The Creative Penn Podcast For Writers

When is it time to leave an unsuccessful series behind and pivot into something new? What is the process of writing to market? Anna Sayburn Lane explores these topics and more. In the intro, help with Amazon KDP Account suspension [Kindlepreneur]; Selling direct to the EU? Thresholds coming in 2025; Some honest thoughts about the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival [Charlotte Duckworth]; OpenAI's SearchGPT; and Signing Spearof Destiny pics. 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  Anna Sayburn Lane writes 1920s murder mysteries and contemporary thrillers, and is an award-winning short story writer. 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 Lessons learned from self-publishing your first book The mindset shift when deciding to pivot When the cost of production outweighs the profits — is it time to pivot? Assessing the financial potential of a genre How writing to market makes marketing easier Researching and changing your branding when pivoting genre Balancing research time with writing time Historical accuracy vs. believability You can find Anna at AnnaSayburnLane.com. Transcript of Interview with Anna Sayburn Lane Joanna: Anna Sayburn Lane writes 1920s murder mysteries and contemporary thrillers and is an award-winning short story writer. So welcome to the show, Anna. Anna: Hello, thank you very much for having me. Joanna: Oh, it's great to have you on the show. So first up— Tell us a bit more about you and how you originally got into writing and self-publishing. Anna: I was the typical bookworm kid, which led me into an English and History degree. I didn't really think at the time that writing stories for a living was an option. So I kind of went into journalism thinking, oh, that's close. Turns out, it's a completely different thing, but anyway, it kind of worked. So I worked for local newspapers for five years. Then I moved into the health and medical field. I enjoyed work, I was quite happy doing what I was doing. I'd always written a bit of fiction on the side, but I only really started taking it seriously about 15 years ago. I just got bitten with the idea for a novel, and it wouldn't let me go. So I spent about eight years writing my first novel, and then another two years trying to get it published. I went through all of the ups and downs, and near misses, and getting more and more frustrated with the process. So eventually, I decided I'm going to find out about self-publishing. I went to London Book Fair, I joined ALLi (Alliance of Independent Authors), I did various online courses, and I found out as much about it as I possibly could. Then I eventually went on to publish Unlawful Things, which is the first novel, and that was back in 2018. Joanna: That's interesting. That's quite a long journey then. Didn't that book win some awards or something? I mean, it's a very well-respected kind of book. How did that experience go with traditional publishing? Anna: Well, that was the thing. It kept getting shortlisted for stuff, it kept nearly winning things. Then I'd sort of get agents who were saying, “Oh, yes, we really love it,” and then they'd have a closer look and say, “The trouble is, we're not sure that it's commercial enough. Blah, blah, blah.” So that was really the reason that I eventually went into self-publishing. I forget the exact ones now, but there were a couple of awards that it got onto the final roster for. When I published it, it did pretty well. It got really well reviewed, people seemed to really like it. So I thought, oh, great, you know, better write the next one. Unfortunately, the next one to two years to write, and that was when I suppose things started slowing down a bit, really. Well, let's just stay a few years back because you and I first met as I arrived in Canterbury at the end of my pilgrimage in 2020. So we were literally just days before lockdown, I think, that time. Joanna: Then you came on my Books and Travel Podcast in 2021, and we geeked out over Canterbury history. That was while you were still writing the Helen Oddfellow Mysteries. So first, tell us more about those books. Why did you start out writing that series, in particular, Was it based on your history degree? Anna: Well, actually, the Helen Oddfellow series really started when I walked from London to Canterbury back in 2010, which I just sort of did for fun. It gave me an idea fo

Why is writing emotion so important in our books, whatever the genre? How can we create an emotional connection between our readers and our characters? Roz Morris gives her tips in this episode. In the intro, how to get your indie book into schools [Self-Publishing Advice]; Did my bestselling book turn out to be a financial failure? [Tiago Forte]; How to Build a World Class Substack; Why did The Atlantic sign a licensing deal with OpenAI? [The Verge]; Like It or Not, Publishers Are Licensing Books for AI Training—And Using AI Themselves [Jane Friedman]; and my personal update post-Covid. 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 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. 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 is writing emotion is so important? How can we create an emotional connection between our readers and our characters? How to write layers of emotion Using description and dialogue to evoke feelings in the reader “Show, don't tell” when writing emotion Learning to lean into our intuition and trust more Using your own emotions and experiences in writing How and when to use a beat sheet You can find Roz at RozMorris.org. Transcript of 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. So welcome back to the show, Roz. Roz: Hi, Jo. It's so great to be here again. Joanna: Yes, and you have been on the show many times before over the last 14 years. Roz: I feel like we're old timers, gosh. Joanna: Oh, we are so old timers, but that's because you're so good at this, I wanted you back. The last time was in January 2023, when we talked about how to finally finish your book, which was a super popular episode. Though, given your many creative projects, what have you been working on in the last 18 months? Give us an idea of where you are in the creative cycle. Roz: Well, just after that, I did an audiobook of my third novel. Then I was playing with ideas for another novel, and they sort of settled a bit, but I couldn't figure out really what I wanted to do. Then another novel idea came along, and that's starting to incubate. Meanwhile, just as a kind of amuse-bouche, I've been writing a follow-up to my travel memoir, which is Not Quite Lost: Travels Without A Sense of Direction. So I've rather got the taste for writing little memoirs of un-adventures. I just really like them as a way of storytelling. Joanna: Oh, that's funny. Un-adventures, I do love that. The audiobook, did you narrate that? Roz: No, I didn't. I managed to get back my narrator who did my first two novels because she just had such a good take and understanding of the material. She really wanted to do a third one if there was a possibility, so that worked really well. Joanna: What about the travel memoir? Have you done that as an audiobook yourself? Roz: I haven't, but if there is an audiobook that, I want to do it. Joanna: Yes, you must. You've got such a lovely voice. I do think memoir is one of those things, and your Nail Your Novel books as well. I think that these are some things, the nonfiction side, that we can do as authors more easily, I think. Roz: I think so. Also, people get used to hearing the real us on podcasts like this, on videos that we appear on, when we speak in real life, and that sort of thing. So our genuine voice is really important there. Joanna: Absolutely. Well, people should look forward to that at some point. Anyway, into our topic for today, we're going to focus on writing emotion into our books, both for fiction and also for other genres like memoir and narrative nonfiction. So just to set the scene— Why is writing emotion so important? Roz: Well, readers love to feel. They absolutely wants to care about what happens. They love to be involved in what happens. Reading is a really intimate thing to do if you think about it. It's just you and the author's words, and yet it sort of goes into you and creates pictures and emotions. So being in control of the emotion you are writing is a really important writing skill. The emotion you write is closely linked to the genre. You have to know as a writer what emotion the reader of your genre is seeking. Are they seeking thrills, or shivers, or a bit of romance? Do they want to be scared? What kind of scariness? Do

