fiction, one of the big problems with too much research is the danger of brain-dumping. Readers go to fiction for escapism. They want the interesting side of it, but they want a story first. What are your tips for authors who might feel like, “Where's the line between putting in my research so that it's interesting for readers, but not going too far and turning it into a textbook?” How do you find that balance? Jamie: It's such a great question. I live in New York now, but I used to live in Washington when I was working for the U.S. government, and there were a number of people I served with who later wrote novels. Some of those novels felt like policy memos with a few sex scenes – and that's not what to do. To write something that's informed by science or really by anything, everything needs to be subservient to the story and the characters. The question is: what is the essential piece of information that can convey something that's both important to your story and your character development, and is also an accurate representation of the world as you want it to be? I certainly write novels that are set in the future – although some of them were a future that's now already happened because I wrote them a long time ago. You can make stuff up, but as an author you have to decide what your connection to existing science and existing technology and the existing world is going to be. I come at it from two angles. One: I read a huge number of scientific papers and think, “What does this mean for now, and if you extrapolate into the future, where might that go?” Two: I think about how to condense things. We've all read books where you're humming along because people read fiction for story and emotional connection, and then you hit a bit like: “I sat down in front of the president, and the president said, ‘Tell me what I need to know about the nuclear threat.'” And then it’s like: insert memo. That's a deal-killer. It's like all things – how do you have a meaningful relationship with another person? It's not by just telling them your story. Even when you're telling them something about you, you need to be imagining yourself sitting in their shoes, hearing you. These are very different disciplines, fiction and nonfiction. But for the speculative nonfiction I write – “here's where things are now, and here's where the world is heading” – there's a lot of imagination that goes into that too. It feels in many ways like we're living in a sci-fi world because the rate of technological change has been accelerating continuously, certainly for the last 12,000 years since the dawn of agriculture. It's a balance. For me, I feel like I'm a better fiction writer because I write nonfiction, and I'm a better nonfiction writer because I write fiction. When I'm writing nonfiction, I don't want it to be boring either – I want people to feel like there's a story and characters and that they can feel themselves inside that story. Jo: Yeah, definitely. I think having some distance helps as well. If you're really deep into your topics, as you are, you have to leave that manuscript a little bit so you can go back with the eyes of the reader as opposed to your eyes as the expert. Then you can get their experience, which is great. Looking Beyond Author-Focused AI Fears Jo: I want to come to your technical knowledge, because AI is a big thing in the author and creative community, like everywhere else. One of the issues is that creators are focusing on just this tiny part of the impact of AI, and there's a much bigger picture. For example, in 2024, Demis Hassabis from Google DeepMind and his collaborative partner John Jumper won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry with AlphaFold. It feels to me like there's this massive world of what's happening with AI in health, climate, and other areas, and yet we are so focused on a lot of the negative stuff. Maybe you could give us a couple of things about what there is to be excited and optimistic about in terms of AI-powered science? Jamie: Sure. I'm so excited about all of the new opportunities that AI creates. But I also think there's a reason why evolution has preserved this very human feeling of anxiety: because there are real dangers. Anybody who's Pollyanna-ish and says, “Oh, the AI story is inevitably positive,” I’d be distrustful. And anyone who says, “We're absolutely doomed, this is the end of humanity,” I'd also be distrustful. So let me tell you the positives and the negatives, and maybe some thoughts about how we navigate toward the former and away from the latter. AI as the New Electricity Jamie: When people think of AI right now, they’re thinking very narrowly about these AI tools and ChatGPT. But we don't think of electricity that way. Nobody says, “I know electricity – electricity is what happens at the power station.” We've internalised the idea that electricity is woven into not just our communication systems or our houses, but into our clothes, our glasses – it's woven into everything and has super-empowered almost everything in our modern lives. That's what AI is. In Superconvergence, the majority of the book is about positive opportunities: In healthcare, moving from generalised healthcare based on population averages to personalised or precision healthcare based on a molecular understanding of each person's individual biology. As we build these massive datasets like the UK Biobank, we can take a next jump toward predictive and preventive healthcare, where we're able to address health issues far earlier in the process, when interventions can be far more benign. I'm really excited about that, not to mention the incredible new kinds of treatments – gene therapies, or pharmaceuticals based on genetics and systems-biology analyses of patients. Then there's agriculture. Over the last hundred years, because of the technologies of the Green Revolution and synthetic fertilisers, we've had an incredible increase in agricultural productivity. That's what's allowed us to quadruple the global population. But if we just continue agriculture as it is, as we get towards ten billion wealthier, more empowered people wanting to eat like we eat, we're going to have to wipe out all the wild spaces on Earth to feed them. These technologies help provide different paths toward increasing agricultural productivity with fewer inputs of land, water, fertiliser, insecticides, and pesticides. That's really positive. I could go on and on about these positives – and I do – but there are very real negatives. I was a member of the WHO Expert Advisory Committee on Human Genome Editing after the first CRISPR babies were very unethically created in China. I'm extremely aware that these same capabilities have potentially incredible upsides and very real downsides. That's the same as every technology in the past, but this is happening so quickly that it's triggering a lot of anxieties. Governance, Responsibility, and Why Everyone Has a Role Jamie: The question now is: how do we optimise the benefits and minimise the harms? The short, unsexy word for that is governance. Governance is not just what governments do; it's what all of us do. That's why I try to write books, both fiction and nonfiction, to bring people into this story. If people “other” this story – if they say, “There's a technology revolution, it has nothing to do with me, I'm going to keep my head down” – I think that's dangerous. The way we're going to handle this as responsibly as possible is if everybody says, “I have some role. Maybe it's small, maybe it's big. The first step is I need to educate myself. Then I need to have conversations with people around me. I need to express my desires, wishes, and thoughts – with political leaders, organisations I’m part of, businesses.” That has to happen at every level. You're in the UK – you know the anti-slavery movement started with a handful of people in Cambridge and grew into a global movement. I really believe in the power of ideas, but ideas don't spread on their own. These are very human networks, and that's why writing, speaking, communicating – probably for every single person listening to this podcast – is so important. Jo: Mm, yeah. Fiction Like AI 2041 and Thinking Through the Issues Jo: Have you read AI 2041 by Kai-Fu Lee and Chen Qiufan? Jamie: No. I heard a bunch of their interviews when the book came out, but I haven't read it. Jo: I think that's another good one because it's fiction – a whole load of short stories. It came out a few years ago now, but the issues they cover in the stories, about different people in different countries – I remember one about deepfakes – make you think more about the topics and help you figure out where you stand. I think that's the issue right now: it's so complex, there are so many things. I'm generally positive about AI, but of course I don't want autonomous drone weapons, you know? The Messy Reality of “Bad” Technologies Jamie: Can I ask you about that? Because this is why it's so complicated. Like you, I think nobody wants autonomous killer drones anywhere in the world. But if you right now were the defence minister of Ukraine, and your children are being kidnapped, your country is being destroyed, you're fighting for your survival, you're getting attacked every night – and you're getting attacked by the Russians, who are investing more and more in autonomous killer robots – you kind of have two choices. You can say, “I'm going to surrender,” or, “I'm going to use what technology I have available to defend myself, and hopefully fight to either victory or some kind of stand-off.” That's what our societies did with nuclear weapons. Maybe not every American recognises that Churchill gave Britain's nuclear secrets to America as a way of greasing the wheels of the Anglo-American alliance during the Second World War – but that was our programme: we couldn't afford to lose that war, and we couldn't afford to let the Nazis get nuclear weapons before we did. So there's the abstract feeling of, “I'm against all war in the abstract. I'm against autonomous killer robots in the abstract.” But if I were the defence minister of Ukraine, I would say, “What will it take for us to build the weapons we can use to defend ourselves?” That's why all this stuff gets so complicated. And frankly, it's why the relationship between fiction and nonfiction is so important. If every novel had a situation where every character said, “Oh, I know exactly the right answer,” and then they just did the right answer and it was obviously right, it wouldn't make for great fiction. We're dealing with really complex humans. We have conflicting impulses. We're not perfect. Maybe there are no perfect answers – but how do we strive toward better rather than worse? That’s the question. Jo: Absolutely. I don't want to get too political on things. How AI Is Changing the Writing Life Jo: Let's come back to authors. In terms of the creative process, the writing process, the research process, and the business of being an author – what are some of the ways that you already use AI tools, and some of the ways, given your futurist brain, that you think things are going to change for us? Jamie: Great question. I'll start with a little middle piece. I found you, Jo, through GPT-5. I asked ChatGPT, “I'm coming out with this book and I want to connect with podcasters who are a little different from the ones I've done in the past. I've been a guest on Joe Rogan twice and some of the bigger podcasts. Make me a list of really interesting people I can have great conversations with.” That's how I found you. So this is one reward of that process. Let me say that in the last year I've worked on three books, and I'll explain how my relationship with AI has changed over those books. Cleaning Up Citations (and Getting Burned) Jamie: First is the highly revised paperback edition of Superconvergence. When the hardback came out, I had – I don't normally work with research assistants because I like to dig into everything myself – but the one thing I do use a research assistant for is that I can't be bothered, when I'm writing something, to do the full Chicago-style footnote if I'm already referencing an academic paper. So I'd just put the URL as the footnote and then hire a research assistant and say, “Go to this URL and change it into a Chicago-style citation. That's it.” Unfortunately, my research assistant on the hardback used early-days ChatGPT for that work. He did the whole thing, came back, everything looked perfect. I said, “Wow, amazing job.” It was only later, as I was going through them, that I realised something like 50% of them were invented footnotes. It was very painful to go back and fix, and it took ten times more time. With the paperback edition, I didn't use AI that much, but I did say things like, “Here's all the information – generate a Chicago-style citation.” That was better. I noticed there were a few things where I stopped using the thesaurus function on Microsoft Word because I'd just put the whole paragraph into the AI and say, “Give me ten other options for this one word,” and it would be like a contextual thesaurus. That was pretty good. Talking to a Robot Pianist Character Jamie: Then, for my new novel Virtuoso, I was writing a character who is a futurist robot that plays the piano very beautifully – not just humanly, but almost finding new things in the music we've written and composing music that resonates with us. I described the actions of that robot in the novel, but I didn't describe the inner workings of the robot’s mind. In thinking about that character, I realised I was the first science-fiction writer in history who could interrogate a machine about what it was “thinking” in a particular context. I had the most beautiful conversations with ChatGPT, where I would give scenarios and ask, “What are you thinking? What are you feeling in this context?” It was all background for that character, but it was truly profound. Co-Authoring The AI Ten Commandments with GPT-5 Jamie: Third, I have another book coming out in May in the United States. I gave a talk this summer at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York about AI and spirituality. I talked about the history of our human relationship with our technology, about how all our religious and spiritual traditions have deep technological underpinnings – certainly our Abrahamic religions are deeply connected to farming, and Protestantism to the printing press. Then I had a section about the role of AI in generating moral codes that would resonate with humans. Everybody went nuts for this talk, and I thought, “I think I'm going to write a book.” I decided to write it differently, with GPT-5 as my named co-author. The first thing I did was outline the entire book based on the talk, which I’d already spent a huge amount of time thinking about and organising. Then I did a full outline of the arguments and structures. Then I trained GPT-5 on my writing style. The way I did it – which I fully describe in the introduction to the book – was that I'd handle all the framing: the full introduction, the argument, the structure. But if there was a section where, for a few paragraphs, I was summarising a huge field of data, even something I knew well, I'd give GPT-5 the intro sentence and say, “In my writing style, prepare four paragraphs on this.” For example, I might write: “AI has the potential to see us humans like we humans see ant colonies.” Then I’d say, “Give me four paragraphs on the relationship between the individual and the collective in ant colonies.” I could have written those four paragraphs myself, but it would’ve taken a month to read the life’s work of E.O. Wilson and then write them. GPT-5 wrote them in seconds or minutes, in its thinking mode. I'd then say, “It's not quite right – change this, change that,” and we'd go back and forth three or four times. Then I’d edit the whole thing and put it into the text. So this book that I could have written on my own in a year, I wrote a first draft of with GPT-5 as my named co-author in two days. The whole project will take about six months from start to finish, and I'm having massive human editing – multiple edits from me, plus a professional editor. It's not a magic AI button. But I feel strongly about listing GPT-5 as a co-author because I've written it differently than previous books. I'm a huge believer in the old-fashioned lone author struggling and suffering – that’s in my novels, and in Virtuoso I explore that. But other forms are going to emerge, just like video games are a creative, artistic form deeply connected to technology. The novel hasn’t been around forever – the current format is only a few centuries old – and forms are always changing. There are real opportunities for authors, and there will be so much crap flooding the market because everybody can write something and put it up on Amazon. But I think there will be a very special place for thoughtful human authors who have an idea of what humans do at our best, and who translate that into content other humans can enjoy. Traditional vs Indie: Why This Book Will Be Self-Published Jo: I'm interested – you mentioned that it's your named co-author. Is this book going through a traditional publisher, and what do they think about that? Or are you going to publish it yourself? Jamie: It's such a smart question. What I found quickly is that when you get to be an author later in your career, you have all the infrastructure – a track record, a fantastic agent, all of that. But there were two things that were really important to me here: I wanted to get this book out really fast – six months instead of a year and a half. It was essential to me to have GPT-5 listed as my co-author, because if it were just my name, I feel like it would be dishonest. Readers who are used to reading my books – I didn't want to present something different than what it was. I spoke with my agent, who I absolutely love, and she said that for this particular project it was going to be really hard in traditional publishing. So I did a huge amount of research, because I'd never done anything in the self-publishing world before. I looked at different models. There was one hybrid model that's basically the same as traditional, but you pay for the things the publisher would normally pay for. I ended up not doing that. Instead, I decided on a self-publishing route where I disaggregated the publishing process. I found three teams: one for producing the book, one for getting the book out into the world, and a smaller one for the audiobook. I still believe in traditional publishing – there's a lot of wonderful human value-add. But some works just don't lend themselves to traditional publishing. For this book, which is called The AI Ten Commandments, that's the path I've chosen. Jo: And when's that out? I think people will be interested. Jamie: April 26th. Those of us used to traditional publishing think, “I've finished the book, sold the proposal, it’ll be out any day now,” and then it can be a year and a half. It's frustrating. With this, the process can be much faster because it's possible to control more of the variables. But the key – as I was saying – is to make sure it's as good a book as everything else you've written. It's great to speed up, but you don't want to compromise on quality. The Coming Flood of Excellent AI-Generated Work Jo: Yeah, absolutely. We're almost out of time, but I want to come back to your “flood of crap” and the “AI slop” idea that's going around. Because you are working with GPT-5 – and I do as well, and I work with Claude and Gemini – and right now there are still issues. Like you said about referencing, there are still hallucinations, though fewer. But fast-forward two, five years: it's not a flood of crap. It's a flood of excellent. It's a flood of stuff that's better than us. Jamie: We're humans. It's better than us in certain ways. If you have farm machinery, it's better than us at certain aspects of farming. I'm a true humanist. I think there will be lots of things machines do better than us, but there will be tons of things we do better than them. There's a reason humans still care about chess, even though machines can beat humans at chess. Some people are saying things I fully disagree with, like this concept of AGI – artificial general intelligence – where machines do everything better than humans. I've summarised my position in seven letters: “AGI is BS.” The only way you can believe in AGI in that sense is if your concept of what a human is and what a human mind is is so narrow that you think it's just a narrow range of analytical skills. We are so much more than that. Humans represent almost four billion years of embodied evolution. There's so much about ourselves that we don't know. As incredible as these machines are and will become, there will always be wonderful things humans can do that are different from machines. What I always tell people is: whatever you're doing, don't be a second-rate machine. Be a first-rate human. If you're doing something and a machine is doing that thing much better than you, then shift to something where your unique capacities as a human give you the opportunity to do something better. So yes, I totally agree that the quality of AI-generated stuff will get better. But I think the most creative and successful humans will be the ones who say, “I recognise that this is creating new opportunities, and I'm going to insert my core humanity to do something magical and new.” People are “othering” these technologies, but the technologies themselves are magnificent human-generated artefacts. They're not alien UFOs that landed here. It's a scary moment for creatives, no doubt, because there are things all of us did in the past that machines can now do really well. But this is the moment where the most creative people ask themselves, “What does it mean for me to be a great human?” The pat answers won't apply. In my Virtuoso novel I explore that a lot. The idea that “machines don't do creativity” – they will do incredible creativity; it just won't be exactly human creativity. We will be potentially huge beneficiaries of these capabilities, but we really have to believe in and invest in the magic of our core humanity. Where to Find Jamie and His Books Jo: Brilliant. So where can people find you and your books online? Jamie: Thank you so much for asking. My website is jamiemetzl.com – and my books are available everywhere. Jo: Fantastic. Thanks so much for your time, Jamie. That was great. Jamie: Thank you, Joanna.The post Writing The Future, And Being More Human In An Age of AI With Jamie Metzl first appeared on The Creative Penn.

In early November 2025, I attended and spoke at Author Nation in Las Vegas. It was a fantastic conference for authors at all levels, and in this episode, I share my lessons learned and tips from reflecting on the event. In the intro, scam emails and what to watch out for; Spotify launches Recaps, and how I currently self-publish audiobooks; Successful Self-Publishing 4th Edition free audiobook; My audiobooks on YouTube The Creative Penn / Fiction/memoir audiobooks on JFPennAuthor; 22 ways to grow your author email list [BookBub]; Author Nation with the Wish I’d Known Then Podcast; and Your Author Business Plan on special. Bookfunnel, the essential tool for your author business, sponsors today's show. Whether it’s delivering your reader magnet, sending out advanced copies of your book, handing out ebooks at a conference, or fulfilling your digital sales to readers, BookFunnel does it all. Check it out at bookfunnel.com/thecreativepenn Joanna Penn writes non-fiction for authors and is an award-winning, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of thrillers, dark fantasy, and memoir as J.F. Penn. She’s also an award-winning podcaster, creative entrepreneur, and international professional speaker. Double down on being human and the importance of connection in person (if possible) Constraints breed creativity What do you need for a long-term sustainable career as an author? How do you want your author business to run? What are your contingency plans for when things don’t go as planned? Money management tips — books and resources here How do you know when to work with a company as part of your author business? How to assess vendors and services. Thoughts from others You can find Author Nation at AuthorNation.live. You can find my books on writing craft and author business in all formats at CreativePennBooks.com, or on your favourite online store, or request at your local bookstore or library. Jo Penn walking the strip, by the luxor; with Mark lefebvre, johnny B. truant & dan wood (d2d), and with sacha black and orna ross, las vegas, nov 2025 Lessons Learned from Author Nation 2025 In early November 2025, I attended Author Nation in Las Vegas along with around 1500 other authors, and lots of vendors. There were about 80 different sessions over four days and a Reader Nation signing and book sales event. The sessions were on different tracks so you could go to basic craft and self-publishing things, or more advanced sessions on author business and mindset. I spoke several times, once as part of a panel on long-term career strategies, once in my own solo session on collaboration with AI, all the things you can use AI for that are not writing, and once in a private meet up for my Patrons.  Congratulations to the Author Nation team for delivering such a fantastic conference! I know how hard everyone worked and it went super well from what I could see. If you’re interested in learning more, just go to https://www.authornation.live/ Here are some of my thoughts from the 2025 conference, but of course, remember, I am a writing conference veteran and have been an author entrepreneur for a long time, so my takeaways will be different to someone who is at a different place in their career.   (1) Double down on being human, and the importance of connection in person (if possible) To be clear, I know this isn’t possible for everyone, because of time or money or health reasons, or caring responsibilities, as Donn’s recent interview illustrated. But if you can, it’s always worth going to conferences in person.  If you attend, organise well in advance. Schedule meetings early, but also leave room for serendipity. Make the most of meeting people at your level; build your network. There were people I hadn’t seen for years at Author Nation, so much elbow bumping, human connection — and LOTS of coffee.While I attended a few sessions, most of my time was back-to-back meetings and chats with other authors and vendors, and we had a great Patreon meet-up with over 100 people.Author conferences are a great way to build relationships, and if you start with people at your level now, over time, you will all grow and change, and people will become successful in different ways, or disappear sometimes. The longer you are in this business, and the more you join in and help others, the more people you get to know and social karma kicks in. Some of those relationships naturally turn into business opportunities, and other author friends will be your support crew over the inevitable challenging years ahead.So if you feel like you don’t have any author friends, or know enough people at your level, then consider booking an in-person conference for 2026. It could be a genre conference, or a broader overall conference like Author Nation, but get away from your screen and do some peopling! As hard as it is, it’s worth it. (2) Constraints breed creativity Drew Davies did the opening keynote, and if you want to be a keynote speaker and get paid the big bucks, then it was a masterclass in professional speaking. I’ve done a lot of speaker training and it was inspiring to watch Drew’s presentation and consider how he used multimedia, how he engaged with different mediums, how he made people laugh, and brought emotion in, as well as deliver a message.If you’re ever in sessions or at events and you want to learn on a different level, consider the person and their skill — or lack of it — instead of the content. You can learn a lot from watching or listening to the person delivering, and how they speak or teach or react to the room.Drew’s content was great too, and he spoke on the Cube of Constraints which can be the catalyst for supercharging your creativity. He had an actual cube too, which he built into a sculpture later, part of his multi-faceted teaching style.In a world of unlimited possibilities, it’s hard to stick to one choice, and especially if you listen to author podcasts like this one, or go to conferences where you ingest a ton of sessions like Author Nation, you will have hundreds of ideas, and you can have popcorn brain with things firing off everywhere.But if you don’t settle into one thing and focus, you might not achieve much, so Drew recommended deliberately constraining your work in 4 ways.  (a) Eliminate the unnecessary What can you stop doing in order to pursue the new thing? If you start something new, kill two things. Kill the easy one, then kill the hard one.When I was writing my first book and trying to exit my day job to become a full-time author, I gave up TV and this was before smartphones and social media, so that wasn’t even a distraction. Giving up TV in the evenings gave me the time I needed to build a new direction. You have to make the time somehow.   (b) Define the outcome What single result defines success? For example, with my first novel, Pentecost, which became Stone of Fire, the goal was to publish it on Amazon by my birthday. I ended up falling short by about a month, but a birthday-related goal is always a good one as it’s so memorable and clear.  (c) Limit your options What unreasonable limitations can you apply to your project? Give it a time limit, and a creative limit. That creative limit is a good one, for example, if you constrain the genre or the number of POV characters in your book, it will make it easier to achieve your goal. (d) Raise the stakes What specifically will happen if you fail? This is a tough one, as it’s so personal. For me, I like achieving goals, and so failing a goal is a big enough stake for me. Some people talk about signing a cheque to a charity they hate or something and sending it off if they fail, but that doesn't motivate me. Whatever floats your boat, but decide what the stakes are. As we know with writing fiction, high stakes are important to keep things moving!  Drew also talked about turning constraints you already have, like time and budget, into positives. This kind of reframing can help you embrace your situation. For example, if you only have 30 minutes per day to write while commuting, well, so be it. Try dictating or typing on your phone, and I know several authors who have written many books during a work commute. Or busy mums who dictate while doing chores. Or again, coming back to Donn’s interview, if you’re a carer, raging against it may not help as much as adapting and changing your creative goals and being more relaxed about time. I’ve embraced my constraints recently as I’m doing this Masters in Death, Religion, and Culture. It’s full-time, so I am doing at least 20 hours a week of study and online lectures and reading on some really interesting topics. I’m writing essays, so I don’t have time or the headspace to write books, too. I’m currently working on three essays — one on natural burial, one on the ethics of using dead bodies to inspire commercial fiction, and one on the depiction of hell in an area of art history. I am clearly collecting ideas for when I am ready to write fiction again, but the constraint of study is focusing my mind on the bare minimum I need to do to keep my author business running and the money coming in. My Books and Travel Podcast is going on hiatus again soon, and I’m going to do fewer interviews here in 2026.  What constraints do you have, and how can you reframe them? Or how can you add constraints rather than giving yourself unlimited possibilities?  (3) What do you need for a long-term sustainable career?  Becca Syme did a talk on sustainability for a long-term career, which tied into the theme of Author Nation, which was ‘Build your best life through writing.’ Becca was on the show recently – Loki is in charge – and she is always worth listening to as she will definitely say something challenging in any session. Becca started with a need for basic self-knowledge. Do you know yourself well enough to understand what works for you, and what you’re capable of doing? Do you know what to say yes to and what to say no to? How are you learning more about yourself and your personality? There’s always a lot of talk about the Clifton Strengths Assessment as that’s what Becca specialises in, and I have found that very useful. I also love Myers Briggs. I’m INFJ, which is uncommon in the wider population but very common in the author community.  Some of the other things Becca talked about included understanding the limits of your energy so you don’t burn out, and making sure you reflect on and audit tasks so you know what to do more of and what to get rid of. For example, it’s more common now to find some authors who are not doing social media at all, or are reducing it because it doesn’t feed them, whereas others love it as the basis of their business.  Becca also talked about the need for a ‘personal growth stimulator,’ a way to make sure you’re always learning and growing and finding community. For me, that’s mostly listening to podcasts and reading books, and at the moment, my Masters course, which is mostly reading a lot of sources and then writing essays on diverse topics.   Becca also said you need to do a business edit and/or a persona edit every now and then, as — You are likely over-committed, either personally or in business. You need to take things OFF your plate, not keep adding more. She said, “When you prune a tree, it grows more.” Also, one very key point:  If you can’t tell whether something is working or not, it’s not working.  My take on this is about understanding ‘ease.’ What is easy for you? What do you love that other people think is hard?  For example, people often ask me, how do I find time to learn so much about what’s going on, and input so much, so I can share with you every week? Well, my top 5 Clifton Strengths are Learner, Intellection, Strategic, Input, and Futuristic. By my very nature, I am constantly inputting and learning and thinking, and considering the impact on the future. It’s easy and fun for me as I live in the stream of input and I love it! However, my bottom ‘strengths’ i.e. my weaknesses, mean that hard things include peopling and crowds, social energy in person or online, and doing things off the cuff (as I need to plan way in advance).  If you do Clifton Strengths or any of the personality tests, it might help you figure things out, but you can also just pay more attention to what is easy for you, what brings you joy and energy and fun, versus what drains you and makes you unhappy.  Becca also said that you need the ability to set boundaries and understand who to say yes to, and who to say no to. You also need a community for support, care for your physical body, and a source of hope for the future.  I hope I can remain a part of that for you, as I remain hopeful and excited about so many things. Change will continue as ever, but there are more opportunities ahead. What do you need to have in place if you want a long-term sustainable career?  You can find many more of Becca’s wise words in her books and also on her QuitCast and on her Patreon.  (4) How do you want your author business to run?  Katie Cross did a great session on SOPs, Standard Operating Procedures, which are just documents or spreadsheets with step-by-step instructions on specific tasks. They also include sections on WHY things are done and why they are important to your business, and I feel like many people miss out on these important aspects, preferring to focus on the ‘how to’ rather than the ‘why’ which is more critical. For example, selling direct is trendy in the indie author community, and some of the numbers thrown around are inspiring, but also need to be questioned, since it is not for everyone, at every stage. I love selling direct through Kickstarter and Shopify in my limited way, but I don’t want a warehouse like Sacha Black or Adam Beswick or David Viergutz. I also don’t recommend selling direct if you don’t have an audience or a budget or a marketing funnel, or time to set up and/or test the technical side of it. Selling direct is not a silver bullet to becoming a successful indie author. It’s also a lot of work, so you need a good reason to commit to it for the long term, and it needs to be part of a considered author business plan. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter what platform you put your book/s on. You won’t sell any copies if you don’t do any marketing, and that is often the side of the author business that is missing. Back to Katie’s talk, I went along because I’m interested in how we will work with AI agents in the coming years, and I want to have SOPs so I can give them to my AI partners, rather than human assistants. Katie didn’t even mention AI as she is a superstar at working with other humans, but the processes can be used for either/both.  She also mentioned that “some SOPs are just for me,” which is a really good point. You can document your own processes, and put at the top: Why am I doing this? Why is this important to my author business? If you can’t answer the question, maybe you need to eliminate that task altogether. (5) What are your contingency plans for when things don’t go to plan?  The team at Author Nation had to deal with lots of challenges. It’s extremely hard to run any conference, let alone a big conference, so congratulations to Joe and Suze, and Chelle, Jamie, Isabella, and the team for pulling it off and doing an amazing job. It went incredibly well, and it is a great conference that I highly recommend for authors. But what happened on the last few days was also a good lesson for all of us in business. James Patterson was meant to be the closing keynote speaker, and do a VIP evening thing, and then sign at Reader Nation the next day, and his attendance in person was a draw card for many. But he got sick and pulled out, only appearing on zoom for a short time instead.  On top of that challenge, the government shutdown impacted flights, so many people changed their flights to leave early rather than get caught up in the expected delays.  But the Author Nation team did a great job of “the show must go on,” bringing in James Patterson by zoom and then interviewing other successful authors, and the pivot in such a short time was impressive — but it also made me want to reflect on the bigger lesson. Things will not always go to plan.  People will disappoint you. So will publishers, so will your own marketing attempts.  Readers will leave you one star reviews.  People will say things about you that are not true.  People will judge you — and that has always been my biggest fear, and yet, it continues to happen.  If you are out in the world in public in any way, you will get criticism and rejection, and yes, there will be haters.  If you hide and try not to attract any attention at all, no one will find your books, and you won’t sell anything, and you will moan about not selling instead. This is the reality of the author life, so you have to accept that.  You can’t let these things stop you. The writing life show must go on. Even if you have everything sorted, something may happen that is outside your control.  Like James Patterson cancelling and flights being disrupted, and a political situation that makes people not want to travel, anyway. Like the pandemic.  Like the Global Financial Crisis (GFC).  Like the dot com crash.  All of which I have been through in my working adult life, as will many of you listening. These will not be the only large-scale disruptions in our lifetime, and there will, of course, be personal disruptions that will blindside you too. So what do we do — in addition to keep creating?    I talked on the long-term success panel about the biggest mistake I’ve seen authors make, and that is bad financial management.  It’s the thing that destroys businesses regardless of what kind of business you run, or what job you have. I have seen many authors hit it big and then spend it all without saving for the inevitable down times, or who take on too much debt, or over-expose themselves to risk. Or those who have one stream of income instead of many, and when that one stream dries up, they have to start again.  That’s what happened to me in the GFC. I had one stream of income — my job. Then we all got laid off in one day and none of us had work, and that day, back in 2008, was the day I said I would build multiple streams and that no single company would ever be able to take away all my income in one fell swoop again. I now have so many streams of income, I need a pretty developed accounting system to keep track!  Hard times will come; they inevitably do, so make sure you have a buffer to weather the storm.  To be clear, this is not about the conference business of Author Nation, as Joe and Suze Solari are experienced business people and they know about managing risk and cash flow and all that. Joe has a consulting business that helps authors in that specific way. But many authors are not so experienced in business or money management.  If you don’t feel confident in this area, check out my list of resources at www.thecreativepenn.com/moneybooks   So the question for you here is, how exposed is your author business — or just your life and job in general — to disruption if it’s out of your control? What’s the worst that can happen? Can you build multiple streams of income? Can you make contingency plans?  What can you do to de-risk? Within reason of course, but you need to have plans for when things go right, and when things go wrong. (6) How do you know when to work with a company as part of your author business?  We use the term ‘self-publishing’ alongside being an ‘indie author,’ but of course, we are not truly independent and you can’t be a successful author on your own. We need service providers and software vendors and publishing partners, and there are many of them trying to catch your attention.  It’s always lovely to catch up with various vendors I’ve been working with for years, many of whom I consider friends now, and at Author Nation I spoke to people from Draft2Digital, Bookfunnel, Kickstarter, ProWritingAid, Reedsy, and BookVault, as well as my editor Kristen Tate, and others.  There were LOTS of vendors at Author Nation, some with brand new businesses, many I had never heard of, and I wanted to give you some advice about deciding which companies to work with. There are so many these days online and at conferences, and I thought it might be useful to give you a framework. Many of the companies are wonderful, but not all are worth it. Only you can decide for your situation, and it will differ depending on where you are in the author journey. For example, it makes sense for an author working on their first book to spend money on editing, but to avoid vendors who want to help you sell direct as it is way too early for that.  Here are some questions I consider when weighing up new vendors or services, or reconsidering them over time, as the industry changes, and my needs change, too.  You could always paste these into ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini and ask it to help you evaluate a service if you don’t want to ask the vendor directly.  What purpose does this serve in helping me write, publish, or market my books, or as part of running my author business? What is the cost versus the return on investment? How do I make money with this? How quickly might I get my money back if that is a consideration? Are they asking for a one-off payment, or a subscription? (If you sign up for subscriptions, I recommend paying monthly, even if it is more expensive, so you can reconsider every month and change your mind if necessary).  How does the company make money? Remember, if it is free, you are the product in some way, often through advertising. A company that lasts needs sustainable revenue streams, and it might run out of funding at some point and need to change the terms in order to make money. Does the business have a sustainable business model? Do they understand their competitors in the market — and how do they compare with them?  Who are the team behind the company? How long have they been in business? Do I trust that they will be around for the long term? Why do they care about authors? If in doubt, are they a Partner Member of the Alliance of Independent Authors, which vets terms and conditions and contracts so we know companies can be trusted.  Once you have all this information, you can make a more informed decision as to whether to sign up. And of course, I say all this as I see authors getting excited and making emotional choices without considering their author business plan for the years ahead! Or signing up for so many things, they are overwhelmed. As an example, let’s take BookFunnel — and full disclosure, Bookfunnel was a primary sponsor of AuthorNation, and they sponsor my podcast, and I am an affiliate — because I am a happy user of the service since the beginning and believe it is a great company and useful product (for many authors, but not all.)  I’ve used BookFunnel for years to give away my free books, which was primarily a way of marketing to bring people into my ecosystem so they would buy other books, and now I also use them for direct sales of ebooks and audiobooks. I would struggle to make money selling direct without BookFunnel, so yes, they make me money and they are worth the cost. Of course, if you are just writing your first book, you don’t need them yet, so don’t sign up!  I pay an annual subscription to use Bookfunnel, as do many thousands of other authors worldwide, so they have consistent cash flow. Damon Courtney, a wonderful coder and fantasy author, founded Bookfunnel a decade ago when he recognised the need in the author community for an easy way to deliver ebooks directly.  Every year since, Damon has expanded the offerings, and I know he cares about authors because he IS an author. He also understands his responsibility to the community, and his business has already lasted more than 8 years. Considering most businesses fail within 5 years, any company that has managed for longer is doing well. They also have a succession plan in case anything happens to Damon, and I know this, because I asked him specifically! I’m always thinking about death as you know!  I also wanted to mention BookFunnel as they launched personalised, signed ebooks at Author Nation, which is a fantastic feature where you can sign a copy of an ebook for a fan, or personalise it with a message. Of course, I asked about personalised audiobooks which will hopefully come in 2026, as I definitely want to do both of those. Again, this is something for authors with an existing fan base, not brand new authors with no readers yet. I wanted to talk about this kind of financial and market analysis of vendors since — A big mistake of many new authors is getting ahead of themselves For example, going to sessions on advertising or Kickstarter when they haven’t even finished a first draft of their first book, or signing up with a vendor or a service too early, and spending money too soon. The industry changes fast, so finish that book first!  The biggest mistake of authors at my level is thinking that things will stay the same, that the way of making money that worked so well 5 or 10 or 20 years ago will still work today.  The industry changes fast, so you will need to keep adapting, and keep letting go of things that don’t work anymore. Either they don’t work anymore because they don’t work for everyone i.e. the industry or the market has changed, or they don’t work for you personally because your life has changed. I certainly have different goals at 50 than I did at 30, and back then, I hustled so much more than I am willing to do now. I am in a different life stage and my author business is mature and stable, so I can do things differently than I did when I was starting out. I started writing seriously for publication in 2005, 20 years ago. I was 30, living in New Zealand and then Australia, and I had just met Jonathan. There was no iPhone, no Kindle or Amazon KDP, no TikTok, no mobile commerce. Ebooks were downloadable PDFs. Audiobooks were still mostly on tape or CD, or they were downloadable MP3s. There was no real infrastructure for an indie author business. The term ‘indie author’ was only starting to be used as a term to be proud of. It was a different world.  We are so lucky now to have such a fantastic ecosystem for indie authors, to have so many companies who help us with our writing craft and our author business, and also our community and finding friends along the way. Author conferences are certainly an important part of this, so a big thank you to Joe and Suze Solari and the Author Nation team and all the vendors who supported the show, and all the authors who attended.   7) Thoughts from other people  My perspective is only one view, and I attended Author Nation primarily as a speaker and also as a Patreon host, and of course, as a podcaster, author of several decades, and veteran of many, many author conferences all over the world. I didn’t go to many sessions or take many photos, I didn’t keep a daily log, and most of my interactions were private one-on-one meetings, so I wanted to share a couple of other perspectives, and these people might be listening so hello to —  Amber Field, who did a post on 5 overarching themes of Author Nation said, “My hope was to meet other authors like me and to get inspired to do more book promotion — a task I hate and procrastinate on…badly. I’ve been a published author since 2023, but this was my first writing conference. It really paid off for me! I met amazing authors, got tips for every part of my author business, and just plain had a lot of fun.” The themes she identified were: AI is changing how we work but not necessarily how we write. Absolutely, you can use it for so many things without ever using it for writing, and Amber shared how she got ideas about using AI in marketing from my session and others (and thanks for sharing the lovely picture of us, Amber!)Some of her other themes: When it comes to marketing, you don’t have to do everything; as well as Be yourself. She says,  “None of the most successful authors at the conference followed in another author’s footprints exactly. 100% of them followed a path that can only be described as “doing what they liked”, which often included hopping genres and doing side projects that they found fulfilling.” So true, and this year, my short story collection and my Masters in Death and certainly evidence of that! Lots more detail and photos at Amber’s Medium post here.  Pamela Hines, posted on Substack every day, and in her round-up piece with links to all the daily posts, she says, “I went to Author Nation as an editor and coach, but also as a writer in need of reconnection. I wanted to learn, recharge, and see where this rapidly evolving publishing world is headed. I came home with a clearer vision for my work and a renewed faith in what happens when we gather.” She also noted, “The first day of any conference begins long before the first keynote. It starts with a decision: to show up. [It’s] the power of presence — of choosing to step back into community even when it feels easier to stay home. For many writers, the hardest part isn’t pitching or networking. It’s walking into the room in the first place. Las Vegas may not sound like a literary destination, but Author Nation (following the tradition of 20BooksVegas) transforms it into one. Between the hotels, neon, and laughter, I found my people — fellow professionals determined to grow, learn, and connect. The first handshake, the first panel, the first “Oh, you too?” moment reminded me that creativity expands in the presence of others.” At the end of the week, she says, “This conference has reminded me never to forget that the thing I work on alone in my writing space is part of a larger whole. That whole includes small entrepreneurs, big corporations, innovative idealists, editors, consultants, and, most importantly, readers. We write to share something meaningful. All of it exists to serve a single, simple act—someone reading a story and being changed by it. This conference allowed me to connect directly with that meaning and those individuals. As an editor, book coach, and writer, I’m leaving with sharper tools and deeper clarity. But more than that, I’m leaving with gratitude—for the people who read, who believe in story, and who remind me that art isn’t finished until it’s received.” Wonderful posts, Pamela, and I know how much work you put into all that, so thanks for sharing! If you want to get a sense of what happened as well as notes on many of the sessions, and photos, check out Pamela’s Substack, or her main site with links here.  As an aside, I asked ChatGPT to find me posts about Author Nation 2025, and both of these showed up, so Pamela and Amber, congratulations, you are discoverable!  Conclusion Author Nation is a fantastic conference, and I highly recommend the show whether you are just starting out, or whether you are a more experienced author.  However, I won’t be attending in 2026 as I need a year off Las Vegas. I’ve done three years in a row, and I want to make room for other travel and other possibilities. I’m also doing this full-time Masters which goes through to next autumn, and I don’t know what conferences, if any, I will do in 2026. But as I said, I highly recommend Author Nation, and you never know, I might be back in 2027! The post Lessons Learned From Author Nation 2025 With Joanna Penn first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Why do so many memoir manuscripts fail to engage readers, even when the writer has lived through extraordinary experiences? What's the hidden code that separates a chronological account of events from a compelling memoir that readers can't put down? How do you know when you're ready to write about trauma, and where's the ethical line between truth and storytelling? With Wendy Dale In the intro, Amazon Kindle Translate, and the Writing Storybundle. Today's show is sponsored by Draft2Digital, self-publishing with support, where you can get free formatting, free distribution to multiple stores, and a host of other benefits. Just go to www.draft2digital.com to get started. This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn  Wendy Dale is a memoir author and teacher, as well as a screenwriter. Today we are talking about The Memoir Engineering System: Make Your First Draft Your Final Draft. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.  Show Notes Why memoir is about connected events, not chronological storytelling—and how to transform random experiences into compelling plot The difference between scenes and transitions, and why structure matters in every sentence of your book How to write about trauma and family without crossing ethical lines or damaging relationships Why character arc is actually the easiest part of memoir writing (and what's really difficult) The truth about dialogue, memory, and where to draw the line on fabrication — plus reflections on The Salt Path controversy Whether you can make money from memoir and why marketing matters as much as writing You can find Wendy at GeniusMemoirWriting.com. Transcript of interview with Wendy Dale Joanna: Wendy Dale is a memoir author and teacher, as well as a screenwriter. Today we are talking about The Memoir Engineering System: Make Your First Draft Your Final Draft. So welcome to the show, Wendy. Wendy: Thank you so much for inviting me, Joanna. It's exciting to talk about this topic. Joanna: First up— Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and publishing. Wendy: I think I grew up loving books and I always wanted to be a writer when I was a little girl. I really dreamed of being a writer. My mother said, “No, it's just way too hard. So few people have success. Why don't you become an actress?” So I actually moved to Los Angeles when I was 17 to become an actress. I really did not like the film industry at all from an acting perspective. I was studying acting at UCLA and decided I was really going to be a writer. That was when I changed and really felt like I'd found my calling. That was always what I'd wanted to do. So I tried writing a novel at 19 that didn't go so well. But when I was 23 I started working on a memoir. From there, I have worked in writing in all different aspects, but really my first love will always be books. Now having made that decision, I haven't always done the kind of writing that I would always want to do, right? So sometimes I've done ad copywriting, which actually I did rather love. I've done screenwriting, I've done all kinds of writing, not always my first choice of the type of writing I was doing. For the most part, I have made it work though. So being flexible, you can't always get exactly what you want. I didn't say I'm going to only earn my living publishing books. I don't know if that would've been possible, but I have, for the most part, managed to earn my living as a writer. Joanna: How did you get into memoir specifically? Wendy: So I started trying to write this novel at 19, and it was very difficult and I didn't know what I was doing. I thought, well, it would be so much easier to write about my life. Are you laughing, Joanna? Joanna: Yes, sure. Writing a memoir, right? Wendy: So another misguided idea. I thought, oh, memoir would be easy because you don't even have to come up with the plot. You just write down what you lived through. Lots of misconceptions in everything I just said, but that was how I started writing a memoir. Around this time my parents also made this decision that they were going to retire in their forties and take their life savings and move to a developing country. They sold everything. I mean, they really just fled the United States and moved to Honduras with the idea of retiring early. So I went to visit them and I was like, well, this could be something to write about. So that actually wound up being the first chapter of my memoir. Joanna: And you were telling me before you live in Peru, right? Wendy: I do, yes. I've lived in Peru for almost six years now. Joanna: Oh, right. So, why do that? I mean, a lot of people want to travel. What is it that brought you to Peru? Wendy: I lived in Peru when I was a child and really, it sounds kind of strange, but I think deep down I've always had this identity of feeling Peruvian, right? You look at me and Peruvians don't think I am Peruvian, but really, my first memories as a child were growing up in Peru. Coming back here has been really incredible. So I feel very much at home. I've actually lived by this point, almost half my life in Latin America. Not just Peru—Bolivia, other Latin American countries. So, yes, I've lived half my life in the United States, the other half in Latin America. So I really do feel at home here, partly because my first memories were growing up in Peru. Joanna: Well, I think this might segue into why writing memoir is not just “this is what happened,” because I feel like, as you mentioned, one of the misconceptions is almost that it's just an autobiography. Like, this happened, this happened, this happened. As you said there, for example, the fact that you spent half your life in Latin America, half in the USA, to me is immediately like a potential hook into stories about your life that aren't necessarily in order. Talk a bit about that issue of it's not just “this happened, this happened” and how to think about memoir. Wendy: Oh, I'm going to take a deep sigh here because I just think back to writing this memoir and all of the misconceptions I had. Now, I love prose. I just love prose. I love putting words on the page. I think words are so beautiful. Sometimes I just want to eat them. I'm a prose writer. I don't like structure, I don't like plot, and I didn't even realize the importance of plot until I thought I had finished this memoir. So first chapter starts in Honduras. The last chapter ends in Bolivia because by this point my parents had moved to Bolivia, and all the chapters in between are all these different countries that I went to on my own. I'd finished the book, or so I thought, and I started sending it out to agents and really wasn't getting the response I had hoped for. Then finally I got an agent who called me up, and that was really good news, and she said, “You're a really good prose writer.” I was like, yes, I love writing prose. And she says, “But you know nothing about structure.” And I honestly—are you laughing? Joanna: Yes. Wendy: Right, and I remember the words that went through my head. I was like, what is this structure thing she's talking about? I'd never heard the word. So obviously I knew nothing about structure, and that was kind of the beginning of what I guess would become my life's work—really comprehending memoir structure. So that was a long time ago. That was the beginning of the process, but I didn't even understand that plot plays such a huge role in memoir. I just thought you wrote about your life, and I think that is what a lot of people don't understand, right? It's really easy to confuse the memories of your life with thinking that it's plot, and it just isn't. So one thing I tell my clients is you are not writing a chronicle of what you've lived through. You are taking true stories from your life and turning them into art. This is an art form for other people to enjoy. It's true, but you are creating art. It's very different than chronicling your life. It took me a long time to learn that. Joanna: Yes. Let's come back to this word “art,” but first of all, I want us to tackle structure because, okay, I also learned this the hard way. When I wrote my travel memoir, Pilgrimage, I had like over a hundred thousand words of writing, and I just couldn't figure out how the structure of the book could work until I found another book that helped me figure out the structure. Like, there are lots of different types of memoir structures and mine I found a sort of model and then I was like, oh, okay, this is how it works. Talk us through how we can potentially structure a memoir. Even if we're someone like me who might be a discovery writer first, or like you by the sound of it. Wendy: Oh, well, absolutely. So I hate structure, right? And that's why I became an expert in it—in order to make it a lot easier for me to understand. So I am not a planner, right? In fact, there's a line in my memoir about there are two different kinds of travelers. There are planners and there are fun people, right? So I've never been a planner in any aspect of my life. So the fact that I would become this expert in structure is kind of ironic. Let me go back to this idea of structure. So I think when people talk about structure, their first thought is three acts. Or are you doing a dual timeline? How is the big picture? How is your book going to play out? When I use the word structure, I am referring to how structure plays itself out in every sentence of your book. I mean, it's such a critical part of your story. So there's global structure, which is really referring to how you're going to use chronology in your book, how you're going to tell this story, and then there is structure on every page of your book. So what happened is I actually started teaching after my memoir got published. Several years later, I started teaching memoir writing, and teaching is very different than doing, right? I wrote my memoir by a process of trial and error. Eventually, this agent did sign me and kind of helped me understand what wasn't working in the manuscript that I'd submitted, and I spent a year rewriting it. It eventually got published. When I started teaching memoir writing, it was different because teaching someone how to do this is very different than this trial and error of doing it yourself. So as time went on, I would see the same mistakes over and over again. I started to say, well, there are these categories of mistakes, and what if I reverse engineered this and kept people from making these mistakes? So in order to not make the mistake, there must be a principle that people need to follow. So that was the beginning of The Memoir Engineering System. It took me 15 years to understand that —  Plot can be summed up in two words and it's connected events. Now, why do I say that? Well, the problem with memoir writing is that it's very tempting to feel like the things that you did—the things that you're including in your memoir—let's say it's a travel memoir. So arriving in Paris and then going out to eat for the first time, and then walking down the Champs-Élysées, and then going to the Louvre. So I just mentioned several things that you might have done, that a person might have theoretically done in this memoir on Paris. The problem with this from a reader's perspective is that this is not plot, and the reason it's not plot is that these things are not related to one another. So by relating them, it could be with an idea. What do all of these things have in common other than they are things that you did in Paris? You need something a little deeper than that. You take these disconnected events—I went to the restaurant, I walked down the Champs-Élysées, I went to the Louvre—and you turn them into plot. So that really is the basis of everything I teach is that connected events equal plot. A memoir writer's biggest challenge is taking all these things that they lived through, whether it's a travel narrative or different kind of narrative. It's a bunch of stuff that happened to you, and that's not plot. How do you take a bunch of stuff that happened to you and turn it into plot? You let your reader know how these events are connected. So that's really the basis of what I teach. Does that make sense? Joanna: Yes. Well, maybe give us a concrete example with your own memoir, Avoiding Prison and Other Noble Vacation Goals: Adventures in Love and Danger, which obviously are connected events. They would be vignettes, I imagine, about these different adventures. What is the connected event? Is that more about you as the character or is it the theme? Wendy: So this is called The Memoir Engineering System, right? I really believe that there was this hidden code underlying memoir. I promise I'm not avoiding the question, Joanna. I'm going to get to it in a second. In order to explain how this works, what took me 15 years of reading over a thousand manuscripts to understand about how memoir actually is doing, how it actually works, is that there are two different components in your book. You have scenes and you have transitions. In your scene, you have the building blocks of plot and something must happen. In your transition you have an idea that shows what happens in one scene is related to what happens in the next. So in my own book, I didn't know this because I wrote this as a process of trial and error. If I were to go back to my made up example of, you know, I go out to eat on the Champs-Élysées and then I go to the Louvre, what do those things have to do with each other? Absolutely nothing. They're not related in any way. But you can ask yourself is, what was I doing in Paris? What was I searching for? Maybe I was searching for a sense of understanding myself. I don't know, there's no one right answer, right? It's a fictitious example. So in your transitions between your scenes, maybe this is a search for identity, maybe when you're outside of your own country, you understand yourself better. So the transitions in that chapter would all be about identity and this idea of identity would infuse itself through your chapter and it would take these disconnected things you did and it would turn them into a story. Does that make more sense? Joanna: Yes. I mean, I know what you mean because I think this is where people need to get more personal. I feel like you can write a travel guide, and when I started writing my pilgrimage books, I thought I was writing travel guides. Then I realized I actually had a deeper sense of the whole thing. I was lost and I was trying to find myself and all that like you do at midlife. Seeking faith and all of that. I think memoir only really happens when you get a lot more personal. So as you mentioned there, sort of the idea that something happens, but it's your personal reflection and how your own personal transformation happens through the course of the book. So you have to write at a much deeper level than you would if it was, say, just a travel guide about Paris. Wendy: Oh, I think all memoir is more closely related to literary fiction than commercial fiction because you're never going to have the plot twists and turns of a detective novel, for instance. So it's really dependent on the depth of the prose, right? Your insights. That is why people read memoir. So you need some plot, but you're never going to have those twists and turns and surprises and unbelievable suspense that you would have in commercial fiction. In that way, it's more like literary fiction. So it's so dependent on the prose, so dependent on the insight, the quality of the prose, affecting your reader emotionally with your words. So I tell my clients structure is kind of black or white. It's either working or it's not. So don't stress over finding the best structure for your book. Structure is there to keep your reader from being confused, to keep them from going, wait, I have no idea why you're telling me this after reading this scene. I've no idea why you're telling me about this other thing because they're not at all related. Structure is there to keep your reader from being confused. What makes them actually love your memoir is the quality of your prose affecting them emotionally, your insight, your point of view, how subjective your writing is. Joanna: So what are some tips for people who are finding it difficult to get down to that depth? Because it is very difficult. I found writing memoir much more difficult than fiction, and I've written lots of other kind of self-help nonfiction. You really do kind of have to bare your soul. What are some of your tips for people to write at a much deeper level? Wendy: Well, so what I suggest, even though I hate planning, is that people start with an outline, but a very specific outline that really consists of figuring out what their scenes are. Now, this outline can change along the way, but starting with an outline so that they ask themselves, okay, what is each scene about? When I've had people do that, the process of writing becomes so much easier because structuring your book is a very logical process. Writing your book really is this creative process. That's the part I love. I love the creative part. I don't love the structuring part. But when faced with the choice, okay, you can spend seven years writing and rewriting and figuring this out by trial and error, or you can spend a month of your life creating this outline and then finish your memoir in a year, somehow that investment of time starts to seem worth it. So when it comes to actually writing, I find that any kind of writer's block, I find the reason that prompts work, I think, is that you push against limitations and that actually makes me more creative. So I found that having the structure for my book before I start writing actually makes it so much easier to write and it makes me more creative. If I have this outline for the book and I don't feel like writing that depressing scene about that time I got in this argument with my mother, I feel like writing this fun scene over here because I'm in a funny mood today, I can do that because I have a sense of what the book is like globally. So I really do believe in outlines, even though I hate actually creating them. I think it makes it easier to write. I think it makes it actually more fun to write once you've gotten through the drudgery of creating this outline. Joanna: Yes, I must say, because like I said, I'm a discovery writer. I've never ever written a book with an outline. With my book Pilgrimage, I hadn't finished the character arc until I had done three pilgrimages. I feel like perhaps your method is more suitable for people who already have an idea of their story in mind. Like they've already finished their transformation, whatever that may be, or that period of their life that they want to write about. Whereas I think when I started writing, I still hadn't found the meaning. I guess I hadn't found the, what you are calling the idea in each of the scenes. Wendy: So I do take a really different approach than most memoir coaches. So what you're talking about, your character arc, I actually find the easiest part of any memoir, and I'll explain why in a second. Plot is difficult. Plot requires thinking and figuring out your plot. For me, your character arc is synonymous with the theme of your book. Is it about belonging? Is it about identity? Is it about coming to terms with your childhood? I find that that actually comes out in the writing itself because that is the theme of your life, and I think that is so much a part of everything you do and everything you write, that it comes out in the writing itself. That to me is the easiest part of writing a memoir, is this character arc, this internal journey, and that is one of the few things that doesn't require structure because it's in the writing itself. Now there's a little bit of thought that goes into it, but I honestly find one of the easiest parts of writing a memoir. What is actually difficult is taking a bunch of things you did in a country and connecting—this day I did this, and the next day I did this, and the next day I saw this place, and the next time I met this person. All of that will bore your reader to tears if you don't connect these events in some way, and if you don't make them related to one another to tell a story. Otherwise you're just telling them a bunch of stuff you did and you're a stranger to them and they don't care. If you take all of these things you did and you connect them in some way, usually with an idea—usually with some thematic idea—you are creating plot in that chapter. That's really a challenge for memoir because we don't have the advantage of making things up as a novelist does. Joanna: Yes, we should tackle the making things up aspect because you've used language like character arc, you've used plot, you've said it is more similar to literary fiction, so you have used a lot of fiction language. So where is the line for truth? People might know of The Salt Path controversy, which is—if people don't know—a travel memoir which is a lot of truth, but some quite core things have been challenged in the press. So there's sort of been a feeling of betrayal by people who loved that memoir. What are some of the lines around truth with writing memoir? Wendy: I honestly think the bar is pretty low in the sense that the people who are getting in trouble—and this is not the first time a memoirist has been in trouble for fabricating facts of their life—it kind of is shocking to me, right? So I would say that all memoirs take some license, and so there's this ethical continuum and you have to feel comfortable with it. So I tell people you need to put a disclaimer in your book. Most memoirs will play a little bit with the order of events. Now, when I'm saying that, what I mean is that I might have had a really funny conversation with my mother in October, and in the book it comes in March because that's a perfect place to put this conversation in my book. I don't think that is being unethical, and I would also put a disclaimer in the beginning of my memoir that I have sometimes changed the chronology of the book. Now making up huge things that never happened—so one thing I tell people I work with is I would never make up something happening. So I had this conversation with my mother. I may not remember the dialogue exactly, but it's to the best of my memory, it's my representation of that moment in time, but I would never make up something happening. The memoirs who are getting in trouble—so this is not the first time a memoirist has been in trouble—but all of the ones who've really had these public scandals have made up huge things. So I don't think it's a complicated issue, to be honest with you. I think all memoirs take some license. The ones who get in trouble kind of deserve to get in trouble because these are big things they're making up. I'm thinking James Frey, do you remember James Frey? Joanna: Yes. Was it A Million Little Pieces? Wendy: I think that's what it was. Yes. I mean, I think Augusten Burroughs got in trouble too. There've been many cases, but people were making up big chunks of their life. They weren't moving things around in time. Joanna: I agree, but it is hard because, for example, if people are writing something from a long time ago. So I guess I was shocked at the end of Cheryl Strayed's Wild, because suddenly it's kind of revealed at the end that she's writing it decades later. My first thought, I think it was one of the first memoirs I kind of read, and I was like, well, how can you remember those conversations? How can you write dialogue as if it was last week? In my own memoir, like I wrote while I was doing my pilgrimages. Over three years, I was writing journals and I wrote the book very soon after. But a lot of people do write memoir from decades ago, so how do we keep that line? Also, I wanted to ask you, you mentioned your mother as well. A lot of people are putting family members or people they met or whatever into books. How do we make sure that our memory of something is right? Wendy: Oh, that's a much harder question, Joanna. Okay, to answer your first question, how do you recount dialogue? Let's say you're writing 30 years later and you're trying to recount what someone said. You do the best you can. What I want to say is that people who are getting in trouble, famous memoirs getting in trouble, are not getting in trouble because their mother comes back and says, “You know, I didn't say exactly that 20 years ago.” They're getting in trouble for making up big things, making up illnesses that they didn't have, making up criminal records that they didn't have. So these are big things that can be fact checked. That's what people get in trouble with. I have never heard of a memoir getting in trouble because a family member said, “Well, I think the conversation was different.” Ever, have you? So we're talking that's a whole different level and you do the best you can. So that is not an issue for me. I have an issue with people who make up facts. I'm doing the best I can to remember dialogue, and if I don't remember dialogue, I don't put it in my book. You don't need tons of dialogue in your book. What you need is great point of view, great prose in your scene to make it engaging to a reader. Joanna: Yes, that's true. But on the family thing, it's more like— “Well, you portrayed this situation this way, and I don't feel like it happened like that.” Wendy: That is really difficult, right? So first of all, one of the things I teach memoirs is that it's really important to give us a point of view. I think some of my hardest clients are journalists. They've been taught to be objective. Objective, just the facts, right? That is not what a reader wants from memoir. We really want this point of view. It's really ironic that in being incredibly personal, you actually make your story universal. It's the only way I know to make your book universal is being so personal that I see myself in the story. So we need that point of view, and your point of view may be very different than your mother's point of view. That's true, right? I mean, life is that way. So you do need to be faithful to your point of view. Now, having said that, you are writing about real life people and there are repercussions. Your mother may come back to you and say, “I'm never speaking to you again. How dare you portray me that way?” I mean, it depends on your relationship with the person, but it is something to consider. So that, to me, is a very different question. I always write my truth. Now, once I've finished writing my truth and my point of view, I go through my memoir and I say, well, whose opinion do I really care about? Is my mother going to be so devastated by this that I'm going to damage my relationship and is it worth it? So there were some people in my book, I'm like, oh, this person's going to hate what I said about them. I don't care. I don't even like this person. So I left it. With my mother, for instance, I said, “Well, mom, I'm going to tell you, this memoir is coming out.” This was a long time ago, by the way, kind of like Cheryl Strayed, right? So long time ago. a I said, “Well, I say a lot of things about you, but we really needed this conclusion at the end. And in the end, this really turns out to be this character arc about understanding my relationship with my mother even better. So in the beginning, we needed lots of conflict to get there.” Totally true, but a little out of proportion so that my mother would let me get away with talking about some of the things she probably didn't want me talking about. She took this really well, and the way I handled it was I had her read the last chapter first, where she really does come across really great, right? I know my mother incredibly well, and I also knew what would work with her. So she loved the publicity. She would do book readings with me. She went on television with me. She hammed it up in book readings. She would read her lines in the book. So it actually brought us closer together. My father is very different. My father does not like publicity. I knew if I had said anything negative about my father, he wouldn't speak to me again, and so I didn't. So it wasn't that I lied, but I did take into consideration the relationship I had with my parents. They are different people and I knew they would take it in different ways. So that is a real life consideration that you do need to take into account. Joanna: Well, I think that's very respectful of you for both of them, and the most healthy way to do things for sure. I think another thing that happens with memoir is people have far more damaged relationships than you clearly had. I think some people want to use memoir as a form of therapy or revenge. That's another thing. Revenge, rage, anger, and a very negative emotion. So absolutely people need to write their truth in at least the first draft, but where do you think the line is between therapy and what could be conceived? What could go very, very wrong for both the person writing and also anyone on another side? Wendy: I think a lot of people want to write their memoir for the sake of therapy and in the end, that's really fine. I've always wanted to be a published writer. I care about having an audience. I care about saying the truth. My truth, obviously not the truth. I care about saying my truth and creating art for an audience, and that really is a different consideration than journal writing, which is for yourself. So if you are writing a memoir for an audience, you are writing it in a different way. So what I would say to people full of trauma and anger—yes, plenty of trauma, let me tell you, right? Plenty of trauma in my memoir as well. Even though it's a humorous book, there's plenty of trauma in there. What I would say is that it depends on the tone you use. Let me give you an example of just talking to another human being, a stranger. If you start to talk to that stranger and they're like, “My life has been so unfair, nobody has ever given me a chance,” do you really want to talk to that stranger? So it's a matter of tone. If that stranger says, “I have gone through so much. I was abused as a child, I suffered poverty and homelessness. Let me tell you what I've come away with.” You kind of want to lean in and you're like, “Well, tell me about being homeless.” You want to hear that story. So it's not what you've lived through. I think it's where you are in dealing with this. So if you are still processing trauma, and you're at the stage where life is unfair, and you know, I've given up, you probably are not ready to write a memoir for other people yet. Feel free to write to process that trauma, but if you're writing for a public, we want to learn through what you've lived through. Living through someone else's difficulties can be really therapeutic for your reader as long as you're on the other side of them. There's a Tobias Wolff quote, and I'm not going to get it wrong—I'm paraphrasing it—but I heard this on an NPR radio interview many, many years ago. He was being interviewed, I think it might've even been for This Boy's Life. So that would've been a long time ago. He said, “You should write about what has hurt you the most, but only after it's quit hurting you. So then you have that perspective. You have that wisdom.” Joanna: Yes. I mean having written journals through dark times in my life, and then looking at it later, when you are going through these things, your writing is really repetitive and quite frankly, boring. Wendy: “Poor me, life is so hard,” and that's okay. It's okay in the moment. Joanna: Yes, but as you say, nobody wants to read a repetitive journal over and over again. That's not a memoir. So it is difficult, isn't it, to find that line between sharing enough and then not being repetitive. I feel like this is where you have to keep the audience in mind. It's like, okay— That was good for me as a writer, but what's good for the reader? Wendy: It is, and it really depends on your goals as a writer. It really does. Both are valid. If you are writing to heal from trauma, that is a really valid reason to write. It works. It really does work to write to heal from trauma. If you're writing for an audience, it is a different level. You might have to leave some things out of your book that really mattered to you. You are trying to take true events from your life and turn them into plot, so it is a different goal. Joanna: Well, let's just talk about that then. Definition of success is so important and I think with every genre there are books that hit big. So everyone thinks they're going to be Cheryl Strayed with Wild, and everyone did want to be like The Salt Path until quite recently. These books that become mega, mega bestsellers and have movies. Should authors expect to make money with memoir, or how could success be defined? Wendy: It really depends on how badly you want to be financially successful when it comes to writing. Let me qualify that just a little bit. So if you really care about making money, what you do need to learn is marketing and publicity. So a huge portion of your time is going to be spent getting publicity for your book. So what makes for a successful book, I think is three things. It's writing a book that readers love. Not every reader—some people are going to hate your book. In fact, that's actually a good sign. Not everyone needs to love your book. Some people need to love it, some should hate it. That means you've written a book that actually says something. So you need to have written a good book. You need publicity because if no one hears about this really good book you've written, it's not going to be financially successful. And then you need luck. So I think the Cheryl Strayeds, the Wilds of the world, also had a little bit of luck. So you can control it to a certain extent if you are willing to put in the work to do marketing and publicity on your book. I think you could count on a modest success if you're willing to work hard on it, because the reality is, if you care about making money off of your book, the money comes from publicity and marketing. If you don't, and you're writing a book and you've put it out in the world and it's beautiful and you want to see what happens and who finds it, and that is your satisfaction, that's valid too. It just depends on what your goals are. If you want to make money off of a book, there really is this whole publicity and marketing side of it. That's just the reality because there are books out there, and if no one has heard of your book, no one's going to buy it. Joanna: And that's true for all books. Wendy: Yes, unfortunately. We hate that, right, Joanna? Don't you hate marketing? Joanna: Oh, nobody wants to do it, but it just has to be done. I think what's interesting about memoir though, which is a very good thing, is that it's kind of timeless. So I really think that like my memoir, Pilgrimage, and like your memoir, we can talk about them for the rest of our lives because they are part of life at a point. Obviously there'll be other books that we write about different parts of our life, but to me it's far more timeless than other genres. I mean, you mentioned marketing. I have a book called How to Market a Book, and it's on its third edition. It needs updating all the time because marketing changes, but— Memoir is evergreen. Wendy: It's evergreen. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yes, though I do have to say that I wrote my memoir in my twenties though. It's been 30 years—I whisper that to you, right? So I think I wrote my truth then. If I were to write about the exact same experiences, I would write about them in such a different way, and not in a better way. Just a different way. Hindsight is 20/20. Joanna: Yes, but I feel like there are different times of our lives, so I feel like I will write another memoir at some point, but it won't be about pilgrimage, it'll be about something else. Wendy: What is it going to be about? Do you know? Joanna: I don't know yet. I haven't lived it yet. I think it will appear. Although, I've got this book around gothic cathedrals that I started out as a photo book and now it's kind of turning into half a memoir. Because I'm a discovery writer, I don't even know what happens until these things arrive. Wendy: Fair enough. If you ever want help with an outline, you call me and I will help you with your outline. Joanna: Fantastic. Well, tell us— Where can people find you and your books and courses online? Wendy: I think the easiest way to find me is to go to GeniusMemoirWriting.com and you can find information about The Memoir Engineering System, which is my book on memoir structure. My own memoir's called Avoiding Prison and Other Noble Vacation Goals. Or just Google Wendy Dale. I also have a YouTube channel, so Google Wendy Dale and you'll find lots of stuff. Joanna: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Wendy. That was great. Wendy: Thank you so much, Joanna.The post Why Structure Matters More Than You Think. Writing Memoir With Wendy Dale first appeared on The Creative Penn.

