The Creative Penn Podcast For Writers

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.

Are you feeling overwhelmed by the pressure to constantly release new books and battle algorithms? Do you wonder if there's a more sustainable, low-stress path to a successful author career? Is it possible to focus on art, build a loyal fanbase, and escape the publishing rat race? In this episode, Johnny B. Truant discusses the artisan author approach. In the intro, When your brain says “write!” but your body says, “nope.” [The Author Stack]; Productivity, AI, and pushback [Seth Godin]; The Buried and the Drowned, Short Story Collection. 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  Johnny B. Truant is the author of over one hundred and fifty books across multiple genres, including thriller, science fiction, fantasy, comedy, and nonfiction. His latest book is The Artisan Author: The Low-Stress, High-Quality, Fan-Focused Approach to Escaping the Publishing Rat Race. 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 Prioritising art over profit and building direct connections with fans Moving away from the high-pressure, algorithm-focused “rapid release” model that can lead to burnout The benefits and strategies of in-person, live selling at markets and festivals to find new readers Utilising platforms like Kickstarter for book launches to create special editions and connect with true fans Adopting a “low-stress” approach to marketing by choosing what you enjoy and opting out of things like social media You can find Johnny at JohnnyBTruant.com, and the Artisan Author Kickstarter here. Transcript of Interview with Johnny B Truant Joanna: Johnny B. Truant is the author of over one hundred and fifty books across multiple genres, including thriller, science fiction, fantasy, comedy, and nonfiction. His latest book is The Artisan Author: The Low-Stress, High-Quality, Fan-Focused Approach to Escaping the Publishing Rat Race. So welcome back to the show, Johnny. Johnny: Man, it is so fun to be on The Creative Penn. It's just like coming home. It's just so great. So thank you for having me. Joanna: Well, you've been on the show multiple times over the years, and the last time was a couple of years ago when you were pivoting into this stage of your author journey. So we are going to jump straight into the topic today. Why The Artisan Author and why now? What were you seeing in the author community that made you want to write this book? Johnny: I used to do a lot of author education. We had a podcast and a book and all that. Around the time COVID started, I stopped doing a lot of that and just focused on fiction. When I came back to the 20Books Conference, the last one, so much had changed. People were really ramping up AI in different ways, the rapid release had gotten faster, and all the tactical stuff had gotten more tactical. I just remembered thinking, “Boy, I always wanted to just write books my own way, at my own speed.” Despite going fast, I don't like being forced to go fast and I don't know if this is a game I want to play anymore. You have to fit into all the very specific categories that the algorithms like to promote, and a lot of people are playing those games. In the midst of that, I did talk to another author. You may know her. She's British and runs a podcast. Joanna: Yes, it was me! Johnny: I know that you had said—I don't know if you used the word ‘artisan,' but you definitely described a lot of the things that I'm looking at now, which is, “I don't want to go in that direction either, and I'm doing more and more of what I want to do and trusting my true fans to be interested in it.” Over the course of the next year, I started thinking more and more about that. What if instead of going into that faster, faster, rapid-release, kind of a death spiral sometimes—a lot of burnouts is related to that— What if instead we acted like artists who are selling fine goods to very discerning customers? I would just call them artists and readers. We don't have to worry about price and we don't have to worry about fighting the algorithms. We can just rely on a one-to-one connection to true fans rather than hoping the algorithms will find people for us. Joanna: Yes, and I did use that word. In fact, a couple of years ago, I wrote a positioning paper for the show about positioning myself also in the artisan space. I think this is really important. It's something that we obviously care about. Having known you for many years, our conversation was sort of, “Look, don't give it all up because you are great at this.” I've been reading your writing for a long, long time, before you wrote fiction. I think what is nice about this period right now is that we do get to question things. For a while, there were kind of rules. You guys had a book, what was it, The Fiction Formula or something like that, at one point? Johnny: You know, it's so funny because I work with Sean Platt. I was working with him a lot more in that nonfiction space, and Sean will do things like that. He'll say, “Okay, we're going to call it The Fiction Formula.” And I'm like, “But we've already talked about how there's no formula.” He's like, “No, no, that's the genius. It's going to be called The Fiction Formula. There is no formula,” because he wants the catch. Joanna: But the thing is, there almost was for a bit. Like you said, we met again at the last 20BooksTo50k. That was actually a thing for a period of time. Now I kind of say, “Well, one book to 50k.” Like you said, you can, if you do fine goods to discerning customers, you can do one book to 50k. It's a very different time. It's almost like at the beginning of the indie revolution, we got to reinvent the way things were done. I feel like that's where we are again. We are reinventing the way things were done because what is new becomes old. I feel like where we are now, fifteen-plus years into the indie revolution, or maybe seventeen-plus years into it, now we can reinvent it all over again. Johnny: Yes, and that's something that I explored in The Artisan Author book. It was almost a little bit of a history lesson, not because I wanted to bore people with it, but because we were on this very sensible and aspirational trajectory for a while. We came out of the old traditional publishing days where you had to query an agent and hope that you hit the right person at the right time and in the right mood. Instead, we were suddenly without gatekeepers and we could do what we wanted. Then it started to be, “Okay, so if you write more books, you'll make more money.” We helped to contribute to that with Write. Publish. Repeat. Then it became that at all costs, with no governor on it. Like, let's just go faster. Let's forget about the caveats of trying to enjoy yourself and maybe trying to write art that you actually care about. A lot of people just went to extremes with the rapid release thing, and that's what I think really hit me when I went back to 20Books. It was like when you watch a kid grow up and then you're away for a year and you see that kid again, and that kid has gotten so big. It's kind of like that. I came back and it was like, “Oh, I remember rapid release.” It was this annoying little thing over there, and then it had become this huge thing and had become almost default. That's what bothered me the most. It wasn't that it was so dominant, it was that I knew that there were new writers coming in—not just at that conference or the Author Nation conference to follow it, but people who watch from afar, who listen to the podcasts and watch the YouTube videos. I just thought of those poor authors coming in and how overwhelming this must be. “I finally finished the book I always wanted to write. Okay, now write six more and release them every three weeks.” It's just terrible. Joanna: It is. But I wanted to make the point that — I've never done rapid release, and a lot of authors were never rapid release. It just became a loud segment of the community — — and possibly true that the people who were making more income that way. As you say, also in the time that we've been doing this, people have disappeared. Now, you disappeared, but you came back. Johnny: You said that they're loud and that more of them appeared. That's part of the problem, really. Because they are loud—and by loud I don't mean necessarily obnoxious, I just mean that you tend to talk about it a lot when you've found something that works like that. It's a vanishingly small percentage of authors, but because they are so loud, they're the ones who usually speak or write books or whatever. So it looks to people as if that's the norm, and if you aren't making serious bank as a rapid-release author, then you're just not trying hard enough. It's not; it's this tiny percentage. I remember reading in one of Becca Syme's books, she had done the research to determine how many books actually make money, and it's the vast, vast, vast majority who don't make any money at all. Yet those people are being given the same advice as everyone else, as if that's the majority and that's the way the majority works, and it's just not true. Then if we come to what you mean by an ‘artisan author,' what are some of the hallmarks? Johnny: Well, the first thing is it's art first and profit second. I think that's the key defining hallmark, meaning that you're writing what it is that you want to write. You can define art however you want to define it. It usually just means, “This is the thing I want to do, and so I'm going to do it.” But practically speaking, the biggest thing that I think is going to be attractive to people is you don't have to burn yourself out. You don't have to keep doing this. When I came back this year, I gave a presentation called “The Artisan Author,” with the tagline “the low-stress, high-quality, fan-focused way to beat the publishing rat race.” People came up to me after and they said, “I didn't really know that this was an option. Thank you for giving me some clarity into the fact that it's not rapid release or nothing,” which is what most people think. So, yes, there was a lot of appetite for it. Joanna: What are the other things you are focusing on under that artisan umbrella? Johnny: Well, certainly—and I didn't really finish my thought, so I apologize—the idea is that release of pressure. “Take your time” is another one of the pillars. Connecting with fans is a huge one to me. That leads to this weird kind of backwards logic where usually self-published authors want to think bigger and faster because a lot of us have this very strong entrepreneurial streak, and it's almost eclipsed the artistic streak that people used to predominantly come into publishing for. It used to be you came in because you wanted to write a book, and maybe you'd make money at it. Now it's like, “Here's a way to make money, and so I'm going to do it as quickly as I can.” The customer focus thing is anti-leverage. Rapid release is trying to do as much leverage as possible. “If I make this one book, if I use the algorithms to my maximal advantage, then I can blow up without needing to do necessarily as much work.” It's very highly leveraged, and the artisan approach is actually the opposite, where it's very, very one-to-one. So that means that you're making individual connections. So, I'll give you an example. I do a lot of live selling, and I know that you wanted to ask about that. That's a super high-quality bond. When I meet those people, it's like I almost get them to like me before they even buy the book. So they leap very close to the fan end of the spectrum rather than the casual end. I had somebody email me yesterday and say, “Hey, I bought one of your books at some open-air market here in Austin. I wish you had pressured me to buy the whole series because now I'm out of books. When are you doing this again?” So tonight, he and one of his friends, I'm going to take books to them and I'm going to sell them. It's nineteen total books between these two guys, but that's the sort of quality connection to fans rather than a one-to-many connection. That slow scale, I think, is much more logical to people. It's something that we can actually imagine because it follows the normal rules of regular commerce and interpersonal communication in a way that rapid release never did, which was just anonymous algorithms. This entire thing, the founding principle, is Kevin Kelly's “1000 True Fans.” We're not looking to do that rapid-release paradigm, so you can't do artisan things with those customers. You need to invert the paradigm and say, “Okay, rather than trying for high leverage, I'm going to connect with people one-on-one. I'm going to create high-quality stuff, and then find the individual people who are interested in that and then bring them into my camp until I have theoretically a thousand of them,” according to Kevin Kelly. Joanna: It's amazing how well that has stood the test of time. That was, I think the original one was back in 2006, which again, would've been around the time when you were writing on Copyblogger and doing the online marketing stuff. This is what's so crazy, is you and I both come from that highly leveraged world where online marketing was the primary thing. Yet now, you've said in the book and you just said there about how you love live selling, and I find that very surprising. I'm an introvert and I find it incredibly hard. I don't know whether it's also being a highly sensitive person, but I find a lot of visual stimulation just too tiring. I can't look at all these people's faces. I can't deal with the noise. I wondered if you could talk about how you discovered that you like live selling? What are your tips for people? Johnny: Well, this is actually kind of funny because it is a really good fit for me, and in retrospect, I see why. It's because I have a strong extrovert streak in me that a lot of authors don't. So it is a little more natural for me, but I didn't know that. I was at the last Author Nation this year, and I actually had a presentation scheduled, but I hadn't done any of this live selling. This is only six months old. I talked to our mutual friend, Mark Lefebvre, and Mark was talking about how much he missed going out and doing book signings. I said, “Oh my God, I have nightmares about that. Just imagining being that poor author at the table who everybody's trying not to make eye contact with.” His reaction was so genuinely shocked. He said, “Why?” Someone that I knew and respected and who I thought I shared a lot in common with, really loves it, and was shocked that I wouldn't. What I started to realize is, yes, you can go out and you can be the sad author behind the table who's just sitting there and everybody's ignoring. Or you can take it as part of the art, and the puzzle of solving how to market these books has become such a fun part of it. How can I sell them? So to answer the question, I've done everything from small farmer's markets up to my first Comic-Con coming soon. I've done huge street festivals. What I've started to realize is it's just about being nice. I mean, that sounds so basic, but I don't go out and say, “Hey, want a book? Want a book?” and chase people down the street. Instead, the book people, they turn toward you. They express interest, and so they're already warm by the time you talk to them. You're not having to go out there and be a carnival barker. I just ask, “Hey, are you a reader? What are you into?” And we'll start talking about books. So if somebody's interested in my Beam series, for instance, they're looking at that. I'll say, “Hey, did you see the original Battlestar Galactica?” Oh yes, they've always seen it. Then I say, “You know how that was really a political power play drama that just happens to take place in space?” “Yes, I know that.” “Well, The Beam is a political power play drama that just happens to take place in blah, blah, blah.” It becomes much more about having conversations, and sometimes they don't buy, but that's fine. I've met some really interesting people. When you go in with that attitude of “I'm just going to go out and meet people who are interested in books,” that shift alone makes a huge difference, for me anyway. I don't really care if they buy, although they tend to do so. It's kind of amazing. The things that have shocked me the most are learning about my customers in ways that I never ever could have before. I've learned which of my covers are most attractive. I've learned that my covers in particular are attractive enough, apparently, that people will usually buy a book without even reading the back. I will talk to them, they'll say, “Oh, that sounds good,” and they don't ask the price and they don't read the back, and they just buy it. I've learned that there are things that I can recommend to people. So one of the things I get a lot is, “Oh, I would love to get back into reading, but I haven't done it as much.” It's like they're apologizing to me. So instead of saying, “Oh, well that's too bad, see ya,” I'll usually recommend something really fast-paced like The Target, which is like John Wick meets Fight Club. A lot of people go, “Oh, it's a fast-paced short book that has that energy. Okay, I will do it.” I would never see these things and I would never meet these people and I would never have people saying, “I want to buy three hundred dollars worth of books from you if you come down and meet me today,” if I wasn't doing all this stuff. Joanna: So, some practical questions. You have a huge backlist, and when you are doing these in-person sales at, say, a market, you've got to set up a table. It is only so big, and you've got to schlep all the stuff down, and books are heavy. Give us a sense of what the physical setup is and how you decide which books to take out of your massive collection. Johnny: Well, one of the key things in The Artisan Author book that I talk about a lot is, “it depends.” So I just want to say this ahead of time: I'm going tell you what I do, but it is not advice. It is not, “you should do this.” I have several friends, some of them we have in common, who do a lot of conventions and they'll say things like, “Take fewer books, just take a few, because it's an overwhelming environment. Make your table really clean. Don't bring everything.” I'm going to bring absolutely everything I have to a Comic-Con, which is not the quote-unquote “official” way to do it. It isn't what most people do. It works really well with my style because I have such a broad backlist and because they're interested in me first—which is an artisan principle, you're trying to interest them in you, not just an individual book. There are people who will say, “Well, I don't really like sci-fi.” “Okay, well, do you like thrillers? Do you like urban fantasy? Do you like regular fantasy?” There's always something else. That sense of visual overwhelm is actually a positive thing because it just looks like, “Wow, there's a lot of stuff here.” Typically, an outdoor booth space is ten feet by ten feet. I have to do a lot of them outside, which I'm not always super happy about, but that's the way they are here in Texas. So I have a ten by ten tent. For Comic-Con, it's a little smaller, it's eight by eight, and it's just a puzzle each time to say, “Well, how should I arrange things?” When I'm outside, I typically do a corner if I can, because that allows me twenty feet of space rather than just ten to stack up all my books. I have to adjust every single time. It's different buyers, it's different setups, it's different locations. For me, it's just about displaying the books, and then that attracts them. Usually the book people come over with big eyes like, “Ooh, books.” They already like the idea of the books. They're like, “Wow, I didn't think there were going to be book people here.” So I just talk to them and see where their tastes lie, and then I guide them towards something that they might enjoy. Joanna: Yes, so what you just said there I think is a really big point: they didn't know there'd be book people there. So these are not book fairs in general, these are other types of markets. Johnny: Yes. In the book, I have a section that's like, “Finding Readers.” I divided that into multiple buckets where you're either doing the passive thing, where you're trying to find readers on Amazon or wherever. The best ways to do this, I think, is what I call the third bucket, which is “creating customers out of nowhere” or something like that, because that's what it feels like. I'm going to somewhere where people are not expecting to buy books. They don't know that they're in the market for a book. By the way, if you're getting cold chills at the idea of selling live, that's so not the point. This isn't a live-selling book. It just happens to be something that I really enjoy and that works well for me. But there is some degree of personal connection in everything in that “finding readers out of nowhere” sort of thing. If you let people know that you are an author, just casually in your personal life, eventually you'll find that the word gets around, because authors are interesting to people. Some of those people, they didn't know they were in the market, but hey, “I just met an author. Maybe I want to buy one of their books.” That's what all of those most effective artisan strategies are for me. It's like you're fishing in a pond where nobody else is fishing. You're just meeting people and nobody else is pursuing them. So when I'm set up at a street festival, nobody is there trying to buy a book, and then they go, “Oh, there are books.” And it's like I don't have any competition, and they self-sort. It's a very cool thing. Joanna: I like that. Perhaps it's also less intimidating because when I saw your stall at Author Nation, you were in a room with hundreds of other authors with books. So it's very hard not to have some kind of comparison. I know Matt Dinniman, the huge LitRPG author, had a queue out the door. Whereas if you are an author and you are at a fair next to cupcakes or soaps or something, I suppose you definitely can be noticed by the people who want that. So I actually like that tip. How does live selling work financially? Johnny: Well, first of all, I want to say that yes, you do need to have more books than you're going to sell, because that's something that isn't always noticed. At least that's my philosophy, because a sparse table is kind of a sad table. Imagine you went into Barnes and Noble and there were three copies left. No, you want those shelves overflowing. So in my house right now, I probably have five to six hundred books, and I'll typically take a few hundred to any given event. It depends on the event. I did a big event called the Pecan Street Festival here in Austin and I sold about two hundred and twenty books, but it's more common at a smaller one to sell thirty or so. It'll give you an idea of the scope. What I've found is that as I've dialed this in, because I am iterating very quickly, I'm doing an event and then calibrating and learning. I also stepped up from very small markets to bigger markets. What I've learned is that for me personally—and again, this is me personally, your mileage may vary— My table fee, meaning what I pay to be there, tends to be ten to fifteen percent of my expected gross sales. Because that's such a reliable thing, I'm actually actively looking for ones with big table fees. I want to pay as much as possible, because if I'm going to go out there for a weekend, I want something where I'm going to walk away with more money than I would otherwise. You just kind of have to be aware that this is an area where if you did want to get into live selling, you do need to invest in yourself, but you can start very small. What I tell people is, go slow. If you're interested in this, you can split a table with somebody at an event if you are intimidated by the idea of having to be there the entire time, because you can come and go if you have a table mate. You can start at a very small farmer's market. The first farmer's market that I went to locally here was thirty-five dollars. Compare that to the Comic-Cons, which can be near a thousand dollars. If you just think small to begin with and you just take a limited stock, then your investment in the table fee, the equipment, and the books is much smaller. I've just kept reinvesting. If I made three hundred and fifty dollars and I spent one hundred and fifty dollars, then that gives me two hundred dollars that I then go back and buy more books for the next bigger event. So you can step into it, and I would suggest that people do, if they're interested. Joanna: Tell us about the process of doing a Shopify store and any lessons learned from that. Johnny: Well, again, did you see my shout-out? I did mention that Jo Penn has a really good “Minimum Viable Store” episode of a podcast. That's kind of the approach that I took. The thing about Shopify for me, I don't know if this is true for everybody, is that it takes a certain amount of momentum to get it started, like a rock rolling down a hill. I have found that if I'm not actively advertising, my store traffic dwindles to almost nothing. So given that you have to pay for the software every single month, it's one of those things where I don't know whether to recommend it or not. I tried to give a whole bunch of caveats to people and said, “If you're ready to go in, or if you just want to have it established so you can build it, then great, but know what you're getting into.” There's so much talk about “go direct” that I think there's probably a lot of people who are investing all the time and money and hassle and mental headaches of building a Shopify store and then not getting the reward out of it to pay for it. I also know so many people who I would consider artisan authors who do a lot of direct selling, and they're largely advertising-driven. So that's kind of the way I look at it. If you can afford to start playing with advertising, it might be a better move financially, but if you just want to begin growing your store, you can do it over time. What do you think? Do you need to advertise aggressively? Joanna: I don't advertise, but like you and I, I have always done email lists and also launching. Where you do in-person sales, I always say, “Buying direct from me means buying from my Shopify stores.” So my hardbacks and stuff are on my Shopify, the bundles are on Shopify, the special deals, the whole series— I just have so much that is Shopify-only. My workbooks and all of my website stuff, the podcast, my emails—they all direct people to those pages first. [My stores are at CreativePennBooks.com and JFPennBooks.com] So you are right, you need traffic. I don't think you need to advertise because I don't advertise to my stores right now, but I do send traffic from my other sources, like this show, for example. Johnny: Right. Well, you're kind of your own advertising too. That is a thing. Joanna: It's marketing. It's not paid advertising. But you are right, you can't just build it and they will come, but I don't think you can do that anywhere. You can't do that on Amazon, you can't do that wherever. Johnny: No, but what I love about this is that — Every artisan author is different. The metaphor is, “learn to use a compass, don't try to follow a map.” The fact that your approach is already so different from my experience and some other people that I know is really cool. You're able to drive artisan traffic on your Shopify store, and I have focused so much on driving it in live sales. It's just different pools, different buckets. Joanna: Let's come to one of the things in the subtitle of the book, which says “The Low-Stress Approach.” Low stress is a very interesting term to use, Johnny, because you taught marketing back in the day. In the book, you say you don't do social media anymore. There's a lot of things that are stressful, social media being one of them for me, but marketing still matters. What can you recommend for people who do want this low-stress approach to book marketing? Johnny: So interestingly, I work much more now than I used to. Neither of us, I think, were ever doing rapid release, not by its formal definition, but it is such a high-churn thing. That low-pressure thing… I think there's a huge difference between what you have to do and when you have options. When I say that I work a lot now, I'm choosing to build something on my own timetable, and I can do it however I want and follow the results that I'm getting. What bugs me about rapid release is the “have to” of it. I think that's where the stress and the pressure comes from, because the algorithm demands that you keep producing, otherwise it falls apart. So, to be clear, the target I'm looking at as maybe not so great for a lot of authors is rapid release with an almost exclusive Kindle Unlimited focus. There are plenty of people who use Kindle Unlimited who I think are artisan authors, or can be, because they just have that for their eBooks and they have a sensible funnel. Typically it's that myopic focus on largely Amazon-only because it's exclusive, largely just eBooks only, and then America-only almost by default. When you talk about international, that bugs the crap out of me that it seems like so many authors, including authors in other countries sometimes, are considering, “Well, I'm just going to hit the US market primarily.” Because, yes, Amazon has stores outside of the US, but it's really the US that we're focusing on. So that sort of churn, that very specific thing… you don't have diversification of assets, so you have to keep producing because that's all you have. When I say low pressure, it means that if you wanted to take a two-week vacation, you could do it. Meanwhile, I know rapid-release authors who are like, “Man, if I want to take a two-week vacation, I have to work really, really fast so that I have something to release while I'm on vacation. Otherwise, I'm going to get to the four or five-week mark and my whole empire is going to collapse.” It's that relentless grind and the fact that you almost have to do it forever—because when does the algorithm give you a break? I think that's what's leading so many people into this horrible burnout. Joanna: Well then, can you comment on the lack of social media? Because— I feel like another rule that people have at the moment is you have to be on social media to be an author. Johnny: Yes, I don't believe that at all. I don't like social media. By the way, that's no judgment. I know plenty of people do like it. I just don't, and so I don't do the things that I don't want to do. I think that an artisan author is kind of stubborn and says, “Well, I don't want to do things that I don't want to do.” For me, I think that there are many different ways to focus. I had a guy next to me at a live stall recently, and he was just enamored with my displays and kept saying, “You have to do social media, man.” What I kept trying to tell him was, “I have X amount of energy and focus, and I can spend it wherever I want.” At the time I was talking to him, I was choosing to spend it around the square in a small Texas town selling books. That was how I was using my energy because there are many different things that you could do that could make a lot of money, but you have to pick and choose them. Otherwise, I just think we get spread too thin. For me, that's just a choice that I've made not to do social media, but there are plenty of other choices. The people who do social media heavily might decide, “I'm not going to do advertising,” or, “I'm certainly not going to sell live.” So it's just a different choice for me. I have opted out of that. You're right, everybody says you must do social media, and I'm here to tell you that you don't. I don't do it at all. My off-Amazon sales—Kickstarter and live sales alone—are basically my bread and butter right now and are enough to live on. Joanna: I'm almost completely off it, but I'm still on X for looking at things and I put some pictures on Instagram @jfpennauthor , but I'm just not on it every day. I think more and more, as you say, part of the artisan approach is choosing what you want to do because it's a lifestyle as well, right? It's a lifestyle that we want, and we want to live this way, and we want it to be sustainable. So you mentioned Kickstarter there, and of course I also love Kickstarter. What I love about it, apart from being able to do amazing books and gorgeous signed things, is that it's more campaign-focused. So you can do a big push for a couple of weeks and then you fulfill. So I like that kind of approach too, which I think works with taking a break and stuff like that. Why do you like Kickstarter? Because this is your second or third, something like that? Johnny: No, it's actually my sixth. The Kickstarter for The Artisan Author is my sixth because we were old school. Sean and I did Fiction Unboxed and then StoryShop back around 2014 or 2016 or so. It was a while ago, before Brandon Sanderson nuked Kickstarter with his books. The reason that I like it… interestingly, I just thought it was a cool tool to play with originally. “Boy, I can do these cool, beautiful books and I can have a direct connection, and from a business standpoint, I can have a higher average order value” and that sort of thing. What's been interesting is that as I've really been thinking in an artisan direction, my brain has been there and I've realized, “Oh, launches don't really matter in the way that they used to.” For me, a typical book launch was on Amazon… now I think, “Oh, well, the Kickstarter should just be my launch.” Then I don't really have to have a launch on the bookstores. Now, you need some mechanism to get some reviews and stuff because that matters, but you can ask your Kickstarter backers to review your book on Amazon if you want. The back-shelving of Amazon has kind of made me say, “Well, the Kickstarter is just my main tool now. That's just how I launch.” And when it's been launched, then it's been launched and it becomes one more book in my catalog. I don't have to keep throwing fuel on that fire in the same way because the people who are coming back to me week after week, they're self-fueling. I don't need to hit them with some algorithmic thing on Amazon. Joanna: Tell us what you are doing for this Kickstarter because this interview goes out as you are doing a Kickstarter. Johnny: Yes, it's live right now — The Artisan Author. This is actually kind of fun. I wanted to just do the Kickstarter for the reasons that I've already mentioned, and I thought, “Well, okay, I can create the audiobook and the paperback and the ebook and then I'll have a nice hardback special edition.” The more I thought about it and the more I did comparison shopping and market research, I realized—and I knew this—that usually for a non-fiction Kickstarter, you're able to offer some sort of higher-touch service. So I've kind of reframed—and stick with me on this because it's a little weird—I don't really like online courses because so many of them just rub me the wrong way. I know I made a bunch of them, and I'm just kind of burned out on that. I was like, “Wouldn't it be cool if I could do a course, but I don't want to do a course like that? That sucks.” I was talking to my wife, who had coached me through something a little while ago where I was feeling kind of lonely out here, not being around people. She said, “Well, you always really liked college. You've talked about wanting to lecture at a college. Wouldn't that be cool?” Those conversations came together and I thought, “What if I were to do it like a college?” I get that it's a little weird, that it would be like an Artisan University, but rather than having a bunch of pre-recorded things with some sort of grandiose promises, it's more like, “No, what if you were to go through and we were to treat the book like a textbook over a ten-week curriculum and have units and discussions and a final exam and all the sort of trappings of college?” It felt like a really cool experiment. So it's very different from the typical online course, but that's the way I'm framing everything. If you want to just self-learn and you just want to get the ebook or the paperback or whatever, that's great. But then I have these many tiers of attending the course, from auditing it to doing high-touch accountability groups and almost like private tutoring. So it's kind of cool. I'm really curious to see what happens and how people like it. Joanna: And of course, people can just get the ebook if they want. This is one of the important things about Kickstarter: to have different tiers for different ways that people might want to interact with you. Johnny: Yes, and it'll be available as a normal book too. If you aren't into Kickstarter, you can just go and search for it. It's on Amazon and Kobo and Barnes & Noble and all those places as a pre-order. For people who really like the Kickstarter energy, I thought this would be cool. I kind of like the idea of doing the professor thing. I think that might be really neat. Joanna: Where can people find you and your books and the Kickstarter online? Johnny: Well, most importantly, the Kickstarter is at JohnnyBTruant.com/artisan, and that'll redirect to the regular book after the Kickstarter. Then I'm at JohnnyBTruant.com. There are links to my live selling schedule if you happen to be in or around Austin or anywhere I'm going, or if you want to check out my book catalog or anything like that. Joanna: Fantastic. Well, thanks so much for your time, Johnny. That was great. Johnny: Thanks for having me on.The post The Artisan Author With Johnny B Truant first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Are you struggling to get reviews for your book? Wondering how to navigate the different types of reviews, from customer feedback to professional blurbs? Joe Walters from IndependentBookReview.com gives his tips. In the intro, how important is ‘truth' in memoir? The Observer on Raynor Winn's The Salt Path; Raynor's statement; Memoir controversies [The Guardian]; Tips on memoir writing and ‘truth'; The Buried and the Drowned Short Story Collection; and when life stops you from achieving a goal. 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  Joe Walters is the author of The Truth About Book Reviews: An Insider's Guide to Getting and Using Reviews to Grow Your Readership, and also runs IndependentBookReview.com, which focuses on reviewing indie books. 