How can you lean into intuition and curiosity to embrace discovery writing? How might serial fiction fit into your business model? KimBoo York gives her tips and more in this interview. In the intro, BookVault now has integration with PayHip; 7 lessons learned from 5 years writing full-time [Sacha Black, Rebel Author Podcast]; My author timeline; List of money books; Crowdfunding for Participation, Profit, and Payment [Self-Publishing Advice] 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 a podcaster at The Author Alchemist and Around the Writer's Table. Her latest book for authors is By the Seat of Your Pants: Secrets of Discovery 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 What is discovery writing and how does it differ from plotting and outlining? How trust and intuition guide discovery writing Where to begin the discovery writing process Adding layers during the writing and editing process The “penny drop” moment of discovery writing Embracing the process that works for you Differences between a serial, a series, and a novel Platforms and marketing for different genres of serials Building a business model based on ‘you' You can find KimBoo at HouseofYork.info. Transcript of Interview with KimBoo York Joanna: KimBoo York is the author of romance, fantasy and nonfiction, as well as a productivity coach, and a podcaster at The Author Alchemist and Around the Writer's Table. Her latest book for authors is By the Seat of Your Pants: Secrets of Discovery Writing. So welcome, KimBoo. KimBoo: Thank you so much, Joanna. You know I am thrilled to be here. I'm very excited. Joanna: Oh, good. So first up— Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and publishing. KimBoo: I'm one of those bog standard, ‘I wanted to be a storyteller since I was a kid.' I loved reading as a kid. I loved telling stories. I think I got into fanfiction when I was like 10 years old, which was like after the original Star Wars. We're talking in the 70s, because I'm old, Joanna, so this was a long time ago. In the modern era, let's say, I got back into writing original fiction, again, through fanfiction. I came into fanfiction during a very rough time of my life, in about 2007/2008. I wrote a lot, and doing that got me back into the habit of writing regularly. I had given up on it throughout the 90s because I just kind of decided nobody was ever going to publish what I wrote. The publishing industry was just too hidebound, didn't want people like me. Eventually, some friends of mine got published, got their original fiction published, and they were like, you could do it too. So I did eventually get published by a small indie publisher in 2011. I eventually went totally independent, self-published later. I got the rights back to my books and republished them, and I've kind of just been rolling on ever since. In early 2023, I really rejuvenized my author career. I realized the way things were going. As you and I talked about before the recording started, serial fiction is a huge growth area right now, and because of my experiences in fanfiction, I love the serial format. So that really just got me back into the game. So that's where I am right now. I'm trying to make it all work, juggling a bunch of plates. Joanna: Okay, wow. We're gonna come back to the serial side because I definitely want to talk about that. I do just want to mention the fanfiction. I feel like this is something that doesn't get talked about very much. Given that you did quite a lot of it before writing your own stuff, just remind people what is the legal aspect of fan fiction. In terms of— Can people publish what they write in fanfiction worlds? KimBoo: So the straight legal answer is no. You can't make money off of fanfiction. There's a lot of people who are doing gray areas in that, I do not recommend it. Fanfiction is a hobby, fanfiction is a pastime. There's been some legal contest of it. I'm in the US, so that's where the copyright laws I'm familiar with. It differs by country, as you well know, Joanna. So, no, you can't make money off of fanfiction. It's a hobby. That said, there's lots of places where you can share your fanfiction. There's Archive of Our Own, quickly known as AO3, which is basically a repository where people can post their fanfiction that they're working on. That is huge. I think that's like the third biggest site in the world right now. It's massive. So there's

How can you make sure your manuscript is ready for submission to an agent — or for publication if you go indie? What are the benefits and challenges of traditional publishing? Will they really do all the marketing for you? Renee Fountain talks about these things and more in today's interview. In the intro, Referencing and citations [Self Publishing Advice]; will.i.am on the WSJ talking about AI, music and media; Behind the scenes of Pilgrimage [BookBrunch]; how a chapel visit in Zambia led to a published short story [X @mwanabibi] 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  Renee Fountain has more than three decades in the publishing industry, including being a literary agent, a developmental editor, and story analyst. She is the president of Gandolfo Helin & Fountain Literary Management and founder of Gryphon Quill Editing. 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 Main issues seen with manuscript submissions Is your manuscript overwritten? Tips on pacing What is developmental editing? Key elements of a pitch package and query letter Will traditional publishers do all the marketing for you? Using an agent to get a TV or film deal vs. going indie Dealing with rejection Cash flow management in traditional publishing You can find Renee at GHliterary.com or ReneeFountain.com. Transcript of Interview with Renee Fountain Joanna: Renee Fountain has more than three decades in the publishing industry, including being a literary agent, a developmental editor, and story analyst. She is the president of Gandolfo Helin & Fountain Literary Management and founder of Gryphon Quill Editing. So welcome to the show, Renee. Renee: Thank you very much. Great to be here. Joanna: Yes, indeed. So first up— Tell us a bit more about you, how you got into the publishing industry, and what you do now. Renee: Well, I've loved books since I was a little kid. I was that kid getting yelled at for reading under the covers with a flashlight when I was supposed to be sleeping. So after a bunch of boring jobs, I wanted to do something I love. So I was living in San Diego at the time, and Harcourt Brace was the only publisher there. So I thought, I'm going to do that. I started in the very boring division of accounting guides before landing a coveted spot in children's books. I eventually moved back to New York City, just in time for 9/11. So that kind of dashed my hopes of growing my publishing empire. Now I'm wearing a few hats. I'm a literary agent—when I did come back to New York, I did go with Simon and Schuster eventually. So now I'm wearing a few hats. I'm a literary agent. I'm a developmental editor, working with writers in my private business. I'm also on the faculty of Manuscript Academy, working with writers there. I'm also writing reviews for Kirkus Indie because it's one of the few ways I get to keep my own writing skills sharp while dipping my toe in the indie pool. Joanna: A portfolio career, as they call it. Renee: Sure, why not? Joanna: I say I'm a multi-passionate creative, so don't put me in a one-genre box! Now, when you pitched me, it was really interesting. You said, “I get a lot of manuscript submissions that are just not query ready.” I was like, oh, my goodness, that is a super juicy topic. So let's get into that. What are the main issues you see with those manuscript submissions? Renee: Mostly it's the writing, whether at a line level or the overall story structure. It could be the writing isn't strong enough yet or the word count may be too high for the genre they're writing. It's mostly due to loose writing, bad pacing, excessive description, or the scene goes on way too long. Or what I call “story for story sake.” Just telling the reader a lot of stuff that doesn't really matter in the big picture, no matter how interesting it is. You'll know if you have that if you take out that section and it still makes sense. So it's just a lot of things just aren't quite gelling yet. I've talked to so many people that are just like, “Well, I want to work on a new project, so I just need to get it out there.” Like it's a time limit, and you've got to shove it out the door. You really don't. You really need to take your time. Joanna: There's a few things to come back on there. I want to address the word count first because this is really interesting, and people don't really understand why word count is an issue. Could you talk a bit more about word count for some of

Can you have a business with a soul through writing? How does the business of fiction differ from non-fiction? What are some tips for pitching a book for film & TV? All this and more with Aurora Winter. In the intro, 100 book marketing ideas [Written Word Media]; 25 indie authors tips to finding success [Self Publishing Advice]; BookFunnel for audiobooks; Bookfunnel as landing page for Facebook Ads; TIME signs licensing deal with OpenAI; ALCS AI licensing survey; my 2020 book on AI for authors and publishing. Plus, Corfu on Instagram and proving I am human; In My Time of Dying by Sebastian Junger; Eruption by Michael Crichton and James Patterson; De-Extinction of the Nephilim on JFPennBooks; Other stores]. 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 to get started. This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn  Aurora Winter is the multi-award-winning author of nonfiction business books and teen fantasy novels, as well as a publisher, TV producer, and serial entrepreneur. 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 writing can help people during difficult times Actionable ways to turn grief into gratitude Tips for pitching to producers The importance of patience and connections in the film industry How self-development can lead to increased opportunities How and when to delegate tasks to a virtual assistant The neuroscience behind effective pitches You can find Aurora at AuroraWinter.com, and her latest book at MagicMysteryAndTheMultiverse.com. Transcript of Interview with Aurora Winter Joanna: Aurora Winter is the multi-award-winning author of nonfiction business books and teen fantasy novels, as well as a publisher, TV producer, and serial entrepreneur. So welcome to the show, Aurora. Aurora: It's so great to be on the show with you, Joanna. Joanna: I'm excited to talk to you. First up— Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and publishing. Aurora: Well, my life changed when I was just nine years old, and I first read the Narnia series by CS Lewis. As I reached for the last book in that series, I just felt such a thrill of anticipation, but also anticipatory grief. I realized the moment that my little nine-year-old hand touched that book, that writers are kinds of wizards. That with just ink on white paper, we can transport the reader to another place in time, even somewhere that doesn't even exist. In that moment, my little nine-year-old heart decided I would do whatever it took to become a great writer, like CS Lewis, and I'm still working on that. Then CS Lewis changed my life a second time after my husband died suddenly. He was only 33, and our son was four. I read CS Lewis's book, A Grief Observed, which was later made into a movie, and that book so touched me because he was willing to share those mad midnight moments. It allowed me to feel like it's okay, I can get through this. So two times, once when I was 31, and once when I was nine, CS Lewis changed my life, and he was already dead. What better way to leave a lasting legacy and help other people than to write books? What better way to uplift, inform, and inspire others? Joanna: How did you get from the nine year old who really wanted to write—we're going to come back to the grief—but you have had loads of businesses. As I said, you're like a serial entrepreneur. You've done loads. So was it a case like many of us, that it was just not a proper job to go into writing? How did you end up back in writing? Aurora: When I went to university, my father who's an economist, scoffed at me when I said that I wanted to major in English. He's like, there's no money in that, do something sensible. So I studied economics, I have an MBA now. Yet, I always had this passion for writing. So I took a minor in languages and literature, and I never stopped writing. I was writing journals, or as a nine-year-old, I wrote little illustrated stories that never got beyond chapter three. Then eventually, one thing leads to another. I actually got sick, to be honest. I was running a profitable business with my husband. We had launched a yacht sales company, it was a seven-figure business. We sold $3 million of boats in one week when I was pregnant. I'm like, okay, this is a very lucrative business, and yet my soul was sick. I was missing writing. So after my baby was born, I got up at 4 a.m. to write, and then I looked after the baby, and then I did the accounting for the company, and I got sick. I got chronic fatigue syndrome, or Epstein Barr. I realized I couldn't put my soul aside forever, that there would be a price to pay. So I went back into writing screenplays. Then, this is a little min