What happens when your creative dreams collide with the demands of caregiving? How do you keep writing when you're caring for someone full-time? Can you still be a creative person when traditional productivity advice simply doesn't work? With Donn King. In the intro, Agatha Christie meets Mr Men [BBC]; Podcast guesting and co-writing [Stark Reflections]; thoughts on pushing your comfort zone; Disrupt Everything and Win – James Patterson. This podcast is sponsored by Kobo Writing Life, which helps authors self-publish and reach readers in global markets through the Kobo eco-system. You can also subscribe to the Kobo Writing Life podcast for interviews with successful indie authors. This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn  Donn King is a nonfiction author, college professor, pastor, speaker, and podcast host at The Alignment Show. His latest book is Creating While Caring: Practical Tips to Keep Creating While Caring for a Loved One. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights, and the full transcript is below.  Show Notes Why traditional writing advice (block time, dedicated space, write daily) doesn't work for caregivers and what to do instead How emotional fatigue whispers “why bother?” and the philosophy that helps push through when writing seems pointless Practical tools and techniques for capturing ideas in stolen moments—from hospital chapels to 7-second voice recordings The painful truth about letting go of deadlines, perfect book launches, and achieving your full potential while caregiving The transition after 22 years: moving Hannah to full-time care and reclaiming creative time while managing complex emotions You can find Donn at DonnKing.com or TheAlignmentShow.com. Transcript of interview with Donn King Joanna: Donn King is a nonfiction author, college professor, pastor, speaker, and podcast host at The Alignment Show, which I've been on twice, which was fantastic. His latest book is Creating While Caring: Practical Tips to Keep Creating While Caring for a Loved One. So welcome to the show, Donn. Donn: Thank you very much, Joanna. It's an honor to be on with you. Joanna: I'm excited to talk about this. Now, first up— Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and self-publishing. Donn: Well, the short version is that I've always been a writer. People aren't seeing me, but I turned 70 this year. My first story, I think I wrote when I was about 12 years old. I remember writing a science fiction story and I got the characters in such a situation I couldn't figure out what to do with them, and so I wrote, “and then the spaceship blew up. The end.” Not an auspicious start. Then in eighth grade I started working at a newspaper, and in the early years, most of it was newspapers. So that's where I developed, I guess you would say, some discipline. You know, you can't wait on the muse. You've got a three o'clock deadline every day. I did that for a few years. I worked in radio for a few years. I helped to launch one of the first electronic magazines. A lot of people know America Online. I was working with a parallel service that was known as Genie. They published a member's magazine, and I wound up as associate editor for that. We launched electronically as well as in print. Let's see, what else. In the old days I co-authored a textbook. I still have to say traditional publishing, I think of them as third party publishers, but you know, the old fashioned way of doing things. So three books there, one of which is still in print, I think. Then in those early days of blogging and electronic magazines, I wrote freelance for some business magazines, some local publications. It was almost always short form except for that textbook. Then I worked in advertising. I worked for Walmart stores and helped to launch the first five Sam's Wholesale Clubs. So that was with copywriting and such. Then in the most recent years, I have scratched that writing itch quite a bit through blogging and academic writing, helping other people to write. As I mentioned in the current book, I did hit a space of about 10 years there when it was like the well went dry. I think this is worthwhile mentioning for folks out there—there's a difference between writer's block and what I was experiencing. It was just that there was nothing there and I really thought my writing days had ended. Then a friend pushed me to write what became the first book in The Spark Life Chronicles, which is a business parable. It was like the floodgates had opened again after 10 years. What I realized was—I think this is the important part to say for maybe others—I thought that I wasn't writing because I was depressed. It turned out I was depressed because I wasn't writing. Now, I don't mean to suggest that all you have to do to get over depression is to write. I think it more has to do with respecting your core values and what's important to you. Writing has always been so important to me in so many ways that when I wasn't doing that, it wasn't feeding my soul. So that's what led to the depression. So I hope that's helpful. Maybe for somebody out there, they kind of go together, depression and not being able to do anything. But the making yourself take those steps can very well be the first step towards coming out of the depression. I found that to be the case with writing. Joanna: Yes, and I think you're right. I mean, there are seasons of our life. Let's talk about a big season of your life, which is the caregiving. So why write this book about caregiving? And just tell us more about your experience and why this matters to you? Donn: Okay, so a real quick context. Our daughter, who is now 22, she has a very rare chromosomal disorder. It's trisomy 14, mosaic partial. And any medical folks out there are going to be saying, I never heard of that. The one study we could find about it said there were 15 to 20 like her known in the world at any given time. Probably more in third world countries, maybe where they don't have genetic testing available, but it's just very rare. The way it manifests with her is, I guess we would say extreme cerebral palsy. She does not even close her epiglottis when she swallows, for instance. So we were older parents when she came along and I had figured I could change diapers for a couple of years. Well, I've been changing diapers for 22 years, which kind of changed things. So that's where the caregiving came in. Now the why write this book? Honestly, I had been writing—I mentioned the Spark Life Chronicles. I've got two books out in that series, and a third one that was about two thirds of the way through. Then you came on my podcast, and thank you. You're an excellent guest, unsurprisingly. I think it was after we had turned off the recording, we were just talking about my situation and you said, well, that sounds like something that would be useful to talk about on the creative end. In the United States alone, there are 50 million caregivers, unpaid caregivers. Now, I don't know what it is in the rest of the world, but with that many, there must be people who are in a similar situation to me in the sense that they already had some success as a writer or a painter, a sculptor, musician, whatever creative field it might be, and then they suddenly find themselves in this caregiving role. So, yes, that sounds great, we should have a conversation about that. It wasn't until we got off of our conversation that I thought, if we're going to be talking about this on The Creative Penn, and I think there are people out there who need this, I should write a book about it. As you know very well, Joanna, we have tried to schedule this thing like three times because of the caregiving situation. It just points out to me that yes, there is a need for this. So this book kind of jumped the queue. It pushed itself ahead of the other book that I was working on. So now my challenge is to get back into that book. Joanna: Well, I think you've underplayed Hannah's situation and your situation. You mentioned changing diapers there, but I mean, it was pretty hardcore caring all the time, right? This wasn't she would just get on with things during the day. Just tell us a bit more about that, because there are all kinds of spectrums of caregiving. Obviously for some people it might be parents with dementia, for some people it's children like for you or a partner. So just tell us how much of your time were you spending caregiving. Donn: Yes, that's a good way to put it in context. For her first four years of life, we did not have nursing care for her because on paper I made too much money. You know, don't get me started on the system. Joanna: Oh, we all have problems with the system for sure, but I think caregiving is a particularly difficult one for sure. Donn: Oh, yes. When she was four years old, she wound up in the hospital for 58 straight days. The technicality there is that meant the hospital became her legal residence and therefore our income didn't figure into it anymore, and she got the nursing care. Again, to give some quick context, she was hospitalized in her first four years 27 times. Then once we got a nursing agency to help us at home, from age four until age 22, she was hospitalized about another 10 times. So it really slowed down and the average stay was much shorter. So that nursing care was tremendously helpful. I don't know how it is elsewhere in this country, and especially in the state of Tennessee where I live, there is a nursing shortage. So even though she qualified for 168 hours a week—that's 24/7—seldom have we had full coverage. So most recently I wound up taking care of Hannah for 108 hours out of 168 pretty much every week. Again, for context, it's worth mentioning my wife is also partially disabled. So she just can't stand up for very long and therefore she really hasn't been able to take part in the care. Hannah's brother, technically half brother, but he has literally helped take care of her from the day she was born. He has helped, but he's keeping up a job. I was fortunate in that I taught college all during that time and my college was very understanding of the situation. I was able to teach online a lot of those years, not all those years, but a lot of the time. So that's kind of how we managed it. So on average I probably spent about 40 to 50 hours a week taking care of her on top of a full-time job and then doing the writing around that. Does that make sense? Joanna: Yes, and obviously, I think one of the times that I was coming on your podcast, we postponed because a nurse was meant to come and they didn't come. So you had to change your situation. That was just like one meeting, and I think that's what really struck me was that it's so out of your control. You know, Hannah is a person and needs caring for, and so you can't just take a meeting. Like, I would shut my cat upstairs or something if it's being too noisy. It's like, oh, well, just even the basic things of there's a meeting that starts at this time, or I want to go to a cafe and do some writing. I know I take those freedoms for granted. In talking to you, I'm not in your situation, but reading your book, it's heartbreaking in so many ways. Also, I know for people listening who are in that situation, and why I encouraged you was so many people just want to feel like they're heard, like their situation is heard. So just outline some of the writing tips and productivity tips that just don't work for people in your situation who are carers. This sort of normal “just get it done, harden up” kind of attitude just isn't appropriate. Donn: Well, and as you say, there are so many people in that situation, and because we're so busy, we're not out there. People don't know that there are so many of us. So, you know, it's understandable that for the average writer who's trying to get their art done, their business done, that these tips make sense. I guess I should also say with Hannah, certainly it wasn't just changing diapers. She has a tracheotomy, so I was changing trachs, I was changing the feeding tube. She had to be fed continuously 24/7. She got some kind of medication about every two hours. So it was pretty intense, and I know that there are people listening who are in that situation. So the tips that just don't work for caregivers that are good advice: things like block out time on your calendar and tell your family, “Don't bother me during these two hours, I really am working.” We know that when we work at home, people assume, oh, you can just run to the grocery store for me, right? You know, so needing to get the family to respect your time and place is a realistic thing for the average writer. But for caregivers, we just can't do that. The advice to make a special writing space. I have written in doctors' waiting rooms and hospital rooms. I've gone to the hospital chapel in the middle of the night to get some writing done. One that I know that we hear a lot, but neither you nor I follow this one anyway, and that's the “write every day” thing. Good advice I think for most people in order to have the consistency. But with caregivers, you've just got to work it in wherever you can. So those are just three quick examples that come to mind of the normal writing tips and advice that are good tips and advice. My concern with the book was for people who think, well, I just can't do that and therefore I can't write. That's the real concern. You may not be able to do it perfectly, and of course, over and over we all hit that thing about perfectionism as the enemy anyway. But this is a special form of perfectionism. That if I can't do it the way that other writers do it, then I just can't do it, and I might as well give up that dream. Joanna: Yes, and I think another thing, and you and I talked about this, because you know you are a business guy and as you said earlier, you worked in newspapers, you had the discipline to write to deadline, and you didn't miss deadlines. I know you were also kind of frustrated by not being able to meet what you set as a deadline for this book. I imagine that you have to just let go of deadlines and just kind of embrace a longer timeline. Is that something that helps you as well, sort of releasing that? It must be hard. Donn: Well, and one of the things we frequently say is that Hannah has taught us to make your plans, but hold them lightly because they're going to change. So we do still make plans, but the plans are always fluid. Similar to that, it's not only the letting go of the deadlines. I know for instance, thanks in no small degree to things that I've learned from listening to your podcast and the books that you have written and other podcasts, I know how to do a proper book launch. But if I wait until I've got everything lined up for that, I'm never going to get a book out. So I kind of have to let go of best practices in order to have some publication, in order to get to the finish line in some way. So the metaphor that's coming to mind, we've all seen this on TV where there's somebody running like an Olympic race and they twist their ankle or whatever. They don't come in first, but they limp across the finish line. I have had to get okay with not achieving my potential, I guess you could say. That would include not only deadlines, but also what I know about how the ideal book launch is supposed to go, for instance. Joanna: That is so hard because, of course, you have reached your potential as a caring father and husband, but that's not measured by the level of success that anyone could see externally with a book launch. Again, I think this is so important to people. Even if they're not in that caregiving situation— How we measure the success in our life has got to be more important than the success of a book. Yet we do hold these things so tightly, don't we? Donn: Absolutely. I mean, just the idea that it can't be measured in a great degree. I mean, my day job for so long was teaching college and very seldom would I hear back from students about how much difference it made. I taught public speaking for whatever it's worth, and for most of them it was just a required class. They just needed to check off that box so they could get their degree. Every once in a while I will have one come back. I know one of my students has become a very successful professional speaker. I had a budding career as a professional speaker that I had to give up when Hannah came along because I couldn't be dependable. So to be able to see that in a published book, and not, as you say, to dwell so much on the sales figures or that sort of thing. That's a good measure. There was a study that came out some years ago that they asked people, would you like to write a book? And 85% of them said yes. Out of that 85%, only 15% of them ever started on a book, only I think it was 6% got halfway through, only 3% finished the book and one half of 1% published. Now this study was done before independent publishing. So I imagine that's probably changed some. But given that 3% figure, there's not a lot of people that ever finish a book. So I've learned to place my measures on what I can control. The lack of control is something you mentioned a little earlier, and that is something that I think all caregivers deal with, the lack of the sense of control. So focusing your success measures on what you can control not only is good advice for every writer, but especially for people like caregivers who have so much of their lives that they don't have that sense of control over. Joanna: You almost have to let it go. You can't sit there being angry and frustrated the whole time. I imagine you are some of the time, but you can't wish your life away wishing you were doing something else. Donn: Exactly. I mean, I could drive myself nuts all day long with what I think should be happening with our healthcare system, but I can't have much impact on that. So I try to focus on what I can do as opposed to what I can't or what I can no longer do. Joanna: Well, then just give us some practical tips. You mentioned there the hospital chapel, which I love that. I have that in my mind, I can imagine you dashing in there. So you've got some minutes, I guess you don't know how long, or maybe you think, oh, maybe I've got half an hour or something. How are you getting the writing done? People who have these pockets of time, what can they actually do in those times? Or any useful tips or technology that you've found has helped? Donn: Well, one of the things that I personally had to do was to let go of the notion that I really needed uninterrupted time to be effective. We all know what task switching costs, but task switching is just a reality when you're in this situation. So I have always kept a notebook with me, and that goes back to the newspaper days. You know, I used to keep one of those long notebooks stuck in my back pocket. After cell phones came along, I have never dictated a book, although I'm experimenting with that at this point, but I always kept the phone handy to be able to jot something down. I will mention, in fact, I was thinking about this, I should have put it in the book and I didn't mention this specific app. It's called Say&Go — S-A-Y and then the ampersand G-O. I know it's available on iPhone. I'm not certain on Android. I first got it really so that I could grab ideas when I was driving because you hit the icon on your phone and it immediately starts recording, so you don't have to fiddle with getting the recorder started. It will record for seven seconds and then automatically shut off. You can tap the screen to make it go for 30 seconds. So you can tie it to a Dropbox or Evernote or something like that. So when I would be somewhere, I just grab an idea real quick. The inspiration that you can get while caring—you know, keep reading the books. I was thinking of this this morning, Joanna, you often say send me pictures of where you're listening. There's been so many times that you have accompanied me while I was changing her feeding tube or something, and I'm thinking, Joanna doesn't want to see this! Joanna: Oh, well I mean, that's the reality, isn't it? It's so interesting because I do hear from people who say, you don't want to see my washing machine. I mean, obviously Hannah is a person, so that is a different situation. There might be somebody listening now who is caring for somebody, and they are like, do you really want to see the armchair where I sit next to my parents' bed or something like that? I think it's so amazing, this kind of feeling that there are people who are going through these situations and that we can be with people virtually, or that could be people listening in years time. hatT, I mean, it's a privilege, isn't it really? I mean that's interesting. But coming back to any more practicalities, you talk there about jotting down ideas. How are you getting finished sentences, and editing, and all of that kind of work where you do need to sit down and have a bit more time? Donn: Right, right. Well, the way it would work with Hannah—and one of her neurological impacts is she did not sleep on a regular schedule. She might be awake for 48 straight hours and then suddenly she would sleep for 24 hours. One good thing is that once she went to sleep, she would sleep through a tornado, so I didn't have to worry about disturbing her. So when she slept, I would do one of two things. I would sleep, I'd put a cot down right here beside her because she could have an oxygen issue at any time. So, you know, couldn't leave her by herself. But I would grab a nap and then at other times I would write. Laptops have been a real boom. When I started with them, of course there were these big, clunky desktop computers, and so I take my laptop with me everywhere. I have a little portable keyboard that I can connect to my iPhone. I've always got at least a pad, and so just getting those finished sentences down, I would take advantage of the time that she was asleep or that we had a nurse here at home. I mean the home nurses, they were here primarily for her, of course, but they were a real benefit to me as well. One of the things I think I would say to anybody in this situation listening is you've got to let go of the guilt of thinking, I need to be with that person all the time. You do need to make sure they're taken care of, of course. But many times Hannah would be in the ICU at the hospital and I would know that they are keeping watch on her. If one of her alarms goes off, there's somebody going to be there immediately. So I'd take my laptop and go to the hospital cafeteria or go to the chapel and just squeeze it out as long as I can, but also recognizing that that can stop at any minute. So I've learned to make sure that the material is saved. I plant little breadcrumbs to help me get back into it when I come back. That's not exactly a technical tip, but I'll use square brackets for any notes to myself so that I can do a search for square brackets later to see, okay, what was it I intended to do there? Joanna: That's a good tip. Absolutely. Then the book is obviously an emotional book, and you are also very practical. It's not a memoir as such. There are elements of memoir, but there's a lot of practical tips for people. I think it would be useful for people with young children, although it's a very different kind of caring, it's still those little pockets of time. There is a section, a line I wanted to read here. You say, “Emotional fatigue dulls hope. It whispers, why bother? It convinces you that what you have to say has already been said, or that even if you manage to get the words out, they won't matter.” This really hit me because emotional fatigue for carers is extraordinary, but there's also a lot of stuff going on in the world, right? Conflict in the news. I mean, in America, here in Europe, all over the world, there is a lot of conflict and people have emotional fatigue in general, I think. So a lot of people are saying, why bother? Like it doesn't matter. So how have you gotten over this emotional fatigue? And how can people write even when it seems pointless? Donn: Well, it's an excellent question and I think that humans have wrestled with that question for centuries, outside of caregiving. The nihilism is a very real philosophy. You know, basically what's the point? So the point of living, I think is to live. We could get real philosophical here and that's worth for anybody kind of digging into—what is the point? So for me, one of the things I discovered was apparently I am here to write. It's the thing that makes my heart sing. So given that there is so much conflict in the news, and I'll tell you honestly, that I battle depression anyway, but hings are so depressing in a lot of ways. I'm not sure things are any worse now than what they have always been for humans. It's just that we have a greater ability to be aware of challenges. So you mentioned I'm a pastor. I describe myself as a Zen Methodist. I have been encouraged by the work of like Thich Nhat Hanh, and focusing on not just mindfulness, but this breath, this step, and what can I do as opposed to what I can't or what I no longer can. There's an old saying as I understand it, among Eastern folks, which is “chop wood, carry water.” It's what's in front of me right now. I have learned to manage, I guess you would say, to manage social media. I spent some time training Facebook and other such things by noting the posts that I'm not interested in this, by responding to the ones that I was interested in. So my social media feed is not nearly as toxic as it could be, and I've learned to turn it off. I mainly use it to stay in touch with old high school friends, and when I find myself reading something that just starts to get me outraged, I remind myself one of the great bits of wisdom for the internet age is don't feed the trolls. If you let outrage lead you to post a frowny face or to argue or whatever, that just trains the algorithm that you will engage with that. It doesn't matter whether you like it or not, they just want to keep you reading. So I just ignore those things and after a while it has stopped showing me that. So that helps my peace of mind. I wrestle with, or wrestle against, the idea of sticking my head in the sand, but I bring it right back to, okay, what can I do versus what can't I do? There are things that I can do to help in a little way make the world a better place. When I start getting upset with the lack of empathy and caring that I see in our political class these days, I think, well, what can I do? That's when I will try to find some encouraging meme, for example, and post it to a friend that I know is struggling a bit. Joanna: This book, for example, I don't believe there's anything political in this book about anything. Donn: Yes. Joanna: I think with this book, it doesn't matter where you sit on the political spectrum. It doesn't matter what religion you are, what gender you are, or anything like that. Caring for a loved one is an experience that many people, perhaps most people, will do at some point in their lifetime. So a book like this, I feel, is at heart, it's a human book about the experience of being human and caring for another human. So to me, you're helping the world by putting this book out there. I know one of the things that comes up for us fiction writers is, “Whoa, isn't this a waste of time? I should be writing something more important.” But amusingly, when things are bad, people like to escape into a story. So by writing a story, you're helping people escape, and helping people escape is also a helpful thing. Donn: Absolutely. Yes. Joanna: So writing, I think writing can be of service to our community and ourselves, and it doesn't have to be like a serious book, even though yours is serious, but it's also practical. Donn: And I hope there's some comic relief in the book on occasion. Joanna: There's some dark humor there. Donn: Yes, and it does make me think too, just with this conversation, when we write our stories—and I haven't, other than the business parables, which they use fiction to teach nonfiction—so I've tried to learn good characterization and scene setting and dialogue and all the tools of fiction. It occurs to me that through our books, whether it's fiction, nonfiction, whatever, we are emphasizing that as humans, we have more in common than we have differences. Yes, there are those things that divide us, but when you are sitting beside the bed of somebody who is on the verge of leaving this world or someone who's very sick, all those differences disappear. We just all have more in common than we have differences. Through our writing, you know, the tropes that we talk about, well, they are tropes because they appeal to fairly universal human experience. So I think that's a real service that we provide to people in times of hopelessness is to reinforce the connections that we have. There's no better way to do that than through story. Joanna: Yes, absolutely. So another thing that's happened is after several decades of having Hannah at home and caring for her at home, she now lives in a full-time care facility. I knew that had happened, we had spoken about it, but in reading the book, I kind of was trying to reflect on how big a change this is for you. You say in the book, “We face change, even in impermanence we create.” So I wondered if you could talk about that, because I imagine there's also some relief, but also some guilt over the relief, and a whole load of emotional things. So how are you managing this? Donn: Well, and we moved her—as we're recording this—it was about six weeks ago. So we're still getting used to the change. Initially I would say to people, I'm still getting used to the new routine, but then I realized, heck, for the first time in 22 years, I can have a routine. So that is a change. We had talked about it for a long time before moving her. Again, just for quick context, because of her respiratory needs in particular, I had worried for years about what would happen to her when I could no longer do it because in Tennessee at the time, the only option really would've been to put her in a nursing home with octogenarians, and there was no way that she would get the attention that she needed. So we figured that if we had to do that, she would not survive for a year. Unfortunately her brother heard us saying this. So when we made the decision to move her into this nursing care, what's different is that they opened a new wing for respiratory patients, one of only three in all of East Tennessee. The other two were a two hour drive away, and so this one opened up a mere 30 minutes drive away. We decided to go ahead and move her because it would be better to do it in a controlled manner when the bed was available than to try to deal with it if we were in a crisis situation because I had had a heart attack or something. So I'll admit that there is some problem because I'm not sure her brother emotionally really understands the decision. He hasn't argued or anything. I just think he's very worried. Given that old thing about is the glass half empty or half full, he's always been of the temperament that that glass is nearly empty. Somebody's going to knock it off any minute and I'm going to have to clean it up. So it's hard on him and it's hard on my wife, hard on me, but at the same time, yes, there is some relief there. I think one of the things we would say to listeners who are in this same situation is, in a way, you've got to learn to live with grief. It's going to be there, but don't try to make it go away. That just makes it hang around. I'm not saying ignore it, but you have to address it and let it be there. We made the best decision that we could. Same thing for anybody else listening here, don't feel guilty if you realize that you just cannot keep up the care. Do your best, find the best care that you can get. We're over there two or three times a week. We're keeping a close eye on things, but we're also not bugging them all the time because we need to let them do their jobs. It is different. It's just not lesser or not worse, if that makes sense. Joanna: Well, I mean, you mentioned at the beginning, you're in your seventies now. I think this is an entirely responsible thing to do as you get older, and as you say, doing it while you can control things as opposed to in an emergency sounds very responsible to me. So I hope that settles down. Just on the creative side with the writing, how are you finding this is changing your ability to write? I mean, are you finding you want to write more or you can write more now? How has that changed? Donn: I am writing more. I can write more. I can do more of the good advice we talked about earlier. I'm blocking out time on my calendar. Along with the writing, I also do book interiors and covers and formatting for other authors, so I've been spending more time on that. The systems that I evolved over the years are standing me in good stead even in this situation, like I still leave breadcrumbs for myself. It's easier for me to pick up where I left off than what it used to be. I'm finding, and again, you have been such a great guide on how to use AI to foster your processes. Well, like the book I mentioned that I got two thirds of the way through, and then this one jumped the queue. I gave the manuscript to my AI, whom I have named, by the way. My ChatGPT is Lizzie, named after a character in one of my short stories. So I gave the manuscript to Lizzie and I said, “Okay, tell me where have I left off? Where are the gaps? What do I need to address next?” And she gave me some really good advice and it really cut down the time that I need for getting back into it. Joanna: That is a good use case. It's just because it's so hard in our own brains to kind of hold everything in your brain and it can really help to use an external brain to do that. Donn: Exactly. Yes. I think that's good. Joanna: So we're almost out of time, but I wanted to also ask you about your podcast, The Alignment Show, which, you know, I know podcasting is a lot of work. So why do you podcast? And what is the podcast, for people who might be interested in listening? Donn: Well, the podcast is The Alignment Show, which you can easily find at thealignmentshow.com. It started during the pandemic. I kept hearing about the Great Resignation and I realized for a lot of people, really it was the great realignment as they realized life is short. You don't want to spend it doing something you don't want to do. Some of them were quitting and starting businesses or going to some other job. Some people, and this has been true of some of the guests that had been on the program, they had kind of gotten a little bored with what they were doing. The pandemic had them reassess and they realized, you know, they really took joy in what they were doing and they rediscovered that. Even within that, they decided this part of the job, it's not really essential. I can get rid of that or I can outsource it. So just having these conversations with people I would not otherwise get to talk with. I mean, quite honestly, I think it brought you and me together. You were gracious enough to come on The Alignment Show twice. I'll mention this, I have a small group of people that I call stars in alignment. They're people who can come on my podcast anytime they want to, because I know they will have something useful for my audience. And you are one of the stars in alignment. Joanna: Oh, thank you. Donn: Absolutely. But see, although I have followed you for years, I'm a patron and I would encourage anybody who benefits from your mentorship, even from afar, to take advantage of that. Despite that connection, I'm not sure we would've connected had it not been for the podcast. So that's one of the things that makes it important to me to do that. Plus just like writing itself, it gives me an observable outcome. I started saying income—doesn't give me much. Not there. No. But it gives me an observable outcome. You know, I can tell when I've had a conversation and I've made an episode and I've posted it and I can see people responding to it. You're on what episode, 2000? Joanna: Not quite, but that direction. Donn: Yes, way up there. I'm approaching 100. Well, just a fun fact, 90% of podcasts don't make it past three episodes. Joanna: Yes. Donn: Of those that get past three episodes, 90% of that group don't make it past episode 20. The average podcast lifespan is about 174 days. So you have far outlasted that and so have I. I'm not to your level yet, but there is some satisfaction in that and that's encouraging when you are in a situation like caregiving where so much is just out of your control. This is something I can control. Joanna: Yes, I think that's great. Also, it externalizes your day. I mean, if you've been caring all day and then you get an hour on the phone with someone else talking about something completely different, I imagine that's somehow refreshing as well, mentally. Donn: Oh, yes. Absolutely. I mean, wow, there are other people on the planet! Joanna: Yes. Donn: You know, I got to be honest, during the pandemic when we all had the isolation and all that sort of thing, I couldn't tell much difference. I mean, it was just about what our days were like anyway. So having that connection, and we emphasized that several places in the book, find ways to have the connection, even if it is virtual. Joanna: Yes, absolutely. Because caregivers, I think, get more sick than non-caregivers. It puts a big strain on you emotionally, physically, in every single way. So having a community, even online, must really help. Donn: Yes. Sow I will say, for many years, even before Hannah came along, teaching college, I would not get sick during the semester because I just couldn't. Then when the semester was over, almost every semester, I would get sick for three or four days. It was like my body saying, okay, fool, you're not going to rest on your own. I'm going to make you. Well, the last few years I have not gotten sick. You know, as we've mentioned on another conversation, Joanna, our oldest son died about eight years ago. When he died, all of us were down with the flu. So it has happened, not very often. When we placed Hannah in the nursing home, I got sick almost immediately. I got food poisoning three times. Joanna: Your body just shut you down, right? Donn: Yes. That was basically it. I mean, that was the first time I'd really been sick, probably in five years. Joanna: So it's really important to look after yourself in this transitional time for you. So the book is fantastic. Obviously I am not a caregiver at the moment. I mean, like I said, this can come for anyone at different points in our lives. The book is Creating While Caring, but also you have lots more. So where can people find you and your books and your podcast online? Donn: So two or three quick URLs here. The podcast is TheAlignmentShow.com. That's all one word. My base website, which needs updating is DonnKing.com. That's Donn with a double N. Where have I heard that before? And I have learned to say that from you. So D-O-N-N-K-I-N-G.com. Within that, the most up-to-date parts, the most important ones: DonnKing.com/books. This book is at DonnKing.com/creatingwhilecaring, all one word. And then anything else that folks want to connect with, like I'm active on LinkedIn. You can go to LinkTree, that's linktr.ee/donnking. Joanna: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Donn. That was great. Donn: Thank you. This has been a wonderful conversation as I always love talking with you, and I hope that this is helpful to some of my friends and colleagues out there in the same situation.The post Creating While Caring With Donn King first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Why does the publishing industry feel more chaotic than ever, and what can writers do about it? How do you know if you're truly burned out or just creatively empty? When should successful authors start saying no instead of yes to every opportunity? Becca Syme shares her hard-won wisdom about navigating burnout, embracing unpredictability, and knowing what to quit (and what not to quit) in your writing career. In the intro, Frankfurt Book Fair AI and audio [Audible, Publishers Weekly]; Free Reads by BookBub; Halloween book sale; Writing Storybundle; Today's show is sponsored by Bookfunnel, the essential tool for your author business. Whether it’s delivering your reader magnet, sending out advanced copies of your book, handing out ebooks at a conference, or fulfilling your digital sales to readers, BookFunnel does it all. Check it out at bookfunnel.com/thecreativepenn This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn  Becca Syme is an author, coach, and creator of the Better Faster Academy. She is a USA Today bestselling author of small town romance and cozy mystery, and also writes the Dear Writer series of non-fiction books. She's also the host of the QuitCast Podcast. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.  Show Notes Identifying burnout vs. creative blocks. How long symptoms last and checking for biological/life transition causes first. The transition from saying yes to saying no. Learning when you've reached the point where selectivity becomes essential for sustainability “Loki is in charge.” Why publishing is unpredictable and when to stop analyzing what went wrong. Increased chaos or increased visibility. Whether publishing really has more unpredictability now or we're just seeing it more clearly. What to quit doing. Book signings as investments and judging other authors online, plus the dangers of social media dysregulation. What not to quit. Writing itself and maintaining hope for the future, regardless of industry changes. You can find Becca at betterfasteracademy.com/links. Transcript of Interview with Becca Syme Joanna: Becca Syme is an author, coach, and creator of the Better Faster Academy. She is a USA Today bestselling author of small town romance and cozy mystery, and also writes the Dear Writer series of non-fiction books. She's also the host of the QuitCast Podcast. So welcome back to the show, Becca. Becca: Thank you so much for having me again. I love being here. Joanna: You were last on the show in March 2024, so I guess around 18 months now. Give us an update. What has changed in your writing and your author business? Becca: So I've started writing more fiction again. I think the last time I was here I was doing almost zero fiction writing, just because I was so busy. And I went through burnout, which is not going to surprise anyone. I think we've all been there. One of the things I decided as a post-burnout goal was to try to write fiction every day. I don't every single day do it, but I do it often enough that it feels like I'm doing it every day. So I'm happy about that. Joanna: That's interesting because you hear people saying, “Oh, I've got a block around writing fiction” or something. How do people know if they are in burnout versus they are just empty, or perhaps they have other reasons? How do people tell where they are and the reason why they can't write? Becca: How long it lasts is usually the biggest indicator for me. Because if you're empty and you try to fill again, right? Like, let's go reading, let's go watching, and it doesn't come back, then it's more likely to be burnout. Burnout itself, like the kind of extreme burnout that we hear about where you can't get up off the bathroom floor, that kind of thing, will be real evident when you're in what we call “all systems burnout.” Usually a burnout that is a creative burnout or a physical or emotional burnout can have other potential causes. So I would always go looking for things like, “Am I in perimenopause?” I joke with people, “Is it burnout or am I in perimenopause?” because it feels the same. So I always want to check biological first, or if I'm in a life transition, that's often the reason why I'm more blocked. So I want to look outside at environmental first to see if there's a cause. If there is, then I want the cause to get dealt with. But it's usually time. How long is it lasting? Joanna: How long does it last? I think that's so important. It seems like people blame writing before anything else. I had a friend who had a death in the family and was like, “Oh, I just can't write.” And I'm like, “Give it six months.” Grieving is another reason. There are lots of reasons why your whole self might be like, “Now's not the time to write a cozy mystery” or whatever. Becca: I don't think we consider enough how different it is to be a creative person versus other things you might do for work. If I'm grieving, I can probably still show up to my Starbucks job and do a reasonable job of making coffee most of the time, right? So I may not be as affected in my ability to go to the grocery store or my ability to paint houses or something. But all of our work comes from our brain, so anything that impacts our cognition, anything that impacts our processing time. Honestly, if the stakes go up even just a little bit in our real life, there's a likelihood that it's going to impact our creativity to a point where sometimes, “I'm afraid I might lose my job,” then all of a sudden the creativity dries up and goes away. Or “I'm afraid of what might happen if…” and then insert a million things here that can be making me feel afraid. Creativity can just go away because, again, it's Maslow's hierarchy, right? I know it's not 100% one layer at a time all the time, but if your base level foundation is being attacked, if you don't know for sure how you're going to make your mortgage next month, it's going to be real hard to reach creative freedom if you're worried about stuff. Joanna: Thinking about ourselves as whole people rather than like you can just turn on the writing even if everything else is kind of crazy. I've got to ask you, Becca, since you are a coach, you're a very wise person, you've been on this show lots, and you've helped me, helped many people that you coach, and you've talked about avoiding burnout before— How on earth did you end up in burnout? Becca: So some of it is high stakes, right? It's not uncommon for people when they see a lot of success in their business to be overwhelmed by all the things that there are to do, to have a hard time delegating. It's kind of in the phases of a business and the way businesses grow. There's a phase that is like massive growth. Infrastructure causes massive growth. Then if you don't adapt to that easily or quickly by either offloading things off your plate or lowering the financial stakes, a lot of people will get burned out when they have to make all of these decisions about money. Money stresses them out. So you have high stakes, that means the stress goes up, which means it costs me more energy to do things that I would have done previously with less energy. It can kind of sneak up on you if you're not conscious about it all the time. Then, of course, you have to quit stuff. You would think being the quit coach, I would be really great at that, but it's really hard to quit something that has been good or beneficial, even if it is having a high cost. Joanna: I mean, obviously being a coach, you give a lot of yourself to other people. I just can't imagine how hard that is. I mean, one of the reasons I do this podcast is I hope to help people through the show, but it's not the intensity that coaches like yourself do. How did you then manage to adapt and change things so that now you are out of burnout again? Becca: I'm probably doing more similar things to what you've been doing, which is trying to create more what I would call large scale, right? Like doing more podcast episodes. I'm trying to travel less and be really intentional about the places I travel being worth it for my energy and time. Then I'm also doing more volume. So I'm trying to do more books, more posts, more social media time, things that don't cost me one-on-one. For a long time and probably the last time I was here, I was at maybe not the height, but pretty close to the height. I was coaching eight to ten hours a day, every day sometimes. Joanna: Oh my goodness. Becca: Yes, so I was doing super high volume coaching and then also traveling a lot at the same time. I would travel two times a month for conference speaking sometimes, and every single month of the year. I never really had a break from it, but that was again, my own choice. Nobody forced me to do it. So I had to quit saying yes to everything, which was very difficult. Then I had to quit saying yes to all coaching. I had to do things like raise my coaching prices, but then I also have to create the value in other places. So go back to making the QuitCast again, start producing more non-fiction books, doing more high volume courses like small free courses and stuff like that. So I'm doing similar high volume things, but it is a transition for me who's used to being accessible and reachable and able to help people one-on-one a lot. It's been a challenge. Joanna: I get that. I guess for people listening, I mean, there's a point in your career, whatever that is, where you do have to say yes a lot. Then there's a point where you have to start saying no more. How do people figure out when the hell that is? Is it like you say, at the point of overwhelm, you are almost forced into it? Are there ways people can tell when they need to start saying no rather than forcing themselves to say yes? Becca: So usually you learn by the sort of everything crashes down, right? Like you have a burnout, you miss a big important deadline, you let somebody down. So that's usually where most of us get our awareness or our learning curve of like, “Oh, I need to quit these things.” It is possible to see the patterns coming and sort of strategize for yourself about how to be more intentional with your time, especially as you see growth happening. Once you get into a place with your author career where there's demand for what you're doing, there's going to only be increasing demand because demand is so unusual, like high levels of demand. So once you see that coming, if you want to not get into a burnout place, you want to be more strategic about it. You can say no earlier, but you have to be willing to pay the price for it. I think that's what a lot of us aren't capable of doing, that we're so afraid of what happens if we say no, that we get that FOMO, right? The fear of missing out and we're not able to say no. So we sort of have to teach ourselves that JOMO concept, the joy of missing out, by being forced to say no by life or energy or just circumstances. So most of us have to learn by falling face first into it. Joanna: Which happened to you. It's so interesting because literally just before we got on the phone, I had an email about a speaking opportunity and part of me was like, “Oh, that would be really good networking.” So this was not a money thing, this was more a networking thing, and I was like, “Maybe I should say yes.” Then I remembered that I keep an email template for precisely this time, which basically says reasons why I'm not doing this kind of thing. So I copy and paste that email and then make a few adjustments to it. I did send that email, and I didn't think about it too long, and I've kind of reached that point now. Having the email template helps me a lot because— As people pleasers, you have to be able to say no in a graceful manner. I mean, you don't, but I feel like I do. Becca: I think a lot of people pleasers do though, and there's a fair number of us in the artistic industry, right? The way that we got here is often because we like to make people happy. So you need to know that whatever consequence you're afraid of paying is either not as bad as you think it's going to be. So me saying no, I think that stakes are very high for that, but it turns out they're not as high as I am afraid that they are. So just knowing with practice that it does actually get easier to say no if I will allow myself to practice it. The problem is we don't understand what's going on in our brain, right? So with a lot of us, we actually have life and death stakes attached to the idea of saying no at all. I think somehow it's going to be this nebulous outcome. So anytime I think, “Well, what happens if I say no?” and I get a fear that is so nebulous, I can't tell you what it is that I'm actually afraid of. That's something we can just not listen to because that's a fear response. That's not helpful. A lot of us need to learn how to say no by doing. We can't just have a magical feeling that we're waiting for. “I'll say no when it feels okay to say no.” Well, it's never going to feel okay to say no. You've got to do it. Then it feels better each time you do it because it turns out that it didn't kill me to say no, and that's what I'm afraid of. Joanna: As you said, it's not hard to say no to things you hate. It's hard to say no to things that are good and would be good for your business or would be good connections or whatever. But if you say no, then you have more energy for the things that you want to do. So I think that's so important. Okay, I wanted to ask you about something. I've heard you say this a couple of times, and on your Facebook page just last week, you had a post saying “Loki is in charge.” So I wanted to ask you what do you mean by that? It's fascinating, but— Just explain who Loki is, just in case people don't know. Becca: Yes, the God of chaos, right? So Loki is the God of mischief or the God of chaos and the things that are unpredictable. So I'll use the Marvel version because it's easy to kind of contrast Loki with Captain America inside of Marvel. I mean, Loki is like the commonly known God of chaos or God of mischief. But inside of the Marvel universe, Captain America is the sort of logical… everything is logical, everything's predictable, everything that's good is good, everything that's bad is bad. The consequences seem to follow logically that if you do good, good things happen. If you do bad, bad things happen. That's kind of the template that we have in our head about how we think the world should work. So a lot of writers think, “Well, if I do the work, I'll get the outcome. If I run these ads, I'll sell books. If I do this thing, I'll sell…” The logical follow of doing work is that it will naturally be the consequence of something sort of like one plus one equals two. We think that that math is in charge of the publishing industry, that somehow good books will sell, or if I write more books, I will sell, or if I write to market, I will sell. Captain America is not in charge of the publishing industry. Loki is in charge. So sometimes the things that you do have no impact whatsoever, and sometimes they have all the impact. Sometimes you change covers and it makes the book sell, and sometimes you change covers and it doesn't. I think part of what I'm trying to say in this “Loki is in charge” is not about the future, right? It's not to say, “Well, we should all be very afraid because Loki's in charge and Loki's in charge of the future.” No, no, no. The question is if I am looking backwards and I'm trying to evaluate what I have done and I have come to the end of my evaluation and can't find a reason why it's not happening. So I'm three months past a launch and the books didn't sell the way I wanted them to sell, and my tendency internally is to say, “Well, the rules of the publishing industry are logical and therefore there must be a logical reason, a logical cause for why this didn't happen that I could find and change, and then next time I will sell better.” Sometimes the answer is literally “Loki's in charge.” We don't know what happened. It's not worth trying to figure it out is essentially what I'm saying, right? Like, yes, there's a reason somewhere, but it's not worth spending your time trying to figure it out or trying to iterate when the highest level of chance that you have at better results is starting a new thing. Right? So like writing a new book, starting a new launch, doing a new series. The answer isn't always start a new series, but it might be do the next book in the series you're not enough books in. So many of us are trying to be so precious with each individual action that we take and figure out what it was that didn't work as though somehow there's this very easy to find causal reason, a one-to-one reason. So often what I want people to do is just look backwards and be like, “Okay, well, sometimes the answer is Loki's in charge and I need to not worry too much about it because I'm wasting my time trying to find the reason.” When sometimes the reason is there are too many people publishing that day or you didn't happen to take off on TikTok and that is not something you can control and do anything about. So a lot of it is just what's in our control and what's not, and trying to be more comfortable with things being out of our control. So I use Loki because we all laugh when I say it, right? It's like “Loki's in charge. Oh, Loki. Stupid Loki,” right? Like whatever. It makes the cause be something that feels enough out of your control in a safe way instead of it feeling like, “No, I have to figure this out and fix it.” Right? It's sort of meant to be a tongue-in-cheek way of being like, “Okay, let's just move on. You're going to be okay. Let's do the next one.” Joanna: Who is this Kevin you keep talking to? Becca: Kevin is like the John Doe, right? Like the sort of John Doe. I use George and Kevin and Carol sort of interchangeably when I'm talking to a random writer. Like trying to say, “All right, let's go. It's okay to move on.” Joanna: I thought… and everyone, Becca does know my name. It's not Kevin. This is not Kevin. So, well, I think this is interesting and I wonder whether you feel that there is more chaos right now? As in we've always had chaos in the publishing industry, but it does seem like there is a lot of transition right now. There are things that were working even kind of last month, and now people are like, “Oh no, this is bad.” Do you think there is more chaos, or is it just the same as normal? Becca: I sort of go back and forth on whether there is more. Usually in transition periods there is a little bit more, right? Like if you think about when you live in your house on a normal day, there's very little unpredictable stuff that's probably going to happen. When you're moving, all of a sudden there's probably more unpredictable stuff that's going to happen, just because the added sort of transition causes more chaos. So I do think it's possible that there's more chaos. What I think is happening is that the unpredictability is becoming more visible than it's ever been before, because in the past it feels sort of like the people who were getting the unpredictable results were either not being heard effectively. Just speaking objectively as a coach, there's always been a high level of unpredictability in this industry. It's just that the people who are teaching are often the ones who are getting whatever result and then saying, “Oh, this is what should be happening when you do this.” So the people who are at what I would call that kind of expert level often feel like there's a lot more predictability, ahat's not always the case anymore. I think there's a lot of teachers and a lot of speakers and presenters who are feeling the unpredictability more than maybe they were in the past. So now we're seeing it a little bit more visibly. I don't know that I believe there's any more unpredictability other than the typical transitional stuff of like, “Well, that used to work and now it doesn't work anymore.” But if you've been in this industry as long as I think some of us have who listen to this show, this happens every time there's a transition. It happened in the transition between when Facebook ads slowed down in their effectiveness or changed in effectiveness. It happened when Instagram changed in its effectiveness. It's happened when KU first started, it happened in KU 2.0 launch. There's always some transition feeling. I think there's additionally more transition globally and internationally and nationally than there has been in the past too. So less stability in other places makes it feel more unstable. So I go back and forth about if there's actually less predictability or if we're just more conscious of it. But either way, we feel like there is more now, for sure. Joanna: I was just reflecting as you were talking about the people who were teaching, but there's quite a few who've dropped away. I mean, if you think about Author Nation, the speakers are quite different and new voices come in and teach new things, and I'm not going to necessarily pivot into others. So for example, TikTok is always my go-to example of, I am not going to. I did not pivot into TikTok. I'm not going to, that is just not my thing. So there's lots of people who are starting now who I'm like, “No, no, you really maybe should try TikTok. Don't listen to me. You can't have my career in the same way.” People can't have your career. Lee Child always says you can't have my career. When you're starting out fresh, you almost need to look for different people to follow. What do you think about voices to listen to in a transition? Becca: Ultimately, and this is why I said I think it might feel like there's more chaos, is because we do get a lot of security out of people who are starting something new, right? Because they have a lot of brash excitement and they believe that things are possible. It's almost like a wave that crests on the shore. In order for us to maintain that level of progress as an industry, we need new people to always be coming up over the old wave and coming up over the old wave. The old wave might go out and then come back again. There may be that I need to retreat a little bit and kind of regroup and then come back with new enthusiasm. Sure, but in a creative industry, because so much of creativity happens when I am more secure, what we always need is to listen to people who make us feel like there is a security about what could be happening, like what could be possible. The reality of the industry on just a one-to-one basis is not something that most of us need to be worried about because it is so unpredictable. Who will and who won't? What will take off and what won't? What will work and what won't? It's so unpredictable. All you need to do is just have the resilience to keep going, and I think we need that new wave to come up every once in a while to remind us all and fill us all with this renewed hope of like, “Oh my gosh, think about what might happen if…” et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Whenever I hear that there's new people teaching new stuff, I get excited about it because I think authors need to have that excitement and enthusiasm and “this is what's possible.” Then they learn something new and it opens their mind, it helps them get through transitions, it creates more stability. We get more engaged, we have more fun. Like ultimately that is the way we thrive long term, that we have a sustainable career. Joanna: I guess, obviously as you said, we're both learners and there are things that we both have changed our businesses. Although I've been selling direct since I started in 2008, I only adopted Kickstarter a couple of years ago and now I love it. I absolutely love it. It's a really important part of my business financially, but also creatively. Like the things I create in my Kickstarters are so important to me in so many ways. You are doing a Kickstarter. So tell us a bit more about that and why you are doing that. You've done them before too, haven't you? Why is it important to you to do Kickstarters? Becca: So, I love being able to bring a new book to people and like, I usually do a book and a tool, right? Like some kind of workshop or card deck or like, something that I will do in addition to the non-fiction book. There's something that happens around when we infuse new learning into a community, and specifically my community is very learner focused in the sort of the Better Faster, QuitCast kind of arena. So my first book that I sort of took off with was called Dear Writer, You Need to Quit. And I've become the QuitCast and quit books and quit coach and all those things. So the new book is called Dear Writer, You Still Need to Quit. It is basically the same sort of structure as the first book in terms of one essay will be aimed at this group and the next essay will be aimed at a different group. I think I had 18 or 19 chapters in the first book, and this one has 40 so far. Joanna: Love it. Becca: There are probably more coming apart from that. What I'm trying to do with this book is sort of give us this… almost like these aren't the droids you're looking for moment, right? Like it's okay to just let that go. It's okay to not worry about that. It's okay to look away, and try to remind people like what is it that's really important about maintaining forward motion in your career? And what are the rules that you actually need to live by? And what are the forms and functions you actually need to live by and what can you release and just stop worrying about? So much of what I want to get across to authors is like we worry about so much that is just, you can't know any of these things. Like you can't know whether a book is going to take off until after you've released it. So the more we worry that it won't happen, instead of encouraging ourselves to practice the resilience that will allow us to see incremental growth as beneficial and also prepare us for larger growth when it happens. And to know that incremental growth doesn't preclude you from having larger growth in the future. So sort of things like, here's how we might misunderstand what a career trajectory looks like, and we worry so much about following a particular pattern, not realizing that there are 300 other patterns that can also lead to the success that we want. So I think a lot of what I'm trying to do is just remind us like, these aren't the droids you're looking for. It's fine to ignore this stuff. Let's refocus on what's really, really important. Joanna: It's interesting that you said about we don't know whether a book will take off. I just got to be realistic. I mean, I've written like nearly 50 books and I've never had a book like take off in the sense of like traditional media going, “Wow, this is amazing,” or number one on Amazon. So just to encourage people, you can have a career just selling some books every month. Becca: A fulfilling career, and not just a fulfilling career, but it doesn't mean that you're not successful. I think we all look at these sort of success patterns of like, “Okay, this person went from selling 10 books a month to selling 10,000 books a month,” and now we're like, “Well if I don't hit that trajectory that somehow there's something wrong with me.” As opposed to, “Well, okay, but that's just one story.” Joanna is a great example. You build over time or you get a little bit more each release and then you have a thing where you have a slump where you don't sell as much. Sometimes when people go into those slumps, they're like, “Oh, well my career is over. I stopped growing. So clearly there's a problem now.” Where I would say, “But if you look from a big picture at it, this is probably just a downturn that needs a creative upturn, rather than this is the end. I'm never going to be able to do this again.” We just make so many pronouncements about things, or we're afraid of those pronouncements in our heads because we don't actually know what it is that could be happening. We're too ready to be afraid that it's all going to be over, as opposed to, “You know what, I can weather this. So if I have to get a second job for a while so that I can continue to write, I don't see that as a failure. I see that as resilience and progress and me being creative and still being able to write. Like I just want to never stop writing.” We have these templates in our head that we get so attached to, and I just want us to remember that resilience is important and there's more that could be possible than you would ever think because of what we're afraid might happen. That fear keeps us really narrowed and tight and stressed, and the hope really makes us more expansive and feel better in our skin. Joanna: Well, I'm looking forward to all the 45-plus different things I need to quit. Obviously we're not going to go through everything now, but just maybe— Give us one thing that is a really common thing that we haven't talked about that we should be quitting. Becca: Yes. Quit going to book signings. This is my little bit of a soapbox about this. By all means go to book signings if what you want is to network, like if your goal is networking or if your goal is like, “I'll take whatever new readers I can get and I'm not going to try to break even,” let's say on book signings. Because I think book signings are something that went through a phase in like 2014, 15, 16 as well, where we had a similar fervor about like, “Let's start 55 book signings and everybody's going to do one, and this is going to be it for me. I'm investing $5,000 into this and so in order for me to get out what I need, I have to break even because this is a business expense.” And I'm like, “No. If you are a mid-list or low-list author, book signings are either ways for you to connect with the fans that you already have.” So seeing it as an investment with the fans and trying to increase your longevity of your career by keeping those fans around. Or it's an opportunity for you to network with other authors. Very rarely is it going to sell enough books at enough volume that it's going to be a good investment of your time and money. I think a lot of us see book signings as something that we have to do in order to grow, but we just don't understand that growth doesn't happen that way. You can't create demand in that way unless demand is already visible in other places. So what I'd rather see people do, if it was me, I'd rather see people have much lower price or free books if they're low and mid-list authors paperbacks at the book signings and see it as almost like a lead magnet sample promotional opportunity rather than trying to feel like I have to. I think we treat it like an investment when that's not a great business decision for most of us. I would rather see people do fewer signings or treat them like promotional opportunities and really invest in getting as broad of a reach as you can rather than trying to see it as an investment financially, like where I'm going to try to make all my money back, and then people price their books really high and they don't sell. Joanna: It's interesting though because I've had quite a few people on recently who—I mean, I think you mean a different kind of thing—but people selling at fairs, people selling in person direct from a store. Becca: Direct from a store? Like from a stall? Joanna: Yes, like a market stall or a… Becca: So I'm a fan of stuff like that if the person is going into it knowing that this is going to be a very high level of investment for one sale at a time, right? Or there are some people out there who adore hand selling. Again, I think part of what happens when we look at other people's stories is we have to say, “Was there already a demand for their books that they're responding to?” Like, is there already a high level of demand for those books? And they're essentially filling a demand that already exists. Or if I think about like a fair or a farmer's market or a craft fair or something where there is no one else selling books there, so they're taking advantage of the blue water. That's a totally different thing for me from attending a book signing where there's 500 authors and I'm going there assuming that if I can somehow compete with those top sellers, that I'm going to be able to sell all of my books at full price. I see people signing up for four and five and six and seven signings a year, and I'm like, we disrupt our travel, we spend more time. Again, unless you love it—because my caveat for things is always, if you love hand selling, please do it. If you love festivals, please do it. If you love signings, please do it. If you're feeling pressured to do it because everybody's doing it, please question the premise. Not everyone has the same experience. Again, Loki's in charge, right? It doesn't react the same when everyone does it. Joanna: Or it's just not your thing. I find it interesting talking to people who really enjoy hand selling because it's not at all what I enjoy. I have a bit of a soapbox too, and I thought I'd put this in. Quit hating on other authors and judging other independent authors. Particularly because as independent authors, we are responsible for our creative choices, our business choices. We are independent. At the moment there just seems to be a lot more hating on other authors and judging other authors, because of the AI stuff in a major way. So what do you think about this? Becca: I feel like anytime there is a level of judgment with other people, there's always a fear at the core of it, right? So if I find myself having really big responses to something, like I see people doing a certain thing online, whatever the thing is, and I get really up in my feelings about it, there are two options there. One is I can do the work internally to try to figure out what that emotion is and walk away from the keyboard. I can let myself calm down first, and then come back and have a conversation that is less emotional about it. I think the problem usually with people who are hating on other people online, like they're getting very up in their feelings, is that they're not pausing at all. When they feel frustrated or angry or judgmental, they're just going along with the dysregulation and they don't understand. So if you think about Joanna and I in a room with 300 people, let's just say we're at Author Nation, we're all in a room with 300 people in that room. We're all listening to someone talk and we're all feeling very safe and secure and excited and we're having all these positive feelings. Then there are people in the room who see danger somewhere, like let's say there's a bear in the back corner of the room. Most of the room can't see it, and there's like 10 people in the back of the room who can see it. Then they can actually feel feelings that are big enough that they can dysregulate the rest of the room no matter what's happening from the front. We won't even realize that it's happening until we all turn and look at the bear and see it and then run away, right? So we mass dysregulate each other. When we're online and we don't realize that the exact same thing is happening, that we all feel like, “Oh, there's this… I'm feeling a lot of fear or frustration and I'm going to the computer because I feel dysregulated. I want to express it.” Usually we express emotion and then somehow we get regulated by that. But because when we dysregulate other people, they dysregulate us, it's like this big dysregulation fest that ends up happening. When we're all getting on, let's say, Threads and complaining about something, right? The goal in complaining one person to one person is that somebody listens, somebody talks, and then we regulate each other by coming to a conclusion of how we can handle the situation. What we don't realize is if I feel really big feelings, the goal of me feeling those big feelings is to regulate the situation for me to feel secure again. When we take it to the internet or we start complaining or yelling or getting frustrated or whatever, we're looking for that loop close of that validation of those feelings, but then we end up just mass dysregulating each other. The problem is because we're not 300 people in a room, we are each in our own room with our own computer, there is no loop closed to that dysregulation pattern. It just keeps growing and growing and growing and getting worse and worse and worse and worse and worse. There's no end to the dysregulation until we get so overwhelmed that we have to walk away from the computer. The reason I say I would like us to walk away from the computer first and then come back and engage after we have gotten rid of that emotion, rather than communicating in the middle of it, is that you cannot mass regulate people. So I can't say something, for instance, on Threads in a response to a comment chain that has gone sort of off the rails. Everybody that's reading it is dysregulated. I can't say something that will regulate all of those people because they want to be dysregulated in that moment, unless I specifically answer the one thing that they're saying. So I will say the judgment also frustrates me, but for a different reason. It frustrates me because it's not helpful. Us all getting dysregulated together doesn't actually help solve any of the problems. All it does is make us spend more time on social media or make us spend more time on Threads or TikTok or YouTube or whatever. It takes us away from the thing that could regulate us, which is people actually listening and talking and coming to a conclusion and having a conversation. I'd rather see us call a friend than comment on Threads, because then at least we could have a conversation that's relational and we could get somewhere productive. I just wish people could understand, you cannot mass regulate people. You can only mass dysregulate them. So the computer and the phone are just an excuse for waiting to be dysregulated at some point. I wish more people would think about the fact that it's not helping the way we think it's helping. Joanna: To engage with that. Becca: Yes. Joanna: So the answer is to walk away rather than… Becca: I would rather have us walk away first. Yes. Joanna: I mean, I do that. I just see so much misinformation, and you know how it is. I guess we started off by sort of saying no more. In general, I do just walk away. I really just take myself out of it rather than, as you say— Trying to persuade people on social media of anything is just kind of pointless. Becca: Yes. Joanna: As you also mentioned, we are at a time in history where there's a lot, a lot going on, let's say. There's so much going on. So as you say, if you are head up around whatever you are, head up around politically or wars and all kinds of things to get angry about. Then you see another comment about something in the author world, I suppose it's all just very triggering at the moment. So it would be good if we all walked away a lot more. It is hard. It is hard though, isn't it? Is that maybe how it feels at the moment, that Loki is in charge of the world, not just publishing? Becca: Yes, it does. It feels so unpredictable and chaotic, but so much of that again is because we are not all in a room together. We're each in our own rooms at the computer. If you think about what benefits digital spaces is actually benefits all digital spaces for us to be dysregulated, not for us to be regulated. Because regulated people don't need to spend time on social media. They can be like, “Oh, look at this cool thing, and oh, puppy,” and then they go about their life. When I'm dysregulated, I have to spend more time there because I'm trying to close whatever loop it is. So it's either the boredom loop that I'm trying to close that will never close because it keeps just opening more boredom loops, one after another. Or it's an anger loop, or a sadness loop, or a fear loop. heT Internet's not going to close any of those for us. All it's going to do is keep them open because it benefits when our loops are open. This is why I end all of my QuitCasts now with “shut the computer down, turn off the phone, go open the manuscript,” because that has a higher percentage of ability to regulate you than anything you're going to read on Facebook or Threads, or see on TikTok or whatever. Including the positive stuff because the positive stuff is just anesthetic to keep you engaged until the negative stuff catches you and then it can suck you in. So on some level, and I know I'm sounding very negative to social media, some of it's really fine and beneficial, but the number one difference in people who easily and quickly are productive versus the people who aren't, almost 2-to-1 is how much time they allow themselves to spend on social media. It's whether or not they reach for their phone first thing in the morning or whether they don't. It's so hard sometimes to convince people that it's actually dangerous enough to be there, that we should really be avoiding it as much as possible. Tt the same time, I understand we're all adults, we're going to make our own choices. Realistically, I think a lot of our productivity woes, our selling woes, et cetera, could be helped if we would just not reach for the phone first thing in the morning. Joanna: I find going for a walk helps. Getting outside. Like, oh, there's a world out there. The world is not in the screen. The world is actually a lot bigger. I find that helps. Joanna: Okay, so we are almost out of time, but obviously, so the campaign is “Dear Writer, You Still Need to Quit,” but— What don't we need to quit? What can we keep doing? Becca: So we do not need to quit writing. Joanna: Yay. Becca: That's the key for me. I think no matter what happens on any level, no matter how bad the predictions get about whatever's going to change, there is no need for us to quit writing or to believe that writing is going to be taken away from us. Even if the capacity to sell in one way is taken away, there's always going to be other ways. I feel like we need to just remind ourselves almost like that kind of motto or catchphrase that you repeat to yourself every time it comes up. Like the jingles, right? There's this “Save big money at Menards” thing that comes up a lot in the Midwest because we see Menards signs everywhere, and I always think “Save big money at Menards.” Like I sing it in my head. I wish that people would sing in their head, “Open the manuscript, open the manuscript, open the manuscript” just over and over and over again. So much of our fear can be combated by stopping ourselves from thinking about what might happen and just continuing to practice the opening of the manuscript and the disappearing into the writing and the enjoyment of the writing, as often as possible. No matter how bad the predictions are, I still don't believe that there's a reason for us to stop hoping for writing and wanting to write more. On that note, I just don't believe there's a reason for us not to be hopeful about the future. We might go through some hard stuff. We might have change, so learn how to be resilient, learn how to pivot, learn how to be flexible. There's an element of learning that no matter what you think is being taken away, there's always a possibility that we could switch back, that things could transition backwards, right? I don't mean to come off saying don't be worried about. I'm not saying don't be worried about anything. I'm specifically talking about it in the publishing industry. I think we think about what might happen and we get so closed off about the future and there's going to be so much fear and change and closing. So many of us don't realize that we will be good at change when it happens. We're not going to be good at change now, but we can be more flexible and more hopeful about the future if we look for things to be flexible and hopeful about instead of focusing on the things that we're not. So there's no reason for us to quit being hopeful about the future. There's no reason for us to quit writing, and if we can just focus on that, there's always some more interesting thing I could be writing, some manuscript that I could open, something that I could hope for. There's always possibility in the future. There's always possibility of selling, there's always possibility of new readers. There's always going to be possibility. So if we can just focus on that, it's going to be a lot easier to get through the hard things if we don't lose our hope about the future. Joanna: Absolutely. Brilliant. So where can people find you and your books and the Kickstarter online? Becca: betterfasteracademy.com/links will have everything. So all one word, all lowercase. That is the one-stop shop for Becca. Joanna: Brilliant. Thanks so much for your time, Becca. That was great. Becca: Thank you for having me. This transcript has been edited for clarity and readability while maintaining the authentic voices and insights of both speakers.The post Loki Is In Charge. How Authors Can Thrive In A Time Of Transition With Becca Syme first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How can authors write about climate change without preaching? What happens when your publisher goes under just before your book launch? How do theatre skills translate to better dialogue, readings, and author events? With author and theater director Laura Baggaley. In the intro, Indie presses are in existential crisis [The Bookseller]; what to do when things are hard [Wish I'd Known Then]; Book marketing with garlic-infused ink [The Guardian]; Writing Storybundle; Halloween horror promo; Blood Vintage folk horror; My new author photos; Day of the Dead [Books and Travel]; Today's show is sponsored by ProWritingAid, writing and editing software that goes way beyond just grammar and typo checking. With its detailed reports on how to improve your writing and integration with writing software, ProWritingAid will help you improve your book before you send it to an editor, agent or publisher. Check it out for free or get 15% off the premium edition at www.ProWritingAid.com/joanna This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn  Laura Baggaley is an award-nominated children's and YA author, theater director, and also teaches acting, writing, and literature at City Lit College in London. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.  Show Notes How to write climate fiction that embeds solutions in world-building rather than lecturing readers Dealing with publisher collapse and finding empowerment in regaining control of your books Using theatre techniques to write better dialogue and avoid clunky exposition Essential performance skills for author readings, interviews, and public speaking Practical tips for preparing workshops and managing nerves at literary events Building collaborative writing projects and the benefits of author support groups You can find Laura at LauraBaggaley.co.uk. Transcript of Interview with Laura Baggaley Jo: Laura Baggaley is an award-nominated children's and YA author, theater director, and also teaches acting, writing, and literature at City Lit College in London. So welcome to the show, Laura. Laura: Thank you, Jo. It's lovely to be here. Jo: Yes, I'm excited to talk to you today. First up— Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and publishing. Laura: Well, I was one of those kids who always had their nose in a book, you know, loved reading. Whenever anyone said, “What are you going to be when you grow up?” I would say, “A writer,” like, straight away, no question about it. So that was always the plan. In my late teens, I changed schools for sixth form. I went to this school that was really strong on performing arts. I started to get into drama and doing lots of acting and school plays. Then at university started directing plays, which was even more fun than acting. I just found myself pursuing a different path and became a theater director for about 15 years. That was really creatively exciting, but after a while, I started to feel something was missing, I guess. Of course the writing had been completely sidelined, but I came back to it and I started writing again. First of all, I started working on a literary novel that I was trying to craft with extremely beautiful language and lovely sentences. When I got to the end of the draft and I read it, I realized it was incredibly boring because like nothing happened in the book. So I put that in a drawer and started again. I started working on another one and I was sort of crafting my sentences. And anyway, fortunately about halfway through that one, I had this idea, this story came to me about a 15-year-old kid in a dystopian future. It had to be a young protagonist and it had to be a YA book. I just really wanted to tell this story. So I chucked the boring literary half-written draft in that same drawer and started working on the YA book. So that's where I really started to sort of find my voice as it were. Jo: Where did it go from there? When was that? Laura: Oh gosh, before the pandemic, which is kind of how we judge everything time-wise these days, isn't it? I think it was 2019 that I was a finalist in the Mslexia Children's Fiction Competition with that manuscript. So I'd obviously written it before then, and then through that competition, got an agent and had wrote another book, and got a publishing deal with a small indie publisher called Neem Tree Press. Jo: I wanted to talk to you about this. So you were a finalist, Mslexia, if people don't know, is very prestigious magazine here in the UK. You've got an agent, you've got a deal. So what happened then? What happened with the publishing experience? Laura: Well, I think the term is probably rollercoaster. I was really excited to sign this contract and obviously to have this publishing contract. But what happened was, publication obviously takes a long time. So it was going to be 18 months or so before the book came out. After about a year of this process, Neem Tree Press merged with a much bigger UK publisher called Unbound. And they were saying how great this was because obviously there were advantages of scale, like wider distribution to bookshops, that kind of thing. I don't think that Neem Tree Press quite realized how much financial trouble Unbound was in when they merged. Essentially Unbound folded and took Neem Tree press down with them. So the two books that I'd been so excited to get published with Neem Tree have not been published. However, on the plus side, the rights have reverted to me, and now I can do what I want with them. So they will be coming out, just not with Neem Tree Press. The good thing was, is that in the meantime I'd got on with writing another YA book and that has been published by Habitat Press. So I carried on writing. Jo: The thing is we hear this over and over again. Like there's pros and cons with small press versus big houses and one of the benefits of a big house is it's very unlikely to go under. But one of the benefits of small press is you get a lot more attention and you know the people and you feel it's a much more personal process. There's pros and cons every which way, but over the years I've been in publishing, almost 20 years now, so many small press companies either get bought or things happen. Things happen. Let's just say things happen. So this happened. How did you deal with this, like mentally and thinking about whether it was all going to happen? Because obviously writers look forward to their publication and you're going through this process. So how did you deal with all that time? Laura: As I say, it was really up and down. There were some months early on where I was really down about it because I just didn't hear anything. So I think that was the most frustrating thing is I'd be sending emails saying, “When are we going to start on the edits?” and just not hear anything. So it felt like I was sort of being ghosted, you know? The positive thing I think was that because of listening to your podcast and doing lots of research into indie publishing, I'd already decided that even if I had a traditional publishing deal, I was going to pursue my author business in an entrepreneurial way. So I'd already decided, you know, why can't a traditionally published author have a reader magnet, for example? So I got on with doing things in the meantime. I wasn't just waiting, and I think if I just waited, it would have been really crushing. As it was when I finally had the sort of confirmation that Neem Tree Press had closed and there was no chance of the books being published, what I felt was relief and a sense of almost kind of empowerment. As like, well, thank goodness the books are mine again. Now I can get on with publishing them. Jo: That's really interesting. I think that empowerment, it's such a good energy. Being long time indie, I think that empowerment and that sort of, “I can do this” and like you said, “I got on with doing things.” If you are a doer and you like doing things, then being an indie author is a good thing because you can move at your pace. Let's face it— Even if you do get a deal with whoever, the person who cares the most about your book is you. Laura: Exactly. Exactly. I think just that feeling of I'm not going to wait for permission anymore. I've had enough of that. Habitat Press, who brought out Dirt, my new book, they've been a joy to work with because they're much more flexible and collaborative. So I don't feel like I've given up all my power working with them, so that's really nice. Jo: But you are going to self-publish those other two? Laura: TBC. I'm hoping that one of them might come out with Habitat Press and one of them will be self-published. That's the current plan. I'm waiting for Habitat Press to read the greener one because Habitat Press is the green, environmental kind of publisher. Jo: Yes. Well, let's talk about that because your novel Dirt is eco fiction or climate fiction, and this is turning into a bit of a niche. So tell us what are the hallmarks of that genre. How can authors write in important areas, but not bash people over the head with a message? Laura: That is so important, isn't it? Yes. So what climate fiction is, I mean, I'd say it's any story with a focus on environmental or climate issues. So it could be a thriller, it could be a romance, it could be crime fiction. It's a really kind of broad genre. But from my perspective, when I think about it, the key thing is climate solutions. It's about looking forward to joyful possibilities and about kind of normalizing positive action. So not writing a book to tell everybody to buy an electric car or something, but just kind of in the world building embedding things like yes, solar panels or heat pumps or whatever as just normal parts of life. Of course in my books, because I tend to write near future dystopias, it's really easy to imagine a future where say everyone gets all their energy from renewable energy. So the eco element, it's in the background and just taken for granted rather than trying to preach. If that makes sense. Jo: That's interesting because I know Habitat Press wants a positive spin on it, but I was thinking one of the books I've read, I guess a few years ago now, The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson, I don't think of that as a positive book. Laura: I know, I know that book. I love that book. Yes, I know what you mean. I mean, it has one of the bleakest beginnings, but it stayed with me. I have never forgotten that book. What I would say about that book is it is absolutely packed with ideas for ways of moving towards a better future. He's got all kinds of economic innovations and ideas about blockchain and how world banks could work together. So I would say although it's in the action and the plot, there are bleak elements. I mean, overall, I would call it really quite hopeful. I mean, I sort of got into all this through the Green Stories Project. They run free writing competitions, encouraging writers to explore embedding climate solutions into their work. And of course, Habitat Press kind of emerged out of the Green Stories Project. I think you interviewed Denise from Habitat Press some years ago. Jo: Yes. Laura: Another thing that they did, which I really thought was really fun, was the Green Stories collaboration with BAFTA on #ClimateCharacters. Jo: I don't know about that. Tell us about that. Laura: They were comparing fictional characters with high and low carbon lifestyles. So they took like James Bond versus Jack Reacher. Jack Reacher, he spends his money on like coffee and public transport, whereas James Bond is all like jet skis and smart suits and expensive cars. I mean, I love both those characters of course, but if you're looking at what you glamorize in your fiction, it's a choice that you can make. So in one of my books, I have all the rich kids at school wearing CarPos trainers. And CarPos in my sort of future world is short for carbon positivity. So they're carbon positive trainers that have absorbed more carbon in the manufacture than they've emitted, and that's this massive status symbol. So the cool kids all have CarPos. Then of course, my protagonist, who's not a rich kid, his trainers are just neutral, which means like carbon neutral. That's not what the plot is about, but I like the idea that in a world where legislation has said that all manufacturing processes have to be carbon neutral, it becomes a status symbol to be sustainable. Like who can be the most eco. Jo: Yes, I absolutely agree. So I think that's a good sort of pointer is put it in the world building, don't lecture. You don't have to have characters lecturing other characters about their behavior, which I feel like is one of the bad things with any movement is bashing people over the head with stuff as opposed to trying to put things into stories that it's almost invisible, but yet still impactful, I suppose. Laura: Yes, I think Denise at Habitat Press talks about smuggling the messages in. You know, that you want the book to be exciting because it's got great characters and a great story, and that the eco stuff is incidental almost. But there's just a little bit of a mind shift going on in the way that you construct the world of the book. Jo: So I wanted to come onto your theater background. Well, first of all, I should ask— So did you write any plays or were you more in the directing thing? Laura: Mainly directing, but I did do some devised productions when I was directing, so I did write some scripts for those. I wrote several scripts actually for children's plays, which were kind of adaptations. Then it was in 2019, I devised and wrote a play for a London New Writing Festival called This Play Will Solve Climate Change. Jo: Yes, that's a bit more on the nose as a title. Laura: It was, yes. It was a full on activist kind of physical theater, experimental production. It was really fun. It was perhaps a kind of a step back towards writing for me. Jo: Well, because this is interesting, right? So I write a novel, you write a novel, and we can upload it to Amazon. Let's say the very basic thing you can do is upload it to Amazon. People can buy it and you get some money. With a play, it just isn't like that, is it? I mean— Is there anything like a sort of self-publishing scene in the theater world? Laura: I have to say, not that I know of with scripts at all. In fact, with the climate change play that I wrote, well, I actually set up a little theater company around that time, and we called ourselves Reusable Theater. The idea was that our scripts could be reused by anyone, anywhere, because we wanted to to generate more of this kind of work. I mean, there were theater makers all over the place generating their own productions and putting on work independently. So yes, but I don't think anyone's making any money out of it is the thing. Jo: No, exactly. I mean there are obviously people who buy scripts to put on at schools and stuff, usually you have to buy the certain text or whatever, but people don't really shop for plays, I guess. Laura: I don't think so. Jo: So, yes, it is difficult. So I'm glad you've discovered the business of books. In terms of if people are interested in adaptation—like you said there, you did some adaptations— What are some tips for writing stories that could be more easily adapted into theater? Or even just brought alive with marketing, with images and that kind of thing? Laura: That's a really interesting question, because I think in some ways, theater is a really expansive, inventive storytelling mode. So you can almost put anything on stage, but what I would say is, I think it's primarily about theater and film being really visual mediums. This is often the case in marketing as well, isn't it? So it's about finding those really striking images and just thinking about your plot does. Are there key moments that have really clear, vivid images attached to them? I think I'm often really inspired by images. So there was a play I directed once simply because I loved the opening image on stage and it was a 18th century garden in Lambeth with an apple tree. There were two figures, a man and a woman sitting in the tree with their backs to the audience, both completely naked. I just thought this was such a kind of striking image. Of course, we didn't have a tree on stage. We had apples suspended from invisible threads. So the actors were sitting on a step ladder in this kind of cloud of apples. It was really beautiful. I guess that's the kind of thing you are thinking about. With Dirt, that whole book really started with an image for me. There's an expansive desert, a single road running through it. A girl wearing a sun hat as big as a bicycle wheel cycling alone along that road towards us. That was like the first idea for the story in my head. It was kind of like a western, you know, a stranger rides into town. So that's where my inspiration, I think, often comes from. I think that does translate well into marketing, for instance. Jo: Yes. I guess another thing is dialogue, because if you are on the stage, then you're going to have to have some people speaking. So you've probably read a heck of a lot of very bad dialogue or heard dialogue that might look okay on the text, but then an actor tries to perform it and it sounds terrible. So how can we identify bad dialogue? And any tips for writing it better? Laura: Yes, I've certainly encountered some terrible dialogue. I think for me the clunkiest is when characters say things without motivation just to further the plot. I get students doing this in my acting classes. Sometimes they'll be improvising and they'll say something like, “Oh, Uncle Bernard, how good to see you after you've spent 10 years in Australia” and I'll be like, “Bernard knows he's been in Australia and he knows it's been a long time.” So the character, like, there's just no reason for them to say that. It always tells me that the actor is being super conscious of the audience, trying to convey information rather than getting into the character's skin. I think with dialogue it's about really immersing yourself, getting in there in the character's head. What is the character's attitude to this situation? What's the relationship to the other people? How are they feeling? And then you get that kind of, what would I say if I was this person in this situation? And that's where the dialogue should be coming from. I think you really hit on it, Jo, when you said, it's reading it aloud. It can read well on the page, but to test it, read it aloud and better get other people to read it aloud for you. I mean, in theater it's standard practice. You've got a new script, you workshop it, get a load of actors, playwright sits with a red pen and their script and listens and scribbles all over the script while the actors read it out. Jo: Yes, it's funny, I've actually just yesterday finished the audiobook of Blood Vintage, which is my folk horror novel. I've done it with ElevenLabs using my voice clone, which is very, very good. So it's very strange because I'm listening to myself and then I direct myself, the AI, and— I've actually rewritten bits and bobs of dialogue because even my own voice clone can't do it properly. Laura: Wow. That's brilliant. Jo: It is. It's really funny. The other thing that I found, and again, like I've literally just sort of discovered this is at the end of chapters, sometimes I've rewritten things in order that they end on a with a certain sound as opposed to how they can end in the text. You would have come across this too. There can be sounds that written down, don't look like they match, but when you speak them, the sounds resonate with each other and then it just sounds wrong basically. Laura: Yes. Yes, absolutely. It sound like ending a chapter sounds a bit to me, like doing what we call a button at the end of a scene or at the end of a musical number, you need that kind of finishing moment. Jo: Yes. Finishing moment. Rather than with text, you can easily cut something and the reader's going to turn the page. But if you are driving and you're listening to an audiobook, there's a few seconds of space. So you almost need it to end in a certain audio way to make a point. Like you say, button's a really good word. I've never heard it in that context. Laura: Yes, absolutely. You need to navigate to guide them through the text because they haven't got that kind of expanse of the blank bit of page at the end of the chapter or whatever. Jo: So then I guess the other thing about theater is performance and I feel like a lot of authors think they have no need to learn performance because they're just going to be in their rooms writing. If you are successful or if you want to be successful, yes, you are going to have to do stuff. You have to speak on a podcast, you have to speak at a festival, you have to do a reading, you have to talk to media. So what are your tips on performance? I guess from seeing a lot of bad performances as well, what can we do? We want to be authentic, like we don't need to be rah rah. How can we do it where we can deliver the best to the people who are listening? Laura: Yes, it's such a good question. I think for me there's kind of two things. So I find—and this is probably my theater background—but I find it really helps to imagine a character who is a version of me and that's who I'm playing in public. The character is essentially the same. They're me just a bit more confident, you know, a slightly shinier version. So like, I'm Laura and then there's Laura Baggaley Writer. If you ask those two people like, “How is your new book going?” Like, me, Laura sitting at my desk might say, “Oh, I'm really struggling. I'm trying to write in this new utopian genre. And I've got ideas for two characters, but the world isn't clear at all and I'm just not sure which plot strand to prioritize” and so on. But if you ask Laura Baggaley Writer, she might say, “Oh, it's exciting. I'm experimenting with a new literary genre. I'm writing a utopian novel for young adults, and it's about two teenage girls. They're both outsiders in different ways.” So like both of those statements are completely true. I'm not being inauthentic because it is exciting that I'm writing this book in this genre. But one of them, I hope you'll agree, one of them sounds better than the other. It's a bit like putting on a smart jacket for a book reading. It's just getting into character. Does that make sense? Jo: Yes, I totally agree. I think the smart jacket is a point as well. Makeup for women, I mean, you don't have to, but I remember I did professional speaker training back in Australia like 20 years ago, and I remember seeing these women and they wore, they didn't have to be designer clothes, but they wore smart clothes on stage and they looked professional and their hair was done and their makeup was done. I just learned a lot from that because it gives a professional impression and I feel that's the thing. If you want to be a successful author, then you are a professional. So whatever that means, however you want to dress. I think again, whether it's a smart jacket or it's just different clothes, I feel it can really help. Laura: That is so true. I mean, a lot of actors talk about needing to find the right shoes for a character. They put on their costume and then that's part of the process of getting ready for performance. So I think that's absolutely right. Jo: This is terrible. I was just thinking then, so I've been to some of these pitch things, right? For film and TV and stuff. The last one I went to, they sent an email out and the email basically said, “please chew gum or use mints.” Laura: Oh, oh no. Jo: No, I mean not to me personally, but the email went out and it also said, “use deodorant.” And I was like, if you are emailing a group of people and telling them to use mints and deodorant, then what the hell happened last year? Laura: That's horrendous. Oh my goodness. Jo: Yes, I know. I was just thinking about that. I think, again, as authors it's fine to sit here at your desk in your tracky bottoms and your whatever and mess. Like, I basically don't do my hair most of the time. But if you are going to do a reading or you're going to a conference or you are doing anything where you are Joanna Penn Writer or Laura Baggaley Writer— When it is that writer side of you, you have to make an effort, right? Even if it's hard. And it is hard, isn't it? Laura: Yes, it is hard. I think it does boost your confidence to be wearing the right stuff. There are practical performance tips as well. I would say practice a lot out loud. Sometimes with my students, I'll see them rehearsing a speech in their head and I'll say, “Come on. No, no, do it out loud because you need your mouth to practice saying the words, there's a muscle memory involved.” So if you are doing a reading of your own book, you might know the book inside out, but your mouth might not know it. If you read it out loud to the mirror to a friend multiple times, when you are feeling really nervous up on stage, your mouth will do some of the work because it already knows what it has to do. It sounds really silly, but just practice, practice, practice and remember to slow down because adrenaline makes us all speed up. Actors often say to me like, “Oh, what do I do about nerves?” When they're just starting out, they might be doing their first ever acting performance. And I say, “Well, it's part of performance. It's absolutely natural. It's a completely normal response to the situation.” Even though you can't just tell your brain to calm down, you can physically relax your body. So you can lift your shoulders right up to your ears and then drop them down and feel the difference. That is physical relaxation. So even if your brain and your stomach are churning, you can consciously physically relax your body and do that breathing. My favorite breathing is in for two out for three. Just extend the out breath and doing that, it's so obvious, but it does help. Jo: Yes, and on that breathing and that practicing things with your mouth, that's so good. The other thing with our own writing, if you're not reading it aloud or you don't do anything with audio, especially with literary writing, you can get some really long sentences. Where do you breathe? Decide where you are going to breathe. Laura: Yes, absolutely. In fact, audiobook narrators will. I've done a lot of my own audiobook, so you mark up your script where you're going to breathe. So as an audiobook narrator, you prepare a document with that kind of thing if it's a difficult bit. Jo: So if someone's got a reading coming up—I know you have got one coming up, you talked about that beforehand. So I guess another question would be, what do you pick? Some people say, “Oh, well, I just start at the beginning,” but I've been to so many readings where I'm like, “I don't think that's the best section to read.” What bits do you pick? Any tips for preparing a reading as opposed to an interview? I think, you know, pick an exciting bit. Laura: Yes, exactly. I mean, sort of obvious, but if the beginning of your book is really intriguing and gets straight into the action, then go for it. You want to excite people, don't you? You want to inspire them to want to read more. So you might even want to choose a bit that ends on a bit of a cliffhanger. Not right at the end, no spoilers, but choose an exciting bit and a bit that will be fun to read out loud, and then practice and decide how you are going to read it. Really think about that performance element. How can you draw people in by varying the volume or the tempo of the reading? You know, you might want to just slow down a little bit on a suspenseful moment. Are you going to do anything when you do dialogue? You know, I don't think anyone should do silly voices, by the way. Jo: Unless you are an actor, and well, yes you can. Laura: Yes. But you probably do want to speak slightly differently so that we know it's dialogue, for instance, you know? Jo: Yes, I think, and also— Videoing yourself practicing can really help. Because I think you still have to, as if you were doing an interview. You are always looking out to the audience now and then, or if you are doing a professional speaking engagement, you are meeting eyes of the audience. I feel with the reading, like the worst readings I've seen is the author literally has got their nose in the book and doesn't even look up. They're just like rushing through it. So you do have to look up, don't you, to bring people in. Laura: I couldn't agree more. It's so important. I mean, that kind of reading from a script while still connecting with the other character is a really basic part of actor training. Reading and connecting with the audience is so important. It just comes from practice and knowing the text really, really well. Not quite memorizing it, but having such a clear sense of the shape of it and what happens in the sentences that you can look away from the page a lot. Jo: Because at the end of the day, it's that—is it Maya Angelou? People will forget what you said, but they won't forget how they feel. Laura: Yes. Jo: So, you want people to go away feeling like, “Wow, that author was really great. I'm really interested in that book.” They might not remember what the hell you read, but if you read it in a way that connects with them. I think you just have to bring that energy, don't you, in some form. Laura: Yes, and the other thing to remember is that people who come to book readings come because they enjoy it. They come because they want to have a good time. So if you are scared to make eye contact with them, you are sort of pushing them away a bit. If you look around the room as people are arriving, if you look and you make eye contact, they'll probably smile at you because they're excited to hear from your book. They're probably excited to be there. At the very least, they want you to succeed. So don't be scared of your audience. Think of them as a group of people who just want to share in the pleasure of hearing your work. Jo: Yes, and I think just to encourage people, obviously both of us, I have different experience to you, but— I've been speaking for a long time and done a lot of events, and it just gets easier with practice. Laura: It really, really, really does. I mean, I used to be terrified of directing, of teaching, of leading workshops, of all the things that I have spent most of my life doing, the first time I did it. Not just the first time, for a while it was nerve wracking, but it's a great feeling when you've done it, and then when you meet someone or they send you a message saying, “Oh, that was great.” You know, it's just wonderful. Jo: Well, you mentioned workshops there, and I think this is another skill that's different to reading or speaking. A lot of writers teach at retreats and also attend retreats or doing classes. So what are your tips for the more participatory things, where either the writer who's trying to run the workshop is an introvert, or the people who attend are introverts? Like, have you come across any particular challenges there? Laura: Yes, I think for me, for like leading workshops, it's all about preparation and knowing what the purpose of the workshop is. So what do you want people to go away with? You know, what skill or experience are you trying to convey? If you've done lots of prep, and you've got discussion topics and activities fulfilling that objective, then that's a confidence booster. Just knowing that you've got lots of stuff to fill the time. Then if you are really struggling with nerves, make sure that you get the participants to do some of the work. Because you can set them a task. They're there to learn to do, and people learn by doing. They learn by experience. So you can even have a task that they get stuck into straight away so that they're all busy writing while you are doing your careful breathing and getting command of yourself. Then get them to discuss. So try and structure it in a way that's helpful to you. Jo: Yes, I think preparation is a huge part of helping introverts in particular. I don't know, I think it is correlated with introversion, like needing preparation. I sent you questions for this interview and we probably could have winged it, but I hate winging it. I need to have questions. Laura: Me too. Jo: We might not stick with them, but at least we both know that we are prepared and that makes me feel better, even if you don't even look at them. Some people come on and say, “Oh, I didn't even look at your questions.” Oh my goodness. No. I love getting questions. I love being prepared. Laura: I love getting questions. I love being prepared. I would never go into a workshop or a rehearsal without a really clear sense of what I'm going to do because that's how the participants are going to get the best experience, I think, out of the workshop. I think also just thinking about participants, if people who are introverted attend a workshop, they should think about how they can get their needs met because you don't want to go and be too shy and not get value from the workshop. So, for instance, things like if you hate the thought of reading your work aloud for it to be critiqued, get in touch with the workshop leader or the tutor in advance or speak to them on the day or just slip them a note and just tell them that. They'll get someone else to read it out. You can find ways to mitigate your anxiety and still get the most out of it. Jo: So we're almost out of time, but I did also want to ask you, you collaborate with a group of authors on a Substack magazine—I guess online magazine—called Bending the Arc. I always find collaborative author things a challenge. You are in theater, so you're used to collaboration. So tell us— What is the intent in that magazine? What are the benefits and challenges of collaborating on something like an email newsletter thing? Laura: Well, I sort of have to say where it comes from because Bending the Arc, it emerged out of my exploration of climate fiction that I've been doing. It led me to Manda Scott's Thrutopia Masterclass, which was an online study course. So we were five of us teamed up in 2024 to study this masterclass for six months. I don't know if people are familiar with the term thrutopia. I think it's still quite new. So it was a term that Rupert Reed came up with. He's an environmental academic and it means telling stories that aren't dystopias. So not imagining how awful everything's going to be, but not utopias where you've got a kind of magically perfect future, but looking at thrutopia. How do we get through from here to a better place? So it fits in a lot with the Green Stories idea and the climate fiction. So for this masterclass, we met every week for six months, watched a weekly video, did writing exercises, and discussed it. When we got to the end of it, we didn't want to stop. We didn't want to stop meeting. We had generated some new, some work in this new genre, and we wanted a place to showcase it. Also, probably as importantly, we wanted to invite other writers to experiment with this kind of work as well. So we thought a Substack magazine would be a good way of doing this. Jo: Has it performed a function though? I feel like a lot of the experimental writing we do and group writing and everything is great for a certain amount of time. But then having obviously podcasted for years and done various things, things do not continue unless there is a benefit to the people involved at some point. So, for example, marketing your own books or something. Laura: Yes. Yes. I mean, I think there's sort of two things. One is, I've made lots of really interesting connections with people that I just wouldn't have met without this. There's five of us. So putting out a Substack with five people's networks, we were very quickly reaching a lot more people than just I would reach on my own. I have used it to promote my own work in that an extract from Dirt was in the first edition. Also I think what I get out of it is we are like a writer support group. We critique each other's work, we champion each other, so it gives us a focus for our weekly meetings. We are meeting lots of other writers through it when we open up submissions so that it's coming out in two editions at the moment. We're doing it twice a year, so we send out a flurry of posts. It's not like we put out a post every week. So it's a slightly different way of using Substack. Jo: What other marketing are you doing for your book? Laura: Oh, I would say I'm following all the advice on all the webinars and podcasts and Alliance of Independent Authors. I've got my author newsletter that I'm doing. Obviously Dirt is for children and young adults, so I'm going into schools, I'm doing talks in libraries, a blog tour, all those kinds of things. Jo: Great. So where can people find you and your book online? Laura: So my website is LauraBaggaley.co.uk and that's Baggaley, B-A-double-G-A-L-E-Y. I'm on Instagram, @LauraBaggaleyWriter. The Thrutopian Magazine, Bending the Arc is on Substack. If anyone is interested in the thrutopian genre or Green Stories or anything else we've talked about, drop me a line. I love talking about all this, and as I said, I love connecting with other writers. Jo: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Laura. That was great. Laura: It's been a pleasure. Thank you for having me.The post Performance Tips For Authors, And Writing Climate Fiction With Laura Baggaley first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How do you stand out as an author when thousands of books are published every day? What's the difference between having a logo and having a real brand that sells books? Is it possible to maintain your authentic voice while appealing to genre readers who seem more loyal to categories than authors? With Steve Brock In the intro, Baker & Taylor shutting down [The Bottom Line]; Holiday promotions for your books [Productive indie fiction writer]; Writing Storybundle; Updating Shopify metadata — Hextom app; Publishing and change [Publishing Perspectives]; Paying AIs to read my books [Kevin Kelly]; signing my special editions at BookVault; The Critically Reflective Practitioner; Deliciously twisted Halloween book sale. Today's show is sponsored by Draft2Digital, self-publishing with support, where you can get free formatting, free distribution to multiple stores, and a host of other benefits. Just go to www.draft2digital.com to get started. This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn  Steve Brock is a nonfiction author, photographer, and branding expert. His books include Hidden Travel, which he has talked about on my Books and Travel podcast, as well as The Creative Wild, Make Something Beautiful, and Brand Something Beautiful: A Branding Workbook for Artists, Writers, and Other Creatives. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.  Show Notes Brand vs. reputation. Why branding is about perception in readers' minds, not just visual consistency Discovery vs. creation. How to uncover what makes you distinctive Standing out in crowded genres. Techniques for differentiating yourself while still satisfying genre expectations Multiple pen names. Managing branded houses vs. house of brands when writing across different audiences From brand to sales. Converting nebulous brand concepts into practical marketing confidence and clear messaging Beautiful book production. Creating workbooks and products that command attention in an AI-saturated market You can find Steve at BrandSomethingBeautiful.com or brandsomethingbeautiful.substack.com. Transcript of the interview with Steve Brock Joanna: Steve Brock is a nonfiction author, photographer, and branding expert. His books include Hidden Travel, which he has talked about on my Books and Travel podcast, as well as The Creative Wild, Make Something Beautiful, and Brand Something Beautiful: A Branding Workbook for Artists, Writers, and Other Creatives, which we are talking about today. Welcome to the show, Steve. Steve: Thank you, Joanna. It's a pleasure to be here. Joanna: So much to talk about. But first up— Tell us a bit more about how you got into writing and publishing and branding. Steve: I've written all my adult life, but it was more in the realms of school writing and then working in branding and marketing agencies, doing a lot of marketing copy and ad copy. Then in 2007, I think, I had this sense of wanting to work on a book, which was the one that ended up becoming Hidden Travel. It only took 14 years to get that from idea to publication. Since then, as you mentioned, some other books, so I've embraced that. The branding has come along actually in parallel, and it's a great point of how one area of your life, particularly your creative life, affects the other. Branding fundamentally is about telling your story well. It's understanding who you are, what you do, and what makes you different. There's a lot of storytelling involved. So the more I focus and spend time on writing, particularly in the fiction realm, which has been mostly just short stories for me lately, the more that it has improved the work of branding. I find branding interesting because, like we've talked about with travel, branding is really about exploration. It's diving deep into understanding something that is hidden and bringing that to light. Joanna: Before we get back into branding— You mentioned short stories there. Are you publishing those? Steve: No, those have always been a sideline. I have a novel that I started when I got stuck on Hidden Travel, and it's about maybe a third done, so that'll be the next effort that I focus on for the fiction realm. But no, the short stories have always just been more for my own craft building and just the enjoyment of it. I'm looking forward to actually reading yours that's coming out, or is it out? Joanna: Well, as we record this, the Kickstarter has just finished. So depending on when this comes out, it may be available. The Buried and the Drowned is my short story collection. I think it's interesting because you can play with short stories and you can explore, as you mentioned there, exploring and looking at hidden things. I think it's much easier to play around with short stories because you can just do such different things. Let's come to branding, because the word “brand” is really difficult and people are already flinching. They're like, “Oh, I don't want to think about author brand.” So you mentioned a little bit there, but— How are you defining brand as it relates to authors? And why should we even care about this? Steve: The word “brand” applies whether you are a major corporation, a nonprofit organization, a single solopreneur, or an author, because it's all about perception. A lot of people think of branding as being about your logo or your tagline, or maybe the colors that you use in the background of your Instagram reels and having consistency there. That's part of it, but it's such a small part of it. Branding is fundamentally about the overall perception that people have of you or your creative work. If I say, for example, Stephen King, or James Patterson, or Toni Morrison, there are going to be associations you have with each of those people, and those associations are actually what make up their brand. The brand is a tricky thing because we think we can control it, but we can't. The brand exists in the minds of your audiences. So for writers, that means the minds of your readers out there. Your job is to craft it, to know the story you want people to tell and be able to reinforce that over time so that they're telling the same story. Because if you do not know the story you want to tell, someone else is going to do it for you, and most likely in a way that's not going to be helpful to you. So just think of brand almost like your reputation. What are you doing to build up your reputation? That's maybe the simplest way to think about brand and branding. Joanna: For authors, I mean for me, I have Joanna Penn and I have J.F. Penn. So for anyone who's writing under two names, are we thinking about two brands? Steve: Yes and no. Because you show up in a lot of places. For example, on this podcast, you show up as both people, not your products necessarily, but you as a person that represents both of those brands. When you have an author brand with multiple pen names, there are elements of that you may want to keep discrete and separate. But on the other hand, in your case, the real divide there is—to oversimplify—J.F. Penn for the fiction and Joanna Penn for the nonfiction. You as the person and the brand that you represent, there's a lot of consistency between those two. What you don't want to do is if those two brand names or author names are different and they represent two completely different audiences that you really want to keep separate. The example I give in the book is if you're writing both children's illustrated fiction books and you're also writing erotica, you do not want those two audiences to even really know that you're the same person. So you would keep those dramatically separate. It's the same in the corporate world where we talk about what the fancy jargony term is “a brand spectrum.” You have, for example, a branded house like BMW, and then a house of brands like Procter & Gamble, which has a whole bunch of sub-brands underneath that, and some people may not even know that Procter & Gamble is behind those. If your pen names are really different genres, you're probably more like a house of brands. Whereas if you have a consistent vibe or theme or thing you want to be known for, you would be more like a branded house, even if you have different pen names. Joanna: I like “branded house” and I like “brand spectrum.” That feels more natural, I think. There are also two angles that potentially we can approach this from. Maybe we can take them separately. One is new author or author wanting to start a new pen name, wanting to construct a brand from nothing, from scratch—actually control it and build it. The other way is discovery branding, let's call it, where you look back at your work and you go, “I guess I've somehow created a brand. I just can't figure out really what it is, but I just keep writing stuff and it kind of gets created.” Could you tackle those two ends of the spectrum, of creating it from nothing versus discovering it? Steve: That's a great question because I would say that discovering it is probably the more common approach. One of the elements of your brand is your voice or your style, and I define those as three different things. Brand is the overarching perception. Style is the visual representation of the brand. Voice is the verbal or written representation. I think that part of finding what your style and your voice are comes through discovery almost entirely. If you try to overthink it, it's really hard. If you start that journey of discovery, focusing on a consistent and distinctive voice, it kind of emerges naturally and it's easy to step into that. There's a point though, even on a discovery brand as you name it, that it becomes intentional. That's where you start to identify certain themes that have emerged that you want to be known for, and then you want to elevate those or amplify those. Honestly, that's like discovery writing. I'm kind of a hybrid myself. I will do an outline, but then I'll go off of it. Same thing here. You're discovering your brand, but once you find, “Okay, that really resonates, that element really resonates with my audiences,” then you want to amplify that and make sure that gets incorporated into everything you're doing. Now if you're just creating from scratch, you can actually define what those elements are. That's what the book is really about—how to create what we call a brand identity, which is just like a personal identity. It's who you are, what are the elements, what are your characteristics, what are your personality traits, what's the promise that you make to your audiences? If you craft that from scratch, you can be very intentional. I would say even there, just like a planner writer goes off script sometimes and starts going in directions they find that their characters have a life of their own, the same way here is you can map out that planned brand, but still be able to change it as you start to find things that resonate or that you want to lean into. Joanna: One thing that I think of when it comes to brand is also book covers. Even if I used exactly the same name, if I used Joanna Penn for all of my books, my fiction would look quite different. Different color palette, different font, different design elements. How can we relate book covers in particular to our brand? Steve: It's consistency. Consistency is the key to all branding, whether it's for authors or anyone. As long as people can recognize you—think about branding, where it came from. It came from the American West and branding cattle to know that they belonged to a particular ranch. A brand has evolved, but it is essentially about identification. I want to know what that brand stands for, who is it and who's behind it, and what does it stand for? On covers, you want consistency, you want a through line. Really that's another way of thinking about a brand—what is that through line that you're going to find? Now this is a key for authors, which doesn't exist completely in the same way in other industries: there are many, many readers out there that will always be more loyal to a genre than they are to a brand. If you have a reader who absolutely loves your thrillers, and then all of a sudden you decide you want to start writing something in the romance category, well, they may still like you and get your books, but they're not going to necessarily buy your romance because the brand's not as strong as the loyalty to the genre. Joanna: It's interesting also because I feel like authors know publishers and know imprints, but most readers wouldn't even know. They don't know HarperCollins or they don't necessarily know an imprint. Most readers are not loyal to those brand name publishing houses. Secondarily, they may or may not care about an author brand, and as you say, they're more likely to be faithful to a genre. Most of us can't remember the names of the authors whose books we read. It's a sad truth, but some people will remember, and those are the people who I guess we're trying to connect with. Is that right, or— With our covers and our consistency, are we also appealing to those people who read by genre as well? Steve: It's a little bit of both because we're dealing with that really wacky, crazy inconsistent thing called human beings. We're all that way. Like Walt Whitman said, we contain multitudes and we do contradict ourselves. What you're really going after is not really like Kevin Kelly's thousand true fans, but something close to that. It's finding that super fan, it's finding those people that are going to follow you no matter what you put out. The nicest compliment I ever received was at a travel writer conference. I did a workshop and the head of it said he really liked the particular piece and he said, “You're on your way to being that person of whom it is said, ‘Whatever Steve Brock writes, I will read it. I will read anything from him.'” I am nowhere near there. I don't know if I will ever achieve that, but that's kind of the goal that you want to be for those particular super fans. Here's where the brand kicks in. You can still betray even the most loyal fan if you write something that doesn't feel true to who you are as an author. For example, let's think of Richard Osman. Richard Osman, who wrote The Thursday Murder Club and all those—if he were to go and write a science fiction genre book, there would be a ton of people that would follow him and want to read that book. If, however, that science fiction book had no humor in it, and the characters were downright mean to each other and it was really violent and graphic, he would not only lose those readers, but they would probably be hesitant to pick up the next book in The Thursday Murder Club series because he's kind of wrecked his brand. Joanna: It's so interesting. I'm going to blame you Americans for this because we're not so sensitive here in the UK, but swearing is a really interesting thing. When I wrote my first book, in my private life, I do swear sometimes. In my first book, I had naturally written as a British person, had included some words. The reaction I had from my American readers, who were not bothered by the violence—and I don't write graphic violence, but I write thrillers, so there's some body count—the reaction to the swear words made me decide, this is back in 2009 now, I was like, “Okay, I won't swear in my books.” So I don't use swear words at all. It's so interesting how there are a lot of different genre elements that might put people off, but— If you use a swear word that you wouldn't normally use in your books, that can make readers disappear and never come back. Steve: Honestly, in today's world—and again, yes, you can blame America, but it has spread everywhere in terms of just how divided we are and how prickly we are in terms of topics and issues—basically anything you do will upset somebody. So you can't worry about that. This is why you have to focus on that persona of that one true fan, your best fan, that you're writing towards. Because if you try to write towards every possible criticism, you're going to mess up. Just stick to that. Know that not everyone's going to be happy. The example we give in a lot of corporate branding workshops: there's always a good number of people sitting around in the conference room with a MacBook or some Apple product, and I mention to them, “Do you realize that there are far more people in the world that absolutely rabidly hate Apple than there are people that love Apple?” Just sheer numbers. If you look at PCs, for example, Apple has maybe an 8% market share. Is Apple a bad brand because so many people hate it? The reality is no, it's a great brand because those who do love it are even more passionate about it. You're not going to be able to please everybody, but if you can please those who are in your tribe, then you're going to succeed. After all, we're in a “niches are riches” world. The more you niche down, the more profitable it is in today's world. So don't be afraid of being true to who you are, but also being sensitive to who that audience is. Joanna: I wasn't saying don't swear. I was saying if you decide to swear or not swear, stay consistent. The level of sex and the level of violence—if you're writing fiction, those three things are things that people's preferences generally stay pretty similar on within a brand. So the mainstream thriller niche, those things—you could read a lot of mainstream thrillers and they would obey those rules as well. You mentioned niching down and thinking about that, but one of the things you had in the book—and you have some really big questions in the book because one that is very difficult is: say you are writing action adventure thrillers. So my Arcane series, a bit like Dan Brown. Dan Brown has a new book out, The Secret of Secrets, and I'm reading it at the moment and it makes me feel both happy because I write similar books to him, but also, “Oh no, I write similar books to him.” You tackle this: how do I make my work distinctive and stand out amid all the noise? There is so much noise and I'm not competing with Dan Brown, by the way, but in terms of action adventure thrillers, there's tons of them. How do we stand out when we also need to please genre readers? Steve: I would say by knowing what it is that makes you distinctive. Part of it is your voice, part of it is your interest, part of it is just the way you go about framing sentences and plots and so forth. Take, going back to Stephen King as an example—part of it, for loyal fans, they know this and they don't necessarily like it, but part of his brand is he doesn't end his books well. He's known in a lot of circles as just having pretty mediocre endings. But people don't care because they know that the journey to get there was really rewarding. I would say things like that—being known for just a surprise ending, being known for—you know, the O. Henry Awards, right? We look at O. Henry simply because he was so good at those surprise twists at the end that we actually use his name today associated with that. Or even like Hemingway, his style, the short, curt sentences. There are elements of your book that are going to be unique to you. For example, your voice, your human voice that comes across in your brand here. That's the main thing that I think people will identify with—separating out you and your products from you the person. That can get kind of complex, but one of the key things to me is recognizing that your products are going to have a certain voice to them, and that voice in those genres may be different from genre to genre. You as the author, as you're interfacing with the public, will have a consistent voice, but it's still different from you the person from Joanna Penn the person versus Joanna Penn the brand. Those are two different things, and that's hard for a lot of people. If you think about like an actor playing a character, it works pretty well. We as authors, when we're publicly speaking or talking, there's a character that represents our brand that is going to be, in some ways the best of our personal characteristics, but it's not us. And that gives you some padding, some distance from it so that you can separate that out and be able to address it. But going back to your point: knowing what the distinctives are of your own personality and the brand there, and being able to identify those and call those out—that's what helps you be distinctive. If you do not know what those distinctives are, how you're different from Dan Brown in this particular case, it will be very difficult. And by just reading Dan Brown, it starts to seep in, and you might start writing like Dan Brown and you don't want to do that. Joanna: I don't know, getting banned by the Vatican was the best marketing move he ever made! But on this, like you said there, if you don't know what makes you distinctive—from the side of many authors listening— I don't think we do understand what makes us distinctive. It is very hard. We have this thing in particularly the fiction community of finding your author voice. The reason we say “finding” it is because it's so hard, it's not obvious, and it takes practice writing lots of words and then something kind of emerges from it. I think the question of what is distinctive—this is where AI can help. I've certainly done this: if people are happy uploading their work into ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini—read the terms and conditions as I always say—but you can then have a discussion with it as to what makes you distinctive, where do you fit in the spectrum of different authors. I've actually found that the most useful tool, even though I've been doing this for a couple of decades, because it's so hard to figure it out yourself. Steve: I totally agree with your last statement there, and I think that is a really good tactic for doing that. I would just add to it another thing that seems obvious, but I know so many authors who have never done this: You ask your audience. You ask your readers. You take a dozen readers of any of your series, and you ask them, “Okay, why is this book different? What do you love most about this? What makes it distinctive from others?” Now, they're not always going to be able to give you a clear idea, but pretty soon it's really interesting how themes start to emerge there when you start doing that. I mentioned Richard Osman, for example. I could just whip off those as just three characteristics that make his books different: he has a really good sense of humor, his characters are all caring about each other, and he addresses age from a fresh perspective. Many, many other authors address those three type of elements, but not in quite the same way. So in the same way with you, there's going to be elements that are going to be similar to Dan Brown and others, but that combination of those—that's something that only you do. Joanna: I guess we've been talking a lot about fiction. Is there anything that nonfiction authors need to think about differently, or do all the principles apply? Steve: I think the principles are even clearer and in some ways easier to manage for nonfiction writers because you can talk about the subject. If you're thinking about nonfiction, it's like, “How do I become the thought leader expert on this?” And then what are the distinctive ways I'm going to treat things? I can speak to it. Let's talk about from the standpoint of this book and from my own branding. I have been told by clients over the years—probably the best compliment I get is that “we've hired branding experts before, they come in, they tell us what they think our brand should be, and then we fire them.” “We don't like consultants, but you don't act like a consultant. You came in and you listened and you heard us, and then you didn't tell us what we should be. You told us what we already knew, but we didn't have the words to use to explain that.” So that tells me that my own brand is: there's a high degree of empathy, there's a high degree of listening, but there's also an element of synthesis. I can start to unpack those and say, “Okay, this is why my nonfiction book or works, in particular this book on branding for artists and writers, is going to be different.” Another element would be simplifying. I've seen too many organizations, particularly working with nonprofits, that fail because they've tried to take on too much. So a key part of this is making it simple. You start to understand what those elements—simplicity, empathy, synthesis—those things can become brand points, characteristics, distinctives, that then I could apply to other nonfiction works that I do. Joanna: So then once we've got these, I guess, quite nebulous words around branding, how do we turn that into effective book marketing? How do we go from this broader idea to specifics that will actually sell books? Steve: I would say listen to your episode from, I think it was in August, where you read from Marketing for Authors, and you have the entire list of the specifics there. So those are the tactics that you can do in terms of selling more books. Marketing is downstream from branding. But here's how branding can help you sell more books—two ways: internal and external. First is the internal. Branding gives you the clarity of the messages that you want to communicate because it gives you a sense of what it is that you're really about. There's almost this idea of mindset that comes and the confidence that comes from having that clarity about what you stand for, what you believe. One of the examples in the book is this exercise of “I believe… I exist to…” Just that simple sense of knowing what your purpose is and your beliefs and values are—that alone can help provide that clarity. So there's clarity, there's mindset, there's confidence. Externally, your messaging becomes so much clearer because you know how to talk about yourself. That's the thing—authors, we are great at telling stories, but we're terrible at telling our own story. That's what branding is about, is helping you to tell your own story better, so it builds the confidence, gives you the story that you want others to tell so that they can in turn tell others about you. That's a huge piece of it. It's like the game of telephone. If you have a very clear and consistent message, they can tell others about you in a way that they couldn't before. I think another aspect about this is that quite frankly, most authors can go out there and ask ChatGPT, “Give me 20 tactics that I need to do to market my book,” and you'll get them right away. There's no lack of access to information on how to market your book out there. The problem is we don't do it. The reason we don't do it is because usually we're afraid. We're either afraid of what might happen, what people might think. We don't think we know enough to do it. We do all these things where we do not act. Part of the beauty of the brand—you say it's nebulous concepts, but I would say that the nebulous concepts, the intangibles of life: trust, relationships, love, friendship, hope, accomplishment. Those are all nebulous concepts, but those are also the most powerful drivers that we have in life. I think the same thing is here. You get that nebulous concept of knowing what you're doing and how you're different and how to tell your story better, and that builds your confidence. So you are far more likely to engage in doing those tactics that are going to help you sell the books. Joanna: I wonder if it's also that in book marketing we do rely a lot on things like paid ads where the book cover is the thing that draws people in, and so having this sort of whole-self approach is less used. Podcasting is a game, I think, where this kind of branding that you are talking about can really come across. Is that a good way for authors to think about pitching different podcasts around elements of their brand—in terms of their story behind the books, the person behind the books? Steve: Yes, I think podcast is one channel for that. I mean, your blog, if you have one, even your social media—all of those are ways for the audience to connect with you as the author, and you're absolutely spot on. Because the problem a lot of times with author marketing is we confuse the author brand—which is almost like the equivalent of an organizational brand, but you're just a one-person organization—we confuse that with a product brand. The book itself is a product. It has in some ways its own brand, so it has to relate. Just like I'm selling products on a shelf in a store, you're going to have one reaction to the product itself, and you're going to compare that to other products on the shelf. Over time, if you find that there is a particular product from a particular manufacturer that you really like, you're going to be more loyal and you're going to start looking for other products in that line. So the podcast, the blog, all these other touchpoints give people a way to engage with you so they know what other products… Here's a key thing about all this: think in terms of ecosystems. We tend to think in terms of one-offs, like, “Oh, okay, I've got to work on this particular book. I'm launching this particular book. I'm doing the Facebook ads for this particular book,” and not thinking about how it relates back. To your earlier question or comment about having consistency in the book covers, same type of thing. You want people to know that there is this through line, that there's this consistent connection back to something more. If they can connect that to you as a person through the podcast or other ways of having more of the personality of you and everything else, all the better. Joanna: I did want to also talk to you about the product itself, your book, which is this workbook. It's more than a workbook though because I think I have called some of my workbooks—they really only just contain the questions, not the full text. Mine are also not designed and laid out as yours is. It really is a beautiful product in the layout, in the way it's done, and it makes me want to do better with mine. I wondered if you could maybe— Talk about this product of a branding workbook because I feel it's so much more than that. And any other thoughts on multiple streams of income? Steve: Thank you for that. I would say thank you also because unbeknownst to you, you were actually one of the reasons for this particular format. It was probably a year or so ago on one of the podcasts where you said, “Amazon's pulling my workbooks because they're pulling everybody's workbooks because they're finding that people are using AI to say, ‘Hey, Claude, give me 40 different questions about this topic and some exercises,' and then they add in some fill-in-the-blank lines and publish it on Amazon.” So the idea of that traditional fill-in-the-blank workbook, I think it made me hesitant to try something like that. The other thing was I started this off as a course, and so the course creation—I had a lot of the graphics and different things in place, and it just ended up being that this became a hybrid. So it's both a workbook and a book, but I think this is key, and I would say for a lot of listeners, if you're doing something particularly like this in nonfiction, to consider this approach. It's not just a hybrid from a formatting standpoint, it's a hybrid in terms of the outcome or the goal of the book. Here's the thing I say in the book: The goal of this book is not to make you an expert on branding. The goal of this book is to help you create your own creative brand. So this book, I do not care. After you're done with it, you've filled it in, it's an artifact of your learning. Every other book I've worked on has always been about educating, and this one is about accomplishment. I think people today—we have too much information out there. People want to achieve things and get things done, and so the more that you can think of formats that are going to help with that, I think the better. The other thing about it is breaking it down to smaller bites and takeaways that people can use. I'm also mindful of just the positioning of it. I think it was Jonah Berger in his book Contagious, who talks about venture capitalists and how when they're evaluating a company, they look at it and say, “Is this company a vitamin or a painkiller?” A vitamin is something that's very good for you and very useful and very healthy, but you can put it off. A painkiller—if you got pain, you need it right away. My previous book, The Creative Wild on creativity, it was very vitamin-like. I would actually say that even Hidden Travel was more of a vitamin. It's good for you, it's interesting, it's about meaningful travel, all of that. But it's not a pressing felt need for a lot of people. I think this book on branding for those who are struggling with marketing and everything—I positioned this one, it really is more of a painkiller. So the question for all of you out there listening is— How can you make your nonfiction work more of a painkiller? Then look at other formats that are related to it. Another key aspect of this is that the workbook has a paper and a Kindle version, but then the worksheets—I call them worksheets—I have two versions: a Google Doc version and a fillable or editable PDF version that are on my website that have all the questions. It doesn't have all the explanatory text, but it has all the questions and all the fields. But what I'm doing is I'm sending people to my website and they have to sign up for it. So now all of a sudden you've got them into the broader ecosystem there. And there could be follow-ups, right? You've already written the marketing book, so I don't need to do that, but I could take any chapter and go into much more detail about it. I could do this and there's a tiny element in this thing on choose-your-own-adventure. There are ways of formatting a book so it's more of a choose-your-own-adventure or a scavenger hunt, which is more of a guidebook that could help people. You can have additional merchandise that's related to it. All these different things. I have a friend, Naomi Kinsman, who has a “creativity in a box” type of thing. So these boxed elements, lots of ancillary products that you can add to that for multiple streams of income as well. Joanna: Your book also leads to speaking engagements. It really is—it's beautiful. I do want to emphasize that, but you've also made it harder on yourself. So one of the reasons that we as independent authors have done more basic workbooks and have done more basic books is because of the cost of production. I wondered— Has this made it more complicated for you to sell? Or are there different versions of the print edition for, say, Amazon print-on-demand versus selling from your website, for example? Because it looks very high quality. Steve: Yes, but it is the same for all of us, right? The more heavy lifting you do upfront, the easier you make it for others. So yes, it has been a pain. I will not argue about that. I think the writing of this was the easiest book of all because it's just 27 years worth of expertise that I could just—I didn't have to research anything. I just whipped it out. That part was easy. Formatting it, getting into all that—pain in the ankle. But I think that it makes it more accessible for people, because a lot of people have the same reaction that you have. With the title, like Brand Something Beautiful, you kind of want it to look that way. That has been actually an allure to people. I don't think that a lot of the graphics got translated into the Kindle version of it. The tablet version that's full color works, the Kindle version—I had to scale down a lot. But that's okay because it still delivers the product as well. Joanna: I love AI, everybody knows that, and I use it a lot, but I also don't like the sort of mass-produced books that are coming out. So anyone who puts more effort into physical production of beautiful products is going to stand out. I mentioned about what is it that makes you distinctive, and I'm at this kind of point in my career where I also want to be known for making beautiful books. So I love that you've used the word “beautiful.” We all love beautiful books and we buy stuff because we love covers and we love the foil, and we love all the cool stuff. Just so people know, on your website, brandsomethingbeautiful.com, you can see examples of the interior pages so people can see how that is done. Did you do this yourself or did you work with a designer? Steve: I worked with the designer actually, though the full disclosure is my son is a graphic designer and a brilliant one. So he did all the graphic elements. What I did was—and this is taking the extra step—I remember there was, I think it was Steve Zaillian, some producer in Hollywood years ago who's been dramatically successful, and someone said, “How did you become so good at this?” And he said, “Because I looked around at the work that needed to be done and I looked at the level of effort that other people were making, and I just did a little bit more.” I think on here, I upped my game using Adobe InDesign for the layouts and things like that. I would encourage people that there's so much you can do in Canva these days. Just dive into it and get competent in it. But I think there are also times when you do want some professional design help on it as well. Joanna: It's interesting you mentioned Canva because I'm sure you've heard me talk about my gothic cathedral book, and over the summer I was looking at my photos,and obviously you are a photographer as well and you do travel stuff, and I was like, “Oh my goodness, there's so many ways this book could go in terms of how the beautiful layout is done.” It almost just opens up a completely different form of creativity, even though that's not something I'm focusing on right now because it feels like a whole other area. I also feel like it does help set us apart. As you said, it's that extra effort in terms of making a beautiful interior as well as a beautiful cover. I think nonfiction, this is easier because, fiction, obviously the inside of a novel is plain text mostly—you can do some extra title pages or maps or whatever, but I think these nonfiction books can have all kinds of elements of design that help people: pull-outs and quotes and diagrams and all this kind of thing. So it is a really creative process. Steve: It totally is. I just read a book—we're about to head off to Portugal soon, just for vacation—but I was reading a book that takes place in Lisbon called The Murderer's Ape, like ape as in gorilla. It's about a gorilla who can speak and is an engineer on this guy's boat. The long story of it is at the beginning of each chapter are just kind of these beautiful hand-drawn pen and ink illustrations, and just having that makes it such a richer experience. Little things like that. So there's a case where, if I had more time in my life and everything, I would be focusing on illustrated adult books, which are fictional like a novel, but that I illustrate. What is it? The T.S. Spivet by… can't remember his name. They made it into a movie, but The Life of T.S. Spivet. Anyway, he does that. It's a brilliant book because of the illustrations that are on the margins of almost every single page. So there are ways of doing that even in fiction. Joanna: We've all got to do more creative stuff in order to stand out, and for ourselves as well as for the readers. It kind of just brings the material alive. So I think that's really cool. But you mentioned there heading off to Portugal, and you and I connected around our love of travel. Hidden Travel I think is a wonderful book and you came on my Books and Travel podcast and we talked about that. This is an interesting thing, right? Even for your brand, because brandsomethingbeautiful.com to me doesn't look like the same person who did Hidden Travel. The conversation we had around that, to me, is very different conversation to the one we've had today. So how does travel weave into your business? Or do you feel like those two things are quite different? Steve: Oh, you called me out because it's like, you know, do what I say, not what I do. Because I totally feel that way. Honestly, from my own brand and what I'm trying to do, I probably should. You know, what is it? The cobbler's children have no shoes. Joanna: The cobbler's children have no shoes or something like that. Steve: Right, exactly. Well, but the answer to that is, what you're going to see over time is I start to build out more of particularly some of the social media stuff for Brand Something Beautiful, and this goes back to the idea of confidence. Once the book is done, I'm into getting it out there. I'm like you, I do not like video, I do not like to be on video, et cetera. So I've never done anything, but I decided for this book I'm going to do Instagram reels. One of the things I did was—I think it was either Gemini or ChatGPT—I just said, “Okay, here are the themes that I want to cover. These are going to be like blog posts and Substack type of things and LinkedIn articles over the next 12 weeks. Give me—and I'm going to be in these places in Portugal. I want to create reels that illustrate these points. Give me some ideas.” It came out with some really wonderful ideas like the 25th of April Bridge in Lisbon. It said the point is that one of the points in the book is that the brand is the bridge between the making of something beautiful and the marketing of it. Most people, artists especially, and writers, we hate marketing, but if you do the branding right, it's the bridge between it, so it makes the marketing easier. And so then have a shot of me holding the book in front of the bridge and blah, blah, blah. Joanna: Nice. That is great, actually, that's a really good prompt. Thank you for that. Steve: Yes. So those type of things. I'm definitely using those, so you will start to see a connection between the travel and the brand, but it will emerge over time because in a way, I have my brandwallop.com, which is the company, the agency I've run for decades. That's really more for corporations and nonprofits. So this Brand Something Beautiful is really more the individual brand type of stuff. It is exactly what you were talking about earlier. There's some intentionality to it. I have not fully lived and leaned into that as much. The travel and adventure—because the theme of my other book, The Creative Wild, was about what does it mean to create adventurously? It really is like a sequel to Hidden Travel in the sense of what do we learn from travel that we can apply to our creativity? How do you create adventurously? What does that mean? What does that look like? How does discovery fit into creativity? All of that type of thing. So that will all get woven in there. But the main thing of all is that even if it never shows up in my external artifacts and manifestation of the brand, it is affecting me as a person, as a creative. As you know, in fact, one of the quotes—I paraphrase, I should say—from you, I think it was on the St… was it St. Cuthbert, the one you did in the southern part of England? Joanna: The Pilgrims Way to Canterbury. Steve: Okay, the Pilgrims Way. You said something after that in one of the podcasts, which I have told so many other people because it is so true. When I heard you, it's like, “Okay, validation.” It was this: “I went on this pilgrimage thinking I would have all this time walking and I would have all this time to come up with new ideas. And I had like virtually none on the trip itself.” Joanna: Hmm. Steve: But then two weeks later, after I got back, I couldn't stop the ideas. I was overwhelmed with all the new ideas that came, and to me that's the benefit of travel for all of us. Yes, you can use the sites for, if you're writing a novel, for getting the research. I know you love doing that and that's a key piece of it, but just the experience of getting out of your comfort zone, being in a foreign place, particularly where your senses are picking up on things. You notice things better, you pay better attention. All of that is going to help you as a creative. Joanna: It's so interesting and I'm glad we kind of finished with your own personal journey of growing into this other side of yourself as well, or trying to knit them together. I think that's brilliant. It certainly shows that we're all on this journey. This is a lifetime of experience and we just keep creating. So people, if you are like, “Oh, I just don't know,” just keep creating and something will emerge, won't it? Steve: It is absolutely true, and that would be one thing I didn't mention earlier, really quickly, that relates to this in terms of those other streams of income: this idea of combinatorial thinking, where everything you do affects everything else in a good way. To me in terms of multiple streams of income, the question is, rather than thinking of these one-offs, but this idea of ecosystems—how it all relates to each other and how can I leverage that? I may do this, but I would say advice to anyone out there is: instead of selling individual courses—not instead of, in addition to selling like individual courses and books—start thinking in terms of membership programs. There's a ton of membership programs out there, but most of those memberships, or even like the subscriptions, like if you have a paid subscription on Substack or something like that, or even Patreon, is to treat those less as just like this gathering place for people to get additional content, but to make it more achievement-oriented. What can I accomplish? Are there steps? Think in terms of the audience's pathways and their journey through that, so that membership has these elements of like, “I'm gaining something and I'm growing through this.” Key to that is gamification. Things like levels of rewards, of access, of just status. All these different things we can learn from gamification that you can be applying to that. Quite frankly, I don't think you have done this overtly or consciously, Joanna, but I think you do a great job of that. Like with your Patreon, you don't just say, “Okay, I'm going to give you access to just additional content.” Yes, you do that, but in addition, there's a sense of belonging, there's a sense of participation, there's a sense of access that you get to you. And all those little elements really are about the key. The last section of Brand Something Beautiful is all about creating experiences of delight rather than trying to see your audience as someone you want to sell to. It's someone you want to delight. So what do you do? What can you do with every little touchpoint? All these little touchpoints add up. So whether it's travel and how that helps us to learn new things, or it's intentionally using your multiple streams of income—all the different books, merch, all that stuff coming together. If you focus on it being about delighting your audience, it just changes the whole way you look at them. Joanna: Fantastic. So where can people find you and your books online? Steve: Probably the easiest way for the purposes here would be BrandSomethingBeautiful.com or Substack, brandsomethingbeautiful.substack.com. Joanna: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Steve. That was great. Steve: Thank you. The post Brand Something Beautiful: How Authors Can Stand Out In A Crowded Market with Steve Brock first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How do you know when it's time to wrap up one phase of your life and move on to the next? What's the secret to staying connected as a writer when you're working alone? And if you have multiple passions and endless ideas, how do you actually finish things instead of constantly starting new projects? Pilar Orti gives her tips in this interview. In the intro, Writing Storybundle; An honest accounting from an extensive self audit of an indie author publishing business [The Author Stack]; Money books; Direct purchases through ChatGPT; Book discovery and GEO; The ultimate guide to AEO [Lenny's Podcast]; Conversions through Chat [SearchEngineLand]; SORA video app; AI for eCommerce and Amazon Sellers; Deliciously twisted Halloween book sale. This podcast is sponsored by Kobo Writing Life, which helps authors self-publish and reach readers in global markets through the Kobo eco-system. You can also subscribe to the Kobo Writing Life podcast for interviews with successful indie authors. This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn  Pilar Orti is a nonfiction and memoir author, as well as a voiceover artist, podcaster, and Pilates instructor. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights, and the full transcript is below.  Show Notes Wrapping up life phases with books. Using writing to process and close chapters of your personal and professional journey Connection strategies for remote workers and writers. Understanding your own connection style and respecting others' preferences Co-writing across continents. The practical process of collaborating with someone you've never met in person Using AI as a writing collaborator. How generative AI helped overcome the blank page and create a unified voice Knowing when to end projects. Recognising the signs that it's time to stop versus push through challenges Being a finisher in a world of ideas. Balancing multiple interests while actually completing projects You can find Pilar at PilarWrites.com or on LinkedIn. Transcript of interview with Pilar Orti Jo: Pilar Orti is a nonfiction and memoir author, as well as a voiceover artist, podcaster, and Pilates instructor. So welcome to the show, Pilar. Pilar: Thank you very much, Jo. Hello everyone. Hello creatives. It's exciting to talk to you. Jo: Tell us a bit more about you, how you got into writing and podcasting, and your multi-passionate career. Pilar: I'm going to try and give you the bit that's more related to writing, because if not, we'll be here for half an hour just with me bubbling on. I always liked writing, and I was thinking about this, I wrote my first play to be performed when I was seven. I got all my friends together and we did this little show. I think it was about a soldier or something, I don't know why. All throughout my teens I kept writing plays and got my friends together to do them, and we put on the shows. Looking back, I think for me writing has always been about sharing. All the writing I've done, I've always wanted it to be public, so I've never journaled or anything like that. I continued writing plays. Eventually I set up a theater company with a friend and we did some plays. Then I did a translation of a Lorca play, When Five Years Pass. That was the first time that I started to think that my work could be published in some way. So I looked for literary managers in theaters to see if they were interested in the show. I even sent it to Samuel French and Oberon Books, all these small presses that specialized in theater. They all came back with that same thing: “It's a great translation, but it's really niche and nobody's going to want to see this Lorca play.” So I started to think about how to put it out there and came across self-publishing. Once I saw that my work could get out there relatively easily—I didn't have to go through the whole trying to find a publisher process—I started to write a lot more. I continued doing some stuff for the theater company and then I started blogging as well. We're talking now about the end of the 90s, 2000s. Then I wrote a book called The A to Z of Spanish Culture, which was supposed to be a nice project with lots of friends. We would each take a letter of the alphabet and of course, like these projects go, everyone dropped out and I ended up doing the whole thing myself. Jo: We should just say at this point, you're Spanish. Are you writing at this point in English or in both? Pilar: So I went to an English school. I landed there when I was five, in Madrid. So I'm bilingual. My first written language is English and my first spoken language is Spanish. Unfortunately I've dropped writing in Spanish and I really struggle, but my entire academic career has also been in English. So I think English is the language I feel most comfortable in when I'm writing. Everything I've written has been in English. Looking at The A to Z of Spanish Culture, I was sharing an office with a theater company and a couple of other theater companies at the time. At some point I mentioned this book, and someone said, “Oh, you're a writer or you want to publish some books. You have to listen to this great podcast called The Creative Penn.” That was my gateway into the whole world of podcasting. I mean, I knew about podcasting because I'm also a voiceover artist—I've been one since '98—but that really opened up that world. So I continued writing, and my relationship with writing up to a couple of years ago was just that I wrote mainly nonfiction about things I wanted to write about, looking back at where I was at that time. Then I published a book on physical theater, a very small book, just as I was leaving the theater company. I also wrote a little book about my life as a voiceover as I saw that work was starting to dry out. I think I'm wrapping up parts of my life with books. Last year, as I came to the end of my consultancy career talking about working with remote teams, I spent some time just writing, either editing something I was working on or writing. I decided after trying it for a few months that now was the time to write all those books I wanted to write and to also start looking at my writing as the main thing I was focusing on, because as you said, I always do lots of things. So that's where I am with the writing. Jo: I like this idea of wrapping up parts of your life with books. I actually think that's a really interesting comment and I definitely feel that. I guess I've started to do that too. I feel that it's true for me, for my fiction as well. My Desecration, Delirium and Deviance series, I wrote when we were in London and they're about London. When I moved to Bath, I wrote my Matt Walker series, which was set in Bath. Then the Pilgrimage book was about that pilgrimage. So I really like that insight, that sort of wrapping up parts of your life with books. Just coming back, you said you finished the consulting side. Was that a decision? I really wanted to get your insights on this finishing up things. Why did you stop doing the consulting side of things? Pilar: It's a mixture of things and I think also a great reflection of why do we end things, especially professional ones. I set up a consultancy called “Virtual Not Distant” around maybe nine, ten years ago to help leaders of remote teams and remote teams. Of course that was a different world then. Then through the pandemic, as we know, it all exploded. So I started to get more work, but maybe not the kind of work I really wanted to do. I was coming into helping remote teams and remote work as an alternative way of working and something that could be embraced and set up carefully and in a sustainable way. What I found after all the lockdowns and all the remote work—the forced remote work—and as organizations started to adopt maybe a little bit more flexible working, hybrid work, the clients or the people I would end up working with were not the ones that I should be helping. Or at least I couldn't help them in the way I wanted to help them because I have my vision. What had been left was a very different world. I just wasn't comfortable anymore with what I was finding when I was going in. At the same time, let's be honest, the work started to dry up. There wasn't this need anymore for people who needed to work remotel. They'd figured out some version that worked more or less for them. I see it with my peers as well, that the whole cohort, almost everyone has pivoted or shifted. So it was a mixture of both. I have to say that I don't think the market wanted me anymore as much, because before the pandemic it was great fun. But also I couldn't shape that way of working like I wanted to. So I decided to write more instead about it, as you say, to wrap up. Jo: That's interesting. So this new book, Connection and Disconnection in Remote Teams, this is really, as you've said, summing up all your thoughts and what your ideal situation is, I guess. Lots of people listening work their day jobs separately and often write alone. Writers, we're often disconnected in many ways and we are not really in teams, but certainly I feel like connection and disconnection are huge themes for writers. Give us some tips for connecting with other humans when we work disconnected. Pilar: Unfortunately one of the reasons I left consultancy was because all my answers were “it depends,” and that's why I moved into Pilates teaching because that is very set and “it depends” very little. A few things—when I'm talking about wrapping up, I think that's going to be my theme. In 2019, this season of Connection and Disconnection in Remote Teams was a podcast season that I created with a collaborator and with lots of other people actually, to talk about this theme of loneliness in remote teams, because we saw that was something that remote teams were struggling with a lot then. We created a seven-part episode series around it. For all these years I've been looking back at that and thinking there's a lot of material here which could be useful for a lot of people. We don't want this loneliness thing of working alone becoming a problem because of loneliness. What this book shows, what the podcast showed, and my co-author Bree Katy actually led most of those interviews, is that you need a high level of self-awareness to really find how you connect with others and then a level of awareness about how other people like to connect. So that's why it really “it depends.” I think that level of self-awareness is: What does it mean for me to feel like I belong in a community? Like I belong with other professionals? Like I connect to my collaborators? What is it about it? I came up with three things which you can look at. Do you connect across the work? So is that where you really get your value of “Yes, we're doing something together and this is interesting. This makes me want to be with you. We are together in this.” So is it across the work, or is it around the work? Is it actually the conversations like this one, Joanna, that we're having, which is around what's happening? Or is it away from the work? So some people do not connect through the work they do, but they really connect with somebody else's personal story or personal life or hobbies, etc. I think work connection has a general meaning that's out there, but it's very wide. In understanding how you connect or when you prefer to connect in each way—because that also happens—then you can seek those opportunities, which can be, as you're saying, in our case, online communities. But is it enough to be on a forum-type community and that's enough for you to feel like you belong? Or do you actually need to find people who will go on a Zoom call with you? The technology has opened up lots of avenues and this is what's exciting and complicated. If you're someone who connects through writing and through being okay being a little bit anonymous, you've got that. And if you're someone who likes to have a more interactive experience, seeing people and being real time, you can look for meetups online or in person. Jo: I think, like you said, it's understanding yourself and being self-aware and then respecting other people too. For example, we've emailed for many years. I was on your podcast years ago, but we've not hung out. Right now we're on audio only. We're not on video because I prefer audio, especially later in the day. So we are connected, but we are not closely connected. And yet, I would say we're aware of each other and we are in a sort of adjoining community. That's completely different from somebody who wants to be on video talking to people on Slack every day, wanting to be always chatting with other people. We have to learn how we can do this sustainably because that's the other thing, isn't it? I can do video, but it's so tiring to me that I can't do it sustainably. How can people learn more about what works for them in this connection way? Pilar: And I think you mentioned as well, respecting other people. I would add to that asking people and learning to find out about other people. That's how we can respect each other. The learning aspect, there's something that my friend Lisette Sutherland is very hot on, which are called personal manual. These are things that people in remote teams do where they say how they work best or how they prefer to connect with other people or how they like to spend their day. Because what happens when you're away from people is that you're missing a lot of information and sometimes we have to make this information explicit. If I'm trying to build a relationship, a professional relationship with someone, or if I want to connect a little bit more around the work, then I can say a little bit more about, “Well, I much prefer an audio conversation next time. Can we do audio?” Or “Hey, I had a great time doing this video thing. Do you ever meet up with other colleagues?” or “When we talk together, do you prefer email?” I think questioning how other people want to connect as well will help us then to strengthen those relationships. Sometimes we can maybe try something that we hadn't tried before or find out how other people are doing it. For example, I get a lot of pleasure from reading people's comments on Google Docs when I'm working on something together. So for me, working on a shared document really gives me something more than if an email is coming backwards and forwards because the comments are always there. In a way, when I go into a Google Doc, it's like I'm going to see someone else. I'm going to see the people I'm working with in the shared document. So that says to me, okay, if I can, I'll ask if we can work in this way. Whereas other people prefer email for whatever reason, or audio as well. Audio recordings. So I think, like you said, being aware of all the different modes of communication and seeing when we go, “Ah, yes, okay. Now I'm really comfortable,” or “I'm really excited now about this.” Jo: It's funny, I was just thinking then, a lot of people pitch me by sending a video and I never ever, ever, ever, ever will click on any video if they recorded some Loom or even a personalized YouTube video. I literally will never look at them. Even people will send me an audio message and then expect me to listen to it. Even though I am generally audio, I'm like, definitely not. So this is about understanding for pitching as well. Sometimes you just assume something because you might be comfortable with it, but that other person on the other end just might not be. It's also fascinating to me that you love Google Doc comments because I hate that too. Is it our age as well, do you think? I'm 50 and I feel like Slack messaging, for example, completely passed me by. Pilar: I don't think it's age because I'm only three years older than you. As you say, I love Slack, but I have a way of using it. That's another thing, this feels very strange, but when you're working with someone in remote teams, you have to make explicit things like this. So if you decide you're going to use Slack, okay, how are we going to use it? When can I get you urgently? And is it okay to wait two days to reply to your message? It is, by the way, unless it's urgent. But it's the use of it. That's another very important thing, Joanna. When we are going more into the working together or even in communities, the technology is really widespread, is ubiquitous at the moment, and a lot of people have used either this technology or something similar. We all have our own ways of doing it. So we need to agree on one or two things so that we use it in the same way, so that we don't get frustrated. For example, if you prefer to wait three or four days, and I'm the one that wants everything urgently. I think it's just being explicit. I don't really know because I only worked with people who were like 10 years younger or, well, my collaborator Bree is 20 years younger and we got on well with the docs. Jo: Yes. It's just not imposing judgment on other people based on how they prefer to do things. It's just like, well, we have to agree on a way to work together. But as you said, you've co-written this book, Connection and Disconnection, with a writer in Australia without meeting in person. So obviously you use Google Docs, but— Tell us more about that process of co-writing. Pilar: I love co-writing, and to be honest, I've been waiting to co-write a book for ages. I did co-create a book together, which was a collection of blog posts with my colleague Maya Middlemiss, a long time ago. This has been getting something almost from scratch, so I think the fact that we had done that podcast season is important because we'd already worked together. So there were a couple of things that meant that the book got—as I'm talking to you, it's not finished yet, but hopefully when this comes out, it will be at least on preorder. There were a few things: one, we already had the material, but the material needed shaping. That actually took a few years because we started one process that didn't work and then we started a new process which has worked. I think that has been finding that we could both hook onto a process that was sustainable and that would get us both onto the computer. That's been really important. I'd met Bree more or less a few times working on the season together. We also did do about a monthly catch-up on Zoom or Google Hangouts, whatever, online. I think that was quite important because it just meant that we could just relax a little bit more in the conversation, and the conversation could go anywhere. Of course we could make faster decisions, so we had that. We didn't have that as a rule, but it happened and neither of us are very meeting people. So we were fine with that. You would've hated this process—we had so many Google Docs. But what we decided was instead of using a chat-based application or email, we started talking in a Google document. It could be a Word document, so a shared document where we would work a little bit on the book. Then we'd check out at the end of the day and we just write a few things. Or if something had happened in our personal lives that the other person needed to know, we wrote it there. What's really nice about that is, one, we didn't end up with more chat messages. We always knew our conversation was only there, our written conversation. And now we have a record. We have a whole year of this project from the start, right to the end. We might not do anything with it, but it's really nice to have. From the practical point of view of working on the text, we've used shared documents. We split up the chapters—we had one person writing the first draft and then we went in and commented, etc. The one thing I do have to say, and thanks to you, Joanna, because you've introduced me to generative AI—I'd been playing a lot with ChatGPT, Claude, feeding into my own writing work, and that's why I approached Bree again last year in 2024 to start to work on this again. We'd already tried to put the book together and we'd found it very daunting because we had transcripts from seven episodes plus all the full interviews of about seven or eight guests that Bree had done. We were finding it really difficult to come to the page. So I ran by her, I said, “What do you feel about generative AI?” I ran some ideas via Claude. I asked it to maybe generate some text based on the transcripts from our interviews. We saw that there could be something there. What Bree was saying was really useful for her was the fact that we created a project in Claude, which had all the transcripts. So you could say, “Oh, at some point we talked about somebody who had moved to the middle of nowhere and suddenly realized that their career prospects had decreased or something. Who was that? What episode was that in and what did they say?” Then instead of having to dig through all these transcripts, suddenly we had our own assistant that pulled it out. The other thing was that for some chunks it started to give us a common voice. It's not that Claude was writing everything, but it started to smooth the differences in both our voices. So we found one voice for the book without, and you can't really tell who's writing which bit, but it's still us. It's really still us. So it's been interesting. We've had technology as an intermediary, not just in the communication process, but also in the writing process. Jo: I think that's great. I certainly think these tools are really useful for when you have your own material. I'd also suggest to people listening, Google's Notebook LM, where you can actually load the transcripts and it will only use those. Whereas the other models will kind of bring insights from the rest of the model. So I think that's super useful. You did mention that you basically failed the first time around and the process didn't work the first time around, so you said it was just too daunting. Was it literally just the volume of stuff and you didn't know where to start? What other insights do you have from failing that first time around? Because I feel like a lot of people when they approach any sort of big project, do maybe fail at things and then they don't come back to it. Any insights from the failure and getting over that? Pilar: I think it was the fact that we were always coming to a blank page. So we had the material, and especially Bree, she was closer to the material and she had less time than I had as well. So I think time was definitely a factor, which is why I went back to her and said, “Look, I think this can save us some time,” as well as help us in other ways. So time was really a factor. The blank page was a factor, whereas this time we felt that we could start with something, even if it was that I prompted the generative AI with this prompt to write, I don't know, chapter one, and this is what it's come up with. “Okay. Well I like this point. I like this point. Yes. Okay. So we can now work on chapter one, but at least we've got something that we could both start from as well,” which is quite important. So I think it was the classic, it was time and it was the blank page, and also this feeling of how we had organized the material. Again, technology, you need to find the right space for you to work in. We were using Notion, which has a lot of moving parts, and in the end we just went back to transcripts, PDFs, Google Doc, which are nicely set in our folder. So that was another learning—we needed our own office space that worked for us and the first time it didn't quite work and the second time it helped us. Jo: I've tried Notion several times. I even had like a tutorial with someone and it just didn't work for me. It didn't click at all. I think this is really important for people listening. You can hear people say, “Oh, well this transformed my process. It's just amazing,” but it doesn't work for your brain. You can't force it into a different way. Try things. I have tried Notion several times and I'm like, no, I just cannot get it. I still use Scrivener for my first drafts and I just paste everything into Scrivener. When I co-write, I have co-written several times using Google Drive and Google Docs as the sort of beginning place. It is still probably the simplest idea, isn't it? Pilar: Yes. I think Google Docs is definitely simple because you've got a blank page, but now of course you have to push away the AI that's trying to do everything. I think what you said about why—what was it about the first time that didn't work—is really important because this is something that is often missing, one as individuals and then also definitely as collaborators and in teams, is that we try something, it doesn't work, and we don't stop to think why. It doesn't mean we go, “Why?” and then we try and make it work again. No. We think, “Okay, why didn't this work? What else could work?” Or sometimes we've got the right technology, but we need to adapt something. So we ask “Why didn't this work?” and we went, “Okay, maybe what we need to do is something different.” Or actually, like you say, “Well, this is not going to work, but now we know that when we look for the next thing, it's got to have this, this, and this.” But that step, especially because we don't like to think back, “Why didn't that work?” It's quite hard work for the brain. But I think it's quite important. I feel like some apps, I find them so easy to use and other ones they just… I mean, technology and humans, they go together. For me, technology, sometimes you have to have that connection with it. It's easy. You can get your brain around it, you can get your hands around it in a way, metaphorically. I think we should acknowledge that and it's fine. Jo: Yes, exactly. Use what works for you. I wanted to circle back on the sort of ending things, because you have paused and you've done the seasons. Like you said, this book was born out of a seven-part season. You've paused some of your shows, you've ended others. Maybe just talk about how do you know when something is ending? When is it not failure? Because you've just explained how something didn't work, so that was a failure, but you did decide to end that. Whereas some of your podcasts, and like your consulting, you ended that. It wasn't a failure. You made a decision to end it. How do you know when something is finished and end it in a way that feels positive and satisfying? Pilar: For me it's when I really don't want to do something anymore or when something is a bit of a drag. Sometimes there are some signs. I'll go back to a very long time ago. I used to teach physical theater and acting a long time ago. I was doing maybe two hours a week only in a drama school around the corner. I went on my way there and every now and then, because this was before lots of email, I would turn up and my class would've been canceled. It was great because I still got paid, but my class would've been canceled and no one had told me. I found myself walking one day towards the school going, “I wish, I hope that the class is being canceled” and I went, “Okay. That's it. This is something I don't want to do anymore.” So there are those kinds of signs that I really listen to—when I really don't want to do something. Then the podcasts, the podcasts are creative projects, so they're driven by a curiosity at that moment. Or I have to say, a lot of the shows I've done, I've done with co-hosts. Sometimes I've just done it because I wanted to do something with this person and something has come up. I think that even with podcasting, because you mentioned the podcasts in particular, I didn't have anything else to say. I had nothing more to say and I thought, “Well, that's it.” So I was doing a show called Management Cafe with Tim Burgess, who is actually the boss of Bree, who I'm writing with. Both of us have left the organizational world. Neither of us lead people anymore. We were like, “What are we doing?” The show Management Cafe was just like therapy and reminiscing of how it used to be and what happened to this and what happened to that. I think understanding, especially if it's a creative project that you keep doing, and suddenly you're like, “I don't know why I'm doing this. I have nothing more to say. I'm getting tired of the sound of my own voice” in whatever way. Then wrapping up, I think especially with creative projects, we need to try so many things to understand what it is we want to do, what it is that we like doing, and I'm being very lucky in that respect that I've been able to try lots of different things in my life. Because of that, I've learned to try things that don't work out without thinking that there's something wrong with it. Of course some things don't work out and they have larger consequences than others. So understanding that, especially in a creative process, whatever you're doing, you touch on one thing and then that doesn't work. Well, maybe that's not the right thing for you right now. You can always come back to those kinds of things. So I think it's recognizing that that's not the right thing to be doing anymore, and just seeing it as something that I'm going to put to one side now because, okay, it might be doing well, but I'm not getting anything out of it. Jo: It's funny though. I was thinking there, you mentioned earlier that your voiceover work, that there's less work there than there used to be. I guess that's a lot to do with AI, digital voice. I guess for some people sometimes the decision as to things ending is not necessarily theirs. Or they need to do it for money or something. I think this is probably happening to a lot of people. They're seeing some streams of income begin to dwindle because of whatever reasons. How do you pivot into something new? What's your process? Do you end something and then learn something new? Or do you make sure these overlap so you have periods where you're still earning from the old ways? Pilar: Just going back to the voiceover, because that's a very good example, as you said. I still work as a voiceover, but not very much. When we're talking a few years ago, actually, my own work didn't decrease because of the AI. It decreased because of the internet, great internet connections that we can now have with voices in Spain. So I'm a Spanish voiceover in London, and before we always did our recordings in London. Whereas as the internet connections got better, they can now beam into Spain and they have a wider talent pool there. The other thing that happened was the home studios. I don't have a home studio. My bedroom's good enough for podcasting, but not for client work. I started to see it was pre-pandemic that the artificial intelligence was taking all the small jobs, like the “press one for this, press two for that.” That was actually a decision, talking about when to shift. I saw that coming and I had to make a choice for myself, which was do I set up a home studio? Or do I get out and do something else? Which is why I started the consultancy on the side. Of course, I love voiceover and it still brings some income. So talking of that— I think starting to do something and trying it out while you're still doing your income-generating work is a very good idea. You can start to try it. Like maybe I'm going to do this thing, I don't know, could be writing. “I really want to write, but I don't have the time. I'm going to try and do two hours a day and see if I still like it if I have to do it.” Because I think that when you discover that you can go into a profession is if you have to do something, is it still that joyful? So finding out how sustainable your new career might be by doing little experiments before you decide to take a big plunge. Again, you've said it many times and your guests have as well, that when we leave something that is a recurring income at the moment, we have to look at our figures. We have to look at how we are going to live before we take that plunge and then start making our plans around that. Can you work a little bit less at your full-time job, you know, four days a week instead of five, and things like that? And not be afraid of the fact that that might not happen. We might try it and it's okay if actually we discover that, “You know what? The stress of thinking that I'm going to have to earn an income with this is making me sick.” That's fine. Pull right back. It might not be the right moment as well. Again, see what it is bringing up in you. So I've recently trained as a Pilates teacher, which actually, talking of income, it's going to be a small part of my income, but I just noticed that I was really enjoying the classes that I was taking, getting really curious about it. That's how I know that it's time to move on to something else. I might not leave behind what I've already got, but I need to start looking into something else. I find myself listening to podcasts around the subject. I read around the subject. I start to want to know more, and that's when I know. When I start to bring in the input from other places, and when I start to really soak in lots of other information, that's when I know, “Okay, something is shifting. I have to look at this.” I've tried lots of things. At one point, I started doing cartoons, and I've got this happy daisy. So I looked into merchandising, could that work? Well, no, because the money coming in from all the print-on-demand merchandising side is really small and also they treat you not very well. Okay. That won't do, I'll put it to one side. It might turn into a comic at some point, but for now I've got to do something else. I've had to train myself because you can hear that I can go anywhere, anytime. I've had to train myself now to go, “No, that is for later. Write it down, make notes, have a place where you can record your thoughts around that thing you really want to do. But now is not the right moment.” So now I'm doing this book and I'm doing the Pilates thing. That's it for now. I've got lots of things that are going to come after, but for now, not everything all at once. Jo: Because you are also a finisher. I think this is really important. It's interesting because I do talk to a lot of creatives who are similar to both you and me. We have lots and lots of ideas and start lots of things, but a lot of people can't finish them. So they've got too many projects on the go at the same time. People say to me all the time, “Oh, you must be so busy.” And I'm like, actually, I'm not that busy. It might sound like I work on a ton of things, but I don't really. I'm kind of launching one book, and then writing another book and doing this show. I feel like the finishing energy is just as important. So is that something you've had to learn or is that just something you have naturally, which is, I must finish this thing before I move on to the next thing? Pilar: It's natural. I've always had this. When we first set up the theater company, I remember my friend Philip, who we set it up with, he said, “I'm like an ideas person. You're a finisher.” Yes, I am. I think it comes naturally. I don't like open endings and open loops. It also comes back to this knowing that because you don't succeed at something, it doesn't mean you are not a great person. You know what I mean? So finishing for me sometimes is not doing it anymore. It doesn't mean I've completed the project. It doesn't mean that I've made a success of this thing I wanted to do. It means I've gone, “You know what? In one year, how much have I enjoyed this? How successful was it? If it was supposed to bring income, did it bring an income?” You know what? Okay, let's wrap that up and that's okay. Put it away. Sometimes it is about, “Okay. This book, it's dragging.” My books, Joanna, they take like three or four years. If it's worth it, then I finish it. I have put some books away. I put some ideas away. I had some brilliant ideas about things and I thought, “Am I going to be able to do that? It's going to take me three more years and I have to do all this research.” Put it in the ideas list, and being okay with that. Jo: I think being okay with it, I mean, I'm the same. I have a massive drive, so I use Dropbox for my main drive. I've got this “for later” kind of folder structure. Sometimes I do indulge myself, especially now with like deep research on ChatGPT. Sometimes I'll be like, “Do a deep research into this topic,” to just see if I want to go deeper into it. I always say, “Recommend like 20 books on this subject.” Then if I want desperately to kind of get into all that, it's like you said, if I feel that need to research, then I will dive into that more seriously. Like right now by my desk, I have about 20 physical books on gothic cathedrals and architecture and beauty and awe and wonder. I just needed to go down that rabbit hole. But a lot of the time I'll be like, “Okay, I am not quite ready to do that.” It sounds like we have a similar process on what to spend the time on and projects that are worth spending the time on. Pilar: Yes, and I think you develop an instinct at some point, or a process, or you trust that the right thing will kind of stay you in the face or something. Because I think that that is also a process and it'll be different for everyone, is learning to trust how we manage our ideas. There was something else I was going to say. Oh, the other thing is, of course, that it's also okay to dream. So sometimes I know I'm not going to do something. I would've loved to be a cozy mystery writer. I still have my first novel there waiting for me and sometimes I just dream. I dream I have this series and it's okay. I don't have to then turn it into anything. I wonder sometimes when something we love doing, like writing, can be so close to how we want to earn an income. I think that sometimes we forget that it's okay to dream about plans and then we let them go and that's fine. Jo: I think that's good. Hold some of them lightly or hold them lightly until you decide to commit. Then if you're going to commit, then absolutely commit. This has been super useful and we are out of time. Where can people find you and everything you do online? Pilar: I have one website that I'm sure will be there for a while, which is PilarWrites.com. That's P-I-L-A-R-writes, as in writing. Then on LinkedIn, I'm Pilar Orti. Jo: Fantastic. Well, thanks so much for your time, Pilar. That was great. Pilar: Thanks Joanna. Thank you so much. I've been listening to your show forever, so this has been amazing. Thank you everyone for listening too. Thank you, Joanna. This transcript has been edited for clarity and readability while maintaining the authentic conversational tone and key insights shared by both speakers.The post How to Pivot Careers, Co-Write Books, And Stay Connected As A Remote Creative With Pilar Orti first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Have you optimized the seven essential elements of your Amazon book page before you even consider marketing? Are you making the most of A+ content, and advertising with Amazon? Amazon Ads expert Geoff Affleck gives his tips. In the intro, potential TikTok US changes [BBC]; Special editions [Written Word Media]; Self-Publishing with Dale Kickstarter books; Successful Self-Publishing Fourth Edition; Egypt beyond the pyramids, an example of fiction-adjacent content marketing [Books and Travel]; British Powerlifting; Starting something new, clearing space, beginner's mind, and Leuchtturm1917 journals. This episode is supported by my patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn  Geoff Affleck is a bestselling nonfiction author, self-publishing consultant, and Amazon ads expert working with authors to produce and promote their books through his business, Authorpreneur Publishing. Geoff is originally Australian but now lives in Canada. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.  Show Notes The seven essential elements every Amazon book page needs before spending a penny on advertising, from cover design to A+ Content Why Amazon ads work like shopping in the soup aisle (targeted intent) versus Facebook ads being like impulse candy purchases at checkout How series authors can break even on book one ads while making profits from organic read-through on subsequent books The critical difference between automatic ads and manual targeting, and why manual campaigns with specific ASINs get better results When new authors should start advertising (even with few reviews) and how established authors should maintain their backlist keywords and categories You can find Geoff at GeoffAffleck.com. Transcript of the interview with Geoff Affleck Joanna: Geoff Affleck is a bestselling nonfiction author, self-publishing consultant, and Amazon ads expert working with authors to produce and promote their books through his business, Authorpreneur Publishing. Geoff is originally Australian but now lives in Canada. So welcome to the show, Geoff. Geoff: Hi Joanna, thanks for having me here. It's great. Joanna: Yes, this is an interesting topic. So first up— Tell us a bit more about you, how you got into writing and self-publishing, and why you decided to move into author services. Geoff: Sure. It was about 15 years ago that I started getting involved in this industry. I had always been involved in marketing in more of a corporate job. I got involved in personal development for myself, just for personal growth, and managed to connect up with some New York Times bestselling authors who appeared in the movie The Secret. Joanna: Oh yes, wonderful time! Geoff: Right. So I worked as a marketing director for a couple of these authors who were part of that movie and, as a result, got exposed to the world of traditional publishing because they had New York Times bestselling books. We started a course where we would invite people to come and learn about—basically the premise was we'll teach you how to become a bestselling self-help author. I was the marketing guy, mostly talking about building their author platforms, and became really interested in the self-publishing side of it because that was really the door that most of these authors would come into rather than traditional, and had to learn very quickly about self-publishing. So this was, as I mentioned, probably now 2012 or thereabouts. As I learned about self-publishing, we decided to self-publish a book ourselves, the four of us. Since then, I've just continued to be really enamored by the whole industry. I realized quickly that I'm not really an author. I've co-authored a number of books, but writing's not my passion, although copywriting is, but not story writing. I really love the production side of it and the book launches, the marketing, especially with Amazon. So that's really where I focused in my business over the last eight years or so. Joanna: That's so funny with The Secret—it brings back those days. I remember reading that and it's where I really first learned about affirmations. My first affirmation that really changed my life was “I am creative. I am an author.” And I said that years before it actually happened. I know it's funny now, isn't it? We kind of look back and I don't think it's been tarnished, but there's not so much a halo around the law of attraction stuff. At the time, I feel like that really made such a big hit. A lot of the mindset stuff around it I still feel is valuable. Let's get into the advertising stuff, but before we get into that, I feel like a lot of authors jump into ads like they're some kind of magic bullet. What are the basic things that an author needs to get right with their Amazon book sales page before they even think about advertising? We're going to focus on Amazon today. Geoff: Right. Yes, absolutely. This is the starting point, and it should be the starting point for anyone who's looking to publish a book, let alone promote it or spend money on it with Amazon ads. You have to think about the conversions. What I mean by that is that if you're going to generate clicks to your book page, you have to be confident that a reasonable percentage of those clicks will turn into orders, or if you're in Kindle Unlimited, you know, Kindle Unlimited page reads. The number that we look for is 10%. So if you get 10 clicks from an ad, you want to get one sale or the equivalent of that in page reads. So it's really important to optimize your Amazon page—some people call it a product page or a book listing—so that when people land, they're going to be attracted to buying your book. Just makes sense, doesn't it? Joanna: Mm-hmm. Geoff: There are about seven elements that we focus on that you really need to get right, and you need to get all of them right. Sometimes just having one of them a little bit off can skew it. I could do a two-hour talk on this, but I'll just give you a quick introduction. Obviously the first one is the book cover. And that's the one that actually helps generate ad clicks because people don't see a lot about your book. They just see the cover, the title, how many reviews you have and so on. If it looks interesting, they'll click on it. So if you've got a cover that stands out as a little thumbnail on an Amazon ad, you're more likely to get a higher click-through rate on your ads, which means more traffic. So that's super important. Of course, the cover has to be aligned with the genre and be legible and all of that. Here's one that a lot of people miss, and it's the attention to keywords. You probably know that when you self-publish, there's seven keywords you can put in the metadata when you upload your book to Amazon, right? Most people don't give a lot of thought to that—just put in some words and hope that's okay. Keywords are really important, and it's a whole thing to learn how to get them right. Finding keywords that are popular yet not too competitive is the key because that's what Amazon's algorithm looks at when it's deciding whether your book's going to show up or not on a search. It's really important to get at least one good keyword phrase into your title or, more often, into your subtitle. I see a lot of authors that they'll publish a novel with a title and then leave the subtitle blank. So adding a subtitle that describes a little bit about the genre or a trope—like “A Billionaire Office Romance” could be a subtitle for a romance novel—that tells the reader something, but it also tells the algorithm something. That is one of the most important fields I find. If you're only relying on your seven keywords, I think you're potentially missing out on organic traffic. Beyond that— Obviously people look at how many reviews you have and what the quality is of the average star rating. Those are super important. So doing whatever you can to boost the number of reviews and ratings early on will give your conversion rate a big boost. So beyond that though— We've got to have a strong blurb. Usually there's a whole structure for blurbs, but not too long. Back even a few years ago, we were writing longer blurbs. Now it's around 200 words. A really strong headline with a hook, bolded is nice. Short paragraphs, the right elements, and then a call to action. I won't go any further than that, but that is key. But beyond that, a lot of people don't read blurbs. They kind of skim them. That's why shorter is often a little bit better. Increasingly, A+ Content is another way to supplement the blurb. So it's kind of like an additional blurb where we can put graphics up on the page that will help the reader understand more about the book and some reasons why they should buy it. Finally, I think price is really important. It can't be too high or even too low—that can sometimes be a disincentive because price and quality are often correlated. You've got to make sure your books are in the right categories, so that's really important too. Categories that are relevant. Sometimes I see people, even people who are helping other authors, put their books in categories that just aren't relevant in order to try to game the system and get a bestseller badge. That just doesn't work. Joanna: Yeah, that again feels like a tactic from like 15 years ago. Geoff: Let's just put it here in basket weaving, even though it's a basket weaving romance! Joanna: That is interesting. Lots of things to come back on here, but the A+ Content—your team helped me do some A+ Content for my How to Write a Novel book. I think as a buyer, like as a reader, I never, ever, ever scroll down that far. So I had some hesitation of, was this worth it? So talk a bit more about A+ Content and why you think that it is a good idea to have. Geoff: Well, first of all, for anyone who's not familiar with A+ Content, it doesn't say that word anywhere on your book page. But if you notice, as you're browsing on Amazon, you'll see the section called “From the Publisher.” So that's what we're referring to. You go below the book description, below the first couple of carousels of ads or suggestions, and then you'll see it there. It'll be snuggled in just above the editorial review section. What it is is kind of like a magazine-style layout of banners and images. You can have up to five rows of them, and you can choose as few as one or as many as five different banners. There are different layouts, and it's all template-driven on the backend of Amazon through your KDP account. It's also available to traditional publishers using Amazon Advantage. So I think the only time you can't really use it is, let's say you publish with IngramSpark or Draft2Digital—you won't be able to apply Amazon A+ Content to your books. Anyway, lots of different layouts available, including for nonfiction you can do side-by-side charts and this type of thing. You can provide, for a series, a series layout where people can see all the books in your series, or up to six anyway, and then click directly through to the different books. I think, other than being visually appealing—provided, and this is really important, they must be designed well—you design them outside of Amazon usually, although Amazon does have some sort of an AI image generator. Last time I checked it wasn't very good, so I don't use it. I get a professional graphic designer to design the graphics and then we upload them ourselves. We find that generally speaking, it will help increase your conversion rate because as people skim the book blurb, maybe don't take it all in, it gives you another chance to connect with them. It's visually appealing, so it tends to stop shoppers from scrolling because it's a little more interesting. So it's something they can quickly read and perhaps even get more of an emotional connection to the book. You can use it to build trust and authority for the author in a way that you can't really do in the blurb. As I mentioned, you can showcase the series, and it gives you an SEO boost because behind each image you get to input more keywords. We all know that Amazon is basically just a big search engine. Search engines are driven by keywords. So you can have, in addition to the seven boxes on your book listing, you can add more keywords on the backend of your Amazon A+ Content. So I think for most authors, it's worth doing. It can work very well for series authors, children's authors, because you can show the visuals of the inside of the book. I feel like if you're not doing it, you're sort of leaving something on the table that with not much effort you could do. Joanna: I think another important thing is it is free. I mean, obviously if you hire someone to make the images that costs money, but actually you can just add it onto your KDP account per book and per country as well. It has to be done per country, which is a bit of a pain, but it's not a great interface, to be fair. Geoff: No, no, it's not. Joanna: But it's free. Geoff: Absolutely. I will say that some authors that I've come across have done their own A+ Content using say one of those design tools like Canva or something, which can be great if you are a graphic designer. I've seen some pretty poor A+ Content design, and that can detract from the book and it can actually impact your sales negatively because I think if readers see sort of amateurish graphic design, they subconsciously think, well geez, what's the writing like? I'd caution your listeners to get a professional designer. It doesn't have to be expensive—a hundred dollars or something—and you get some good design. Joanna: Yes, absolutely. Joanna: Okay, so let's come to the advertising. We're going to assume now that we've got our page sorted with all those things, and I know some people who haven't heard this before are like, “Goodness me, that's a lot to do before just clicking on an ad.” But as you say, it's not just a magic bullet. Let's ask a bigger question: do we really have to advertise? People back in the old days could just upload a book on Amazon and it would sell. Is that possible anymore? Is organic reach a reality? Geoff: I don't really think so. For new authors, for most authors who don't have a platform—say a large email list, social media following and so on—it's pretty hard to get noticed. I don't know what you've heard. I think it's something like 5,000 books a day are published on Amazon or something. Joanna: It is ridiculous. It's just crazy. Geoff: Right. So you've got all this clutter that you've got to cut through. I came across someone last week who'd done nothing. He'd published his book in July and he said, “Oh, I think we've done all right. We sold 1,800 copies so far.” I said, “Oh my God, that's really good.” Joanna: That's very good. Geoff: That's really good. It's his first book, and no advertising. “What did you do?” “Oh, well I've got a pretty big email list.” “Ah, right.” So we all know that that's important, but he's probably tapped out his email list by now. So now we're doing the things we just talked about, optimizing the product page, and then starting Amazon ads, because eventually your email list is going to run dry. So in the absence of a platform or some way to promote your book, Amazon ads are, I think, the best way to have your book put in front of thousands, even millions of shoppers over time. Usually we see it takes about a thousand impressions to get a click. So in other words, your ads show a thousand times, you get a click—that's average, sometimes better, sometimes worse. So you've got to get lots of impressions of your ads to get a small number of clicks, to get a small number of sales. So I think it's important unless you've got something else that works for you. Some authors do really well with Facebook ads, and I think that's great too. To me, Amazon ads is like you're going to the supermarket and you're looking for soup. You go to the soup aisle and you look at the soup, and then another can of soup catches your eye. And you know what? That's interesting. I think I'll try that one. Whereas something like a Facebook ad is more like you're at the supermarket and you're looking for corn, and then you're at the checkout. You happen to see candy or some gum, and so you go, “Oh, impulse buy.” It's not really what you were on Facebook looking for—it's sort of a random thing. It does seem to work for some authors, so… Joanna: Yes, as you say, there's lots of different options. I mean, even like podcasting—you can't track clicks from podcasts because it's more of a brand-building approach and people will go look for stuff. But it's definitely a way to market. So there's lots of different options, but as we said, we're focusing on Amazon ads. So your team helped me with some nonfiction books, and one of the things that I thought was great about your approach is even on your website, you are really clear about what books ads work best for and what they don't work well for. So let's start with the good stuff. What are Amazon ads good for? What are the kinds of books they work best for? Geoff: Yes, they work best for series or if perhaps you have multiple standalones. The reason, of course, is read-through. Usually you're going to spend a little more, perhaps break even, on getting those initial readers. But if they enjoy your books, they're going to want to read more. Usually they're not clicking on an ad for the second, third, fourth, fifth book. They're going to just find it directly. So that becomes an organic sale with full royalties. So series can work very, very well with Amazon ads. I think in general, any book where the book page converts from clicks to orders. So that can be the book one in a series, which perhaps has a low price to entice the reader. It can also be a standalone. It could be a standalone nonfiction, could be a standalone novel, as long as it converts. We've got some examples where we just know that for every six clicks that this author gets, there's a sale. It just happens over and over again, probably because they've got the great product page and good reviews. I think sometimes it doesn't work as well if you're in a very low-volume niche, something that's just really obscure. That's more because there's just not much traffic, you know? So I think those are probably the best answers I can give for you. Joanna: What about KU? Geoff: Yes, absolutely. Amazon ads will certainly drive up your KU. We've got one author in particular is doing 150,000 monthly page reads on KU from her ad clicks, but a million and a half monthly overall. So the ad clicks are just driving people into book one, and then they just keep on reading. Joanna: You mentioned series, but for example, there are some genres where most of the series in a genre might be in KU, and then if you're trying to advertise a book that's not in KU, it might not work so well. Geoff: Yes, we find it works either way. It really varies from case to case, but Amazon ads on the dashboard, it does track your page reads that you generate from the ads as well as the orders that you generate. So you can really effectively see the impact of the ads—exactly how many page reads came from your ads versus orders. Joanna: You've mentioned reviews briefly. Many authors, who are new to self-publishing especially, think that they should be advertising at launch doing Amazon ads. You don't really have any reviews at launch, so when is the best time to be advertising? Geoff: Well, one thing about advertising at launch—it can help you certainly get your book, your brand out there with all of the different impressions of your ads. And Amazon gives you like a little banner on your ads when your book is new that says “Just Released.” It's a little gray banner that goes right above the cover. I think even if you have low reviews, because you have the “Just Released” banner on, shoppers might be a little more forgiving about the low number of reviews because it's obviously just released. So when we do book launches, I almost always include Amazon ads in the book launch. It might not be a really high budget, but just to continue to do everything we can to get that initial traffic. Because what we're trying to do with a launch is really three things: Get the Amazon algorithm to notice your book and figure out how it fits into the Amazon universe Get as many reviews as you can quickly Royalties, because without the first two, long-term royalties are just not going to happen So I think Amazon ads play an important role in helping the algorithm understand your book. Joanna: But if someone is brand new, it's their first book, is that a good fit? Or are we really looking at— Do you need a couple of books to make advertising worth the money? Geoff: Yes, it's a good question. I think with new authors, in a way today, you have to be prepared either to invest in your book, in book marketing. It's kind of like, I used to often use the analogy of a rocket launch—rockets burn a lot of fuel to get off the ground. Without the fuel, they stay on the ground. So there's that consideration that if you want the book to have a chance, you've got to invest in marketing somehow, whether it's Amazon ads or whether it's paid third-party book promotions through the different book promotion websites, or Facebook or TikTok, or whatever you are able to do. Email, whatever you can do. A small Amazon ads budget can help. Even if you're not doing $20 a day, which is what we would normally recommend, you might find that you can start to generate some sales with a much smaller budget and very conservative bids or cost per click. Perhaps you're only spending $3 a day and you're only picking up a couple of sales a week or something. But you've just got to do something to get that initial inertia going. Otherwise, the Amazon algorithm will basically drop you like a hot potato. Joanna: So that's new authors, but then authors who've been around a while, like myself, who have big backlists—and as you are talking about the seven things we need to have, I know there's people listening in the same place as me. They're like, “Well, we've got 40 books, 50 books, 100 books. This is way too depressing.” I was in my KDP dashboard like yesterday, and I realized that a whole load of my sales descriptions had reformatted to some old version. I don't even know when that happened, but it made me laugh. Then I looked down at my keywords and my categories. So if we want to keep things moving, how often should we be reviewing these fields if we've been going a while? When do we refresh categories? When do we refresh keywords? Geoff: Yes, good idea. I think it was perhaps a year and a half ago, Amazon changed their category rules where you used to be able to have 10 and now you have three. So some authors who were grandfathered into the old 10-category system, it may be well enough just to leave that alone because it's great to have to be across all of those categories. I think keywords is probably the most important thing to look at. Well, I'll say book blurb and keywords. Book blurb for sure, because that's very much customer-facing. Keywords aren't customer-facing. They're Amazon algorithm-facing. I was just listening to Dave Chesson last week with a webinar that he presented on Amazon's new algorithm. He stressed the importance of finding the right keywords, but also the importance of having the keywords in your book blurb. It must be done in a way that doesn't sound like it was just written by AI or something, you know? So that's probably one area to really take a good look at and republish. Publisher Rocket is a great tool for researching the best keywords. You can look up other books and see what keywords those books are ranking for, and therefore that might be a good set of keywords for you. So it is something worth doing and spending an hour or two on, as well as book blurb is also worth spending time on for sure. Joanna: Yes, it's one of these things that the more you write, the more you publish, and then the backlist becomes this kind of sprawling thing, especially when you're wide like I am. Then you have all these different formats and platforms, and you figure how traditional publishers forget to maintain things. It's kind of obvious when you realize how many books they manage. Geoff: You mentioned formatting issues with book blurbs, and that's quite common too. Because Amazon's little WYSIWYG where you enter your book description isn't perfect, and it does strange things. So you've really got to— After you publish your book description, make sure you look at it on your Amazon page and check the formatting. I can't tell you how many times I've seen all bold… Joanna: Oh yeah, all bold or… Geoff: All bold or large heading, or all italic, no spaces between the paragraphs or whatever. So you've got to really check your output as well. There are tools out there that can generate the HTML so that you could put it in directly that way. Get some eyeballs on your product pages, whether it's yours, but better off someone else's, or even better, someone like me who does this for a living. Get some opinions on what are customers seeing when they come to your product page. Usually you're, as an author, too close to it. You can't see the forest for the trees, so to speak. So get some other opinions on what do you think about my blurb and the cover? Is it clear? Because it might be clear to you, but it might not be clear to someone who's never heard of your book before. Joanna: Yes, absolutely. There are so many things, and that's partly why I wanted to talk to you because I feel like people just say “advertising” or “paid ads” as if it is going to solve all the problems of selling books. And yet so much stuff does go into it. A lot of it is basics, like it's basic marketing 101, but it's still hard, particularly for cross-genre books. A lot of my fiction, I found that many of the standard approaches don't work on Amazon when you write cross-genre because just in the categories and the keywords, it doesn't fit the boxes. Geoff: Yes, cross-genre is a tough one for sure. Joanna: Yes, it is. So my answer to that is to focus on the books that are more easily marketed. That's another trick, isn't it? You don't have to market every single book. Geoff: Oh no, you don't. Absolutely not. Joanna: Just market the ones that are going to make you the most money and the ones that are more easily marketed on this platform. So for me, Amazon ads work best for my nonfiction because it's really obvious what it is. Geoff: Yes, that makes sense. Absolutely. Joanna: So I did want to ask you, because I've used a combination of auto ads and manual targeting. Can you explain to people what's the difference between auto ads and manual targeting, and when might auto ads work and when might they not? Geoff: Oh, absolutely. So with Amazon ads, the way that they work is all about something called targeting. And targeting, you can think of it like this: Which other books on Amazon do you want to piggyback on? Which ones are like yours? If you can find books that are like yours, then when someone's browsing that book, they'll see your ad, they'll click on it, and they might buy your book. So we want to target, and there's really two—we call it three ways of targeting your ads. One is automatic, often just called auto ads. Amazon decides where it thinks your ads should be displayed, so you have no control over where they show up. You just trust the algorithm understands your book and will put it in the right place. Now usually it's going to advertise it on books that are in the same categories as you. That's sort of the default. That can result in some wasted reach because it might just not be really zeroing in on books that are like yours, especially if you're in a little bit of a broader category. The other thing we find with auto ads is that quite often you don't get that many impressions. Impressions is how many times your ads are displayed. When you have low impressions, you have lower clicks, and when you have lower clicks, you have lower sales. So while auto ads can be a sort of a time saver—they don't take much research to set up, you just fill in the boxes and click the button and off they go—usually they don't have a terrific result until such time as the algorithm really understands your book. So we don't set up auto ads at the beginning when we work with authors. We wait until we feel like the algorithm has a better understanding of the book. So what do we do? We do manual campaigns. Manual campaigns are, as the name suggests, where you have to tell the algorithm where to display your ads. And there are two types of manual campaigns: One's called a keywords campaign, and as the name implies, you would enter in, let's say, 50 keywords that you want to use for your ads. They could be author names of comps, they could be other book titles or series titles, and they could be genre or trope-related terms or even character types, et cetera. So if you have a combination of those things, which you should—which you have to manually research by perhaps looking at the also-boughts for your book that are showing up on your product page, using Publisher Rocket is a great tool. Even AI can help you come up with your keywords. Then the second kind of manual ad is the product ad. With that ad, we're targeting specific categories of books and also specific ASINs. ASIN being a product number. So you find the ASIN of a book like yours and you target it, and we might target five categories and 20 ASINs to start with, something like that. With those ads, we find that we usually get better results because we are in control of where the ads are showing. So it's one of those things—it's easier to show than tell. If you can just remember, there's auto and manual. There's two types of manual. When you're starting out, manual's the way to go because you will get more traction with manual ads. Joanna: I think another issue with the manual advertising, certainly for anyone who's like me, who's just not that interested in data—this is where it becomes difficult. People are like, “Oh my goodness, this is so difficult.” So if people are manually doing their own ads, should they have to log in every day to check things? What are the time requirements if you want to do your own ads? Geoff: Not every day. Although at the beginning, it's hard to resist the temptation sometimes to log in every day. It's a bit like when I first started buying stocks for investments—I'd check the stock price every day, but you drive yourself mad. Every time it would go down, you'd get all stressed out, and then it would go up, you'd get all excited. So probably once a week is a better timeframe. Maybe a little bit more in the first week, but you can set some parameters to make sure that your ads don't run away. That's important. You can set a daily budget, you can set a monthly budget, and then when your ads hit those upper limits, they'll just stop. So that's really good. You don't want to have that problem where you suddenly get a huge bill that you weren't expecting. You also want to check on them to make sure that you haven't perhaps accidentally bid too high on one of your targets. Every target, you set a dollar or pound or euro amount for how much you're willing to pay for a click on that target. Sometimes, if you're a little bit careless, you could accidentally bid too much because they may default to a suggested bid, which might be $2. Well, imagine you're paying $2 for a click and you're making, maybe you're only making $2 on a sale—you could be really upside down on your advertising. So do take care, make sure nothing's gone awry. You also want to be checking to see which of those targets are getting the clicks and the sales, and then adjusting bids up and down accordingly. If one of your targets is really working for you, you might want to increase the amount that you're willing to bid. That'll make your ad show up closer to the top, which is going to get you more clicks. Similarly, if you've got targets that are getting clicks but not sales, you may want to turn those off. We usually use a rule of thumb of 20. When we get 20 clicks and we haven't had any orders, we'll turn it off. So you do need to do some adjustments, and usually twice a month or so is enough time between adjustments. Joanna: Obviously authors can do their own ads. It's just available. People can log into their KDP dashboard, or there's just one marketing link for the whole thing. You can go in and manage it all there. If people want help, what does your team offer? Geoff: Yes, sure. Everyone can do Amazon ads, even if you self-published, or even if you're traditionally published, you can still run Amazon ads. That's just fine. I should just mention those who are traditionally published won't have a KDP dashboard, but you can get into Amazon ads through your Author Central account under the Marketing and Reports tab. We offer a managed Amazon ad service. We've been doing that since 2019. Basically, you turn over your ads to us. We access your ads account through what is known as editor access, which basically is a permission that you grant us so that we can log into your ads account through my account. We don't need your password. We can't go shopping and buy anything on your Amazon. We handle the setup of the ads, including all the keyword and target research, set up the ads, and then monitor, analyze, and optimize regularly. We provide support for authors as well. In particular, we'll take a good look at your product page—back to the beginning of our conversation. That's actually our first step before we even run the ads. We'll have a session with you. One of my team will evaluate your product page and make written recommendations about what we recommend that you would improve before you even start advertising. Then we give you the guidance on what to do. If you can't do it yourself, we can help you with those things usually too. Joanna: Fantastic. Where can people find you and everything you do online? Geoff: Thanks. My website has everything there. All our pricing and everything is upfront. It's GeoffAffleck.com. Or you can go to GeoffAffleck.com/ads. That goes directly to the Amazon Ads page on my website. Joanna: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Geoff. That was great. Geoff: Thanks, Joanna. I appreciate you having me on today.The post Amazon Advertising For Books With Geoff Affleck first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Are you truly procrastinating, or are you protecting yourself from uncomfortable emotions? What if the real reason you're not finishing your book has nothing to do with laziness or lack of motivation? Colleen Story explores the types of procrastination that keep writers stuck and how you can move past them into success. In the intro, lessons learned from 14 years as an author entrepreneur; Surprised by Pilgrimage on The Leader's Way Podcast; Blood Vintage, out now. Write and format stunning books with Atticus. Create professional print books and eBooks easily with the all-in-one book writing software. Try it out at Atticus.io This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn  Colleen Story is the award-winning author of historical fantasy, supernatural thrillers and motivational books for writers. Her latest book is Escape the Writer's Web: Untangle Your Procrastination Type, Discover Personalized Solutions, and Transform Your Writing Life. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.  