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 are the three different types of book reviews? How to get customer reviews, whether you're a new author or more established Why blurbs / editorial reviews are still worth getting and how to use them Pitching influencers, book bloggers, and more What kind of reviews can you pay for, and what can you definitely NOT pay for? Handling negative reviews, and the importance of getting feedback before publication You can find Joe at IndependentBookReview.com. Transcript of Interview with Joe Walters Joanna: Joe Walters is the author of The Truth About Book Reviews: An Insider's Guide to Getting and Using Reviews to Grow Your Readership, and also runs IndependentBookReview.com, which focuses on reviewing indie books. So welcome to the show, Joe. Joe: Oh, thank you so much for having me. Joanna: It's good to have you on. So first up— Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and publishing. Joe: I started writing back in college and fell in love with it through Ray Bradbury. I wanted to be a high school English teacher, but I learned pretty quickly that teaching was a lot of work when I came home, and not the same as discussing books in college. So, I decided to become a volunteer reader for a literary magazine called Indianola Review. We were print and digital, and I would read short stories with a team and vote on whether they would be published. I absolutely loved that. I moved away from teaching and became a server so that I could have more time to read and write. While I was serving, I found a job in Oregon as the marketing director at a small press called Inkwater Press. By some miracle, I got that job and had to figure out what book marketing was. It's a long game, and I read your book and so many others about how to do it. I got my feet wet, figured out how to market and sell books, and how to get authors who I knew cared about their writing read by more people. Then I had to move from Portland, Oregon, and come back home to Pennsylvania. But I didn't want to stop being in publishing, so I started Independent Book Review. I knew that indie authors needed a platform for book reviews, and I knew I could do a good job with it. I started building that and worked freelance for two other indie presses, Paper Raven Books and Sunbury Press. I was targeting book reviews for them, doing metadata, book descriptions, author bios—anything you could think of for book marketing. I was doing all of that for those presses while building Independent Book Review. A couple of years ago, Independent Book Review became my full-time job. So every day, I'm editing and promoting reviews, and it's truly the best job I've ever had. Joanna: I love that. I love that you have loved books and stories so much that you've dedicated so much time to it. But why indie books then? Because you obviously worked in the more traditional side as well, and you come from literature at university and all that. Why did you choose indie books? Joe: I just knew how much they needed it. It has nothing to do with quality why they're not getting picked up by major review companies or major blurbers. Their books are still great. They still get editing and great cover design, but they don't have big teams or a lot of money behind them pushing the books. I knew how much I could at least be another voice for them. “Indie” really means all of the authors that you know down the street, your friends. It's very rare that you're friends with Stephen King. I'm trying to help the little guy who loves writing and books and just wants to get his work out there. So, I'm all indie all the time, that's for sure. Except for my leisure reading—sometimes I dabble elsewhere. Joanna: We all read around. When you are a big reader like we are, you hardly ever look at the publisher, right? It's not like we go shopping by publisher, but you are right in terms of who reviews stuff. Then your own book— What kind of writing have you done, and tell us why you wanted to do this book? Joe: I've always been a fiction writer. I've been writing short stories for a long time. I'm still working on a novel I started 10 years ago, and it's not there yet. I wanted to finish that book before I got my book review book out, but then I just had to get the book review book out. I couldn't wait on my little 10-year-old protagonist anymore. I had to jump in and offer my expertise to the indie community for book reviews. Mostly, when I was working for presses, I just got the question a lot: “How do you get book reviews?” “How do you get certain types of book reviews?” So, big media, blogs, podcast interviews, customer reviews—I got all of these questions all the time. I wanted to create a resource for all of those authors. I enjoy writing about it too. I've been writing book marketing blogs for years, and I always thought that was my best chance of making jokes. So I filled my book with jokes and as much experience and knowledge as I have, and put them all in one place. You're going to get specific platforms to try pitching. You're going to have book review resources in my book. I just tried to gather all of the things in one place instead of authors and presses searching forever to figure out what works. I tried to compress everything I know into one document, and now I've got it with The Truth About Book Reviews. Joanna: It is super useful. We are going to come to the content of the book in a minute. Given that this was, I guess, your first self-publishing experience, how did that go? Did you learn anything that made you understand why being an indie is difficult? Joe: Oh, too many things. First of all, the timeline. The hope I had for finishing a book in like three months definitely got sidetracked. With the amount of things I have to do for Independent Book Review and in my everyday life, three months was impossible. Initially, I said, “Oh, this book's going to be out in January,” and here we are with a July 10th release date and I'm still sprinting. So that is difficult. Also, I tried to upload my ebook for KDP pre-order about two weeks ago with a different subtitle, and they shut me down four or five different times before I had to change it. I even told my wife, “I'm not changing the subtitle. I like it too much. I'm not keyword farming or anything. I'm not cheating.” My book is about books. The subtitle was originally “An Insider's Guide to Getting Book Reviews and Using Them to Market Your Book.” Pretty straightforward, I think. But you can't have “book” too many times in the title and subtitle. I had it three times, so I cut one out. I said, “Getting Reviews and Using Them to Market Your Book,” and they didn't even like that. So I had to get rid of it. There are no “books” in the subtitle now, but at least it's up for pre-order. Joanna: This is so interesting. With my very first book, I also put up something—this was in the early days when there was only really Amazon in terms of self-publishing. I had something like “From Idea to Amazon” as a subtitle, and they shut that down because, of course, I used their own company name, and I understood that. The word “book” does seem a little extreme, especially when it's about book reviews. But this is the point, there are all of these things that are difficult to do. So let's get into the content of the book. It is super useful. So authors do obviously talk about book reviews as if they're one thing, but they're not all one thing. What are the different types of book reviews and where can they be used? Joe: I separate them into three different types of reviews. I've seen other marketers separate them into four, but let's stick with three for now. The first one in my timeline is blurbs or editorial reviews. Basically, those are like testimonials for your book. You ask authors or experts in your niche to read an early copy of your book and provide a few sentences of praise for it so that you can use it on your marketing material. That could be putting it on your book cover. For example, if you get a big notable name, you put J.F. Penn right on the front cover, and bam, that's helping other readers and browsers see that this could be a book for them. You can also put it on your Amazon page itself in the editorial review section through Amazon Author Central, or you can do it with Amazon A+ content, which is graphics on your Amazon page. I love those. You can also use it on things like your website and on social media graphics. One of my favorite things to do is to use it in future pitches. If I reach out to a different review platform and I have a blurb from a notable company who said this book was incredible and gave it a starred review, then that really works wonders for helping that recipient think maybe this book's quality has already been gate-kept in a way that indie authors aren't always. It's a way for readers to see, “Okay, somebody read this book and somebody said it was good.” So those would be blurbs or editorial reviews. The second type of review I consider media or trade reviews. Media reviews, to me, are any reviews in the media. I'm going to count social media because it has it in the name. I think as long as you're getting publicity for it, that is a media review. You can get it on social media. Podcasts aren't always necessarily a review, but it's media. Then trade reviews are from trade review publications—publications that focus only on books, as opposed to bigger media like People that focuses on culture and fashion and all sorts of cool stuff in addition to books. You can use those in different ways too. The first of which is publicity. Share that link with your audience. Then you can put it on your websites as well. Just like blurbs, you can pull a quote from your larger review and use it with newsletters, websites, and social media. You can also put it in distributor backends like PublishDrive or IngramSpark. The third type of review is the most common and probably the most difficult: customer reviews on Amazon, Goodreads, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Kobo. You're getting those reviews for your product page so every browser that comes sees that you have 150 reviews and can scroll through them to find out what everyday people are saying about it. So that is a totally different strategy than the strategy that you would use for media reviews. Joanna: That is a great overview. It's interesting because I've certainly always focused more on customer reviews than anything else because they help the algorithms, they help the social proof, and they help with advertising. It's very hard to advertise a book with no reviews. The comments I get from authors now are, “Oh, well, it's all right for you. You've got X number of reviews.” And I'm like, “Yeah, we all start somewhere.” So if someone listening is like, “Okay, I need to get customer reviews on, say, Amazon or Goodreads,”— What are some tips for getting those customer reviews for new authors with new books who might not have an ARC review team? Joe: Everybody does start somewhere. It is difficult and time-consuming, most of all. So much in publishing is you're either paying for it with your dollars or your time, and with customer reviews, so much of it is your time. My favorite way to get customer reviews is using comp titles. Even if you wrote the most unique book you've ever read, other people have written unique books. You should have been reading other books similar to yours while you were writing it or before, but you can check them out now on the bestseller pages on Amazon. You can find books that are similar to yours, and then find out where those books have been reviewed. If you're looking for customer reviews, head over to their Amazon page and see if they've been published in the last 10 to 15 years. You don't want to go too deep, and you probably don't want to pick books that have a thousand-plus reviews, but maybe in the 100 to 500 review range. You can scroll down to those customer reviews and check out if those reviewers have profiles. If they have profiles, they might share public social media accounts or websites, and they like to be pitched for free reviews. So that's definitely one of the best ways that I've found to get new customer reviews. You can also do the same thing with smaller blogs. Smaller blogs can turn into customer reviews pretty often. If you search a book just like yours and you Google it or you ask ChatGPT to find where they've been reviewed and you pay attention to the lesser-known ones, then you can give yourself a pretty good shot of pitching for a customer review from those places. Asking for the blog review first and seeing if it can convert into a customer review. Then there's also building a launch team. I know if you are just starting out, you might not have a big list of supporters who you know will be reading your book, but— You can definitely still build a launch team with your personal connections. Anybody who you've worked with in a writing workshop or something in the past—as long as they're not Facebook friends with you, so they shouldn't be really close people to you—you can build launch teams by recognizing who you've interacted with in the past and who might want to support you. Ask them to read an early copy so that they can help out in that first week of publication. I did that with my newsletter a lot. I built a launch team through my newsletter by just creating a form for people to sign up and putting it in my automation sequence. I ended up getting 20-plus people to offer to review the book. So there are options. They're all going to take time. You can ask people inside the book itself with a link to review the book at the very end, right before the back matter. You can also try paid resources. You can't pay for customer reviews, but you can pay places like Pubby, where you can read other indie author books and get your book reviewed in return. They work around it in that way. Then you can try things like BookFunnel, StoryOrigin, and NetGalley. PubNook is another one like Pubby. There are options; it's just about time. Joanna: This is so important. You did say it there, but just to emphasize, you cannot offer something in exchange for a review. So when we're offering our book to people, we are saying, “Here's my book.” I always just say, “If you like it and would like to leave a review, I'd really appreciate that.” Even with our ARC lists, we can't say, “Here's a free book in exchange for a review.” It has to be somebody's free choice to do a review. And as you said, you can't pay someone to do a review. There are lots of these services, but that's not allowed. So as you say, there are ways around it, but we have to be clear. If I send out an email to my review list, my ARC team, maybe one out of three, or sometimes one in two, will actually leave a review within the period. So even people who've signed up to say they will do a review… I guess what I'm saying is don't get annoyed with people if they don't. Everyone has things on their to-do list, haven't they? So we do have to be careful about how we're asking for these things. Joe: Yes, I said it multiple times in my book: really, don't get annoyed at these people. They're offering to read your book; that is the best part. So if they leave a review, that is super helpful, but if they disappear, that's okay too. Don't chase people and be annoyed. Do not chase them. Joanna: These lovely book bloggers do all this stuff basically for the love of it, and they just get so many pitches. So, yes, it is one of those sort of frustrating areas, but also really important. So let's say, like me, when I was a new author, I did make a lot more effort. There'll be authors listening who have an email list, they have a lot of books. The more backlist you have, the more difficult it is to try and tell people which book you need reviews on. What can we do to get consistent reviews over years, especially on backlist books? Because basically, you need to get reviews regularly in order to keep things sort of moving. Joe: This is a good problem to have, really. But you do still have to stay on top of it even though you have less time to pitch one-on-one. My favorite way, the easiest way, is to make sure that there's a page at the end of the book that includes an actual clickable link. What I like to do is create a redirection link before your book is available. My redirection link is independentbookreview.com/reviewlink. I just use that through WordPress. Right now, the ebook is not published, so if I were to redirect that link to my ebook review page, it would just be dead. So right now, pre-publication, it's taking you to a Goodreads review page, which you can have beforehand. Once the book gets published, you go over to the redirect, you change the link, and then you don't have to edit the ebook or anything. All the person has to do is click that link when the book is already out. You should have changed it to the ebook review link, so you don't have to edit anything. It's just automatically clickable. So that's one of my favorite ways to do it, for sure. Then you don't have to do any work after that. I also like automation sequences in emails. You can set up a special sign-up page for those who read your book. Let's say you have a specific link that you send them to in your bio or in the front matter. They sign up via a specific form that separates them in your email company, and you can have a review request that automatically goes out to whoever signed up for that 30 days after, for example. You already know that these are the people who came from your book. I like automation sequences in emails, for sure. And then, make it easy to find on your website. All you need is “Contact for review copies.” It's very simple. Have an email if you want, or a contact box. You can also have a Google Form or a Jotform for people to click and say, “I want to join my ARC team.” They sign up, put their information in, and you will already have somebody to send it out to the next time your book comes out. Joanna: I like those, good tips there. So let's come to the blurbs or the editorial reviews because this has very much been a sort of traditionally published thing. Indies have never really done this as much. It was interesting that earlier in the year, there was a Simon and Schuster article in The Guardian here in the UK, and it basically said — “Expecting authors, agents, and editors to secure blurbs can create an incestuous and unmeritocratic literary ecosystem that often rewards connections over talent.” I thought that was interesting because it seems to suggest that there's a sort of move against these kinds of blurbs and editorial reviews. So what are your thoughts on when these are useful? How can we get them in an authentic way rather than just always pitching famous names? Joe: Yes, I love that article. Somebody said it finally. I feel like it's so true. Rewarding connections over talent—blurbs are connections. Stephen King is one of the most prolific blurbers I know. I don't know if he reads all those books. I would love to ask him, but I just don't know. It's about putting their name on your marketing. If they get to put their name on your popular book cover, that's positive for them. The thing is that most readers, I would say, don't really understand the connections part of it in the same way that literary inside-circle people do. I know this, other writers know this, authors know this, that some of these blurbs mean that maybe they share an agent with that author or have the same indie press. But it's still about needing more content, and blurbs are content. You can't be the one who calls your book spectacular, so putting somebody else's name on there is beneficial. Connections are good too. I'm a person who runs a book review site. If I see that somebody has a connection with someone as influential as Ta-Nehisi Coates and the book is in the niche, then it gets my brain going. It's like, “Oh, maybe they were in the same writing program, maybe they have the same agent, maybe they were in a panel together.” Those are still beneficial. That means that that book could get good publicity, like Ta-Nehisi Coates's books get good publicity. I like them. Bookstores and librarians still like them. I understand it from the Simon and Schuster side because their books are already getting into bookstores and libraries. They're succeeding there. We need as much help as we can get as indies, so I still like them. Media and trade reviews can also be used as blurbs, so you don't necessarily have to have these crazy good connections. Although, of course, it's really helpful to have connections. All you need to do is get reviewed on these other platforms, and you can use them in that way. In terms of getting them authentically, just having an actually marketable book and story, I think, is the most important. You have to have the recipient believe in that product before they endorse it. Sometimes blurb writers don't read every word of every book, and so they want to be able to trust it just from the outset. So you have to look at it and be like, “Okay, this doesn't include any problematic tropes in the description, or the cover isn't already bad.” There are a lot of things that go into it, but make sure it's marketable right away, and then just be genuine in your pitch. And maybe read their books before you pitch them. Joanna: I mean, this is what I was going to say. The worst thing is I get so many pitches all the time, and most of them are completely inappropriate. They're just not targeted at me, either my non-fiction or my fiction, and that is the most frustrating thing. It's better to send three proper emails to people who you know are a good fit than just scatter-gunning. Joe: Absolutely. And we can tell too, when you say, “I've read your book” or “I read your website,” and then you use a generic example that is in every book, make sure it's so pointed. If you're reaching out to a romance author and you've read one of their books, don't just say, “Oh, the love story was so sweet.” No. Say something like, “Timmy and Sarah in the locker room.” Be so specific. Make sure that they see it and recognize, “Okay, they actually did read it, and I like that scene too.” So hit their feels a little bit by being really specific. Joanna: Definitely. I think that's a really good tip. It also has to be a good fit with the genre. Reading a book is not like listening to a song. This is not like a three-to-five-minute job. This is reading a book, which for most of us, we have so many books on our TBR list, that taking time out to read a book is significant. The other thing I guess is the amount of time. I think one of the reasons traditional publishing is much better at this kind of thing is because they have such a long lead time. They might give people six months, whereas most indies are like, “Oh, it comes out next week.” So doing it a lot further in advance, I guess, would be another tip. Joe: Yes, absolutely. Joanna: Okay. So then what about influencers and other media? We don't have any connections with these people. Everybody wants a big-name TikToker to do a review on their book on their channel. How can we research and pitch influencers? Joe: I think first, you have to have a good platform. Not necessarily a big follower platform, although it would help, but make sure wherever you're pitching social media influencers, in particular, that your platform is actually good at curating the content. If you think of it in terms of a collaboration, they want their stuff to get seen by your people too. So build up your people, make sure that the actual content is likable, lovable, unique, stands out, and is good, shareable content, first of all. Then, if you are looking for Instagram in particular and you want to DM influencers, you're going to have to find a way to get them to follow you. I think that would be the biggest piece of it. So seek out not necessarily relationships, but engage with their stuff. Make sure they see you in the comments. Make sure you are being genuine and trying to form connections rather than just pitching someone cold because if you pitch somebody cold who doesn't follow you on Instagram, you're going to get buried in their message requests. So definitely try to work with that first. It's going to take a ton of time, but it's time that maybe, if you're on social media already, you are already spending there. So I think those things make a big difference over time. Get started early. Don't just start a month before publication. Even if you do start a month before publication, you can still make it work as long as you are forming a connection over time. In terms of finding those people, you just have to spend time on your platforms. Whichever platform you think would be most beneficial to you, spend time on it. See who is being successful. Search your keywords, search your comp titles, search your categories, and let the TikTok algorithm start to show you more book stuff. The only way to reach out to and find these people is to find them on those platforms first. Joanna: So there's a whole load of people going, “This sounds like a ton of work. I don't want to be doing this. This is an absolute nightmare.” So what are the lines around paying for reviews? We mentioned that there are some ways around this. I guess also tell us about Independent Book Review, because I think you have both options, don't you? So tell us about that. How can we navigate paying for specific types of book reviews, and what are some good ways to do that, while avoiding the scams? Joe: Yes. First, it is a time nightmare sometimes. I wrote this book to be the most helpful for authors to recognize what they're up against and where they should be putting their time, because realistically, there's just more time than you have to spend getting book reviews. It's also about not putting too much pressure on yourself. Recognize how much work this is, but don't take shortcuts by trying to pay for customer reviews. You cannot do it. You don't want your account banned; you don't want the other people's accounts banned. So make sure you put a full stop there. Don't try to get around it by getting Facebook friends or the person who lives in your house to write a review for you. Skip out on all that. But you can pay for other review services. You can pay people to do research for you. I already mentioned how many minutes you can spend just on Amazon pages trying to find customer reviewers, and if you don't have that much time because you have to write your next book, you can pay people to do it. You can find marketers or assistants on Reedsy, which is a good source. Fiverr can have some good assistants as long as you do your vetting. Then you can use services like Pubby, which I still like a lot, because you get to read and help other indie authors and help yourself in the process. For editorial reviews, which are blurbs that you use in your marketing material from authors, experts, and review companies, you can pay for those. You can one hundred percent pay for publicity. When you pay for an editorial review by a book review company like mine, you are making sure your book is read, assessed, and given an honest review by experts—the book reviewers. You are making sure a reader puts your book on the top of their list, and you'll end up with a 400-word or more book review from Independent Book Review. It includes a summary and, if applicable, praise and criticism. So it really depends on how they like your book. The only thing is, you don't want to pay for too many editorial reviews. You shouldn't pay every book review company you come across because you're going to lose a lot of money that way. It can go from $100 to $500 to $600. So make sure you recognize your budget beforehand. If you feel like you're spending too much time pitching—if you are pitching too many media and trade reviews and not getting any of them, or only getting one, and you really want to have blurbs by launch day—you can pay companies like mine to give you a chance for a couple of sentences of a blurb. It can help. I think that you should probably have three to five editorial reviews on your Amazon page before publication, but every author is different, every publisher is different. Although I do think having that validity helps. Joanna: It can also help your confidence. You mentioned NetGalley before. I think a lot of indie authors have a difficult time with NetGalley because it is so dominated by traditionally published books. Again, it's not necessarily the quality, but the reviewers themselves sometimes have a bit of an attitude towards indie books. So I would say that NetGalley can be quite difficult and that it is potentially a better idea, as you say, to focus on other types of reviews. One thing we do need to cover is, everybody wants reviews, but what if they are one-star or two-star, or even three-star reviews? Obviously, we would love everything to be a five-star or a four-star review. So how do we handle bad reviews? How do we handle negative reviews in general, whether it is an editorial review or a customer review? Joe: Yes. First of all, breathe. For customer reviews in particular, these people are not experts. They're not editors. Well, I mean, they're experts in that they read all the time and provide critical analysis of books, but they're not here trying to improve your book. They're speaking to other readers, and they have personal reading experiences. That means that they could be coming at it with bias, with prejudices, with incorrect information. My favorite way for dealing with negative customer reviews is to just get so many of them that the numbers don't affect you. Keep chasing them. If you have five negative reviews out of 20, get to 50. If you took your time with that content, if you really worked hard on it and you don't even agree with these customers, then the numbers will even out. The more people you get, the more it evens out. So keep working. Don't stop. If you feel like the customer review is abusive or it's about a product that's not even yours—so they're reviewing a TV instead of your book—you can hit “report abuse” under an Amazon customer review. They might not necessarily take it down, but you can try. Don't respond to them, for sure, no matter where they are—Amazon, Goodreads, or if you had emailed them asking for a review in the past. With media and trade reviews, if they are negative or mixed, I get a lot of people who are nervous about publishing it on my website if it is a mixed or critical review. I recommend publishing it anyway. I think it's helpful to be Googleable. It's helpful because not every reader that makes it to my site reads every word of every review. Sometimes they scan. It's easier to scan with your eyes than it is to read every word on a digital screen. So they might not even read the negative part, or if they do read the criticism, maybe they don't agree with it and just decide to read the book anyway. It's just more content for your readers and your audience to engage with. If there's a negative review, try to take your emotions and yourself out of it for a little bit. It's impossible, I can say it all I want, but try. These are not meant to tell you you're doing something wrong. They're meant to speak to other readers. That's it. You can definitely think about them, but don't beat yourself up about them. Keep chasing good reviews. Keep working. Joanna: I also, same as you, consider that you should just drown it by getting more reviews. Joe: Yes. Joanna: Say you get 50 reviews and they're all one-star, then there is something wrong. Either there's probably something wrong with the book, or you've really put it in the wrong place. So let's say you've put up a book under “Christian Sweet Romance” and it's full of hardcore violence and swearing and all kinds of other things, then you've made a mistake in terms of positioning your book. So if you've positioned it well and it is a good product, then, like you say, you will get some one-star reviews, but you should mainly get alright reviews, I guess. Joe: Yes, and indie authors sometimes can run into a problem where they haven't gotten feedback before publishing. It is just so important to actually hear criticism before you get going. Reviews are not the time to get your criticism, even though it does happen. Sometimes criticism can be actually helpful to learn if you did something wrong. You can fix it with this book if you wanted to edit it again, or you can just fix it in your next one. Reviews are informative. They're about your author journey, about how you are presenting your book, if you're putting it in the right categories. Listen to them. It's important. Joanna: That's interesting you say that because I've always paid for professional editing, so I've always had feedback and critical feedback before publishing. But you are right, there are a lot of people who don't do that anymore. So that would be, I guess, another tip. I still believe in professional editors. I think it's really important to keep improving our craft, but also for that very reason, as you said, it's better to have other eyes on your book before publishing. Now, all of that has been super useful. And of course, you do have various things at Independent Book Review— Tell us a bit more about Independent Book Review? Joe: First and foremost, IndependentBookReview.com is a site for readers. So if you're looking for cool indie books, that's what I tried to do. I tried to put together book lists, starred reviews, the best in indie publishing. So definitely start reading indie books and come to IndependentBookReview.com for it. But then for writers also, you can submit your book for free if you'd like. You can buy an editorial review and guarantee it in a certain amount of time. Or you can get group beta reading, which we also offer. Basically, I have a team of booksellers, librarians, reviewers, and bloggers who will read your book before publication and share what they consider to be the most important takeaways from a reader's standpoint, not necessarily from an editor's standpoint. So you can get group beta reading with us too. My book will be available through there too. Not direct fulfillment, but if you want to go to independentbookreview.com/thetruth, you can just go ahead and find it there. I also run the Write Indie newsletter, which you'll find on my website too. Really, just go to IndependentBookReview.com, you'll figure it out. Joanna: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Joe. That was great. Joe: Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. It means a ton.The post How To Get More Book Reviews With Joe Walters first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Have you ever dreamed of turning a passion for storytelling into a profitable, long-term career? How do you build multiple successful author brands without burning out? What marketing strategies actually work in today's fast-changing industry? Ines Johnson shares her journey and the secrets to her success. In the intro, 5 phases of an author business [Becca Syme]; Lessons from writing every day for two decades [Ryan Holiday]; What the First AI Copyright Ruling Means for Authors [ALLi Podcast]; Plus, Lichfield Cathedral; The Buried and the Drowned Short Story Collection; and 50% off all my JFPenn ebooks and audiobooks and digital bundles for July 25.   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  Ines Johnson is a romance author with over a hundred books spanning paranormal, urban fantasy, contemporary, and erotica, as well as sweet romance under another pen name. 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 funk band upbringing to TV, teaching and writing Writing faster as a trained screenwriter Staying within your lane — depending on your goals The business of writing, and planning income and progress AIDA for marketing — Attention, Interest, Desire, Action Kickstarter for PageTurner Planning Selling direct and the experience you bring to readers The joys of Romancelandia You can find Ines at InesWrites.com or InesWrites.substack.com. Transcript of Interview with Ines Johnson Joanna: Ines Johnson is a romance author with over a hundred books spanning paranormal, urban fantasy, contemporary, and erotica, as well as sweet romance under another pen name. Welcome to the show, Ines. Ines: Hi, Jo. Thank you so much for having me. Joanna: 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. Ines: I grew up in a funk band; that's always my truth. My father was the bass player, and one of my formative memories was of him explaining music composition to me. He explained how the keyboard had its part and would tell a story, the drums had a part and would tell a story, and then finally the vocalists came on and they told a different story. He showed me how all of these worked together to make the story complete, to be the characters. It was from that moment I knew I was supposed to be in storytelling. I thought I was going to be a singer, but my daddy said, “Oh, sweetie, no, you're not going to be a singer.” So I started first in television, and then I found my way into novel writing. I worked in cable television for a number of years for National Geographic Television, on the Explorer show, which was before they had a channel. I loved that; we met so many fascinating people from all around the world. Then I started to work in children's television. While I was working in children's television, I was also an avid reader, which I have been since I was very young. There are pictures of my youngest aunt corralling me and my cousins off the city bus and into the library. Going to the library and being able to take books home was the best thing ever. But my godmother, who lived a few blocks up the street, had a pantry where you’re supposed to keep boxes of pasta and cans of beans. She didn't have that. Instead, she had all these teeny tiny little Harlequins and Silhouettes; that was my second library. She said I could take and read whatever I wanted, and I did. She didn't try to censor me because, back then, the love scene was when the waves would crash! I read those books and it became an absolute addiction for me, and it stayed with me even when I was working in television. When I went on to work in children's television, I was reading Twilight in between reading scripts for the show. The writing bug bit me. I would be writing screenplays in Final Draft, then switch over to Word or eventually Scrivener and work on a novel. It took me years for that first novel to be recognizable as a piece of literature. It has not seen the light of day, but that was fine. After the first one, I wrote the next one in a year, the next in six months, the next in three months, and now I'm a whole lot faster than that. But I always like to preface my “speed” with the fact that I'm a trained screenwriter. We would do 13 scripts per season, two seasons per year. That's a normal pace for me. My brain doesn't think it's supposed to take a year or more to write a novel. No, you need to have this full script, this part of the story, done in the time you have. Joanna: That is really interesting. I think people who come from screenwriting or journalism are fast writers because they're used to deadlines. It’s a job, you do the work, and there are the words. I get that. When did you first decide to self-publish? Ines: I first self-published in December 2014. I published a three-part serial, as it was really popular to do serial books back then. It was the era of KU 1.0, where you got paid the same no matter how long or short the book was. That worked for me because that's how my mind is; I don't think in terms of a feature film, I think in episodes. So I started to write these shorter stories, and they did well, and then I just wrote more and more. At the time, I only wrote romance, but I didn't understand genres or tropes. I started writing a dystopian, then a sci-fi, then a paranormal. I was going all over the place, and each time I was building a new audience that wouldn't follow to the next genre. The people that read the dystopian were not interested in the contemporary, and so on. It didn't make sense to me until other authors pulled me up by my bootstraps and said, “Girlfriend, let me give you some advice.” That's the beautiful thing about the romance author community. They told me, “It's fantastic that you keep finding an audience, but you want to try to retain them. One of the ways to do that is to pick a lane and stay in it.” I was crisscrossing too many lanes on the highway to keep my readers. That's when I decided pen names were for me because I didn't want to limit myself, so I just made more than one. Joanna: I know that people don't cross over and it's so weird, isn't it? Because I think many writers, myself included, read so many different genres. So I don't really understand people who only read one. How have the pen names worked for you and how do you keep multiple names going? Ines: For the folks that are listening, I think the vast majority of readers probably read a handful of books a year. Indies aren't focused on the masses like that. We're very focused on the ‘whale readers,' the ones that read a book a day. I'm a whale reader; I read one to two books a day. A lot of these whale readers are often mood readers, so you don't necessarily have to pick a lane and stay in it forever. For a period of time, they may only want one specific thing. Right now, I'm in a contemporary mood. Next week I'll be in a historical mood, and after that, I might be in a sci-fi mood. However, if you want a faster route to profitability, picking a lane is a strategy that works. It's just a strategy, and it's a strategy that works if you're looking at profitability. If you are an artist, then you don't have to listen to this advice. You have to determine what you want out of your career, and that's the lane you need to pick. If your goal requires you to be a very focused genre writer, then you do that. If you are a different kind of writer and you want to write across various spectrums, you just need to set your goals accordingly. Find the right readers, and then stay on your beautiful highway. Joanna: Apart from focus, what are the other mistakes that either you've made yourself or that you see others make? Ines: The main mistake I see… well, one person's mistake can be another person's boon. I feel that if you understand who you are, what you want, and what your goals are, you make fewer mistakes. They just become opportunities. For me, you are not going to see me talking about politics in my books. I'm trying to escape it as much as I possibly can. But I see other authors who embrace it wholeheartedly, and the readers love them for it. I see authors who post very personal things on social media. I am not that girl. I keep a lot of things close to my chest. You'll feel like you know me, but you couldn't tell a lot of actual facts about me after a conversation. I don't suffer from that because I know what my limits are. For other authors, that’s a mistake for them because they go too far. I really think it becomes about understanding who you are and what you want because this industry changes so fast you will get whiplash. The thing that stays the same is you, your goals, and why you're doing this. If you can keep that close to your chest, any potential mistake becomes an opportunity that you can really see and dig deep into to make the best of it. Joanna: You mentioned you started in KU, but now you are selling direct as well as publishing wide. A lot of people think all romance authors are just KU authors. Tell us about selling direct and wide. Ines: I started in KU because I didn't understand how to upload to the other retailers. Eventually, I learned, but I'm always looking at my goals, and my pen names have different goals. My Ines Johnson pen name mostly writes paranormal and fantasy. My Shanae Johnson pen name is the queen of wholesome romance. She sticks to her lane. Those are my two main pen names. Shanae can be wide because if you look on Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, or Google Play, you can see genres like contemporary western, military, and small-town romance. Those are universal. Genres like paranormal romance, paranormal women's fiction, and reverse harem were born on Amazon. Those specific categories were born there. So I'm always watching not only what the industry is doing but what the readers are doing and where they are. Shanae could go into KU with her clean and wholesome romance, but why, when there are readers everywhere? Ines could come out of KU, but why, when the readers for her genres are concentrated right there? And yes, I am selling direct. I sell more print books direct than I do on Amazon, and the margins are better for me there. When you're selling direct, you have to think about how you are different. Amazon can't do everything. Amazon can't sell you the ebook, the audiobook, the print book, a special edition, and a swag pack all in one bundle. For one Kickstarter I did for a spicy romance, I sold the ebook, the print book, and the audiobook. I also sold a webinar. Inside the book, there were some spicy scenes that dealt with rope play, so I got an expert to come on and give my readers a special demonstration, and they all got some rope. You can't do that on Amazon. You can give a completely different experience. You can have tea parties. You can build a book box with all kinds of amazing goodies. A friend of mine who's really crafty made objects for her readers to go with the book. You can't do that on Amazon. Direct is an experience. It's about bundles and creating an experience you can give your readers. Joanna: You’ve got a Kickstarter campaign coming for Page Turner Planning. Tell us about that and any tips for people who want to run a Kickstarter. Ines: You really have to know yourself, your why, and your lane. My number one strength on the CliftonStrengths chart is discipline. I like doing the same thing over and over again. My number two strength is achiever. I have to achieve; I have to evolve; I have to win something new. For the longest time, those two just clashed. I'm a planner. Every day I get up—and I have a number of journals—every day, I get up and I record my data. It costs me about $2,500 to $3,000 a month to cover my living expenses, which is about $80 a day. So I sit down in my little journal and I go through and check the dashboards to see how much I've earned, and I write the numbers down. I'm not just writing it down from Amazon because I'm wide, so I write all the numbers down. I don't put it in a spreadsheet; I just write them down, and that calms my mind. It reminds me, “Yes, you can do this self-employed thing. You can do this small business thing. You are fine. You have made the money to cover your expenses. You're good. Now, go have fun.” And that's where my muse starts to write the book. When I'm on retreats, people look over my shoulder and ask me about my planners. I record my word count, what's going on in the story… I have tons of different journals for all this information. It's really anti-anxiety for me. Two years ago, I started a little mastermind where I was showing people how to write with pacing, how I marketed, and all the prep work I did before the book was even out—how I set up my Instagram, my website, my newsletter. I also knew I needed to go to the bank and get a DBA, which became an LLC, then maybe an S Corp. Because I have a couple of degrees in education, I figured out how to deliver the information in a logical sequence. I would talk to them once a week about what they should be thinking about in their writing, their business, their branding, and their marketing. As I was supposed to be writing Page Retention, the second book in my Page Turner series, I looked back at all this content from the mastermind—more than 52 weeks' worth—and said, “This is a book.” I turned that two-year-long experiment of helping people write their book, build their business, and market themselves into a planner. And that's Page Turner Planning. Joanna: That's really useful. How does a Kickstarter work? Why is the pre-launch page so important? Ines: Kickstarter says you're going to pull some people from your audience, but you're going to pull a lot of new people to you. These new people don't know you, so you have to introduce yourself and build trust. I'm asking you for money for something that came from my brain. In this instance, it's a product that will benefit you, but you don't know me. I could be making all this stuff up. So the pre-launch page is to give you sneak peeks and to build trust. Once you have those things, people are more likely to come on board and give you a try. Joanna: What other things did you learn from your past Kickstarters that might help other people? Ines: The first thing is fear. I was terrified to run my first Kickstarter. We're both introverts who probably like to sit in our houses and write our books. I don't like to put my business out there, but when you do something like Kickstarter, you're putting your business out there for everyone to see, whether it succeeds or fails. My very first Kickstarter was with my sweet pen name, Shanae Johnson, who has a huge audience. I got 30 backers. I limped my way to funding that Kickstarter and was all kinds of confused. I was very hesitant to do a second one. I had to do a lot of mindset work before I did the Page Turner Pacing Kickstarter. The best thing I did was talking about it before it launched. These people didn't know me. I had to show them that I knew what I was talking about first. Once people saw that and I was giving them free tidbits to try, that's what worked. Having tiers where they could just try something out and see… over 700 people backed that Kickstarter, Joanna. I'm still breathless over it. I had to have a moment to convince them, or maybe I convinced their friends, that I know what I'm talking about and that I'm really here to help. Joanna: In terms of book marketing, what have you kept doing since 2014, and what have you changed? Ines: I get these bursts of energy where I figure something out and I just want to tell everybody, because I truly want us all to win. So when you see me showing up on Instagram or TikTok, it's because I figured something out and I want to show everybody. But then once I've told you, I go away. I'm always writing. You will not find me without a piece of paper and a pen. So things like Substack really work for me because I have so much to write about on the nonfiction side. In terms of marketing —  My number one piece of marketing advice is to find one new reader every single day. I might find them using an AMS ad, a Facebook ad, an Instagram post, or at a book signing. Every day, I'm looking for just one new reader. To distill what I learned in television, we used a formula called AIDA: Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action. That's really what marketing is to me. How are you going to get people's attention? You could use a startling statement, music, or color theory. We learned so much psychology on how to keep you in your seat. Then, interest starts the storytelling bit of your advertising. Then you play on people's desires—we mostly deal with emotional desires. And finally, you have to tell them to act with a call to action. That's what marketing boils down to, whether you're on TikTok, Instagram, or hand-selling in person. Joanna: What has stayed the same? I still have an email list, which has been the core. Do you think Substack has replaced email marketing for you? Ines: My Substack is purely nonfiction, but I email my fiction list every week. The thing that has stayed the same for me is consistency. I consistently publish. I'm consistently telling stories. I'm consistently talking to my audience. I don't stop. I'm consistently promoting. Things in this industry change, but the part of you that doesn't change is your goal to succeed. You just have to change how you're going to succeed based upon what is moving and shaking in the industry. It's that consistency and just showing up and using AIDA. Joanna: How much is paid advertising a part of your marketing strategy? Ines: It's very much a part of my marketing strategy. I am always looking for where the readers are. If you tell me I can go on Facebook, where there are a lot of readers who read the books I write, and all I have to do is pay some money to talk to them, I'm going to pay. How else am I going to find them? It gets harder. I'm thankful for paid advertising. Yes, I'm going to do social media. Yes, I'm going to do paid cost-per-click marketing. Yes, I'm going to do paid newsletters. Yes, I'm going to purchase a table at a signing event because guess who's there? The readers. My dad always says it takes money to make money, so I came into this business knowing that I was going to have to spend. I have my thresholds and I know when it's not worth it, but I don't think we can expect to come into a business and just start making money for free. Joanna: You've been doing this for over a decade and have seen people leave the industry. Why are you still here and still so upbeat? Ines: I'm unemployable, Joanna! But it really goes back to my dad and that lesson I learned about how story works. I feel that's why I succeeded: because I understand how story works at a granular level. That's what I try to tell people. It's because I studied the art form that I so love, and I never stop studying. I feel like every book I write is me practicing a new lesson. What am I going to study today? Maybe I watched a television show and they did something with an unreliable narrator, and I think, “I want to try that.” I will break that down, looking for the structure, the way that I was taught to look in screenwriting, and then I will write that book. I think I'm still here because I understood structure and I'm a consistent, permanent student of the structure of story. Also business. I came from corporate television—National Geographic, Discovery Channel—so I always understood that I will not be a success unless I find the audience and get my product in front of them. Joanna: Let's come back to romance. It still feels like there's some kind of stigma in the mainstream. What do you say to authors who love romance but are scared of writing it because of what people might say? Ines: Joanna, this is when my feral Gen X is about to come out. Seriously, if you are afraid, I don't think you should do it. If you don't believe in “feel the fear and do it anyway,” then don't do it. Do something else, because the romance readers will smell it on you. We are also feral creatures. I so often forget that there is a stigma outside of Romancelandia because the party inside is so loud, it's on and popping, and we're all cheering each other on. We don't come outside a lot, and when we do, we're like, “Why are you guys out here? Come inside, it's great in here!” So, if you are not in the Romancelandia community, get yourself there. But if, after you see what it’s like, you're still scared, don't do it. That's fine. You do not have to write romance. You can write something with a romantic element, and that might do better for you. Joanna: If someone wants to come inside Romancelandia, how do they do that? Ines: If you have a romance bookstore in your area, go. I just did my first trip to The Ripped Bodice in New York, and when I walked in those doors, I was like, “Oh, I'm home.” That's what it feels like. Go to the romance section of your library; you'll find a friend. Go to the romance section of your bookstore; trust me, you will find a friend. I don't know what it is about the people in this world, but as soon as we see you next to us and you pick up a book, we have something to say! “Girl, not that one. You need to read this one instead!” If that's not enough, or if you don't have a bookstore with a romance section, look up romance conferences. Look up Romance Writers of America; even though they've struggled, there are still pockets of groups and chapters that have broken off that want to talk to you and will welcome you inside. I really feel like it's like when you get a new car and all of a sudden you see your car everywhere on the road. If you speak romance into the world and say you want a romance book sister, she will find you. Joanna: We are out of time. Where can people find you and your books and your Kickstarter online? Ines: If you are an author, you'll want to go and read my Substack. I've got tons of content there, so go to ineswrites.substack.com. If you want to read any of my books, you can go to ineswrites.com for the paranormal and fantasy—all spicy, so gird your loins! If you want to read something clean and wholesome that you can share with your mom or your auntie, then you'll go to shanaejohnson.com. The Kickstarter should be findable on Substack or my site, but the direct link is ineswrites.com/kickstarter for the Page Turner Planning campaign. Joanna: Thank you so much for your time, Ines. That was great. Ines: Thank you so much.The post Crafting Stories, Finding Readers And Selling Direct With Ines Johnson first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How is the rise of AI changing the world of audiobooks for authors and narrators? Can a synthetic voice ever capture the nuance of human performance, and what does it mean to write for the ear, not just the eye? Jules Horne talks about the seismic shifts in the audiobook industry and how you can adapt your writing process for an audio-first world. In the intro, using AI tools in the editing business [Words to Write By Podcast]; Fair use ruling for generative AI [BBC; Publishers Weekly; Alicia Wright interview]; I'm also on various podcasts talking about author branding, longevity, and creating over the long term [Writing With Purpose; The Authors Lounge; Bookfunnel Podcast]. Plus, Pèlerinage: Seule sur trois chemins anciens pour réinventer ma vie; Traveling by Cruise Ship on Books and Travel, my Kickstarter for short story collection, The Buried and the Drowned. 