How do we write authentic humanity into our books, whether that's our own experience or a fictional character's? How can we embrace the challenges of life and the author journey and make the most of the opportunities along the way? Efren Delgado gives his tips in this interview. In the intro, How to plan and release a second edition of your book [SelfPublishingAdvice]; plus, Kickstarter update; Stone carving a green man; De-Extinction of the Nephilim [JFPennBooks; other stores]; 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  Efren Delgado is a former FBI special agent with 25 years of national security, law enforcement, and private protection experience. He's also a consultant, professional speaker, and the author of The Opposite is True: Discover Your Unexpected Enemies, Allies, and Purpose Through the Eyes of Counterintuitive Psychology. 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 Balancing being authentic while maintaining your boundaries How to take our failures and move on to success Creating a mind map to help during the brainstorming process Fact checking and managing citations when writing nonfiction Writing to deal with trauma while avoiding using it as therapy Uncomfortable truths indie authors need to face about the industry Common misconceptions authors get wrong when writing FBI thrillers You can find Efren at EfrenDelgado.com. Transcript of Interview with Efren Delgado Joanna: Efren Delgado is a former FBI special agent with 25 years of national security, law enforcement, and private protection experience. He's also a consultant, professional speaker, and the author of The Opposite is True: Discover Your Unexpected Enemies, Allies, and Purpose Through the Eyes of Counterintuitive Psychology. So welcome to the show, Efren. Efren: Thank you, Joanna. I've been looking forward to this. Joanna: Yes, it's very exciting. First off— Tell us a bit more about you and how you went from FBI agent to author. Efren: I'm going to backtrack a little bit. It all started from a little bit of minor bullying, relatively minor bullying, when I was a child. That planted a basic seed in me just asking, why would people choose to be mean when they could simply be nice? If you think about that question, it's the fundamental question of psychology. Why do people do what they do? More specifically, why do bad people do what they do? As a child, I had no idea and a legitimate interest. So that seed was there. It did also inspire me to want to protect others if I ever could. As I grew up throughout school and university, I developed my interest in psychology and, accidentally, my interest in criminology. I decided to pursue a career in protecting people, and I simply thought the best vehicle for that was the FBI. So I joined the FBI, I implemented my purpose, you could say, in protecting people in the National Security Division of the FBI, and later the Criminal Division, what most people think of when they think of the FBI. Then later in the private sector, protecting people as a bodyguard and a threat assessment consultant. Now, currently as a writer, author, speaker, I'm just trying to express the observations I've made to help encourage the “good guys,” your audience and my reader, that they are actually stronger than the bad guys. They are not chihuahuas barking at the doorbell presenting this large presentation of how scary they are. Good guys actually have the courage to be vulnerable, to be humble, to be kind. That's the main message I want to come across, and that's what brought me to the FBI, and brought me to you today. Joanna: Yes, and I love the book. We're going to get into it in a minute. I'm fascinated. So you were bullied, and you became a protector. Obviously, a lot of people listening are fiction writers, and so often when we think about writing antagonists, sometimes they may have been bullied and turn into bullies. Sometimes people who are abused become abusers, whereas some people who are abused become protectors. So just with all your knowledge of psychology and criminal behavior— How do you think people become the protector instead of the bully in a situation where you came from? When does it go one way, not the other? Efren: So I love this question, not only as a protector, but also as an author. The best antagonists, the best protagonists, have elements of both. It's just not one or the

How can we use AI tools to enhance and improve our creative process? How can we double down on being human by writing what we are passionate about, while still using generative AI to help fulfil our creative vision? Rachelle Ayala gives her thoughts in this episode. Today's show is sponsored by my patrons! Join my community and get access to extra videos on writing craft, author business, AI and behind the scenes info, plus an extra Q&A show a month where I answer Patron questions. It's about the same as a black coffee a month! Join the community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn Rachelle Ayala is the multi-award-winning USA Today bestselling author of playful and passionate romances with a twist. She also has a series of books for authors, including Write with AI, An AI Author's Journal, and AI Fiction Mastery. 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 Understanding generative AI tools as a non-technical person How the creative process can work with AI tools and why it's always changing Using AI tools as a collaborative discovery process, and why it's all about your creative vision and author voice. For more on this, check out my AI-Assisted Artisan Author episode Aspects of copyright Staying focused on writing as new AI technology emerges, and why you need to double down on being human You can find Rachelle at RachelleAyala.net. Transcript of Interview with Rachelle Ayala Joanna: Rachelle Ayala is the multi-award-winning USA Today bestselling author of playful and passionate romances with a twist. She also has a series of books for authors, including Write with AI, An AI Author's Journal, and AI Fiction Mastery. So welcome to the show, Rachelle. Rachelle: Thank you, Joanna. Thank you for having me. Joanna: I'm super excited to talk to you. As I was telling you, I have the ebook and the print edition of AI Fiction Mastery because I think you put things so well in your writing. Before we get into it— Tell us a bit more about you and your background in technology and writing. Rachelle: Okay, sure. I was a math major, and I actually have a PhD in applied math. So you would think that's kind of the farthest thing from writing. I got into parallel computing back in the 80s. Then in the early 90s, neural networks, where we were basically trying to recognize handwritten characters between zero to nine. So that was quite interesting and fascinating. So I basically worked in software development and network management until 2011. Then I got into writing. So romance writing was my gig, and I liked dealing with feelings and happy endings. Joanna: Well, I love that, going from maths and neural networks into romance. You do explain a lot of the stuff behind AI in your books, which I think is really good. You're used to writing for normal people, so I don't find your writing technical at all. Do you think people who are not very technical are struggling with this AI world at the moment? Rachelle: I don't even think you need to be technical to understand AI because—well, there's different types of AI, but we're talking about large language models for writing. So there's other AI systems like expert systems, machine learning, and people have been using that. They don't even know it, but they've been using it under the hood. The AI we're talking about, large language models, ChatGPT was one of the first ones that most people became aware of. So GPT is a Generative Pretrained Transformer. You could think of it as a word slot machine, where you could think of all these slots. So when you write a prompt, then the AI will look at the words that are in there, and then try to predict the best word that comes after. Let's say, we say Monday, Wednesday, and most people will say Friday because that's the next word that you think of. Or if you say Monday, Tuesday, most people will say Wednesday. So what the AI does is it was trained on reading, I think somebody said between half a trillion or trillion pieces of text. When an AI is trained, it's not reading a book like we do, where we read it from beginning to end. So think of if you cut a piece of newspaper into a strip or a square, and then it's got all these words that are in there, and it's looking for words, associations, and patterns. So it'll say, oh, this word goes with that word, and those words go together. So it could take a word like, say, “bark.” If it sees dog in the other slots, it's going to most likely come out with “woof,” but if it sees trees in the other slot, then it might say, “the bark is wrinkly or hard,” and it's thinking of a tree bark. So that's how it is able to create words, and that's why you think it's intelligent, because it understands the context. It does so with these huge, huge context windows. So I don't want to get too technical, but a context window is how many words can it keep