Show Notes Why procrastination is an emotional coping technique that protects your current identity How “overthinker” writers use learning and courses to avoid actually writing their own work The “guilty type” who feels bad whether they're writing or not writing Why perfectionist writers fear failure so much they endlessly revise the same manuscript for years How successful writers still procrastinate on uncomfortable tasks like submissions and marketing The power of five-minute timed sessions and small wins to ease into a new writing identity You can find Colleen at ColleenMStory.com and MasterWriterMindset.com. Transcript of interview with Colleen M. Story Joanna: Colleen Story is the award-winning author of historical fantasy, supernatural thrillers and motivational books for writers. Her latest book is Escape the Writer's Web: Untangle Your Procrastination Type, Discover Personalized Solutions, and Transform Your Writing Life. So welcome to the show, Colleen. Colleen: Thanks, Joanna. It's great to be here. I'm really excited to have this chat today. Joanna: It's such an interesting topic. But first up— Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing. Colleen: Well, you know, I wasn't one of those people who knew from the time I was in the cradle that I wanted to be a writer. I hear about that a lot, that people seem to know early on. I did not. I always enjoyed reading. I don't know if anybody will remember the bookmobile that used to come down the street in our neighborhood. That was a highlight of my week, going out and seeing the books in the bookmobile. So I was always a big reader, and I enjoyed whenever there was an essay test in school. I was thrilled because I felt like I could do well at those. I didn't think about writing until I had actually graduated with my music degree. Music came first for me. I graduated with a music degree and had moved to a different state, which gave me a little time to think. When you go to a different state, I would have had to have gone back to more classes to have gotten my teaching certificate in that state. So I just kind of took some time to think. It was during that time that I got bit by the writing bug. It's just kind of weird how it happened, but it was like out of the blue. I wanted to all of a sudden write stories. I grabbed a word processor—shows you how long ago this was—and started writing short stories. Within three years I had gotten my first short story published and I got a $10 check for it, which felt so awesome. I had to frame that and put it up. It's still on my writing desk. So that kind of changed the whole trajectory of my career because I continued to teach music privately, and I still play in the local symphonies and pit orchestras, but as far as my job went, writing just was the thing. After I got that publication, it was soon after that a copywriting job opened in my town and I got it. That kind of sent me on this new career. I started out as a corporate copywriter and was promoted to managing editor before I left there. I was there for about three years. My dream at that point was to write a novel and have it traditionally published. I knew that as long as I worked for the corporation, I wouldn't have the time to devote to that—that I needed to really learn the craft of writing a novel. So I went ahead and went freelance so that I could control my schedule a bit more. I worked on the side for about six months and then turned in my notice. I've been a freelance writer full-time ever since then. So that got me into the business side of writing. Then on the side I was working on novels for many, many years and got my first novel published in 2015. As of this year, I've now published 10 books, both fiction and nonfiction. That's kind of how it happened for me. I almost fell into it accidentally, but I'm really glad I did. Joanna: That's interesting. So are they all traditionally published or are you hybrid now? Colleen: I am hybrid. Yes, my novels were all traditionally published until my very latest series, the historical fantasy series. So my first three were traditionally published. Then when I started writing for writers, that kind of happened accidentally too. I had never intended to be a nonfiction writer. But when my second novel came out, the publisher—this was back in 2017 when it was released—was wanting you to build more of an online author platform. The one that I had started, the blog I had started, was not doing very well. So I wanted to try something else. I ended up combining my day job expertise, which was really as a health and wellness writer, with my passion for creativity and I created what was then called Writing and Wellness. I've since morphed that into Master Writer Mindset, but Writing and Wellness kind of took off and was doing very well. I started getting invitations to go speak at conferences and workshops and things. During that time I was really discussing issues with writers and realizing that they needed some help in different areas of productivity. Time management at that time was what I was looking into, and I decided I wanted to go ahead and write a book on that. But I didn't want to submit it to a publisher because I knew I would have to create a marketing plan and everything for it, and then I would have to allow them to change it however they felt that they should. I kind of knew what writers were looking for at that point. I wanted more control over that book so I could really deliver what my writers and my subscribers were telling me they needed. So that's when I dove into self-publishing, was with my writing books, and I've done those that way ever since. Joanna: That's interesting. So then this book, which is about procrastination specifically, I mean, to me it's like, wow, a whole book on procrastination. You were not procrastinating when you decided on this one. I said to you before we started recording, I personally don't understand procrastination because I just don't suffer from it myself, but I know that lots of other writers do. So when you sent this to me, I was like, oh yes, this is something that writers really do need. It was interesting, but— You don't sound much like a procrastinator. So why did you decide to pick this topic? Colleen: It was interesting, and right, I never would have thought of myself as a procrastinator. I typically do surveys of my subscribers and it seems like over the years… I mean, I started the Writing and Wellness, I think it was around 2015. So it's been about 10 years and I will regularly do these surveys. Repeatedly the subject of productivity, time management, and procrastination would come back as one of the main things that writers were struggling with every year that I would survey. So I had done some articles, some blog posts on procrastination. I did a couple of YouTube videos on it, but I kept hearing this come back to me. I also would talk to writers at conferences and things, or even at signings. I would have people come up and say, “I started this book and I never finished it,” or “I really wanted to write this book, but I just never did.” I would talk to writers over and over again and just see this haunted look in their faces about this dream that was untapped. They just had not been able to find a way to finish it. Then even those writers who had dove in with lots of enthusiasm and maybe were halfway through and then they got stuck, or maybe they got almost finished, but then they weren't sure what to do next. So the story would end up sitting there and they would never actually complete that cycle. That made me feel really badly because I know what a joy it is to actually go through, finish the project, put it out there, get feedback, and then be on that road of actually being a writer. There are so many benefits to that that it just felt so badly for these people who were struggling with the different steps along the way that would lead to procrastination. It's interesting though, as I started doing research for this book, which I did quite a bit, that I did learn that I had procrastinated in the past in certain ways. Because procrastination doesn't always look like completely avoiding the project or scrolling your TikTok feed while you're supposed to be writing. These are the ways we normally think of what procrastination looks like, and I don't usually do those things. I learned as I was doing the research that I had done some other forms of procrastination that I didn't realize at the time were procrastination. Joanna: So what were they? Now I'm writing down a list too. What else? What are the other ways we can recognize procrastination? Colleen: Well, it's kind of like anytime that we avoid doing what we know is the next step, and it's usually very subtle and devious how procrastination works, this type of procrastination, because even very productive writers can end up procrastinating on things that bring up uncomfortable emotions. At its core, procrastination is always an emotional coping technique. It is a way to protect us from any sort of uncomfortable emotions we may be feeling around doing a certain task. So I'll give you an example. Where I realized it had happened for me was in submitting my work to editors and publishers. So there came a point in my career as I was writing that I had a novel that I felt was potentially good enough to get a traditional publishing contract, but I wasn't being serious about taking that next step. I might offhandedly find one publisher, work really hard on the query letter and the synopsis, send it off, get the expected rejection, and then I wouldn't touch it again for another six months to a year. I was looking back now—I didn't know it at the time—but looking back now, I realize I was totally procrastinating on getting serious about submitting my novel because when I'm honest about it, it was because I was afraid of getting rejected, which makes total sense. All of us are afraid of that. So I was afraid after all this blood, sweat, and tears I put into this novel to put it out there, nobody was going to want it. So my procrastination was protecting me from the reality of potentially being rejected or having this story never be picked up by a traditional publisher. It wasn't until I finally got ticked off at myself for not getting serious about this, that I started really making it part of my schedule. So I would make it part of my weekly writing schedule to research publishers, to find their submission guidelines, to create query letters that would go with what they were looking for, to really dig deeper into finding publishers that would fit for my project. When I finally did that and got serious about it and stopped dancing around it, that's when I got my first publishing contract. So looking back, I could see, okay, I was procrastinating on the part of the job, so to speak, that I needed to tackle, but that brought up uncomfortable emotions. I've since realized that even very productive writers, I hear this from other writers, perhaps in their marketing side of the work that they do that brings up uncomfortable emotions. So they may avoid that or decide they're too busy for that, or just, “Well, I'm just going to focus on writing and not worry about that.” We're actually procrastinating on this other part of our craft or business that we know we should be doing because it's uncomfortable for us. Joanna: Yes. Well, it's good we're talking about this because I now think back to when I started writing. So when you are at the beginning of your writing journey—and I did all the course. I love learning. I spent really years doing courses, going to conferences, taking a lot of notes. So I did a lot of writing, but it was all writing notes on other people's talks and things like that. Colleen: That sounds familiar. Joanna: Yes, exactly. I know this is common. There are people listening who are like, yes, I'm still doing that too. So perhaps I was procrastinating about actually writing my own work by thinking I was doing all the right stuff, you know? I was going to all the conferences and actually I was going on courses, but I was never writing my own work as such. Or if I did, it was just a tiny piece. Then I remember going to one course and this guy said, “Okay, before we get started, we're going to do some writing.” He said, “The time is starting now. Write for five minutes on the moment where you knew something had happened, like the moment you knew this thing had happened.” I was like, “What? We have to do some writing. This isn't what I signed up for. You're meant to tell me more stuff so I can avoid writing.” So I guess that's an example from my earlier days. Then after I did that timed writing exercise, that kind of just tipped me over and I've never struggled with that since. It literally is, if there's an issue, do some timed writing exercises. So if people are listening and they're like, yes, I recognize myself, how do you get over it? Like, what are some of the things we can do? Timed writing worked for me. What are some of the things people can do? Colleen: Well, I think the first thing we have to do is be aware. I mean, because most of us at the time, I certainly wasn't aware that that's what I was doing until I finally got ticked off enough that I was like, I need to move forward or I need to forget this. So I think we have to be aware that what we're doing is actually procrastinating on the next step we need to take. That can be, I think, the most difficult part because it's like you said, you didn't feel like you were avoiding anything. I didn't feel like I was. So I think we have to kind of take a step back and say, am I doing what I need to do to progress to the next level I want to get to? If I'm really serious about whatever your next goal is, whether that be selling your self-published book, or that be trying to get a traditional publishing contract, or that be actually finishing this novel, whatever it might be for you. Am I really taking the steps I need to take to get to that next place? What you were speaking of reminded me of one of the types in my book, which is the overthinker. We think that thinking is going to help us progress. I have been guilty of that myself in the past, thinking if I think through things that that's going to help me move forward. I've since learned that doing is a far better teacher. It's like you said, once you start doing the writing, that is going to take you a lot farther. There's an example in my history that I was leaving a lot of novels half finished because I would get halfway through, I would get stuck, and then I would start thinking about it. So I would say, “Okay, well this must not be a very good idea, or the idea must not be good enough to carry through a novel, so I need to actually think about a new one and start a new one.” I would do that over and over. It wasn't until I had a mentor talk about how important it was to actually finish the story. “You can't learn how to write a story until you finish this story,” that I realized I was procrastinating, that I was not doing what I needed to do to get to the next level, which for me was learning how to tell the complete story. The only way that I could learn to do that was to do it. I had to stick with the story I had and go back and study story structure, go get some help from an editor or book coach, or do something to help me take it to the next level, which was to actually finish the book. So I think the first thing we have to do is be aware of what we're dancing around or what we're avoiding because it makes us feel nervous or afraid, or we won't be up to this next step. That's often what happens is we don't feel ready for the next step. We have to bring that into our awareness and then say, okay, I think the best way to always approach it is in the smallest step possible. I talk a lot about giving yourself small wins. So what you said about some timed writing, he asked you to write for five minutes. That's one of my favorites, is the five minute rule, to sit down and do something for five minutes. That can apply to most anything. For a lot of writers that are struggling with, “How can I start building my platform?” or “How can I start marketing this book?” Say, “Today I'm going to sit down for five minutes and I'm going to create some graphics for my social media posts,” or “Today I am going to sit down for five minutes and I'm going to start researching places where I might be able to promote my book,” whatever it might be. Taking little, tiny, small wins is a way to ease yourself into what this is really about, which is building a new identity. Because if we take a look at this seriously, procrastination is a comforting, emotional coping tool that keeps us in the identity we are at right now. So if I look back at the example I gave, I was the writer who was not yet published. I was the aspiring writer. I was the writer who wanted to be published, and that was my identity at the time. So there was a lot wrapped up into that. You know, I was comfortable being that person. I was trying to get better at writing. I was trying to finish a good novel. I was trying to create a novel that was good enough to be published, and that was my identity at the time. What I needed to do was step into a new identity of being a traditionally published author. That is a big step in our brains because we are very used to being who we are. Anything that takes us beyond that feels scary to us. So we have to then take a very small step. So the small step, anything that has to do with, “I want to get here. So what's the smallest step I can take to start down that path?” If we take one little tiny step at a time, we can gradually ease our brains and our identities into this new identity we want to create, if that makes sense. Joanna: Yes, I like that. It's interesting. I think the five minute thing is also good the other way. So you mentioned before, are we avoiding things by, for example, scrolling TikTok. Or, for me, I'll sometimes check X or go and look at my Feedly list of blog posts and things that I've got on there. So I give myself five minutes in that direction sometimes. So it's like, this isn't procrastination, this is a break. This is a break. I think these types of behaviors can turn into a way of procrastinating if they go on for an unlimited amount of time. Like people look up and suddenly they've actually spent two hours on social media or something instead. So can we stop that as well? Colleen: Well, what you said sounds like something that I recommend to people who have a type of brain that seeks out that novelty, that seeks out that occasional distraction. That's another type of brain I talk about in the book. There is actually a distracted type of procrastination, and I've actually discussed this with several different writers who do struggle with this. They have found success doing that very thing, giving themselves a limited amount of time. “Okay, so I'm going to do whatever distracted behavior I enjoy,” whatever those various things you mentioned, whatever it might be, “but I'm going to do it for a set amount of time.” Some people will also trade time, so they'll say 10 minutes of distraction for 20 minutes of writing. So you might have a half an hour blocked out for writing, and 20 minutes of that time will be writing and 10 minutes will be your chosen form of distraction, whatever that may be. One of the things I talk about in the book a lot and in my videos too, is this importance of self understanding, being able to understand the kind of creative brains that we have. I've learned over the research of this book and just over my experience working with different writers, that we are all so very different. We all often talk about what we have in common as far as being writers go, but we're all very different in how our brains work and how our creative selves operate. Knowing how they operate and what they need to operate at their best can really help us improve our productivity and take that next step into the next identity that we want to reach. So finding out that this is something that you need or that you enjoy or that helps you stay on task, can be a good piece of knowledge that you can then turn around and say, “Okay, how can I use this to help myself be more productive?” Joanna: Yes, I think that's so important, this self understanding. I spoke to someone recently and she was almost having guilt over not writing. Guilt seems to be a massive thing in the writing community. “Oh, I didn't write, therefore I feel guilty,” which is crazy because there are a lot better things to feel guilty about, I think, than not writing. It's so interesting that it's very real though. I think the self understanding is like not beating yourself up over this. It's trying to figure out who you are and what works for you, and then figuring out a way that will make it work for you if you like. If you really do want to write a book, for example, then you have to figure out your type as such. So maybe you could give us a couple more of the common types that you found. Colleen: Well, let's talk about the great one that you just brought up there. I do actually have a guilty type in my book because this is so pervasive in the writing community. I saw this many, many years ago. I did a blog post on writing guilt and just punched it in at Google at the time—”Writer's Guilt”—and I was shocked about how many posts came back. I was like, “Wow, this is huge in the writing community.” It's this thing that so many of us writers seem to carry around with us. It's like we're guilty when we're writing and we're guilty when we're not writing. Many people end up in this place so they feel guilty if they don't get the writing done. But then if they actually set the time aside for themselves to write, then they feel guilty about what they're not doing when they're writing. So it's this really mean double-edged sword that can just tear a person's whole motivation for going after this dream down into shreds. So in the book, I talk about guilt as it relates to that, but also as it relates to procrastination. You procrastinate on your writing for whatever the reason is. There are many different reasons. Then you feel guilty that you procrastinated. So you come back and try to restart your writing process, but that guilt gets in the way and you're feeling bad about everything you haven't done that you should be at this certain point in your book or whatever it might be. That kind of tends to destroy the joy you might have brought to writing for that day. So there's all kinds of coping techniques for that. One of them is just that you have to always allow yourself to start fresh. Always allow yourself to start fresh. Then if you're someone who tends to feel guilty one way or the other, whether you're writing or not, I think that often is a case of not allowing yourself to follow your dreams. There's a whole thing about people pleasing that I'm going to talk about on YouTube because I was definitely a people pleaser for a long time that we have to reckon ourselves with. We have to say, “Okay, my dreams matter too.” This is one of the things I'm really passionate about helping writers with because as you and I know having lived the writing life, we realize all the benefits that come from devoting your life to a craft like writing. It's not just about finishing the books or having something to leave behind you. It's all the ways that it shapes you. There are studies proving that regularly writing helps to shape your brain. It helps you to become smarter in a lot of ways. It increases the connections in your brain. It makes you more empathetic. Studies have shown that as well, that you tend to overcome difficulties and challenges along the way because we all know how difficult the writing life can be. You become a more resilient and stronger person. Also, you're always expressing yourself through writing, which can really be, even if you're not writing about your own life experiences, it can be really therapeutic. So people that are robbing themselves of that by not allowing themselves to take their dreams seriously, aren't just robbing themselves of the book they may write, they're robbing themselves of the people they could be becoming by going through the process of writing and completing a book and perhaps publishing it. So I try to emphasize to people that if you have a dream to write, there's usually a deeper reason for it besides just that you want to write a book. There's usually, I like a calling to your soul that is asking you to step up and be even more than perhaps you are right now. If you deny that, if you say, “Well, it's not that important,” or “What other people want me to do is more important,” or you feel guilty because you're making room in your life for that. Imagine if you had a friend who was doing that, and you could see this in this friend wanting to come out, you can see that this is where this friend needs to go in their own personal development and they're denying themselves that. It's really a crime because it's kind of like you're robbing this person of their ability to self-actualize at an even higher level. So I try to impress upon people to give your dream the position it needs in your life so that you understand that making it a priority is not about being selfish or self-indulgent. It's about your own development, about becoming the best person you possibly can be. If that dream is there and has been there, especially for the person you are talking about for 30 years, that dream has not left, and there's a reason for that. I believe there's kind of a soul calling reason for that, whether people believe that or not. It doesn't matter. Giving yourself that importance in your dreams and allowing yourself that time is going to make you a happier person. So I would just suggest, again, a small win. Set aside 15, 20 minutes, however many days of the week that you can make it, and start making that a priority. Don't allow anyone to take that time away from you. You will start to see how beneficial it is for yourself. How much better you feel, how much more whole as a person you feel because we've all experienced it as writers. When we actually make the time and we honor that part of ourselves, how much better people we are. Once a person starts doing that, they'll realize that they're a better person, not only for themselves, but for everyone around them. So that's a little bit about the guilty type. Joanna: Yes, I think it's interesting. I mean, you said there about, think about it as another friend or something, you wouldn't knock down their dream. I kind of think that our creative selves are like children. Like you, there's the child inside you who wants to write and as you say, this kind of calling, creative calling that we have had for a long time whenever it came up in our lives. You had it for music at the beginning and then it came for writing. For me it probably was always writing. Like you would never say to like a 6-year-old or an 8-year-old, “No. Go and do some accounting or something.” Like you encourage—you know, nothing wrong with accounting—but I mean, you wouldn't say to a little 6-year-old, “No, you can't go write a story or you can't go play with words or play music or whatever.” We encourage that behavior in children. So I think when we squash down that creative self in our own lives, it can almost feel like that growth is stunted somehow, or there's this kind of sad child inside that just really wants to play with words or play with music. So we want to help that and facilitate that. As you say, find the joy. Colleen: Exactly. And I think when you become an adult, I would almost say it's even more important than I think that it is in children because of the many benefits I see that in people and that the studies have found in people when you write and you write regularly. It's hard to describe when you've gone through a lifetime of writing as you and I have, but it's kind of like imagining myself not having devoted my life to the craft of writing and everything that entails. I mean, you go through the process of just writing a story is a huge thing that happens in your brain when you learn how to do that, and that happens with your empathy. Studies have found that we become more empathetic as we write about different characters, and we have to be in their skin as we write about them. We go through the process of actually completing this story, and then we publish it, and then we get feedback, and then we go back and do it again. This is all very much a personal development thing that happens. So we are becoming better versions of ourselves through this whole process. Like you say, if we squash it down, then we're denying ourselves that ability to become that person. It's almost like we kind of sit there and we stay at the same level rather than growing, which we would hope to do throughout our lives. Joanna: Absolutely. Okay. So one more type. Do we have one more type that you're like, yes, that one I definitely want to talk about? Colleen: Yes, and that would be the perfectionist, I think. When I was asking writers to complete the questionnaire that I have in the story and making sure that it was all coming out accurate and everything, a great number of them were coming back as the perfectionist types. In my book, just so people know, there usually isn't just one type. There usually is maybe one or two primary types. But when I was doing this, checking with writers and having them take this quiz, I often found that many of them were a blend of perhaps two or three more types. I talk about the blend and how that operates in your writing life, but many of them had the perfectionist in there. It was either their primary type or perhaps their secondary type. The whole thing about perfecting our work. I've always known that I was a perfectionist as well, and so many writers came back with that. So it's kind of like the guilty type that seems very pervasive among writers as creators. So I looked into that research a little bit more carefully, and what I discovered surprised me and has helped me with my perfectionism as well. Perfectionism, at its core, is a huge fear of failure. So we often think when we're perfectionists we're like, “Well, I just want this project to be as good as it can be,” and there is a lot of that in there. I mean, often perfectionists do put out very high quality work, but there's also something else behind that if we are so perfectionist that we are endlessly tweaking and “here's draft number 75” and we're not taking that next step to share our work. What's really at the core of that is this huge fear of failure. So in perfectionist writers, I feel like one of the big things they have to help themselves with is to gather the courage to take the risk that they need to take. Because one thing that I've learned over my writing career, the more that I risk failure, the less of a big deal it seems to be. So I'm more willing now to go out and try things that I may fail at or some new marketing technique or some new author platform building thing, or some different type of book or story, because now I realize that failure is not as big a deal. In fact, failure is great. It's a good way for us to learn. When you're in the early stages of being a perfectionist, that can really hold you back because you're just constantly thinking about it. One example that I hear often from writers is they're on the same book. They've been working on this first book that they wrote for 10 years because they got to make this book just perfect. They have this belief that this one book is going to kind of be their writing career. I understand that because I did that too. I really focused on that book number one. Book number one was going to be what launched me into my novel writing career, which looking back now to me seems really silly. Book number one is basically just practice. After I had written seven half-finished manuscripts and I finally managed to complete one that I felt was good enough for publication, and it did get published. But still looking back at it now, it's like, “Okay, well that was just practice.” We start to realize the more we do, and this is going back to that thing, that doing is so much better than thinking. Doing the book and going to the next book and going to the next book. Perfectionists tend to really get caught up, especially young writers in that first book and not taking the long view of, “Okay, do you want to be a writer for life? Then you want to be thinking about book five, book 10, book 15 down the road. When we think that way, we are less likely to be so nitpicky about that first one. Yes, make it as high quality as you can, but have a time limit. You know, “I have this book, and I'm going to give myself one year or two years, or whatever it is to finish it, and then I'm going to move on and I'm going to risk failure.” I'm going to risk perhaps this not being perfect or perhaps it not selling millions of copies or whatever our dreams might be for it, because I know that this is about my experience and getting better and developing my skills as a writer. I do that by writing the next book. Joanna: Yes, I actually get really annoyed at this kind of “my book is my baby” metaphor. I mean, obviously babies are very precious and special when they're with you for a long, long time and all of that, and so you attach the kind of emotional language around a book. People just get obsessed with this one book for years and years and years. I have a lot of books now too, and it's sort of that they're employees actually. Once they're finished and they go out in the world, they're employees. Colleen: That's a great way to think of it. I haven't thought of it that way. Joanna: Yes, they're assets. They're intellectual property assets, and they earn me money. So, therefore, they're employees. Now, of course, I didn't think about that at the beginning of my career, but it feels like a much, yes, I do the best job I can on every single book, but I'm not so emotionally attached, you know, to them, I think in the same way. So as you say, it's changing the attitude, and I agree with you. There's so many people who just fixate on one book for a really long time, and also I think you, you don't think you have any more ideas. I remember that from the beginning of my career. It was like, “Well, I'll never have any ideas.” But the truth is, once you clear that pipe—that's how I call it, it's like a pipe—you just need to clear that first blockage out the way, and then that pipe just keeps flowing. The ideas keep flowing, but you need to kind of unblock it with that first book. Colleen: Oh, so very true. I was going to say, even if you do remain emotionally connected, which I think many of us do, I'm emotionally connected to my stories. The whole thing of finding the courage and risking getting that book out there is such a good skill to develop because once you put it out there and you realize, like you say that the pipe is now open and you're off working on book number two, suddenly book number one is not as important to you. You're now attached to book number two, and it happens that way with every single one that you go on and do next. Your next book is the one that you're really emotionally invested in. So I think that's the other thing we don't see when we're just starting out, is that this same sort of investment could apply to a different child, so to speak, if that's how we look at our work. We could apply to the next story that we're doing. We think this is the only one in our lives, which is just a shortsighted way of looking at it. So I try to encourage young writers to try to take that longer view and like you say, to realize that they have a lot more in them than just the one book. I think the other big problem with that approach is that then when you finally do get it out there, if it doesn't fulfill all of your dreams, it is so hugely crushing and is so discouraging. Esepcially for young writers to have put all this stuff in there, maybe 10 years, 15 years, 20 years on one single book, and then you finally get it to where you think it's amazing and you put it out there and it doesn't do everything you wanted it to do. Then you, instead of realizing this was book number one and I have a lot more in me and I need to keep going and get better and go on and have this writing life, you think, “Oh. Well, this wasn't what I thought it was going to be, so I guess I better just quit” because it becomes such a crushing defeat, if that makes sense. So I think trying to reprogram kind of your thinking into “there will be another one that I can be invested in. There will be the next project, and the important thing is to get this out and give myself the time to do these other books that are going to come along afterwards” is going to help you retain much more of your courage and your motivation as you move forward than if you put all your eggs in one basket, so to speak. Joanna: You've used the phrase “young writers” a couple of times. Just to be clear for people, you mean people who have a low writing age, as in people who are still on one book or only started writing last year, whatever their actual age, they might be 65. Colleen: Right, exactly. Exactly. Still a young writer. I think that's really important. Joanna: And then you just said something like, and if that book doesn't fulfill all the dreams you had for it, then you might be disappointed. I'm thinking— How likely is it that any book fulfills all the dreams? Colleen: Right. But I mean, I remember thinking that when I was first starting out that this book was, and I hear that from so many writers. They're, “Here's draft number 20 of the first book that they're working on.” What really kills me is when it's book one in a series, and they've still got book two and three to write and they're putting all their eggs in this basket and I can just see this huge fall coming in the future. I don't want that to happen. Joanna: Well, I guess we've talked about that writing craft side, but I'm also interested around the business side because you said earlier that you did procrastinate around sending out the book and pitching and that kind of thing. I feel like writers also procrastinate on marketing. So you write fiction and nonfiction, you're also a freelance writer. So how do you tackle marketing and the business side? What might people procrastinate in around that? Colleen: Yes. I feel like that is a huge side of it that I wouldn't have really thought about procrastinating applying to before I did the research for this book. I am definitely a good candidate for this because I'm more on the creative side. I was not looking at this as a business early on. This has been something that I've tried to then develop later in my career, because I've always had my freelance writing job to cover the bills, so to speak. So the writing was my creative outlet on the side. Then as I've grown as a writer and have several books now, and I've gotten older and kind of in looking at the future, I'm like, “Boy, I really would like this to be more on the business side of what I do.” Also, I'm experiencing changes now because as AI comes on, the whole freelance writing industry is going through a lot of big upheavals and changes. So as I look at that, I think, “Okay, well I need to tackle the business side of this as well.” I've always had that along there as far as I have built author platforms that have grown and I've got a subscriber list and I'm doing all those things. I find that the marketing things that work change so often that it becomes like this whole other part of what we do as creatives that we need to learn about and get better at as we go. So for me, it's become very much a self-education thing, and I'm learning and then I'm doing, and I'm learning and I'm trying something else, and I'm learning and trying something else. I think the whole thing of being willing to risk failure really comes in huge on the marketing side. So again, it's like what's going to work for you personally? Maybe you are really good at creating a blog and that becomes your platform. Maybe you are better at doing YouTube videos and that becomes your platform. Maybe you do a podcast like you do, and that becomes how you reach people. At the end of the day, marketing is just about trying to introduce our work to more people. So it's like, “How do I do that, and what are my natural strengths, and how can I apply those to the marketing side of things?” I think most writers are uncomfortable with this because we never learned how to do this. Many of us are not natural business people or marketing people. That's not something we've done in our past. We were drawn to the creative side, but the business side seems very foreign to us. So many writers will come to me at workshops and say, “I'm bad at marketing.” And I don't think that that's it necessarily. I think we just didn't learn how to do this and perhaps we're not naturally gifted at it, but that doesn't mean that we can't educate ourselves and put ourselves out there. So I think for me, the key has been just trying this and trying that. The more I do that, the more marketing becomes fun because it's like experimentation and trying different things to get word about my book out there, and then just seeing what works and going back and analyzing the results and then doing more of what does and less of what didn't. So for me, I'm definitely not a master marketer by any means, and I'm always listening to The Creative Penn podcast so that I could learn more about all of that. The Novel Marketing podcast and some of those others that I'm always tuning into. I've kind of made it part of my writing life now. I think that's another key for writers is just to bring that marketing side in more often in what you're exposing yourself to and working into your weekly timeline of what you're tackling so that you have writing time, but you also have marketing time. That's how I'm tackling it at this point. I don't know if that really answered your question, but that's where I'm at. Joanna: Well, I mean, even that you said you listen to podcasts and here you are on the podcast. I feel like people feel—and I have had this feeling—like I should be doing something like TikTok. TikTok is the obvious one we should be doing, you know, short form video. I'm like, I did try and literally my friend Sacha Black got on the phone with me, tried to help me do it, and I had a TikTok account for about six hours, and I just hated it. I hate it. The main thing is, like you said, I don't consume short form video. Not on Instagram. Not on YouTube, not on TikTok, not anywhere. I don't really watch video, but I listen to a lot of podcasts. So whether this has all become one because I've been podcasting so long, but the fact is, of course I can do podcasting and I listen to podcasts so I know the medium and it suits me and it's what I enjoy—the longer form discussions. Whereas somebody who loves being on TikTok as a consumer would also be better at it as a creator. So we have to think about it that way, don't we? You can't do everything. You just have to find what works for you. Colleen: You're exactly right. This comes back to that self-knowledge. What are we? What do we naturally gravitate toward? What are we good at? And what do we enjoy? Personally, I enjoy doing YouTube videos. I didn't think I would, but I saw that YouTube was a place where you could connect with people. I started picking that up. I'd had the channel for a while, but I hadn't done much with it. Last August, actually, I decided to get serious and start posting once a week, and I found that I really enjoy that format. It seems a little similar to blogging to me, which I did well with my blog on my platform. Now it seems like video's kind of becoming even more of an immediate way to reach people, especially in an age of AI. So the long form video, kind of the educational type videos I've taken to, and I think people have to decide what is going to work best. I think often the only way you can figure that out is to try it. You just have to give it a try. The good thing is, I think the biggest thing that's helped me is most people don't care. They're not watching you. You know, when I was first thinking about getting on video, I'm like, “Oh my gosh, people are going to see me and this is going to be scary and all that.” But you realize after you do it that it's really hard to build an audience and you have to get serious about it. You have to have a regular plan for how you're doing it. It has to be in your writing life regularly. So one video, two videos, three videos is pretty much probably going to be ignored. We can assume that. So that kind of takes some of the fear out of it. It's like, “Oh, go ahead and try it. See what happens.” If you have an inclination to do short form video, give it a try, see how it goes. You're not going to get 50 zillion views on your first or second or third video most likely, but you can determine if you enjoy it. Do you enjoy this type of creative outlet? Do you enjoy blogging? Do you enjoy creating graphics and things on social media? Now, one of my writing friends just loves Instagram. Is always creating reels and things for Instagram, not really my cup of tea. I found out that that's not really where my interests lie, but again, it's just trying these different things and seeing what works for you and what helps you to connect with new readers. Joanna: Right. So where can people find you and your books online? Colleen: My writing motivational site is MasterWriterMindset.com, and then my author site is just my name, ColleenMStory.com. People always ask me, that is my real name. My dad gifted me with a pen name. It's cool how often that happens actually. Those are my two main websites. I am on YouTube at ColleenMStoryteller, and there is actually a free quiz that people can take that's related to the procrastination book that's on my website right now. That's called MasterWriterMindset.com/findyours. Joanna: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Colleen. That was great. Colleen: Thank you, Joanna. It was great to be here.The post Overcoming Procrastination With Colleen M. Story first appeared on The Creative Penn.

What are the challenges of writing and publishing books for children? How can you publish high-quality books and still make a profit? How can you market books to children effectively in a scalable manner? Darcy Pattison gives her tips. In the intro, Novel Writing November; Business models and ethics for authors [Self-Publishing with ALLi]; AI-Assisted Artisan Author – my final AI webinar for 2025; Metal-working! with WTF Workshops, Bristol; Blood Vintage, a folk horror novel – out now on my store, coming 15 October everywhere. Today's show is sponsored by ProWritingAid, writing and editing software that goes way beyond just grammar and typo checking. With its detailed reports on how to improve your writing and integration with writing software, ProWritingAid will help you improve your book before you send it to an editor, agent or publisher. Check it out for free or get 15% off the premium edition at www.ProWritingAid.com/joanna This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn  Darcy Pattison is the multi-award winning bestselling author of more than 70 fiction and non-fiction books for children across multiple age groups. Her book for authors is Publish: Find Surprising Success Self-Publishing Your Children's Book. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.  Show Notes Why writing children's picture books is more challenging than you might think Why Darcy moved from traditional publishing books to self-publishing for creative freedom and business control Working with illustrators through contracts, sketch revisions, and treating them as professional collaborators Using multiple print-on-demand services (Ingram, KDP, Lulu) instead of expensive offset printing for 70+ book catalog Marketing to educators through state and national conferences rather than individual school visits for scalable reach Focusing on STEM narrative nonfiction as a reliable income while still writing fiction passion projects Longevity as an author You can find Darcy at IndieKidsBooks.com and MimsHouseBooks.com. You can find the Kickstarter here. Transcript of Interview with Darcy Pattison Joanna: Darcy Pattison is the multi-award winning bestselling author of more than 70 fiction and non-fiction books for children across multiple age groups. Her book for authors is Publish: Find Surprising Success Self-Publishing Your Children's Book. So welcome to the show, Darcy. Darcy: I'm so excited to be here today. Joanna: This is such a great topic. So first up— Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and publishing. Darcy: Well, I have four children and I found myself reading books to them, and at some point I wanted to be on the flip side of that—to write the books that were read to kids. So I started writing. It took a long time for me to learn the craft of writing children's books. It's very different than adult books. Picture books especially are very different than just a novel. So it took me a while, but I finally got an offer on a picture book, and I have eight traditionally published books. Then at some point I decided that it was better for me to bring books to market myself. We'll probably talk about that more, but I'm actually a hybrid at this point. I do some pop-up books with a small Christian press, so I'm designing the pop-ups, but I do a lot of nonfiction STEM books for kids. I also do several novel series. Joanna: I think that's really interesting. First up, you said that the craft of writing children's books is different, picture books in particular. So just tell us more about that craft side, because I feel like often people say, “Oh well, it's only a few thousand words. It must be super easy compared to writing a lot more words.” Tell us about the craft side of writing children's books. Darcy: I do teach writing picture books all the time for the Highlights Foundation and other places. Picture books are a very tight art form. I sort of compare it to writing poetry. There are 32 pages, and you have a title page, a half title page, a copyright page. It turns out you have about 14 double page spreads, and in those 14 double page spreads, you have to set up a character and a problem. You have to complicate the story, then resolve it in some satisfying way, in less than 500 words, while leaving room for the illustrator to do their job. So it's a very demanding process. Joanna: And it's not the same now then, because like you say there, the 32 pages and all of this—I mean, this is a very print-heavy issue, I guess—but there are plenty of things now that might be on tablets. Has that shifted at all or is it still a real print-heavy world? Darcy: It still is a print-heavy world for children's books. Most people who independently publish will tell you that 90% of their sales are paperback. It's still 32 pages. I can do 27 pages, I can do 36 pages. The problem is if I ever need to offset print—and I've needed to several times when I have a large order—then it's cheaper if it's 32 pages, because they figured out how to print 32 pages on one piece of paper. If I go to 37 pages, it's two pieces of paper, more expensive. If I do 25 pages, you're wasting paper. So really the 32 pages is because of the requirements of print. I still go with that because children's books, even for independent people like me, are still by and large paperback or hardcover. Joanna: Then I guess, talking about a 32-page picture book, that's not the only thing for children. What is the range of books for children? Darcy: You can do board books. That's for the very young children. Those are hard for self-publishers to do because there's no one who does print-on-demand for that. You have to do offset printing. So those are more difficult. Then starting about age four to eight is picture book world. That's the young readers where the parents are reading to the kid. Then—and the ages are very fluid here because some kids read faster than others—but maybe about six or seven years old, they're starting to read more independently. They want these short chapter books. So those might be 48 pages or 60-page short novels where you're really paying attention. That's the only place where you really have to pay attention to the vocabulary levels for kids. Then after that, you have middle grade, and that would run eight to twelve years old, roughly. Then YA would be—again, the definitions are very fluid—but maybe 14 and up would be young adult. Joanna: Yes, and that YA category now I feel like has moved very adult. So I think that can probably be quite fluid as well, depending on what you find in the store. Let's come back to your journey. You mentioned the hybrid approach. You did eight traditionally published books, but in your book Publish, you said deciding to self-publish was a way to avoid creative death, which I thought was a brilliant line. Maybe you could expand on that and— Why is self-publishing a great choice? Darcy: Self-publishing is a very great choice. There was a time period when I had sold eight books. I teach on a very high level—I teach a novel revision retreat. To come, you must bring a full draft of a novel. We talk about how to revise that novel. One lady came to my retreat, she revised her novel, sent it out for submission. It sold in 11 days flat and went on to win one of the major awards in children's literature in America, the Newbery Honor. So I know what I'm doing. I know how to write, and yet I could not sell anything. It was so discouraging at that point. I either decided I would quit—I don't know what I was going to do, but I was going to quit—or I had to figure out how to bring books to market myself. So I decided, yes, I can do this. I can bring books to market myself. So I worked. I worked for five years. I just put my head down and worked. I published books that I liked. I did what no one else would accept, but I thought was good writing. I looked for great illustrators and I found some great illustrators to work with, because children's picture books have pictures. You have to work with an illustrator. So I worked for about five years and finally after five years, I kind of lifted my head and looked around and went, “Wow, look at this. I've got books out that I love. They're winning awards. They're selling, I'm making money. This works.” So for me, one person asked me recently to talk about this in terms of scarcity and abundance. For me, the traditional publishing world is a place of scarcity. Nobody respected my opinion, nobody respected my writing. As we know from Scheherazade, if you do not have a story, you die. So self-publishing is a place of abundance for me. I do what I want. I find stories that excite me, and I put them in the hands of kids. Joanna: So what year was it when you were like, “Oh, I really can't sell, I am going to try indie”? Darcy: Thirteen years ago. I've been doing this 13 years. Joanna: So around 2012, I guess. Darcy: Yes, 2013 I think. Joanna: 2012, 2013. That really was, I think, a real takeoff time in the self-publishing arena when you could actually start doing this. For example, doing print-on-demand through Amazon. These things weren't that easy when you started in traditional publishing—it wasn't easy to do self-publishing. Darcy: No, no, no. When I first started submitting books, self-publishing was not available. I did a book on writing very early and that taught me how to do the self-publishing process. It was not a book anyone was going to publish because it was revising your novel, which is very niche. For people who want to write a novel, that's a fairly big market, but those who finished the novel and want to revise it, it's even a smaller market. So I self-published that book and that taught me so much about how to set up your files, how to set up the accounts on everything, on KDP and everywhere else. Joanna: Yes, I do feel like so often actually just doing one—whether it might be maybe a short story or just something, but actually just going through the process gets rid of a lot of the difficulty with it. Let's come back to some of the things you have to do. So you mentioned illustrators there, particularly for the picture books. Illustrators are important, but it also might be cover design. What are your tips for finding and working with illustrators? Darcy: This is a long topic, but basically I find illustrators through a couple of sources. One is the SCBWI.org, that's the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators. It's the only professional organization for people who write for children, and they have a gallery that's available to their illustrators, and it's not behind a paywall. You can just go look at it. Most illustrators use the Adobe suite of programs. There are other programs, but they learn on that one at least. Adobe has a social media platform for illustrators called Behance.net. The illustrators from around the world put their portfolios there, and I find people there all the time. My family has hosted exchange students eight times, so I'm familiar with working with internationals. I'm not afraid of that. I've had illustrators from Colombia, Ukraine, Poland, Canada. So I don't mind finding an international illustrator to work on my projects and I work well with them. So Behance.net is one of my main ways to find professional illustrators. And then finally referrals. Just talk to other people. Ask them who they used, were they happy with the process, that kind of thing. Joanna: Then what do you give them? Do you give them like the story, the text, or— How do you actually work with an illustrator? Darcy: Everybody wants to know, can I write notes to the illustrator and tell them that this character must have red hair and white boots? Of course you can do that. If you're self-publishing, you are the art director and you are in charge. I prefer not to do that. I prefer to pick out an illustrator that I think has professional skills and an imagination of their own. So I give them my story, then they give me sketches, and when they give me sketches, then I'm very picky about the sketches. For example, you cannot in a picture book have every page the same. So it can't always be in the cafeteria. It must move from place to place. You must make sure the character looks consistent from page to page. There's a long list of things I go through to make sure that the illustrations are right at that point. So when I get the sketches, they get a long letter and I want a revision of their sketches. Joanna: So you've given them the whole story upfront, then they've given you the sketches, then you've gone back with a letter. How many revisions are you looking for in that process, and is this all set out in a contract upfront? Darcy: Yes. I always do contracts to make sure everything's understood. Usually the contract will say that I need 14 double-page spreads plus a spread for the cover and a spread for page 32. So I'm asking for about 15 to 16 illustrations and within that, then they must tell the story. So they get the manuscript. I try not to give them too many directions on where it goes and just see where they take it. Usually they're much better than I am and usually work well. Joanna: Yes, we all have different gifts, right? Different interests and different skills. Your skill is in writing as is mine. So that's what we do. Darcy: I've found I'm actually a pretty good art director though. I really have a vision for what this should look like in a picture book, so I know how the story has to flow well. The pacing is in the pictures also. So you have to think of all the things you would in a novel, like pacing, characterization. That comes through in the story, so I have to make sure all of that is right in the sketches. Once the sketches are approved, then it's not fair to ask them to change. You cannot do those last minute changes and go, “Oh, I want those white boots.” No, no, no. That's not fair to the illustrator. Joanna: Yes, so treating them like a professional. What about copyright assignment? Are you getting that in the contract? Darcy: Yes, everything's in the contract. There are different ways to do it. You can do a flat fee where you take all rights or you can negotiate a royalty payment. It's all in the contract. Joanna: And if people want templates for those kind of contracts? Darcy: That's the difficulty, isn't it? Because I'm not a lawyer, I don't give them templates, but there are reasonable literary lawyers. I'm glad to give them referrals to some literary lawyers who can do it, and usually they have pretty much a boilerplate and for less than $500 US, you can get a template that you can use multiple times. Joanna: There are also author organizations that have these kind of templates. The most important thing here is you need to sort that out upfront, and absolutely some of the ones I've seen, they do also include things like you can have one revision on this type of level or whatever. It's the same with covers, right? If you're doing older children's books, we are respecting other people's time and professionalism. Darcy: Yes, absolutely. You know, you may want one or maybe two or three revisions at that sketches stage, but after that, when they give me final art, there's almost no changes because we've hashed that out early. That's where they want you to is in the sketches stage, because that's where they can make the changes the easiest. Joanna: So another challenge is quality color printing, because as you said, most of your sales are going to be in print. Talk a bit about printing and distribution and how you manage that. Darcy: So I use three print-on-demand printers. I use Ingram because that reaches the wide distribution that I need, that goes to the schools and libraries and the education distributors and goes out in the world internationally also. So Ingram's quality is what Ingram's quality is. I think if we go into this and say we're going to print-on-demand, we need to accept what they do. I mean, people complain about everybody. Every printer gets complaints, but I think they all do a reasonable job. They correct mistakes when they're made, I think they do fine. So Ingram's print quality is good. It's not offset printing. It will never be offset printing, but we do print-on-demand because the economic issues make sense. We don't have to put a huge investment upfront of ordering 10,000 books. Then your money is tied up in that inventory and you can't recoup and you can't move on to the next book until you sell those books. So I don't think that's wise for self-publishers. I think it's wise to be more nimble. So then the print-on-demand makes a lot of sense. Then the second one I use is KDP, because I find that Ingram and KDP don't always work well together. So I just go ahead and upload it to KDP. It's always available on Amazon. It's never a problem. Then the final one is I use Lulu and I love Lulu's quality. They talk about great looking books. They have a coated paper, 80 pound coated paper that accepts the ink really well. So the books just look much nicer from them. I use them for the back end of my Shopify store, and then anytime I have special orders. So last year, my book Magnet came out and I got an order of 600 books that would be used for a public television station that was having an event. So they wanted 600 books to give people, and they ordered that. And yes, Lulu is where I print anything like that because the quality is just so much better. Joanna: So then with that example, the 600 books, I mean, one of the reasons, as you said, we do print-on-demand is because we don't have to pay for those print runs, but also we do make higher profit because there's higher price per book. So how do you manage the profit side of it with such high printing costs when the price of books just hasn't really gone up? With inflation, people still expect to pay the same thing. With those 600 books, how did you make a fair profit there? Darcy: So I price my books high. You cannot compete on price. I can't sell my picture books for $8.99. They are $11.99 for an eight and a half by eight and a half, full color, 32 page picture book. $11.99 is outrageous, but that's what I have to charge and they sell. What can I say? They sell. Joanna: Plus shipping with your Shopify store? Darcy: Yes, but I charge them shipping. So then you negotiate prices and you just make sure you're making a profit of $2 or $3 a book just like anybody else. People fight against that too. They go, “Well, I need my little chapter book just to be $6.99.” And I go, “Well, you can't make a profit.” You must think as a business person and you must price accordingly and then write a really great book that they will buy anyway. Joanna: Yes, I mean, this is the whole point. We are not competing on price. We cannot compete on price or shipping. Like people say to me, “Oh, well, but if I order from your Shopify store, it's going to take like two weeks or something.” I'm like, “Yes, because I'm a small business. My printer is a small business. It gets printed, it gets sent. I mean, I'm not Amazon.” Literally then people will go, “Oh, right. Yes, I understand,” don't they? I mean, once you explain it, people understand. Darcy: So if I have a large order, like 600 books, if I have three months to deliver, then I'll do an offset run, but I don't always have that luxury of having three months to deliver. They usually want it in two weeks and then Lulu can deliver. Lulu always delivers well. Joanna: Right. Okay. So I guess you sort of addressed this a bit with saying, look, the quality is the quality, but I do find children's authors in particular can be a little bit precious about this, and they're like, “Oh no, this has to be perfect, so I have to use offset printing.” Given that you have more than 70 books— I just can't see how it's practical to have a business with so many different books and insist on incredible quality every time. Darcy: I can't make a profit that way. I can't have a stock of even 500 books of 70. I can't even physically, like a physical warehouse, let alone the price. I can't tie up my money that way. So for me, print-on-demand is the only way that works. I cannot do the offset printing. Again, I do offset printing if I have large orders and I have plenty of time, but that's the only time I can get that kind of quality. So, yes, it is different, but there are printers now who are approaching offset quality with print-on-demand. The newer printers that are coming out are very, very good. Joanna: They are, but again, we have to look at the pricing there because the price is also higher. The quality of the paper and the ink and all that. Of course the same is true for anyone. I mean, like for me with 45-plus books, I never have kept stock, but you just don't know. You don't know which books people are going to buy on any given day. So having print-on-demand just makes sense. I think people who are just starting out, they're like, “Oh, well it's only one book,” but it's like, well soon it won't just be one book. Darcy: Well, we hope it's not just going to be one book. I mean, I want a career. I don't want just a single book out there. Joanna: Then I guess just circling back on anything that's different, because of course— You do nonfiction books for children, as well as fiction. Is the process just exactly the same, but you don't have a story necessarily? It's more like facts and things. Darcy: Most of mine are narrative nonfiction. So I'm usually telling the story of a scientist making some kind of discovery or an animal. And usually it's not a species, usually it's a particular animal that's done something amazing. For example, Nefertiti, the Spider-naut is the true story of a spider that went to the International Space Station. She's a jumping spider. She doesn't spin webs. She jumps to hunt. And the question was, could she jump in space? Because if you jump, you float away. So would she starve to death or would she adapt somehow to that microgravity of the International Space Station? She did indeed adapt and she learned to hunt in space and lived long enough to come back to Earth. Joanna: What did she eat? Darcy: Well, they had fruit flies, so they had a little habitat she lived in and they raised fruit flies for her. They raised three generations. Joanna: She wasn't a stowaway. She was deliberate. Darcy: No, no, no, no. It was a deliberate experiment on the International Space Station. Joanna: Oh, that's really cool. So how did you decide to do that book? Was that a commission or is that just something you are interested in? Darcy: I heard something on the radio. Then what I like to do is original primary research. So I contacted the scientist who's in charge of all of the live animal experiments on the International Space Station. She lived in Colorado and my daughter lives close, so we went to see my daughter and I set up an appointment, interviewed her, and wrote the book. Joanna: I love that because like you said, I mean this is creativity, isn't it? It's kind of hearing something and then making it. So does that book sell or is that just something that you did and it's just a passion project? Darcy: No, no, no. It sells really well. The cover either repulses people because it's a very close-up of the face of the spider, so they either hate the cover or they love the cover. For example, I had a school right when COVID hit that ordered 1,400 copies because they wanted to give one copy to each of their fourth graders to read during the summer. That one has licensed other things also, like for reading programs and things. Joanna: Well, let's talk about that then, because bulk sales to schools is something that children's authors often can do very, very well that the rest of us struggle with. So tell us a bit about that and— How can people can think about things like bulk sales, which is when you sell many books at once? Darcy: Bulk sales come and go. You can't necessarily predict them. What I do is I really pay attention to the science curriculum. I make sure that each book I write and produce fits the curriculum some way. So I like to say that teachers don't just like my book, they need my book to adequately teach sound to their students. So my book Clang is about a German scientist that went to Napoleon's court, entertained Napoleon with his sound experiments. Kind of like Bill Nye the Science Guy does—entertained him. Then Napoleon funded his work. So in the book, there's everything you need to know about sound, how sound waves are produced, vibrating strings, vibrating air columns, all of that. It's also a great story about this scientist who goes to Napoleon's court. So I think teachers need my book to keep kids interested in that topic. So if it fits a curriculum, then it's more likely to be picked up for reading programs, for summer programs, for summer camps, that sort of thing. And so my book on AI, about the story about Lee Sedol playing against AlphaGo, that sold—suddenly I get on Ingram, it sold a thousand copies and I'm sure it was for a summer camp. Joanna: Yes, that one—we're going to circle back to AI, but let's come on to marketing, because I'm sure people listening are going, “Well, I want to do that. How do I sell all of those books?” How are you getting your information into schools? I mean, obviously you are in the USA, it's a massive country, so how are you doing that? Marketing to schools, in particular, and libraries, I guess. Darcy: Well, everybody says go do school visits. Yes, yes, yes. You can do school visits and you can make money that way, but I prefer to try other avenues because school visits are limited to the length of school year. You might have 150 days possible and I'm not going to go out for 150 days doing school visits. So instead what I do is reach out to organizations in the United States. Well just this month I've been to the Arkansas Association of Instructional Media. That's the school librarians. At their conference I had an audience of 60 or 70 people and I talked about my 20 STEM books. Then the next week there was a leadership conference for the Arkansas Literacy Association, and they brought in leaders from the local councils around the state, 20 councils. So there was about 60 or 70 people. Again, these are the leaders, the opinion makers in their region. They did a “build your stack.” So they bought 90 books and each person got a free copy of the book, courtesy of the organization. So what you have to do is find those sorts of organizations in your area, in your state, your region, and say, “Can I fill out applications to speak at their conferences?” For me, that's the audience, not parents. Parents are a moving target because if their child is seven years old this year, next year they're going to be eight, and pretty soon they're going to be 14 and they've aged out of my books. But teachers and librarians always have those eight-year-old kids coming through their system. Joanna: Yes, I think that's super smart and super scalable. I mean, some people really love going into the schools and they love teaching at that level or whatever. I think that's a really interesting, but it's not scalable though. Darcy: No, it's not. I feel like there's other revenue—like some people talk about getting paid for that speaking. It's basically paid for doing assemblies and stuff like that. Joanna: But as you say, yours is a more scalable approach. So is that the same way you hit librarians as well? Darcy: Yes, yes. I'll be going to the Arkansas Library Association Conference in October. So that's just local. Then I also reach out to national organizations. I've spoken at the National Science Teachers Association conferences, just went to the American Library Association Conference. So there are many of those regional and national organizations that focus on kids and kids reading that are my target. Joanna: So those STEM books, have you really done a lot more of those because those are the types of books that those markets want? Darcy: Yes, those sell really well. If I find a topic that's not been covered well with other books, then I can write a book that does pretty well. Then I can still write the fiction that I like, and some of those do well, and some of those don't do well. The bread and butter is probably my STEM books. Joanna: Yes, because they, as you say, would be a lot easier to sell if that's a topic that is covered at that age group. Then just a broader question about age groups. You mentioned you have four children, and I often meet people and they want to write a kid's book, and it's often they're writing a kid's book for the age that their child is. Then sometimes they grow out of the idea because their kid is now a lot older than they were and they've changed their mind about the book, or it was the wrong kind of age. Now, obviously your kids are presumably grown. Darcy: Yes. Joanna: So what advice would you have for people listening who feel like, “Oh, I want to write a book for my kid,” but are wondering— How does that turn into a business? Darcy: Katherine Paterson is a well-known children's book author. She wrote Bridge to Terabithia, which was a popular movie about 10 or 15 years ago. She once said that when she reads an adult novel, she hears an orchestra, but when she reads her own work, she hears a flute solo. I just write flute solos. I don't write the big complicated orchestral pieces. It's just not the way I write. So you just need to find what's your strength and what's your passion. I like children's literature. I read it all the time. I'm reading picture books, novels—I'm reading all the time. I just like the genre. So find a genre that you like and dive in. Joanna: Right. So you can keep writing for an age group if you keep reading in the age group, even if your kids have grown. Darcy: Yes, absolutely. Joanna: Yes, that makes sense. I mean, you have to know the genre and, of course, tastes change as well. I mean, even since you started in like 2012, there's a lot more diversity now in children's books and that's a really important development. Also I guess, translations—you've moved into translations and licensing. How have translations and licensing worked in terms of the business? Darcy: Translations—I did a test last year of five Spanish books. They've not sold particularly well. I need to find new ways to market them, but it was an experiment and I need to find new ways to market them, frankly. However, I do have an agent in China, and they just sold a nine-book series to a Chinese publisher. So we'll see how that goes. They have also sold a six-book series to Korea. So working with a foreign agent has worked for me. Joanna: Yes. I've sold into South Korea as well. They clearly have an interesting book culture. Okay, and then just coming back on the AI side, because you mentioned your children's book about AlphaGo beating Lee Sedol in 2016, as part of your Moments in Science series. So I wondered— How are you using AI tools as part of your creative and business processes? Darcy: Well, I do use AI sometimes, so I love Google NotebookLM for research. I think the AIs hallucinate too much to let them do my research, but when I do the research myself and I find research reports, I drag them into NotebookLM. For example, my new book out this year is NOT Extinct. It's about the Takhi horse, commonly called the Przewalski's horse, which in the 1960s was considered extinct in the wild, and they have worked for decades to bring them back. Now there's about 3000 in the world. So the story is about that process of conservation of the species. So I found tons of research reports and I dragged them into NotebookLM, and then I asked it to give me a timeline and it can go through it, and it annotates the timeline for me. It says this came from this report so that I know that it's documented really well and I can trust that the research is there. I really like that one once we get away from, can it do real research and deal with facts? I do use it sometimes for outlining. I like Claude better than some of the other platforms, and I do use it for book descriptions sometimes. Joanna: I would say that Gemini Deep Research is, I think, the best in terms of— Have you used any of the Deep Research? Darcy: I have not. No. Joanna: So Gemini Deep Research, I would say is extremely good and has a very, very low hallucination rate. So that would be the one I would suggest for research people. Like you mentioned earlier that many of the illustrators use Adobe tools and of course Adobe has Firefly, it has generative AI now. How much generative AI is being used in the illustrators' work, or is that not even something you worry about? Darcy: So far it's not been used very much. Most of the illustrators, I see their sketches at first and then they generally do digital work, but it's clearly their work. There's no question on most of them so far. That will come up, I'm sure in the next five or 10 years, but so far it's not been an issue. Joanna: But it's not something you are embracing because, like you said, you know what you want. So you could be doing this yourself, for example. Darcy: So I have one story. The Kitty Tuber series. It's about cats who make videos and so they're kitty tubers. The main character is Angel and she has one blue eye and one copper eye. I can't tell you how hard it is for ChatGPT to do a cat that has different colored eyes. It's just almost impossible. Finally, I think last week I tried it, and it's finally getting to where it can do it, but it's a difficult task. The programs just aren't there yet. Joanna: Again, I would suggest Midjourney, which is excellent. I know quite a lot of people doing kids books on Midjourney and you can do consistent characters now. So I think there's a lot of potential, and certainly for marketing, even if you don't want to use it for actual creation of the books. Darcy: I think that's coming. I don't think you can stop it. I think it will be lovely, but I just haven't done it yet. Joanna: No, absolutely. Well, you've got your processes for sure. I did want to ask you, because we were saying before we started recording, we've kind of known each other online for a really long time now, and you have managed this career now for a long time. What are your tips for longevity in the market? Both, I guess, in terms of the business and the mindset and just staying the course? Because both of us have seen a lot of people leave the industry in the time we've been doing it. Darcy: A lot of people do leave, and I'm sad when that happens because that was my impetus for doing this, is to stay in the business. I think that's one of the reasons I wrote this new book, Publish. I made the mistakes so other people don't have to. I think staying in the business just means that you stay excited about your work. You find things that you want to write about and you are passionate about. I mean, why do we write at all? Because there's some question that we want to answer or there's some bit of information we want to pass on to kids. I think you have to keep finding that center and just stay really positive. Keep up with the industry. Don't think that it can be run the same way all the time for business. I am not a very good business woman. I started with no information. I've never taken even an accounting class. So accounting just killed me at first. It's really hard for me to do the business, but I think you just have to keep pushing and trying. So I'm very curious, and I research and solve problems. Joanna: Yes, I think that curiosity is what keeps us going, to be honest. I feel at this point that if there's still books I want to write, then I'm just going to keep writing them. Darcy: Absolutely. Joanna: And yes, we both run businesses, but there are lots of better ways to make money than writing books, especially children's books. Darcy: Yes. Joanna: Which is fascinating. Okay, so tell us— You have a Kickstarter running right now. Tell us about that and a bit more about the book. Darcy: So Publish is a book about self-publishing children's books and making a success at it. I did make all the mistakes so you don't have to. I've been doing a blog called IndieKidsBooks.com for three years and writing things on there that I thought would eventually wind up in the book. Mostly they're about what I'm working on right now, what I'm worried about, what the current state of publishing is like. So it's a great resource for you. But I wanted to put things together in a book that would explain the process for people who don't do this, who just come to it with curiosity and go, “Can I do this?” It's not easy. Self-publishing is never easy. You have to do everything from the creative to the accounting. It's not easy, but oh my gosh, it's fun. I want people to get that. I want them to understand that it's not a horrible thing. It's not being put in the ghetto. I submit my books to awards, and I win awards, and I make money. You can do that too. Joanna: Fantastic. Where can people find you and your books online? Darcy: So the best place to find my books is MimsHouseBooks.com, M-I-M-S-H-O-U-S-E books.com. And if you're interested in self-publishing, IndieKidsBooks.com is where I kind of chronicle my journey. So you can find the Publish book on Kickstarter. Right now it will be live when this recording goes out. It will be also available for pre-order on Amazon, but look for the Kickstarter. I think you'll find a lot of things on there that are interesting. Joanna: Brilliant. Thanks so much for your time, Darcy. That was great. Darcy: Oh, thank you so much. The post Writing, Self-Publishing And Marketing Books For Children With Darcy Pattison first appeared on The Creative Penn.