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  Jules Horne is a Scottish playwright, radio dramatist, poet, and fiction writer. She also writes nonfiction for authors, including the very useful Writing for Audiobooks. 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 biggest industry shifts in audio, including the move to subscription models like Spotify and the impact of AI narration. An honest assessment of the quality of AI voices—what are the ‘tells' and how quickly are they improving? Practical tips for adapting your nonfiction book for audio, from handling visuals and numbers to structuring for listener retention. How to write fiction with an “audio-first” mindset, focusing on sentence length, dialogue tags, and the rhythm of your prose. The potential for hybrid and multicast productions using a mix of human and AI voices. Marketing and selling your audiobooks, including direct sales vs. platform exclusives. You can find Jules at method-writing.com. Transcript of Interview with Jules Horne Joanna: Jules Horne is a Scottish playwright, radio dramatist, poet, and fiction writer. She also writes nonfiction for authors, including the very useful Writing for Audiobooks. Welcome back to the show, Jules. Jules: Hello, Joanna. Thanks very much for having me. It's great to be here. Joanna: It's great to have you back. It was 2019 when you were last on the show. So first up— Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and aspects of audio and performance. Jules: Audio was never really a big thing in my life, but I did start writing very small and did a bit of, I guess, very junior theatre. When I studied literature at university, I got totally put off because it was so daunting. I got into playwriting when a theatre company came to our local area and offered engagement workshops. That eventually led to some writing commissions. I ended up writing some stage plays and a few BBC radio dramas, which was really lovely to do. I also worked in radio news writing and presenting for a while, so I did a bit of recording voice and writing for voice. I did a lot of presenting, so you kind of got a real feel for the flow of audio. I loved editing different people's voices; that was really fun, and the techie side. I think that led to an interest in audio first and also a real feel for voices in general and editing. It's been a long-term interest of mine. Joanna: As I mentioned, you were on the show in 2019 when we talked about writing for audiobooks, and you've updated the book since then. I wanted to come back to it because things have really changed over the last five and a half years. What are some of the biggest industry shifts in terms of audiobook growth, publishing, subscription platforms, and technology changes? Jules: It's been astonishing; it's just been extraordinary what's happened in the last few years. We thought it was fast then, but what's happened very recently has just been whoosh. For many years, Audible and ACX were the dominant distribution platforms, with such a monopoly. All that time, audiobooks have been growing really, really strongly as a publishing niche with high growth and new markets taking off. It's still really going strong. I think one of the big things that's changed is it has moved from one-off purchases to subscription models, similar to Netflix or Prime for TV and films. That's been for a good few years now. Then Spotify launched its audiobook tier in 2023, which was a bit of a game changer. It puts audiobooks alongside music and podcasts, and it really widens the audience. Of course, that comes along with some worries for authors because Spotify hasn't been great for musicians, with tiny royalties there. So, time will tell how that plays out. Then of course, there's AI, which is affecting every kind of sector. It has been expected for a while that Amazon would open the gates to AI voices, and now that's happened. You can very simply upload your ebook as usual and then add an audiobook with virtual voices. That's bound to have a major impact on publishing and, of course, on livelihoods for audiobook narrators and actors. So, that's a huge development in this last while. Joanna: Any technological change has a lot of benefits and a lot of downsides. You mentioned Spotify and the worries over potential royalties, but from my personal perspective, I often think about these places as, yes, some income, but also marketing and reaching a much wider audience. As a listener myself, I moved over to Spotify for podcast and music listening years ago, and then I moved my audiobook listening over. Now I wouldn't go back because I listen quite differently and use the Spotify search engine and their algorithm. It's like we are meeting listeners where they are. Yes, there are some good things and some bad things, but you can't stop the change. Jules: Absolutely. I think the widening of listenership and different people suddenly being introduced to your books in ways they wouldn't have before is huge for authors. So, yes, definitely one to consider. Joanna: We're in a time where a lot of people say, “For some reason, I don't read,” as if that's something to be proud of. But a lot of people do listen. A lot of people listen in the car, when they're exercising, or whatever they're doing. I listen when I'm out walking. I think having our books in audio is so important, and yet it has been very expensive, hasn't it? So again, the trade-off is that for a lot of authors, it's not human or AI; it's AI or nothing because they couldn't have afforded it. Jules: That's right, and I think the thing with reading is really interesting too because more and more people are recognizing listening as a form of reading. The attitude to it being “just listening” is changing as well. People are imbibing books in different ways now. The cost of AI is really approachable, and if that's the only option, then that's one that authors will definitely be considering. Particularly with KDP, where they've made it such an integral part of the overall indie publishing experience. They've made it really simple to just upload, continue, and then you can preview some voices and try it out. You can try it out with different voices. It is quite extraordinary, and I think a lot of authors will probably choose that route. Joanna: Just to timestamp this interview, we're in the middle of June 2025. Just last week, I got an email from ACX with a survey. It included a whole load of questions around what I might want from AI voices. It feels like even though the virtual voice is through the KDP dashboard and is quite simple, there might be something else on the horizon. Did you get that or what do you think? Jules: I didn't get that one. What were the questions? That's really curious. Joanna: They were things like, “Here's a list of things that you might be interested in. Rate them in order of what you want.” And one of them would have been a lot more control of the text and the audio quality and sales platforms, like how to do much more marketing of things. It was really interesting because I was like, “Oh, this seems very, very positive for the future.” Jules: Yeah, that's a really interesting one too, because the marketing side with ACX and Audible has been really difficult for authors, hasn't it? You can't really, unless you're a vendor on Amazon, advertise your books, and you can't price them. These kinds of things. So I wonder if that's maybe in the offering too. That would be great. Joanna: People seem to criticize the AI voices, for example, and say, “Oh, well they're not very good.” And it's like, well, they're a lot better than they were six months ago, and in six months' time, they're going to be even better. I wanted to ask you about this because you are very experienced in all this different voice stuff, different elements of human voice performance. So I think your ear is probably very attuned. Honestly, what do you think about some of the quality of these AI-narrated voices? Jules: I think the quality's changing super fast. What maybe sounds a bit monotonous now—and I think that's the main quality that AI voices tend to have now—I think that's going to change really fast. When you hear some of the higher-end products in that space, like ElevenLabs, you realize the way things are evolving. It is quite astounding. At the moment, there are very clear tells, and I think most people will be able to pick those up. Although, having said that, like in film imagery, it's starting to get quite blurred as to whether you can tell or not. I did test my partner on a couple of examples: “Is this an AI or is this not an AI?” And what's really astounding is sometimes he thought a human voice was an AI. Joanna: Mm-hmm. Jules: Which is kind of, “Oh heck.” And that's happening with photos and with films too. You remember that thing about food photography where people were saying the AI food photography looks much more appetizing and realistic. Where's that heading? Technically, it's often things like the emphasis on the wrong syllable. I hear a lot of downward inflections. If you listen to the KDP examples, you hear this: “Once upon a time, there was a…” The rhythm and the pitch go down in quite a regular way, and over time that can get almost sleepy. People often have much more variation; they go up at the ends of sentences and they go down. A lot of the AIs are kind of going down at the end. I'm hearing that a lot, and that might be somebody's natural inflection, but I think it's quite a pattern when you listen to the voice samples in KDP. The other thing I notice as tells, but you have to listen blooming hard to hear these and really be on the alert for them, is emphasis on the wrong syllable. One I heard was like, “salt pans” rather than “salt pans,” or “hot to the touch” rather than “hot to the touch.” It might just slightly misplace the emphasis in a phrase. I listened to your book; I think your voice clone is absolutely amazing. Joanna: That's a higher-end ElevenLabs voice clone. Jules: Yes, and it sounds absolutely uncanny. Your voice timbre and the inflections in your voice are just amazing. All I could hear very occasionally was a slight misemphasis of something like “salt pans” rather than “salt pans.” It was that kind of thing, but that was the tell for me. Otherwise, I don't think I'd have known. Joanna: It is interesting. Coming back to what your husband thought, I sometimes listen to a sample of someone, an author reading their own work, and think, “Oh, I quite like his voice.” Then after maybe half an hour, I'm like, “I can't listen to this anymore.” So I feel like the level of judgment we have for human narration is also pretty similar. As you mentioned, the wrong emphasis. I listened and directed almost every single line of that book, Death Valley, and we worked really hard. It's very interesting because if I had narrated that myself as a human, I might have used the same emphasis and you would've thought that was different. When we are proof-listening to humans, these things come up, don't they? There are always things you might disagree with in terms of the way things are said. Jules: Absolutely, and there are natural inflections in certain kinds of accents which might be indistinguishable from the way that an AI would say it. It might have a downward pattern, or that thing in lots of British English now where people have that rising inflection at the end. I as a speaker of Scots wouldn't know whether an accent which is from South Carolina or something is authentic or not. I think if you're at a distance from the accent that the book is read in, you probably couldn't tell. Some of the Scottish accents, for example, because I'm really close to it, I'm finding, “Ooh, that doesn't sound very authentic.” But with a lot of American accents, I really wouldn't know where it was from or whether it was authentic or not. I think conversely, that would happen for them with British accents. So it's all about context. Often I've heard that if people are primed that it's AI, then they listen in a different way than if they don't know. So I think the blur is just something that's going to get more and more blurry. Joanna: I agree, and as you say, I label everything so people will know whether it's human me or voice clone me. I also feel like people have different expectations of what they want from audio. You mentioned the BBC radio dramas you've been involved with. Now, the expectation there is an incredibly high-quality human production, possibly with famous actors. Compare that to me out for a walk listening to a nonfiction book on Spotify near a busy road. I have a completely different expectation of the content and the production than for a BBC radio drama. There are different levels, aren't there? Jules: Yes, you're listening in different ways and for different reasons, and there are different genres. You might be listening for information or for entertainment, and these things will change how you listen. A lot of audiobooks narrated by AI are more towards nonfiction, which seems to me a sensible use when people are listening for information. Why does it have to be a very highly performed, highly characterized kind of voice? Whereas if you've got a novel with lively characterization, you want to hear that spoken in a particular way. If it leaps off the page, you want it to leap off in the audio experience as well. So I think they're very different contexts. Joanna: Again, with a radio drama, there's the multicast production, maybe with sound effects. This is something that for indie authors has been almost entirely impossible because of the expense and the technical skill you need to edit a multicast radio drama. What are your thoughts on multi-voice with AI? Is that going to make it more accessible to people? Jules: I think it's open to experiment and to people trying these things out because these are new possibilities that are coming in. I really am interested in what that might mean for radio drama because that definitely means huge implications for actor jobs, which is a massive concern. In film, you're seeing people using avatars and artificial sets. It's really quite seismic throughout the creative industries. For indie authors, it is an opportunity to try some things out. I don't know whether many people have yet tried that multi-voice with AI voices, but things like the voice changer are quite transformative. It's really fun to actually try that out. With that, you get the expressiveness and the inflections of your own emotion put across, so the spacing and the intensity are in there, but you can change the timbre and the voice quality. That's really interesting. I wonder if indie authors, and indeed producers in the radio drama sphere, might be starting to experiment with that kind of thing because it certainly gives you the option of a massive cast, which you wouldn't be able to do otherwise. In film, you've got CGI, and in some ways, people have been able to build crowd scenes that they wouldn't have had the budget to do. What are the options then in the sound world? It's a really interesting time. Joanna: I can see, for example, maybe you keep the big-name actors because they're the ones on the headlines, but then there might be 20 other voices in the production. Perhaps somebody would've just narrated a couple of lines, like the police person coming to the door. I think at the moment it's “this whole book is AI narrated” or “this whole book is human,” but I can see a sort of hybrid approach with multicast-type production. Jules: I can, but actually I think it'd be a real pain to edit. With an actor's versatility and different performance skills, I think there's a bit of a difference for me between a trained actor with massive performance skills, which are just brilliant to hear, and someone who's maybe got a beautiful voice but hasn't got the performance background for a novel. I think I'd be looking for that in a narrator every time. I just think they'll do a superb job of that, and part of the interest for the listener is also hearing your Stephen Frys or actors who have got that kind of really engaging versatility and a lovely voice. I just think that's a more immersive and compelling experience for me. I don't think it'll ever quite go there, and I think actors will actually do it more effectively. It's just that it does cost a lot more. Then your editing costs, your production cost, I think would be quite high doing multi-voice with short-fire dialogue. I think that would be quite epic to achieve. Joanna: But again, that might be now. There are already famous people licensing their voices, and also the estates of the dead. You mentioned Stephen Fry, who is still alive as we record this and is a wonderful writer, actor, and voice. Is it likely that Stephen Fry will license his voice, or that his heirs and successors will license his voice after he dies? I often think of David Attenborough here. Jules: Oh gosh. Joanna: His voice is super famous, isn't it? As British people, it's like this voice is iconic. I cannot see how the BBC won't be trying to license Attenborough's voice. Jules: Oh god, that's a terrible thought. I can't imagine him doing it. I think he'd be horrified if his estate and the family did it. That would be such a betrayal, but I guess some people are going there and considering it. I did spot one on ElevenLabs which was somebody who had licensed their voice, who does a lot of audio online. Joanna: ElevenLabs has Laurence Olivier, Deepak Chopra, Maya Angelou… Jules: Wow. Have they really got famous voices in there? Joanna: Burt Reynolds, I'm just looking now. Richard Feynman. They've got these iconic voices. They've got John Wayne. Jules: Oh my goodness. What would John Wayne make of that? What would Laurence Olivier make of this? Joanna: This is the thing. I think it's very hard. You fast forward a decade, and goodness knows, this will be either completely normal or something else. It is a very interesting time. Jules: Yes. I've certainly had my mind blown by listening to some of these voices and understanding what's possible. It is really mind-blowing. Joanna: Regardless of whether we work with human narrators or AI narration, we still need to keep in mind principles around writing for audio. It's not a case of, “Here's the existing book in text and it will just be perfect in audio.” So, let's start with nonfiction. What are some of the things we need to keep in mind if we are trying to adapt a nonfiction book into audio? Jules: For nonfiction, the main thing is there are lots of visual elements that are in nonfiction books like graphs, layout features, and header hierarchies. For that, you need to find some kind of workaround, such as maybe one of these PDF uploads, or just cut these elements. You need to look very carefully at what visual elements don't translate well into audio. Numbers are another thing that's a little bit tricky because they're hard to take in. Your brain just doesn't hold more than five or seven things at one time. There are certain radio conventions like rounding up and down. Also things in radio like putting somebody's job before their name, like “the company boss, Fred Bloggs” rather than “Fred Bloggs, the company boss,” because we take the context in best first and then go into the details. I think context and details is a useful concept in audio writing generally. Other techniques that are really good are forward flagging. So, “Up next, you'll hear…” You hear that a lot on the radio so people are a bit better oriented. Then backward flagging: “So, we've just heard about wombats and now we're moving on to koala bears.” That kind of structuring and giving signals so that people are better oriented is pretty important in nonfiction in particular. Joanna: You mentioned lists of numbers. I go further and say lists in general. Sometimes I'll be listening to an audiobook and there's clearly a list of bullet points in the text, but the way it's read sometimes just doesn't work. I think rewriting lists into a more coherent paragraph can work. I guess the overall point is you are adapting for audio, so sometimes you will actually have to rewrite sections. Jules: Absolutely. What I've found more productive over the years is writing audio-first, and then I don't have to spend time doing that work of rewriting. I did find that I needed an awful lot of cuts and then some rejigging, as you say. Now I actually write audio-first, then I don't have to do that editing. Joanna: But what do you mean by that? When you're saying, “I write audio-first,” what do you mean? Jules: I always read it out loud as I'm writing and test it for whether it will work on air. I'm writing it as a kind of performance. The sentences are shorter. I won't use really awkward words. I'll make sure the order of information is right, just so that it unfolds well for the listener. There are things like mental backflips, where asides are a bit trickier with audio, so I'll probably avoid that kind of structure. So, definitely reading it aloud, and to be honest, I think that that actually improves your writing anyway because it gives it more clarity. I just find that has been really helpful for me as an editor. Joanna: For me, I often use a lot of references in my nonfiction books at the end of the chapter. Part of my adaptation is removing a lot from the narration. Some people are quite religious, like, “No, you have to read every single line that's in the ebook.” And I'm like, well, no, you don't. It's not even abridged if you don't include things like resource lists or appendices. As you mentioned, you can do a download PDF. Jules: Exactly, because they're not going to make very compelling audio. They're just going to sound like that long list of things. URLs are terrible as well. It's great to just put those into a PDF, which most of the platforms now allow you to upload. That adds value as well to what you're providing for the readers. I think that's a really legitimate way to solve that. Joanna: Although as a listener, I never, ever download the PDF. Jules: True. But we know it's there if anyone does want to. Joanna: On URLs, if there are URLs you do want to say, I use pretty links on my site to make an easy-to-say, easy-to-read URL as opposed to the super, super long one. But generally, it's hard to listen to and unless someone's taking notes, it doesn't really matter. Jules: Good call. And “www” is so hard to say, so you can just take that bit off and just say, “yoursite.com.” You don't need to have the “www.” That's already saving you loads of syllables. Joanna: That's an interesting thing around human narration versus AI narration. With human narration, sometimes I will pick up on things, whether it's me or another professional, and I will have read a different word, a word that's not even there, or I would never have said “www” out loud because I just assume it wouldn't be read. Of course, with AI narration, it is going to read every single thing. It'll be really literal. Jules: Absolutely. Joanna: So you do have to take it away. I will add there, one of the benefits is if there is a mispronunciation across the whole book, you only have to change it once with AI and it will update the whole thing. Jules: Oh, that's very handy. For character names and all that kind of thing. Joanna: Yes, that is super useful. Okay, so let's come back to fiction then. If we are writing for audio-first, what are some tips for fiction? Jules: I think some of these points are general, whether it's fiction or nonfiction. So things like order of information and clarity and not overloading, so that there's too much for the listener to take in at once. Remember the context that people are listening in rather than reading. They're very often doing something else. They might be in the car, or there might be noises in the background, or they might be rushing around doing jobs in the house. So, it really needs to be very clear. You can't emphasize that enough. Some kinds of fiction are more reflective and maybe have lots of long sentences. Long sentences can be hard for a human narrator to read really effectively. So look at the length of sentences. I heard some plays being read in my early days, and it was quite horrendous because I realized my sentences meant the actors couldn't breathe. That's a really useful tip for fiction. That reading out loud tip I think is really important. Also, you can maybe cut some of the “he said, she said.” Depending on whether it's a straight narration of a novel or a character performance style of audiobook, you might be able to cut some of the scaffolding. Joanna: In fact, one of the most annoying things as a listener is the repetition of words or sounds. A lot of early writing advice was, “Oh, just use ‘he said, she said' always, because it disappears on the page.” It might disappear to the eyes, but it doesn't disappear to the ear. So as you say, get rid of “he said, she said” and use action tags like, “Morgan walked to the window” and then starts speaking. You don't have to use the word “said.” On your breathing point, another editing tip I found with AI audio is you just add in more punctuation. It might be incorrect punctuation according to written editorial, but it's punctuation that helps with the direction of the AI audio. Jules: Absolutely. I do that as markup in the script anyway. You wouldn't put that in the printed form, but I used to use a lot of slashes and things and extra commas religiously to make sure the breathing was clear. So I would absolutely do that for an audiobook. If you go into the studio, if you're reading your own, it might not be the same as your printed book, but I would have a version where all those things are in there. It saves you a lot of time later on. It saves you fluffing quite a lot. I think the other thing that's important for fiction is where you land in sentences. There's kind of real estate within sentences, which includes the beginnings and ends of sentences. Sometimes I used to read student fiction and quite often something like the murder weapon might be buried in the middle of a paragraph and slightly go under. Whereas if you build up to something and then it's “the knife,” that's kind of resonant. It's something from poetry; the use of lines and where things land can be really powerful on air. It's really worth thinking about that when you're writing, using those powerful places because they give such clarity to what's going on and make it easier to follow. Joanna: I actually think that people have to be listeners in order to understand this. If you don't listen to audiobooks and then you're trying to make an audiobook— You need to be listening to audiobooks in order to understand what sounds good. Jules: Absolutely. I think you have to do your research and listen to books in your genre and get the feel for it and really look closely at the writing. I learned a lot from reading writers really closely and working out what they're doing, what tricks and techniques they are using. I think that's a really valuable thing for getting into audio-first writing. Joanna: I also just wanted to mention that, as we record this, it's not out yet, but the ElevenLabs Version 3 is going to have direction available in square brackets. So you can say [whispered] and the dialogue will be whispered, as opposed to you having to write, “she whispered.” You can direct the voice within the text. So that is going to be hopefully available, I guess, let's say autumn 2025 maybe. So that's certainly going to be interesting. Jules: It sounds really interesting. It reminds me a bit of music where you have the annotation for music notes and then you have an extra layer on top, which is the expression, what's emphasized and what goes loud and what goes soft. So it's kind of aligned to that. I think that's a really interesting development. Joanna: I think the other thing I've heard about is, at the moment we're talking about doing a lot of direction in the text, but essentially— At some point, you should just be able to upload a book and it should be able to do all of that itself. There'll be a lot more tools and help with it. What do you think? Jules: I'm not sure about that. I'm a bit skeptical because I just think human performance has got lots of expressive possibilities that I don't see AI easily being able to reproduce. So I'm kind of on that fence at the moment. But also, knowing how much things are changing, it's really hard to tell. What I noticed in ElevenLabs is that you have these sliders. I thought that was really intriguing, that there are different sliders where you can move different parameters. It's not just a case that you have that voice and that's what you work with. You can also tweak it and have it at low or high intensity and kind of change things. So it's interesting what you were saying about working with your producer there and the degree of control that you have within that, which I think people are maybe not aware of. It's not just a case of uploading it and there it is, but there are lots of tweaks you can do on the way. Joanna: Yes, I mean, there's a total spectrum of what you can do in audio. What I would like is the stratification of audio rights, where you can license a book for human narration and you can license a book for AI narration and then multicast. So it's not just one thing; you can have different variations and then different price points as well. People expect to pay more for a multicast human actor audio than they do for AI narration. Jules: I think that's similar to what's happening with books. Special add-ons and special formats that are really sort of artisanal command a premium price. So, I think similarly with audio, that may happen there as well. Joanna: I just want to pick up there. You said artisanal, whereas I would say artisanal. This is a classic case of two humans actually pronouncing a word differently, and that also speaks to how difficult it is to direct a human or an AI. Jules: Absolutely. The same word pronounced differently by different people in different countries. It's a really interesting consideration in audiobooks for lesser-known languages or lesser-known dialects because it's an opportunity to maybe hear them more. Or voice clones could be used for that kind of thing and maybe give more airing to lesser-known dialects. So maybe more variety in the kinds of audiobooks that people can produce. Joanna: When I was at the Frankfurt Book Fair a few years ago, I heard a Ghanaian publisher, and she was basically saying, “You are all discussing this about English language audiobook production. You have this developed market, you have all the structural stuff that you need to have a really strong audiobook culture. We don't have that, and now we are going to build it.” In the English language, we have a long history of doing this, so there are a lot of people in the industry. But there are countries where there's nothing in their native languages. So I think this is another opportunity, as you say. Jules: Absolutely. I think that's an awesome opportunity. It's been the same with books as well. I think access to the means of production is really opening up things for people, and I think that'll just give such great variety for listeners. I think that's only positive. Joanna: Before we finish, you are obviously an author and you also produce audiobooks. How do you recommend authors try and sell more books in audio? What are some of the ways that you market your audiobooks? Jules: At the moment, that's not too easy because I'm with Audible solely, and it's usually on the back of the print and ebooks. So what I would do is advertise that through Amazon and get some audiobook sales on the back of that. Sometimes I've given out QR codes and that kind of thing, but by and large, they're just advertising on my site and I use the marketing via Amazon ads. I'm hoping that there will be more chance of audiobook-direct advertising in the future because that'll make a huge difference. One thing I've never done, which I'm interested in—I think you do this, Joanna—is it's possible to sell books on your own website as well. Some authors are withdrawing from being with Amazon and only selling their audiobooks themselves. Some authors have taken it into their own hands. So there is that possibility as well. Services like BookFunnel let you have your fans who want to buy your books and buy direct. Joanna: Yes, it is actually the most profitable way to sell audiobooks, especially in bundles. For example, at CreativePennBooks.com, you can buy bundles of my audiobooks. So you get a good deal, I get more profit, and I get paid immediately. If you go wide, to me now, going wide means having your own store plus all the other things as well. Whereas you can't do bundling on Audible because of the credit system. Of course, if you go non-exclusive with Audible, your royalty drops precipitously. So it is definitely a choice, but it can certainly be done. Okay, fantastic. So tell people where they can find you and your books online. Jules: I'm online at www.method-writing.com and you can buy my ebook and print books there, and my audiobooks are on Amazon. Joanna: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Jules. That was great. Jules: Thanks for having me, Joanna. It's a pleasure.The post Writing For Audio First With Jules Horne first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Is the high cost of audiobook production holding you back? What if you could create a high-quality audiobook for a fraction of the traditional cost? In this conversation, Simon Patrick explores the world of AI narration with ElevenLabs, discussing how you can gain complete creative control, and even license your own voice clone for a new stream of income. This episode is supported by my patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn  Simon Patrick founded Ten Times Better Books to support his daughter, Abby Patrick, as one of ElevenLabs' first users and beta testers. He has produced several of their most popular AI voices. He now develops courses and AI audiobook solutions for independent authors at Novel Productions. 