What are some of the common fears that writers face? How can we work through them in order to create more freely? Caroline Donahue gives her tips in this interview. In the intro, How to avoid indie author scams [ALLi; Writer Beware]; Financial strategies and mindset [Self Publishing Advice]; Apple Intelligence at WWDC [The Verge; Marketing against the Grain]; “Not a chef, but an emotion creator.” Massimo Bottura on the Possible Podcast. Plus, Spear of Destiny is on its last day; Thoughts on photography permissions for commercial use — and permission in general; Voodoo Vintners; Winchester pictures; Limeburn Hill vineyard pictures. 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  Caroline Donahue is an author, podcaster, and book coach. Her latest book is Writing Through Fear: A Story Arcana Guide. 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 most common fears writers face How the fear of not being considered a “real writer” holds you back Overcoming the fear of judgement and being cancelled Fearing things before you are anywhere near them in the process Breaking down projects into smaller, more manageable tasks Embracing the unpredictable nature of creativity The challenges and reasons for rebranding a book Substack as a podcasting platform and community tool You can find Caroline at CarolineDonahue.com, her Substack at book-alchemy.com, and her podcast at SecretLibraryPodcast.com. Transcript of Interview with Caroline Donahue Joanna: Caroline Donahue is an author, podcaster, and book coach. Her latest book is Writing Through Fear: A Story Arcana Guide. So welcome back to the show, Caroline. Caroline: Thank you so much for having me. This is such a treat. Joanna: You were on the show back in 2019 when we talked about your background and writing with the tarot. So we're just going to jump straight into the topic today. Why did you want to write about fear? What sparked the book, and why structure it around Tarot? Caroline: Well, I think that the topic of fear evolved because there were a couple of projects I considered doing before I landed on this one. There was a desire to take a course I created during the pandemic, called Dream to Draft, and I thought, oh, I'll make a book version of that course. I tried to do that for most of a year, actually, and realized that I couldn't really recreate the experience of taking that course. So I was trying to distill down elements of what made the difference for people of being able to finish a book or not finish a book. I noticed that they were able to overcome fears that they had while being in the course. The main difference between people who were finishing books and delighted with their progress, and those who were getting kind of stuck in the swamps of sadness—if you'll forgive the 1980s film reference of The NeverEnding Story—were those who just got completely mired in fear about their writing. So I thought, okay, If I can help people to engage with their fear differently, then they'll be able to write — and I can do that from a distance. So that was what I ultimately got excited about. As for why I paired it with the tarot, for one thing, it made it a much easier book to write because I had a built-in structure. I had wanted to return to the tarot ever since writing the previous book, which focused on the first 22 cards, the Major Arcana. I thought, oh, this is a great way to address the Minors because those are everyday life situations that people face. So I matched one fear to each card. Also, I could imagine people pulling a card. I've already had one person who's read the book respond that when they're about to start a difficult scene or difficult project, they'll pull a card and then read the corresponding fear entry in the book. This helps them get into the writing. So that was delightful to hear. Joanna: That is one of the very useful things about tarot or any of these kinds of things that spark ideas by looking at images or thinking about symbolism. So I think that's actually quite a good way into these fears. It feels like if you try and tackle it head on, it's often much harder. Did the people in your course recognize their fears? Caroline: I think in some cases, yes. In some cases, it looked like other things. When I studied psychology ages ago, you have this kind of fight or flight, or we now have freeze that we know about, and fawn. There are different ways that people engage with things that scare them. Sometimes they look like the cartoon Scream face, if you think of the horror movi

What are the pros and cons of selling direct and building an ecommerce business for your books? How can you use click testing on Meta to help refine your creative and book marketing ideas? Steve Pieper explains in this interview. In the intro, The Hotsheet with Jane Friedman; 20 ways you should be using AI in publishing [PerfectBound]; Artificial Intelligence? No, Collective Intelligence [Ezra Klein with Holly Herndon]; AI may take our jobs, but not our creativity [Claire Silver on The TED AI Show]. Plus, De-Extinction of the Nephilim; my webinar on Discovery Writing as part of the Kickstarter – you can buy it in the bundle or just buy the ebook and get the webinar as an Add-On. Only available until 18 June at JFPenn.com/destiny; Writing modern thrillers based on ancient relics and historical places; Ancient Heroes Podcast; Today's show is sponsored by my patrons! Join my community and get access to extra videos on writing craft, author business, AI and behind the scenes info, plus an extra Q&A show a month where I answer Patron questions. It's about the same as a black coffee a month! Join the community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn Steve Pieper is a USA Today bestselling thriller author under the name Lars Emmerich. He's also an entrepreneur and business consultant, specializing in digital marketing and selling direct with his course, AMMO, Author Marketing Mastery through Optimization. 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 more indie authors are embracing selling direct How the emergence of courses has helped mature the indie author market Differences in the process of selling a print book on Amazon vs. Shopify Cash flow management when selling direct When does it make sense for an author to start selling direct? Using click testing to test a book idea with your target audience Steve's Click Testing and Direct Sales courses — If you're interested, please consider using my affiliate link and supporting the show: www.TheCreativePenn.com/clicktesting You can find Steve at AMMOauthor.com and his books at Lars.buzz. Transcript of Interview with Steve Pieper Joanna: Steve Pieper is a USA Today bestselling thriller author under the name Lars Emmerich. He's also an entrepreneur and business consultant, specializing in digital marketing and selling direct with his course, AMMO, Author Marketing Mastery through Optimization. So welcome back to the show, Steve. Steve: Thank you very much. It's such a pleasure to be here, Jo. Joanna: So you were last on the show in January 2023 when we went into your background. So we're just going to jump into the topic today. It seems like selling direct has gone mainstream in the author community since you were last here. What do you think has happened to make authors embrace selling direct in a much bigger way over the last 18 months? Steve: It's a great question. I think a few things have combined to make it more mainstream, as you say. I think the first thing is that Amazon has effectively capped eBook sales prices at $9.99, and nobody's capped the advertising expenses at any particular number. So it becomes more and more important, as ad costs to generate interest in your books continue to increase along with everything else—aside from eBook prices—it's more and more important to be able to track your metrics. You want to be able to reach people who are purchasers, as opposed to people who are just nearly kind of curious. Those things are made possible when you sell direct because your store knows exactly who purchases from you. You get their email address, you get their name, your store processes their credit card. That information can be fed back to Meta, so Facebook and Instagram, to make your ads operate more efficiently and to bring you new purchasers more profitably. So I think that's the first part of it. I think the second part is that we've heard plenty of stories of some fairly high-profile authors having trouble with their Amazon accounts, often through no fault of their own. Whenever you run a big enterprise, such as Amazon, you have to pay attention to the quality of the listings and the quality of the accounts. You also have to deal with people who are trying to abuse the accounts to make a quick buck. The only way to do that at scale is algorithmically, which means the machines are making decisions about whose account to close and leave open. Often Amazon doesn't even ask the authors what was happening, you just find that your account has been closed. So I think those things have combined to make direct sales a more viable option for people. The third reason is that we've noticed, and this has been true since I first started selling directly in 2017 — Whenever you advertise for your direct sales system, there's this beautiful thing called a cross-channel effect. This is where your book advertisements that point t