What if the key to finding your authentic voice as a writer lies in exploring someone else's fictional world first? How can multi-passionate creators manage multiple brands without losing their sanity? KimBoo York reveals how fanfiction can be a powerful training ground for original fiction, and why being your “weird self” is more valuable than ever in an age of AI. In the intro, Everything I know about self-publishing [Kevin Kelly; his interview on The Creative Penn]; KU library distribution [Dale Roberts]; Anthropic settlement on piracy [The Verge; Authors Guild; Writer Beware];Selling direct with ElevenReader; I'm talking about Creativity and AI on Brave New Bookshelf; I'm also talking about An Author's Guide to AI on The Novel Marketing Podcast; My final AI webinar of the year, Sun 21 Sept; The Buried and the Drowned short story collection. This podcast is sponsored by Kobo Writing Life, which helps authors self-publish and reach readers in global markets through the Kobo eco-system. You can also subscribe to the Kobo Writing Life podcast for interviews with successful indie authors. This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn  KimBoo York is the author of romance, fantasy and nonfiction, as well as a productivity coach and podcaster at The Author Alchemist. Her latest book is Out from Fanfic: Transforming Creative Freedom. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights, and the full transcript is below.  Show Notes What is fanfiction? How to transition from writing fanfiction to original fiction by identifying the aspects you love Managing multiple creative brands under one studio umbrella without losing your mind The legal landscape of fanfiction Why fanfiction has been an innovation hub for story trends How AI and generative search create opportunities for cross-genre writers You can find KimBoo at HouseofYork.info. Transcript of interview with KimBoo York Jo: KimBoo York is the author of romance, fantasy and nonfiction, as well as a productivity coach and podcaster at The Author Alchemist. Her latest book is Out from Fanfic: Transforming Creative Freedom. So welcome back to the show, KimBoo. KimBoo: Hi, Jo. It's great to be back. I love talking with you. Jo: Yes, and we had a good chat last July 2024 when we talked about intuitive discovery writing. So we don't need to go further back than that, but just give us an update. What does your writing life and your business look like at the moment? KimBoo: Well, I think I speak for everybody when I say that 2025 has been a challenging year. So I've had to take on a little bit more freelance work as I've restructured how I'm doing some of my business. You were an inspiration for that. I'm kind of separating out my different brands now instead of trying to be one thing to all people, and that's taking a little bit of work. I've launched a new pen name, which I'm not going to talk about here, but it seems to be doing well off the launchpad. Then, of course, I'm redoing some of my older works, doing the business end. We're doing new covers, doing some new links, doing some new giveaways. So it's been a busy year and I look forward to what's going to be happening in the future for me, especially as I go into 2026. So that's kind of where I'm at right now. Jo: Well that's interesting. Just talk a bit about this separating different brands. Just remind us what are the different personas that you have and the different brands you've split into? I feel like a lot of people think about doing this, and I have done myself. I've got my two author names and I felt that they were very different, so it was important to me, but I know how much work it is. So talk a bit about that process of separating brands. KimBoo: Well, I flopped back and forth, so for a long time I tried to keep everything very separate and that took so much work and energy, as you know. Then I tried to put everything under one banner, and that just became cluttered. It became hard to identify my demographics, it became hard to do advertising. You can always do targeting in advertising, but with the more organic stuff, how do I post on social media? How do I talk about all my work? So I am somebody who is a multiple project starter. I always have multiple things going on. So I have KimBoo York, me, myself, and I, who is the author and the writer, and I do fiction under that name. I have Cooper West, which is one of my older pen names. That's gay male romance, romantic thrillers, paranormal romance. I have The Author Alchemist, which is kind of my podcast and my craft writing and writing coaching brand. I have The Task Mistress, which is my productivity brand. I just published a new book, a collection of essays on holistic productivity under that brand. I have The Skeptic's Inspirational, which is daily inspirational posts blog. That's going to be a book here soon. Patience & Fortitude, which is my grief blog and mourning blog and book, which is the house where I published my memoir “Grieving Futures: Surviving the Death of My Parents.” And I could go on, but you kind of see what I'm getting at there. They're very different things and I realized that what I needed was a studio type of branding. So HouseofYork.info is my studio home. House of York is my studio. It's the thing that produces all of these different brands, and so I do still have that brand. Everything is a House of York production. It sounds a little ostentatious when you put it like that, but for me mentally, it's a great way to keep things separate and yet connected. So they're all me, they're all connected, and I can talk about different ones in different places, but they're also very clearly defined for marketing purposes. So that's what I really wanted out of that whole thing. Jo: Yes, it is really hard. But you don't have different email lists for all of those things though? KimBoo: No, I do not. Right now I just have the House of York email list. I'm moving into segmenting them. So I will have some different email lists going down the line, and certainly my newest pen name, the secret one, is going to have its own separate email list. So eventually, yes, there will be separate email lists, but I'm working on developing a way where I'm not having to do six email lists a week. Cycling is important, right? Planning things out, scheduling. Who would have thought? So I will eventually, and that is the goal, is to have these different segmented lists. I would also be able to do a full blast to everybody if I had something special coming out that I wanted all my lists to know. So again, that's one of the reasons why I went with this studio framework of doing all of my brands and putting everything under one umbrella while keeping them branded separately. Jo: No, I like that. I mean, I often have thought about this, because I have the two main websites—well actually now I have three. The Creative Penn, J.F. Penn, and Books and Travel. And so they're my main websites. Then I have my Shopify stores and then I have YouTube channels. I have often thought, oh my goodness, I should have one landing page where I can send people to. Then I thought, well, who do I send to one landing page, because I actually have different people do different things. I guess this is great to start on actually, because I feel like you are a multi-passionate creator, and so am I. We have long careers and it's like, well, you can't just stay in your lane. You know, I feel like some people say, “Oh no, you should just stay in your lane.” And we are like, well, it's not actually possible. KimBoo: No, no. I'm a seven-lane highway. I can't. Jo: Well, it's interesting though, because it's not a seven-lane highway. It's actually like three A-roads, we call them here, like three major roads and then there's some little back lanes, and then you might have one that's a bit of a cul-de-sac. KimBoo: Sadly far more accurate. Yes. Jo: But I think that's important too. I mean, I was actually looking at your grief one and the death of your parents, and I mean, that's like a whole completely different area that perhaps is almost standalone. Different people may find that book than find your romance or your productivity or whatever, and that's fine. They don't need to find anything else. So I think that's really good too. It's having all these different things. So just to make people listening feel better if you are a multi-passionate creator, so are we. You just have to manage it, right? KimBoo: Figure out what works for you, but you've got to just try different things until you land on the system that works. I think that's the lesson takeaway here. Jo: Yes. Or the way it works right now, and then you change things. In fact, let's get into the book because this is another one of these kind of quite random books to be fair, which is Out from Fanfic. I'm fascinated by this because obviously I've heard of fanfiction, but it's not a sort of world I am in at all. So just start by explaining— What is fanfic? And what are the main sites? KimBoo: Sure. So I'm going to start actually with the Wikipedia definition, which is “fiction typically written in an amateur capacity by fans as a form of fan labor, unauthorized by, but based on an existing work of fiction.” And honestly, that is the basis for a thousand different arguments about what exactly fan fiction is. It became very trendy there for a little while to look back and say Dante's Inferno, that's fan fiction. Bible fan fiction. Right? What is fan fiction? It's one of those, well, you kind of know it when you see it type of things, right? I consider it to be the interaction of a creative person, whether it's writing, drawing, painting, creating videos with a property or fiction, a story that they love. It's them engaging with it on a personal level. So that's really what fanfiction is. It's a hobby. It's the same kind of hobby as building Lego houses or model trains. You're taking something that exists and creating your own work, I guess is the word I would use, but creating your own world out of it. So it's fun. That's the bottom line for me is writing fanfiction and reading fanfiction is fun. Jo: So, yes, it's fun. Let's just be clear, you mentioned the word property and that it is fan labor, and it's unauthorized. Right up front we have to say, this is when it's not your character. So it might be, I don't know— Give me some examples of what people have done. KimBoo: Okay. So take any show. Supernatural, Teen Wolf, Game of Thrones, movies. The Avengers, that was one I was in for a long time. It's currently in a lot of Chinese dramas like Nirvana in Fire and The Untamed. You take those characters and that setting and you write your own version of it. Say, a cut scene or a post scene, or you change some of the canon facts of the story and you say, well, what if this person hadn't died? Or what if these people had met earlier? Or what if this one character had left when they were young and then come back 20 years later? And you just add in these elements and have fun with taking it in a new direction. But as you said, they aren't yours. They aren't your characters. It's not your setting, it's not your story. You don't own that, in the sense you own your own writing. Of course, you always own your own writing in a creative sense, but in a legal sense, you do not own it. That's something people really need to be aware of. If they're interested in fanfiction, if they're going to explore it, if they're going to use it as a writing tool, you can, but you can't officially publish. You can't publish and make money off of this. This is definitely hobby level stuff, which I don't say to denigrate. I've read some amazing fan fiction that's truly life transforming, how beautifully and amazingly well done it was. But it's hobby. You can't publish it. You can't do anything with it legally. Jo: I guess you can publish on a website. So what are the places that people are publishing their fanfic on? KimBoo: So they are posting it. The oldest site right now is fanfiction.net. It's still around, it still looks like it did in like 1998. Truly, I don't know how people use it. The one that most people are familiar with is called ArchiveOfOurOwn.org. It is a project of the non-profit organization, Organization for Transformative Works that was started 2008, 2009, I think, for the express purpose of having a place for fanfiction to exist. They've done a lot of work on the legal end to protect people's rights to write and post fanfiction online. I try to draw the line between saying that they publish fanfiction and they post it for that reason. That's just a me thing. I don't think that that's really widespread in fandom, but for me mentally when I'm talking about it, you post your fanfiction to AO3, as it's known colloquially, and you share it and people can read it and comment on it and like it. It's a great site. Their tagging system is truly a thing of beauty, but again, it's not publishing in the sense of you're publishing a book, you're publishing something. There is fanfiction on Wattpad, but they've fought against it. They've taken down fanfiction in the past. They do allow it, it's kind of under the table on Wattpad, but there is a lot of fanfiction on Wattpad. I think, going back a ways, the One Direction fandom really had its moment on Wattpad. That was a long time ago, but there's still people posting fanfiction on Wattpad. A lot of times people cross post, they post on Wattpad and they post on AO3. So it just depends on where you want to put your work. Jo: Okay. A few things here. So it would be obvious to me, like if it's, I don't know, Captain Kirk from Star Trek. KimBoo: Oh, classic. A classic. You know, and a very obvious modern character. But think about Thor for example. So Thor obviously being Norse God, none of that is under copyright, as in anyone can write a Thor story. But then there's Thor, the movies and the things that are Thor-like in that are movie-based as opposed to the original base. So how does that kind of work? Like how do you know? Especially when in people's minds, sometimes things might get mixed up. You know, you might mention Ragnarok now. Ragnarok is in all the ancient stories, but the way they did it in whatever Avengers movie or whatever it might be is specific. So are there lines here that people need to watch out for? KimBoo: I would say these days, yes. There's a little bit of a line you need to watch out for. I mean, if your story's about Thor being a member of the Avengers, then obviously it's like, yes. But if it's just an independent story about Thor and his brother Loki, or Loki himself, there are definitely tells to use to be able to differentiate. Now, to be clear, on sites like AO3 and Fanfiction.net and Wattpad, people do identify. They say like Thor MCU, which is Marvel Cinematic Universe, which tips you off, or Thor mythology, right? So then, oh, this is based on the Thor lore of the old style myths rather than the new style myths, I guess you might say. So there are definitely ways to identify that and I think a lot of fan fiction writers take care to make sure of that because you don't want somebody coming into old school Thor and Loki mythology, thinking that they're getting the fun Avengers good time, “let's beat up the bad guy” story, because they'll just get mad. They're like, “Hey, this wasn't what I wanted to read.” So fanfiction writers are very careful about identifying exactly what they're writing for and how they're writing for it. Oftentimes, yes, you wrote a riff on Little Red Riding Hood. Well, you know, okay. That's definitely in the public domain. They can post that on AO3. They can also publish that as their own original story because that is public domain that is not owned by somebody. So fanfiction authors are usually generally pretty careful about that. Jo: Yes. I guess why I am emphasizing all this is because I still feel like many authors don't really understand what is in the public domain, what is fair use under copyright. Also, it differs. So there are some countries where copyright expires earlier. I think, is Sherlock Holmes one of these where it's sort of—don't quote me on this, people go check it in your country—but it's like some of the Sherlock Holmes stories might be out of copyright and others are still within. I think Tolkien's Universe as well. There's like different ways that things have been extended when they haven't in other areas. So I think this is really interesting and you definitely have to check all this before you publish it. I did have another question. I mean, you mentioned the One Direction thing. Is this just all about having sex with different characters? Is it all romance and erotica? KimBoo: It is not, and in fact, gen—general fiction—is one of the most popular tags on AO3. Romance is very popular. They want the characters, their favorite characters to kiss, right? That is a very popular element of fan fiction, but it's absolutely not what it all is. It's not all written by 14-year-old girls. That's another stereotype that comes out. In fact, if you go back in history, I would say the modern fan fiction era—and a lot of academics would agree with me—began with the Kirk/Spock fandom right out of Star Trek and that like those women were full grown women because this was the late sixties and the seventies. There was no internet. If you wanted to share your stories, you had to have access to a Xerox machine. Remember Xerox machines, right? You had to have access to a Xerox machine or a mimeograph machine, and then you had to have access to the postage that would be required to mail these magazines out. So like you couldn't be a 14-year-old girl and write fan fiction in that era. So it's always been, I would say, owned by older writers, and not teenagers, as the stereotype goes. Yes, a lot of the fiction out there is romantic. Some of it's erotic, but a lot of it is also just general. I was just looking… what was I looking at the other day? Game of Thrones fan fiction. You look at Game of Thrones fan fiction and there's lots of different pairings that are popular in that. The “Time Travel Fix-It” tag is very popular in that fandom. Jo: So people are trying to avoid the final series. KimBoo: Exactly. Like they either want to avoid season eight, six through eight completely, or they just want to redo it, or they want to have something different. So they have one of the characters time travel, you know, the gods step in, whatever, and go back and fix everything. It's really popular in The Untamed fandom as well, the “Time Travel Fix-It” tag. So it's not just about the romance. I have a current Untamed fan fiction in progress right now actually, and it's very alternative universe. I wanted to see what would happen if one of the main characters was actually given some autonomy and power earlier in her life. I just wanted to see what would happen if that happened to her and how that would change all the threads of the story going forward. And is there some romance? Yes, there's some romance. There's also a war. There's also magic and killer slaughter turtles. It's just fun. Jo: Yes. I think fun is definitely the focus here. So coming back on the IP side, there are books—like 50 Shades of Gray is supposedly based on, I think, was it Twilight fan fiction? Not supposedly, very much absolutely. KimBoo: Yes. Yes, it was. It was based on Twilight fanfiction. Jo: So how did that become a publishable original novel that was basically huge? KimBoo: So what you're talking about is what we call in the scene “filing off the serial numbers.” And a lot of authors have done this. E.L. James is not the only one. Cassandra Clare's done it. Naomi Novik's done it. Plenty of authors who don't want to be named have done it. And many I've known. You take a fan fiction of yours that's very popular or that you just personally like, and you go and you file off the serial numbers. You don't just change the names. You change the setting, you change some of the dynamics, you change some of the character traits of the main characters. You have to really file it down enough that if someone was coming after you to say, you based this on our story, versus you stole our story. That's really where the line has to be drawn. Again, it's not a clear one, but if you do it enough, you can get away with it. So that's what E.L. James did. If you did not know that it was Twilight fan fiction, you would never realize it was Twilight fan fiction. Even if you've read Twilight, like most people, they might say, gosh, these characters are kind of similar, but oh, that's just tropes, right. So exactly. That's what she did, and that's what a lot of authors do. Jo: Yes. So the tropes, I mean, tropes are kind of universal, right? As you said, I mean, the time slip, go back in time and fix things. I mean that could go in any world. It doesn't have to go in a Game of Thrones world, you know? I never read the Twilight books or watched the movies, but I have read 50 Shades of Gray. It is obviously it's set in a modern world. There are no vampires, there's no werewolves. So a lot of it is different. So I feel like that's important as well. So let's come back to you because I was really interested in the book you wrote. In talking about your own experience in fan fiction, you say, “My sense of shame was very real,” and I was really interested in that because I don't know you very well, but having talked to you before, I just can't associate that with you. You seem very confident. So explain about that. Why are some people embarrassed or even ashamed of being involved in fan fiction? KimBoo: Well, you've kind of hit on some of the reasons earlier when you asked is it all romance and erotica? And I talked about also it's not all written by 14-year-old girls. For a very long time, these associations with fan fiction was that it was very similar to romance genre, honestly, not that different. “Oh, that's something women enjoy.” “That's what those horny lonely women in their basements are writing.” You know, “sexy fan fiction,” and “it's not real,” and “it doesn't take any effort.” “It doesn't take any work. It's just fake people. They're riding on the coattails of other people's work.” So there was a lot of shame. I mean, there were a couple of people even up into the nineties that—you know, I won't give out names or anything—but whose careers were almost derailed or completely derailed because it was revealed that they had written fan fiction in the past. Publishers wouldn't touch them. It was a bad scene all the way around. It's hilarious because one of the oldest forms of fan fiction that we have these days is what's called Sherlock Holmes Pastiches, and Sherlock Holmes Pastiches started appearing in the 1800s, like they started appearing not long after Sherlock Holmes stories were printed by Arthur Conan Doyle. They were very popular up through the twenties and the thirties, right? They were all written by very educated men. And they weren't called fan fiction, they were called Pastiches. So those were okay. Those were fine. Then you get up into the sixties and the seventies and you have women writing Star Trek fan fiction. Yes. A lot of it was Kirk/Spock, and some of it was truly terrible, but again, I've read some truly terrible books published by traditional publishers, so I'm not really sure that's a fan fiction only problem. You get a lot of new writers coming into fan fiction, so there is a lot of bad writing out there. I'll just be upfront about it, and you can see it right away. You're like, “ooh, that's not good,” but a lot of these people are writing for the first time. I can't tell you how many times I've read an author's note at the start of a fic that's like, “This is the first time I've tried to write anything, but I was just so inspired. I wanted to do it.” To me that's beautiful. That's amazing. That is wonderful. Even if the work itself is very clearly the first thing they've ever written, you're like, “Hey, you've started on an amazing journey,” and that's the beautiful part. But the shame, the shame that's been associated with it. Like when I was first thinking about getting published in the nineties—because I don't know if anybody's listening, but I'm an old person—I realized that I would never be able to admit to having written fan fiction when I was younger. I was a Kirk/Spock girl in the eighties. I totally wrote that. Jo: I've got to ask on this. Is this a gay romance thing with Kirk and Spock? KimBoo: Yes. Jo: Okay. Right. Yes. I'm checking, yes. KimBoo: I assume everybody knows that. Yes. No, Kirks/Spock was one of the first, we call them “ships”. It's slang for relationship that grew out of, I think, X-Files fanfiction in the nineties. The Kirk/Spock ship is one of the big motherships of fandom. If you go on AO3 and look up how many stories are tagged “Kirk/Spock”, there's a lot. There's a lot. Jo: What about the mixed race? Because wasn't it the first kiss on screen with Uhura and Kirk? Was it those two that had a Black and a white actor? KimBoo: Well, first interracial kiss. Jo: Interracial kiss. Yes. That's the right terminology. I was like, what is the terminology here? But that kind of thing. Often this kind of fun writing can also push more boundaries. We've seen so many things come out of indie that would never have started in traditional publishing. I mean you, well, you think about romance, there's no way traditional publishing would have started this romance trend. It is so big now, and they sucked up all the big ones, haven't they? So, yes. Interesting. KimBoo: Reverse harem or “why choose”, I think is what they call it these days, that pretty much came out of the One Direction fandom. Jo: Of course. That makes sense. KimBoo: Yes. The Omegaverse, I don't know if you're familiar with Omegaverse. Jo: Some. Okay. Kimboo: You know what, we don't have two hours, so I won't explain it, but look it up. Omegaverse came out of the Supernatural fandom. A lot of people don't know that they read Omegaverse now. The gay male, the MM Romance publishing industry, which really got started when indies came on the scene, right? 2008, 2010. Almost all of those authors, you go back to 2010, the MM big names, they all came out of fandom. One of the brilliant things about writing fan fiction and being in fan fiction is that you can see some of these trends coming. Like I knew reverse harem was going to be big. I knew Omegaverse was going to be big. I knew romantasy was going to be big long before anything hit because it was being so popularized in fan fiction because in fan fiction you don't have to worry about whether it's going to make you money. All you're doing is you're having fun, you're trying out new ideas, you're throwing things at the wall, you're seeing what's interesting. You're coming up with new ideas and new stuff, and sometimes it clicks and takes off. You have that freedom as a fan fiction writer because you're not worried about how much money is this going to be? And is this on market? And is this a niche? None of that concern is there. You're just writing because you want to write. Jo: Yes, and it feels like you're part of a group, you know, if you love the same thing as other people love. Then as you say, it's part of the fandom for whatever that property is. I mean, your book is called Out from Fanfic, so it's kind of turning from writing fanfiction into more professional writing, I guess. I mean, one of the things I was thinking is, of course there are a lot of writers who are commissioned to write within these universes. So do those sort of companies recruit from fanfiction? KimBoo: They do now. It was less common in the eighties, like when you had the Star Trek novels really taking off. And in the nineties when you had the Star Wars novels taking off, they still went with a lot of traditional publishers, even though the workhorses of the pulp fiction genres these days, it is a lot more popular and it's a lot more. A lot of traditional publishers are looking to popular fan fiction authors to mine for the next big thing. There was a dust up recently. There were three Harry Potter fanfics, Dramione. That's a ship, that's a portmanteau of Hermione and Draco. So Hermione and Draco as a couple is actually incredibly popular in fandom. There were three very, very popular fan fictions that are Dramione fanfic that have recently been taken and filed off—although they didn't do a good job filing off the serial numbers, everybody knew it right away—and then started being promoted. They actually used Harry Potter references in their marketing, which of course, the Harry Potter people were just like, “You got to stop that right now, like you stop it.” But the reason the publishers published this is because some of these stories had a million, 2 million readers online. So they knew this is a popular story. They could file off the serial numbers and make some money off of it. So yes, nowadays it's a lot more common for traditional publishers and agents to look at fan fiction authors who are very popular, who have a following, and who've done a lot of writing. So it is more common these days for sure. Jo: And then I guess your other thoughts on Out from Fanfic, like for your own journey, it sounds like you are still doing a bit of both, as in you still write some fanfic. How do people cross over if they're like, “No, I want to write my own”? Is it just mainly a case of your own characters? And your own world, I guess? KimBoo: Absolutely, so it's easier for some people than for others. I actually wrote the book because I did know quite a few authors who tried to write their own original fiction, and what I noticed in a lot of those cases is that they tried so hard that they went so far out of their lane that they weren't interested in their stories anymore. They're like, “Oh, I just, I get bored by my own writing. I just want to go back and write fanfiction.” And I think, and the whole reason that I wrote the book is to try to help people who are used to writing about characters that they love and writing about settings that they love learn what those things are. Like dial it down, figure out—well, I call them parameters—like figure out what the parameters are of those characters. You know? Do you just like wacky klutzy characters who are also geniuses? Well, that's more of a trope that you can put that in any story. It doesn't have to be Stiles Stilinski from Teen Wolf. A lot of different things that you love, you can pull into your own writing out of your fan fiction without repurposing your fan fiction, without using other people's characters. Learn what you love of those things and use them, because it is a transition. It is definitely not super easy to transition to writing original fiction if all you've ever done really is written fan fiction. I, of course, had a little bit of a lift up because I had been writing original fiction for most of my life. So I was already familiar with some elements of it. I did learn a lot writing fan fiction. In fact, I think I wrote over 1 million words of fan fiction before I think I really found my voice as an author and realized what I really want to write. So it can be a learning ground if you look at it that way. I also don't want to take the fun out of it. I don't want to say, “Oh, you should use this as a training grounds,” but you can, if your goal is to write original fiction and you find that challenging. Jo: Yes, I think that's really interesting. I was reflecting then, I mean, I have thought before, I would love to write a Bond book. Which, I think they've all been men who've written the Bond books. Obviously there's lots of them written in more modern times. It's really interesting because then I think, well, my thriller, my ARKANE series, you could definitely trace a lot of Bond kind of tropes, a lot of Indiana Jones and Lara Croft tropes. You say it is taking the things that you love about the movies and the books and the TV shows and then picking them out and then creating your own stories where there is still elements like that. I mean, those are not the original things. It's how you turn that into your own work, but it's skating that line, isn't it? That remains difficult. KimBoo: Right, and as we talked about a little bit earlier, tropes are more universal. So if you can kind of dial, like you said, the Indiana Jones, Lara Croft—well, what is that trope or the mummy? Like, oh, it's the archaeologist going on adventure and running into and finding cursed things and finding cursed items. That's a trope, but if you're not looking for it, you could just say, well, I just like writing in Indiana Jones. I don't know how I'm going to write my own original story, but if you sit back and look at it like, okay, what is it about Indiana Jones or what is it about Kirk? Or what is it about Wei Wuxian from The Untamed that I love? What is that? Can I pull on that? Can I introduce it into my own characters and my own stories? Jo: That's cool. Then in the book, you have a brief section about how things have changed for indies over the last few years. Obviously I always have to talk about AI, and you said, quote from the book, “What is the point of churning out repetitive stories written to market when an AI program can do it faster, better, cheaper?” “What does it mean to be a human creator of anything?” I love that because then you give people hope and you talk about how this is actually ideal terrain. That's your words for you. So talk about this. Because I get people emailing me all the time saying, “what is the point?” So respond to that. KimBoo: What is the point? What is the point of anything? Okay. No, but I think there's so many moving parts, and Joanna, you talk so well about how AI is impacting our industry, but for me personally, it's opened the door to allowing me to write what I really want to write and allowing me to put my own humanity into the writing. This isn't true for everybody, but for me, trying to write to market, trying to write to narrow down and stay in your lane, as we talked about earlier, felt like trying to turn myself into a machine. I didn't want to do that. I didn't want to. I tried and I tried and I failed abysmally over and over and over again. So the humanity is what we own as humans. Our experiences, our insights. AI, and specifically LLMs—because I like to be specific when we're talking about that specifically LLMs—the training that they've done has been so broad and across so many genres and across so many types of writing and so many eras of writing that it's very generic. Even at the point where you say you can push a button and have it write a book— which we're definitely not there yet as anyone who's played around with LLMs knows for sure. It's going to be median, it's going to be average, right? Because that's what AI is really all about. Taking our own spark of creativity and ingenuity and allowing ourselves to grow into that rather than being worried about churning out the next pulp fiction, I think is an opportunity. Now, some people who've made a lot of money churning out a lot of these books see it as a threat and I understand that, but things change. Things change in our industry all the time now. Like we had a hundred and fifty, two hundred, three hundred years of things not changing at all. Then we had self-publishinga, nd indies changed everything. eBooks changed everything. AI is changing everything. If we invest in ourselves as authors and writers, as creators, as people with creativity, I think it is an ideal terrain because then we can explore the things we love to write. It's one of the reasons why I think that cross genre books such as Cozy Fantasy or romantic contemporary can start to bubble up is because people feel more confident that they can reach the readers they want and that they don't have to try to fit their round peg into a square hole type of situation. So that's my thoughts on it. I mean, I know other people have different opinions, but that's where I'm at. Jo: I actually think this is a better time for, coming back to where we started, around the sort of multi-passionate creator. For many years it's been, well, if you write cross genre—which I do—if you write all over the place, if you don't do series, if you write standalones, if you do this, that and the other, you are not going to make good money. Many of us have made good money like that, but we've certainly felt like, oh, well I should do this. I should go into this one genre, or I should try not to write. Like I've got three books in my Brooke and Daniel series, and when I wrote them, I was trying to write a standard British crime and ended up with a male psychic character. I was like, why isn't this selling? And I figured out over time that the British crime niche is not supernatural when it certainly doesn't have a male psychic in. So it's so funny because I love those books and I've always been like, why? Why can't the people who love this type of thing find these books? I actually think they have more chance in a world of generative search, for example, where people can get much more granular. They're like, “Well, I like this, I like this and this and this and this, and this. Find me something that I might like.” So I feel like that is much going to be much easier for our work to be surfaced than someone who just has one category on Amazon, for example, that they buy in. KimBoo: Absolutely. I think one of the more hilarious examples of that is the search I did recently for Supernatural Cozy Apocalypse. A cozy apocalypse. That is a nice one, right? There were books that came up in that search and I was just like, “Oh, this is cool,” because I wanted something that was like the end of the world, but also people coming together and found family and maybe a little supernatural. Like, dragons are coming up out of the earth because of climate change. I found the book Apocalypse Cow. It's about a cow at the end of the world, and it's fun. These are great for us cross genre writers, which I'm leaning into more. I think my serial Dragon's Grail is in a lot of ways still very much the epic fantasy Second World type of thing, ut I'm looking at it and it doesn't really fit into epic fantasy, it doesn't really fit into romantasy. It doesn't really fit in. So I'm having to think of different ways of building up that explanation of it because it is kind of intrinsically cross genre and it's going to be a challenge, but I think it's a great challenge to have in this day and age. As you said, generative search is really going to be a game changer. I don't think people are ready for how much that's going to change everything. Jo: Probably for the last year now, I used ChatGPT to find books. I just find it so much better. I'm like, “Here's a list of things that I really like. Go find me some books.” I just think it's so cool to find much more weird stuff that just would not have been surfaced otherwise. I guess where I'm going with this too is, and what I say to people is— You need to be your weird self. KimBoo: Well said. All of what I just said, that was what I meant to say. Jo: Be your weird self. I can see that with your work across different things, like I bring up your parents' grief book again. I mean, a lot of people might not have expected a book like that alongside someone who also writes about productivity and this fanfic stuff. So that breadth of humanity is, I think, what people who might come in one of your books and then they're like, oh, this person has a whole load of stuff that brings more depth is just a different side of them. I think this being the full human that you are is so important coming into this sort of new world. KimBoo: I agree, especially coming out of the world where you were supposed to be just one thing, and do that one thing, and be there for only one thing. For me as a reader, I love seeing what other writers are working on. I love seeing a writer whose romance novels I really love and they're branching into, you know, space opera. I'm like, I'm all about it. Like I love to read that. It's more about what I enjoy reading in the author's own take on those stories less than, “oh, this is space opera genre and that's all I read.” I don't think readers are like that. Some are, you got your whale readers who never leave their niche, but I think a lot of us, we like a lot of different things. I think this is a great time for authors to be able to expand and take advantage of that. Jo: Absolutely, and maybe realize that, sure— You might not hit it out the park with every book, but then who ever did? KimBoo: Like, I know there's readers out there who love your psychic British crime stories. Absolutely. I don't have a doubt. Jo: Well the, what's so funny is they get the best reviews of all my books. They get the best reviews. It's just the number of people who actually like that kind of book are quite few and far between. But hey, I didn't know that when I started writing them. I am writing this book about gothic cathedrals at the moment. Nobody asked for that. KimBoo: They didn't, but I am certainly looking forward to it because I love gothic architecture and so I'm excited about that. Jo: Oh, fantastic. Well, this is the thing, and I think we need to keep that in mind. So I guess as we close, write what you want to write and hopefully in this new world with AI search people, more people will find us. KimBoo: The dream. Jo: The dream. Happy times. So where can people find you and your books online? KimBoo: Okay, well I suggest that people go to my main hub studio website, which is HouseofYork.info, and that's all one word, HouseofYork.info. That has links to all my sub-brands, including KimBoo York and Cooper West and Patience & Fortitude, the one about grief and mourning where they can read my dog's obituary as I just lost my pet. I'd love people to love my dog as much as I do. So go check that out. HouseofYork.info, you can find everything there. If you want to reach out to me, I'd love to hear from people. Jo: Great. Well thanks so much for your time, KimBoo. KimBoo: Thank you so much, Jo. It's been a pleasure as always. This transcript has been edited for clarity and readability while maintaining the authentic conversational tone of the original interview.The post Writing Fan Fiction, And Multi-Passionate Creativity With KimBoo York first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How do you know when an idea should become a poem or a short story instead of a longer work? How can indie authors publish and market poetry and short fiction in today's market? Joanna Penn and Orna Ross explore the creative processes, and the business behind writing short-form work, and discuss why being authentically human matters more than ever in our AI-driven world. In the intro, How publishing has changed since 2015 [Jane Friedman]; The Two Authors Podcast; Anthropic settles piracy copyright lawsuit [WIRED; The New Publishing Standard]; AI-Assisted Artisan Author webinars; The Buried and the Drowned out now; Long distance walking and resilience at midlife [Books and Travel] Today's show is sponsored by Draft2Digital, self-publishing with support, where you can get free formatting, free distribution to multiple stores, and a host of other benefits. Just go to www.draft2digital.com to get started. This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn  Orna Ross is a multi-award-winning historical fiction novelist, poet, non-fiction author, and the founder of the Alliance of Independent Authors. Her latest poetry collection is Night Light As It Rises. J.F. Penn is the Award winning, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of thrillers, dark fantasy, crime, horror, and travel memoir. Her short story collection, The Buried and the Drowned, is out now. This discussion was originally published on the Self-Publishing with ALLi Podcast in July 2025. How poems “choose” their writers and the difference between emotion-driven poetry and character/place-driven short stories W.B. Yeats' prose outline technique for poetry and why it helps writers actually finish their poems The challenges and rewards of creating print collections through Kickstarter for niche audiences Why submission to magazines isn't the only path—the case for direct publishing and building reader relationships Marketing strategies specific to poetry and short fiction, from video content to reader teams The importance of professional editing and beautiful book design for short-form collections You can find Orna at OrnaRoss.com and Jo at JFPennBooks.com and BooksAndTravel.page. You can find The Buried and the Drowned at: www.JFPenn.com/buried. You can find Night Light As It Rises here. Transcript of the discussion Jo: Today we are going to be talking about what we've both been working on recently. Actually, we've got a lot of craft-related discussion going on today as we talk about writing, publishing and marketing poetry and short fiction. There are writing craft things in today's show and also business aspects. I had this idea about this show because Orna, you shared a poem written about your mom's death on your Go Creative podcast, and I did tear up and I'm sure a lot of people listening would've teared up too, and it must have been really hard to write. So I wanted to ask you —  Why did you decide to write a poem about this really difficult topic, and how do you know when something should be a poem as opposed to something longer? Orna: So poems pick me rather than me deciding. I don't actually, with longer work, I will make a decision. I'm going to do a book on such and such, but poems kind of come along or they don't. And so this one arrived and that's why I decided to do it. In terms of why I decided to share it, which is a relatively new thing for me to do, and certainly new to do on the Go Creative podcast, something I am going to be doing going forward and share the poetry. I'm challenging myself at the moment to kind of go out there more and share those things. Typically I would have just shared that with my poetry patrons. I wouldn't have gone any further with it. So now I'm trying to just be more human in the world of AI as you and I talk about a lot, that whole double down on being human thing. Well, you know, reading a poem that you've written yourself is probably about as human as it gets and that's why I decided to share it. Then in terms of how do you know whether something's a poem or something longer for me, and again, I think it's really personal for each different writer, but for me — Lyrical poems are short and just a single flash of feeling and image coming together for concentrated emotion. If I can sense the whole experience in just one vivid moment kind of thing, that's a poem for me rather than an essay or a story. So there'd be an image and there'd be a feeling, rather than, there may be an idea as well, but the image and the feeling are the main thing. If plots start coming in or characters, memory, side stories, anything like that, then it's a bigger thing, much bigger thing. Usually for me, novels and all. But one scene, one beat. That's poetry. Jo: And you mentioned there about the doubling down of being human. And of course this poem about the death of your mother — You can't get much more human than a poem about the death of your mother. I mean, AI could generate something, but that is a human experience, right? Orna: Yes, 100%. And I believe that this is a personal belief of mine as a writer, is one of my sort of writing credo. That the feeling and emotion and experiences that you're having while you're writing a poem that opens you out, that in some way that is conveyed to the reader who then experiences. Not exactly the same. They're going to bring their own stuff to it, but they're going to have a sense of that humanity in the poem. I do feel that is something that can't be replicated. Very hard to describe, very hard to explain where it, where it comes, where you see it in the text, but I believe it's there. But yeah, short stories are similar. You've been writing short stories recently and —  How do you know when an idea is a short story or a longer story or a novel? Jo: I normally have like a story seed and I guess I have story seeds for novels as well. And I want to explore that. But usually there has to be some kind of twist. So when I was growing up, I mean, I still read them sometimes, Roald Dahl's Tales of the Unexpected, which I loved. And if people have an idea of Roald Dahl, I know in some ways he has been critiqued these days, but pretty dark children's writing as well. But the Tales of the Unexpected are adult short stories. So I like having this sort of surprising or disturbing or unexpected sense about it. I do feel like you can explore different subgenres a lot more than novels. So my novels tend to be action adventure or straight thriller or supernatural thriller. And then with my short stories, I get into all kinds of different things. So I've got some techno thrillers. I do a lot of archaeology. I like to research a lot, but my short stories do have these sort of themes and archaeology is certainly one of them. So I think if I don't want to turn it into something bigger, I definitely think every short story could be turned into some kind of novel. But I don't necessarily want to do that. I just finished a short story, it's called Between Two Breaths, and it stems from an experience I had scuba diving in the Poor Knights Islands in New Zealand almost 25 years ago, and I haven't actually written about it. Funnily enough, I had written a poem back then I found, it's dated 2005, so I guess that's 20 years ago. And I'm actually going to put that in the edition in my collection to go with that short story. But it's an experience I had that I wanted to encapsulate in something short that leaves the reader with questions. And actually, as we're talking, I'm wondering if that's the difference because with my novels, as a reader, I hate a cliffhanger at the end of a novel. I want things to be wrapped up. And thrillers are, even if they're in a series, are usually completely wrapped up. So they are, they're not like fantasy where you might have seven books and there's cliffhangers on every one. My short stories leave you with a question and I find that that's really important. A bit like the Roald Dahl stories, you can still be thinking about them later because they haven't necessarily ended. So yeah, I guess that's the difference. And it's interesting because you said that the poem stems from emotion, whereas I feel like the short story, it does start with either a character or a place. So, for example, I went, when I went up to Ely Cathedral, it sort of sparked this idea about the area being drowned and this place called Seahenge, which kind of emerged from the waters, this prehistoric wooden circle. And I was like, I have to write a story about that. So that, I think that's kind of the difference, the emotion versus a place or a character. I don't know. What do you think? Orna: Yeah, I think that speaks to me though. Of course you can have character and place in poetry. You have to have it in story in narrative forms, but in poetry you can have narrative elements as well. Poetry can be everything, and I think it very much depends on what kind of poet you are. Just as you know what you said there about your novels are wrapped up and your short stories can be, have a much more open ending for another writer, might be the other way around. And it's very much, I often feel — The forms that we write in, they choose us. And we've discussed this before in terms of the fact that writing across genre and across the big macro genre of fiction and nonfiction. And then I do poetry as well. I mean, you wouldn't choose that if you were just operating from choice, would you? And in similar ways, I think the forms that we use, they kind of choose us a bit, don't they? Jo: Yeah. And also for me, the short story, I'm a discovery writer. As I've talked about before, I don't necessarily know what the twist is going to be or what ending I will leave with. So, although I say that, that Between Two Breaths, I absolutely knew how it would end. I actually started with the end and then, because that's the experience I had, and I wanted to communicate that feeling. Whereas Seahenge, I didn't know how it was going to end. I just knew that I wanted to have the emergence of this prehistoric circle, and it had this upturned tree in the middle and in the roots. Something was there like an ancient sacrifice. I love ancient sacrifice, as you know! So I was like, well, what, what is it? What could that be? And that question of what could that be? I didn't necessarily know. And that's, you know, it eventually came to it. I think there's a lot of fun in the creativity of short stories because it's so much shorter. And actually, I was going to ask you about this. So for me, writing a short story, it is a short process compared to a novel because normally I write between, let's say 5,000 and 10,000 words. I know the word count so you know, it literally just doesn't take so long. It could take a couple of weeks, but it doesn't take forever. Whereas a novel, you know, a lot more words. But how about you? Because I feel like a poem can actually take a lot longer. So tell us about the process for writing a poem. Do you start with loads of words and edit or build up from a line? Like what is the process? Orna: Yeah, so just on the thing of brevity and short. Short is one of the major reasons that I write poetry because novels and nonfiction for me take a very long time and —  Almost all the poems that I have published, I write and publish them pretty quickly. Actually, I have just one big epic I've been writing for a long time, a long poetry sequence about women and writing and a tradition, the writing tradition if you like. So it's a huge theme and that one is taking a long time. But generally speaking, the fact that I can start and finish a poem sometimes in a day is just brilliant for me and it keeps me. I think I can keep on with these big fiction projects and things because I get the satisfaction of putting poetry together in between. So, not every poem is done in a day, not by any means. Sometimes they take weeks and sometimes they take a few months. But that's nothing for me compared to the big books. And in terms of then how I put it together — I only began to produce poetry consistently when I adopted a technique that I learned from the great W.B. Yeats, who always wrote prose outline first. And it might sound really strange, but I never did that for a long time. And now that I do, it's made such a difference to actually finishing, because before I started to do that. I had, I don't know how many hundreds of unfinished poems, but now that I do the prose outline first, if I start the poem, I finish it. And so I free-write that summary by hand and kind of listening as I write more. Then I would, if I was writing fiction or nonfiction and start reading it aloud or take it for a walk and just begin to kind of recite any lines that are. I'm looking for the rhythm and the pulse of it. Again, much more than I would be for fiction or nonfiction. And I'll start thinking about form. Should it be free verse? Should it be, you know, a sonnet or something else. At the moment I'm looking at rondeaux. Lots of, trying to do a few poems in that form because I never did it before until recently. And then when I thought, I kind of realized, okay, that's enough. Now thinking and walking and reciting on that, I'll open a new file and then rewrite the whole thing as poem and then just as much as needed from there. Sometimes it needs lots, sometimes only a little, sometimes I'll take it for a walk again and again. Sometimes it'll just finish up, as I said, in a day. Not very often, but that does happen. I know when it's done. I just know there's a sort of a click and there's nothing else to change, and there's a kind of a silence settles in around the words. So then I know it's finished. Jo: Yeah. Well, it's really interesting. I think, was it Mary Oliver who said like, sometimes she'd be out walking and a poem would come towards her and she knew she had to catch it because if she didn't catch it, it would be gone. Orna: Oh. That's the story that Elizabeth Gilbert tells in her TED Talk, isn't it? Jo: Oh, is it? Orna: It's not at the top of my head, but yeah, it's a brilliant story. She'd run back to the house to write it down and thought before she missed it. What about your process for stories, short stories. Jo: Oh, I need to stay on poetry a minute because you made me, because the poem and people, I really recommend people go listen to you recite this, the poem for your mother. What's it called again? Orna: It's called The Milky Ways. Jo: Yeah, The Milky Ways. And it, I mean some of those images stick in my mind, but of course it was layered. It is a very specific moment. But it's layered with a lot of memory and other emotions other than grief, obviously. And so to me it feels like some poems and I feel like some of our creative works, whatever. They are poetry, short fiction, nonfiction, whatever, memoir take a long, long time to come in some way emerge. I mean like this short story about the diving at the Poor Knights. I don't know why I didn't write that before and it just feels like it took a very long time. So even though some of your poems you are writing quite quickly. Do you feel like some poems, like the one for your mother, have taken a long time to come out? Orna: Yes, definitely. Definitely you can find yourself writing a poem about an experience that you'd forgotten about even, and that is really, really a very long time ago. I feel an awful lot of stuff that turns up in my poetry image wise goes back to childhood. So they take, they've taken half a century to get to get here and come out. And I didn't start writing poetry at all until I was in my forties. I did as a teen, but I didn't then and a friend died. And so it just started at me again and I didn't really start writing it seriously until about, I was in my fifties really. So I do think poetry, I mean there are so many different kinds of poems. It's macro genre, which has millions of genre within, but the kind of poems that I write definitely there, there's a maturing and maturing of the ideas and things are necessary to them, I think. Yeah, definitely. Jo: Well, I've, as you know, turned 50, so maybe I'm coming into my next poetry period! But if people, so if people listening, if they want to start writing. Because it also, it feels to me very, even though I have written some and I've taken some classes and I do buy and read poetry, but it feels so daunting compared to writing fiction or nonfiction. For me, even memoir, writing a poem just seems so much weightier, I think because perhaps I mainly read poems that are quite serious and I love your poem, as I mentioned, and they, it feels so big. So if people listening, they want to write poems, but they don't really know how to start. You mentioned there's a prose outline, so what even is that? Just explain like how someone might start. How might someone start writing poetry? Orna: So in terms of the outline, it would just say what the poem is going to contain. In the poem that you were talking about, literally just a moment standing at the window, looking out at the night sky a while behind me knowing, you know, my mother is in her bed and I can hear her breath, which is being artificially fed to her. And knowing that, we have been told that she doesn't have a long time. So the outline is just the content, what's going to go in there. So it's, and it's best done, as I said, with free writing. Writing fast, raw, let it all out, just kind of pour it down onto the page. And what you're looking for then is some words have energy in them. Free writing, some words in there, have more energy than others. And so you kind of pull them out and start to. You know, if it's a sentence, repeat that sentence in your mind and see what else calls and you're looking for, I mean, for me, what's very important, what makes a poem and why I don't agree that, you know, a lot of poetry that's called poetry for me, if it doesn't have an image. In it then. It's not really a poem to me. It has to have emotion and image. And after that, then the best, the best possible words and the best possible order. I forget who said that as a description of good poetry, but yeah. Image and emotion to me are the heart of poetry. Otherwise, you might as well write prose. To me, that's what makes a difference. So maybe that's where some people feel the challenge is to get the right image to encompass the emotion. Jo: Yes. Because of course some poems have a certain, as you said like, like a meter or they're a certain type like my scuba diving one is a pantoum, so it has a certain rhythm to it and certain lines repeat and all of this kind of thing. And that feels very like overly structured. And then of course we've got a lot of Insta poets who, it might just be an emotional, like, it might even read like an affirmation. It feels like there's a lot of freedom in poetry, but you can make it quite structured if you want to, right? If you feel like you need structure, there are structures you can go to. Orna: Hundred percent. And then there can be the opposite of that, where the structure becomes a complete confinement. And that's not poetry either. So again, if it's playful and you're enjoying it, then it's poetic, but there's nothing poetic about trying to beat yourself into some form that's, you know, your English teacher taught you 30 years ago and you think you should write or whatever. Poetry can be anything. And that freedom. Can be, you know, that can stop us. So if structure helps use structure, if structure doesn't help let it go. Jo: Well, I guess — For my short stories, it's the structure of a novel in that there's a character in a setting, something happens, other things happen, and then it ends somehow. I mean, I also feel like some people think that a short story has to be only one character in one setting and only one thing happens. But I actually, some of my short stories, so one in particular, De-extinction of the Nephilim, so it was based on, there's a company called Colossal and they're de-extincting things. So they just did the dire wolf and they want to do the woolly mammoth and all this. And obviously Jurassic Park is the classic de-extinction story. This one's about the Nephilim and it has three point of view characters, an archaeologist and a geneticist, and a maternity nurse. And so it was like, when that came to me, I knew the archaeologist had to find something underground, and that would then spark the rest of the story. And I didn't know that the other characters would come in and that story ended up being, I think it's about 8000 to 10,000. So it's a bit of a longer one. But I feel like if people feel like it can only be one character in one place and all that, that can hem you in as well. So I do tend, obviously a short story does have a certain word count. I don't submit to magazines or anything, I just publish them myself. I have been in a few anthologies. I've had a few stories commissioned — but generally I write in Scrivener exactly the same as I write my novels. Then I print it out and hand edit. There are different scenes sometimes like mini chapters, so that De-extinction of the Nephilim, it's got like different chapters based on the different characters. And I still use ProWritingAid. I still work with my editor, Kristen. She edits my short stories as well. So I have exactly the same process, I guess for short stories as I do for fiction. And the only difference is, I guess the lens, but also the leaving it with a question. Orna: And do you ever put short stories up on your blog or anything? Jo: No, but I sell them individually, so they are on all the usual stores. They're on my JFPennBooks.com Shopify store. And we are going to talk in a bit about the first print collection, but I find that actually, I mean, I've had people on my podcast, on The Creative Penn podcast talk about you should always try and license short stories to magazines and anthologies and submit them to competitions first because the contracts for short stories are some of the best in the business in that the rights revert usually very quickly, and the contracts are often either for first print rights and they expire quite quickly, or subsequent print rights. And they're usually fine in terms of the people pay per word and all this. But I'm just so impatient that I normally, once I have an idea, I'm like, no, I need to write that story. And then I publish it and I send it out to my email list and you can actually make some decent money even selling them at 99 cents, which I feel, or $2.99. But you can't price an individual short story too high. I also narrate them myself, the audio books as human me. So that can kind of add in that human element as well. Orna: And value. And the people who say, you know. Send them out. I think underestimate how much creative energy that whole submission process takes, backwards and forwards. So I'm the same with poetry. I mean — People assume that you must submit poetry to journals and stuff. And I just never do, never have, never will. And if somebody approaches me or, I might, and I'm not saying never, never say never. I might decide I'd like to be in such and such a thing, but I need another reason to do it. So I have contributed to, at the moment, an anthology here in my new hometown of Hastings called Poet Town being put together. And I have one in there. And also there's Washing Windows, which is a kind of a well-known series of Irish poets anthology in Ireland. I've got one in that, but generally speaking, I'm not going out there in the whole submission thing because it takes a lot of time and effort and energy to do that. And I'd rather write another poem actually. So I just put, I just put them on my blog, at least two a month. The, the whatever my favorite two of the most recent kind of thing. One is for my patrons only and my best one of the month. And then when I have enough for a collection, I eventually publish it in book form, but that can take a long time. So I have different poems sitting in different collections that won't be published until there are enough in them. But I am now beginning to bundle and looking at special editions through Kickstarter, that is something I would like to do, probably for this book. And so the poem that you heard me read on the podcast is part of a collection of poems for bereavement, 12 Poems to Inspire series. And these are the grief and bereavement ones. So, yeah, I'm going to bring a few of those books together and create a special edition through Kickstarter in time for once again, once there's enough. Jo: Do you teach writing poetry as part of your Patreon, or do you do classes at all? Or is that just not something you are… Orna: No, I did in the past. Not anymore. Not anymore. Again, I'd rather just be doing it. Jo: Oh, well, we might have to demand like a stretch goal for your Kickstarter, where you will do a special webinar or something for those of us who want to… Orna: That sounds okay. Jo: Yeah, I think that would be great because I feel like those of us who buy and read poetry often want to do more poetry. It's just that it feels, as I said, it feels. It feels important to me. It's really funny. Whereas I feel like my short stories, I write them and I'm really happy with them and they often, they encapsulate this moment but I don't feel that they're heavy in any way. I don't know. Do you think that people have got the wrong impression of poetry by making it too serious? Orna: Yeah. I think that's a bad place to start. It can be anything you want it to be. And I do think that's school, isn't it? Where they sat us down and chopped it up, like they dissected it like it was a rabbit in science class or something. And that's not how poems are written, and it's not how they're read when you're reading for pleasure yourself. So, I would say just start with the poems you love. And just start to write. I mean, you're a very experienced writer, so you can write poetry, no problem. It just depends then on what kind of poetry it is that you want to try, but definitely take away all the, it's got to be heavy and brilliant and all of that because that's the stopper for all writing, isn't it? I appreciate you feel that way about it. And I know you're exaggerating a bit, but, yeah, it can be really playful poetry and if you look at all the, in inverted commas, great poets, and you read, once you read deeply into what they, or sorry, widely into what they've written, you'll find that they've all written light, playful pieces, you know, poems that aren't very good really, that don't really quite work. And they have their favorite kind of ways of going on and all of those, in inverted commas less than good, you know, poems are part of what actually produces one that does shine and reach a lot more people. So, yeah, playful, I think is, I would think is the key word when it comes to poetry. Tell us about your short story collection. Have you had challenges? Jo: It's certainly a challenge. Like, first of all, I do think that I thought a bit like maybe how I feel about poetry, which is maybe I'm not worthy and I feel I'm not really exaggerating. I do feel like because maybe I studied English literature and I can be too serious about all these things. I feel like Roald Dahl's Tales of the Unexpected, it's like a canon work in my mind, and to do a short story collection? Well, in the sort of literary world, doing a short story collection published by a traditional publishing house is a really big deal because let's face it, they don't make a ton of money. Orna: So they're for super fans, you know? Yeah. Short story collections are for super fans, which means an author can do really well with them, but publishers don't tend to do so well with them. Jo: So it does mean that the famous short story collections are sort of by big name authors. So I feel like that was the first challenge was, oh well I couldn't do that. And then I was like, no, I really want to do, I really want to have my own collection in print because it's easy enough to do a short ebook and a short audiobook digitally, but none of these are in print. I do have a trilogy, which is in print, which is A Thousand Fiendish Angels, which is three short stories inspired by Dante's Inferno. So that is in print, but the rest of them are not. And so I really wanted to do that. And so that was one challenge. I was like, should I do it now? I really want to do it. And then it was, okay, what do you call it? And this kind of titling of a short story collection, that I haven't written to be related to each other was really hard. But this is where ChatGPT and Claude, I used both of them, uploaded all the eBooks that I'd written, all the short stories. Asked for titles for the themes, asked it to really examine the themes across the whole thing. And people could use Notebook LM, Google's Notebook LM as well. Anything where you can get it to really look at your work and kind of analyze it. And we can't see these things ourselves, but there were loads and loads of titles, but the one I love is called The Buried and the Drowned, which, some people, if anyone's read my fiction, that does say a lot about me. That is true. Super dark, dark little soul. But yeah, and I mean, for example, of the ones I've talked about here, Seahenge is very much about the drowned and De-extinction of the Nephilim is very much buried and it's the sort of dangers of messing with what has been buried for so long and what has been drowned will be drowned again and all that kind of thing. So, so the sort of coming up with the title, but it's one of these occasions where I think AI tools can really help and I love the title. And then I asked it, okay, well I need a cover image. So let's brainstorm that. And I've worked with Jane Dixon-Smith, who's been my cover designer for more than a decade now. And so we've got that going. I'm writing a couple of extra stories, which I won't publish separately, so people who have already read the other stories hopefully will want it because there'll be two exclusives. One of which will be that Between Two Breaths and a story called The Black Church, which is where I spent my 50th birthday. I woke up next to the Black Church in Iceland. So writing that, my editor Kristen, is going to read the whole collection because another challenge is what order do you put these in? So I'm going to try and figure it out myself, and then I'm going to give it to Kristen, who has edited some of those stories already, but she will read it as a first reader. I'm also expanding the author's note, so — All my short stories have very personal author's notes, about where these stories come from. Like another one, it's about having an eye operation. When I had, after I had laser surgery. A few years ago it's called With a Demon's Eye, but it's things like that. I've written these sort of super personal authors notes, which again, coming back to the being human in an age of AI, I feel like that's so important and, and putting in the special edition, I'm going to put like that poem I mentioned, which is really about my divorce and my first marriage, and also photos. There's even a photo, a really old photo of me scuba diving during that time, back in the days when there wasn't digital cameras and stuff. So I want to make this collection, as you say, it is for super fans. I'm going to have a really low number on my Kickstarter, but it feels personally very important as part of my 50th year to do something that means so much. But boy, I definitely feel it's been a challenge. Orna: That's great. That sounds fantastic. When do you think it'll all come together? Do you have a date for the Kickstarter yet? Jo: I'm aiming for 1st of September. We're recording this in July. So, if people are interested, it is up JFPenn.com/buried. The Buried and the Drowned. So JFPenn.com/buried and yeah, I think it will. I've bought a lot of short story collections off Kickstarter from people I don't know. I do actually think Kickstarter is a great place for short story collections. I think there is an audience there who are looking for them, and if you've bought one before, other ones come up in your recommendation algorithm. So I'm kind of hoping that maybe some new people will find them, because again, people who read poetry, read poetry, people who read short stories as well as other things. But it's like if you like short stories, then maybe you find other ones by other authors. Yeah, I mean, well what about your collection? Because you actually have quite a lot of poetry collections, so tell us about the process for that. What's the process for a poetry collection? Orna: Yeah, it takes a while, as I said earlier, because I don't, I never sit down and say right, now I'm going to create a collection, you know? Or create a poetry book apart from that epic one, that's going to be one big, long poem. So I have to wait until there are more than enough, on a linked theme. So I have ideas about what that might look like, and I have pinboards on the studio wall. And so I'd be looking for thematic overlaps between different poems or recurring symbols or something like that. And then when they feel like they go together, I have a sense, almost like I'm writing a musical piece with them, you know, and of a rise and fall kind of thing. I like to feel that the reader will go in and begin to gather together, kind of what I'm saying, and then move more deeply into it and then kind of ascend out. But, so I usually break them into sections as well. And I have never really, you know, on the publishing business side for a long time I didn't really think about poetry in that way. So it was, I put stuff out there, but I didn't go out doing ad campaigns or anything like that with poetry. So I've been quite unbusiness-like around it really and perfectly happy to do that and to see them as something that I write and people come to, people to know me, or as you say, who like reading poetry can find them. But then I did start to put together this new most recent series, which is 12 Poems to Inspire, and this is a bit more commercial because they're written around a particular occasion or event. So there are 12 about Christmas or that end of year time, new beginnings, for Mother's Day, 12 poems about love for Valentine's Day, that kind of thing. And so these are the ones that I'm going to now begin to bundle together and I'll do a Kickstarter and put together three of them I think, into a collection called Poetry of Light. And then I am going to start, when the season comes round, actually actively promoting them. And so I think these are my most accessible poems, if you like. And the ones that are most likely to, it's worth treating them in that way. Jo: Just on the number there, so you said, so you, because I've got some of your slim volumes, so those have 12 in, so when you say there's going to be three lots, so you're going to have a collection with 36 poems in, or — How do people know when it's enough to do something like a printed edition? Orna: Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it? So yeah, in this case, yes. I specifically decided these short books, they were to really be almost like an expensive gift card in a situation where you'd buy somebody a sympathy card instead. Buy this slim volume and give them this instead to be more meaningful. They hopefully won't put it in the bin afterward. It will last, they can come back to it and read it again and again. So that was the idea of them. They were deliberately slim and in fact, and they are illustrated as well. I forgot to say that my daughter, has done the illustrations. I had my own efforts at illustration, but I am updating them all now. My daughter has done the illustrations for them. So, they're an experience specifically around a particular thing. So that wouldn't be your typical collection. I have, you know, they will be bigger. For example, I have Allowing Flow is a collection of mindfulness poetry. I'm not sure how many poems are there, but probably 50. So I think the general consideration for a collection is 50 to 60 poems, makes a collection depending, again, on length of poems. So it's difficult to generalize, but that will be, you know, that will be the average, shall we say, for a collection. Jo: And just on the poetry editing side, because as I mentioned, I work with my editor Kristen on the individual stories and then also for the whole collection. And obviously for fiction, I work with editors as I know you do. What do you think about editors for poetry, whether an individual poem or for a collection and kind of understanding the structure of a collection? Orna: Oh, yes. Contrary to what people think. Editing is just as important for poems as it is for fiction and nonfiction, and editors make poems immeasurably better. So, at every level, at the developmental level, in the individual poem, obviously, and copy editing and punctuation choices can make a huge difference to a poem's meaning actually. So punctuation becomes super important. The shorter the form, the more important it is. So, yes. And you need an editor who writes and edits poetry. You can't just have your usual editor for poetry. I think it has to be somebody who understands and understands both when to step in and when to stay away. So, yeah, I think it's really important. Jo: And then I guess the other thing, one of the reasons we do Kickstarters is because we want to produce gorgeous print books. So again, I'm doing green foil for The Buried and the Drowned, which on the cover is going to look awesome. And there'll be a ribbon and sprayed edges. And the photos and the paper will be heavier and it will just be all the cool things that we can do once we get the Kickstarter money. And you can't really do it otherwise. But also — With your collection, are you thinking about beautiful design elements? Because of course, poetry and page layout is so important. Orna: Yeah, definitely. And I think if you're writing poetry is one thing, and producing poetry books is great. But if you want to start to think about selling poetry, then you have to think about beautiful packaging, I think. Because that's essentially what people are looking for when they buy poems and they want, it can be very subtly beautiful, but the layout of the words on the page becomes all important and how that page feels. And as you say, if you can make your poetry book look and feel gift worthy, then it has a much better chance of some commercial success. And it should also, I feel. The coherent emotional experience, the collection. So rather than, you know, here's the first 20 poems I ever wrote, all put together. There needs to be some sense of it working together as a whole, as a collection. And the editor can help with that as well. And I mean, I have had, as I come to, you know, as I begin to bring a collection together, I would then realize I need more poetry for this collection and I would start to write specifically to finish off that collection, but is definitely something that happens. Jo: Then the other thing for the Kickstarter, and in fact in general, I mentioned audio and audio narration. Now you have actually been quite resistant, I think, to publishing audio of you reading. So what are your thoughts? And of course you read this poem for your mother and The Milky Ways poem on your Go Creative podcast and it was fantastic. Are you moving into doing more audio for your poetry? Orna: That's why I'm doing it on the podcast. It's to warm myself up. I'm not drawn to doing it, but you and a few other people have said, and I can see myself how it, you know, it's, I would think it's becoming essential now too. As part of that human thing that we were talking about to read yourself. So yes, I am, I'm going to do, now I do have a little short sampler of my poems out there in audio form, but I did that a very long time ago. At First Flush it's called, just a sample. But yes, I am going to do these myself and to audio. So when I do this collection and bundle everything, I'll have the audio as well. Jo: Well, I mean, you mentioned that. Is it essential? I mean, I probably would've read the poem when you had put it somewhere, but because I'm an audio sort of reader in so many ways, hearing you read that poem, I think has a lot more impact. And again, as the human element. Hearing you read it is so important. So for people who are listening who might be feeling as uncomfortable about it as you have, any tips for getting over that, I guess? Orna: Feel the pain and then do it anyway? I don't really know that I'm the right person to give tips about this because as you say, I have been so. I've kept procrastinating it. I just think for me, not listening back is kind of key. So getting it off to the producer and I don't want to do my own production, for example, on them. So yeah, I don't, but I'll go through the experience maybe, and then I'll share the tips at the far side. How's that? Jo: I think that's good. And I mean, again, talking about the Kickstarter, which I think is a great way to do the poetry collection and the short story collection is that some, a lot of people buy audio through Kickstarter. It is one of the best ways to sell audio direct. So for example, I'd be very interested in buying the beautiful hardback if you're going to do one and plus the audio as an add-on. That's how I would want your poetry would be those two editions. So that I would have the nice print book on my shelf. Like I've got Your Secret Rose beautiful edition on my shelf. And I would, but I would prefer to listen than I would to read. So I don't know. I mean, that's how I feel as a consumer and what I see on my Kickstarters. With fiction and nonfiction so far is that people want the bundle with the audio. So even the print book with the ebook and the audio book as the bundle that they buy. I don't know, is that something you'll offer? Orna: Yes. And I do think that's a great offer for poetry in particular actually, and short form for, you know, we're talking about short stories as well. I think, having that combination is, is a really good thing for short form. Jo: Then I guess, before we finish up, we should, because we also talk about business and I guess the Kickstarter side is business, but marketing. I mean, what do you think about marketing for poetry? I mean, I guess doing the audio is one way and you can put those out. What else do you see poets doing for marketing? Orna: Well, short form video is huge for poets and if you can do that well, I'm not going to ever do that, but if you can do that well, that is probably the easiest, best way. And of course, in doing your video that you can then harvest your audio for your audio book so you're both producing and marketing at the same time, which is my favorite form of marketing content marketing. You don't have to show your face necessarily if you don't want to. But you can still produce videos, so you, I see some poets doing, you know, stock footage or AI illustration or indeed just if they're that way inclined their own illustrations and music and putting it all together as beautiful sort of piece. And that obviously is almost a form in itself. Film poetry is actually an emerging genre and there's some beautiful examples out there if people are attracted to that, but obviously that's very time consuming. So it's much more than just a way of marketing your poetry. But video in poetry, like in every other aspect of publishing is definitely big right now. I think the main thing for poets is to get the poetry out on Substack, on social, on a blog, and I think your email list is super important. It's always important for everybody, but you are depending on that relationship with your readers, in a big way as a poet, I think. I think one thing that I would say to people is don't target general poetry magazines or bloggers, or worse again, general book bloggers and people forget that poetry is a macro genre, like fiction and nonfiction. It divides up into genres, so there's no point in sending your inspirational poems to the dark goth collection, you know it's not going to work. So you have to research your comparable poets like you would with fiction or nonfiction. And then you find out who's working in that arena and you send them a tailored pitch or you can swap reading with other poets. I mean, there's a very thriving poetry scene on all of the platforms. I think Instagram is the one that I'm most familiar with, though I'm not there anymore. I was part of that for a few years and I really loved it. And then there are the magazines and the literary journals and stuff, which as I said, I don't do, but if you want to do those. And they are hungry for content always. And they like dealing directly with the poet and they're not inclined to deal with mainstream PR as much. And then I think the other big thing is to build a reader team who will go out and do your early reviews, but also share your favorite lines and talk about the poems. I think that's really important and I would say don't do ads or any direct promotion until you've seen something work and you know, if you have a reading you do on TikTok or whatever and it goes down well, that's the point at which to invest. But it would be very easy to waste a lot of money and get nowhere. Jo: And I think for me, a lot of the short story ideas and poems, we are not looking at the massive spike on launch. Like, I'm not expecting to do a six figure Kickstarter on a short story collection. You know, it's, I will probably have my lowest goal of any of my Kickstarters. But the point is that — Over the years, these sell. People buy my short stories every day. You know, some of them I wrote a decade ago. Same with your poems, right? They don't age ,these things. They really don't. So I feel like we launch them, we do the Kickstarter, which is a short launch, in only a couple of weeks in the end. But the point is that we will keep writing and people will find them over time. So I just, I feel like that might take the pressure off some people is, look, just think about this as primarily poetry and short stories are creative things. I mean, you could say all books are creative, but these are very creative. You know, there are very few people who aim to make tons of money with these types of writing. It is very much a creative drive and a piece of your body of work that you want to get into a beautiful print edition. That's kind of how I feel. And then I will do my best, but as you say, I'm not going to spend any money on marketing it. I'm going to put it out there and, yeah, see what happens. Orna: Exactly, and I think it is important for us to understand a bit about what is commercial, what is creative in our work when you're building up a body of work, you don't have to give the same marketing treatment to everything you produce. You can go out knowing that something is, you're doing it largely for yourself and for those, for the super fans who kind of like everything you do or for people who particularly like a particular thing. And there is absolutely no shame in aiming small sometimes. And keep the big guns for the things that are most likely to succeed with a wider audience. Jo: Absolutely. And I guess that brings us back to definition of success and why. Why we write these things. And it really is, as we both said, I think these ideas just come to us and we know that we want to write them as a poem or as a short story. So I guess any finishing thoughts Orna? Orna: Just that it's brilliant to be indie. You know, with this stuff, because it can be heartbreaking. I remember back in the day when indie wasn't a thing and trying to get somebody to be interested to say, yeah, it's just great to be able to just put it together, put it out there, see what happens, and not mind too much how it goes, that there is a great freedom in that, that I think is really, really precious. Jo: Fantastic. So, yes, you can find mine at JFPenn.com/buried. And if people want to find your collection Orna? Orna: OrnaRoss.com/nightlight. Jo: Fantastic. Well, thanks for being with us today, everyone. We really hope that you have found this useful and all the best with writing your own poems and short stories. Orna: Happy writing everyone and happy publishing. The post Writing And Publishing Short Stories And Poetry With J.F. Penn And Orna Ross first appeared on The Creative Penn.