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 Costs vs benefits of human vs AI narration Features of ElevenLabs — realistic and expressive voices, creative control, ownership of final audio files for wide distribution to platforms like Spotify. Practical tips for AI narration ElevenLabs v3 and emotion tags Creating and monetizing a voice clone Publishing on ElevenReader You can find Simon at Novel.Productions or 10xb.com. Transcript of the interview Joanna: Simon Patrick founded Ten Times Better Books to support his daughter, Abby Patrick, as one of ElevenLabs' first users and beta testers. He has produced several of their most popular AI voices. He now develops courses and AI audiobook solutions for independent authors at Novel Productions. Welcome to the show, Simon. Simon: Thank you, Joanna. It's such a joy to be speaking with you. Your podcast and books were foundational to my daughter, Abby, becoming an author and me learning to be her publisher and all that's happened since. I love your Patreon @thecreativepenn. It's the best money I spend every month, frankly. It's just a great community to be part of, so it's such a joy to be sharing some of what I've learned. Joanna: Oh, thank you so much. Behind the scenes on the Patreon, Simon has done a video demo of ElevenLabs. Today, obviously, we're doing audio-only. So first up— Tell us a bit more about your background and why you decided to get into AI-narrated audiobooks. Simon: Okay. Well, I've got 25 years of experience in marketing and design. I still am halftime head of communications for an international charity, but we've always had our own businesses too. My wife and I ran a small home education tuition publishing business. We've home-educated our three kids, which brings me to Abby, my daughter who brought me into your world of book publishing. She was going to college, studying early years education, and was just bored out of her mind. She asked if she could drop out of college to be a writer instead. She'd been writing a book since she was 15. To the astonishment of her friends and some of ours too, we said yes. Let me add, it was responsible parenting. We made her finish the term, stick it out, and do the work experience. By Christmas 2019, she'd left to pursue finishing her book based on the deal that — If she learned to write, I would learn to publish for her. Joanna: Wow! Simon: So I attended the first Self Publishing Show in that crazy spring of 2020. I think you were there too, just a few days before the pandemic shut us all down. I've listened to hundreds of your podcasts, read your books, done some of the Self-Publishing Formula courses, and learned to be Abby's publisher. Since then, I have used those skills and connected with a few other authors, so I probably publish a book or two a month, something like that. Audio has always been the stumbling block. I love audiobooks. As a family, we must consume hundreds of hours a month of them. There are incredible narrators like Ray Porter and Daniel Rigby, who self-narrates his own Audible exclusives, and my absolute favourite, a guy called Jeff Hayes, who narrates incredibly. They're amazing talents, and I don't think AI is going to touch them because they bring so much humanity to the performance. But to ordinary authors and publishers, those narrators are inaccessible. I don't even want to think about what they cost. For Abby, who is still just starting out, any professional narration would cost her three to four thousand dollars for her books. The math just doesn't work. While there are options like a royalty split with ACX, Audible's publishing platform, I struggle with that. Firstly, you're tied in exclusively to Audible for seven years, and we're big fans of going wide. Secondly, you're only getting 20% of the royalties when it's being split. I just don't think for us, they're ever going to make that money back. So all of that is what led me in early 2023 to be searching for AI audio options. ChatGPT was going crazy, you were demoing all of that at the time, and I figured there must be some kind of AI audio option that would let me take control of the process and hopefully produce good audiobooks way more cheaply than current options. That's when I discovered ElevenLabs. Joanna: There's lots to unpack there. First of all, as you mentioned, there are some incredible human narrators, and we want to acknowledge them. I'm also a human narrator myself. For most authors, especially indie authors or new authors, it's not a choice between human or AI; it's AI or nothing because they can't afford the fees. As you said, a lot of the time you don't know if you're going to make the money back. So I think that's really important to acknowledge. There are lots of AI narration options now. It is hard for authors to decide which platform to use. So what is ElevenLabs, and why do you think it's the best option for quality and also for publishing reach? You mentioned ACX, and there's obviously AVV, the Audible Virtual Voice. Most people might think, “Well, maybe I should just do that.” Give us an overview on why you made that decision to go with ElevenLabs. Simon: Absolutely. ElevenLabs continues to be the most realistic AI platform out there. They kicked off about two and a half years ago. I was one of their first users, and even back then, they were so much better than everything else. There were lots of programmers wanting to do clever things with APIs and websites, but I just wanted to make audiobooks with these things. They were actually listening, which is remarkable in the publishing industry sometimes. About a year and a half ago, and for reference, we're in June 2025 right now, they launched ElevenLabs Studio. It can take a whole book, like the ePub that I've worked on for Abby or a Word document, you can drop it in and have it convert it chapter by chapter, paragraph by paragraph into a great-sounding audiobook. The high quality and natural-sounding elements of it are why I was first attracted to them. The expressiveness is just another step above. The comparison with Amazon's Virtual Voice is that it's so much more pleasant to listen to, but it doesn't just sound better — What I love about it is the complete creative control it gives me. There are thousands of voices I can pick from, a whole library of voices. They're real people, people like me, actually, who have recorded their voice and then licensed it to ElevenLabs and get paid a small amount. Then when it's used, there's actually compensation to those who've licensed their voices to it. It’s not like the large language models like ChatGPT where the whole universe seems to have been scraped and compiled into this thing. They're being super diligent about making sure it's all kosher, that it's real people's voices and they're getting compensated. Beyond that, the tools they're building give you control. They're incredibly open to listening to feedback, which has been brilliant. I'm talking to the programmers regularly. They've got a great Discord where they're asking for feedback. With the tools, I can spend time perfecting the book. I can get the dialogue just the way I want it. I can create a duet audiobook with a male narrator for male POVs and a female for female POVs. I can even do multi-cast and assign different voices to each character in the book. Probably most importantly, I can download the whole thing as WAV files or MP3s. The big difference with something like Amazon Virtual Voice is that I own what I've created with ElevenLabs. It's a commercial license, so I can put them into BookFunnel's audio delivery service, I can put them on my website, you can add them to a Kickstarter, stick them on YouTube, or just give them away for free if I wanted to. In terms of publishing reach, they're doing a lot. We were kind of stuck with either self-publishing, YouTube, or Kobo, who are superstars and super open. But one of the game changers that's happened in the last few months is you can now add them to Spotify, which has come in as the big disruptor for Audible and Amazon. You've done that recently with the book that we produced together. How's that been? Joanna: Death Valley, which has been on the feed, you can listen to a couple of chapters, and that's using my voice clone. We'll come back to the voice clone in a minute. As you mentioned, I think it's mainly the ownership of the files and the Spotify distribution. At the moment, it really is only Google's auto-narration and ElevenLabs that you can use legitimately on Spotify through Findaway Voices. You cannot use the AVV files anywhere else. So I think that's incredibly important because, of course— We can talk forever about how to make audio, but it's also about selling audio, isn't it? Simon: And for anyone who's dealt with KDP or Audible customer services, I probably don't have to say what the experience was like. So another reason I love ElevenLabs is their support has been brilliant. There's this Discord I mentioned where there are dozens of super helpful and patient people giving input. Their customer service team replies quickly, it's personal, they're helpful, and they've got amazing documentation. Stepping back a little bit, the fact that we can create well-narrated audiobooks for a hundred to two hundred dollars plus a few days of learning and production on each one is just incredible. I took my two boys to a local Comic-Con recently, and there was a self-published author there with a single beautiful book. He'd clearly poured his heart and money into this thing. There were beautiful cover bookmarks and giveaways, and then I saw he had an audiobook. We got talking about it. He'd got it professionally narrated, and he opened up and said it cost £7,000. I honestly wanted to cry. I genuinely get emotional about it even now. I want us as authors and publishers to put our time, energy, and money into creating incredible stories and getting our words out into the world and just make everything around that as simple as possible, using tech where we can. Joanna: I just want to comment on this because one of the reasons we timestamp these episodes is because I'll have people email me and say, “Oh, but you said this,” and I'm like, “Yeah, but when did I say that?” For example, in 2014 when I started audiobook publishing on ACX, they were the only thing out there, and they were the bee's knees. We had a much higher royalty rate, there were very few audiobooks around, and you could make that money back. The amount of money you mentioned, you could make back quite quickly. Now, I know some people will be saying, “Oh, but I make that money back.” And I'm like, “Well, yeah, if you are an established author, absolutely.” If you have a popular series, if you know that you already make that kind of money from audiobooks, then you can. We are in a different era in 2025. There's a lot more audio, and of course, AI is a double-edged sword. There is going to be more audio than ever before. The question is, how do we make that money back? If we lower the costs, then we also lower the amount of revenue we need to make to offset that. Simon: And you know, it's going to move on fast, but now is an extraordinary time. I love good audiobooks, and the fact that AI can help me make those now is very exciting to me. Joanna: It's super fun. You and I both have a reasonably technical background, so we can use these tools. To be fair, you said wonderful documentation. I am terrible at reading documentation. I just jump in and give it a go. There are people who don't know anything about AI audio. How does it work? Can you give a few key elements and tips for authors if they want to use ElevenLabs for AI narration? Simon: Yeah, I've got five tips for you. First, go in and check it out. There is a creator package that you can get for half price for the first month. I would say for exploration, it is worth getting for $11 just to have a little bit of a play with it. Getting familiar with the platform can be a little intimidating because it does lots of different things, like voice changing, sound effects, and dubbing video. We are really only interested in the Studio tool. As soon as you go into that Studio tool, it will start to feel familiar. You can click “Create an audiobook,” drop your ePub in there, and basically instantly see how this thing works, breaking it into chapters, applying a voice, and clicking play. The warning though is this creator package, at $22 a month, is not good enough to create professional audiobooks. This is my first tip: you need the Pro package, which is $99 a month, because that is what outputs 192 kilobits per second. That's the technical specification that you need to go on BookFunnel or Spotify. You only get that by using the $99 a month package. You get about 10 hours of audio creation in that, so for a lot of people, that could make a book. The hours roll over, so you can either wait for month two and have enough hours to do it. As soon as you're done with your book, you can downgrade to a $5 a month package, so don't worry, it's not trapping you in there. Just know that you need the $99 a month Pro package to produce your audiobooks. My second tip is to —  Really spend time choosing or making your voice. You had an experience with this, Joanna, where you try out a voice, commit to it, and then realize two or three chapters in that you don't like it. I've had that experience too. So use that first month on the creator package to really play with voices. Generate your first chapter in five or six different voices. Really get familiar and comfortable with a voice that you want to use so that you're not wasting time and credits when you get into producing something. Third, don't get overwhelmed; have fun with it. It's amazing hearing your book come to life in audio. I feel if you give it an hour, the Studio tool is pretty intuitive. If you have the level of tech ability to do something like typesetting in Atticus or Vellum or use Scrivener, you can absolutely master using Studio. My fourth tip, and a warning, is that it still takes time. This isn't some one-button wonder. Your novella, Death Valley, was six and a half hours long. That took 18 hours of editing. Joanna: And this is where people get confused because with AVV, the Audible Virtual Voice, there is no control. You literally do click one button and it goes live. There's almost no point in proof-listening to it because you can't actually change it. With Studio, you have such fine control that you can add pauses, a breath in the middle of a sentence, or change the emphasis. You kind of direct it with Studio, don't you? Simon: That's the word I use, yes. Directing. It's like you're directing an audiobook. If you are doing non-fiction, it is borderline a one-click wonder. It will deliver it amazingly, and you need to listen to it once, and you're good to go. If you've spent a year or two writing a book, think about the effort we put into making it look good in the typesetting and the covers. A day or two to listen to it, refine it, and make it represent your vision is not time wasted. I'm only interested in high-quality audiobooks that do the story justice. I want to be proud of it. I want Abby to be proud of it. I highly encourage people, particularly fiction writers, to be prepared to spend two or three days working on the book. It is so rewarding to get something that comes out the other end that you are proud of. Joanna: And just on the proofing, if you work with a human narrator, you will be doing proofing. You listen to the audio, find the timestamp, explain what you want changed, and send it back to the human to rerecord. The process is probably pretty similar in terms of the amount of time taken, but you can do it yourself, and there are areas that help. For example, if there's a character name, you can fix that once for the whole audio, can't you? Simon: Correct. It's a pronunciation dictionary for any words. It really struggled with “croissant.” It does little random things. I think our favorite was when it pronounced “desert” as “dessert.” Joanna: It just would not stop wanting some dessert! What are some other tips? Simon: My fifth and final tip right now, and this is only pertinent to those listening as this is broadcast, is if you are wanting to do an audiobook for your fiction book, you should wait. If you're doing non-fiction, the existing models are amazing. But last week, their Version 3 model was released, and it is a game-changer. The initial reactions are, “I can never go back to Version 2.” Version 3, from an expression and liveliness perspective, but also from a control and direction perspective, is changing the game. It wasn't even supposed to come out for a couple of months, so they're moving forward with this fast. The real reason to wait is it's got one massive feature upgrade that I've been waiting for for at least a year: You can add emotion tags. Previously, if we wanted someone to whisper, sometimes it would figure it out from the text. Other times, we would literally be adding, “he whispered,” “she shouted,” “he said excitedly.” We were kind of gaming the system. Now, we can add tags in square brackets to the text like [whispers], [shouts], [says thoughtfully], [says in a British accent]. There is this whole world of things it can do that allows us to work much more effectively as a director, particularly for dialogue and emphasis. There is even a button that will read the text and put in suggested tags throughout the book. The AI is reading those instructions but not reading them out loud. So it is the big breakthrough in terms of us creating audiobooks that sound exactly how we want them to. Joanna: That is really good. I'm looking forward to that as well. Let's wind it back for people. You mentioned non-fiction quite quickly. For non-fiction, what do I do about the table of contents, URLs, or images in my text? Simon: When you upload the ePub, you can just delete those bits. I feel like people forget that you have control. You can completely change the front matter, the back matter, and the bits around it to be something that's going to work most effectively when it's delivered on the platforms you want. And you can create different versions. Joanna: And I think it's really important for people to remember with audiobooks that it is an adaptation, however you're doing it. It is a different product. With Death Valley, for example, I would say to you, “Oh, well, let's just rewrite that sentence,” because it would be easier for me to rewrite it and it will keep the same meaning. Simon: Exactly. You have that luxury as the author, which is why people doing it themselves is wonderful. When producing your book for you, I can't take those liberties. Joanna: So let's come to the voice clone idea because, of course, you mentioned earlier that you've licensed your voice. We used my voice clone for Death Valley, and I am still on the fence as to whether or not to license that publicly. What are some tips for people who want to license their voice or do a voice clone? Simon: For me, it's been amazing getting this bonus income that I totally didn't expect. For Abby, it's been life-changing. She is the most popular English British female voice. She's called Amelia on ElevenLabs. She's earning enough from her voice that she could quit a toxic job and go full-time writing. It’s extraordinary. So, in terms of tips, if you are recording your own voice, whether you are going to use it yourself or think about sharing it with others, first of all, the quality of the recording is essential. You want to be using a good microphone in a quiet place. There are lots of tools to clean it up, but nothing is going to compare to something that's recorded well. When you are delivering your voice, the delivery needs to be varied but consistent. I generally get authors to read their own book. You want to give variations in terms of tone and volume, from whispering through to high energy, as though you are reading to an engaged audience. You do not want to put on character voices. That's really important. The AI will pick up on the variations in your delivery, but it gets very confused if you've done character voices because it doesn't know how those fit in with how you speak. A cheat code for improving the quality if you don't have a really good mic or a quiet area is Adobe Podcast. It's a free service with an enhanced speech function. You can put your recording in there and massively improve how it sounds. The tip is to not put it out at a 100% treatment; you want kind of 70% to 90% of their enhanced speech applied, or else it sounds too obviously affected by AI. Joanna: And right now, my J.F. Penn voice is my voice, and I'm the only one who can use it. There's another step if you want to license it and put it in the voice market, isn't there? Simon: Yes, and the first challenge of that is genuinely a moral evaluation. If you want to monetize your voice, you have to decide if you are prepared for your voice to be used to say almost anything. ElevenLabs has controls to stop things like hate speech or sexual content, but to really monetize it, you have to switch off a feature called “live moderation,” which prevents things like swearing. As soon as you turn that live moderation on, your voice becomes unavailable for most uses that would make money, like audiobooks or conversational AI. The second option to consider is the notice period. You can choose to have the right to instantly withdraw your voice or set a notice period of up to two years. They pay more if you're prepared to have a longer minimum period. As a producer, I am not going to start using someone's voice for an audiobook series if I might not have it to use in three months' time. I instantly filter for anything less than a year's notice period and generally only pick two years. If you want to monetize your voice, you have to turn live moderation off and give a two-year notice period, in my opinion. A final tip would be to be safe. Do not publicly share your voice's name and connect it with you as a person. Forget about voice recognition for telephone banking, for example. Also, do your research. See what voices are most popular, what descriptions work best, and think about the sample you provide. Joanna: As we head towards a close, we do need to quickly come back to —  ElevenReader. It's an emerging place to publish audiobooks, too. You can also upload e-books, and then listeners can choose the voice. Back in 2020, I wrote in my book on AI that at some point there will be an app where listeners can choose whatever voice they want to listen to my book in, and this is it. Simon: It's super exciting. It's an app you'll find on your iPhone or Android store. It's the consumer-facing side of ElevenLabs. You can drop in pretty much any content, like PDFs, e-books, and webpages, and it turns any text into speech. Right from the beginning, it's also offered books for direct sale. Joanna: We have to mention that Melania Trump has used a voice clone of her quite distinctive voice to do her memoir, also called Melania. She has basically said this is the future of publishing. “Here's my AI voice clone, and it's on ElevenReader.” I thought that was a tipping point for me because it means that it's going mainstream. Simon: So you can see it like Audible or Spotify, except you can choose what voice you want to narrate it. For authors, it's an amazingly simple way to offer an audiobook. You don't even have to go through the studio production process. You can just sign up to ElevenReader publishing and upload your book. Boom, they'll review it and publish it. Joanna: I would say to people, you must — Read the terms and conditions of any site that you ever upload anything to. Also, if your e-book is in Kindle Unlimited and exclusive to Amazon, you can't upload that e-book to ElevenReader because it's exclusive. Simon: And we have just taken Abby's books out of Kindle Unlimited so we can put them in ElevenReader this week. Joanna: Before we go, you have courses coming and you also offer services to authors. Tell us about those and where people can find you online. Simon: Wonderful, thank you, Joanna. First, I'd be a very neglectful father if I didn't mention that Abby's latest book, Stolen Legacy, went live yesterday. You can find Abby Hope Patrick and her Deadly Ever After series on Amazon and, very soon, ElevenReader. You can find my voice on ElevenReader; I'm “Christopher” on there. The courses are something new. We've started a new website called Novel Productions. The first course will be “AI Audio for Authors” and will cover everything people need to know to get themselves not just onto ElevenLabs, but all platforms. It's also going to have training on how to record your own voice clones and monetize them if you want to. I was about to publish it, and then Version 3 of ElevenLabs came out, so I don't want to train anyone on anything that's not going to be the best in a couple of months. So right now, if you go to Novel.Productions, there will be a waiting list that you can sign up to. Regarding services, you were my first beta tester outside the books that I publish myself. We're still weighing up how affordable we can make it. I'd rather teach people first, and if they don't want to then do it themselves, we'll see how we can help. I'm beta testing that with authors, so you can email me at [email protected]. Joanna: Brilliant. Well, thank you so much for your time, Simon. That was great. Simon: Thank you, Joanna. It has been such a pleasure.The post Producing AI-Narrated Audiobooks Using ElevenLabs With Simon Patrick first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Are you looking for new ways to connect with readers and market your books? Have you considered using podcasts but aren't sure where to start, or if they're even effective anymore? How can you turn a simple podcast interview into a powerful tool for building your author career? Matty Dalrymple talks about how to leverage podcasting for long-term success. In the intro, Robert MacFarlane on How I Write Podcast; Are em dashes really a sign of AI writing? [Grammar Girl]; Publishing Pitfalls for Authors; ALLi Self-Publishing Services list; Writer Beware; Midjourney for video; 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  Matty Dalrymple is the author of mysteries, thrillers, and nonfiction, and is the host of The Indy Author Podcast. Today we are talking about her new book, co-written with Mark Lefebvre, The Podcast Guest Playbook: Turning Conversations into Connections and Community. 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 podcasts offer a deeper connection with potential readers compared to short-form video How to pitch podcast hosts effectively by providing value and demonstrating familiarity with their show Tangential topics and creative angles fiction authors can use to land interviews on a variety of shows The importance of building authentic, non-transactional relationships with hosts and other creators Practical tips on how to prepare for an interview and gain confidence as a podcast guest Why it's never too late to start your own podcast and how it can benefit your writing process You can find Matty at MattyDalrymple.com or TheIndyAuthor.com. Matty also offers coaching for authors around podcast practice. Transcript of the interview Jo: Matty Dalrymple is the author of mysteries, thrillers, and nonfiction, and is the host of The Indy Author Podcast. Today we are talking about her new book, co-written with Mark Lefebvre, The Podcast Guest Playbook: Turning Conversations into Connections and Community. So welcome back to the show, Matty. Matty: Thank you. It is lovely to be here. Jo: Matty's been on the show before. I need to check when it was. It was in 2020, which is obviously like a lifetime away now because it was the beginning of the pandemic. It is like a completely different life. But you did talk a bit then about how you got into writing. What does your author life and business look like now? Matty: Well, I think this had just become true in 2020, that I am a full-time author, podcaster, and publisher. Since then, I've continued to add to my two fiction series, the Ann Kinnear Suspense Novels and the Lizzy Ballard Thrillers. I've also been working hard on my nonfiction books for authors. We're going to be talking about my new book with Mark. Back then we had been talking about Taking the Short Tack, which is the first book I co-authored with Mark. Since then, I have also co-authored two books with our mutual friend Michael La Ronn on being an author speaker and on, appropriately enough, co-authoring nonfiction. So, yes, continuing to add to the portfolio. Jo: And of course, you've got the podcast and— You are also an advisor for the Alliance of Independent Authors, right? Matty: That's right. I'm the Campaigns Manager, so I'm responsible for ALLi's campaigns which are: Open Up to Indie Authors, Ethical Self-Publishing, Self-Publishing for All, and Publishing for Profit. That has been super fun. I've been doing that for just over a year now. Jo: Fantastic. So yes, multiple strings to your bow. So let's get into the book. I guess the first thing is, are podcasts even useful for book marketing in an age of short-form video? We're all told that it's all about TikTok and BookTok and social media. What is special about podcasting that makes it worth investing time in? Matty: Well, I think that the strength of podcasts is the depth of the connections you can form. I have to say, I'm not super familiar with BookTok. When TikTok first came out, I spent about 35 seconds on it and I found it so not for me that it was clear I was not going to be providing content for TikTok or BookTok, and I probably wasn't going to be consuming that content either. I think that obviously some authors are getting great connections on BookTok, but it doesn't feel like a deep relationship. It feels more like entertainment. The strength of podcasts is that you do have a chunk of time—you know, 30 minutes or 45 minutes or an hour—to dive into your topic in depth, to describe your book, but more importantly, the stories behind your book in depth. The benefit that those other platforms don't have at all is the benefits that come from forming a relationship with the podcast host, which is something that Mark and I spend quite a bit of time discussing in the book. I think that's kind of an underutilized benefit of podcasting. Jo: A few things there. I mean, the in-depth conversation… people listening to this are people who listen to podcasts. So that is the kind of audience. But you are right, it gives people time to decide whether they even identify with this person in a deeper way. I get so many of my book recommendations from podcasting. I think, “Well, that was interesting,” and I'll go and listen to their book or read their book. You obviously interview people all the time for your show, and you are also a listener to shows. How does podcasting translate into book sales, since that is an important reason for it? Matty: It is about letting people know about a book or a new book, but I think more importantly, it's about letting listeners know about you as an author. The advice that Mark and I give very strongly is that if you go into a podcast interview with the mindset that what you're looking to get out of this is book sales, it's not going to be as effective, even for book sales, as if you go into it with the opinion that you're there to provide value to the host and to the host's listeners. Then book sales and many other benefits are going to come from that. You intrigue people about your book by talking about it in a thoughtful and in-depth way, by sharing information. If you're writing nonfiction, you want to get the word out about that. I have learned this from you: you can share lots and lots of information from your nonfiction book on podcasts and people will still buy your book because they want it in even more depth than you can provide in a podcast interview. They want it there for easy reference. They want it as an acknowledgment of the value you've provided. So going into that with that service mindset rather than a sales mindset, I think is the most important thing for getting sales. Jo: Yes, I totally agree. Let's talk about fiction as well, because you are a fiction writer. Both of us write fiction and nonfiction, but I do think it is harder for fiction authors to find appropriate podcasts to pitch and to talk about different angles. So what's your advice to fiction authors who might feel like it's not so worthwhile? Matty: Yes, I agree that it is more of a challenge for fiction authors. I think the thing to keep in mind for those authors is, first of all, to find the podcasts that are focused on your genre. I think certain genres are easier for that. I write in the general crime fiction genre, and there are a number of podcasts that are focused on that, that are specifically targeted to crime fiction readers. I think that there are probably other genres where there isn't maybe that same breadth of availability of podcasts focused on reaching readers of those genres. I think in all those cases, the thing to do after you've identified the target podcasts is to think of the stories behind the story that you can tell. We don't recommend that you go into an interview with the idea that you're going to share a summary of the plot of your book. That's just not going to be interesting to anyone and may deter people from buying the book if they've heard what they think is the whole story. Readers love to hear about the fiction process. Fiction readers love to hear about the research you put into your book, or if your characters are based on real people, or even if you can come up with interesting answers to the “where do you get your ideas?” question. That can be great fodder for these conversations. Think of those things as what you would chat about if you met a reader who loved the same genre that you write in. You might, in your podcast interview, not even focus on your own book. You and the host might get into a really interesting conversation about other books in your genre. Listeners will think, “Oh, that person had such an interesting take on horror, or on thriller, or on romance,” and now they want to see what your take is in your own book. So I think there are lots of angles that fiction writers can take that make for an interesting and engaging interview. Jo: And for me, it's about place. I have my Books and Travel podcast as well. As this goes out, the episode that should be up is on cruise ships and the mystery author Wendy Jones who writes cozy mysteries set on cruise ships. She was an entertainer on cruise ships, and so we have an episode all about being on cruise ships and cruise ship life. Actually, she writes cozy mysteries, so some percentage of that audience will go on and have a look at her books, but it is that tangential thought. Wendy pitched me on Books and Travel and said, “My books are set around cruise ships. We could talk about that.” And I'm like, “Yes, that is interesting.” Which was a much better pitch than maybe pitching me on this show to talk about cozy mysteries, because I've done that before. So I think it's thinking tangentially. What are the themes? Like you mentioned characters. What are the topics that you have in your fiction book that might be appropriate for a different podcast? Matty: Yes, and I can imagine that a very successful pitch for the Books and Travel podcast would be, “Here is an aspect of travel that maybe you haven't hit before, and I think that your listeners would really be interested in this.” Some listeners are going to have been on cruises and will be intrigued for that reason. Some of your listeners will not have been on cruises and are probably equally intrigued for different reasons. So emphasizing how this topic is going to help the host and be interesting to the audience. Jo: Yes, exactly. You mentioned it before: providing value to the host and the listeners. In the end, it's not about you, the guest, even though it is about you. It is about giving value. So let's talk about that. What are some other tips for pitches that will land an interview and make the host want to talk to you as soon as that email arrives? Matty: In addition to emphasizing the value you provide, I think the other key aspect of a successful pitch is making it clear that you understand the podcast you're pitching. That this is not a generic pitch. You are sending the pitch and you're describing the value based on what is obviously your experience with that podcast. For example, “Knowing that your listeners are interested in travel, I have an interesting spin on travel that I can share with them,” or “I think this would be a great follow-up to a previous episode where you talked about the Caribbean. I cruise to the Caribbean and I think this would be a nice companion episode.” Sometimes I'll get pitches… as listeners of The Indy Author Podcast will know, I love the nautical metaphor for the writing craft and the publishing voyage. Every once in a while, I'll get a pitch that is completely based on a nautical metaphor that is instantly attention-getting to me. So I think that combination of providing value and then demonstrating your familiarity with the podcast you're pitching is important. No generic, “Dear Sir or Madam” kind of pitches. Jo: Or “Dear Podcaster.” Matty: “Dear Podcaster.” Or even worse, when it's personalized, but wrong. I got a pitch for The Career Author Podcast once, and I was like, “That sounds fascinating, but that's not my podcast.” Jo: I think some of the worst pitches at the moment are from traditional publishing. I don't know about you, but I just get these—they're literally, they get my name right, but then they just copy and paste a press release and say, “You would love to interview this author.” They're not even really pitching for a podcast. They're just scatter-gunning. What are some of the things that people should find out about the host before they email? Matty: Well, one thing I wanted to mention, because you had mentioned getting pitches from publishers or PR firms. I get a lot of pitches from PR firms and people are always really interested to hear that I actually set a higher bar for inviting a guest on the podcast if I'm being pitched by a third party. It makes it very difficult for me to really get a sense of who the person is. I also feel as if third parties don't necessarily always have the same incentive or ability to communicate the essence of the person they're representing as the person does themselves. So I think sometimes people who are thinking about pursuing podcast appearances think, “Oh, it's going to look much more professional if I have a PR firm or my assistant approach them.” But for me, that's not true. Hearing from the person directly is more attractive to me. I think some of the other things to do or not to do are to be very flexible about what you're asking. I can encapsulate many of the aspects of an unsuccessful pitch easily. If the pitch is, “I have a new book, can I come on your podcast and talk about it?” That's just wrong in so many ways. First of all, my podcast is not that kind of podcast. My podcast is specifically with guests who have demonstrated expertise in an area of writing or publishing through writing a book about it, or writing an article about it, or speaking at a conference about it, and they're demonstrating their expertise for books outside their own books. That's really the key for The Indy Author Podcast. You can't come on just talking about your own book; you have to discuss what you've learned from your own experiences that can be generalized to my listeners. And so, “I have a new book, can I come talk about it?” is also not demonstrating any value for the people you're pitching. You're only emphasizing what you're trying to get out of that. Summarizing what I was just running through: Make the contact direct, emphasize the value, emphasize your familiarity, and mention other episodes from that podcast — that you think would be good companions. I think that combination is the recipe for a successful pitch. Jo: I like having a few bullet points, maybe three to five, that show there are multiple angles. You can obviously mention your book in the pitch. For example, you'd say, “I'm the author of The Podcast Guest Playbook, and here are some topics we could cover.” I've definitely said yes to pitches like that because they've given me different angles that are potentially interesting— Rather than a generic, “I've written a book,” you can say, “I'm the author of this book, and these are the angles we could cover.” You could pitch The Podcast Guest Playbook on all kinds of levels—to an entrepreneur podcast because they are people who want to go on these shows, or to professional speaking podcasts—but on each one, you would have different bullet points as to how that might apply to that particular podcast. I would also say, on referring to previous episodes, I think this has become a bit of a copy-and-paste hack that I get from so many now. They will literally say, “Dear Joanna, I really enjoyed the episode on The Podcast Guest Playbook with Matty Dalrymple, and I think you would like this book on flower arranging.” They've literally just chucked in the last episode without thinking about it, and it makes you read the first sentence and then you're like, “Oh, delete.” Matty: Yes, unless there's a legitimate connection, don't do that. The benefit of making a connection is if you're acknowledging, for example, that the host has had a guest on about podcasting previously, and you're acknowledging that you recognize that, and yet you feel like your topic is different enough. That's another way of acknowledging that. I'm glad you also reminded me about the flexibility aspect. The idea of providing different options is great. Then the other aspect of flexibility is that a lot of authors want to have their podcast appearances grouped around a book launch. First of all, I think that's not always realistic because I know you, for example, record your episodes way in advance. I also have a backlog of episodes. There are a whole bunch of considerations for podcast hosts about how they order the podcasts. For example, I might have had a couple of episodes that are focused on publishing, and now I want to make sure that I get back to craft. So I need the flexibility to do that. Being insistent about when your episode airs is not good form. I also think, in general, there is a benefit to not grouping a lot of podcast appearances around a book launch. The danger is that if I was pitching podcasts to promote one of my mystery novels, I might pitch a bunch of mystery reader-focused podcasts, and if I landed them all around the launch of the book, it's very likely that a lot of those listeners overlap and they may be hearing me on several podcasts in a short period of time. Now, if you have different aspects you can address about your book, then you can make sure that even if someone hears you on several podcasts, they're not hearing the same thing over and over again. But still, for podcast hosts, it's not appealing to know that their show is number four of seven appearances you have lined up. So you can really make a benefit out of what might initially seem to be a challenge by not trying to group all your appearances around a launch. Jo: I absolutely agree, although it's a double-edged sword, especially these days with Kickstarter, because people do want things within a window. So maybe say to the host, “This is my window.” As we record this, my show's booked out for the next six months. I get all the time, “My launch is next week.” I'm like, this just doesn't work. We put this in the calendar four months ago. Let's be really brutal about it. I got a pitch even this week that said, “I'm still writing my first book, and I would love to come on your podcast to talk about writing.” I literally didn't know what to say to this person. Maybe you could give us some tough love, Matty. Why is that not a good pitch, and why is that person maybe not expert enough for a show? Matty: Well, first of all, they're clearly not conveying any value that you or your audience are going to get. I suppose there could be podcasts out there that focus on early creators and what their experiences are. I can imagine a podcast where the host is more like offering advice to somebody early in their career, and they're looking for guests who are willing to have that kind of conversation with them, but obviously, that's not The Creative Penn Podcast. A lot of times, podcasters, just as with agents in the traditional publishing world, will post what they accept. The advice is, if they say they're looking for thrillers and you've written a cozy, then don't pitch them because you're wasting your time and theirs. The same thing with podcasts. If the host has posted what they're looking for, then don't pitch them if you don't meet that requirement. Even people who are representing well-known organizations that are clearly coming on a podcast to encourage people to use their products need to be able to focus on providing that value. I'm going to use Damon Courtney of BookFunnel as an example. I've interviewed Damon for The Indy Author Podcast. Obviously, Damon has an understandable interest in educating people about BookFunnel, but we had a great conversation that never really mentioned BookFunnel until the very end, when I gave him the opportunity to let people know about it, because he had great information to share about cross-promotion and how to get the word out about your book. I think everybody should follow Damon's example. If you're providing that value, then people are going to come to the product or book you're hoping they will get to. Jo: Damon is a great example of a very entertaining and engaging speaker. He's got an interesting voice, he's very animated, so he brings a lot of personality as well. I think that is important. Let's just give people some other tips. You do have to know what you are doing, and you are only a good interview for the host if you've done this before. Someone once sent a wonderful pitch, and I was like, “This is a great pitch. Come on the show.” Then when we turned on the recording, it was very clear this person had never done an interview before. It was so bad I had to stop the interview and say, “Look, I just think you need some more practice at this. This is a really good topic, and I'm really interested. How about you come back in six months? In the meantime, go practice and do some other interviews.” You and I have been doing this for a long time. There is a hierarchy of podcasts. There are brand new podcasts that maybe only have a couple of episodes and are new, and then there are long-running podcasts that have a bigger audience. How can people work their way up to bigger podcasts and also get experience so they feel more confident giving interviews on shows, radio, and TV? Matty: One tip I would share is that if you're starting to pitch podcasts and you don't have other interviews to point them to, which should be part of a pitch letter, you can create a demo reel. I got one pitch years ago from J.W. Judge, and he sent me a video where it was his pitch, personalized to me, in video format. He said, “Hi, Matty. I write as J.W. Judge, and I would love to join you on The Indy Author Podcast to talk about these things.” It was great because at that point, he didn't have any other interviews to point me to, but he was very clearly comfortable on camera, had everything set up, and was engaging. I appreciated the time he had spent making this specific pitch for me. If you are really uncomfortable with the concept, I think there are a couple of things you can do. One is to be an enthusiastic podcast listener. As with any kind of content, you are most successful doing it well if you enjoy consuming the content before you start trying to create it. That can provide comfort, especially if you're becoming familiar with a specific podcast that you want to pitch yourself to, because you'll understand the rhythm of it, the tone, and the gestalt of the podcast. I think there are certain expectations that podcast listeners develop about how a podcast interview works. Also, practice with people you know. Find someone you can sit down with over coffee and say, “Hey, here are some questions that I would love to be able to answer as a podcast guest. Let's chat through them.” Do that a couple of times with a couple of different friends and refine your answers each time. The great thing about that is you're sitting right across the table from them and you can kind of see when their eyes start to glaze over and when they're sitting forward and more engaged. You do less of the first thing and more of the second. Once you have done those preparatory steps, podcasts can be really nice because you're not in front of an audience. Obviously, you hope that there will be an audience, but unlike speaking in front of a group at your local library, it can feel like you're just chatting with the host, especially if you have a proficient host who's good at making guests feel comfortable. It can be a good entrée to other speaking engagements. Jo: I just want to comment on that video thing. Do not send me videos, anybody, because I literally never watch videos and will not watch them! When people send me a link to a video, I think it's a scam. What I would say is have an author website. One of the first things I will do if someone pitches me is go and look at their author website. It is amazing how many times something's broken or it's just not professional. You can have a landing page, like your author website