What are the tropes of action adventure thrillers? How can you please readers and sell more books? J.F. Penn shares her own tips and also features excerpts from interviews with other thriller writers. J.F. Penn is the award-winning, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of the ARKANE action-adventure thrillers, the Mapwalker fantasy adventures, and the Brooke & Daniel crime thrillers, as well as horror, travel memoir, and short 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 Put your characters in difficult and dangerous situations Writing fight scenes Include a ticking clock and high stakes What is a MacGuffin and how is it used? Research into places and experiences Trust your writing instinct and have fun! Help your readers escape to exciting places Using quotes, and source citation Write a series If you love action adventure thrillers, check out the ARKANE series by J.F. Penn. Spear of Destiny, book 13, is out now on Kickstarter with special edition signed exclusive cover hardbacks, plus paperback, large print, ebook, audiobook, and bundle deals in all formats. You can find J.F. Penn at www.jfpenn.com, buy books direct at www.JFPennBooks.com, and read the blog or listen to the Books and Travel Podcast at BooksAndTravel.page. 7 Tips for Writing Action Adventure Thrillers with J.F. Penn I’m an action adventure thriller fan from way back, but what are the hallmarks of the action adventure genre? Clive Cussler said, “Adventure is just putting characters in settings and locales that are unfamiliar to the reader and then as the writer, having fun with what happens.” I’ve always loved adventure stories. As a child I read The Hardy Boys, and King Solomon’s Mines, and I remember the Choose Your Own Adventure books where you would flick to a new page as you made your choice of action. I loved Clive Cussler’s Dirk Pitt series and read a lot of marine biology books, as I thought I might be able to join NUMA or something like it. I was able to meet Clive before he died at Thrillerfest in New York in 2015 and have a selfie which really made my trip. J.F. Penn and Clive Cussler (Thrillerfest, 2015) I discovered Wilbur Smith’s African and ancient Egyptian adventures, then Michael Crichton, Matthew Reilly, and James Rollins, who also combined the religious aspects I enjoyed into his books. I love the Pendergast series from Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, with its crossover into occult and supernatural. Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code came out in 2003, and I jumped into that as soon as it launched. I had previously enjoyed Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, but wanted more action and a modern take on the religious themes. In terms of TV and movies, I loved The A Team, James Bond, Indiana Jones and all the action movies Angelina Jolie did including Lara Croft, and of course, Nicholas Cage in his action movie era — Con Air, The Rock, and Face Off. I loved Arnie in End of Days, Keanu in Constantine, both a blend of action and religious thriller. I have a Masters degree in Theology from the University of Oxford, and although I am not a Christian, I am fascinated by religious history, relics, conspiracy, and places in Europe and the Middle East in particular that have so much rich religious culture. I’m also glad to be able to use my degree in my books since it was pretty useless when I used to implement accounts payable systems as an IT consultant! Adventure is generally a male dominated field, and that’s part of why I wanted to write an action adventure series with a strong female protagonist. Morgan Sierra is my alter-ego, but she has a lot more practical fighting skills. Think Angelina in Mr & Mrs Smith and Salt, or Charlize Theron in The Old Guard. Morgan is most often joined by Jake Timber, her partner at ARKANE, a secret British agency investigating supernatural mysteries around the world. Back in May 2011 with Pentecost — since then I have re-edited, re-covered, re-titled, and changed my author name I started writing the series in 2009 and Pentecost by Joanna Penn came out in 2011, which I later rewrote and rebranded to Stone of Fire in 2015. I did another rewrite in 2022. I've written 13 ARKANE books and a short story across 13 years, during which I’ve written many other books of course, but my ARKANE adventures have to be inspired by real life, and they take a while to research and percolate before writing. They cannot be rushed!  If you’d like to read more action adventure by indie authors, check out RD Brady, David Wood, Alan Baxter, J. Robert Kennedy, PJ Skinner, Ernest Dempsey, Nick Thacker, Avanti Centrae, and Kevin Tumlinson — and yes, several of the list are women. You can recognise us by our initials! Right, let’s get into some tips for writing action adventure thrillers. Tip 1: Put your characters in difficult and dangerous situations Lee Child, author of the

How can you adopt the seasons of nature in your writing? How can you allow periods of rest as well as abundance? Jacqueline Suskin explores these ideas and more in this interview. In the intro, thoughts on children's book publishing [Always Take Notes Podcast]; how to market a memoir as an indie author [ALLi]; A desperate quest. A holy relic. A race against time. Spear of Destiny is live on Kickstarter!; What is Kickstarter and why am I launching there?, I'm on the Wordslinger Podcast talking about marketing later books in a series. Book cover designer Stuart Bache on AI for book covers [Brave New Bookshelf]; OpenAI signs licensing deals with The Atlantic, Vox Media, and NewsCorp [OpenAI] 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 to get started. This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn  Jacqueline Suskin is a poet, author, speaker, and creative consultant. Her latest book is A Year In Practice: Seasonal Rituals And Prompts To Awaken Cycles Of Creative Expression. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.  Show Notes Writing a poem quickly, live and in person, or order Choosing the poems that go into a collection and knowing when it's finished The physical beauty of layout on the page Embracing the seasons of life and creativity Trust emergence Choosing the “easeful” path for your next project Celebrating our creative accomplishments while continuing our journey Practices to help us slow down ‘The veil is thin' and how it manifests in our work You can find Jacqueline at JacquelineSuskin.com. Transcript of Interview with Jacqueline Suskin Joanna: Jacqueline Suskin is a poet, author, speaker, and creative consultant. Her latest book is A Year In Practice: Seasonal Rituals And Prompts To Awaken Cycles Of Creative Expression. So welcome to the show, Jacqueline. Jacqueline: Thanks so much for having me. Joanna: I'm excited to talk to you today. First up, just— Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing poetry and books. Jacqueline: I've been writing ever since I was a little kid. I feel like I'm one of those people who just sort of knew at a young age that words were the world I wanted to live in. I didn't really know what that meant for a long time. I didn't know I was writing poems. Then the older I got, the more I was familiarized with that world, and I thought, oh, I've just always been a poet. So I ended up going to university to study poetry, and getting a degree in poetry, and then just continued to follow that. It's really led me to some pretty incredible places, including this project that I've done for a long time called Poem Store, where for about 12 years, my only job was to take my typewriter around to public places and write poems for people on the spot. So I really got this sort of direct connection with the way that everyday people connect with poetry. That has definitely illuminated my path as a writer. Joanna: That is so crazy. I mean, what possessed you to do that? How did you make that a living? I mean, I have seen some people do that. As an introvert who just doesn't really want to speak to people in general, I just find that utterly terrifying. Tell us a bit more about Poem Store. Jacqueline: I mean, honestly, it happened by chance. I just met someone in Oakland who was doing that, and he found out I was a poet, and he invited me to come try it with him. I had just purchased a typewriter, which was so strange, everything kind of aligned magically like that. That was in 2009. I did that as an experiment just to see if I could, and then I just realized almost immediately how special it was. It was the perfect combination of my two skills. One is writing and the other is to connect deeply with people. So I just let myself follow it and see how far I could take it. I had no idea it would become my full-time job. That was very clear, after about a year of doing it at farmer's markets and just kind of continuing the experiment, I was like, I think this is more than an experiment, I think this is something I should probably really give myself over to. Once I did that, it definitely took root and grew into a huge project. I've written over 40,000 poems with Poem Store. I don't really do it in public anymore because I just kind of got burnt out. It was a very young person's world to do that in. I had a lot of energy then, and now I'm a little older, and I feel a little more protective of my energy. In the midst of all of that, that's how I got books published, that's how I met people. It was a really connective way to be part of the community and bring poetry to all types of different people. Joanna: Wow, 40,000 poe