What if you could turn a monthly writing challenge into a successful book collaboration—all while recording the entire creative process as a podcast? What if hand-selling locally sells more books than online marketing? Clay Vermulm talks about his creative and business processes. In the intro, Spotify’s new ‘Follow Along’ Feature for some audiobooks [Publishing Perspectives]; and thoughts on special edition vinyl or tapes for audio, like Harper Collins special edition example; AI-Assisted Artisan Author webinars; Hindenburg Narrator for audiobook mastering; Canterbury Cathedral; CreativePennBooks.com new theme; The Buried and the Drowned. This episode is sponsored by Publisher Rocket, which will help you get your book in front of more Amazon readers so you can spend less time marketing and more time writing. I use Publisher Rocket for researching book titles, categories, and keywords — for new books and for updating my backlist. Check it out at www.PublisherRocket.com This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn  Clay Vermulm is a horror novelist and short story author, co-author of Rain Shadows: Dark Tales from Washington State along with Tamara Kaye Sellman, and a podcaster at Fermented Fiction and Beneath the Rain Shadow. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.  Show Notes How a chance meeting at a sci-fi critique group led to a successful horror writing collaboration The unique podcast-to-book model: using monthly prompts and live critiques to create Rain Shadows How they've sold more books by hand than online—plus specific tactics for face-to-face selling Essential tips for being a better critique partner without destroying someone's confidence The business side of co-authoring: 50/50 splits, paying contributors, and why royalty tracking is a nightmare You can find Clay at RainShadowStories.com and on Substack. Transcript of Interview with Clay Vermulm Jo: Clay Vermulm is a horror novelist and short story author, co-author of Rain Shadows: Dark Tales from Washington State along with Tamara Kaye Sellman, and a podcaster at Fermented Fiction and Beneath the Rain Shadow. So welcome to the show, Clay. Clay: Hey, thank you so much for having me. I'm very excited to be on here. Jo: Lots for us to talk about. So first up— Tll us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and publishing. Clay: Like a lot of people, I've been writing since I was a little kid with crayons and everything like that, so I think a lot of writers out there can relate to that story. More specifically, I went to college for English and history. Like a lot of people, I think I was told through a good portion of my life this sort of narrative—and I think it's ironic, right? We tell people, “Oh, follow your dreams.” If people do something creative when they're a kid or when they're younger, we encourage that. We parade that, we champion that. Then as soon as you turn 18, we're like, “Okay, time to make money now. Do something that's a real job.” I always resented that, and once I got to college, I had a really good English professor who taught a class on actual publishing. His whole class was about how to submit a short story and how to go out there and try to get your work published. Your final for the class was just to actually show him that you had submitted a short story to a professional market and written one, because we wrote and critiqued them throughout class. I grew up in rural Montana, so I hadn't had a lot of opportunities to do critique groups or writing groups or theater or any of that until I went to college. Once I did and saw some of the avenues you could take to really pursue a life in creativity, I was totally hooked. That's where it officially began for me. Honestly, I owe it largely to theater. I got into theater and I went to college on a wrestling scholarship. I ended up dropping out of that and going into the community theater, doing some shows, learning to write stage plays and standup comedy and music. I tried writing everything and eventually landed on books because, as you know Joanna, you can carve out your own path in indie publishing in books, and you don't have to rely on like a million other people like you do in a play or a film. That's why I've focused on writing novels and short stories in recent years, just to get some of my stories finished and get them out there. Jo: So did you ever get a “real job” as college people like to call it, or— Have you managed a creative portfolio career, as we call it now? Clay: I'm finally getting to where that is my full-time job. For about the last three years, I've been a full-time writer—freelance stuff, magazines, editing gigs, kind of patching all that together with what I publish and put out there and a bunch of other groups I work with. So I'm there now, but it's only been about the last three years. Up until then I've worked lots of side jobs, kitchen jobs, a teaching job, and all kinds of stuff like that. I freelanced in the film industry here in Seattle for a solid five, six years as well. When I was doing that, I was just taking whatever new job would come my way. So I did a lot of production assistant stuff and grip and electric stuff. Jo: I think this is so important because I feel like a lot of people do think, “Oh well, it's just the one book.” Maybe they do a degree like yours in English and then they think, “Okay, I just need to write one book and that's it.” But what you're talking about—this sort of patchwork of all these different creative things, plus bits and bobs of jobs—is really the reality, isn't it? I certainly don't know anyone who just writes one book and then that's it, they're done. Clay: Yes, that is certainly an illusion, and a loosely held one at that. These days, I don't know anyone who's tried selling a book who still believes that. Jo: But perhaps if you haven't yet finished that first book, you can still believe that. It's great that your professor encouraged you all to submit because I guess you also started getting rejections pretty early, right? Are most of your works short stories? Because I saw from your website you do a lot of short stories. Clay: That's kind of become my favorite medium, my favorite form. I like editing too, because I really like to bring other artists, other authors together on projects. I love to showcase things that are really beautiful and strong works of fiction, especially in the short market, because there's just sort of a thing that happens with short stories. I think that a lot of writers read short stories. They are harder to get out to your actual larger reader base. Luckily in horror, I think there's been quite a movement towards reading short fiction, but even still, people primarily like to read novels or longer work for the larger reader base, it seems. I love taking every opportunity I can to collaborate with people and to bring awesome artists together on projects and to get these stories that—even if they've been printed somewhere else before—to get them back out there. When I find them and I'm like, “This story's awesome,” I see if I can get a reprint and make an anthology with it, just doing those kinds of projects. It's always been really rewarding to me. I think I like writing short stories because it also allows me to explore that editing side of the work as well. Jo: I like writing shorts as well (my new collection is The Buried and the Drowned.) It's funny you said writers read short stories, and I was just trying to question that in my mind, like, is that true? I think you are definitely right because many of us want to write them so we read them. I definitely remember reading the Roald Dahl Tales of the Unexpected back in the eighties, and those still shaped me. Then I was thinking about the ones that I buy now and they are pretty much all horror, which is really interesting that you said that. So people listening, definitely short stories. Let's talk about one of your collaborations then. You have this unusual origin story for the new collection called Rain Shadows. Talk about how Rain Shadows started, and the prompts, and the podcast, and why the hell you did it this way. Clay: It all ties together nicely. This story came out of a critique group where I met Tamara for the first time. I found this critique group randomly on Meetup, and it's actually a fantasy sci-fi critique group. It's still going in North Seattle right now. It's a great group of people. If you happen to be a writer of sci-fi and fantasy, they're on Meetup as North Seattle Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers. I met Tamara there and I was the only horror writer, which happens a lot in critique groups as well. You show up being the only horror writer is a common enough thing. Tamara came in with also some pretty dark stories that she was workshopping. It was like a bunch of dream sequences from her novel that she was working on. As soon as I read her stuff, I was like, “This person is the person out of this group that I want to really work with. I hope she likes my stories because her writing's awesome.” We had a good chemistry. We have a similar kind of style. I wouldn't say writing style, but we have a similar flavor of the kind of story we like to tell. We both liked the slow burn, the more psychological angle on horror, and it was just a good match. From that moment on, I knew I wanted to work with Tamara at some time, in some way. I was thinking of the story I sort of told you earlier about how a lot of writers need that person. For a lot of people, that might be you, Joanna, in this podcast. So that person to tell them that, “No, you can do this. There are avenues forward into the publishing industry for the everyday writer.” I wanted to show people that. One of the biggest things you have to overcome is that first draft, right? You have to overcome finishing it, and then showing it to some people, and getting some feedback and starting to polish that thing and edit that thing. You can't edit a blank page. That's the twofold goal for this project: to both show people how to finish a project and how to kickstart that creativity, which is what we use the prompts for. Then also to show that early editing process and how far a story can come from a rough draft to a completed project. I wanted to show how you just have to get into it, find somebody you can trust who can give you good feedback, and then work through it together. Once you get that thing finished and you start editing it, you'll always be surprised how much of the story is in there on the first draft, how much you can bring out, and how much you can lift up and make it whatever you really want to make it. So that was the goal of Rain Shadows—to encourage finishing your stories and getting through that early editing process to start the journey towards the finished draft and finishing projects, because that really is the hardest thing for a lot of beginning writers, I think. Jo: Okay, so you didn't really explain the podcast. Tell us— How is it a podcast with this process? Because I've co-written with other people and there was certainly no podcasting involved! Clay: That's fair. The concept of the podcast—it's called Beneath the Rain Shadow—and it is a craft-centric podcast focused around writing and editing short stories into a collection. Then we have collected them into a book, which is called Rain Shadows. Every episode we alternate. So I would come in with a prompt that I created. I would give it to Tamara. She would write a story in a month's time, and at the end of the month we would record an episode where we critique that rough draft live on the show. Every prompt was threefold. So they all had a Pacific Northwest location—and if you're not from America, the Pacific Northwest is the northwest Pacific coast corner of the country, like Washington State, Oregon, and Montana, Idaho, those kinds of areas. We had a Pacific Northwest location, a Pacific Northwest quirk—so something that's funny about the area we live in or eccentric, like beard grooming or driving a Subaru or something like that. Then we had a horror trope—so these are everything from “sex equals death” to slashers or zombies or whatever you want to do. Those are largely just jumping off points for us. We had a rule to include every part of the prompt in some way, but it could be as small as a character just driving a Subaru or the story could be centered around a Subaru, but it didn't have to. That's how the podcast worked. We would come with these fun prompts, we would use them to challenge each other. We would use them to mess with each other a little bit because we're good friends. For example, I did not want to have to write a slasher story, so I gave that to Tamara. Then for revenge, she gave me a zombie story because she knows I hate zombies. Jo: I mean, to be fair, I do like horror, but I'm not into slasher at all. I also read very few zombies. I read Jonathan Maberry's zombies, but that's about it. This is so interesting to me because, well, one, you mentioned this critique group, this meetup, and two, I think you are just very collaborative, clearly, as a person. As I said, I have co-written, but I definitely struggle with it. Do you think that you have had to learn techniques of collaboration? Do you think it's part of your personality to be collaborative? How can we be better collaborators if we feel like, “Oh my goodness, I am not sharing my writing with anyone”? Clay: That's a great question. I definitely learned a lot. The nice thing about co-writing like a single narrative would be one thing, right? And this isn't necessarily that because we were alternating short stories. So we definitely co-edited this collection, but we also had the benefit of co-writing individual stories. So we still had final say over our own creative narratives, which I think helped. I think that kind of collaboration could be a good way to work into it if it's your first time. You could try collaborating something where you're more co-editing than co-writing everything. But regardless, I think the key to it is just you have to come into it with an open mind. You have to come into it feeling ready and malleable, because as we all know, we have to kill our darlings in the writing game. That's just part of it. You're going to have passages of interior monologue or a beautiful conversation that you have to cut from the story because it just doesn't serve the larger goal. You have to get to that stage of the editing process where you're able to take the feedback of your co-writer effectively and constructively and apply it to the work in a meaningful way. I find that I always discover that makes the story better. It always does to get good feedback from an experienced collaborator who can bring an objective opinion to it and help you improve it from there. Then you have to make sure to hold onto the essence of the story. I think the key to writing together is not to look at how they're going to change the story, but looking at it as what they're going to bring to the story. What about their work or their style of writing or who they are as a person makes them someone you want to collaborate with? Remember that as you're working with them. What are they bringing to the table that you couldn't? Because everybody is better than you at something. That's what I love about collaborating the most, everybody can bring something wholly unique. Everybody can tell a story that I could never tell. That's what makes writing beautiful, right? I want that involved in all of my work if I can. If somebody else can bring their perspective, their vision, their creative power and energy to something I'm working on, it's always going to make my stuff better. Also, pick your collaborators wisely. Do your research, read their stuff, get to know them as a person before you jump on board. That's important too. I knew very well that I was going to get along with Tamara on multiple levels. As you've said, this is a podcast too, right? So it's extra tricky. You can't just be a good writer for this project to work. You also have to be good on the podcast, which is an entirely different set of skills. Jo: I'm still interested in this. So you met this critique group. I've never been in a writer's group. I'm like a super lone wolf kind of writer! So you talk there about the feedback and the critique in the podcast, Beneath the Rain Shadow. If people listening want to be a better critique partner, so somebody who is able to work with someone in the way that you are, where they're respecting that person's voice, they're respecting what the author wants to do with the story… So like both you and I don't like slasher stories, but if a friend said, “Okay, I need your feedback on this,” we can't just say, “I don't like that.” I'm really asking— How do we take our personal preference away in order to be more positive in feedback, but still useful? I feel like I get so many emails from people that say, “I went to this critique group and I got absolutely slated. I just got destroyed because people were so negative and horrible. They just don't like my stuff.” So how do we tell the difference and help be better critique partners? Clay: That's a great question, and finding a critique group is difficult. So if you are one of those people out there that's looking for a good critique group and you've just run into a bunch of bad situations, know that that's part of the process. That is normal. There are good groups out there, and when you find them, they really do help make your work better. I think the key to it, if you're going into it as a critique partner, go into it remembering who you are and why you brought your stuff to the critique group. Go in remembering what you're looking for from a group, and remembering how hard it is to put a story together and to bring a final story to the page and then share it with the world and put it out there. It's a very vulnerable thing. Writing is such a lonely game, and the critique group can be a beautiful place to not only share your story and your work, which we all end up sharing with the world eventually, but it's a place where you get to share the process too, and that's the part that's so lonely. That's the part that the world doesn't know about, right? Unless they're listening to interviews like this and getting that behind the scenes. Your critique group is a chance to go in there and share that whole experience with people who truly understand it. I think that's always good for people whenever you're working through something difficult like writing. It can be a very difficult game, right? So I would say start with that, and then there are some semantic tips and tricks too. I try to read every story twice when I critique, if not three times, depending on how confusing the story is or whatever. One technique I like to use, and Tamara will champion this technique as well: Take the story off your computer and put it on an e-reader or print it out or do something that makes it feel different than a Word document. E-readers specifically are nice because they format it like a book, and I know it's kind of a dumb little thing, but it flicks a little switch in your brain and then you start reading it differently. You sort of have a different subconscious level of respect for it almost. I don't know if you've experienced this at all, Joanna, but I find that's really useful for me to put it on a different device, take it off my computer and get the laptop out from in front of me. Then I feel like I'm editing or correcting a homework assignment. Read it as a reader first and try to really capture the essence of the story. Try to really look for what is the intentionality of the story, because every writer has that in every story. If you can find that, then the goal is just to help and try to aid in whatever way you can to bring that essence of the story to the surface and make the story more powerful. You can only offer your subjective opinion, so be conscious of that, right? Everything you are offering is feedback or whatever. You never want to try to rewrite someone's story or tell them how to write. You want to share your experience as a subjective reader, a consumer of the story itself, and then as a peer and as a writer. If you're going to give feedback, always offer something to go with it that helps bring the essence of the story to the surface. I think if you could do those things, that's a good place to start on being a good critique partner. If you want to hear a really long rant about it, you can listen to episode one of Beneath the Rain Shadow. Jo: I was going to say, I mean obviously you and Tamara do that on your show. But I also think those tips are pretty good for your own stories if you can get some distance from it. Also, I think short stories are great for this kind of critiquing, aren't they? Because if people come with novels, I mean, you can't read a whole novel in that way, and if you get a chapter, then things don't make sense. There are open loops. You don't know all the things. So short stories, again, you said writers read them because we write them. That's what they are. They're so perfect for this kind of critiquing and getting outside the genre you might usually work in. Let's get into the business side. You and Tamara have started a new imprint for this and the other projects. Talk about this, and also the publishing and production process and the marketing, because being a co-producer—and whether you are describing yourselves as co-writers or co-editors—this is difficult. It is difficult to do the business side just as much as the creative side. Clay: I'm still figuring out the business side, to be completely honest, when it comes to having an imprint. That is a new experience for me. I have worked for a couple small indie presses and helped out at a couple other magazines and things like that. I've indie published my own anthologies and my own work, but I've always just done it under my own name and not really worried about that as much. So doing this joint business venture with Tamara is very interesting, and luckily she has like 40 years of experience in the publishing industry. So she's definitely got that skillset to put together the marketing playbook and put together the timeline and help us stay on track for everything. My part of that has largely been finding the contacts and utilizing a lot of the tools that I used when I have indie published my own work. So I have a good contact with a guy who's really good at book formatting, copy editing, and proofreading. So I usually go to him for my final stage stuff. That's JW Donnelly at Dark Forest Press. I definitely recommend him if you need those kinds of late stage publishing services or editing services. He's awesome. So I've had those contacts for a while, and I helped connect some of those dots. In terms of organizing everything and getting it all laid out, Tamara was largely the instrument of success there. We're trying a lot of things. You come from a podcast, and one of the reasons I got into podcasting in the first place was actually from—I know you know these guys—Johnny B. Truant and Sean Platt's book Write. Publish. Repeat. They talked about finding a way to create content that works for you and to be present in the writing community in a way that actually works for you instead of just social media lurking or half-heartedly doing something you're supposed to do. Podcasting for me is my way of engaging with the writing community. Beneath the Rain Shadow is a great way to do that, as well as create a book. Then part of our marketing plan was always to have the creation of the book connected with the book itself as a product and that going all the way back to the podcast. So they're in this nice loop of if you're out selling your books on the street, which we do a lot of that. A big part of where we sell is street fairs and markets and stuff, which is why we chose to do such a localized horror theme. That's why we wanted it to be from Washington state and from where we both live, because people love that. When you're selling at these big events, conventions, and street fairs, and we do night markets and all kinds of things like that, this book is perfect for that because people love to read about where they're from. They love to read that localized horror. So that's a really big part of our marketing plan as well, that boots on the ground selling mentality. Then obviously we went wide too. We used Ingram Spark to distribute. If you're an indie publisher, you've got to learn about Ingram Spark. If you want to get your book into libraries and you want to get your book into smaller bookstores and you're not going to go through a distribution network that's more established and do it yourself, Ingram Spark will be a required publishing asset for you in a lot of places. Especially for libraries and bookstores because they facilitate returns and stuff like that. So that's something to know as well, but we just went wide on the internet and we are very focused on in-person sales with this book because it is so localized. Jo: You knew you were going to do a book from the podcast— Did you set up a pre-order from the beginning of the podcast? Clay: We set up our pre-order about halfway through, I think. But as we were doing the podcast, we were still getting it all off the ground at the same time. Hopefully we'll be a little ahead of the curve on the next book, which is going to be very exciting as well, and the next season of the podcast. Jo: I love the local idea again. You really baked some good marketing into the actual book itself, saying that people like to buy local stories. Of course, it doesn't have to be horror. People listening, if they write romance or whatever they write. Nonfiction as well. Mark Leslie Lefebvre, who's been on the show, he's written sort of local various books about places. So I think this is really interesting. Any tips for selling in person at fairs and things? How has that gone? What about writers like me who are still worried about this? Clay: Definitely could give you some tips. I do a lot of that. We haven't sold a ton of Rain Shadows online, but we have sold almost 200 copies by hand already. It's a lot of fun because you get to engage directly with your readership, and I think that goes a long way towards word of mouth, especially in this day and age of oversaturation out there. There's so many writers, there's so many stories, there's so many books, so many algorithms to compete with. Word of mouth is still our most powerful ally as indie publishers. People going out there and reviewing our work and sharing it with their friends. If they meet you in person, I think they're more likely to do all of those things as well as to read the actual book. I think a lot of people are trophy collectors too, right? Just a good looking book for the shelf and you never read it. We all have giant TBR piles. So that face-to-face interaction I think in this day and age is exceptionally powerful and important for indie authors. So that's a good reason to do it all by itself. And for tips and tricks, you have to learn the energy of selling books in person is definitely different than doing it online or through social media. Doing a podcast is helpful for that, learning how to talk and raise your energy level, an appropriate on-air personality. You do have to adjust all that, right? We're always putting on a little bit of a performance even when we're just having a chat essentially. So engaging with your audience, being genuinely interested in people, and letting them engage with the work. Then there's a few tricks we have in this collection specifically. So something that's nice about it is at the start of every story, you get to see the prompt that created the story originally. So the Northwest location, the quirk, and the horror trope are there. Then we also have a map of Washington with a little star on it so you can point right to where every story happens. This is nice for a couple of salesy reasons. It is a good way to get the book in people's hands, which is a classic sales trick, right? If you're selling at a street fair, you can get people holding the book. They're a lot more likely to buy the book. Jo: Nice tip. So as in— You are opening it and showing them the map, and then they're holding it. Clay: Mm-hmm. It goes a long way. People already have it in their hand, they're already thinking about it. Then you open it and you're like, “Oh, where are you from?” And they go, “Oh, I'm from Granite Falls.” And you're, “Oh, okay, well we have a story that takes place, boom, right here, right where you live.” Then the other thing we have is a bookmark that lists all the horror tropes we did. So I will also be telling them about the one story with the one map picture that I'm showing them, and then I'll hand them the bookmark and be like, “And if you like any of these other horror tropes, we also did these 12 tropes, so you might be into this book for all these reasons.” Then they're holding two things. So those are some of the simple tips and tricks. I would say just have a good energy, engage with people, be interested in them, ask them a question or two, and find out what they like to read. Then in the case of this book, we went wide on topics. We went wide all over the horror genre. So we wrote stories from aliens to zombies to technology, creepy technology, all kinds of things. Mushrooms. So there's a wide swath of horror stuff that we included in this collection. We did that knowing that we want to capture as big of a horror audience as we can, because there's a lot of people that are into a certain sub-genre, but then there's other aspects of horror they don't like, and largely those are based on misconceptions in a lot of cases anyway. So hopefully this collection that's dedicated almost wholly to subverting tropes and taking unique approaches at old tired ideas can help with that and get some people reading horror. Jo: I think that's really cool. I actually haven't really talked about this on the show, but I do have an idea for a book set in my county of Somerset here in the southwest of England. As you're talking about this and the map and all of that, I'm thinking, yes, I mean, I can see how baking in that marketing early on is just such a good idea that I think that will help a lot of people listening actually. Let's just come back to some of the other considerations around podcasting. So when you set up the podcast with Tamara, is this a business thing? Are you paying for hosting? Are you driving traffic to an email list, your Patreon? Is that under your new imprint? Is everything co-owned now around this idea? Clay: When it comes to this project, Tamara and I just split everything 50/50. We pay for a few hosting things and your standard things you have to have, like we have a domain name and we have a pretty basic website. We have Patreon that we're still building out and we paid for all the publishing costs 50/50. We split royalties 50/50. So it's just all right down the middle for us. Now for the next season, we're bringing on two more authors. So for that we have a different strategy that we've talked through and thought about quite a bit. We've decided we're going to pay them a good rate for short stories rather than do a royalty split. Trying to split it… because I don't know if you've ever had to track someone down—it's a nightmare. It's the worst. So that's another part of the strategy too that you might be interested in. When we do in-person sales, Tamara and I, so we split royalties just 50/50, but then when we order author copies to sell in person, we also just split the cost of that down the middle. Then we split the books down the middle and then when we go out and sell in person, we don't really worry about royalties. If you sold the book, you keep the money for that book, unless we're both at the event. So we're collaborating on it on a lot of levels. Luckily we have a lot of trust for each other, which is requisite for this, clearly, but it works for us. It wouldn't work in a lot of other situations. So for the next one, that's why we're keeping it that we're going to pay both of you a good writing rate and then we are going to keep all the royalties because we don't want to have to chase our tails on that for the rest of eternity. Jo: I think that's a really good idea, especially for short stories. I mean, having co-written with people for a decade now, some of those books, the monthly royalty is negligible. Even if you do it once every six months, it's like, oh my goodness, the time I have to spend doing reporting. Although, to be fair, this is one place AI has just really started helping me because when you are wide, you get so many different reports from so many different vendors. I used to have to open everyone and go through and find the stuff, and now I just upload them all to ChatGPT Agent, and it does it for me. So this is a good part of AI for business admin. But I think you are right there. I guess with your contracts with those people, there are also rights reversion within a certain amount of time because— Short story contracts often have faster rights reversion than longer works. Clay: Yes, and we're just basing that on a cents per word situation. We're trying to pay as high as we can, as close to the pro rates as we can. We'll probably end up averaging out that cents per word rate that everybody's happy with and then paying it as a flat rate. Because it's all prompt based, right? And it's all writing in a month's time. There's all these other variables that someone might want to write longer or shorter. So we want them to have the flexibility to do that, but without breaking our banks. So we're probably going to agree on a contract that's like we're going to pay 5 cents a word, which is considered a pro rate, right? Or I think it's 8 cents a word now, but 5 cents a word is a decent enough payment for an editor to pay you if you're a writer. We'll probably agree to that with a set word count for each story, and then just pay a flat rate for all four stories since we rotate. Every writer will have to write three stories for the next book. Jo: I think it's all good to think about though, if people get enthusiastic about doing short story anthologies. As you say, if you have 15 stories and 15 different writers, I mean, these kinds of payments are an absolute nightmare. I think you're doing the right thing there. So let's talk a little bit more about podcasting because you also have your own podcast, Fermented Fiction, which I went over to have a little listen to before we started talking, and I was like, “Oh my goodness. This is a really long show.” There's multiple hosts and you talk about lots of pop culture stuff, books and movies and stuff like that. I'm very interested in this. How does podcasting help you on the fiction side? Because I can see that it's part of your business and everything like that, but in your fiction side— Talk about Fermented Fiction and how you think it builds your author brand. Clay: How much time do you got, Joanna?! Jo: Well, you've got about five minutes left! Clay: I love Fermented Fiction for so many reasons. It's become one of my favorite things I do. As I said earlier, Johnny and Sean and David are huge inspirations to the beginning of my indie career and still huge inspirations to this day. They're also just such lovely people. They came on the show season one when we had like three listeners, because they're just willing to do that for people. So shout out to them, by the way. So initially that was the goal, right? Was just to create an engine for engagement with the author community that felt meaningful and that felt productive instead of social media. Then it became something much more. You're asking specifically about how it affects my fiction and how it helps with my writing, and Fermented Fiction has been fantastic for that because it helps me analyze fiction through a new lens, through a critical lens. For those of you who don't know, the premise of Fermented Fiction is we invite on guests from the creative industries. So we will bring on filmmakers or writers or whoever else we can get. We mostly bring on writers just because that's where we have connections, but we are open to bringing any creative people on. We've brought on some podcasters as well. We choose a movie, book, or show and then we roll 2D20. So if you roll high, you have to defend the movie, book, or show. If you roll low, you have to attack it no matter what you actually think. Then we do a 10 minute debate, and after the debate we do an hour, hour and a half long panel on the chosen movie, book or show and everything else that comes up along the way. So this has been a fantastic exercise, Joanna, for analyzing work I love and work I don't love from a totally different lens because if you're watching or reading for Fermented Fiction, you have to be prepared to debate it either way. So it's a good way to learn how to look for things you love in maybe movies that you didn't used to appreciate or that you didn't like on first watch or books. The same thing, right? Maybe you read it and it wasn't your cup of tea, but if you're going in for the show, you've got to reread it and you've got to find something to love about it. Then same thing with things you love. I had to debate against Pan's Labyrinth recently. Oh, it was so hard. It was so hard, Joanna. I had to watch that movie like three times in a row to be like, “How is this not a perfect movie?” And my conclusion was, it is. It is a perfect movie, but you can still find little things to nitpick. It's a fun exercise. Almost more so with the things you love, right? Because then you can humanize those creators too by like, “Oh, this is still writing. It's still a story. It's still following a lot of the same rules I have to follow.” That's a good way to look at the stories you love. It's not nitpicking for the sake of finding something that doesn't work. It's just nitpicking for finding the nuts and bolts that hold all stories together. They're in all the stories. Even the best ones. The best ones are just better at hiding it. Jo: For sure. Any thoughts for fiction authors or anyone listening who thinks, “Oh, well, I kind of want to do a podcast because that would be awesome,” but it feels like it's oversubscribed now. Like we said with books, there's a lot of books. I mean, there's a lot of podcasts out there, right? It is hard to find an audience. What are your thoughts on people who are new to podcasting, who might want to start a podcast? Clay: I will just give the answer I've heard from a lot of people, but I would say do it. You know, it doesn't hurt. It doesn't hurt to do it. There's a low bar for entry when it comes to commitment in terms of money and stuff. These days you can get a pretty good mic for affordable costs. You can get a good webcam and that's all you need. Then you can get started. I would say just think of why you want to do a podcast. What about it excites you? Because it's a lot of work and you're not going to make money on it, not for a very long time anyway. You might eventually, but if that's your ticket to making money and then that's going to fund your writing career, neither of those is a great way to make money in the short and quick. Jo: For sure. Clay: So you're going to have to work really hard to pull off either of those career choices. However, I do think podcasting is really good at fueling a creative career. It's really good at helping you promote yourself. It's a great way to put out good content out there without making your writing—if you don't want your writing to be the content that you feel you have lots of deadlines around or lots of obligations. For example, I don't want to write a short story every month necessarily forever, right? I like doing it for Rain Shadows, but that's a self-contained project that has an end date. I don't feel like I have this looming obligation to my readership for all time to produce a story a week or something. I would rather be able to take my time with my writing and release the stories I want to tell when they have become the stories I want to tell and not before. I like to have more control over that. So for me, having a podcast is a great way for me to release something every single week that is directly connected to the work that is connected to the craft that is connected to the community in some way. That keeps you out there. It keeps your voice active, it keeps you thinking, it keeps you creative. So I think podcasts can be great fuel for that. They can help you prop up your writing and vice versa. And they can be a great way to engage with the community in a meaningful way. You will be shocked who will say yes if you ask them to come on a podcast. It's awesome. I mean, writers are very generous people a lot of the time. Most of the time. We've had all kinds of awesome guests on the show, and you can just ask. The worst thing people can say is no, and it's a great way to engage with the community. Jo: Brilliant. Where can people find you and your books and your podcasts online? Clay: You can find everything about Rain Shadows at RainShadowStories.com. That is RainShadowStories.com. That will have the Beneath the Rain Shadow podcast and it will have all the info on that book. I have a Substack: Clay Vermulm Fiction Horror. There you can join my newsletter and that will also get Fermented Fiction delivered right to your inbox, as well as a monthly letter from me with all the writing updates from Clay Vermulm Fiction and Beneath the Rain Shadows books. Fermented Fiction is a weekly show, so we go live usually on Tuesdays and Wednesdays on YouTube, and we're just Fermented Fiction on there. We're easy to find. Jo: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Clay. That was great. Clay: Thank you. It was a true joy to be on this show. I've been listening a long time and thank you so much for taking a punt on me here. The post Writing Short Stories, Publishing Collaboration, And Podcasting, With Clay Vermulm first appeared on The Creative Penn.

What happens when you fall in love with a book that deserves a wider audience but has never been translated into English? How do you navigate international copyright law, multiple publishers, and estate permissions when you have no translation experience? Dani James shares her journey from discovering a powerful Flemish memoir in her childhood home to becoming its first English translator, a labor of love that took years to complete. In the intro, How to start dictating fiction [Helping Writers Become Authors]; Payment splitting with co-writers and collaborators [Draft2Digital]; Rise in spam and scam emails [Writer Beware]; The Thinking Game Documentary; My AI-Assisted Artisan Author webinars; The Buried and the Drowned, A Short Story Collection; Writing Partition with Merryn Glover [Books and Travel]. Write and format stunning books with Atticus. Create professional print books and eBooks easily with the all-in-one book writing software. Try it out at Atticus.io This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn  Dani James is a writer and literary translator who recently translated Return to the Place I Never Left, a Holocaust survivor memoir by Tobias Schiff. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.  Show Notes Growing up in Belgium's Jewish community and discovering Tobias Schiff's Holocaust memoir Navigating international rights and copyright law. The complex legal process of securing translation rights across borders. The creative challenges of literary translation. Balancing faithfulness to the original with making the English version the best it could be. The challenges of publishing Marketing a translated memoir. The realities of promoting a niche book as a first-time author. Lessons learned and what's next for both translation and original writing You can find Dani at DaniJames.co. Transcript of Interview with Dani James Jo: Dani James is a writer and literary translator who recently translated Return to the Place I Never Left, a Holocaust survivor memoir by Tobias Schiff. Welcome to the show, Dani. Dani: Thank you for having me. Jo: It's great to have you on the show. First up, just— Tell us a bit more about you and your background and how and why you got into translation. Dani: I'm a writer based in New York City, but I grew up in Antwerp, Belgium. Even though I'd been writing creative nonfiction and fiction for years, Return to the Place I Never Left was my first foray into translation. It was really driven by an interest in translating this book that I personally adored and kept rereading over the years. Thankfully, I speak several languages and I grew up going to school and learning Flemish and Dutch, and being educated in that language. I had no previous translation background, but just because I enjoyed this book so much and felt it was deserving of a wider audience, it inspired me to try my hand at it. That's ultimately what drew me to translation. I found a lot of joy in it, and I've actually learned a lot about how translation, in my opinion, can really enhance a creative practice in ways that I wouldn't have expected before I took this on. Jo: It's fascinating because your accent is American to my ear, but I've worked in Belgium and people might not know much about Antwerp. How did you get from Belgium to New York City? Tell us a bit more about your traveling childhood and upbringing. Dani: My parents actually met in New York City. That's also where I was born. They met in Washington Square Park in the eighties, I feel like that gives you a little bit of a lay of the land if you've ever been there. My mother was visiting, my father's Jamaican and he had been living in the US since he was a teenager. My mother was visiting and they met and fell in love, ended up getting married and having me. So I was actually born in New York City, but then when I was still a baby, we moved to Belgium. I did kindergarten all throughout high school in Belgium. In the summertime though, I would come to New York City because the biggest part of my family is my dad's side of the family and they lived in New York. So I spent my summers—the whole summer and sometimes even the winter break—in New York City, and the rest of the time in Belgium. I've been back in New York now for about 15 years. Now I do the opposite, I visit Belgium every summer. My mother still lives in Belgium and I have a lot of childhood friends there. That's how that came about, and why I definitely have the New York City accent. Jo: Let's get into this book then. Return to the Place I Never Left has great personal meaning to you and your family. Tell us about that. What are the connections there? It seems so strange to hear your accent and then to think of the connections you have there. Dani: There are so many connections actually. First, my grandparents were Holocaust survivors. When you think of the Jewish community in Belgium at the time where I grew up, they were all survivors or descendants of survivors. In the case of my grandparents, they survived the war by hiding. My mom's side of the family is Jewish, so I am Jewish. The majority of both of my grandparents' families did not survive being deported to Auschwitz. The story of the Holocaust is one that is part of my family's history and therefore also my history. I really grew up with this knowledge and knowing these stories. They're very common in my family because they've directly affected my relatives and my family members. Growing up, when I used to go to synagogue—I'm not as religious, but I am of course culturally Jewish—for the high holidays, I did used to go to the synagogue to celebrate them. Fun fact: typically there would be two Black people in the synagogue when I grew up in Belgium at the time, and it was me and another girl who actually is Tobias Schiff's granddaughter. Me and this other girl, our mothers knew each other. Of course, it's a small community. We knew each other and I believe that this is how the book entered my home. I believe the daughter of Tobias Schiff, the mother of this childhood friend, ended up bringing a copy of the book when it first came out. I don't really remember how I first was introduced to it, but I do know that like all people who grow up with big bookshelves at home, and when you're a reader, I would just pick up books from the bookshelf and at some point I came across Return to the Place I Never Left. The original title is Terug naar de plaats die ik nooit heb verlaten. When I read this book the first time, it really stood out to me because I had known about the Holocaust, had heard all of these stories. Every family of survivors has these crazy stories that you know of and that you learn growing up, and I'd read several books. What stood out about Tobias Schiff's book was the style in which it was written. It's written in verse and it looks like poetry on the page. It's very direct language because it comes from an oral project initially where he was interviewed for a documentary, and it makes reading it very accessible because the language is very direct. He's speaking to you as a friend, or sometimes it sounds as if he's speaking to himself as well. It allows you to be a witness to his innermost thoughts, or it allows you to hear him speak to you as if he was a friend. The style of the book really drew me in and I ended up rereading it several times over the years. I have really bad movie and book memory where I will forget entire plots. That works really well for me because it allows me to reread my favorites over and over again. Some of my favorite books and movies, I'll reread them or rewatch them four or five times. That's one of the things I did with Return to the Place I Never Left. I've reread it several times over the years. At some point I thought I feel like more people would appreciate this story. It gives people good insight into the experience of someone during the Holocaust and what that was like and surviving these death camps, and afterwards grappling and navigating with these really traumatic experiences and how that impacted him in his life. Outside of those really intriguing parts of the book, it's also set in Antwerp partially. If you've traveled around the world, very few people know Belgium. A lot of people know the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, France, all the countries around it, but not a lot of people know about Belgium, and definitely not about Antwerp. I also like the fact that in a way it shows some details about the city of Antwerp in a very unfortunate setting, but Antwerp is where I also grew up in Belgium. For all these reasons, Return to the Place I Never Left is an incredibly powerful book in itself, but it also tells such an important story of important places and important experiences that are meaningful to me and many people around the world. I think even if you don't have a personal connection to this, you could gain a lot and learn a lot just from reading this book. Jo: The original was in Flemish, is that right? Dani: Yes. There's actually quite a journey even to getting to this book. Originally Tobias Schiff was interviewed for a documentary, and the documentary was titled Récits d'Ellis Island. It was in French. It was a documentary about Holocaust survivors and their experience, and I believe it was filmed in the late eighties and perhaps came out in 1989. It was filmed by a French filmmaker named Claude Lelouch. He interviewed Schiff for hours and learned about his experience. Afterwards, the slot that the TV station had allocated—it was going to be aired on TV—was only 26 minutes long. The filmmaker thought, “How can I distill this story into 26 minutes? It's not doing justice to the entire story. I can't tell this story in such a short amount of time,” but it was a limitation set by the TV channel. He had to edit it down, so what he ended up doing was releasing or publishing at the time the transcripts of his interviews with Tobias Schiff. Those initial transcripts were in French and I believe it was a little booklet. Some editors came across it and thought, “Wow, this is really powerful,” and then contacted Schiff to collaborate and use these transcripts as a starting point to create what would then become Return to the Place I Never Left, the book. He ended up writing more and it ended up being, instead of French, translated into Flemish or Dutch, which Schiff also spoke. That was the official first publication, which was published in the nineties in Belgium, the Flemish version of Return to the Place I Never Left. That version was then translated into French around 2012. Jo: Yes, that's crazy. He died in 1999, right? So this is now his estate who are making these decisions. Dani: Yes, exactly. Jo: So now it's in French, the book is in French. Dani: Yes. In 2012, the book was translated into French, and then in 2017 it was republished in Belgium and the Netherlands in Flemish. In 2025 my version came out, which is the very first English translation of the book. Jo: Which is great. We have to go further into this because some people listening might be thinking, “Oh great, if I find a book I love in a different language, I can just translate it.” But that's not true. How did you get the rights to do this, and what was that process, given that you don't have a translation background? Dani: It was a complex process and I had no former knowledge of the process when I started. I just knew I wanted to translate the book. Before I even got started, I asked the family for permission. I know one of Schiff's daughters, and so I was able to ask her because, as you mentioned, since Schiff passed away, the family is the estate. That was my initial request. I just said, “I really love your father's book. I would love to bring it to a wider audience. Would you be okay with me translating it?” They said yes. They were actually excited about this prospect and I had a verbal confirmation. That was my first step. I had had this idea for several years, but then in 2019 I did an MFA in creative writing, a Master's in Fine Arts. I had asked the director of the program if they had a translation course and they didn't, but they did encourage me to pursue this project. They said me translating it could be one of my final projects in addition to my thesis. What was great is that even though there was no particular guidance on translation or what to do there, I was able to translate it and have someone give feedback on at least the parts that I produced with no context of the original. That was just a good experience there, and I was motivated to work on it also alongside generating new material for a thesis. Rights-wise, once I had completed the manuscript and I was ready to shop it around, I realized that when I looked into it a little bit more, I needed proof that I had the rights. Jo: Yes, exactly. It's kind of crazy to me listening to you. You went ahead with translating the whole thing without having any kind of contract? Dani: Yes, and I recognize that this is very different also because the original author had already passed away. There are several ways. When books are published today and when the author is still alive, sometimes the publishers contract it out and they look for translators, and the publication deal then looks very differently because as a translator, you're contracted just to translate. The publishing deal is with the author, of course. In this case it was very different. I have this manuscript, I start shopping it around, a publisher's interested. I have this note, this little PDF note from the family stating I have their permission. Once the publisher was interested in publication and sent me a publication contract, then I had to ensure that I really had everything in order with the rights in Belgium and with the family. Initially what I did is I have a friend, a good friend who's a lawyer, and I asked him to review and he said, “Okay, I can look at this, but you need to get yourself a real lawyer.” So I got a lawyer and that was the best decision I had made because this lawyer had experience and really helped me navigate not just the publication deal with the publisher here because in the US I am the copyright holder of the English translation of Tobias Schiff's book. Jo: I was going to say to people listening, this translation is a subsidiary right of the original book. Actually it is the publisher as well, I presume, of whichever you translated from—the French or the Flemish—that is also the point, right? It's not even just that you are asking permission, you are using another publisher's book as the basis for your own translation. Dani: Yes, exactly. As I was navigating this—signing my publication deal and negotiating it here in the US—I was also navigating the rights in Belgium. Some of the steps we had to go through were that I had to formalize the permission. First of all, we had to find out who owned the rights. Was it still the Belgian publisher or had it gone back to the estate? That's what we had to figure out. Actually, the rights had reverted back to the estate. Jo: Oh, okay. That's good. Dani: Yes, so then we knew who we had to collaborate with, who had the rights and who could transfer the rights to me or grant me permission. Then we had to create a document for the estate to sign. But in creating this document, we also had to navigate Belgian copyright law. At some point I also had to find a Belgian lawyer to not just review, but to make sure that what we are writing in this document aligns with both US and Belgian copyright laws. Jo: Oh my goodness. Dani: Yes. We also, for best practice, had to translate the paperwork on the Belgian side as well. All the documentation with the family were in two languages, they were both in English and in Dutch or Flemish. All of that had to be squared away before I could sign the publication deal here. Jo: You're paying for all of this, you're paying for all those legal things. Did you get an advance from the English language publisher or is this all a labor of love? Dani: This is really a labor of love. I did not get an advance because I already had the finished manuscript. I was like, “Here it is.” So no advance. Thankfully in Belgium there was an organization for Belgian authors and we were able to get support from a Belgian lawyer specializing in literature who was able to help us pro bono. So that was a beautiful find. I had to dig deep, just because I was reaching out to several lawyers and trying to find out who could help and then find out about some organizations. It took a lot of navigating. I have to say, I'm very grateful for my lawyer because my lawyer had more experience, not in translation specifically, but just in the literary or creative industry, and so he's able to see ten steps ahead. While I'm looking at a document and thinking about how does this make sense for right now, he's thinking, “But what if three years down the line this happens and that happens?” Jo: Yes, like if there's a potential movie, for example, from the English language. That's what you have to plan for—utter failure where nothing happens and then utter success where everything happens. It's like, “Okay, movie deal, massive amount of money comes into whose account and how does that get to the estate and where's the split?” It's great that you had that experience with your lawyer because these kinds of rights are really difficult to manage. Dani: Yes. With the right people in place, specifically the lawyer, that was amazing. You mentioned no advance, you have to invest your money in it, but money well spent when it's someone who's really out to also protect you and has this experience and this insight for just those situations that you mentioned. What about if there are movie rights involved? What if someone wants to adapt this into a play? Who owns the rights even? Jo: Yes, or even somebody then decides to translate your English version into a different version. These things go back to multiple layers, which is why copyright law is so complicated. Just taking a view now— Would you have done this project if you had realized all of this stuff you would have to do later? I would say to people listening, it is important to get that stuff done before you start a project, because if you hadn't known them, they could have just said, “Well, no, you can't have the rights,” or they could have had an offer for an English translation as well, and your work would have been wasted. I guess it's just all worked out well. Dani: I probably would have done it the same had I known. It ultimately, in my experience, was a great learning experience and like you mentioned, the book is here, it's published in the US, it's doing well. So it was very much worth it. I learned so much from it. I've also learned that the way that the process works is not always this way, and it really depends on the whole situation. How long has the book been out? Who owns the rights? Is there interest? Is there a publisher? Typically I would say though, in smaller cases, in the case of this book, this is written in Flemish or Dutch, it's a language that's not really spoken in many places in the world. Between the estate and the publishers, people would usually be excited to have this become available for a larger audience. Typically there's also when you negotiate these rights and when you publish something, there's also a percentage of potentially profit sharing or royalty sharing, so it also benefits ultimately the rights holder if they're interested in that as well, of course. Jo: Yes, absolutely. Potentially earning from that. Dani: And also having the book receive a wider readership, so that's where the benefit lies. Jo: Yes, absolutely. It's very different to you doing this pretty obscure book compared to somebody saying, “Oh, this is a bestselling novel in English, let's turn it into Flemish,” because that's sometimes a lot more complicated. Let's just finish the publication story. You find a publisher who's interested. Was this just then an easy process all the way to publication, or— How was the publication process for you? Dani: I will say… it was a learning process. Jo: This is your first publication, right? Dani: Yes, my first publication that's through a publisher that's not in an anthology or literary magazine. The publisher was great. It's a small publisher, Wayne State University Press. Great team, small team, but they were great in keeping me in the loop. I had to complete a sales and marketing questionnaire to talk about ideas about how we would market the book. I had to do a design questionnaire and was able to share my ideas for the cover art, which I really enjoyed because it was fun. I would go into bookstores and look around and look at covers and think about ideas. The final cover for Return to the Place I Never Left merges some elements of the original cover, which I really love. It has red and the barbed wire, and we kept that the same. Then there's also a lot of white space, which I was intentional about because there's also a lot of white space on every page. I felt like it really reflects this modernized version of the book. We went through these design and marketing decisions and then through copy edits and proof edits. It actually went pretty smoothly because it was already a completed manuscript when I presented it to them. Those parts went well. It was fun to think of new things to generate when it came to sales and marketing and the cover, but when it came to the book itself and the copy edits and the proof edits, that went pretty fast. Jo: Well, it's not like they're going to say, “We need you to improve the story in this way,” because as a translation, you're not making a change to the story. I also presume they couldn't read the original, so they couldn't really say to you, “Well, that's the wrong word.” Dani: That's right. Jo: Just on that sales and marketing, because most authors have a massive problem with this— Is it basically down to you to do all the marketing? Dani: A lot of it is, not all, but a lot of it is. The publisher will take some things on. They'll submit the book for reviews to several places. They'll sometimes share some ads that they've launched for the book in specific places. I just recently came across a new prize for Jewish literature in translation, actually, given by an organization in the UK. I was able to contact my publisher and send it to them and ask them, “Hey, is this something that you could submit this book for?” They will take that part on so I don't have to go and submit myself and send copies of the book myself. If I see an opportunity, I send it to them and see and ask them, “Was this on your radar already or not? Is this something you'll take care of or will I take care of it?” They will do that, but I would say the majority falls on the author, or translator in this case, to really push it out into the world. Jo: You made a lovely video. In fact, you pitched me for this and I went to watch your video and I think it's lovely. You've got a lovely voice, but you've got a lovely manner about you which comes across really well on video. Is video something you do normally or is this something you've done specifically for the book? Dani: This is something I've done specifically for the book. I kind of shy away from video specifically. Jo: Oh, me too. I think you did a good job of talking about yourself, but also about the book and reading. I know it's hard, but I do think it's an effective way of breaking through when books are hard to market. Dani: Thank you. I think one of the things that made that video work as well is that the director of that video is also a friend of mine and a creative collaborator. He was really good at teasing out some responses from me, I would say. I generally get excited when I speak about the book and the translation process. There's so much to say about it. I really appreciate it. As writers, we typically are very excited about the writing and the creation part, so I could talk about it for a very long time. My friend, his name is Kofi, he's also a writer himself and a filmmaker. He was also very good at just asking specific questions and he also knows me and knows some parts of the stories. He can look at it from an outsider perspective and then know, “Okay, this could be interesting to other people,” because there's some parts of the story that for me are just so normal that I don't really think somebody else would be interested in hearing this. But he'd be the one to say, “Actually, let's talk about this a little bit more. I think people would be interested in that.” Sometimes I would think, “Really?” Then later when people see the video, sometimes people come back and share some things that stood out to them in the video, and they're the things that I wouldn't have even put in that video myself because I would think this is normal, no one's going to care. It's really helpful to have that outsider perspective, and when you have a good editor or director, they can really direct and pull out things from you and put them together in a way that would be interesting to the audience. I'm very grateful that's how that came together with two friends working on a project there. Jo: I think from everything you've said, a lot of this has been based on relationships and tapping into your network, and I think that's really good and what you have to do, especially with a labor of love. I don't imagine this is going to make you like millions of dollars. I mean, it's just not the reality, is it? Dani: We shall see. You never know. Jo: The amount of work you've put in and the amount of work you're going to have to keep putting in to keep this book alive, I think is amazing. That's partly why I want to talk to you, because I feel like a lot of translation work is contracted by a publisher. It's not necessarily done in the way that you've done it. Let's just briefly touch on the creative side of the translation. You said that you learned a lot, obviously, but that it enhanced a creative practice. Just tell us a few things about the actual translation process and the literary challenges of that. Dani: Happy to talk about this. Again, this was my very first time undertaking literary translation. So the first version was me translating it longhand. I wrote it in a notebook. I had the original book, and then I had my little notebook. I translated it almost word for word. I wanted to stay as close to the original in this first version. Later I took my notes from my notebook and put them on my laptop and already started making some tweaks here and there. You see a word and think, “Hmm, actually,” or sometimes I would notice, “Oh, I actually translated this with Flemish grammar, this doesn't quite read well in English.” So I start making those types of edits. Over time, I would re-edit, reread the whole body of work and edit it. Over time, as I became more familiar with the text and started seeing certain things like, “Hmm, actually I feel like the way that this sentence is written, it kind of glosses over what's actually a really important moment.” So I made some choices there. For example, the original, if you see the book, it has very little punctuation and only names and place names and people's names are capitalized. It reads almost like this stream of consciousness and it looks like poetry on the page. The original is the same way. That's where I got that style from. I ended up pulling that style through a little bit more because there were some scenes in the original where I felt that you almost gloss over something that's really important. I made deliberate choices to add some line breaks sometimes, or create more vignettes so that some parts were standalone. For example, when they get deported, or when scammers ring the doorbell pretending that they can get the daughter who's deported back to the family. There were some moments that I felt could stand out a little bit more, and so those types of choices came in further editing rounds because I really wanted to honor this original text of this man who has passed away. At the same time, I also wanted to really bring forth the meaning of the text as much as I could and make sure that it resonated with English readers as much as it did with me in reading it in Flemish. Over time and later editing rounds, I saw that I became a little bit more comfortable in making those stylistic decisions to emphasize some things by changing words or adding a word or two, or removing a word or rejiggering a line. That was challenging since I had no one to guide me through this, and so I had to think to myself — What is the ultimate goal? Is it to stay as close as possible to the original text, or is it to make the translation as strong as possible? What was helpful to me was to think about the fact that no two translations are the same. You have several classic novels that have been translated several times and some translations win awards. What makes one translation better than the other? When I thought to myself about this, I realized, “Okay, it's okay to put some of myself into this piece.” There are these two quotes by translators that I absolutely love. The first one is by Mark Polizzotti, who says, “When you read a translation, it doesn't mean it's a secondary experience. It doesn't mean that you're not reading the author. It means that you are reading the product of two authors: the original author and the translator who has to read the text, interpret it, and regenerate it in terms that make linguistic sense.“ There's another translator named Catherine Øhrgaard Jensen, who actually is now, I believe, the director of ALTA, which is an international organization for literary translators. She calls a translated book “a sibling of the original, but not a twin.” I love both of these quotes because they really show how the translation is, in a way, a collaboration. It is in a way being a conversation with the text of the original author and in some cases with the original author when the author is still alive. Over time in later editing rounds, I was more comfortable in making these decisions and infusing a little bit more of myself and how I would approach this, how I would change this up a little bit to amplify this a little bit and make sure it reads well. I made sure it presents well with the goal to honor the original text and make the English version as strong as the Flemish version. Once I was in that mode, I think the challenges, I wouldn't say fell away, but they became a lot more fun. Also because you're able to still be creative and really think of what is the perfect word here. What words specifically would personify or would really highlight what this line means? Sometimes there's not a one-to-one translation either. Then you get to play around and really figure out, “Okay, which word do I use? Do I need two words to replace one?” There's a lot. You have to really flex your creative muscles in ways that I hadn't really expected and in ways that I find have made me a better writer, even when I come back to my own projects. You're so concerned with every single word. It's similar to poetry and to all good writing, really. We think about every word and what it evokes to the reader and how it looks on the page. With translation, that is very true as well, in a way that I hadn't really expected when I started translating it. I didn't think that I would find so much joy and that I'd be able to be this creative when it came to word choice and sentence crafting. Jo: It just sounds like a lovely process. I'm a kind of classic British person who doesn't speak any other languages, and I think it's really interesting. I did want to just ask you about your thoughts on AI-assisted translation, because this is obviously becoming a big part of the industry now, in traditional publishing as well as in the self-publishing space. Obviously the type of book you are talking about is, like you said, more poetry. It's not a standard, just a novel, narrative novel. What are your thoughts on AI assistance in translation? Dani: I did not use it for Return to the Place I Never Left at all. I don't know that I would use it. I understand why people would use it, especially for a first draft potentially. The reason that I would stay away from it personally is because I think even in that first draft, when you're taking words from one language into another, you become more familiar with the original text. So you're really rereading it from one language and putting it into English or the language that you're translating it in. You already start forming ideas sometimes about certain words or certain things you might want to do or change when you're translating it. I think if I were to use an AI tool to take on even that earlier draft, it would already make assumptions for certain words. As we mentioned, certain specific word choices can have such a big impact. Not every language has a one-to-one translation for every single word in a different language. I think that process of becoming really intimately familiar with the original language and your first draft into the language you're translating in, I think that's actually quite important to do. I would be nervous that AI would translate certain words, and then I would now look at the AI translation and base my translation off what AI already selected. For some words, when you then look at the original, you might think, “Hmm, actually what the author meant is a little bit different from how AI translated it, but now I've given it the same meaning of the AI translation.” That's why I would personally be hesitant specifically when it comes to literary translation. Now, for legal documents or marketing terms or anything, that's different. I'd probably leverage it, or I'd be open to leveraging it. With literature and writing, we're so concerned with words and strong writing is so important at this time, I would not yet use it in my own translations. Who knows? That might change in the future. Jo: Who knows. But I love that your process was so detailed, and as we said, you've put a lot of love into this project. Before we go, I am interested, are you done with translation? Like you mentioned you've got your MFA, you've got lots of other writing. Are you now working on your own original work in English, or are you still open to other translation work? Dani: Yes, I am still open to other translation work. Actually, someone already gave me a little booklet to consider. It is a short book also about a Holocaust survivor, and I do plan to do something with that one day, just not right now. Right now I am working on a fictional novel and one thing I have learned is when you are publishing something, you're steeped in the subject matter for at least a year, I'd say around two from writing it or generating it. Then if you have a publication deal, or if you're self-publishing, the proof edits, the copy edits, you're so knee deep in the subject matter. When it comes to the topic, like the Holocaust, it was very challenging at some point. I actually took a break for about three years after I had finalized the manuscript before I ended up picking it back up and shopping it around because it was a pandemic, it was lockdown. There was a lot going on, and it's a very, very heavy subject matter, especially when this is something that my family members went through. What I've learned now is you have to be so entrenched in the subject matter for so long. I actually have two manuscripts that are far closer to completion, but they also deal with quite heavy subjects. I have decided to pursue a different project that is a little bit of a lighter subject matter. It has some humor in it, a little bit of romance, little bit of juiciness. That is going to be my next project that I hope to complete and be able to find a home for by next year. After that one then I'll tackle one of those other more serious or a little bit darker subjects again. Jo: I think that's good. It's good to have a break. I often do a nonfiction book in between thing. It kind of helps, but I guess you've done a nonfiction that was the heavy one. But no, that's great. The book is Return to The Place I Never Left. Where can people find the book and find you and everything you do online? Dani: Thank you. Return to the Place I Never Left can be found anywhere books are sold online, and also at DaniJames.co. That's my website. That's where you can order the book. That's where you can sign up for the newsletter. That's where I'll publish any upcoming events and readings. You can also find a link to my YouTube channel as well. Jo: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Dani. That was great. Dani: Thank you so much. I just really want to take a moment to thank you because I absolutely love your channel. I found you through YouTube, by the way. That is where I mainly listen to your podcast. I have to say, you have created such an incredible wealth of resources for writers. Every time I look at your videos, I have like ten videos that are in my queue that I want to listen to, and they're all so helpful. Even though I know that you talk a lot about the journey of being self-published, it's so helpful—all the guests you have on, all the resources. I just wanted to thank you. I have shared your channel with several of my friends who are writing books as well and taking on other creative projects. Big, big thank you for doing this work. Jo: Thanks so much.The post The Art And Business Of Literary Translation With Dani James first appeared on The Creative Penn.