name, forward slash media, and you could put a video there. Then I can choose to watch that video on a website as opposed to through my email. The other thing is, I always have notes. I always send questions before every interview. I think that's part of being an introvert and needing a lot of preparation. ChatGPT is very good for this. If you say to ChatGPT, “I'm going on Matty Dalrymple's The Indy Author Podcast. Tell me about Matty and some of her catchphrases and some of the things she likes. How does my book overlap with Matty's interests? What are some of the things that her audience would like?” That's a really good prompt. Then, just on the notes, I have notes as a host and as a guest, but a big tip: do not read the notes! Matty: Over time, I've evolved to an approach where I communicate with the guest and we land on an overall topic. When I ask them to schedule, I use Calendly, and one of the questions in there is to provide five subtopics related to the general topic that we've discussed. They provide those, so they can prepare for those subtopics, and it just gives us some sort of points in the conversation. Generally, I find that sufficient because as a host, I'm standing in for the listener. So if Damon's coming on the podcast to talk about cross-promotion, by having five guiding points for our conversation that I can ask him questions about, I feel like that's sufficient for my needs. But it's a great point that the more you can get insight into the preparation process of your host, the more you can be serving them by making that process as easy for them as possible. Mark and I talk about the three P's: politeness, professionalism, and preparedness, and the importance of these in your interactions. If they ask you to provide a list of URLs for your social media sites, then don't just provide them with your handle; actually provide them with a link. If they want a bio that's 100 words, don't send them 500. Every way that you don't comply with what they ask for, you're just making their lives a little harder. For many podcast hosts, this is a labor of love. You can't interact with them as if they were a service provider to you. If you think about hiring an editor, you and the editor have come to an agreement, you're paying them money, and for that, you expect certain deliverables. You can't go into an interaction with a podcast host with that mindset because you really have to recognize they are doing you a favor, even if they're getting benefits for themselves. My guess is that very few podcast hosts are making money from this. They're doing this as a service to the community. Jo: And even more than that, I do make money from this podcast, so it is part of my business, but I've been doing this for 16 years. At least seven of those years, it was not monetized. We put our time into connecting with an audience, and listeners come back to a show for the host. They might listen to a guest, but they come back for the host. The trust of our audience is what I value so highly, which is why I cannot bring somebody who doesn't bring value to the show. I'm not going to interview someone unless I'm like, “That is going to help the audience.” We've spent years building up trust with our audiences so they know what they're going to get when they listen to our show. Now, you mentioned Damon Courtney from BookFunnel, who we've both met at events. You and I met at ThrillerFest, about a decade or so ago. This is another tip. We mentioned friends before; both of us have co-written with Mark, who is a long-term friend. We met on Twitter originally, and then we met in person. How can people develop authentic relationships that can possibly develop into things like this? It is much easier for you to say, “I've got this book coming out, can I come on your show?” than it is for a blind pitch. How can people do that authentically? The book does talk about connections as well. Matty: I'm realizing that there's a connections aspect to every nonfiction book that I've written for authors. This is so interesting to me that I think my next book is going to be specifically on the connections that authors and other creatives can develop with the audience they want to reach, but also the real value of making those among your creative colleagues. I think there are just general tips that can lead to podcast appearances and lots of other benefits, and I'm going to go back again to value. If you meet somebody at a conference and they're a short fiction writer, and you've been thinking about putting together an anthology of short fiction, that is something you can offer them. Even things like interactions on social media. When I got that video from J.W. Judge, I had already met him. I had had interactions with him, so I could feel comfortable that it wasn't spam. If I see people who I recognize as being Patreon patrons or somebody who follows me on social media and comments in a productive way on my posts, that just paves the way to good feelings. If I have a whole list of potential podcast guests I'm looking at and there's a name I recognize and I've already had a good experience with them, then that obviously paves the way to me wanting to say yes more than no to that pitch. So fully understanding where your audience and interests and the audience and interests of your creative colleagues overlap can open up fantastic opportunities for podcast appearances and a whole lot of other things, whether that's co-authored books or just a collaborative friend that you may be able to provide mutual benefit to. Jo: Just to come back on the authentic connection, as we said, you and I met a decade ago at ThrillerFest as thriller writers. There was no transactional thing going on. We met as peers at a writer's conference. That's what I would say to people— Go to conferences, meet people, and make genuine relationships. You never know what they're going to turn into years later. It's not a case of, “Oh, nice to meet you. Can I come on your podcast?” Matty: Right, and that idea of not treating it as transactional is so important. This is where I think that even if you've gone through all the earlier processes of doing your research, finding the right podcasts, making your pitch, preparing for the interview, and conducting it with all the best practices. What a lot of podcast guests do is they sit back afterwards and say, “Phew, glad that went well. Now I'm onto the next thing.” I think that's a very transactional attitude. If that's where you feel like the transaction has ended, you are really under-representing the benefit you can gain from it and the benefit you can provide. Do those things to keep that relationship alive. If you are speaking on evergreen content, then every six months, maybe re-post on social media, “Oh, you might want to go back and look at this conversation I had with Jo.” Make sure that you, as the podcast host, know that I'm doing that, that I'm continuing to point people to your work. Nurturing that relationship with a host can pay you back way more than just that one transactional interview appearance. Jo: Last question, as we're almost out of time. You have your long-running podcast, The Indy Author, your co-author Mark LeFebvre has his long-running Stark Reflections, and I have this long-running show. Now some people will say, “Oh, well, it's all right for you lot, but now it's too late to start a show.” I've just rebooted my Books and Travel podcast, and I think we need new voices more than ever. Why do you keep podcasting, and any tips for those who want to start their own show? Matty: Well, I would first point people to my book, The Indy Author's Guide to Podcasting for Authors. In that, I walk through what is really driving you to think about hosting a podcast. You want to make sure you think through your goals and if they're realistic before you venture into that. The primary reason that I keep doing The Indy Author Podcast is because those relationships I build up are so worthwhile for me. I first met Mark because I was a listener to the Stark Reflections Podcast. An interaction I had with him related to a topic he talked about on that podcast is what led to our first co-authored book. It later led to me inviting Mark to be an advisor for ALLi. I feel like that connection we built long ago through Mark's podcast has paid off. Michael La Ronn and I have now co-authored two books together, and that has been based on many appearances that Michael has made on my podcast. It's that idea that if I'm really interested in whatever the topic is, I'm developing a network of people that I can reach out to. So I continue doing it because of the learning opportunities it offers me, the community-building opportunities it offers me, and because I just feel good about paying it back to the community. I feel as if, if I'm gaining these benefits from my guests, then I want to share those benefits with my listeners as well. Jo: Yes, I totally agree. From my Books and Travel show, what I realized as I rebooted it is that it enabled me to write my memoir, Pilgrimage. A lot of the episodes had helped me shape what that book became, and even though I didn't necessarily realize it at the time, it made a huge difference to me. One of my reasons for rebooting it again is because I have a book that's gestating on English gothic cathedrals, and I've got another one on the idea of home. I am interviewing people whose books I'm reading as book research on that show, and I'm so sure that it's going to help me to bring those books into the world. That show is not about the writing process or publishing or book marketing. I want to make sure people know that those podcasts are also wonderful. I would recommend people start shows on what they are really passionate about, where other people are also passionate. Yes, you are a writer, but there are lots of things that intersect with that. Where can people find you and your podcast and your books online? Matty: If they would like to listen to The Indy Author Podcast, that is “Indy” with a Y. If they'd like to find out more about all my nonfiction work, they can go to TheIndyAuthor.com. If they would like to find out about my fiction work, they can go to MattyDalrymple.com, and that's “Matty” with a Y. Jo: Brilliant. Well, thanks for your time, Matty. That was great. Matty: Thanks so much, Jo.The post How To Pitch Podcasts And Be A Great Podcast Guest With Matty Dalrymple first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How can you find your voice through writing in different genres and mediums over the years? How can you shift your mindset around book marketing, whatever your age? Betsy Lerner shares her experience of writing and books over decades in the publishing industry. In the intro, Going Local: Authors on the payoffs and pitfalls of hometown sales and promotion [Self-Publishing Advice]; Selling Books in Person at Live Events; Artist = Entrepreneur [Steven Pressfield]; Ecosystems come and go [Seth Godin]; 1000 True Fans [Kevin Kelly]. Plus, Exeter Cathedral, Death Valley, a Thriller; Successful Self-Publishing Fourth Edition; and The AI-Assisted Artisan Author webinar. 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  Betsy Lerner is an award-winning editor, literary agent and the author of fiction, non-fiction and memoir. Her book for writers is The Forest for the Trees: An Editor's Advice to 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 The publishing hierarchy—and the love of books that brings us together Tips to overcome your perception of writers vs. your own potential Balancing the desire for success and the fear of failure How writing can help one cope with grief Balancing editorial feedback and maintaining creative confidence Why publishers want their authors to have a pre-existing platform Embracing TikTok and BookTok at any age Navigating the current publishing industry You can find Betsy at BetsyLerner.com or on Tiktok at @BetsyLerner. Transcript of Interview with Betsy Lerner Joanna: Betsy Lerner is an award-winning editor, literary agent and the author of fiction, non-fiction and memoir. Her book for writers is The Forest for the Trees: An Editor's Advice to Writers.So welcome to the show, Betsy. Betsy: Thank you so much. Joanna: Oh, it's great to have you on. So first up— Tell us a bit more about you and how you have managed to experience almost every aspect of publishing across your career. Betsy: Publishing was actually not my first dream. I went to NYU for film school my freshman year, and I was “invited to leave” after the first year. That was devastating. I was not kicked out of school completely. I finished and got my degree in English, and then, like most English majors, was at a complete loss of what to do. I could not get a publishing job because I couldn't pass a typing test, which was required back in 1982. So I did a stop gap, and I worked at an investment bank for a couple of years in the library. I got it together to apply to graduate school, and I went for my MFA in poetry. At that time, I interned at a literary agency. That was really my first bite into the publishing world. I absolutely loved it. I loved being around writers and books and book jackets and galleys and all the accoutrements of that world. So when I finished my MFA, I went into publishing. I climbed the editorial ladder, as one does in the States. I'm not quite sure if it's the same in the UK. You go from being an editorial assistant to an assistant editor, editor, senior editor, etc. I really thrived and loved it very much. I became an agent when I had my child, and pre-pandemic there was no flexibility in the publishing houses. You couldn't even work at home for a half a day, let alone remote work. So I eventually crossed over to agenting, really for the flexibility of my time. Over these 40 years, I managed to write a few books every few years or so. I think the writer in me always sort of played second fiddle to the editor or agent in me. It always sort of came out one way or another. Joanna: I love that. You said how much you found a home in publishing because you love books and all the things of being around books. That's what I wanted people to remember. Often, there's always this stuff about, oh, this editor or this publishing house or this agent, or whatever. People always want to moan. We’re just all book people, right? We all love books. That's why, despite all the ups and downs, we all want to be in this industry. Betsy: Absolutely. There’s, in my mind, sort of this hierarchy where everybody wants to be the writer. Then next best is the editor. Then next best is the marketing, publicity, sales person. Also, all the wonderful designers and illustrators and people who make book jackets. Everybody is all in it together, but I’ve often found that the people behind the scenes get very little credit. I always, as an editor and even as an agent, always really loved and respected all the people all up and down the chain who contributed. Yes, all book people, big readers, movie goers, pop culture people. I’ve had a wonderful 40 years in the industry, even with all the ups and downs, and there are many downs. Joanna: Yes, we'll come back to those. You said that everyone wants to be the writer, like that's the first thing. In the book, you have this wonderful line: “When I entered the business, I believed that writers were exalted beings.” That made me smile because I remember feeling like that. I always was a reader, and I thought I could never be a writer, because they're so special, and it stopped me. So what can you say to people listening to encourage people, like if they're still feeling the separation between what they think a writer is and the truth of it? Betsy: Well, the answer is very complex, but it’s also very simple. You have to write. There are so many people who say they want to be writers and dream of being writers and have stories inside them, etc, etc. The fact is if you aren't actually writing, whatever form it takes, it's not going to happen. It's a craft and it takes a lot of time and practice. So I always tell people, do you write diaries? Do you keep notebooks? Are you writing blogs? Are you doing Substack? What writing are you actually doing? It doesn't all have to be prose. I wrote screenplays for years. I blogged for years. All of that was in the development of my voice and in my ability to story tell. Then, of course, all the editing that I did, I really learned what goes into making a book. The key thing is simply writing and understanding that all the writing you do is either in practice of the professional writing you might do, or it's just who you are and how you express yourself. Joanna: Well, it's interesting there. You talk there about you have to write and the different types of writing, but, of course —  You were 64 when you wrote your first novel. You've written loads of different things. Tell us about that. There’s this idea that you have to be young and beautiful to do your debut novel, right? The people who seem to get all the press are the young debut writers. So tell us a bit more about that experience. Betsy: When I was in my 20s, if I could have published a book, I'm sure I would have. I did not have it together. I went into publishing really, as I said, sort of as a default. I did have my MFA in poetry, and many of my fellow poets were going off to write and teach. I just didn't have access to any of those opportunities, nor did I think I would be particularly good at it. Fast forward, it was the pandemic. I did have more time on my hands. I had also just come through an extremely traumatic time in my life. My niece and nephew were killed by a drunk driver, then my mom passed away, and then my best friend committed suicide. Those tragedies all happened in the space of four or five months. I was in some sort of shock. I was in deep grief, and I guess I wrote my way out of it. I just sat down one day, opened my laptop and wrote the first words of the book, which are: “Here are the ways I could start this story.” I wrote for seven months, four or five hours a day, really until my hands cramped. I just poured this book out of myself. I don’t think magic happened and I wrote a novel, I do think it is based on 40 years of keeping diaries, blogging, developing my voice. Writing those screenplays really taught me how to write plot. So I think all the writing I did came together in this novel in my mid-60s. I was very fortunate that I was able to get it published. I found a small publisher who was able to say, instead of being a hot, young debut novelist, I was a senior, late bloomer. I had all this experience. We were able to do a bunch of publicity around the fact that I was a literary agent turned novelist. So my age sort of worked for me, both in the experience of writing and the attention I was able to get. Joanna: That's a great way to put it. Obviously those tragedies are awful, and it’s amazing that you managed to write your way out of it, as you said. Just for that, is the book about surviving tragedy? How did those things that happened to you emerge in the writing? Or do you think it was just an entirely different thing? You better tell us the title as well. Betsy: Well, the title is Shred Sisters. It's really a book about two sisters. The older sister has bipolar illness, and the younger sister is the narrator. It's coming-of-age and how she lived under the shadow of this very destructive, and yet charismatic sister. It doesn't involve the tragedies at all, except for the fact that a number of people do die in the book. It is a way, I guess, that I really coped with a lot of grief, but it's a separate story from that. I feel that all of those events are deeply connected to my writing fiction for the first time. Joanna: Well, it's interesting because you've also written several memoirs, including Food and Loathing, which I saw that title and was like, oh my goodness, that is such a powerful title. That's about disordered eating. The Bridge Ladies is about your mum. You've clearly delved into really personal things before. This book, The Forest for the Trees, is also really personal. So how do you do that? I do it now, but I know how hard it is for people to really put themselves out there in words. Fear of judgment is a big thing. How did you get over that for your memoir and everything you write? Betsy: I think because I kept diaries from the age of nine or 10, daily diaries for my whole life. Then when I became interested in poetry, it was the confessional poets who really drew me in. Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton and Robert Lowell were among my favorite writers. So I've always been interested in first-person writing, in intimate writing, and confessional writing. Then as an editor, I really became known for working with authors on their memoirs. I worked on Prozac Nation by Elizabeth Wurtzel and Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy. I eventually became the agent and editor for Patti Smith's Just Kids and all of her memoirs. It's really what I most love and gravitate towards. When I started to write The Forest for the Trees, I didn't see that as an entirely personal book. I was writing in my persona as an editor. Then when I did write Food and Loathing, I think I just felt that it was my time to write. I wanted to write my story. I felt bold. I didn't want to pull back, really, If I was going to do it, I was going to do it—I guess is what I was thinking. Do I now sometimes regret some of the things I wrote in that book? Possibly. I had a lot of bravado, I guess. I had worked on so many memoirs, and I just thought I wanted to tell my story. I was lucky that I had the chance to publish it. Joanna: It's so interesting. You keep saying that you've been lucky to publish or you were lucky to find a publisher. You've been in publishing for 40 years, and you're an agent. How is it that somebody like you would even struggle to find a publisher? Betsy: Well, I guess it's more that my ego, my self-esteem, all come from being an editor and an agent. If you meet me on a plane and you say, what do you do? I'll say, I'm a literary agent. I would never say I'm a writer. It doesn't matter how many books I have published. It's just not my identity, and I don't know why that is. I mean, it's a shame, I should own it. I still feel more comfortable behind the desk. I do feel very lucky. A lot of people in publishing write and want to be published. I just don't take it for granted. Yes, I had connections. I was able to find an agent more easily than someone who's not in the business. I still think it's a privilege to find people who are willing to actually pay you and work with you and put your work out there. Joanna: Interesting. Well, then coming back to your work editing memoirs. If you have a writer who brings you a manuscript and you're like, they have not let it all out— How do you encourage a writer to be more personal in their writing? Betsy: If I've accepted a book and I'm working with the person, we have an understanding that I would expect certain revisions from them. I would be very clear about what they would be. That might include going deeper in certain parts and investigating certain questions that are left clearly unsaid or holes in the manuscript. I recently read a manuscript by a woman with a child with a disability, and she never described what the disability was. Yet there was something very moving about the book, and I said to her, this can't be a question mark if you're going to write this book. So that was a very obvious one. Sometimes it's just more subtle. Sometimes you say too much, actually, and understatement can be more effective. It's not necessarily saying more, it's just crafting. Memoirs are crafted. They propose to be the truth, but they’re really a work of art, in my opinion. The quality of the writing is what makes people invested and believe in the story that they're being given. Joanna: Well, in another aspect of the book, you say — “Most writers have very little choice in what they write about.” You talk about the obsessions, and themes returning, and this finding your voice. I remember finding this very difficult at the beginning of my career. Like, what is this finding your voice? So there might be people listening who feel that way. So how can writers identify these things? Betsy: That's such a good question. I think it's organic, and it starts probably with what you gravitate towards as a reader. If you sit down to write science fiction, my guess is that you've read a ton of it as a kid and as a teenager. You've immersed yourself in that world. It's a world you love. It's a world that sparks your own imagination. I think I did a lot of personal writing because of how much I connected with books like The Bell Jar and Diary of Anne Frank and things like that when I was a girl. So I think your voice is part of the world that you immerse yourself in. Becoming good at it really just takes a lot of practice, and getting feedback, and doing revisions, and putting in the hours, putting in the hard work. It's very unusual that somebody who's never read in a certain genre is suddenly going to be great at that genre. At least in my experience, people write out of the worlds that they know. Joanna: I guess with author voice, so this idea of creative confidence as well—like, I'm pretty confident in what is my J.F. Penn writing, which is my fiction and memoir brand. I know what is me, and I work with an editor, but she also knows me. Now, I hear from people who work with editors, and there's a real line between an editor trying to make your book better and an editor who you feel might be affecting your voice. How can people listening ascertain where an editor would sit on that continuum and when an editor is a good fit? Betsy: I've had many editors, and I would say everybody has added something of value. Certainly there were people who also stymied me with their notes, or even frightened me or put me off completely. I've had every experience. Then with my novel, I had the most wonderful editor who completely helped me make the book better. They actually really taught me how to be a better writer in the process, which is something that has stayed with me even beyond working on that book. It's very intimidating if you're a new writer and your editor tells you something, you think you have to do it. It takes a bit of spine to not do it. Then are you doing that at your own peril? Are you being defensive? Are you not really listening? Or is the advice bad? When you're a beginning writer, it's very difficult to parse all of that. It takes time and experience and even a little bit of luck to find the editor with whom you feel you're really a hand in glove in what you're doing. I think a lot of people do suffer at the hands of editors. Then, of course, many people are extremely helped, then everything in the middle. Joanna: Well, I think that's the point—it's not like the first editor you ever work with is it for the rest of your life. You will have different editors in your life. The relationships will be different, a bit like our friendships or partners or whatever. So yes, I think you kind of touched on that. I also was interested, you have a lot in this book, The Forest for the Trees, around mindset. I particularly like this line: “The desire for success and the fear of failure run along a continuum.” So talk about that from your own perspective. How have you balanced desire for success and the fear of failure? Betsy: I love that question. It's something I think about probably on a daily basis. I think that the act of writing, the desire to be in your own mind, in your own sort of playground, and the beautiful solitude of it all, is really what the heart of writing is all about. At the same time, I would say most people are writing, even in a diary, with the hope of being read. So they're very connected. When you read writers’ diaries, you can tell that they're not just writing for themselves. It's almost as if they have an audience in mind. So I think that when we're writing, it is about the desire to communicate, even though we really are writing alone, and in many ways for ourselves. The ego can get very tied up in that. There are some writers who are obsessed with success. I work with one writer who's a complete and total recluse, and never reads her reviews, and doesn't want to know anything besides just getting her contract and getting her book out there. She does no publicity either, by the way, which makes it very difficult to publish her. That's what I mean about the continuum. There are some people who are so blinded by the desire for success that their work almost seems to be secondary. Obviously, the best is to find some balance between your discipline, and love of writing, and the outcome for any book that you create, and how much energy you're going to put into that, and how much the world is going to welcome it or not. So many books get published with no fanfare at all, and it's always just a very few every season that seem to get all the attention. Writers have to learn how to live with those outcomes and see if they're willing to keep going. Joanna: How have your books gone in that way? Have you hit the success as a writer? I mean, you said before that you didn't identify that way. Do you feel like you are a successful writer, as well as an award-winning editor and all the other things you are? Betsy: Yes, but I work very hard at it. Part of why I was so drawn to your podcast, in fact, is that — I love marketing. I love publicity. I love figuring out how to get the work out there. I've mostly done that for my clients and my authors, but when I have published my books, with each consecutive book, I've gotten better and bolder at doing the marketing. So with this novel, for instance, I pulled out all the stops. I did everything I humanly could. I even got on TikTok and befriended book influencers. I made fortune cookies with lines from the book inside and gave them out at readings. I wrote hundreds of note cards to librarians and booksellers and people in the media that I had even the most tangential relationship with. I've been helping my authors for all of these years try to get attention for their books in every imaginable way possible. With Forest for the Trees, with my first book, I did write to a ton of writing conferences and MFA programs and offered to give talks and send free copies and do that sort of thing. I am very proud of it because it's still in print all these years later. I still hear from people that it's helped them, and that's so rewarding. Joanna: Wow, everyone's still reeling at your comment, “I love marketing.” So yes, obviously you're full of ideas of different kinds of things. Then you also mentioned this writer before who's a recluse and doesn't do any marketing. So how can writers listening change their attitude? How can people learn to love marketing like you do, and be creative with it as you've obviously been? Betsy: Well, it's really difficult, since most writers do enjoy their solitude and may not be the most social people going. Some people just turn their nose up at marketing. People have such a strange idea of marketing and sales. In my mind, what it all boils down to is communicating and figuring out that one-line pitch that can get people interested in your book, then just putting a lot of elbow grease into it. I often use the metaphor of, if you were to open a store and you lovingly furnished it with all sorts of goods that you've hand-picked, and you've made the store so beautiful, but then all you did was put an open sign in the door—nobody's really—maybe one or two people might walk in. If you wanted a lot of customers, you'd have to do some outreach. So it's just outreach. It is a different head. You have to be very sensitive to be a writer, but you also have to be sort of thick-skinned to get out there and sell your book and market your book. These days, even the big publishers often don't do all that much, and it really is up to the author if they want to get the word out. Another thing I often ask writers too is, what are your goals? What do you want this book to do for you? How many copies do you think you want to sell? Do you want to use it as a calling card to get a job or to get speaking engagements? Do you have a political agenda? Why are you writing this book? What do you want it to do in the world? A lot of writers say, “I hadn't thought about that.” So I say, think about that, and then let's make a plan that's commensurate with your goals. Joanna: Yes, you said there that a lot of publishers don't even do much marketing for books anymore. I think certainly in the self-publishing and the independent publishing side of things, I hear often people say, “I don't want to do any marketing, so I'll just get a traditional publisher, and then they will do it all for me.” Right? Is that just not true anymore? Betsy: It's not true anymore. It's not true at all. In fact — Publishers these days are most drawn to authors who come with a platform — either a large social media platform or an institutional platform, because that helps them sell their books. They've identified the market already. It's disheartening. I remember the first time I was agenting a book, and the editor, before even asking, “What is the title? Who is the author? What's it about?” said, “What's their platform?” I was so taken aback. Another time, I heard an author, an editor, I was pitching a book, and I heard clicking, and I knew the editor was looking up the sales figures for the author rather than listening to my pitch about my passion for the book. That’s when I knew—and I'd say that was about 10 years ago—the landscape had completely shifted from content-based material to platform-based material. Joanna: I think people, even though we're all book people, like we said at the beginning, people still have to make money in a business. I think it's important that we think about that sales side, even though, as you said, it's like a different head. I do have to come back to TikTok, because I did actually go and look at your TikTok channel. I have basically refused to do TikTok. I'm like, I do audio as my main marketing channel, and I do a little bit of social media. You're on TikTok, so tell us about that. Why did you decide to jump in? What kind of things do you do? And are you still doing it? Betsy: Yes, I'm still doing it. I love it. I went on out of curiosity, because as I said, the landscape was changing. As of about somewhere in the middle of COVID, people began saying that BookTok was the only thing moving the needle for selling books. Everyone saw the Colleen Hoover phenomenon, and then romantasy. I started to recognize that it wasn’t just genre and romantasy, but literary books were also getting a big bump on BookTok. I decided I had to see what this was that everyone said was moving the needle, even though most people in publishing were not going on BookTok at all or getting their marketing teams excited about it. Just a couple of publishers were at the vanguard. In any case, I wanted to learn about it as a literary agent to help my clients, but also because I had a novel coming out and thought maybe I could get some of these book influencers to talk about my book. So I got on the platform, started learning, and started became part of the community by leaving comments on other BookTokers’ videos. Some dialogue started happening, and I reached out to many book influencers, asking if I could send them my galley. A lot of them said yes and many posted about my book. So that was really exciting for me watching young people with tattoos and nose rings holding my little book and saying why they liked it so much. It was fantastic. I also thought maybe I could create some content. I started reading snippets from my diaries from my 20s. I found very quickly that I could build an audience, and many young people resonated with my diary entries and made them feel less alone in the world. Most of my entries are all about being someone in their 20s who is sad and lost. Turns out there's still a lot of lost and said people in their 20s out there. Joanna: I was so impressed with your videos. I feel—I don't know, and this is totally about me, this is not about anyone else—but that I somehow have to do my hair and makeup. I know it's not meant to be scripted, but to turn on a video and start talking or share bits of your diary as you do. You have your face there and everything. You're there. It's not just your diaries. If people are worried, like me— What would you say to people like me? Is it really worth it? Do people have to get over themselves? Betsy: That's a great question. When I first started trying on BookTok, I refused to be on camera. I was just posting these little literary tidbits of books that I liked. I was just messing around. One of our clients, who's big on BookTok, called me and said, “Your stuff is adorable, but you're not getting any traction. You won't get any unless you get on camera.” I said, “No way, no way, no way.” About a month later, I saw her somewhere. She said, “So how are you doing on the platform?” I said, “I'm not getting anywhere. “ She said, “Are you going to get on camera or not?” I said, “I don't think so.” She explained how my posts were all random and that — To get traction, you have to pick a lane, and do something people know you for. Think of it as your own little TV show. That's when I thought, all right, maybe I'll try it. What the hell? By the way, nobody I know is on TikTok, so I had nothing to be worried about. That night, I went home and realized I have all these diaries. Maybe I can do this. That first post that I did went viral, so that was very encouraging. Not all posts go viral—many don’t. I have built an audience. I have over 30,000 followers. My posts generally get a good reception. Every now and then, one goes viral. I find it extremely exciting. I'm a child. What can I say? I love attention. I love the app. I've made some very good friends. Even in real life, I've met some of these BookTokers. They're all young, and I just think they're fantastic. Joanna: I love that. It's interesting because I got on Twitter, as it was back then, in 2009. For those first few years of being in Twitter, a lot of my friends in real life are people I met on Twitter back then. I built a lot of my business on Twitter. Obviously, that platform has changed. That almost feels like what you're talking about there with TikTok and BookTok. So I love to hear that. Hopefully, that encourages people of different ages. I always hear people say to me, it's only for people in their 20s and 30s. There really are a lot of different ages and demographics now, aren't there? Betsy: Absolutely. Also, I'm a big science person. Within TikTok, there's everything under the sun, including STEMTok. I watch a lot of scientists talk about their work. I've even found clients on TikTok. We represent this incredible linguist called Etymology Nerd and sold his book. I'm working with an ornithologist who has a fantastic following and is a wonderful communicator. Yes, there are a lot of cowboys dancing without their shirts on and kitten videos, that's all there. If you have a real interest, you'll probably also find people making content, either there, or on YouTube, or even on Instagram now people are doing videos. It is sort of the Wild West. There's a lot out there, and it takes some time to figure out how to use the platform. I'm really happy to hear you found real friends through Twitter. I think people don't understand that social networks are also about connecting. The BookTokers who I've become friends with are people who, if I'd met them at a party, I would have loved to have met them. They're young, vibrant, read tons of books, and have tons of opinions. Yes, and they're not just talking about their knee replacements, and mortgages, and Medicare. I really appreciate that. Joanna: I love that. You are really fun! What I actually really enjoyed about your book is it's very ‘voicey.' I can hear your fun and your opinions, which I really like. I think that's great. Obviously, people can check you out on TikTok. I wanted to come back to publishing because in the book, you say, “The cyclical nature of the publishing business, the brutality of the media, and the vagaries of the marketplace are things that we all have to get used to.” So I wondered if you could maybe give us a perspective on the changes of the publishing industry that are still happening, and, in fact, even more so with AI. How can authors now navigate the industry? Betsy: That's such a big question. It's so difficult. At least in the States, the biggest problem is when I entered publishing, there were about 40 publishers. Now they're called the Big Five. It's all been conglomerated. There are many imprints within each major publisher, but they all basically run the same way and have the same mindset about publishing. People want either the hot, sexy debut author, or the author with the big platform, or the celebrity, or the CEO. That's what the world really wants. If you're a literary writer or genre writer, you might have to make your way not looking at the big publishers in the beginning, as you develop your audience and grow as a writer. Getting published by a major publisher isn't the end-all and be-all anymore. Even someone like Colleen Hoover started by self-publishing. There's a real path outside of traditional publishing. I still work within traditional publishing. I still am able to break writers in, but it's much more difficult that it used to be. There's much more scrutiny before a book is acquired. Authors just have to have a bigger platform or some real literary fairy dust that's been sprinkled on them, either by other famous writers, or an MFA program, or publishing in a very high quality magazine. I would just say that —  You better really love writing, because it's a long haul and it's very difficult to sustain a career. So it just has to be what you have to do. I've always written part time. I've always had my day job. I think most writers have to survive by also doing other jobs, unless you really break through. So you just have to understand that you're probably going to have to do other work to sustain yourself, but if writing is what you have to do, then you'll find a way. Joanna: You said earlier, every couple of years, you end up writing another book. So you clearly can't help yourself. Betsy: Exactly. For all the books I've published, I have many unfinished notebooks. I have many projects that have never seen the light of day. I've got seven screenplays—if there are any producers listening. I have an MFA collection of poetry that will never see the light of day. That's all fine, because that’s all of what you do to develop as a writer, and that goes into the books that you do eventually publish. All of the unpublished work is, to me, I'm as proud of that as I am of the published work. More than that, it sustained me and kept me going, because that's really how I live. Joanna: Fantastic. Where can people find you and your books online? Betsy: Well, there's always Amazon, of course. I love to direct people to Bookshop, which basically is also an online a bookseller that taps your local booksellers, which is fantastic. Also Indiebound. I'm on TikTok at @BetsyLerner. I have my blog, which is BetsyLerner.com. That's really a community of miserable writers coming to check in on the misery that I post. Now, only maybe every few weeks, but I had posted for many, many years, and that's all there in the archives. For any writing lonely hearts, I have a wonderful community of malcontents who read my blog. Joanna: Brilliant. Thanks so much for your time, Betsy. That was great. Betsy: Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.The post Finding Your Voice, Writing Across Genre And Loving Book Marketing With Betsy Lerner first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How will generative AI change search and book discoverability in the years ahead? How can you make sure your books and your author website can be found in AI tools like ChatGPT? Thomas Umstattd Jr. joins me to discuss Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) and how it will replace traditional SEO marketing. I first covered this topic in Dec 2023, How Generative Search Will Impact Book Discoverability in the Next Decade. As ever, I was early, but those changes are now starting to happen. Thomas recently covered the topic on his Novel Marketing Podcast on Does ChatGPT Recommend Your Book? This episode is supported by my patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn  Thomas Umstattd Jr. is the CEO of AuthorMedia.com, as well as an award-winning professional speaker, non-fiction author, and host of the Novel Marketing Podcast and the Christian Publishing 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 How authors can benefit from AI optimization Principles authors need to keep in mind as search is changing Different AI models and their capabilities Making your author website LLM-friendly