How can you plan for success as an indie author even early in your writing career? How can you create multiple streams of income and multiple marketing channels, while still writing your books? Adam Beswick goes into his strategies. In the intro, Kickstarter announces new functionality to help creatives;Watch out for a scam email about ALLi [Writer Beware]; Gary Vaynerchuk on the shifting marketing arena [Marketing Against the Grain Podcast]; Day Trading Attention by Gary Vaynerchuk; Camera free video options [Brave New Bookshelf] Plus, Microsoft Build event with new AI-enabled PCs and Copilot agents [Microsoft]; My thoughts on seeing Hamilton; and Spear of Destiny coming this week! 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 Scrivener, ProWritingAid will help you improve your book before you send it to an editor, agent or publisher. Check it out for free or get 25% 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 the best-selling author of the Levanthria series which has taken readers on epic journeys from corner to corner of the world. While mastering the craft of fantastical storytelling, Adam simultaneously embraces the rewarding challenges of family life as well as being an authorpreneur. 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 Setting the foundation for your author business Having the confidence to financially invest in yourself Wrestling with the “importance” of choosing a writing career Creating multiple streams of income Overcoming the initial fear of creating video marketing content Staying consistent with your TikTok marketing and growing your viewership How to diversify away from reliance on any single platform You can find Adam at APBeswickPublications.com. Transcript of Interview with Adam Beswick Joanna: Welcome to the show, Adam. Adam: Hi there. Thanks for having me. Joanna: I'm excited to talk to you. Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and publishing. Adam: Well, I started writing around 2017. I was a mental health nurse, working silly hours in really stressful environments. I absolutely loved my job, but I needed a bit of an outlet at the end of my day. I started writing bedtime stories for my children. Then it was my eldest daughter who challenged me to write a proper story, as she said at the time. I was joking with her that by the time I've written it, you'll probably be old enough to read it. Lo and behold, two and a half or three years later, I had a story that was written. I'd published my first book, which was Arnold Ethon and The Lions of Tsavo, which is now known as the Spirit Beast Series, as I've rebranded that story last year. So that's really how I got into writing. I wrote a couple of books in that series, they were kind of YA urban fantasy. It was a bit confusing what genre it was in. Then I spent the next two years figuring out how to actually publish them. I was listening to all your podcasts, listening to Jenna Moreci, Bethany Atazadeh, and quite a few different indie authors to get hints and tips on how to publish those books. It wasn't really until 2022, when I pivoted and released a new book in a new series, which was A Forest of Vanity and Valour, which was a dark fantasy retelling inspired by Robin Hood, that my career started taking off. Joanna: Oh, so interesting. So first of all, I love that you come from healthcare. I mean, as a mental health nurse, I feel like you bring an attitude of caring from that job. I've seen you speak, and I think that comes through in the way you are in the community, which I really appreciate. I wanted to ask you about how you went full time as an indie author in 2023, and we're recording this in 2024. So this is a big decision. So you left that job, and— Can you just tell us how you made the decision to leave the job and how you've dealt with that shift? I know it's a big deal. Adam: So the hardest part was convincing my wife that it was a stable career choice to be making. So, yes, throughout 2022, my books' trajectory started increasing. It was late 2022 when I sat down with Mrs. Beswick and kind of laid out the financials and told her my intention that I really wanted to go full time. I did really enjoy my job. I was in a band 7 post in the NHS in a complex care commissioning team, which I did really enjoy. I had a good sense of purpose, but the hours compared to the time it was allowing me to write and keep on track of everything for my indie author side that was really gathering momentum made it quite difficult to juggle the two. Luckily, I managed to convince Mrs. Besw

How can you outline a story based on a ‘thought dump' and interweave genre tropes you love to create a successful book? How can you use video marketing to reach more readers, even if you are an introvert? Jenna Moreci gives her tips. In the intro, my new ProWritingAid tutorial; Embracing change and starting over [Wish I'd Known Then Podcast]; OpenAI released ChatGPT 4o; Using 4o as a tutor [Khan Academy]; Claude 3 now in Europe; Google IO announcements including Search impact [The Verge; My episode on impact of generative search; Hard Fork Podcast; Platformer]; Spear of Destiny Kickstarter, and my deadlift PB. Today's podcast sponsor is Findaway Voices, which gives you access to the world's largest network of audiobook sellers and everything you need to create and sell professional audiobooks. Take back your freedom. Choose your price, choose how you sell, choose how you distribute audio. Check it out at FindawayVoices.com. This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn  Jenna Moreci is the bestselling author of dark fantasy romance, The Savior's Series, and books for authors including Shut Up and Write the Book: A Step-by-Step Guide to Crafting Your Novel From Plan to Print. She's also a YouTuber at Writing with Jenna Moreci, with over 300,000 subscribers. 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 Structuring and outlining — utilizing the “thought dump” The planning process for including tropes in your book How long should an outline be? Conquering fears and distractions to get words on the page Researching publishing options as a first time author Getting comfortable in front of the camera through trial and error How to build a channel around a fiction author business Different goals of short form and longer form video marketing You can find Jenna at JennaMoreci.com or on her YouTube channel Writing with Jenna. Transcript of Interview with Jenna Moreci Joanna: Jenna Moreci is the bestselling author of dark fantasy romance, The Savior's Series, and books for authors including Shut Up and Write the Book: A Step-by-Step Guide to Crafting Your Novel From Plan to Print. She's also a YouTuber at Writing with Jenna Moreci, with over 300,000 subscribers. So, welcome to the show, Jenna Jenna: Thank you so much for having me. It is such an honor to be here. Joanna: I'm excited to talk to you. First up— Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and publishing. Jenna: Well, how I got into writing, it's literally been my lifelong dream ever since I was a child. I've wanted to be a writer since I was six years old. So it, quite literally, is a childhood dream fulfilled. With my first job after college, I was a stockbroker. Which is just like writing, right? It is exactly the same thing, you know, dealing with finances. So similar to writing. Basically, I was working full time in finance, and I really, really, really just did not enjoy it. I had this moment where I thought, you know what, this is going to be my life. I'm going to be trading stocks forever, and I can't do it. So I thought I would, at the very least, give writing a shot since that was my dream, and I had been writing stories my whole life on the side. So I figured I would go ahead and try to write a book and see how it did. My goal was for it to be a lucrative side gig, something that made my life feel fulfilling while I paid the bills working in finance. Then along the way, things happened. My partner suffered a major accident, so I had to quit my job so I could sign on to be his caregiver and help him recover from the accident. During that time, I started my YouTube channel. I started it on a whim because a lot of people told me that I would be good at YouTube. It wasn't something I was really interested in because, like a lot of authors, I'm an introvert. I did not want my face on the internet, but I gave it a shot. My goal was 100 subscribers, and nearly 300,000 subscribers later, at some point, it blew up. Due to the YouTube channel blowing up, my first novel sold well enough that I was able to make writing a full-time job. Now at this point in my life, I'm on my fifth and sixth novel, and I write and do YouTube full time. I never thought that this would be where my life was headed, but here we are. Joanna: I love that. Obviously, we have some similarities. My job before this was in accounts payable, and I used to implement systems. So it was a similar feeling of I just cannot do this for the rest of my life. So lots to come back on there. I've been through your book, so we'll start with the writing process, and then we'll get back into YouTube and business. So you talk about structure and outlining in your book, and I'm a discovery writer, so I'm always absolutely fascinated by outlining. Can you talk about how you structure and outl