What marketing principles remain true regardless of the tools you use? What are the different ways you can market your book, whatever your genre? In this episode, I share two chapters from my audiobook, Successful Self-Publishing, Fourth Edition. In the intro, Pricing strategies on The Biz Book Broadcast; What to do Three Years Before your book launch [Dan Blank]; ChatGPT GPT5; Gemini Storybook, ElevenLabs Music. Plus, AI-Assisted Artisan Author webinars in September; Gothic Cathedrals; British Pilgrimage [Books and Travel]; The Buried and the Drowned – J.F. Penn. Today's show is sponsored by ProWritingAid, writing and editing software that goes way beyond just grammar and typo checking. With its detailed reports on how to improve your writing and integration with writing software, ProWritingAid will help you improve your book before you send it to an editor, agent or publisher. Check it out for free or get 15% off the premium edition at www.ProWritingAid.com/joanna This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn  J.F. Penn is an award-winning, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of thrillers, crime, horror, dark fantasy, short stories and travel memoir, as well as writing non-fiction for authors as Joanna Penn. She's also an award-winning podcaster and creative entrepreneur. Marketing principles 15 ways to market your book These chapters are excerpted from Successful Self-Publishing, Fourth Edition by Joanna Penn, available in ebook, audiobook, and print formats. Marketing Principles If you ask most authors about book marketing, they’re likely to grimace, shake their head, and sigh… We became authors because we love to write, but if you want your books to sell — regardless of how you choose to publish — at some point you’ll need to embrace marketing as part of your author journey. In this chapter, I’ll go through marketing principles that will be useful no matter how the industry changes. But first, let’s cover the question everyone always asks.  Do I have to do my own marketing? Can’t I just outsource it all? There are many people and services you can hire for aspects of book marketing, but consider these questions: What specific area of marketing do you want to outsource? Is it worth doing at all?  Is it worth paying for? What return on investment (ROI) are you expecting?  Is this service short-term or long-term and how might that affect your budget?  Book marketing is not one thing, so you need to first consider what exactly you want to outsource. For example, setting up and running Amazon Ads is a different skill to pitching magazines and podcasts for interviews.  You also have to consider whether you even want to start something you might not sustain.  Is it worth starting a TikTok channel if you hate making videos?  Is it worth starting your own podcast when it might be a year or so before your listenership grows to a decent size?  Is it worth paying a PR professional to get you interviews in magazines when you’re just starting out, you’re unsure of your brand, and there is no obvious return on investment? Do you want to keep paying people for months and years? Or could you spend some of that money learning new skills and building your own sustainable marketing strategy?  If you want to hire a professional, be specific about the tasks and your budget, as well as timeframe. For example, ‘Run Meta Ads for three months to the first book in my fantasy series’ or ‘Pitch media outlets for three months around my non-fiction self-help book on dealing with anxiety.’ If you want help with book marketing, you can hire vetted professionals from the Reedsy Marketplace and find people on the Alliance of Independent Authors Partner Member list. While I have hired specific people over the years for short-term marketing campaigns, I primarily do my own marketing. Here are some principles that will help you if you choose to do the same. (1) Reframe marketing as creative sharing Many authors feel that marketing and sales are negative in some way, but that attitude makes the whole thing more difficult. Whether you have a traditional book deal or you self-publish, you have to learn to market if you want to sell books. So, it’s time to reframe what marketing is! Marketing is sharing what you love with people who will appreciate hearing about it. Marketing is not shouting ‘buy my book’ every day on social media or accosting readers in bookstores or at author events. You should never be pushing anything to those who are not interested. Instead, try to attract people who will love what you do once they know about it. We’re readers too and we all love to find new books to immerse ourselves in, so think about other readers in the same way. If you’ve written a great story in a genre that you love, why would you ever be embarrassed about promoting it ethically to fans of that genre? If you’ve written a book on gluten-free weight loss, it’s likely that you’ve achieved success with your method. You’re trying to help people, so why wouldn’t you want to spread the word? Once you change your attitude, the whole marketing landscape shifts. It becomes far more positive when you’re sharing things you love and attracting like-minded people. If you start enjoying marketing and make it a sustainable part of your creative life, you’ll find it works a whole lot better — and might even be fun! (2) Focus on the reader Writing is about you. Publishing is about the book. Marketing is about the reader. When we write, we are in our own heads. We’re thinking about ourselves. But when we publish and market, we have to switch our heads around to the other side of the equation and consider the person who reads or listens to the book and what they want out of the experience. Step outside your own head and ask these questions: Who is my ideal reader? What emotion or outcome do they crave? What problem am I solving, or what entertainment experience am I providing? The answers will help you with the words and images you use in marketing to attract the right readers. (3) Own your platform When you write a book, you need to have somewhere to direct people so they can find out information about you and what you write. There are many options for building your home on the internet, but an important consideration is who owns the site you build on. If you use a free site, it’s owned by someone else, whereas if you pay for hosting, you control it. You can back it up and make sure it’s always available. This matters because things change over time. Some authors let their publisher build a website for them, but what if you begin working with a different publisher? Some authors just use a Facebook page, but what about when Facebook changes the rules (as they have done several times over the years)? Some authors use a free website service, but if that company disappears or gets bought or decides your book isn’t appropriate, what happens to your site? If you’re serious about writing and selling books for the long-term, then consider owning your website. You can do all kinds of other things to market your book, but at least you’ll always have somewhere to send people. Equally, it’s important to build your own email list of readers who like your books, because again, who knows what will happen in the future with the book retailers or the publishers you use? If you have an email list of readers, you can always sell books whatever changes come along. You can find the services I use and more tips at: www.TheCreativePenn.com/website-email-help  (4) Build a cohesive author brand Branding is your promise to the reader. It’s the words, images, and emotions that surround your work and the way readers think of you. Many authors consider using a pseudonym, or different names if they write books aimed at separate audiences. I write under J.F. Penn for my fiction and memoir and Joanna Penn for my non-fiction for authors. I have different types of books with almost completely different audiences, so I need separate brands. Book cover design also expresses brand and differs by genre. You should have some idea of the books and authors that are similar to yours.  Examine their book covers and the color palette they use, as well as their author websites.  What words, images, and colors do they use?  What emotional resonance does their brand present?  How does it make you feel as a reader?  Now try to apply those principles to your own author brand. If you’re struggling with brand, don’t worry. It will emerge and become clearer over time as you find your voice and attract an audience over multiple books.  When I started out, I published everything under Joanna Penn, and eventually split my author brand to make things clearer for readers, as well as myself. But it took five books and several years before I understood that was the right decision for me.  (5) Find marketing that fits your personality. Double down on being human. If you want a sustainable career as an author, you need to consider what kinds of marketing you can consistently do over time. You can’t fake it or force yourself to do things you hate. Marketing needs to fit with your personality and your lifestyle, and that will differ for everyone.  You also need to be personal and, in an age of AI, double down on being human. The more you share authentically, the more people will get to know, like, and trust you, and the more likely they are to want to buy your books.  Of course, you have to draw your personal line in the sand. I don’t share pictures of my family on social media, and some authors use codenames for their children so they can talk about being a parent while still protecting privacy. You also need to know what’s best for managing your energy. I’m an introvert, so I find in-person events and group things difficult, and I tend to avoid in-person marketing. I also don’t watch video online so I produce little of it, and I don’t do short-form video like TikTok or Instagram Reels.  I listen to a lot of podcasts and audiobooks, so audio marketing is my primary channel. I have two shows, The Creative Penn Podcast for writers, which markets my Joanna Penn books, and my Books and Travel Podcast, which is for my J.F. Penn side. The shows go out on audio podcast feeds and also onto my two YouTube channels.  I also like taking photos, so I use Instagram @jfpennauthor and also share on X @thecreativepenn. I share pictures of my travels and what I’m up to for research, and my cats, and over time, I’ve become a lot more open about what I like. For example, I’m a taphophile. I enjoy walking around graveyards and I like ossuaries and crypts, as well as art history and cultural aspects of death and memento mori. It turns out there are many people with Gothic leanings like me, and people even send me photos of their favorite graveyards from all over the world now.  Sharing details about your interests might not be an obvious path to book sales, but attracting readers slowly over time in an authentic way can underpin a sustainable long-term career. (7) Balance short-term and long-term marketing New authors often focus on the launch of their latest book, but most indie authors and publishing companies make more money from the ‘back list,’ older books with more reviews and a sales history. A book is always new to someone who has just discovered it, and that ‘new’ book might not be your latest release. Short-term marketing is a good option for new releases, for campaigns like a Kickstarter, or if you want to push a first-in-series book from your backlist to introduce people to your work. These kinds of campaigns usually include some form of paid marketing, which can drive a sales spike that drops once you stop pumping money and energy into it. For most authors, this is not sustainable. Long-term marketing is more about building evergreen assets that drip sales every day. If you want a long-term career as an author, you need to think about building a sustainable baseline income, money that comes in from your books consistently every month without you having to keep paying for it. Successful long-term marketing requires more books on the market, more streams of income, more readers on your email list, and consistent content marketing of some kind. It takes time to build but is worth the investment if you want a long-term career. The most successful authors combine these two approaches with sustainable marketing strategies. (8) Measure the success of your marketing If you’re not measuring the results of a promotion, how do you know if it worked? Marketing should ultimately result in sales, and if you’re self-published, you can measure this easily, as you get daily sales figures from the self-publishing platforms. You can also check your rankings on the stores and take screenshots before and after the promotion to check results. This is why I prefer online marketing to traditional media and PR. If you have a clickable link associated with your promotion, you can track results and understand what works and what doesn’t. When I first started out, I had national TV, radio, and newspaper coverage, but it had no noticeable impact on my book sales. These days, I can pay for a BookBub ad or email my list with a link and see the resulting direct sales spike. Measure promotion results, rather than basing your opinion on assumptions or ego metrics (likes and comments rather than sales). Track what matters to your author business: sales, income, profit, email subscriber growth, number of reviews, and use those to guide your next campaign. (9) Build community and collaborate with other authors Some people say being a writer is lonely, but that is a choice, because there are so many different communities you can join in person or online. You can also build one of your own.  People want to belong to something, they want to be part of a group, and together, we can achieve more and the journey will be a lot more fun!  I’m a member of the Alliance of Independent Authors, which has a thriving community online and also meets up in person at book industry events. I speak at and also attend lots of conferences, including Author Nation, the biggest indie author conference in the world. I’m also a member of several Facebook groups, for writing craft and author business, where I check in every few days to see what’s going on. I also have my own Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn, where I share behind-the-scenes details about running an author business. Not every group is for every person, of course, so you must find the places that feel right for you. But give things a try, be generous and helpful and a good community member, and you will find author friends. Being part of a community can also lead to marketing ideas and opportunities — for example, collaborating on email newsletter swaps or book recommendations, joint promotions, multi-author bundles and box-sets, and cross promotion on podcasts and social media.  Remember, as with writing, marketing gets easier with practice. Start small, be consistent, and focus on the principles that never change, even as the tools and platforms evolve over time. Marketing your book is not a onetime event but an ongoing process, so take one step at a time and iterate as you go.  Experiment to find what works best for your personality and lifestyle — for each book and at each stage of your author journey. Once you choose a strategy, commit to it for the long term, and you’ll build an audience and book sales in a sustainable manner. Different ways to market your book I’m often asked, “What’s the one thing I should do to market my book?” Annoyingly, the answer is: “It depends.” It depends on you and your personality, your book, your budget, your goals and definition of success, as well as market conditions.  There is no silver bullet, no magic formula that works for every book and every author every time. Here are some ideas you could use to get started. You can find books and courses on each of these, so if you’re drawn to a particular method, dive deeper, learn more, experiment, and see what works for you. (1) Write more books If you look at lists of the best-known, best-loved, and richest authors, they generally have a lot of books and have been publishing for many years. We are writers. We write. So it makes sense that the best marketing starts by writing more books. One book is not enough to establish an author career, if that’s what you want. Even if a single book breaks out and becomes the ‘must read’ of a particular year, it doesn’t mean that readers will buy the next book from that author. They may not even remember the author’s name. But if you have three or four books that offer the same type of experience and if a reader reads them all, you’re likely to have won a fan who will actively look for your next book. Every time you launch something new, more people have a chance to find out about your work. Every time you write in a new genre or publish in a new format, different kinds of people discover you. Some of them will go on to buy or read or listen to more of your work, join your email list, or support you in other ways. For example, perhaps you found me through my show, The Creative Penn Podcast, then you downloaded my Author Blueprint, then you listened to my craft audiobook, How to Write a Novel, and now you’ve bought this book. Or perhaps you found my first thriller, Stone of Fire, as a free promotion through BookBub and then read all the others in the ARKANE thriller series, before supporting my Kickstarter for book 13, Spear of Destiny.  I have a lot of books across many genres written over almost twenty years, so there are many different paths into my body of work, which grows over time as I continue to create. This is definitely my favorite way to market! By producing new work, you will develop an audience over time, as well as finding your voice and increasing your creative self-confidence. You will become a better writer with every book, so the chances of readers loving your work will also increase. You can also experiment with different forms. Try short stories, short non-fiction or novellas, as well as novels and full-length non-fiction or memoir. Once you have enough material, consider putting multiple books together in a boxset or bundle. There are so many possibilities! (2) Write multiple books in a series and link them together Existing customers will buy more books from an author if the new book promises the same experience delivered in previous books, whether they are fiction or non-fiction. This is why series are so powerful. As a reader, there are some authors I pre-order from because I love a particular series, even though I might not read the other books they have. I’m loyal to the series characters, even more so than the author, because I want to know what happens next and I get an (almost) guaranteed experience. For non-fiction, there are authors who I trust and whose books I buy because I know they will be interesting, informative, and inspiring.  If a reader discovers and loves your series when you release book five, they are likely to go back and buy the rest of them, which means more income for you and more satisfaction for the reader. A novel in a series is also faster to write than a stand-alone title, as you don’t have to reinvent the characters and the world, you just need to find your plot and start writing. If you write literary fiction or enjoy writing stand-alone books, consider the themes that tie your books together and think of ways to encourage people to move between them. You can create interconnected stand-alones — for example, books set in the same universe or linked by theme — so recommendation engines connect the dots. Your options expand the more books you write. I have several fiction series, with the main being my ARKANE thrillers, but I also have stand-alone stories like Catacomb and Death Valley. For non-fiction, I have books for authors in a series, but I also have a memoir, Pilgrimage, which is a stand-alone.  While it’s easier to market books in a series, I certainly understand the creative urge to write all kinds of different things! (3) Optimize your metadata Metadata is the information about your book, rather than the book itself. It includes your title, subtitle, series title, sales description, keywords, categories, and your author bio. Some platforms also include data points like reviews and sales history so their recommendation engines understand where your book fits into the ecosystem.  We went through this in chapter 2.3, but metadata is a key aspect of marketing. If you find your marketing efforts aren’t getting the results you want, make sure you’ve made the right metadata choices for your book, and change things over time to keep it fresh. (4) Use different price points, strategic discounting, and value bundles The more books you publish, the more flexibility you have with pricing. You also won’t be so emotionally attached to any individual book, which makes it easier to play with pricing. If you’re in Kindle Unlimited for your ebooks, you get five free days for promotion every ninety days. If you’re wide, you can set the price to free on all other stores, and Amazon will price match. My first ARKANE thriller, Stone of Fire, is free on all ebook stores, which brings people into the thirteen-book series. You can also use limited-time discounts — for example, drop the price to 99 cents and promote the sale, introducing your books to new readers who might be hesitant to try a new author at full price. You can also use fan pricing and launch pricing interspersed with full-priced books, rewarding your most loyal readers while still capitalizing on launch momentum and algorithms. If you have books in a series, you can sell bundles at a great price, giving the reader value and putting more money in your pocket, especially if you sell direct. (5) Build an email list by offering a reader magnet, then stay in touch Make sure you have a link at the back of your book to a free reader magnet, something that the reader wants, if they give you their email address. For my non-fiction, I offer my free Author Blueprint ebook at: www.TheCreativePenn.com/blueprint For fiction, I offer a free thriller at: www.JFPenn.com/free The call to action for both is in the back of every book, and also on my websites, podcasts, and social media, and people sign up for these lists every day. Once people are on your email list, stay in touch. Let them know about new releases and giveaways, and draw them closer to you by sharing personal photos, book recommendations, or behind-the-scenes research. If you’re unsure what to email about, join a few successful author lists and see what they’re doing. There are lots of email services. I use and recommend Kit (previously ConvertKit) at: www.TheCreativePenn.com/kit (6) Build a ‘street’ team or ARC team This group is a subset of your main email list, and is made up of readers who want advance reader copies (ARCs) and who are happy to promote, write reviews, and share on social media. Some authors have incredibly active ARC teams with extra swag and giveaways as well as events. But you can keep it simple. I have an automated email inviting people to my Pennfriends list that goes out after six months on my fiction email list. They get early access to some new books and also free backlist books and many of them write reviews. You can give away ebooks with watermarks through BookFunnel if you want to protect the files.  (7) Ask for reviews to build social proof You don’t need an ARC team to get reviews. You can just ask readers by including a call to action at the back of your books — for example, “If you enjoyed the book, please leave a review on the store where you bought it. Thank you.” Many authors obsess about getting reviewed in traditional media, but it’s more important to build up social proof on the online stores or on Goodreads (owned by Amazon). This evidence of reader approval will help you get promotions. For example, BookBub requires a certain number of reviews and a high average review rating before accepting a book for promotion. Free books are the easiest to get reviews on, so if you’re struggling to get started, put your book on a free promotion and do some advertising to get downloads. (8) Use social media There are lots of different social media platforms, and each has its own rules and tactics, as well as its own demographic. You cannot be successful on all of them, so focus on one or two, learn the right skills for that platform, test out different content, and lean into what works. The rise in beautiful print editions, particularly for fiction, has benefitted from the trend in social media video, with TikTok videos driving many books up the bestseller lists. While social media marketing can be ‘free’ in terms of money, you will certainly pay with your time. All the platforms reward regular content and engagement, which works for some authors, but not for others.  There are authors who use social media effectively to drive massive sales and success online, but they put a lot of work in, or they hire people to help. Find successful authors in your niche to follow and model what they do if this is an area you want to focus on. Personally, I’m not a huge fan of social media and use it more to prove I’m a human, sharing photos of my life and book research on Instagram @jfpennauthor. I also use X @thecreativepenn as a news platform where I learn about new technology and find content to share on my podcast. I also have Facebook pages, Pinterest boards, and a LinkedIn profile, but I’m not particularly active on any site. (9) Use content marketing Content marketing is my favorite form of marketing, and I’ve built my business around it. It’s essentially offering free content in your preferred format that educates, inspires, or entertains, and attracts people who might also be interested in buying your books, products, and services. For non-fiction, I’ve been blogging and podcasting at www.TheCreativePenn.com since 2008. I also have a YouTube channel @thecreativepenn.  For fiction, I have free short stories, audio and video on YouTube @jfpennauthor, and I also have my Books and Travel Podcast and blog. This content can also be a stream of income. For example, YouTube videos can be monetized with ads, podcasts can include sponsorships, and Substack newsletters can offer a paid tier alongside free information. Providing quality content over time builds up your site and you personally as an authority and trusted source in a niche. The content remains on your site and you can build up a body of work that continues to attract people over the long term.  Content marketing often requires longer form pieces than social media. I create podcast interviews and episodes of thirty minutes to an hour weekly, instead of multiple thirty second videos on social media every day. No one has time for both things, so choose what suits you and your personality.  To help you decide, ask yourself this question: What do you currently consume? I walk a lot and listen to podcasts, and I rarely scroll social media, so it makes sense for me to focus on audio-first content marketing. I also travel and take a lot of photos for book research, which I enjoy sharing on my blog and podcast at BooksAndTravel.page.  If you watch a lot of TikTok videos, or you love scrolling on Pinterest or reading articles on LinkedIn, then your own daily preferences should give you a hint as to what would suit you as a creator.  (10) Pitch for podcast or YouTube interviews If you don’t want to build up your own content marketing site, you can pitch podcasters, YouTubers, or bloggers with your book, and appear on their platforms. Do your research to find shows that will be a great fit for your work, then send an effective pitch to a few specifically targeted creators.  These interviews are never about selling your book. They are all about giving incredible value to the audience, which will make them want to find out more and naturally lead to book sales. Include five bullet points in your pitch about what exactly the audience will find useful, and make it easy for the host to understand why you’re a good fit. This targeted approach will lead to much greater success than sending hundreds of pitches with a basic press release about your book. (11) Pitch other media for interviews Traditional media still has significant reach and authority, although it’s usually more for brand-building than direct sales. Start by pitching local newspapers, TV, and radio, as they are often looking for local success stories and are easier to access than national media. Research which journalists cover your topic or genre at each outlet, and look for those who have written similar stories.  As with podcast pitches above, you need a hook beyond ‘I wrote a book.’ Connect your pitch to current events, trends, or a unique personal journey. Make sure you have a professional headshot, book cover image, short and long bio, and sample interview questions ready to send. (12) Try paid advertising: pay per click A lot of marketing takes time rather than money, but you can get traffic — and sales — more quickly if you use paid ads.  The most popular and effective pay-per-click ads for authors are Amazon Advertising, Meta Ads for Facebook and Instagram, as well as BookBub Ads. Choose which audience to market to, either with keywords or target audiences, set a budget, design the images, and let the ads run, paying per click or per impression. You’ll need a period of testing and time to monitor and adjust ads, and you may find you need to refresh the images or ad copy over time. Most successful indie authors use paid advertising of some kind to drive traffic to their books, but it’s certainly not necessary. You need patience to learn the specific platform, test, monitor, analyze, and adjust ads. Or you can outsource your advertising, paying someone to run them as well as paying advertising platform costs. This approach is most effective when you have multiple books in a series, as cost per click can be expensive if you only have one or two books. I use Amazon Ads for some non-fiction books and rely on auto-ads using Amazon’s own algorithm to manage them. I also use Meta and BookBub Ads as part of short-term campaigns at launch or for promotional spikes. (13) Try paid advertising: email newsletters The most popular email marketing newsletter services are BookBub Featured Deals, and Freebooksy, Bargain Booksy, and other options run by Written Word Media. With these services, you pay to submit your book for a genre promotion, and they email their targeted list of readers with a link to your book, along with many others. Hopefully, you get enough sales to justify the cost. To be clear, you are buying a place on an email blast to readers. You are not buying a list of email addresses. Never do that as it violates anti-spam regulations.  (14) Try local, in-person marketing While online marketing can be effective for reaching readers all over the world, in-person marketing can be rewarding for connections with readers and other authors, and can result in significant sales.  In-person marketing might include speaking at a local networking event or school assembly, literary festival, book club, or library, as well as having a book stall at conventions, conferences, local fairs, and markets. Investigate options in your area and balance the costs of setting up a stall and ordering physical stock with the potential for income and local marketing reach. (15) Collaborate with other authors on joint promotions or events Even the most prolific authors can’t satisfy their readers alone, so it’s good to develop a network of authors in your genre, or those with a crossover audience. You can help promote each other’s books and do joint events and promotions together to keep readers reading in your niche. You’ll also make author friends, and this support is critical for long-term success. There are lots of options for collaboration, from co-writing books, cross-promotion in email newsletters, to multi-author bundles, joint online launch parties, and social media sharing. If you’re new or want to expand your network, BookFunnel offers different kinds of group promos. I collaborate with authors in lots of ways and often build relationships and attract opportunities through my podcast interviews. I’ve co-written fiction and non-fiction books, appeared on other shows, promoted authors to my email lists and on social media, and also collaborated on joint author in-person events. I’ve also done bigger paid ad campaigns. In 2014, I was part of the Deadly Dozen, where twelve mystery and thriller authors hit the New York Times and USA Today bestseller lists with our multi-author ebook boxset. We all ran different promotions as well as jointly paying for advertising, and we sold over 100,000 ebook bundles and attracted many readers to our email lists. If you want to collaborate with other authors, be generous and helpful and you will attract opportunities. Volunteering at author conferences can also be a great way to build your network.  Marketing is an ecosystem It takes time to build out a sustainable marketing approach that keeps your books selling every month over many years. You can pay for advertising right now and you will drive traffic to your books and hopefully sell some, but as soon as you stop paying, the sales will drop off.  The best approach is to think of marketing as an ecosystem made up of multiple aspects around you and your creative work.  What do you enjoy doing and what kinds of marketing can you sustain over time? The most successful authors build marketing into their regular routine rather than treating it as a separate, painful task to check off as required for each book launch. Marketing is about connecting people with your books. When you genuinely help people find stories they’ll love or solutions to their challenges, marketing becomes less about self-promotion and more about valuable service. It’s an important part of being a successful self-published author. These chapters are excerpted from Successful Self-Publishing, Fourth Edition by Joanna Penn, available in ebook, audiobook, and print formats. The post Book Marketing Tips For Fiction And Non-Fiction Authors With Joanna Penn first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Are you curious about the lives of your ancestors? What secrets might be hiding in your family tree, and where would you even begin to look for them? How do you turn dusty records and vague family stories into a compelling book for others to read? T.L. Whalan shares how she researched and wrote a book about her family history. In the intro, InAudio.com and Spotify for Authors; The Written Word Podcast from Written Word Media; How to sell 1000 books a month [Author Media]; Vetted services from Alliance of Independent Authors, and Reedsy; Writer Beware for scams. Plus, Ideogram for consistent Characters; Google Notebook LM video overviews; Gothic Cathedrals; The Buried and the Drowned – J.F. Penn. Today's show is sponsored by Draft2Digital, self-publishing with support, where you can get free formatting, free distribution to multiple stores, and a host of other benefits. Just go to www.draft2digital.com to get started. This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn  T.L. Whalan is the Australian author of short stories, young adult, and middle-grade fiction, as well as co-author of the family history project, The Wirrabara Whalans. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.  Show Notes What genealogy is and the motivations for researching your family history Why you should always start your research by interviewing living relatives Key resources for research, including official records, newspaper archives, and genealogy websites The importance of getting family consent and how to handle sensitive information The practical challenges of compiling vast amounts of research and formatting a book You can find Tegan at TLWhalan.com.au. Transcript of Interview with T.L. Whalan Joanna: T.L. Whalan is the Australian author of short stories, young adult, and middle-grade fiction, as well as co-author of the family history project, The Wirrabara Whalans. Welcome to the show, Tegan. Tegan: Thank you so much for having me. Joanna: First up— Tell us a bit more about you, how you got into writing, and also tell us about where you live. Tegan: Sure thing. It's pretty obvious from my accent that I'm Australian. I live in a town called Hamley Bridge, which has only 700 people. It's a country town north of Adelaide in South Australia. My husband and I chose this country life because of our animals. We have dogs ourselves, but we also run a dog rescue. Last year we started bottle-raising orphaned lambs, and now we run a dog and lamb rescue. Over the last 15 years, we've re-homed about 400 animals. In terms of my writing, I was one of those people who always said, “I'm going to write a novel one day,” but never really got around to it. Then, in mid-2014, I decided to get serious. I Googled how to write a novel and discovered NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). I thought, “Well, that's good because I can wait until November.” So I did exactly that. I waited until November for NaNoWriMo, wrote a novel that year, and I've been writing compulsively ever since. Joanna: Just on those bottle-fed orphan lambs. They turn into sheep, right? Do you just have loads of sheep? Tegan: We've got 10 of our own sheep, which are wonderful pets. They're just like dogs; they run up to the fence and want pets and treats. The lambs that we're raising this year, we are finding good homes for, for them to live out their lives as lawnmowers and lovely pets themselves. My husband's been very happy since we got the sheep. He hasn't had to mow the lawn, so it's been a good addition. Joanna: Let's get into this family history project. What is genealogy and why are people so fascinated with it? Tegan: There are lots of people who are quite into genealogy or their family history, and it's basically the study of lineage. Often people choose to start with themselves and then work their way back, figuring out who their ancestors are. I think people are fascinated because we're all a little bit self-centered and want to know more about ourselves. When I'm researching my family tree and find a particularly exciting ancestor, I actually do the math and work out how much of their DNA is in me. It's nice to know that person makes up part of me. So there's that aspect of learning about yourself that I think is really motivating. Another part of it is the thrill of the hunt; wanting to knuckle down and find information about these ancestors. Sometimes when you find a really nice tidbit, you get to the point that you go, “I think I might be the only person alive who knows this about this person.” It's a pretty cool feeling to think that you're at that brink of your research. I've also done family trees for people in my fiction writing. When I've written historical fiction based on true historical figures, I have been known to make a family tree for that person because I want to make sure that I get it right in terms of their siblings, their parents, their aunties, their uncles, the years of their birth, and how old they would be. Joanna: You mentioned the research and the thrill of the hunt, but how do you research family history? What are some of the resources people might use? Tegan: There are lots of resources, but I think sometimes people start in the wrong place. I'm a big advocate of starting with people who are alive now and interviewing them to get those stories. When that person passes, that story could potentially be gone as well. While I agree it's exciting to get as far back on your family tree as possible, if we can start with living people and the resource that they provide, that's a really excellent starting point. Once we have all the information we can from living people, we can start to look at other resources. As an Australian, a lot of our ship records are really important. For me, it's free settlers, but for plenty of people in Australia, there are convict records. We have Births, Deaths and Marriages registries in Australia, which are a valuable resource, though there's a different one in every state, which makes it a little bit complicated. In Australia, we have a newspaper website called Trove; I think the US equivalent is newspapers.com. Newspapers have a phenomenal amount of information, like birth and death records, engagement notices, marriages, and sometimes even whole stories about a wedding, which will tell you who the wedding party was and what the bride wore. We have also had to use Freedom of Information (FOI) to get information about some of our relatives. On my father's side, my great-grandfather was charged with being destitute as an 8-year-old boy and was then in what was fundamentally an orphanage. We were able to seek freedom of information from the Department of Child Protection to get information about him. We're about to do something similar for one of my relatives who was institutionalized in a mental asylum. So those FOI records can be a valuable resource. It's a little difficult to give really specific ideas on resources because they are often quite country-specific or even state-specific. For people who are interested, their state-based genealogical center is a good place to start for area-specific resources. Joanna: Then there are bigger websites too, aren't there? Like Ancestry.com, these more global websites that you have to pay for? Tegan: Exactly, and they can be a really good resource. They make it their business to collate a lot of records, so you can sometimes search many records quite quickly. They are useful, but part of the problem with them is that many are user-based, so some of the information is what other users have submitted. Sometimes that's useful, but sometimes that information is inaccurate. There's also the possibility of those inaccuracies spreading through many people's records on those sites. So Ancestry and other sites are a really good starting point, and we certainly used it a lot to generate hints, but like all resources, you also need to corroborate them and try to access that original source if possible. Joanna: Being Australian, did you go further back than Australia? Did you end up looking at Britain or anywhere else? Tegan: Yes, we certainly did. Our ancestors are mostly Irish, and that's who we pursue in this book. We got to the point that we hired a researcher in Ireland for some of our dead ends because if you are in a different country, you are more savvy about the genealogical systems in place. Knowing locations and their proximity to one another can be really time-consuming. If I were doing that research from here, I would have to have a map app open all the time. Plus, as you mentioned, some sites require payment to access resources, which can be a hurdle in other countries. We did get an Irish researcher who was fantastic; she managed to get us one generation further back, which was very valuable. There was another one we sent her that she wasn't able to get any further on, which made us feel very satisfied that we were able to get as far as we did. Joanna: You mentioned freedom of information. If people don't know what that is, can you tell us more about it? Tegan: With different records, there are different processes in place. With a lot of the ones we've found in Australia, you have to be a very close relation to campaign for those records. In the case I mentioned with the Department of Child Protection, my father was a direct descendant of that man, which is why he was able to apply for those records. There are different thresholds these organizations require you to meet for them to release that information. It's certainly worth investigating, and it will be very nuanced depending on the information you're looking for and the organization or government agency you're approaching. A lot of family history is just taking your time and doing things bit by bit. It might be that an organization has now changed its rules, or enough time has passed. Things often get quite loose after about 100 years, and there's more willingness to release records. It's worth revisiting resources because things can change. Joanna: You said it's good to start by interviewing family members who are alive. What are some of the questions that you asked? Was it literally, “What was the name of your mother?” or did you go much wider? Tegan: We went much more in-depth. When my parents and I started this project for the Whalans, we wanted it to be more than just a person's name, their date of birth, their children, and their date of death. We wanted to know who that person was. So we compiled 13 questions, which we call the “cousin questions,” and they are available on my blog if anyone wants to see them. A lot of the questions were around location: where they went to school, where they were born, where they lived, where they traveled. That information becomes really important when you're searching later because it helps to confirm that the person on a record is the one you're looking for. This is particularly relevant if you have a common surname like Smith. We had the benefit that Whalan is not a common name in Australia, which helped our research a lot. The other questions were about the human story. We asked about people's idiosyncrasies and what they were proud of in their life. That gives you the flavor of a person. One of my favorite stories we were told was about a man, from his son. He said that his father, when working on the farm, always wore his overalls, and in the front pocket, he always carried a $5 note in case the ice cream truck came by. I just think that's a beautiful way of explaining a person. It gives you so much more character than his name and dates. You learn he's a farmer, he wears overalls, he must value ice cream, and you learn about the currency and that it was a cash-based society. We learned a lot from that little phrase, and that's the kind of rich color we wanted for our book. Joanna: What about inaccuracies and corroboration? How do you know a story like that is true? What do you check and what don't you check? Tegan: The first part is considering how close the person we're interviewing is to that person. In this particular case, the person telling me the story was his son, and his wife was in the background and laughed, remembering the story with him. So that gives me confidence that it's true. We can also try to find other evidence. For example, a couple of older ladies told us their father lived in Yundi because of some kind of government chicken farm. They couldn't give me more details, but that sent me on a research journey. I was able to find out that Yundi was set up by the government to teach impoverished families how to farm chickens. So that vague comment was steeped in truth. All those resources I've already talked about can be helpful in finding and corroborating those threads. Also, if you interview multiple people, you can often get several versions of the same story. When we produced this book, we sometimes used direct quotes. In that way, we're not necessarily describing it as an absolute truth; we're describing what someone has said about these people, which again gives an impression of a person. Joanna: How far back did you get? Tegan: For The Wirrabara Whalans, we go back to 1810. It was a happy surprise that we managed to get ourselves back to 1810, to be honest. That ancestor, born in 1810, immigrated to Australia in 1855. Joanna: How did the family feel about you making a book that is publicly available? A lot of people don't particularly want to talk about their family. Tegan: Overwhelmingly, the response has been pretty positive, and the ones that haven't been positive have been neutral, so that has been a success. When we were interviewing people, my father, who is quite well connected with the Whalans, could call them up, introduce himself, and get an interview. I had the more difficult job of cold-calling a branch of the family we haven't been actively involved with. I had about a 50/50 success rate. For those people who weren't willing to help, we respected that choice. A lot of people think they don't have anything to contribute, but almost everyone we interviewed would start with, “Well, I don't know much,” and then they would know quite a lot. One of the decisions we made early on was that we were only going to feature people who had passed away. This meant we didn't have as much conflict as if we were presenting living people, and there were also privacy concerns. Another way we protected ourselves was that once we had completed a chapter about their loved one, we gave them that chapter to review. We asked them to look over it and let us know if there was anything they wanted changed. Every now and then, there was a sentence or two they wanted to remove. Family is important to us, so if someone was uncomfortable, we deleted it. In a 450-page manuscript, a sentence or two isn't going to make a big difference. Joanna: Was there anything that came up with your family history that was surprising? Tegan: The most shocking parts involved a lot of bar fights. The one that always shocks me was a bar fight described in a newspaper where one of my relatives broke another man's leg. The force you'd have to use to do that is just horrific to me. That made it into the book. It's all readily accessible details from newspapers, not new things that aren't already in the public domain. The nicest surprise was when we managed to go back one extra generation. We found a funeral notice for a woman that turned out to be my three-times great-grandmother. Later, we were able to corroborate that with DNA; my father's DNA matched with someone with her same surname, which as far as we are concerned, confirms it. That was a very satisfying part of our journey. We also found with DNA that my dad's uncle had an illegitimate child. We were able to confirm the name of that child through DNA. We knew they existed and had an idea of their name, and the DNA match confirmed it. It was another way we had two resources saying the same thing. Joanna: How did you handle permissions for photos and newspaper articles? Tegan: There are a lot of images in the book. Many come from state libraries, which often allow you to use an image if you attribute the source and it's no longer in copyright. We purchased the occasional image from international library collections. My parents drove all around South Australia taking photos of gravestones, so those are all our own images. There were also lots of family photos donated by family members who gave us consent to publish them. The newspaper articles often appear in the book in full. They might be slightly fixed up if there are glaring errors, but for the most part, they're reproduced as they appeared and are fully credited. It was really important for us to make a valid resource, so the book has a bibliography and references for most things throughout. Joanna: How did you keep everything organized? It sounds like a huge amount of work. Tegan: It was a huge amount of work. I was working with my parents on this project, and we live geographically separated, so we had to use online ways to communicate and store information. We used Ancestry.com.au for a lot of our research collation because we could both access it from our different locations. My parents did a lot of the research, and I did some research while also doing a lot of the formatting and writing. Almost from day one, I had a document that I was adding information to. It was basically one document that just kept growing and growing into the 450-page manuscript it is now. Joanna: How do you get a family tree into a book? Does it have to go across multiple pages so the font isn't tiny? Tegan: It was such a painful experience doing these family charts. From the early days, I knew I wanted a family chart for every family at the start of their chapter. I searched online for programs that could do it, but basically all of them fell down once I got to a family with 13 children. As a result, the family charts in our book were all handmade in Word. That meant I could have a lot of control over the colors, the font, and the readability. It was a lot of work, and I actually had two family members help me with the formatting. Those family tree charts were a nightmare, but they are very readable and look just how I wanted them to. So that's a small win, but there was a lot of pain to get there. Joanna: Why did you decide to make the book commercially available? Are people who aren't in your family buying it? Tegan: We did a lot of work on this project, and we want people to learn not just about our family, but about all the aspects that fed into our family. We sometimes liken this book to being a history of the mid-north of South Australia. The index we compiled is enormous, and if someone has a mid-north name, you can probably find it in there because many of the same families were moving around the area. This means we do get interest from people who just have a connection to the mid-north, not necessarily the Whalan family. Most of our book sales have been to family, which is what we expected, but we do sell some to others. We recently attended a market in a small country town about a three-hour drive from Adelaide, and we sold six books. For a very niche family history book, we were really happy with that. A lot of people were buying it because they know a Whalan, or they have a connection to the mid-north. A lot of the book is about the pioneering days and the shepherd lifestyle in that area. The book is also in all the libraries we have to supply in Australia, plus some extra ones. We've also made donations of the book to some of the organizations we used in our research to make sure that information is preserved in their records. Joanna: Tell people where they can find you and this book and everything else you do online. Tegan: My website is TLWhalan.com.au. You can also find me on Facebook as T.L. Whalan. The Wirrabara Whalans is my only book at the moment, but I am working on a young adult fiction series, which will appear in all those places once I get around to it. I've been busy with all the animals and bottle-feeding lambs four times a day! Joanna: Well, look, it's been lovely to talk to you, Tegan. Thanks so much for your time. Tegan: Thanks, Jo.The post Researching And Writing Family History Or Genealogy With TL Whalan first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How do you turn a big-budget TV show idea into an audio drama you can produce yourself? What does it take to create a 10-hour, 30-actor historical drama? And how can guerrilla marketing in airport bookstores help find your audience? Alison Haselden shares her experience of writing and directing Wicked Dames. In the intro, David Whyte on deeper writing [How I Write]; Midlife and the Great Unknown – David Whyte; How can I do my creative work when I’m so worried about the world? [Orna Ross]; Successful Self-Publishing Fourth Edition ebook on special; The Simple Path to Wealth 2025 Edition by JL Collins; Reshuffle: Who Wins When AI Restacks the Knowledge Economy by Sangeet Paul Choudary; The Buried and the Drowned Short Story Collection; Touching History: The Ancient Craft Of Stonemasonry [Books And Travel]. This podcast is sponsored by Kobo Writing Life, which helps authors self-publish and reach readers in global markets through the Kobo eco-system. You can also subscribe to the Kobo Writing Life podcast for interviews with successful indie authors. This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn  Alison Haselden is an author, screenwriter, and actor. Her latest project is the historical fiction audio drama, Wicked Dames. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.  Show Notes From child actor to a “portfolio career” as an author, screenwriter, and actor Choosing an audio drama format to create an immersive experience How to produce an audio drama series on a budget Marketing vs monetization—project visibility as the goal Utilizing guerrilla marketing tactics to find new listeners Who are the Wicked Dames? You can find Alison at AlisonHaselden.com. Transcript of Interview with Alison Haselden Joanna: Alison Haselden is an author, screenwriter, and actor. Her latest project is the historical fiction audio drama, Wicked Dames. Welcome to the show, Alison. Alison: Thank you so much for having me, Jo. Joanna: I'm excited to talk to you today. First off— Tell us a bit more about you and your creative background. Alison: I have been in the creative world since the day I was born. I'm so grateful to have had a very supportive family who realized they had no choice; I was going to be singing, dancing, acting, and putting on plays in the neighborhood whether they wanted me to or not. I grew up in Orlando, Florida, which has always had a bit of a pipeline to Los Angeles. In the nineties, we had all the boy bands and the Musketeers, so there was a lot of opportunity there. I started working in professional acting at age six and was fortunate to be able to work and train throughout my childhood in Orlando, and I was able to go to Los Angeles a bit as well. I was also an avid reader and writer my entire life. I just love stories in every medium I could get my hands on, which has continued into my adult life. I went to university for journalism and marketing, which really honed my writing skills. Coming out of university, I worked in content marketing for seven years. That helped me get my reps in for building writing stamina, as well as learning marketing skills that now help me so much in my acting and writing careers. It's been a beautiful journey. I'm at a place this year where I can look back and see that — In the years I thought I was treading water, I was actually building useful skills — that I'm so grateful for now, even though they felt like detours at the time. Now, I've quit the corporate world and I work for myself, marketing consulting for creative executives keeps the lights on while I pursue my acting and writing careers. I act primarily in film and TV now. I just wrapped on my first series regular role in a limited series that should hopefully be coming out at the end of this year or in 2026. We released Wicked Dames in the fall of 2024, and I just finished writing my YA Fantasy. So, we've got a lot of projects going on. Joanna: I love that. I love how you outlined that you also did jobs that maybe felt like you were treading water, but you were building on the side. I think some people think that you just go from child actor to TV shows to multimillionaire. Alison: That is a common misconception. Most of us are what I call “middle-class actors.” Joanna: Like mid-list authors. Alison: Exactly. It's the same thing. Most folks that I work with, we all have something else going on on the side because this career is so inconsistent, and it's the same with writing. We all have to have multiple irons in the fire these days. Joanna: On that, because you are juggling freelance work as well, with all these different projects and interests— How do you manage your time with a portfolio career? Alison: I used to be a “white-knuckle-it” kind of person and would hyper-schedule myself to try and pack every minute of every day with a box to check off. In the past two years, I have shifted away from that, and it's weirdly worked out better than I could have ever imagined. There's some kind of divine intervention there, I think. Somehow, I rarely have competing deadlines and I follow my intuition in terms of what my priorities should be. If I have a deadline on something, of course, that gets put to the top of the pile, but I've been so fortunate that it's just worked out. For example, this past year I was focusing solely on Wicked Dames from about April 2024 through the beginning of November 2024. Then I took a little break and an idea came to me, and I put my head down and wrote this whole YA fantasy I'm working on about witches in Nantucket. Right when I finished that and needed a little break, this TV show opportunity came along. I couldn't really write while I was on set—it’s pretty demanding of your brain space—but it worked out because I needed to have time away before coming back for edits. The less I try to control things, the more it weirdly works out in a way that is supportive of my creative process. There are so many different sides of our brain. I can't just be creatively brainstorming 24/7; I need to switch to the other side of my brain and do more logistical things. For the way my energy works, being able to switch hats helps me recharge in the process, so I'm not over-functioning in one way for too long. Then I'm actually excited to go back and check in on another project. Joanna: It sounds like you never do the same thing back-to-back; you're switching all the time. Alison: Yes, and that part has been pure chance. I don't know how that's worked out so far, and maybe it won't be that way forever, but I really have been lucky enough to have quite a bit of variety that cycles through the year. Joanna: Let's get into Wicked Dames. You mentioned the YA fantasy, but Wicked Dames is a historical story. Why write Wicked Dames? And why make it an audio drama instead of a book? Alison: One of the unique things about my background is that I don't sit down and say, “Okay, I want to write a film script,” or, “Okay, I want to write a novel.” My ideas download into my brain, and I know immediately what format I want to lead with. I do write almost everything in multiple forms of IP. I'm working on two different books right now, and I'll probably write a pilot episode or a spec sheet for each of those, but both came to me as a novel first. Wicked Dames, however, came to me and I saw it as a TV show. I saw the visuals of it so clearly; it just felt like a TV show. I have written the book version of Wicked Dames, but my intuition really wanted me to get it out there in as close to a TV format as possible. Anyone who knows about film and TV knows that historical fiction is very expensive to make. So, rather than try to scrounge together an opportunity to make it as a pilot episode, I wanted to get the IP out there as soon as possible, but I wanted it to feel very experiential. I wanted the audience to feel like they were really in that world, and an audio drama was the perfect solution. Unlike an audiobook, which is typically one voice reading the book verbatim, an audio drama is essentially a TV show without the visuals. You get a more immersive experience with all the different actors playing the characters, plus music and sound effects. It seemed like the right medium to get the story out into the world, and I'm so glad I did it that way. I write a lot of historical fiction, fantasy, and some contemporary rom-com. Those might sound very different, but to me, they all have an element of magic to them, which is the throughline. I've always loved historical fiction; it's so magical. It's an escape, but also so grounding because we know that parts of it are real. It just all flowed in that way. Joanna: In terms of writing one, people might be able to picture a TV script with camera directions and dialogue. How do you format an audio drama script and add in things like sound effects? Alison: Many people want to have strict rules, but really, there are no rules. I think there are even fewer rules for an audio drama script. I write it like a cross between a novel and a TV script. The formatting on the page is structured like a TV script, so it doesn't read like a novel with paragraphs of text. We have the character breakdowns, the action, and the header that outlines the setting. I do add a lot more to the action and description sections than I would for a traditional film or TV script. In this story, the narrator is doing a lot, so I wanted there to be plenty of description. On my edit passes for Wicked Dames, I was thinking from the audience's perspective: if they are only listening with no visuals, what can be communicated via a sound effect and what cannot? That's where I would decide what kind of narration to add. I didn't nitpick those details until the second or third editing pass. That really helped because you're going from being a storyteller to being more of a strategist, ensuring that your listeners have the best experience possible. Joanna: Of course, you were both acting in and producing this. Alison: Yes, I wore a lot of hats on this. I wrote it, I directed it, and I am a voice actor in it. It was a lot, but I felt uniquely qualified to step into those roles. I wouldn't necessarily recommend that to all authors, unless you have a desire to learn some of those things. For me, I really wanted the opportunity to flex those skills. One day I would love to be a showrunner of a TV show, and this was a good training ground for that. Joanna: Let's get into the challenges of doing an audio drama compared to, say, an audiobook, especially as an independent creator without big studio funding. Alison: I'm going to share all my secrets. I don't think I would've had the confidence to do something like this if I didn't know about some of these tools and opportunities. One of the biggest barriers to entry people imagine is finding actors, but the beautiful thing is that there are actors at all levels out there. It's been a difficult time in the entertainment industry following COVID and the writer and actor strikes in 2023. Our industry is still struggling to recover, so there are more actors than you'd think who are passionate about the work and looking for projects. It is very possible to find incredible actors who will work within your budget. The best places to find actors are sites like Actors Access or Backstage. You have to do a little admin to get your account set up to post a casting call, but I cast all my actors through there. You can be transparent about your budget, set up the audition sides from your script, and then review everyone's profiles and submissions. It seems like a lot, but I promise it's easier than you might think. There's a little nuance here. In the United States, I ran my project through the actors' union, SAG-AFTRA, because I wanted access to a wider net of actors. You don't have to do this; you could do it as completely non-union, but then only non-union actors can be part of your project, which is totally fine. Those websites are open to both union and non-union projects. This is where people get nervous—the technology. You have a few options to consider before casting. You could note in your casting call that you're only considering actors who already have recording equipment. Or, you could make it open to all actors, but you would probably have to accommodate recording them, either by paying for their studio time or inviting them to a home studio. Many actors who do voiceover work have microphones in their homes and can work with you over Zoom and send you the files. That is probably the easiest way. I would say the biggest challenge for me, and the part I was least familiar with, was hiring an editor. The editing is everything, especially if you have a large cast and want lots of sound effects. The editor puts all of that together. I would recommend saving up a decent amount of your budget for that because they put in a lot of hours. That's the part that takes the most time, the most budget, and the most back-and-forth to get the final product you envision. Joanna: Give people an idea of the money, tell us how long the Wicked Dames series is and the scale of the production. Alison: We have 10 episodes in Wicked Dames, and they all range between 35 to 60 minutes. So, it's about 10 hours of content. We had over 30 actors participate, all with different-sized roles. I paid my talent hourly—$25 an hour—or sometimes per session, depending on how much work they were doing. I was super upfront that I did not have a big budget. I paid my editor $3,500, which was a good deal because he was looking for the experience for his portfolio. I got really lucky. I was putting in a lot of my own effort, so I was saving a lot of money but putting in the hours myself. I was able to produce the audio drama for under $6,000, which is very much on the lower side. I was directing, coordinating talent, and had a tight recording schedule. I recorded every single day for the entire month of June last year. I found a group of actors who were really excited about the project and deepening their own artistry. It was a slow season, so everyone had extra free time. All the people who were part of the project were really meant to be part of it, and they brought so much life and fun. Seeing how they brought their own take on the characters I wrote was a joy. Joanna: How do you distribute an audio drama and how do you make money from it? Alison: There are a lot of routes with this, and it depends on your goals. For me, my main goal was to get my IP out there and have a strong portfolio piece showcasing my work as a writer, actor, and director all in one. I wanted to hopefully break even and then start to build a community around my project. I'm happy to say I was able to break even, and we've built a lot of community. My TikTok grew exponentially to 24,000 followers. I'm in this for the long haul, and with the end goal of one day making this a TV show, it was more important for me to get the IP out there than to turn this particular audio drama into a business. Because of that, I chose to release it for free. I have donation links in the show notes for those who enjoy it. However, you could put up a paywall through platforms like Patreon or Substack. That would probably have made more money but would have lowered the visibility, and I wanted visibility more than a short-term financial gain. You can also try to get ads on it. One of the ways I built community was by hosting several in-person, themed events with local coffee shops and bars, which allowed for profit-share opportunities. That worked well to not only bring in a little money, but also to build fans around what we were doing. Joanna: You said you broke even. Was that from donations and events? Alison: Yes, it was from the donations. People were loving the show, making it all the way through, and then they would send us a tip if they enjoyed it, and it was through those events. It was very unexpected and heartwarming to see that people enjoyed what they were listening to and wanted to donate to our production. Joanna: What platform are you publishing on? Alison: It's the same as any other podcast. I just used the Spotify for Podcasters platform. It's cross-posted, so it's on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, iHeartRadio, and YouTube. It's accessible for free on all of those platforms. I also have my own webpage for it with additional content. We filmed a video trailer, which was fun. There's a bit of a mystery in the story, so on the website, you can get some of the materials that the girls discover to put together the clues. I like making things interactive where I can. Joanna: Now you've started— You better tell us more about the actual story. Who are the Wicked Dames? Alison: Wicked Dames is about young women who seduced and killed Nazis during World War II. I was inspired by the very real stories of many young girls and women who did this—some as young as 13 years old. Some worked alone, some with local resistance groups, and some with official intelligence agencies. I had read these stories over the years and thought it was crazy that no one had done anything with them. We have so many World War II stories, but most are about men in primary combat. At the same time, my fiancé's grandmother was a Holocaust survivor, and her mother did incredible things to keep her family alive. I was hearing those stories, and I think they combined in my head and spit out Wicked Dames. I wanted to explore the shades of gray. For young women in Berlin during this time, there were many different nuances to their experiences. Each of our girls comes from a different background and has personal challenges that lead them to work together. We also have a bit of a serial killer moment; one of the girls in the group is a serial killer who is just benefiting from being alive during this time of war. I always thought, “When would be the best time to be a serial killer?” Probably during a world war. She's mixed in with girls who are quite innocent and trying to do what's right, and others who have their own vendettas. There are a lot of layers, a lot of mystery, and I think it's a pretty fun ride. I like to say it's a cross between Little Women and Peaky Blinders, with a dash of Inglourious Basterds. Joanna: You come from a marketing background. How are you marketing the audio drama? Alison: I definitely like to use a mix of tactics; I am not a “put all your eggs in one basket” kind of gal. Digitally, we have the website, an email list, and social media promotion on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Threads. We had those in-person events and partnered with podcasts and other media outlets. My favorite thing that I did was a bit of guerrilla marketing. I ordered a bunch of bookmarks with QR codes and wrote handwritten secret notes on antique-looking paper. I travel a lot, and so do people in my family, so I distributed those amongst everyone. Anytime we went to the airport, we were stuffing these in airport bookstore books, trying to pick relevant ones like other historical fiction or World War II texts. I would also go to my local libraries and do that. It's a delightful surprise if you pick up a book and there's a secret note inside. I would frame it as, “You've been recruited by the Wicked Dames. Learn more and check out the website.” It was really fun to track the QR codes and see where in the world the bookmarks ended up. Joanna: That sounds amazing. Even if it didn't pay off in click-throughs. Alison: And it made for really great social media content. People online thought the idea was cool, so the posts I made about doing that got a lot of engagement and traffic. It's all connected. Joanna: You started by saying you want this to be a TV show. What happens next? Are you pitching it as a TV show? Alison: I am so intuitively led now. I sat and brainstormed about the next steps, and what came to me was to write more. Historical fiction is a difficult sell, especially right now. This IP is going to sit out there and hopefully continue to build community, and maybe it will come across the desk of someone who is excited by it. Right now, I'm focusing on getting my foothold in through some of my other projects that I think would have an easier time getting a green light, like a contemporary rom-com or fantasy. Fantasy, even though it's big budget, is a more popular sell these days. I'm focusing on those projects. My YA fantasy is completed and in edits, and I'm about halfway done with the first draft of my rom-com. I'm actually already talking with one network about that project, and I'm not even done with it. If I hadn't listened to my intuition and had just continued pouring all my energy into Wicked Dames, I wouldn't have been able to make headway on these other projects, which I think will open up more opportunities and get me to a place where I can say, “Oh, and by the way, I have Wicked Dames here.” In publishing, they often tell you to focus on one genre. However — Straddling both the publishing and entertainment worlds, I've noticed it's beneficial to have a few different genres. Having options helps when adjusting your sales strategy with the industry's ebb and flow. Sometimes they want something low-budget, and other times, during an abundance period, you can pitch your high-budget projects. I've let myself dabble for that reason. In an industry that's so flaky, nothing's guaranteed until it's on the screen or the book is in your hands. I've taken that as permission to do whatever I want. Joanna: Some people get disheartened by that and feel like giving up. How do you deal with that? Alison: I certainly do get disheartened, but one of the blessings of having grown up working in this world is that I realize how impersonal it is. That can sting, but it's also freedom. Timing is everything. It's easy to think that if something we love doesn't take off when we want it to, it's never going to work out. And yet, there's so much evidence of the opposite—projects started 10 years ago that suddenly find the right time and all the pieces fall into place. I've seen too much evidence of that, and that's what I turn to when I'm having a hard day. I look at those stories from other artists, and that gives me hope. I've never been a competitive person, except with myself. I believe that seeing other people's success and their journeys is proof of what is possible for us. Also, like I've said this whole time, I allow myself to indulge in what genuinely lights me up creatively. I'm always happier with that work, and people always like that work better too. On the days I'm feeling down, I remind myself that I genuinely delight in the work. It's the business side of it that's the sucky part. So, I let myself go back into my creative cave, and that's where I recharge. Joanna: That's super encouraging. Where can people find you and Wicked Dames and everything you do online? Alison: All of the updates on the multifaceted aspects of my career are on my website, AlisonHaselden.com. I'm also pretty active on social media—Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Threads—under my name, Alison Haselden. I also have a fun new series on YouTube called “The Showrunner Note,” where I walk through my pitch for adapting popular books into TV shows or films. If you are a fellow book and media lover, that might be something fun. I would love to connect. Joanna: Well, thank you so much for your time, Alison. That was great. Alison: Thank you so much for having me.The post Writing And Directing Audio Drama And The Constant Creator Mindset With Alison Haselden first appeared on The Creative Penn.