How to utilize Goodreads to improve your GEO The future of AI agents in book buying Staying positive and curious in the ever-changing AI landscape You can find Thomas at AuthorMedia.com. Transcript of Interview with Thomas Umstattd Jr. Joanna: Thomas Umstattd Jr. is the CEO of AuthorMedia.com, as well as an award-winning professional speaker, non-fiction author, and host of the Novel Marketing Podcast and the Christian Publishing Show. So welcome back to the show, Thomas. Thomas: Thanks, Joanna, for having me. Joanna: It's great to have you back. Now, for everyone listening, you were on the show a few years back. So we're going to dive straight into the topic today, which is based around a recent episode on your Novel Marketing Podcast on “AI Optimization For Authors: Does ChatGPT Recommend Your Book?” I was like, yes, I really want to talk about this. Why did you decide to get into this topic now? What did you see in the author community that made you want to help authors see AI differently? Thomas: Well, what triggered this topic was actually the Google I/O Conference, where one of the features they were demoing was the ability to take a picture of a stack of books and then get recommendations on additional books that were like that book. As somebody who spends a lot of time in tech world, books and authors are often the example that the tech people use to demonstrate new capabilities of AI models. Often, unless people listen to your show, that new tech does not actually get translated to the author community. Most authors are not watching the Google IO Conference or even summaries of it. Joanna: Except you and me! Thomas: So I was like, oh, I need to do some tests with this. So I started testing different models to see how they would recommend books. I kind of realized, oh, this is already happening. People are already asking AI all the questions of their life. Google search traffic is way down. People are moving those big questions of their life conversations away from traditional search engines and towards AI interactions. If you can get the AI to recommend your book, you'll be well-positioned for ongoing sales in this new era. If you're holding on to ranking on Google search, or even Amazon search, as your only way of finding customers, sales are going to keep slipping, and you won't understand why. Joanna: It's interesting. I have been using ChatGPT primarily since November '22 when it first came out. I use it instead of Google. So I have started to use Gemini again, but I mainly use ChatGPT. Also on my phone, it's what I use. So what about your personal behavior? Do you use a lot of AI for normal life that you once would have used Google for? Thomas: I do. In fact, AI has boosted my productivity so much that we've been able to launch a new podcast, a whole additional podcast, called Author Update. It is a news podcast once a week, just covering publishing news. So much of the pieces of that, like taking the transcript and turning it into a blog, creating the timestamps for YouTube, creating the thumbnails for YouTube, creating the titles for YouTube. That's all done by AI. Different AI tools that I've built for each one of those pieces that two years ago would have been incredibly time consuming. There would have been no way we could have added yet another show to the mix. Joanna: I didn't know that. Interestingly, I have also brought back my Books and Travel Podcast, which I stopped doing a couple of years ago because it was too much work, and it's not one that's monetized. I also brought it back in the last few months, because I was like, do you know what? I can now do so much of this with AI that it doesn't matter so much. Actually, one of the things with that show which is interesting, is a lot of the times I'm interviewing people with different accents. A lot of the speech to text, the transcription previously, has been very good with American men, but it hasn't been so good with British women or anyone else of any nationality speaking English. Now I find it's all very good. So it's like people who maybe last year might have said, “Oh no, this still isn't not good enough,” it really is now, isn't it, for a lot of use cases? Thomas: Yes, there's a kind of person who tried ChatGPT when it first came out. They tried GPT 3.5, they played around with it for a couple of hours, they weren't impressed, and then they came to a conclusion. The conclusion that they came to was not that this particular tool isn't ready, but instead, the category of AI is no good. What they haven't realized is that so far in 2025 a new model that's the best in the world has come out almost every 10 days. Almost every episode of Author Update we're like, “And there's a new AI model on the top of the benchmarks.” It's like they all take turns, and now they're starting to snipe each other. So Gemini was number one for like two days, and then Anthropic is, like, “Here,” and pushed them off. Joanna: “Here's Claude 4.” Thomas: “You want to be number one. We're going to take that away from you.” If you were to go back and use GPT now, even the free version, it would be dramatically better than that first experience you had. Really where the power is once you start paying for the AI models. Once you're using GPT-4.1 or -4.5, or Gemini 2.5 Pro. I really like Grok for research. I found that Grok's Deep Search functionality is unbelievable. It has real time access to knowledge and real time access to X. So for doing research on basically any topic, Grok has won in every test that I've done. Joanna: Oh, that's interesting. So I use o3. My primary model is ChatGPT o3 for pretty much everything, unless it's just something very basic that I would Google. Then I use Deep Research on ChatGPT with o3, and also Gemini 2.5. So I do use Grok, but only when I'm on X. This is interesting—we're going to come back to search—but interestingly, with all the stuff with the Deep Research, for example. People listening, you get like, a 20- to 30-plus-page report on what you want to research with loads of sources and links, and most of them never, ever surface social media links. Grok on X obviously does, but that's the only one. So I find that really interesting, too. Thomas: Yes. In fact, that was one of the things I researched for my episode on AI optimization. I was curious which social networks affect which AI models, because some social networks affect all of the models, and some social networks have impacts on basically none. TikTok and Bluesky don't touch anything. You can be the biggest deal on TikTok, and none of the AI will know you exist. YouTube influences Gemini. X is exclusively for Grok. Facebook and Instagram supposedly are tied to Llama. Joanna: Who uses Llama?! Thomas: Llama is so bad, it doesn't matter if it's connected to Facebook. Talking to all AI is like talking to a child, but talking to Llamas is like talking to a toddler that hasn't quite figured out how the words work and how the sentences work. You can learn to understand it, but it's like, why bother when all the other AIs are like talking to middle schoolers who can now do research reports and are actually quite smart? Joanna: I was going to say, yes, it depends on the context. Well, let's bring it back. You mentioned the Google IO Conference, and I also went to the overviews of that. Sundar Pichai said a few things. I've just got a quote here. He said, “AI overviews have scaled to over 1.5 billion users in 200 countries, driving over 10% growth in the types of queries that show them.” Sundar Pichai So if people have used Google, I guess in the last six months, really, but a lot more in the last month or so, is if you ask something on google.com and then you will get this AI overview. So you don't necessarily have to click into the article. So given that, I've heard it also called GEO, generative engine optimization, instead of SEO. What are some of the principles that authors need to keep in mind if search is changing this way? Thomas: So one of the fascinating things about AI is that it's very much a last shall be first and the first shall be last technology. So it's taken a lot of things that didn't used to matter very much, and it's making them suddenly matter a whole lot. The two biggest winners of this new era is the author website, which has been kind of declining in popularity, particularly amongst indie authors because most indie authors are all in on Amazon all the time. They're not wide. They dream of maybe someday going wide, but the KU money is just too good. So if your only existence is on Amazon, it's very easy to ask the question, why does my website matter? Now, the website did matter, right? Being able to sell direct was important. Being able to build your email list was important. Being able to communicate directly to readers was important. There was a kind of author who's like, “Eh, I'm just on Amazon. I can ignore the website.” Now your website is your primary way of influencing large language models that train on the open web. You can't fully control Amazon, you can't fully control anywhere else on the web, but you can control your own website down to the robots.txt file. You have full control over it. That is really, really important for educating an LLM about your book, and about your book's relationship to your other books, and about your book's relationship to the other books in the world. So it's like, “This book is like this other book by this other author,” and your blog, on your website, is a really useful tool for that. Joanna: You mentioned the word control, and that's exactly what I've been thinking about. Now, I've had my own author websites since 2008. You know, old school like you. I also have Shopify stores. Shopify is actually interesting in that they are going AI first, and there are rumors of some kind of collaboration between OpenAI and Shopify in terms of surfacing direct links, which is interesting in itself. So, yes, your control, your author website. Also we've seen—well, we're going to come back to Amazon—but they're doing a lot of things with their own AI. What are some specific things that we can put on our author websites? I mean, if I say, okay, so I've got an about page, which is about me. Then do I have a book page? On a book page, what are some of the things that I might add that the LLMs would be interested in? Thomas: So here's the classic mistake. An author gets started writing, and they have “Home”, “About”, “Book” and “Contact”. It's kind of the classic author website. Then they write a second book, and they're like, oh, well, I need to put this new book at the top of my book page, and I'll rename it to “Books”. Well, that is a blunder, believe it or not, because now you no longer have a page dedicated to either one of the books. So you've done the new book you just wrote a disservice, and you did your existing book a disservice. So one really easy change that many of you listening can do right now is you just create a new page for each book, and you copy and paste the content from your Books page into each individual's book page. Then you make your Books page just a bunch of thumbnails for your covers. Big, beautiful covers, even bigger and more beautiful than the thumbnails on Amazon. They click on that cover, and it takes them to an entire page just about the book. So that's step one. You can do that in 15 minutes. Step two is now realizing this page isn't just for my readers trying to decide about the book. This page is for large language models trying to understand my book. So you want to actually make that page as rich and as in-depth as possible. You also want to make it really good for humans, right? So put discussion questions, have sample chapters, have your audio book resources. So I'm a big reader of fantasy, but I listen to fantasy books, and I really want to see the map. When I go to an author's website, it's some low res garbage map, and I can't see the towns, and it makes me very sad. All I want, fantasy authors, please, for the love of good maps, just upload a five gigabyte version of your map to your book page. I will love it. AI will love it. Your readers will love it. It will make everyone happy, and it already exists on your hard drive. It's what you put in your book. It's not going to keep anyone from buying your book, the fact that they can get the map of your fantasy world for free. That's just one example of the sort of thing that you can put on your site. Also, frequently asked questions. If you do frequently asked questions, there's a Schema, Schema.org that you can add to a page through Yoast SEO. So if you're using WordPress, it really is the best for this sort of thing. It's called a Question Schema, where it will actually surface that question, not just on Google search, but also to the to the LLMs, where they'll see the question and then see the answer. This will really reduce the likelihood of the LLMs hallucinating if somebody else asks that question, or a similar question to the LLM. Joanna: So just on that frequently asked questions. We just mentioned the AI overview on Google, if you have a frequently asked question on your website that it can easily pull from, it is more likely to do that. Also useful is NotebookLM, where you can upload your book and it can actually generate those frequently asked questions for you. So this is another thing I would say. I mean, again, read the terms and conditions but NotebookLM, in particular, says it doesn't train on the data you upload into a Notebook, if people are worried about that. You can actually use the AI tools to help you build this material. The other thing I was going to say on images, one of the things I was reading about is the alt text. Now, the alt text on images, we've been encouraged to use for accessibility reasons. So if somebody is blind or partially sighted, the alt text gets read when there's an image. Alt text is used by the LLMs when they're going through a website. Yes, they can “see” now, but they use the alt text. So is that something that you've considered? Because I guess I didn't think about that before. Thomas: So this is one of the techniques that I think is helpful right now and won't be helpful in two or three years, because this is purely a way of you adding human labor to your website to save the bot from doing bot labor. You can upload an image to GPT's Image-1 Engine and ask it to describe it, and it can describe that image with paragraphs and paragraphs of detail, but for GPT to do that, it requires a lot of compute. They don't have the compute to do that for all of the images on all of the websites on all of the internet. Now, the compute cost is going down. You know, more efficient chips are coming out. The models are getting more efficient. So several years from now, the AI will be able to just go to a page, look at the image, and generate a much more useful understanding of that image than what it can currently get with alt text. In the meantime, adding some descriptive alt text could help before it's understanding the image. Also, not all LLMs are multimodal, which I realize is a big term. So multimodal is being able to interact with text and image at the same time. So GPT is, I would argue, the most multimodal. It's just unbelievably good with images. I'm not a big fan of GPT in general, I find that the other models are better at most of the other specific use cases, but for images, it is just hands down the best. It's often the second best in every other category. So it's a good one if you're only using one. Some of the other engines aren't very good with images yet. I haven't been impressed with Claude's handling of images. Grok is only kind of so-so. Gemini has made some big steps forward, but I still think it's behind GPT in image rendering. So you're also helping these other models more because, you know, Anthropic may not be able to describe the image in a very suitable way right now. It will in a few years, but right now, maybe not so good. Joanna: It's interesting you say that. I think ChatGPT o3, that is my favorite model. I don't really use the 4-models. I also think where if people are saying, “Oh, well, you know, Thomas doesn't rate it,” well, I think everyone prefers different models as well because of personality things. A lot of writers like Claude, for example, for the more creative side of things. As we've also said, If you don't like a model this week, try again in a couple of weeks, and it may well have changed. I mean, GPT-5 is rumored to be coming out, which I think will be interesting. One of the things is, you and I are quite technical, so we're like, “Oh, this number and this letter,” but GPT-5, apparently it will do that for you. So you'll just put your query in, and it will choose the best model for you, which I think will really help. Thomas: Yes, one thing to help simplify this, because GPT has probably the worst naming schema in the history of naming. So they have GPT-4o and GPT-o4, which are entirely different models and have almost nothing to do with each other. Then they have 4.1, which is actually better than 4.5. So the numbering doesn't work. Then o3, which is based off of 4, is actually better at a lot of reasoning tasks. It's very confusing. So let's simplify it in a way that actually will help across all of the companies. There's kind of three main flavors of LLMs in terms of main features, and that is the kind of default model, default model with reasoning, which is what o3 does really well because it can actually think about your question. So if you think about if somebody asked you a question, you can answer off the top of your head, or you can sit down with a piece of paper and kind of think about it a little bit. That left brain slow thinking is what we mean by reasoning. When you're interacting with a reasoning model, it's slower to get back to you because it thinks about it. Then the third kind of model is deep research, where it will actually go and do research. I don't know if you ever do this, Joanna, but on a live call, somebody will ask a question, and you'll do a quick Google search to refresh your memory about that thing that they're talking about. That's kind of how the search functions. It's called Deep Search on Grok. I think it's called Deep Research on GPT [and on Gemini]. Those three features are rolling out to all of the different models, and they're useful in different ways. So if you want a quick answer, you just want to talk to the core model, but if you want some deep, in-depth analysis, you want to turn on research, or maybe turn on thinking as well. That'll simplify it to make it not quite so confusing because if you're not following this every week, the numbers and the letters and the models and the companies will just make your eyes water. It's so complicated. Joanna: Absolutely. Or my tip is, whatever your favorite model is, you just say, “I want to do this. How can you help me do it?” Most people aren't as technical as we are, so they won't necessarily be driving the machines in that way. Let's come back to the website. So I agree with you that sort of the last shall be first. So the author website has sort of fallen out of favor in many ways. For example, blogging. I was blogging from 2008, and then about five years ago I stopped because there were some really, really good websites doing the kind of content I was. So I was like, right, I'm just going to do the podcast. Of course, for our podcast, we have transcripts and all that. I thought, well, that gets indexed, and my site does still rank for lots of good things because of the podcast transcript. So if people are now thinking, okay, well, if these AI engines want this rich content, but we don't want to upload our books onto our website, for example, what are some of the other things they could put on the website? Is it just the book page, or— Could people be thinking about other forms of content on their sites? Thomas: So blogging is really powerful, and I will share this with your audience. I left it out of the blog version of my episode on AI optimization, but it's in the audio and video version. One of the big things that the LLMs look for when it comes to ranking a book is something called context, where it's in relationships, specifically. So relational context is really important for LLMs, and you can guide that with a blog post. So you can say, “The top 10 posts on such and such trope” or, “The top 10 authors who are similar to JF Penn.” “So if you love JF Penn, you'll love…” and you just got these other nine authors and includes JF Penn. So if I'm writing books that are similar to JF Penn, I would include my name in that list, and then train the LLMs to start associating our names and putting them in a semantic cluster. A blog is really powerful at this. The other really good thing to do with blogging has been the best thing to do with blogging for the last 15 years, which is just answer questions. Your inbox fills up with questions, and so you just write one really good answer, you email it to that person, and then you copy and paste it to your blog. Take out all the personal bits, add some bullets, add some headings. Now you've got a really good blog post that already existed in your outbox, that you know for sure a real human being asked. If one human being asked it, probably others asked it. If they're not asking Google, they're asking the LLM. It's not that much more work to have a blog of some kind, the topics of which are driven by your own readers. Joanna: You mentioned there, it's easier with nonfiction because people will ask questions about that. For example, on my Books and Travel, I did the Camino de Santiago, and people email me all the time saying, like, “What shoes did you wear for the Camino?” I mean, just a question like that. It is in my book, and I have actually put it on the website now, but it's interesting because that's easier for nonfiction/memoir. For fiction, like you said, I have done blog posts in the past like, “10 Action Adventure Series with Female Main Characters,” stuff like that. This is what I was also wondering, because if you use any of the LLMs, and you say, for example, “What do you know about author JF Penn?” and it will kind of look at everything. I found that Goodreads is actually incredibly highly ranked. I wonder if that's because a lot of those posts, like you're saying, are often on Goodreads, their blog. That's literally what their blog is. They're always posting lists of relational things, and obviously they're owned by Amazon. What do you think about fiction authors in particular? Would it be better to be posting lists of that kind of thing on Goodreads and/or their website? Thomas: I love Listopia. That's Goodreads' list feature. I don't think authors are allowed to add their own books to lists on Listopia, which means you'd have to work with a compatriot to add each other's books into the list, which adds a little bit of friction. Goodreads has become incredibly important because Goodreads is one of the only places on the internet that has Schema.org information on books. There's actually no good way to add this to your website right now. This is making me feel like I shouldn't have given away MyBookTable, which is a WordPress plugin for making book pages that I developed years ago and I'm no longer a part. Yoast SEO doesn't support the book schema, but Goodreads does. So Goodreads has become like the go-to source for metadata and context and information about books. It also has reviews and rankings and relationships. It can look at shelves and which books are connected with which other books and shelves. It's actually really rich data, and unlike most other social networks, it doesn't have a login wall to access pages. So you can go to any page on Goodreads without being logged into Goodreads, which means there's no good mechanism to keep the bots away. Having a Goodreads profile at 100% is really important. You're like, “But I never use Goodreads, and my readers don't use Goodreads,” like, well, some of your readers do. The mega-readers, the readers who take chances on new authors, they're all over Goodreads. If somebody reads 300 books a year, they need Goodreads to find that 301st book. If somebody reads one book a year, they just go to the bookstore and buy whatever the James Patterson book is that's facing the door. So if you're new to writing and you're still just getting started, Goodreads was always important to you, but now it's even more important, because now Goodreads is informing all of the networks. So when I was doing my research, every single large language model—I don't know about Llama, I don't really care about Llama—but all the ones that matter, they all look at Goodreads quite a bit for informing their context about books. Joanna: That is quite shocking for some people. You know, when I started in 2008, Goodreads was a separate company. It was really big. It still looks the same as it did. Thomas: It's like a time capsule to the days before social media got toxic. Joanna: It really is. It's quite horrible. So I guess maybe a decade ago, I was like, okay, I don't really want to use this anymore. Also, a lot of us were focusing on going wide and building Shopify and all this. Then a couple of years ago I saw that, oh my goodness, Goodreads is becoming more important. So I've really been making much more of an effort and asking people who buy direct to also review on Goodreads. Of course, let's say you read on a Kindle, you read an Amazon device, if you rate a book at the end, that will automatically appear on Goodreads if you've connected your account. Even if people aren't writing reviews, all these ratings is another data point that does all the linking, like you're saying. So I can't see that another site can be as rich as Goodreads in the English language, I guess we should say. I think Goodreads is only in English, as far as I know. So would this be more important than the author website updates? If people are like, oh my goodness, you two, you've just given us too much work— Should people be thinking about updating Goodreads first, or the website? Thomas: I think for most people, starting with Goodreads might make more sense because chances are your Goodreads page is already half built because Goodreads pulls data from Amazon. So if you did a good job with your metadata and having a good Amazon page—which if you've been listening to Joanna Penn's podcast for any amount of time, you've heard her harp on. Joanna: Harp on?! Thomas: You've heard me. I feel like I'm mentioning my metadata episode every single episode. I'm like, “Please. This is so important.” I don't know if you if you harp on it, but I definitely harp on it. So if you've been doing a good job with that, a lot of the Goodreads stuff is already done. So it's just logging in, making sure account is attached to your author account, making sure all of the information is correct, tweaking the things that need to be corrected. You could be done in an hour. Building out these web pages could be done in an hour or two if you're savvy, but if you've never edited your website before, there's actually a bit of a learning curve to do it the first time. If you had somebody build you your website, now it's more complicated because you've got to go find that person and pay them. So the website could be a higher amount of work, but it's still really important. So don't hear me say, “Oh, Goodreads, start there,” as an excuse to then stop there. Do your website as well. Joanna: I guess we should also say that it's early days. In 2008, do you remember back then it was, “It's the year of mobile,” or, you know, 2010, 2012 was still the year of mobile. Like it was the beginning of mobile commerce and all that. Nobody believed it for years, until one time everybody woke up and were like, “Oh, yes, you buy things on your phone. I suppose that's what they were talking about.” This is the same thing. I mean, this is going to grow. So right now, we're still early, I think, on this. So yes, have a look at your Goodreads. Have a look at your website. Let's carry on. So you did mention norobots.txt earlier, which everyone's like, “Oh no, no, that sounds complicated.” Or they're saying, “Well, I don't want things to search my site. I'm against AI, or I don't want them to see my website or to search things that I've spent time doing.” What will definitely stop the AI search engines? Why should we not do that? Thomas: I think that some of the “all AI is evil all the time,” is actually being advocated by people who themselves use AI and don't want other authors to have the competitive advantage that they have. I don't think it's all of that, but I think that some of the most vocal people secretly have pen names where they're making a lot of money with AI everything. It's kind of like you're the first farmer in town to get a tractor, and you're way more productive on your farm than all the other farmers who are still doing it with their hoes and their backs. If you can convince the other farmers that tractors are evil, or if you can get somebody else in the town to do that for you, then you can buy the fields from everyone else who's doing the work with their backs. So I'm not convinced that this fear is all in good faith. There is some of it. You know, some people all they know about AI is they watched The Matrix and they watched The Terminator, and it's really scary. Those people tend to not be very vocal because they don't know the difference between a large language model and machine learning. Like in AI, it's all just a bunch of jumble for them, and it's all scary and evil and strange. That kind of person isn't going to know how to put a norobots.txt file on their website. I don't think that LLMs.txt or norobots.txt are going to go anywhere. I think what's going to happen with AI is the same thing that happened with mobile. So back in 2008 when it's like the year of the mobile, if you remember, we were building mobile versions of our websites. So you had the website, and then you had a completely separate website for mobile. Then in the early 20-teens, this new approach to web design called responsive web design was developed, where everything had percentages instead of fixed number of pixel widths. Pages could get big and they could get small. Now you only had to build one version of a web page for both mobile and for web. The robots.txt file has plenty of space for instructions to LLMs and what you can and cannot do. We don't need other txt files on a website to accomplish those purposes. I think it's simpler for everyone to just use the page we already have for talking to robots, rather than having other pages to also talk to robots, but say different things. So I may be wrong on this, but I don't think the alternate files, norobots or LLMs, are going to take off. I do think people are going to add instructions to robots.txt, and some of them will be encouraged by other authors, well-meaning or not, to start blocking the LLMs. I don't think that's going to work. For one, I don't know how you block Google without blocking Google. It's like, “Are you the Google search bot or the Google Gemini bot?” “I'm the Google bot,” right? Do you really want to block Google? You can. It's your right, and Google won't surface your website, but you have to be found if you want to be read. You can't hide in the wilderness and not let anyone read your book and then complain that no one's reading your book. You either want to be found or you don't. I think for some authors, they're afraid of being found, and they may be using AI as an excuse. I think pretty soon, people are going to be paying money to get AI to learn about their books, this fear of AI doing it for free, I think, is going to go away pretty quickly. Joanna: Well, yes. We should just come back to Amazon because people are like, “Oh, well, I don't need to know any of this because I am just on Amazon,” but of course, Amazon is also moving to generative search. I'm kind of annoyed because this mobile app that you have in the US with this Rufus shopping bot is now using it, and you can ask really detailed follow up questions, and it's more granular, but I can't see that because I'm in the UK. I mean, I'm really pleased about this because I am sick of loading seven keyword terms into my metadata. If I give Amazon the whole book, I mean, surely they can do useful things and do all that themselves. It's very rich data. Is there anything that people need to do specifically with Amazon, other than listen to your metadata episode? Thomas: So one advantage you have being in the UK is that you can still be blissfully unaware of how not great Rufus is. So I would rank Rufus above Llama and below all of the other LLMs. I know that Amazon has a bunch of different AI models that they're developing. I was doing some experiments with one of them—I forget what it's called, started with an A—and it had the most delightful hallucination about me I have ever seen an AI do in my life. So I got this tool where I had access to all the AIs, so I was asking them a lot of the same questions to see what answers they would give. It was like, “Thomas Umstattd is a professor of book marketing at Texas State University,” and then it started listing all of these book marketing books that I had written. They were all vaguely associated with podcast episodes that I had done. It was all close enough to be believable, but none of it was true. It hallucinated an entirely different Thomas Umstattd. Like, oh, Amazon is behind on this AI thing. So right now, Rufus, in my tests, is somewhat better than just a pure review search for answering product questions, but just barely. It's not where the other AIs are at yet. Now, Amazon, just this week as we're recording this, signed a licensing deal with the New York Times. So they're now the only company that has an agreement with the Times for licensing data for AI models. It used to be the New York Times didn't matter for AI training because they had walled it off. Joanna: They were suing OpenAI and all kinds of things. Microsoft. Thomas: They were suing for big money, and Jeff Bezos is like, “Big money? I have big money.” So now they've got this really good source of data—or mediocre source of data, depending on your view of the New York Times—but they're the only ones that have access to it. That's not going to fix Rufus's ability to find the needle in the haystack in a bunch of book reviews. So Amazon will get there. If it worked better, you would have it in the UK. People don't want to give you the kind of mediocre stuff. They want royal quality for the UK. It's like, “This isn't good enough for the king, and the Brits aren't going to take this trash. We'll just keep it for the Colonials right now.” Joanna: Oh, fair enough. Well, we should also say Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic, which does Claude. So it would be nice if they could use some of the Claude juice or something. I mean, again, all these things are going to get better. So if people are like, “Oh, well, I don't like the Amazon automatics review overviews,” or whatever, it's like, look, all these things are going to get better and better. Again, I want to stay really positive about this. As I said, I think we've been in the long tail for like 20 years already, right? Now we're in the very, very, very long tail when we're thinking of generative search and the conversational search. So I do a lot of book recommendations through ChatGPT, and often I'll have gone backwards and forwards several times before I'm happy with the level of granularity I'm at. No longer do we have the sort of basic keywords, but we're having a whole conversation about what we like. Or like you said, I sometimes just upload a screenshot or a picture of my whole bookshelf. I did this the other day, like with my bookshelf with probably hundreds of books on. I said, “Here's my bookshelf. What else might I like?” It can read all the books on the bookshelf and all of that. So I think, again, all of this is going to get better. Thomas: I think it's also going to reward good writing, especially that kind of relational stuff. So you have a really deep relationship with your o3 mini model, right? Like it knows you really well. You've spent months, maybe years, building its context window. So it has a good sense of your preferences. This is one area where GPT really shines, as like a per user context window that persists across conversations. So when you ask your o3 for a recommendation, it has really good knowledge of books. The GPT book recommender is already really good, and it has really good knowledge of you. So it's going to make very likely very good recommendations, and those recommendations are likely going to be the kind of books that are well written. So as we talk about Schema.org and all these technical things, don't forget the fact that none of this will fix a bad book. None of this will fix a bad book. If your book is not fun to read, if it's not engaging, if it doesn't pull readers in, if it doesn't leave them happy at the end, or they're leaving a good review, if it doesn't deliver on its promises, then it's not going to matter. Like these things are great tiebreakers, and they can be really helpful if you're obscure, to move you from obscurity to notoriety. You can't make that move if your book doesn't thrill readers. Your book has to thrill readers first. I probably should have started with this. This is not like a “get out of learning the craft of writing” free card. It's just the opposite, actually, because the AI is much more discriminating on quality than the search engines were. You type a search into Amazon, and it's going to surface whoever paid the most first. Then it will pick, based off of the very limited information you gave it, some books to rank. None of that really had much to do with the writing. Some of it was connected. You know, it would look at review data and sales data and things like that, but a lot of it just became self-reinforcing. Popular books got more attention, which made them more popular. My hope is that these new AI recommendation engines will have more nuance and make better recommendations. It will also be better for people on the fringes of society. So I'm not sure how it is in the UK, but like conservatives got pushed out of publishing. There's hardly any conservatives in the traditional publishing world. If you're writing a book for a conservative audience, it's hard to find your readers right now. Whereas I think AI is going to help bridge that gap. Conservative authors and conservative readers are going to be able to find each other and they're going to get really excited. That's true with every kind of niche group of readers and authors that were really limited by the search engines that were really reductive. Now all this nuance is going to be like, “Oh, you're interested in this kind of unique sub-genre that doesn't have a category in Amazon. Well, guess what? I've read all of the books in that, and here's the best one that I think you'll like really well,” and suddenly you're reading more books. I think this is going to be good for the industry overall. Joanna: Yes, I think so too. It should reduce, or hopefully reduce, that sort of paid ad effect. Although, inevitably, these companies are going to have to monetize more than they are now. So it'll be very interesting how it changes. So I'm also really interested in what else is coming. Now, people have been kind of saying agents and agentic AI for a while, but mostly these have been assistants. So something like Deep Research reports, they're kind of an agent. You give them a task, “go research this,” and then it goes away and it will come back and bring you a report. So it's early days. What is really interesting to me is zero-click. So zero-click with agents. So, for example, I just booked some trips in the US to Antelope Canyon, and I got my Deep Research report, but I still had to go buy the tour. I did go with its recommendation. “Zero-click,” I say to my agent, my travel agent, let's say, “go and find me the best trip to Antelope Canyon. Here's my budget, and just arrange it. You know what I like in terms of hotels and the brands I like and all of that. Go do it.” People are like, “Oh, no, that's years off,” but Visa, the Visa card, now has intelligent commerce. So they actually have a card you can use with an agent, so you essentially task it with buying for you. I was thinking about this with books. It's like, “Here's my bookcase. This is what I like. Here's my budget per month. Just send me a book a week, or buy me some cool books and deliver them to my house.” I'm like, actually, that's quite fun. With ‘zero click' + agents, the human never does the browsing, the human never clicks, and things turn up. So what do you think about this? Thomas: I think AI agents are going to start creating zones of the internet that are devoid of humans, and I don't think that's a bad thing. So the first place we saw this was actually about two decades ago, and it was the stock market. So if you've ever seen an old 1980s video of the stock market, there's actual men in suits with pieces of paper, and they're all shouting at each other. Then somebody was like, “Oh, we'll connect it to computers.” So then somebody had to type on the computer to place an order. Then there was one company that literally created a robot that just typed on the keys because the NASDAQ wouldn't allow automated orders, so something had to push the keys on the keyboard. Then they're like, “Okay, this is stupid. You can just place the orders.” Then they're like, okay, well, let's create AIs that will evaluate a stock's price and make purchases. Now almost all of our stocks are managed by agentic AIs. So we moved away from mutual funds into something called an exchange traded fund, which is entirely run by an AI. It's algorithmic. This has been around for 10 or 15 years. Now the New York Stock Exchange is a film set, and if you go there today, it's just a bunch of reporters reporting on what the computers are doing. Stock trading is no longer the getting the call from the pushy salesman about this really good scoop on such and such stock that you've got to buy and this real scammy thing. We were taking a lot of our really smartest people and putting them in a room and having them shout at each other to buy and sell. I don't think that was the best use of those really smart people. Now those smart people are doing other things that are more beneficial for the economy than shouting at each other to buy and sell shares of IBM or whatever. So that's what we're going to see with these other agents and these other sectors. So you buying a ticket for a train, that's not a very emotionally rewarding experience for you to buy that ticket. For the person selling you the ticket, it's not a very emotionally rewarding experience for them either. Nobody wanted to grow up, like when they were a kid thought, “Like all I want to do when I grow up is sell tickets for trains and answer questions from tourists who are all asking the same stupid questions over and over again, and I've answered this question 500 times this week.” Having an AI handle that is going to be better. I think it's going to be slow. I think right now we're in the phase where early adopters like us are playing with it, but right now we're building our own agents. I think a good model to look at is the spreadsheet. So back in the 80s and 90s, we'd have Microsoft Excel, and you could build your own spreadsheet. The 2000s have all been about taking features that you could do yourself in Excel and building a whole product around it. Now there's a website that does that thing that Excel could do, but the website is for just one purpose, for one kind of user, and it does that same sort of thing. I think we're going to see that same thing with AI because most people don't want to create their own agents. They don't want to create their own personal AI butler. They want to buy an AI butler off the shelf that does just one thing. So don't feel like you have to learn how to build your own agents in order to use them, you'll just have to wait. Who knows, maybe Joanna Penn will build some AI agents that she can rent out in the future. Joanna: I mean, it is interesting to think where it's going to go. I tend to put this in the general category. For example, we've just talked about updating your Goodreads pages or updating your website. Hell, I don't want to do that, so I will just get my admin agent to do that. Right now, there isn't one particular thing that can do that. I can do it with AI, but I'll still have to drive it. Whereas, I don't know, I mean, let's talk about ads as well. Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly said that all you'll need to do on Meta—because, let's face it, Meta ads are just awful now. They're so complicated. What he said is, you'll be able to say, “This is my book. This is the page I want to drive traffic to. Off you go. Meta will do all the creative, do everything, and here's a budget.” I don't have to do anything at all except say, “This is what I want to sell.” That will be great. I think authors will be all over that. Most people want to do the writing, and they do not want to do the marketing, as you know. So I think there are some great use cases. I don't know how long that's going to take. I mean, Zuckerberg has said end of next year I think, 2026. Thomas: Well, it's already here for websites, actually. So if listening to Joanna and I talk about websites stressed you out, if you get Divi from Elegant Themes, it has AI built in, and you can just tell it to build you a homepage and what you want on it, and it will just do it. I played around with this a couple of weeks ago because I was like, can AI really build a web page? And it did. I was kind of flabbergasted. I went in and tweaked and added, and I would copy what it did and add more things to make the page longer, but it's like it's already here. It's already here a little bit for advertising too. The Amazon auto-targeting has gotten a lot better. Joanna: I do use that. Thomas: Yes, and it's self-reinforcing. So if you want to understand what machine learning is, there's some really good like cartoons on YouTube you can look up, but machine learning is the computer kind of getting better on its own, like improving itself. These ad engines are using machine learning to get better every month. So if you tried auto-targeting on Facebook or auto-targeting on Amazon a few months ago, just realize that they're now better because the machine learning is training the algorithm. There's not some developer at meta going, click, click, click, to tweak the algorithm. The algorithm is tweaking itself. Facebook's algorithm has been tweaking itself for over a decade. For people who are against AI and they complain about it on Facebook, I hate to tell you this, but you've been using AI on Facebook. Joanna: Or buying on Amazon or using Google. Thomas: It's like, Facebook particularly, the entire experience is AI, start to finish. It's like, “Oh, but I don't want you to have AI. I only want this powerful Californian to have AI, not the regular people.” Like, okay, now we're getting to a class conversation. This isn't really about AI anymore. Joanna: Well, I mean, we could talk about this forever because you and I geek out on this. There are some people who are like, seriously, how is everything changing so fast, and how are you two so relaxed about the fact that everything is changing? So how are you staying positive and curious? Obviously, there are bad things about AI, which, you know, we try and stay on the positive side of things. Any tips for people who need encouragement to keep going in this time of change? You know, they thought they knew the rules, and now it seems like the rules are changing yet again. Thomas: You're not going to believe this answer, but I'm actually going to encourage you to study history, because we're not actually living in a time of rapid change compared to what our great great grandparents went through. My great great grandfather was born in 1880, and the steam engine was new, that we were just starting to have the Industrial Revolution. When he was a child, the first car rolled into his town, a horseless carriage. Then suddenly there was electric light bulbs. The telegraphs that had already existed when he was a kid, now there was lines that would go to people's houses, and they could actually hear a voice of somebody on the other side of town, and even the other side of the country. It didn't stop there. Then a few years later in his life, something flew over the town that was heavier than air, and yet floating in the sky. Then before this man died, there was an American putting an American flag on the moon. That's not to mention radio, and the nuclear bomb, and like so much innovation. Then we invented the semiconductor in the 1960s, 1970s, and then the innovation basically ended. After that, it was all of this really slow iteration where the transistors got smaller and smaller, the computers got faster and faster. There wasn't this big, life changing technology, like what we were getting every two years in the late 1800s and early 1900s, until you have kind of critical mass of the transistors where they get cheap enough to enter people's homes. Then we have computers, and we have the internet. We've had the internet for a long time. Like the internet's not new. It goes back to the 70s in the States. The World Wide Web was developed by a Brit in the 1980s. Then we didn't have much innovation, right? Web pages got a little bit more complicated, animation got a little bit better. Really slow evolutionary change. Then the phones came around, and the phone was a big shift, but from a technological perspective, the phone wasn't that different than a computer. It's just smaller. So that same trend of smaller and lighter. So in this way, AI is the first time for me to experience the kind of transformation that my great, great grandfather went through, but on a much smaller scale. Like the tractor was unbelievably disruptive. One man in the town with the tractor could do the work of 10 men, which meant that those other nine men had to find something else to do to provide for their families. What it was doing things for the farmer, because the farmer was now making almost the same money. So this is the flip side, the people who use AI—there's actually a report that just came out yesterday about industries where — People are using AI, they're three times more productive and they're making 50% more money on that individual worker perspective. So just like what happened with the tractor, there's nothing new under the sun. The guys who left the farm and started doing jobs for the farmer, those jobs are actually super rewarding. It's things like being a podcaster. Like, I could not have my job of being a podcaster if there wasn't some blessed farmer somewhere in the sun and toil on his tractor making food for me, because I can't make food. I can hardly keep my grass alive. I realize in the UK, grass just grows on its own, but in Texas, it's a fight. It wants to wither and die in the sun. So I'm really thankful that I'm not working in the fields like my ancestors did. So, yes, there's going to be some disruption, but the history of technology shows us that technology creates more jobs than it destroys. 95% of us were working in the fields back in the day, and that was awful, awful work for little pay. It was back breaking. It killed us, literally killed us. I don't think anybody wants to go back to that. Technology isn't good or evil. People are good or evil. So I'm not afraid of AI. I am very afraid of humans and what humans will do with AI, but I'm too much of a Texan to let those humans have AI and me not to have AI, too. The only thing that can stop a bad man with AI is a good man with AI. Joanna: Or a good woman! Thomas: Or a good woman. Joanna: No, I mean, I think so too. We need to be on the side of the angels, and the more we're involved, that's the other thing. Obviously, people listening, Thomas and I are interested in the technical side, but you don't have to be super technical anymore to get involved. The more creatives and other types of people who are getting to grips with these tools, the more they will represent the whole of humanity. So that's why I try and encourage people. But also, you're right, it does make you more productive. Also it's a lot of fun, so I have fun with my AIs like every day. So, yes, lots for people to think about. We're out of time, so— Where can authors find you and everything you do online? Thomas: So my website is AuthorMedia. That's where you can find all three of my podcasts. I have a suite of over 30 AI tools that are really easy to use. They're very specific things like an About Page builder, where you answer a few questions about yourself, and it will write a very interesting about page for you. Or you upload your book cover, and it will analyze the cover and give you tips on how to make it better. Or create a chapter summary. I even have a tool here called “Not a Literary Agent” that can review contracts and even write a rights reversal letter based off of the contract that you signed with that publishing company 10 years ago. And creating book blurbs. There's a bunch of different tools that are there. My hope with these tools is that they're kind of training wheels for using AI, because they're really easy. You just answer a few questions, and you push a button, and that's it. So you don't actually have to be good with AI to try using these tools. I've gotten just incredible feedback from folks who've tried these out. One, you just upload your book, and it creates a strategy for advertising on Amazon. Like a five page strategy based off the content of your book, including who to target and how to target them. So my hope is these will help make you more productive. They're almost all focused on marketing. So they're not going to help you write the book, they're going to help you sell the book because that's my focus. If you want to learn how to learn how to write the book, listen to Joanna Penn. Novel marketing is more focused on getting more sales for the book you already wrote. Joanna: So those tools, is that on AuthorMedia.com? Thomas: Yes. Joanna: Okay, so that's fantastic. Definitely have a listen to Thomas's podcast as well. Well, thanks so much for joining me today, Thomas. That was great. Thomas: Thank you for having me.The post Book Discoverability In An Age Of AI. GEO For Authors With Thomas Umstattd Jr. first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How can you ‘cast a wider net' and reach more readers with your books? How can you embrace the best of publishing options for your work? JD Barker explains how his publishing business works. In the intro, How Authors Measure Success [Self-Publishing Advice]; Creating through Grief [Go Creative]; Death Valley; Successful Self-Publishing, Fourth Edition; Gothic Cathedrals; AI-Assisted Artisan Author webinar. 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.D. Barker is the New York Times and international bestselling author of thrillers and horror. He co-writes with James Patterson, as well as other authors. He's also the co-host of the Writer’s, Ink 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 Weighing up what is worth licensing, and what is worth doing as an indie author The importance of making connections in the publishing industry Why traditionally published authors are more open towards the indie framework Co-writing with James Patterson and others Writing across different genres and mediums to “cast a wider net” Tips for effectively pitching podcasts Benefits for an advanced author coming to Author Nation You can find J.D. at JDBarker.com. Transcript of Interview with J.D. Barker Joanna: JD Barker is the New York Times and international bestselling author of thrillers and horror. He co-writes with James Patterson, as well as other authors. He's also the co-host of the Writer’s Ink Podcast. So welcome back to the show, JD. JD: Hey, Joanna. It's great to be back. I was looking at the timeline, so like this was pre-COVID, I think, the last time we talked. Joanna: Yes, I know. It's crazy. I also had look. It was 2020, which does seem like another life. So back then, we did talk about your background, so we're just going to jump straight into it today. So the last five years, JD, how has it been like? Give us an overview. Well, not of the last five years, but— What does your business look like now? I almost feel like five years ago you were almost relatively new on the indie author scene as such, but now you've really cemented your position. JD: I was. So let me think, like five years ago, so that was about the same time that I called my agent and said, “I don't want you selling my English rights anymore. I'm going to do it myself.” Joanna: Yes, basically. JD: The publishing professionals, I think they hate me, because I tend to pull the rug out from under them quite a bit. Honestly — I indie published my first novel, and I got a taste of what that was like. For better or worse, that was a deal breaker for me. It's something that's always been in the back of my head, and I weigh it against every contract. At one point, I had a book coming out called A Caller's Game, and I called my agent, and like I just decided I'm going to indie publish it in English, and I'd let her go ahead and sell all the foreign territories like she usually does. I wanted to see how that would play out. Honestly, I liked it a lot because it gave me the freedom and control that I had as an indie to get that title out there. I got the economics benefits of being an indie. So I did that for a couple of different books, but I still ran into one particular problem. You know me well enough, I completely gloss over all the good stuff, and I just focus on the one or two things that aren't working right and that's where I tend to try and come up with some kind of solution. I couldn't get into the big box stores. I was still having trouble getting into airports. I couldn't get into Target or Costco or Walmart. So that's something that weighed on me for a couple of years. I guess about a year and a half ago, I sent my agent a copy of Behind a Closed Door, which was my latest thriller. We sold foreign rights on that almost immediately, and the book was going to auction with the traditional publishers—or not foreign rights, film rights. I got a phone call from a friend of mine that worked at Harper Collins, and she said, “We're about to offer on this book, and when that comes in, you need to turn it down.” I got a similar phone call from somebody over at Random House, and I asked why, and she said, “Well, the editor who wants your book is about to get laid off or about to cut a lot of people.” Then a week or two later, all those industry cuts that we all saw happened. I don't know if you've ever been in a position where you've had a book at a traditional publisher where you lost your editor, but like that book can sit there in limbo forever, depending on your contract. Without somebody to champion it, it may not come out at all. So that really scared me. So I kind of reached back to my corporate days. My last real job I had, I worked in finance, and I got a hold of some of the people that were involved in the purchase of Simon and Schuster at the private equity firm. I started some conversations, and ultimately — I created my own imprint at Simon and Schuster, which is what I'm doing today. So I, basically, get the freedom of being an indie author. I can put out what I want, when I want, but I've got Simon and Schuster as my backbone. So they handle my print sales and distribution. So that's what I'm doing today. Joanna: So you still upload the ebook yourself to KDP, but then you give the print to Simon and Schuster? Or does everything go through them? JD: No. So the way I signed the contract, I've got my own LLC—well, it's an S Corp, I guess, at this point—but it's called Barker Creative. So the contract is actually between Simon and Schuster and Barker Creative. So what that means is, when I have a book, I can pick and choose whether JD Barker is publishing it or Barker Creative is publishing it. If it's a Barker Creative book, it has to go to Simon and Schuster. If it's a JD Barker book, I can put it out on my own. So legally, I basically created the wiggle room that I needed. So I can take that book and I can say, “I'm going to put out ebook on my own. I'm going to do audiobook through somebody else.” I can farm out those pieces. So that's kind of what I've been doing. So I signed a contract with Recorded Books. They handle all of my audiobooks. I just keep ebooks for myself because really there's no point in handing that off to anybody. It's so easy to do. Then I've been doing print through Simon and Schuster. Joanna: So how do you make the decision? You said your biggest problem there was the big box stores, airports, which is why you wanted to do a kind of print deal press. How do you make a decision as to what you then keep as a JD Barker book versus a Barker Creative book? For people listening, where is the line? Because a lot of people, let's face it, won't get the contract offers you do, but they do get offers. So I know people who get offers, maybe for a couple of thousand advance. Some are no advance, but royalties, plus maybe some marketing. A lot of authors listening do get the chance for some kind of deal. Also, audio deals are coming up a lot. How do people weigh up what is worth signing and licensing and what is worth doing indie? JD: I basically look at the book when it's finished, and I decide, what is going to cast the widest net? What is going to cause this to get out in front of the largest group of people and possibly bring in more people into my reading audience? That's kind of my goal at this point. A couple years ago, I was told that my audience was women 45 and over. So I wrote a young adult book, and started roping them in a little bit younger, and I continue to do that. One of the books I've got coming out—do you remember a movie from the 90s called Flatliners? Joanna: Yes, you told me about this, but tell everyone else. JD: Flatliners is one of my all-time favorite movies. It came out in 1990, and it's got this crazy cast. It had Kiefer Sutherland, Julia Roberts, Kevin Bacon, Billy Baldwin, and Oliver Platt, and all of them kind of at the start of their career. So people knew their names, but well before they became the household names that they are today. It's about a group of medical students who kill each other one at a time, and then bring each other back to try and discover if there's any type of afterlife. I love that movie. I honestly still think it holds up today, and it's been a favorite of mine. A few years ago, the guy who wrote it, his name is Peter Filardi, he got attached to one of my other projects. I wrote a prequel to Dracula for Bram Stoker's family, so he got attached as the screenwriter on that with Paramount. We got to talking about Flatliners, and I told him, “Listen, I've got an idea to reboot this franchise.” At the time, he didn't have control of the rights. The studio still had those. So I just kind of planted the seed. A couple of years went by, and then I got a phone call back from him, I guess about a year and a half ago. He said, “Listen, I just got the rights back if you still want to do something.” So ultimately, we ended up writing a novel—which I'm literally finishing the final edits on today—to reboot this franchise. So it's going to come out as a book first, with film later. So we have this project basically done. So going back to your original question, how do I decide who is going to get what particular book? I could take this book, I could indie publish it, I could put it out on Simon and Schuster if I want to do that. With a book that's got a high profile like this, I know the best possible place for this to go is one of the other traditional publishers, somebody who's willing to put a lot of marketing dollars behind it. So somebody is going to do something that I can't do on my own. So we're going to let this book go out to auction. The film rights look like they're going to happen again very quickly. So my agent's going to hold up the book, we're going to see who bids the highest on it, and it's going to go that route. Again, this is mainly so I can get it in places that I can't on my own. Joanna: I love that story, and I think that would be very cool. I'm very interested in in seeing that again. I remember that from the 90s. The bigger thing here, when I was listening to you there, so there was this dude, and you met him years ago, and you connected. Then there was Bram Stoker's family that you connected with, and this guy in finance. I remember from when you talked about your history, you were in the music industry and used to drive really famous people around. This is one of the things about you, it seems you have absolutely no fear in talking to anyone, however famous. A lot of your bigger deals come from your connections. Is that part of your personality, or is that just something you fostered over time? I guess, for people listening, how can we be more like that? JD: Well, it's tricky, because as writers, we're all introverted. I'm autistic, which kind of adds another whole level to this mess. I hate talking to other people, just like most authors do. I go to a conference, I want to sit in the corner and hide. It's gotten to the point that if I go, I usually don't take my wife with me, because I would just hang out and talk to my wife the whole time. So I try to force myself out of that comfort zone. At the same time, like, I've got a degree in business. I've spent a lot of time working in marketing. Everything in this world, it doesn't matter if you're selling books or you're selling glasses or you're selling cars, it's all about who you know and cultivating those contacts. So every time I meet somebody, their name, what they do, who they are, all that goes into my mental Rolodex, and at some point I may call back on it. You never know when these kind of things are going to play out. When I talk about this in front of writers groups—like, one year I was at ThrillerFest and I was in the elevator with Lee Child. So I got Lee Child standing five feet away from me. I've got 15 seconds. I can either talk to him and possibly start up a conversation, maybe get a blurb from one of my books, or I can stand there and stare at the numbers like everybody else does. In my head, I'm thinking, well, what harm can come from making that ask? I will always ask the question. I am a lot more afraid of the outcome of not asking the question than I am of hearing no. So I will always ask. Joanna: Yes, but it's something I struggle with, and I know a lot of listeners struggle with as well, is that moment. So as you say, if you've only got a few minutes, can you push yourself past the uncomfort zone, as such, to at least try? Do you think being autistic gives you more, I don't know, ability to take what others might feel as embarrassment or shame—I mean— Is that something that you would ever feel? Like I would feel embarrassed, and then if he snubbed me, I would feel ashamed. JD: I think that's a big part of it. I don't feel a lot of those emotions the same way a, quote, unquote, “normal person” would. I'm just not afraid of it. At the same time, somebody like Lee, Stephen King, all these different guys, like they've all stood in that same position that we are at the beginning of our career. Everybody started somewhere. They've all been there fairly recently, and they still have memories of that. So I think when you do ask that question, as long as you can come up with a unique way to do it, I can stand out a little bit, I don't think there's any harm in doing it. I've got plenty of people that come up to me and ask similar questions now, and I pull from that same knowledge base. I was doing this a couple of years ago, they're doing it to me now. I think in a lot of ways this, this entire author profession, we pay it forward as much as we can, and everybody does. Joanna: Yes, and a lot of them are just—well, most people are nice, in general. I think that would be my thing. Certainly going to ThrillerFest when I first went in like 2012, I was just starstruck by these authors who I'd been reading for years. I remember meeting Doug Preston and like Clive Cussler, and I was just a wreck. Okay, well, here's the other thing, the indie thing. Back then in 2012, it was very early in the indie world, so I felt definitely kind of second class. Have you ever felt that? Or do you think things have changed? You network with lots of traditionally published people. Do you think “the stigma” that some traditionally published authors used to tar us with, is that gone? Or do you come up against that anytime? JD: I don't know if it's gone. So when I published Forsaken, my first book, it was 2014. So we were still very much in the thick of it. Because I had worked in the publishing industry for so long, I worked as a book doctor and a ghost writer for 20-some years, I knew a lot of people in the industry. When I wasn't able to get an agent on Forsaken, I seriously considered indie publishing. I started talking to a lot of authors that I knew that were regularly on The New York Times list, and I would run it by them, you know, the whole indie versus traditional thing. Every single one of them pushed back and said, “You don't want to go indie. If you do that, you're going to be stuck in that world forever. You're never going to get a traditional deal.” Like they completely tried to talk me out of it. I'm honestly glad that it didn't happen, that that didn't work. Now you fast forward a little bit, like, I was just on the board for ITW, so I was working with all those names that you just mentioned, and many other ones. I can't tell you how many phone calls I've gotten over the last four or five years from big name authors who got their rights back on this title or that title, something in their back catalog. They're like, “I really think I should try to indie publish this, but I'm not sure how to do it. Can you help me?” You know, like they are all looking at that. What ends up happening is that title comes back, their agent gets it, their agent resells it again, typically for a lesser amount than they got the previous time. So it's a dwindling asset. Then it gets locked up for another five to seven years or so, and then they rinse and repeat. They're seeing that they're just not making the kind of money that they used to. Every one of those deals is getting smaller. Some cases, those books aren't reselling at all. So they're ending up with all this back catalog. Other authors, they haven't resold their back catalog at all. So books went out of print 15, 20 years ago, and they are sitting on those Word documents on their computer, not sure what to do with them. Today, 2025, they are all looking at indie publishing in one way or another. Joanna: Well, especially if some of the publishers, like you said, Simon and Schuster, and there's quite a few people who were getting these print-only deals and having their own imprints. It's interesting, the last time I was at ThrillerFest—I think it was 2017 the last time I was there—and I remember then people were also asking me about this. One guy said, “I used to get advances that were seven figures, and now the advances are maybe six figures,” and these are big name people. So that almost feels to me why they're interested. The only reason is because all the money is—you know— The long tail is where we live now. JD: Yes, they all see it, and they all feel it. Regardless of the number of zeros in the dollar amount, it's all relative. They see that that industry is drying up. What kills me is, like, I don't see a lot of the traditional publishers making any changes. The last book that I had traditionally published, they sent me the marketing plan. It had a substantial advance to it, so there was a marketing team behind it. The PDF document they sent me was literally the same marketing plan I saw from the same company five years earlier for a different book. They just swapped out the cover images and a couple keywords here or there, but everything else was the same. It was this 30,000-foot view that really told me nothing as far as what they were doing. If you step into a bookstore and look at the best-selling names that are there, the names that are out in front, on the end caps and the very first table and stuff like that, all these people are getting older. The biggest name authors out there are all in their 70s, at this point. They're aging out. The big publishers haven't come up with a way to replenish that stock. In the old days—and when I say old days, you know, 15 years ago—they would spend a lot of money cultivating a new author. They would find somebody who had a solid voice that knew how to write, and they would sign them to a five or six book deal. As long as each book sold better than the previous one, they would continue to re-up that, and they would keep it going, knowing that they could turn that person into one of those big name authors one day. In today's world, that's not happening anymore. They're signing people for one-book deals, two-book deals, and if they don't see the kind of numbers that they need to see at the end of that contract, they let you go. Then you end up leaving one of the top five, and you go with a smaller press, or you indie publish or whatever. A lot of people don't know how to recover from that, and a lot of them are just dropping out of the industry altogether. Joanna: Yes, funny you should say that. I saw a blog post from an author—again, you know, not mentioning any names—but it basically said, “I've seen the income go down, and I've just decided it's not worth it anymore.” This was another reasonably big name. I was like, wow. It's very interesting if that's the way it goes. I almost feel like for a lot of indies, like myself, for example, I've never had a truly breakout book. I've just built up. When you build up from a low number per month to a bigger number per month, you feel, I don't know, perhaps fine, compared to somebody who might have started on a massive deal for book one and then has just spiraled downwards. You know what I mean? That feels like the difference in energy between the indies who are clawing themselves up and then the big name trad authors who are now spiraling down. JD: I think it's almost like a tortoise and hare thing. If you come out of the gate and you have this enormous, big seller, you're going to be chasing that forever. Every book you write is going to be compared to that. I would honestly rather be in your shoes, like a situation like you just said. Gently increase your revenue and your business model, everything just kind of raised just a little bit year after year after year. I think that's better because then it's a gradual thing. As long as each book that you're putting out is selling better than the last one, you know, everything is constantly improving in a nice and slow and steady way. It's almost like the stock market. You're building a nice, solid base beneath you. If something goes wrong, it's not going to just fall out. If you take somebody who has a big seller, all of a sudden they have these giant numbers that they have to try and hit every single time. Even if they have another big seller, if it doesn't hit those original numbers, it's seen as a failure. That's a tough position to be in. I hate picking on people, but like, look at like Gillian Flynn. She had a three book deal. So her first two books did okay, but they didn't really sell that great. Then all of a sudden, Gone Girl hits. Imagine having to follow up Gone Girl. She has been at home writing the follow up to Gone Girl for years, and she hasn't put anything out. Joanna: She wrote the screenplay. She moved into screenwriting. JD: Yes, she she's moved onto other things. It's fantastic that she's actually got her hands in multiple pots. I think that's key, too. You talk about diversification all the time. That's something from this industry, and I think life, in general, I think a lot of people should take that away. Joanna: I do want to just point out there, you said about the stock market and up into the right slowly. I mean, you have to zoom out. I think that would be what I would say. Nobody has that every book sells better than the last. I mean, there's always books that come out that are just creative, and are not necessarily ones that hit the market. So if you zoom out, I think that's the point with the stock market, too. As an investor— If you zoom out far enough over time, it does go up and to the right. JD: It does. Yes, you've got to look at the big picture, and as long as it's improving, you're in good shape. Joanna: Exactly. So I want to come back, you mentioned there the big names, all in their 70s. Of course, one of the biggest names in the world, James Patterson. You co-write with James Patterson. Then since you've been doing that, you've also moved into his model of co-writing with other people. You're the second name under James Patterson, but you're the first name when you're co-writing with others. So tell us about that. Why did you decide to do it? Because, frankly, I have heard from some authors who've done this that they didn't end up getting the sort of sales that they thought they would get. What has been your experience co-writing with James Patterson? JD: Yes, so working with Patterson has been huge. I tell people it's almost like taking his Masterclass online, except he calls you and tells you everything you're doing wrong and gives you some advice. We've had just as many phone calls on the business side of publishing as we have on writing side. He's been helping me kind of create the Patterson 2.0 with my own career. I think I'm a lot of ways it's because he's older. He would probably do these things himself if he was in his 50s, but I think he's in a comfortable place right now. He doesn't see any reason to rock the boat, but he's getting some enjoyment out of helping me create a business model in today's world based on what he's learned. From my standpoint, there's no way I'm going to turn down that advice. So he was largely responsible for me moving to Simon and Schuster the way that I did, the way the co-author titles are coming out, the people that I'm choosing, the countries that these books are dropping in. He's been involved in a lot of those decisions, at least as an ear, a sounding board that I can run some of these things by. I hear you, like I know other people that have tried to do this before, and I've seen it not work, I've seen it work. In my model, it seems to be working okay. People are buying my solo titles in a lot bigger numbers than they do the co-authored stuff. That being said, I'm pricing the co-authored stuff at a lower price point and getting it into places that my bigger titles may or may not get to. I'm using it just like I do everything else. I'm using it to cast a wider net. I'm trying to rope in people that may not be able to afford a $10 ebook, because now they can buy a Barker book for $5. Joanna: I like the idea of casting a wider net. I think this is also something you do, you have deliberately not written the same thing over and over again. I mean, you do have a series, but it's not a massive series. Like, it's not a 25 book series, like some people. Well, like James Patterson has huge, long series. How are you writing different kinds of books in order to cast a wider net? JD: Yes, I made a conscious decision at the get-go that I didn't want to write the same book but different over and over again. Being in the publishing industry, I had seen people get caught up in that. Before you know it, they're 10 books in and they're dreading the writing process because they just don't want to have to do that same thing again. So I came out of the gate, my very first novel was horror, the next one was a thriller, then I did another horror novel. So I bounced back and forth on purpose. This frustrated the hell out of my agents and the publishers because they weren't quite sure how to market all that. What I've been finding is it's allowing me to build brand, like people are basically seeing my name as the brand and knowing that they're going to get a particular type of book. Not necessarily the same book, but they're going to get the same feeling, the same kind of pacing and those types of things. So when I go look for co-authors, I'm trying to find people that can add a little something to my mix that I may not be able to do on my own. I'll give you an example. I had a book out about a year ago now, called Heavy Are the Stones, that I wrote with Christine Daigle. I think you know Christine. In real life, she's a neuropsychologist. So I can fake my way through that in a book. I can do enough Google searches and watch documentaries, just like any other author. I can come up with something that seems realistic and plausible, but having a real neuropsychologist in the writing room is priceless. It allows us to take that to a whole other level. So when I seek out co-authors, I'm really looking for that. I'm trying to find people that can bring something to the table that I can't necessarily do on my own. At the same time, I take that book and I make sure the pacing matches my pacing, and make sure the language and everything is on par, the story is as compelling as any of my other titles. So I kind of take something that they're working on and take it to another level. I dial it up a little bit so my audience will react to it. I think by combining all those different things, it seems to be working. Joanna: Well, I can hear people in the audience who are like, “Oh, well, maybe I could pitch JD.” Do you take pitches? And who are you looking for? JD: I do all the time. Where it honestly came from is I used to mentor a lot of authors. It was the whole pay it forward thing. I feel like helping other people really helps me recharge my batteries. I love finding an author that was doing like 80% of the things right, but I spot like 20% that could be fixed, and I like to help them get through that. At the time, I was charging people for that, and I always felt icky about having to charge people for mentorship. It was a good gatekeeper because it got rid of the people who weren't really serious about it. Ultimately, what I ended up doing is I flipped that when I started bringing in co-authors. So I find somebody who, again, has about 80% of the skill set that I think they need, that needs a little help on one part or another. I bring them in and I walk them through the entire writing process. So we come up with the idea for the book, the title, the tagline, the back-of-book blurb. I hold their hand through the outlining process. I hold their hand through the writing process. I'd make them do the bulk of the work because I want them to walk away from this a better writer. Then in the end, I own the book, because from an accounting standpoint, it's near impossible to do co-authored stuff on a royalty split. It seems to work really well for everybody. So I'm constantly looking for co-authors. I have people that send me stuff all the time. If somebody in your audience is into that and they want to reach out, they can find me on my website. Joanna: To be clear, that's not brand new authors. You're looking for people who have written books, so they actually know what they're doing. We're not talking about newbies. JD: I mean, I get plenty of stuff from newbies too, and I'm waiting to find that gold in there. The truth is, this is just like any other profession. If you want to be a brain surgeon, they're not going to just throw you at the operating table. There's years’ worth of study and practice and things that go into play. Writing is no different. To me, it's like a muscle. You have to work it out every day. Most people have to write maybe a half million words before they really figure out what they're doing. So most of the people that find me that I end up signing, they've got one or two books they've written. Maybe they were with a small press, maybe they were with one of the big publishers, but it didn't work out. A lot of times that's a discoverability issue. You could have the greatest title in the world, and Random House can put it out for you, but if the marketing plan doesn't hit just right, that book will fizzle and die. That doesn't mean the writer doesn't know what they're doing. So those are the kind of people that I'm looking for. I'm trying to find those hidden gems. Joanna: Well, let's talk about marketing then. Of course, we've known each other years now, and I know stuff about you, but I was like, I'm just going to like Google JD to see what he's been doing recently. This column came up in Rolling Stone and I was like, what is JD doing blogging on Rolling Stone magazine? Then I was like, oh, right, you used to kind of work tangentially in the music industry. Why are you blogging for Rolling Stone magazine? JD: You know, I think it was just a call back to the early days. Back when I was working then in the music business, I would have loved to write for Rolling Stone. That was like the Holy Grail back then. They approached me a couple of years ago, and they said, “Hey, would you like to do a column for us?” So it occasionally shows up in the print, most of the time it's just online, but they let me write whatever I want. So I write two or three columns a month on whatever topic I feel like talking about, which is fun. I mean, and it's good exposure. From a marketing standpoint, it gets my name out there on a regular basis. So it seems to work out. Joanna: Well, it's funny though, because this seems to work out. I know you do ads and stuff. With an ad, you pay for an Amazon ad or whatever, and you get some clicks, and you can tell that it's working. With the Rolling Stone, maybe online they let you have a click-through or something, but— How do you know that it's worth it? JD: Well, it comes down to, again, this being a business and branding. So your brand, your name, needs to show up in front of people on a regular basis before they really recognize it. So somebody may see a Rolling Stone article written by me. They may not buy my book for years, they may not buy it at all. But if they see my name once, twice, four or five, six times, just popping up in random places, all of a sudden, I'm a known commodity to them. So they walk into a Barnes and Noble one day, and they're browsing the shelves, and all of a sudden my name jumps out at them. They recognize it. They don't quite understand why, but it speaks to them a little bit, and they pick up that book. From a brand standpoint, anytime you can get your name out there, it's good. Try to do it as often as possible. I do Facebook ads, I do Amazon ads, I do all those different things. I also do tons of podcasts. I do tons of radio. I do tons of television. Any opportunity I have to get my name or voice out there and talk about the book process, I do it. Joanna: Yes, I noticed that. As I said to you, your team pitched me like multiple times, and I'm like, stop it already! I thought it was interesting because they did also pitch me from different angles and different companies. I feel like what you've said there, that some of these things are branding, and some of these things are sales. So the ads are trying to link directly to sales, and then the branding is a sort of nebulous. I haven't got a clue how this is going to work, but maybe somehow it will if it's all together. What percentage of your time are you doing between those two things? Have you outsourced all the ad stuff as well? JD: The ad stuff I've got pretty much dialed in. I tried outsourcing it, but then I found that the people that I talked to, like they are more than willing to take my money. They will put the ads out there, but the click-through rates that they were getting just weren't that great. So I've done the same things that that that you have, and probably everybody in your audience has. I studied up on Facebook ads, and I post my own, and I just tweak them a little bit. I do a lot of AB testing to figure out what images are working. I play with the text a little bit. I'm constantly changing them. I'm finding that my click-through ratios or rates are really low. Like, I get, like, between around five, six cents, sometimes. 