How can you blend ‘work for hire', ghostwriting, and being an indie author into a successful hybrid career writing books for children? Aubre Andrus gives her tips. In the intro, Countdown Pages on FindawayVoices by Spotify; the impact of AI narrated audiobooks on Audible [Bloomberg]; Ideas for short fiction anthologies and Kevin J. Anderson's Kickstarter; Penguin Random House launches internal ChatGPT tool for employees [Publishers Lunch]; 2024 is the year AI at work gets real [Microsoft]. Plus, reasons for the new theme music, licensed from AudioJungle for 10m downloads (the podcast is up to 9.7 million with the old tune); and planning for my Kickstarter launch for Spear of Destiny. 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 Aubre Andrus is an award-winning children's author with more than 50 books, as well as being a ghostwriter and former American Girl magazine editor. Her books, The Look Up Series, feature women in STEM careers. 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 background of the American Girl brand Pros and cons of work for hire and ghostwriting Work for hire best practices to make it worth the money Differences in work for hire contracts and payment models How to seek out work for hire projects Using lessons learned from past projects in your own series Creative control over content and marketing a self-published author Marketing self-published children's books You can find Aubre at AubreAndrus.com. Transcript of Interview with Aubre Andrus Joanna: Aubre Andrus is an award-winning children's author with more than 50 books, as well as being a ghostwriter and former American Girl Magazine editor. Her books, The Look Up Series, center around women in STEM careers. So welcome to the show. Aubre. Aubre: Thank you so much for having me. Joanna: I'm excited to talk about this today. So first up— Tell us a bit more about you, how you got into writing children's books originally, and how you started out in work for hire. Aubre: So I started at a kids' magazine right out of college. If anyone is familiar, the company was American Girl. So they publish magazines, books, and also have an extensive doll collection that's very popular in the US. So while I was working at the magazine, I noticed the book department next door and all the wonderful books they were creating that I had also read as a child. I learned that they were developing all of their concepts in house, and then just hiring authors to execute those ideas. I also learned that a lot of them were former magazine editors. So it was interesting to me that one day, perhaps, I could leave the magazine and then pitch myself to become one of these authors. So that is what I did. It was interesting because American Girl was based in Middleton, Wisconsin, in the US. That's very much in the Midwest, not near New York City publishing. So we're very much an island separate from any other type of children's publishing, like the industry. So even though I got my foot in the door in publishing books, I was still kind of stuck. Like, uh oh, is there any way I can expand this anymore? Do other publishers in New York do this also? I had no idea. I just started networking at children's book conferences, and frankly, just blindly reaching out to people and saying, “Hey, do you offer any work for hire projects? I've done a couple. I'm interested in doing more.” So I was able to slowly build up that work for hire career. Joanna: I have a few questions about this. So first of all, I have been in of the American Girls stores in New York. So I am aware of this, but I know some listeners won't be. So can you maybe just talk a bit about that? I was just fascinated. It did seem to be more modern as in it wasn't just really old school stuff, there were more modern female role models, I guess. I mean, that's what the worry is with these older IP brands, is that they have an old, outdated version of what women are. Talk about how these IP brands work, and if people don't even know what American Girl is. Aubre: So it started as kind of like an heirloom doll company from a former teacher and textbook author. So she was really like an educational entrepreneur. So she was sort of not interested in Barbie for her nieces, and she was trying to create something better, in her mind's eye. So she developed this line of three dolls that were historical characters that then also had a series of six books that accompanied them. It basically was teaching girls what it was like to be a girl back in time. You know, so what was it like to grow up d

How can you use automation and tools to help you streamline your creative and business processes so you can get back to the writing? Chelle Honiker gives some mindset and practical tips. In the intro, IBPA guide to publishing models; We need to talk about independence [Self Publishing Advice article; my podcast episode with Orna Ross]; The Financial Times signs a partnership deal with OpenAI [FT]; The Big Leap — Gay Hendricks; AI Tools on Brave New Bookshelf; Spear of Destiny; Stone Hunters by Rod 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 to get started. This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn Chelle Honiker is the co-founder and publisher of Indie Author Magazine, Indie Author Training, Indie Author Tools, and Direct2Readers.com. She's also an author, speaker, podcaster, and program manager at the Author Nation Conference. 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 a community with other indie authors Blocks that might stop authors from using technology effectively How to figure out which tools work best for your creative process and author business Moving into new and reinvented processes as technology changes Using Zapier to automate your author business When to use a tool vs. when to outsource a task What to expect in the upcoming Author Nation Conference You can find Chelle at ChelleHoniker.com, IndieAuthorMagazine.com, IndieAuthorTraining.com, and AuthorNation.live. Transcript of Interview with Chelle Honiker Joanna: Chelle Honiker is the co-founder and publisher of Indie Author Magazine, Indie Author Training, Indie Author Tools, and Direct2Readers.com. She's also an author, speaker, podcaster, and program manager at the Author Nation Conference. So welcome to the show, Chelle. Chelle: Thanks, Joanna. It's good to be here. Joanna: So first up— Tell us a bit more about your background and how you decided to build businesses to help indie authors. Chelle: Sure. Actually, you're a little bit at fault for this, so I'll explain that. My background is that I started in the travel industry. I was a technology and training professional for many, many years. I had my own consultancy for a very long time. In 2016/2017, I was in Austin, Texas, and I went to a bunch of meetings for NaNoWriMo. I met just the most vibrant authors there, and we got connected. Then I went to the Smarter Artist Summit, and I met those guys. At that conference, I met Craig Martelle, who then went on to start 20Booksto50k conferences. I went to the 20Booksto50k conference in Edinburgh in 2019. At that conference, I met my business partner, Alice Briggs, who coincidentally also lives in Texas, but nine hours away because it's a ginormous state. We had to go all the way to Scotland to meet. When we came back as accountability partners, we had a group of friends that we'd met at that conference. Then I went to the SPF Conference where you spoke. I actually went to London to hear you speak, so that's where you thread in here. Then we all know what happened in 2020, the whole world shut down in the middle of that conference. So I was in Ireland for four months, sort of “stranded.” I say “stranded” in air quotes because I wasn't really stranded, but I had decided to stay over there because my airline went bankrupt, and it was just going to be really difficult to get back. My townhouse was up for a lease again, and it was just a whole mess. So I stayed in Ireland, and I sort of put up a bat signal for friends to write with. We had 24 of us that started to Zoom together twice a day. We were sharing tips and tricks, and things that we were doing, and courses we were taking, and podcasts we were listening to, and sharing our lives on top of that. So we would hear about what was going on in Germany, and Albania, and Malta, and just all over the world. All of us were from everywhere around the world. From that, we started a website called Indie Author Tools, which was really just sort of a crowdsource place for us to stick everything. Then when I came back to the States, Alice and I separately had been thinking about starting a magazine or something that would provide more context for all of the stuff that we were learning, and a way for us to dive in a little bit deeper. So with those original 24 people, we started the magazine three years ago. We're three, we turned three! Joanna: That SPF Conference, as you say, that almost didn't happen. James, kind of as a joke, wore a hazmat suit on stage. Then lockdown happened very soon after. So, I mean, that's kind of crazy. As you were talking now, I was wondering— Do you identify as an introvert or are you an extrovert? Chell