11 cents, I think, is my average that I'm paying per ad on Facebook. I like doing that. I think it's the autistic side of me too. Like I enjoy messing with something like that, coming up with a way to make it better. When I stumble into something that's working, I double down. I enjoy that process. Joanna: Is your day half writing, half marketing? JD: Pretty much. I mean, I start at seven in the morning. I turn off the internet first thing, and I just knock out whatever words I'm working on for my latest projects. I do about 2000 to 3000 words. Then I turn the internet on, that's usually about 10:30 or 11, and let my inbox fill up and just kind of deal with the business side of stuff. Afternoons, I do interviews from around noon until three, and then my quitting bell rings at three o'clock. Joanna: Oh, okay, because you have a daughter, don't you? JD: I do. One of the things that started happening very early on is when my book started to sell in foreign territories, I would get interview requests at crazy hours, like 11 o'clock at night, two o'clock in the morning, because you're basically dealing with their schedule. I took all of those, and I quickly started to burn out. I was like there's no way I can sustain this. So in today's world, I just kind of force everybody into that little box, 12 o'clock to three o'clock. I've worked with tons of publicists, too, on the promo side. It's funny, you said that they contacted you a lot of different times. I had one publicist that I had paid a huge amount to on a monthly basis, a retainer, and they hardly got anything. The publicist that actually contacted you that I've been working with recently, like I pay her for podcast that she gets. So if she gets me a podcast, she gets a certain percentage. If she gets me a newspaper review, she gets a certain dollar amount. Everything is a la carte, and she's been hustling. So I try to find publicists that are willing to work on those terms, rather than just a flat dollar amount where there's no guaranteed results. Joanna: Yes, I think those people are quite rare. JD: They are, but if you keep looking, you will find them. Joanna: Well, it's also really interesting because I've been podcasting since 2009, and for many, many years, a lot of people used to talk about the traditional media stuff. Then book blog tours was a thing for a while. Then a lot of social media. Then what's happened, really in the last 18 months, I would say, is that I get pitched a lot every day, from a lot of traditional publishers. So all the big houses pitching, and all they do is just send a press release directly to my email and say, you know, “Opportunity to interview JD Barker,” and then just a blurb from your book. I'm just like, will these people stop it already? Because this isn't a pitch. So for people listening—I know you have done some of these yourself, although you work with people like—what are you trying to do when you pitch whatever podcast, media, newspaper, whatever? What are you pitching that's more than just “here's my book sales description”? JD: Well, we get them on Writer's Ink, too. So I totally get it. What kills me is when you get the ones that have absolutely nothing to do with the type of show that you do. Joanna: Oh, yes. “Here's a credit card company.” JD: Yes, or, “This guy is a business entrepreneur, and he can tell you all about real estate.” I'm like, that's not what our audience is looking for. Again, I scatter shot this stuff. So I've done podcasts and interviews on autism. I've done it on the business of writing. I've done it on my latest book that's coming out. I do all of them, because it's one of those things, like I'm honestly not sure what's working and what's not working, but I do know that that brand and name recognition is important. So the more places I get, the better. It's funny where I get feedback from. I hear from a lot of parents that heard about me on an autism interview that have then went out and bought one of my books. So it all kind of crosses over. I think if you talk to anybody who works in advertising, for the most part, they can't tell you what's working and what's not working, so they tend to do everything, which is sort of old school. In today's world, I mean, you've got Facebook and Amazon ads, you can monitor metrics and you can kind of track it that way, but that only works for those types of ads. One of the things that's always stuck with me, you know, Patterson told me this story years ago. His very first book, it was called The Thomas Berryman Number, and like, literally, nobody bought that. I don't even think he's got a copy of it. His second book was Along Came a Spider, and the sales on that were decent at the beginning, but they weren't where he expected them to be or where he wanted them to be. So he spent $500 of his own money and created a television spot. If you're old enough, you might remember this. It was just a graphic, and it said, “Your wait for the next Silence of the Lambs is over,” and a tiny little spider crawled down from the corner of the screen, and then it morphed into Along Came a Spider and the cover of the book. So that was 500 bucks, but that's what actually launched that book and caused it to become a mega bestseller. He's constantly doing that, even in today's world when we've got a book coming out. We just had one called The Writer, it debuted at number two on the New York Times list. He approved every single ad, television spot, Facebook ad, Amazon ad, whatever. Every one of them crossed his desk and he approved each one of them. I try to do the same thing. Joanna: Well, he came from marketing, didn't he? Advertising? JD: He did, yes. He actually wrote the Toys R Us theme song. Joanna: I love this. I really respect him, obviously, as a writer, but also as a businessman. He was just doing something with Mr. Beast, right? JD: Yes, he called me actually right after that meeting happened, and this was, geez, maybe about two months ago. He sounded as excited as a teenager. It was crazy. He's tried to explain this to me, and I honestly didn't know who Mr. Beast was until afterwards. So that's the thing. Like, nobody expects him to do that book. Nobody expected him to write a book with Dolly Parton or Bill Clinton. Joanna: Dolly Parton, after doing it with Bill Clinton. JD: Yes, but that's what keeps him going. Think of how that expanded his audience. Dolly Parton is huge on a worldwide basis. All of a sudden they're reading James Patterson thrillers because he wrote that book. Joanna: This is the thing, right? I mean, everyone, even if people don't “like”, in inverted commas, James Patterson's books, and I'm sure there's people listening who are like, “Oh, I'd never read a James Patterson.” It doesn't matter, because he is in his 70s, he's still hustling, he's still writing, he's still doing author business. I mean, that is just impressive. That, to me, is very inspirational. It's interesting, because I've read bits and bobs of his over the years, you know, a book here, a book there. I don't read every one of his books. It's hard to read every one of his books because there's so many of them. I recently read Eruption, which he did with the late Michael Crichton estate. What was so funny was I picked it up because I've read every single Michael Crichton, and I imagine a lot of other people out there did the same thing. So this collaboration and co-writing, which you're now doing as well, is a really interesting model. Is it marketing, or is it just a way of writing to a different market segment? JD: Well, I think ultimately, he's using the books as marketing tools. Every one of them is a business card that's reaching out to a new segment of people. That's what I'm trying to do, too. Joanna: The difference, I guess—and I mean, obviously, you build your name bigger and bigger every year, so I'm sure you'll be in a position to co-write with an ex-American president at some point. I've co-written a couple of books, and I found it a very difficult process. In the kind of thing you're doing and what James Patterson's done, is there's a primary and there's a secondary, right? There's like a primary name and a secondary. What he seems to be doing is also finding other primary brands, as such. Are you looking for other brands to collaborate with, rather than just authors who were kind of secondary? Do you know what I mean? JD: I'm using every opportunity to expand my brand. So if I can work with somebody who's going to take me into a different place. I'd love to work with a science fiction author at this point, because I could take a science fiction book and turn it into a thriller, and all of a sudden we're capturing people from both of those audiences. That's really what a lot of this is about. I keep going back to the “casting a net” thing, but that's what you've got to do, I think, in order to become one of those household names. It's not something that happens overnight. It's done gradually over time. Joanna: Yes, and I like that perspective, because I feel like in the indie community, we're pretty obsessed with having direct ROI. Like we have to see the ROI on the ad. So a lot of indie authors don't do the bigger brand building because it's so hard to measure. So that's a really good perspective. I realize that we're almost out of time, but I did want to ask you about Author Nation, because you and I were on the same thriller panel last year. You're back in 2025, along with James Patterson, who is keynoting. Now, you're very successful, so why come to Author Nation as a successful author who knows what he is doing? What are the benefits for a more advanced author coming to Author Nation? JD: Well, I roped Jim into coming, so I'll give you the same pitch that I gave him. So I have gone to all the big conferences. I've been to ThrillerFest a bunch of times, I've been to Bouchercon, and my takeaway from a lot of those is, I literally had no more takeaways. They were helpful for me for the first year or two, when I was first getting started, but after that, there was really no new information that I could utilize anymore. They are very good at helping people get off that diving board with their debut novel. They're fantastic at promoting the big names that are out there. But they literally had no content for the rest of us who are basically in that muddy middle of trying to get from that debut novel to the household name status. So when I went to Author Nation, I saw something a little different. I saw people not only marketing indie titles, but using a lot of the things that I feel the traditional markets could benefit from. Those waters are getting very muddy at this point. I don't really think there is indie and traditional anymore. I think everybody is somewhere in the middle, or should be somewhere in the middle. They're all stealing from each other. I think indie authors look at the traditional publishers and they take what's working. Traditional publishers are doing the exact same thing. They are looking very closely at the indie market and taking what is working there. That's why you see all these big name titles all of a sudden on BookBub and these places that they didn't do a few years ago. They're utilizing whatever they see working on the indie market. So I see Author Nation as basically the next version of conferences. I think, properly done, they can create the content that the rest of us need to get from A to Z. To fill in that void in between and teach us how to keep their career going for the long term. Joanna: I also feel that. As you say, I mean, there is a lot of content at Author Nation. If you're listening and you haven't written the first book, or you have written a book and you're just starting, there's a lot for those people. Then as you say, there's also a lot for us. A lot of meetings too, right? We don't necessarily go to all the sessions. We're there for the meetings. JD: I mean, again, it's comes down to contacts. There's plenty of people you're going to meet at Author Nation, and four or five years down the road, you may be able to help them, they may be able to help you, but all those contacts come into play. Joanna: Yes, absolutely. So we'll be there, occasionally hanging out in the public spaces, although both of us struggle with a lot of people. Well, I feel like maybe everybody does at these things. There's just a load of introverts and probably a lot of autistic people all in the same room being scared of each other, JD: Yes, but there's also alcohol. I force myself to get out there and talk. I won't stay in my hotel room as much as I want to. I try to get out on the floor and talk to as many people as I can. Joanna: I agree. All right. Where can people find you and your books online? JD: Easiest place to find me is at JDBarker.com. I'm on all the social medias at @JDBarker. My latest title is called Something I Keep Upstairs, which just released on May 13. Joanna: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, JD. That was great. JD: Thanks for having me. The post Casting A Wider Net: Author Brand And The Writing Business With JD Barker first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How can creativity be expressed in both writing and music? How can you improve your creativity by being more mindful of your physical body? How can you manage anxiety when speaking or performing? Jennifer Roig-Francoli gives her thoughts in this interview. In the intro, Taylor Swift buys back the rights to her first six albums [The Verge]; Understanding the rules of self-publishing, Becca Syme on the Bookfunnel Podcast; Multiple Income Streams for Authors, Beyond Just Book Sales [Publishing Performance]; Melania Trump's memoir audiobook using her AI voice clone with ElevenLabs, which she is selling direct from her website; my own voice clone AI-narrated thriller, Death Valley; AI narration in publishing [The New Publishing Standard]; The New York Times has struck an AI licensing deal with Amazon [The Verge]. Plus, my Fourth Edition of Successful Self-Publishing; Desecration, a British crime thriller, on special; and my AI-Assisted Artisan Author webinar; The Geography of Belonging and Finding Home [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  Jennifer Roig-Francoli is an international prize-winning violinist and certified Alexander Technique teacher. She's also a high performance coach and the author of Make Great Music with Ease!: The Secret to Smarter Practice, Confident Performance, and Living a Happier 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 Creativity in music and writing Timing and readiness when approaching a book How perfectionism can hinder your creative process Tips for performing and public speaking, and tackling anxiety How the mind-body connection relates to both music and writing Dealing with physical pain as a musician or a writer (and in the intro, I recommend DeskBound by Kelly & Juliet Starrett) What is Alexander Technique? Integrating music and writing into a creative business You can find Jennifer at artoffreedom.me. Transcript of Interview with Jennifer Roig-Francoli Joanna: Jennifer Roig-Francoli is an international prize-winning violinist and certified Alexander Technique teacher. She's also a high performance coach and the author of Make Great Music with Ease!: The Secret to Smarter Practice, Confident Performance, and Living a Happier Life. So welcome to the show, Jennifer. Jennifer: Thank you so much for having me. I'm looking forward to talking with you. Joanna: Oh, yes. I'm pretty excited about this. We were just saying before the recording, this is my first podcast that's really around music. I don't know why I've missed it so much after like 15 years of doing the show. Jennifer: Well, I'm honored to be the first. Joanna: Yes, indeed. I am interested because why write a book? I tend to think that people have this primary mode of creativity, and yours is clearly music. Why write a book? (when music is your first mode of expression) Jennifer: I've wanted to write a book for a long time. My dad was an English professor, so my favorite class in school was writing. I used to keep journals. I wrote poetry and stories from the time I was really little. I just always loved writing. It’s also been therapeutic for me as an adult, just writing for myself. So writing a book was a thing I always wanted to do. The main thing was to get my ideas across about, specifically, the work I do with the Alexander Technique, music making, and creativity. I just have a lot of ideas, and I wanted to get them out there. So a book made sense. Joanna: So your dad was in the literature field. Were you also encouraged into music as a child? Again, because your primary method, I guess, is music, so writing was second. Did you do that from childhood? Jennifer: I'm told by my mother that when I was two, I declared that I needed a violin. My parents are both musicians, so it makes sense. They would sit around our living room in the evenings when I was a baby, playing quartets with their friends. I vaguely remember sitting in the rocking chair, listening to them and watching them. So when I was two, I fell in love with a violin. My mom is a cellist, and my dad is a violist, but I liked the violin. When I was four years old, my mother discovered the Suzuki method and got me started. So I've been playing the violin since I was four. Joanna: Yes, wow. It's so interesting, isn't it? I think, clearly, when you were a kid, it was fun for you, and it was all around you. I said to you beforehand that I don't really listen to music. I think part of that is my mum likes silence, so we were never really allowed to have sound around. I'm a very quiet person as well and often wear noise-canceling headphones. So it's so weird to imagine your childhood with all this music. Which then sort of brings me to a question about, if that's your main thing that you do— How did you face the challenges around writing when you're used to doing something so different, something so noisy? Jennifer: Funny, I don't think of it that way at all. To be totally honest, I don't listen to much music myself either. I really enjoy making music even more than listening to it. Yes, it's pretty loud to have a violin right next to your ear. So I don't think of it as something different, in a way. A lot of my work and what I'm most interested in is how we get inspired and how do we take that creative inspiration into ourselves? Like how do we let it flow in the mind, the body, the soul, the whole that we are? How do we take these ideas that we have and then express them? I feel like I have these ideas, whether they are musical ideas or thought ideas, concepts. There are ideas in my mind, and somehow they need to get out. They can be expressed through music or they can be expressed through writing. Since I've always been writing, it was actually very easy for me to start writing this book, when it was the right time. I tried three times to write this book, and the first time I attempted it was maybe 15 years ago. I sat down to write the book one summer on vacation, and I think I probably sat down two or three times to try to write the book and realized I was not ready at all to write this book. My ideas were not ready. They were unformed. It just was really hard. So I left it for more than a decade. Then a few years ago, I got back to it. I felt like it was time. I got further into the process, maybe three or four months. Then life events took over and prevented me from continuing. So I took another break for maybe two years or something before I said, okay, third try's the charm. I'm going to try again, and I was determined to make it work this time. It was actually really easy to write most of the book. It just sort of flowed out of me. It's no different from making music, really. Joanna: So that had been kind of incubating. I think that's interesting. I've had that experience with a couple of my books, particularly one called Writing the Shadow around that darker side of ourselves and expressing that. I’d thought about that for a couple of decades, really. You said the third time you tried again. There will be people listening who may well have put off books or tried to write books. How did you know this time it was going to work? Or did you just start again with hope, and then it started working? When do you know the right time to pick a project back up? Jennifer: Part of the reason I wrote the book, one of them, to be completely honest, is that it fit into my business plan. I run a coaching business for musicians, and it would serve a number of purposes for me from a business perspective to have a book out. For one thing, there are so many people in the world that I feel could benefit from my services and what I teach, and yet so many people in the world can't afford my services. So one reason I wrote the book was to offer something really low cost to a much broader audience so they could benefit from the teachings. It just felt like at this point in time, I knew clearly what I wanted to teach. My system was formulated. I had been teaching it a certain way for a number of years already. I really knew my stuff in a way I didn't before. I went through certain life experiences too along the way that fed into the book. That's why the first time I tried writing it, I was just not ready. It wasn't the right time. Even the second time just didn’t work because of other life events that ended up giving me more material for the actual book when it was the right time. So I can't really say other than that it just fit. All the pieces fit at that time. It was right for my business. It was right in my life. I had gotten to a point in my business, financially, where I felt I could make my book number one for a whole year, which is what I did. I really decided that it would be okay for me to focus mostly on the book for a whole year, and that would mean probably bringing in less income from other sources. It was seeing that I could go through this process for a year and still be okay, and not have to worry too much about working hard on other stuff, if that makes sense. Joanna: I love that you said it was the right time in your business as well. I think what that does too, is that helps you get out of your own head and think about other people. Sometimes that's what we need. You can get lost in so many words, and then when you think, okay, who is my audience, and who am I trying to serve? That also helped you because you knew how this fits with the people you coach, and the people who can't afford coaching can afford a book. I think that's fantastic. So often with these deep and meaningful books, we can get lost in our own heads, right? Jennifer: Yes, I think I was completely lost in my own head the first time I tried. Joanna: And it's making it out. So you said it took about a year. How did that year go? Was it a lot of rewriting? Or you said it kind of flowed. Was there a lot of editorial? What was your creative process like during that time? Jennifer: I have to say, there was one piece of advice that made it possible. Without that piece of advice, there’s no way I would have finished the book in the time I did. The advice was to not edit as I was going along. I tend to have perfectionistic tendencies. I tell my students I’m a recovering perfectionist. My old way of writing would be about the process of writing and getting it right as I’m writing. That wasn’t going to work for me because that would take way too long. It also meant that if I started writing that way, there are a thousand different ways to say something. So if I kept finding a better way to say something or saying, “No, this isn’t quite the right word here, let me find another one,” and then I’d have another idea, and it would take me off into tangents. Pretty soon, I’d have no idea what I was writing about. For me to censor myself and give myself a rule, you’re not allowed to edit while writing, you just write. You’re going to write this chapter today, or whatever it was. Sometimes I did a certain number of words. Sometimes I just said, okay, this is the chapter. Sometimes I didn’t even have a plan. For the most part I would just write and not let myself edit. That saved me. That saved that book. Joanna: I totally agree with you, and that's how I do it, too. Everyone has different processes, but I think that is really important. So let's talk a bit about some of the aspects of being a musician, and you cover some of this in the book. In the subtitle is “confident performance.” I was thinking about this, now you've performed at Carnegie Hall, which is kind of one of those amazing things. As authors, we need to become more comfortable with performing. Many of us are introverts. We just don't want to get on stage and do this. What are some of your tips for performing our work or reading our work in a way that engages audiences? Jennifer: Oh, that's a great question. I just have to say that even though I've been performing since I was a really young child with the violin, it took me a really long time to be brave enough to speak in public. The fact that I'm here doing podcasts and interviews and speaking from stages is just mind-blowing to me because I was an extremely shy, introverted child. Somehow, because I started performing with the violin very young, it was just a natural thing that was easy for me. That was no problem, but speaking, I really had to work on that. The breakthrough for me was, to give you an example, I actually knew how bad I was at speaking in public. In college, I signed up for this class on public speaking, and we needed to memorize a poem for the second class. I thought, Oh, this is fine. I can memorize music, no problem. So I memorized the poem, but I freaked out. I was so terrified. So I got to this class, and I stood up, and I think I got maybe the first two lines out, and my mind went totally blank. There was no way I could retrieve anything else from that poem. Unfortunately, I was so mortified that I dropped the class and never went back. Long story short, I actually didn’t work on speaking intentionally, but as a result of my Alexander Technique teacher training—which takes three years, by the way, so like 1600 hours to get certified as an Alexander Technique teacher—through that process, I opened up in my whole self. In opening up in my whole self, including speaking with other people in the class, it became much, much easier for me to expose myself and be myself in public through words. So just speaking off the cuff like we are now, I can do it now, and I find it really fun, but it was mortifying earlier. So I completely understand what you're talking about. I do have some tips. Performance anxiety is a big thing that I help my musicians with. Through the way that I teach the Alexander Technique—which is actually called Primal Alexander—we’re really learning how to connect how we're thinking with how we're feeling in the body. So it’s really important when you're feeling nervous or anxious, it’s really important just to notice that without judging it to begin with. Self-observation is one of our best tools. It’s a human gift to be able to self-reflect, and for you to see yourself from outside, and observe and watch, and ask yourself, “What's going on? What’s actually happening to me right now in this moment?” I'm doing this for myself right now, and anybody listening, I invite you to just ask yourself, “What's happening to me right now? What am I noticing?” If you're nervous, you'll probably notice symptoms like the heart racing or sweating or shaking or shrinking, getting tight. All these things that happen in a fight, flight, freeze, or fawn response. There's a tightening, a constriction going on in the system. It's uncomfortable. We don't like that feeling. So what we usually do is try to fix it, make it go away, or mask it somehow. None of those things really work. They can work to a point, but the best way I've found that is really foolproof—and it works for everybody I've worked with—is if you really just stop and get curious like a little kid, like you're a Martian with no idea what's going on. Or you’re just a scientist taking observations, and you are your own science experiment. Or you’re a detective, and you want to find out. You want information. Like, what is happening to this human being right now? What's happening? “Oh, my heart is racing,” or, “Oh, I'm shaking.” Then if we can develop the response of, “Oh, that's interesting. What else is happening?” and to keep asking “what else?” without and rush and without any judgment. Just be with the experience. That in itself is incredibly powerful. When you really stick with it, with that attitude—and — Attitude is everything. It’s that childlike curiosity where you’re giving yourself time to notice and be curious and not trying to change your experience. Except you don't get fixated on it, so you keep asking yourself, “Okay, interesting. What else?” Joanna: Yes. Obviously, your Alexander Technique is a physical practice, and this idea of being in the body, I feel like so often, as authors, is different to musicians. Especially with the violin, your body is making the sound. Like you're moving with an instrument. Writers, so much of it is in our heads, and yet, as you say, going on a stage or speaking is physical. You are a physical human in this experience. So I like that you talk about that. I also find, because I do a lot of speaking, I always do sort of writing beforehand, and I just write “thank you that I can serve the audience.” Again, like we said at the beginning —  I'm here for them. This isn't actually about me. This is what I can help them with. Is that similar to you, as a musician, that you're really thinking about serving the people who are listening? Jennifer: Yes, that's a beautiful way to think of it. I love how you do that before you go out. Joanna: It just changes my perspective from being obsessed about how I feel to trying to help other people with whatever they're looking for. Jennifer: That's really a great point. It is so good to include both. Ultimately, the way I look at it is that I want to be open and responsive to both what's going on inside me and what's going on outside of me. Ultimately, I feel like I can best serve the world around me when I'm making sure I take care of myself first. When I'm at my best, that's when I have my best to give. So it’s interesting what you said. Also, you might be surprised because I never thought of playing the violin as a physical activity until I ended up having physical problems. I really thought of it as a mental thing. I really had a mind-body split, where I had this false notion, first of all, that there is such a thing as a mental activity that's just mental or a physical activity that's just physical. That’s just not true. Even as a writer, you do have an instrument because you have a pen or a pencil or a computer, and you need to use your physical body to get those ideas out of your brain. It's really not so different from a violinist who has a violin and a bow to get the ideas out. So I actually always used to think it was a mental activity, and I had this prejudice against what I thought of as physical activities. My brother, for example, was really into sports. I liked sports when I was really little, I didn't have a mind-body split when I was really little. The older I got, the more praise I got for being more intellectual, getting good grades in school — and all that kind of thing. The violin was included in there for me. So then I didn’t think much of sports. There was a whole dynamic in my family too that was, in me, kind of messed me up. It caused problems down the road because if you don't recognize how you can't really separate the mind and the body, ultimately something will suffer. Joanna: This is so funny because this is exactly the same for me. My brother also was the sporty one and played basketball. He snowboards and skateboards. In terms of physical intelligence, he is physically intelligent, in terms of just amazing physical awareness. It took me, also, probably 25, 30 years, and then you hit 35, right, and your body starts hurting. Then you hit 40, and it gets worse. Then you have to start doing something. I ended up damaging myself and getting help for that. You talk in the book about chronic pain and your own physical stuff that led you to the Alexander Technique. Tell us a bit about that, because— People listening, if they're not already in pain from writing, they’re probably going to be. Jennifer: Oh, dear. Yes, so I found the Alexander Technique because I had neck pain. It wasn’t directly from playing the violin because at that time, I had young children, and had not been playing the violin seriously for a while. I had a major career that I cut short when I was 19 and got married at 20. I stopped playing as a soloist. Then I spent quite a few years playing the violin in other capacities, but my heart wasn’t really in it. I’m just, by nature, a soloist. I loved doing that. It made me happy. It was exciting. I stopped all of that, then I got married at 20. I started playing in orchestras and teaching violin—things I never really wanted to do—just to earn money. It was good because I kept up my skills, but ultimately I was suffering because I didn’t have a creative outlet other than my family. Of course, having children is a beautiful creative outlet. But carrying toddlers on my hips, my alignment was completely off. It was really stressful, like I didn’t have family around to help. I got progressively less happy. As I got less happy, I had more stress, and the physical stress of lifting my children and carrying them around. One day, I ended up with neck pain that wouldn’t go away. I ended up going to doctors and chiropractors, and nobody could really help until I finally ended up at an Alexander Technique teacher’s studio. That completely changed my entire life. So I went for pain, but it was actually a deeper, creative kind of pain. It wasn’t about the violin, it was about blocked creativity for me. Joanna: I guess if people don’t know— What is the Alexander Technique? Jennifer: Sure. You mentioned earlier that it’s a physical technique, but actually I think of it as a whole-person technique. I know why you’d think that because if people look up Alexander Technique, they’ll probably find things about posture. You’ll see a practitioner touching the student gently with gentle manipulation, and moving, sitting, and standing. It can give the impression that it’s about the physical body only, but it’s much deeper than that. I’ve been fascinated since the beginning of my Alexander journey to know what was underneath. For me, the Alexander Technique is a way to connect how you're thinking with how you're feeling, both physically and emotionally. When you learn how to connect and integrate your whole self—your mind, body, emotions—when you are more integrated and whole, you bring that whole of you into activity, you can learn to do whatever you want to do with much more ease, much less effort, much less tension, and much more joy. So that, to me, is what the Alexander Technique is. That’s also why I teach it with that touch, so I can empower my students to learn to think differently to get different results. Joanna: Yes, I've definitely found—I do a lot of weight training—and I felt like I've learned so much about what the body and mind connection is, just from being much more present in my body, which I wasn't for so long as an author. Obviously, you work with musicians who are suffering pain, and some people listening might also be musicians, but— What are the things that people come to you with that relate to the mind and body connection or the creativity that some people listening might recognize or find useful? Jennifer: Yes, I'll just say as an aside, I'm always open to working with non-musicians. In fact, when I first started teaching Alexander technique, I wanted to work with anybody but musicians, believe it or not. I spent quite a while working with firefighters and journalists and teachers and all kinds of other people. So I'm always open to that. Recently, I had a photographer join one of my classes. Ultimately, we're all just human. We are all working on the same things. We're working on how do you bring your whole self to whatever activity it is that you're engaged in, that you're interested in? Whether you're a musician or a writer or whatever it is that you do. The specific things that people come to me for generally have to do with improving their skills to get better at whatever the activity is, or they have physical pain. A lot of musicians end up with tendinitis, neck pain, back pain, carpal tunnel—real physical issues where it's career threatening. If you have tendinitis, you can't play the violin or the piano. You have to stop. There are a lot of famous musicians in the media, like recently, there have been quite a few people who have had to just take long breaks. It happens with athletes too. Ultimately, musicians are athletes. We just work with fine motor skills, and obviously what we’re producing is different. We are producing music. Athletes are producing a football game. It really doesn't matter because we are human. We need to learn how to think in a way that—well, here's something I always come back to. It's a favorite quote of mine from Frederick Mathias Alexander, who is the originator of this technique. He said, quote, “Mine is a method for the control of human reaction.” End quote. “Mine is a method for the control of human reaction.” We are reacting to stimuli in our lives all day long, unconsciously or consciously. For me, this process is about learning to be more conscious of how we're reacting to things. Noticing, okay, if I react to XYZ by getting tight, for instance, if I react to speaking in public by getting tight and my body's getting stiff, do I like that result? If I don't like that result, then maybe I could examine my attitude or how I'm thinking and think differently. Alexander started all of this, the Alexander Technique originated in his performance issue of getting hoarse when he was speaking in public. He was an actor, not a musician. So everything we're talking about is really pertinent for writers who need to speak in public too. That's what Alexander had to do. He would get hoarse, and then he wouldn't be able to recite Shakespeare, which was his love. He went to specialists and nobody could help him. So he figured he had to either quit and not speak in public, not be an actor, and do something else, or solve the problem himself. So that’s what he did. Thanks to him, we have this method that is amazing. Joanna: Yes, I find this so interesting. For people listening, you mentioned carpal tunnel. I know loads of writers who end up having that operation for carpal tunnel. Or people with back pain who are just on a lot of meds. I feel like people think that it can't be solved in any other way than medically. I pretty much gave myself a shoulder injury from hunching over my keyboard and basically tore my rotator cuff from hunching. Jennifer: Sorry. Very common, though, I'm sure. Joanna: Exactly. I went to a specialist. I got the steroid injection to immediately stop the pain. The shoulder guy said to me—this was about six years ago, I was 44 years old—he said, if you don't sort this out with your posture, do weight training, reverse this, you will be back here and I will have to keep seeing you. It was good. He gave me a real talking to and basically said, get out of here and sort this out. It’s so interesting to me because I know some people listening will be like, well, no, this is clearly just a physical thing that I have to fix with an operation or drugs or whatever. Do you incorporate the medical side into your practice, or is it very much that this takes time to work on your body? Jennifer: I don't diagnose. I don't have that training. I'm not trained to diagnose anything physical like that. Alexander Technique, there's actually quite a bit of research on it. Unfortunately, it's like the best kept secret in the world. It really does help anybody with anything. It's hard to get people to believe that. If you're saying, I can help you with anything, but that's been my experience. Of course, thank goodness for surgeons, thank goodness for doctors, and thank goodness for drugs that are helping people and saving lives. I'm in no way saying we shouldn't have all that. However, there are so many surgeries performed that are unnecessary, in my opinion. In my experience, I've worked with many people who were about to have surgery and then came to me as a last resort. Or they had the surgery, and it wasn't getting better, and it didn’t solve the problem. Or they had the treatment, and they had to keep going back again and again. It's pretty clear to me that there's a purpose and reason for the medical profession. They serve a very important purpose. Yet, there's a huge aspect that's completely missing that they are not trained in, which is seeing the whole person and treating the whole person. Of course, there are alternative practitioners and people who do that. That's great. I don't think of myself as a medical practitioner of any kind, in any way. It's remarkable that I've had many people come to me, primarily because they had pain. I'm thinking of one person in particular that comes to mind immediately, now another one. Two people actually, who were told by their doctors they would always be in pain because the issues they had were so severe. Like from multiple car accidents, from broken vertebrae, from slipped discs. These were very serious physical things you could see on a scan, they’re real things. Yet, through practicing the awareness etudes, those are studies, like little awareness exercises I give my students. I have them do just a few minutes every day. I tell them, take these like they're antibiotics. Don’t skip a dose. Prioritize this. It's really easy, really simple, but you have to stick with it. There's a kind of paradigm shift that happens when you start to look at life a little differently. You notice everything’s related. You start noticing how you react to things and get curious. You keep observing, wondering, experimenting with thinking differently. Then your pain starts dissolving. It's amazing. I've had so many people actually use the word “miraculous.” I don't know what's going on. I do believe there are mysterious forces in the world. It's also a very practical technique that people don't have to believe in it. They just need to be curious enough to try something different. If you keep doing the same thing, you'll get the same results. That’s what we do when we go to the computer, for example. We open up the computer and we typically do the same things. We have the same attitude. We are not aware of the rest of the world. We shut out our peripheral vision. We forget about space behind us. We forget about the rest of our lives. We become so narrow-minded that our bodies just follow the mind. The body becomes narrowed because it follows the narrow-mindedness and the narrow focus. We're taught that in school. It’s drilled into us that we need to focus and concentrate. The way we're taught to concentrate is to narrow how we're thinking. The body is innocent. The body just reflects what we’re doing with the mind. That's why we end up in pain. Joanna: Yes, and particularly, like circling back to what we were saying about what we were rewarded for as, you know, good girls who were doing well at school, and doing what we were told, and doing well on exams. I feel like I spent 30 years denying my body and what my body needed. Then I've essentially had to change direction. Now a lot of what I do every day is physical movement in order to help fuel my creativity and everything else. I'm much happier when I move. If I start to be in pain, I will get moving. So I love what you're doing. I think it's fascinating. Just one last question before we go. So at the end of the book, the subtitle is “living a happier life.” I wondered, how do all these things come together for you now, with the writing and the music and your business? Do you still have your music as a separate thing to your business? Jennifer: I love that question. I've basically spent my whole life working on integrating everything. Actually, it is pretty integrated, I have to say. I do my own marketing, for example, for my coaching business, which entails a lot of writing. When I first started this business and realized how much time was going to go into marketing, it was overwhelming, and the last thing I ever thought I could enjoy doing. Selling anything was far from my artistic beliefs about life. But it's either market yourself, or have somebody else do it, or starve. So I learned how to market. I realized if I need to do this, I might as well figure out a way to enjoy it. I do love writing. So I actually have done a lot of training. I've bought courses, had coaches, and had a lot of coaching in copywriting. My writing is definitely a part of my day every day. My music is what I write about. Even though I'm not necessarily performing much anymore these days, it's been a few years since my last real performance—I've performed live on Facebook, if that counts. I still play my instrument, but I don't need it to feed my creativity. That’s what I realized when I was 19, honestly, that I didn't need it to be a creative person. I don't need to write, but I enjoy writing and I enjoy making music. I also enjoy going for walks in nature. Ultimately, it's really about—and this is what I'm really working on—how can I be really myself, authentically myself, right now? Being who I am includes connecting with people. That's a form of expression, and that's creative. If I can get out of my way and allow inspiration to guide me, that’s a really creative process. I'm doing that right now, and I hope to get better at it as I go through life. That makes me happy. That’s where the happy comes in. Joanna: Yes, absolutely. Where can people find you, and your book, and everything you do online? Jennifer: I have a website. It's www.artoffreedom.me. That's my website. Facebook is my main way to connect with people. I'm very accessible. People can also contact me through the website. I have a YouTube channel. If anybody wants to hear my music, just look up my name on YouTube and you'll have plenty of music to listen to, as well as teaching videos talking about these kinds of things. Joanna: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Jennifer. That was great. Jennifer: Thank you so much.The post Music, Writing, And The Mind-Body Connection With Jennifer Roig-Francoli first appeared on The Creative Penn.