How can you connect to readers in a way that is sustainable for you and effective at selling books? How can you choose the best platform when there are so many options? Dan Blank gives his recommendations. In the intro, TikTok ban signed into law in the USA [The Verge]; No One Buys Books [Elle Griffin]; Please stop bashing book publishing [Publishing Confidential]; The Hotsheet; Books sell, but book doesn't [Seth Godin]. Plus, my new podcast logo; Spear of Destiny finishing energy, artist's date at Salisbury Cathedral. Today's show is sponsored by my patrons! Join my community and get access to extra videos on writing craft, author business, AI and behind the scenes info, plus an extra Q&A show a month where I answer Patron questions. It's about the same as a black coffee a month! Join the community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn Dan Blank helps authors develop a human-centered approach to marketing through his book, Be the Gateway: A Practical Guide to Sharing Your Creative Work and Engaging an Audience, as well as his podcast, The Creative Shift, and his coaching and consultancy services at WeGrowMedia.com. 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 Learning how to feel good about sharing and marketing Keeping the human connection while scaling our reach Deciding what platform is best for your style of marketing Differences between the “daily work” and launch marketing Marketing later books in a series Advantages of Substack to get your newsletter discovered Balancing social engagement with the work of writing books You can find Dan at WeGrowMedia.com and DanBlank.Substack.com. Transcript of Interview with Dan Blank Joanna: Dan Blank helps authors develop a human-centered approach to marketing through his book, Be the Gateway: A Practical Guide to Sharing Your Creative Work and Engaging an Audience, as well as his podcast, The Creative Shift, and his coaching and consultancy services at WeGrowMedia.com. Welcome back to the show, Dan. Dan: Thank you for having me back. It's always such a pleasure. Joanna: Now you were last on the show in 2017. It's kind of a long, long time ago now. So some people might not have heard about you. Tell us a bit more about you and your background in publishing, and also what your business looks like now. Dan: Yes, thank you. So I work with writers every day. This is the full-time work I've done since around 2010. Everything I focus on is really around the idea of author platform, author branding, author marketing, book launches. For me, I've really come to embrace this idea of what I call human-centered marketing. This is, to me, helping writers get past some of the biggest things that stop them, which is self-censorship. This is in terms of not knowing how to share, not knowing how to feel good about marketing, not really understanding all these core aspects of what it means to embrace the idea of being a writer, of feeling good about sharing, of knowing how to use marketing and launch tactics in a way that are very effective, but also make you feel good about the idea of sharing your work. This is opposed to how a lot of writers feel about it, which is they kind of put it off and they say, “Well, I'm going to put my marketing hat on on this specific date. Then I'm taking my marketing hat off as quickly as I can.” So I've done this since 2010 full-time. I work with writers every single day. Of course, I've had a blog and newsletter since before that time. I'm going on 19 years of a weekly email newsletter. I'm sure we'll talk about how I'm on Substack now, and I really appreciate that venue. Like you, I've been out there for just years and years on social media and author events, just connecting with writers and readers and embracing all of the cool, weird ways that we get to share what we do. Joanna: Yes, well, a few things there. Actually, I think you and I met on Twitter, as it was back then. Dan: Isn't that funny? Joanna: It's funny because, like many people, I kind of wound down my usage last year. I've actually now got back on, and I'm pretending it's a completely different platform. So I am now on X, @thecreativepenn, which was my old handle on the old system of Twitter. I was thinking about this, and I was actually on X, and I saw this thread by an author. It said, “I hate marketing. I never want to do it. It's scammy, and sucky, and only for people with no morals and no ethics. It's awful. I don't want to push my book at anyone.” I was reading this going, okay then, that's really interesting. You used the words “feel good about sharing.” So how can authors reframe this, any kind of negativity they feel about this? How can we get to the point of feeling good about marketing? Dan: I'm 51 years old, and what I love about being the age that I am is that I very much grew up and remember the

How can you build a creative, sustainable career as a ‘mid-list' indie author? How can you design a business that works for you and your books over the long term? T. Thorn Coyle explains more in this episode. In the intro, BookVault bespoke printing options; Harper Collins partners with Eleven Labs for AI-narrated non-English audiobooks [Publishing Perspectives]; AI Publishing Formula Podcast; Brave New Bookshelf Podcast; “I’m not worried about AI, because I got my mojo working.” Stephen King; 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 Scrivener, ProWritingAid will help you improve your book before you send it to an editor, agent or publisher. Check it out for free or get 25% off the premium edition at www.ProWritingAid.com/joanna This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn T. Thorn Coyle is the author of paranormal mystery, urban fantasy, alt history, epic fantasy, as well as nonfiction around magical practice. Their latest book is The Midlist Indie Author Mindset. 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 does it mean to be a mid-list author? How being weird can help you connect as more human Finding your sense of weird and letting it shine in your work Making marketing about connection and finding what works for you Marketing for Kickstarter in a short-term promotional window Tips for managing multiple Kickstarters per year Keeping readers engaged with your newsletter and social media Creating a tagline that portrays the message of your author business You can find Thorn at ThornCoyle.com, and the Kickstarter for The Midlist Indie Author Mindset here. Transcript of Interview with Thorn Coyle Joanna: T. Thorn Coyle is the author of paranormal mystery, urban fantasy, alt history, epic fantasy, as well as nonfiction around magical practice. Their latest book is The Midlist Indie Author Mindset. So welcome back to the show, Thorn. Thorn: Thanks so much. It's great to be back. Joanna: Yes, I know. I had a look, and it's been six years since you were last on the show. Thorn: That's a long time, especially in the indie publishing world. Joanna: Yes. I mean, we're old school, which probably means we met like a decade ago! Thorn: Yes, probably. Joanna: Which is so funny. So let's assume people haven't listened to our episode from six years ago, and also, things have moved on. Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and publishing. Thorn: Well, I was one of those people, you know, I've written since I was a tiny child, probably age five or six. I wrote poetry, I did journalism as a teenager, wrote for tattoo magazines in the 80s and 90s, and really wanted to write fiction. I would practice writing fiction, and then I finally just gave up. I was the classic, I would labor over a short story for a year, and I would stall out three quarters into a novel. I loved writing nonfiction also. That was easier for me, less of a challenge. So I got my first nonfiction major traditional publishing contract 20 years ago. I sold a book to Penguin, and I gave up fiction and focused on nonfiction, and traveling the world, and teaching for two decades. Then fiction came back. Some characters showed up in my head one day, and I started writing fiction, and I started studying craft. Then I started seriously indie publishing, I decided I didn't want to go trad. My three first nonfiction books were all traditional published. I didn't want to go traditional for fiction because I saw the struggles my friends were having with traditional publishing and my own struggles with traditional publishing. I started seriously indie publishing in 2017, and here we are today. I've got a big catalog now, and I just keep going. Joanna: So what is a big catalog to you? Thorn: I have probably, including short story collections, probably 30 books, which for me is a big catalog. I know for other people, that's a tiny catalog. It might even be more than 30 books now. I fail to keep track. Joanna: I mean, it's also funny because you sounded slightly apologetic about 30 books, and I do this too. It's like, this is ridiculous because there are authors who write two books in their whole life! Thorn: I know people like that. I certainly know a lot of traditional authors who only wrote a couple books. That's great, it's just a hard way to make a living. Joanna: Yes, exactly. So let's get into the book, so The Midlist Indie Author Mindset. I feel like this word “midlist” probably means more in the traditional publishing world. So why don't we start with that. What is the ‘mid-list,' and why use that concept? What does it mean? Thorn: The reason I latched on to the concept

What can authors learn from the adoption of AI into the music industry? What are some of the ways musicians are making money in the fractured creator economy? Tristra Newyear Yeager gives her thoughts in this interview. In the intro, Draft2Digital announced a retail distribution agreement with Fable [D2D]; Kobo launches a new color e-reader [Rakuten Kobo]; Ultimate guide to subscription models [Self-Publishing Advice]; Independence and interdependence [Self-Publishing Advice]; Becca Syme on getting unstuck [Ink in Your Veins]. Plus, Amazon's new AI board member, Andrew Ng [TechCrunch]; AI for Everyone free course; SEO is Dead [Marketing Against the Grain]; My episode on Generative AI Search for Book Discoverability; Yes, Colossal is real, and Spear of Destiny. 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 Tristra Newyear Yeager is the Chief Strategy Officer for Rock Paper Scissors, which provides PR for music innovators. She's also the author of historical fantasy and scientific romance, and the co-host of the Music Tectonics Podcast, which goes beneath the surface of music and technology. 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 current state of AI for musicians — is Suno the ChatGPT for musicians? [Rolling Stone] AI's effect on the stock music industry How authors and musicians can cut through the sea of content, whether human or AI-generated Using AI for discoverability (more in my episode on generative AI search for books here) The fragmenting of the creative economy [MusicX; Bandzoogle] Do fame and awards matter less as metrics get harder to track? Recommendations for selling author merchandise You can find Tristra at NewyearMedia.com Transcript of Interview with Tristra Newyear Yeager Joanna: Tristra Newyear Yeager is the Chief Strategy Officer for Rock Paper Scissors, which provides PR for music innovators. She's also the author of historical fantasy and scientific romance, and the co-host of the Music Tectonics Podcast, which goes beneath the surface of music and technology. Welcome back to the show, Tristra. Tristra: Oh, it's an absolute pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me back, Joanna. Joanna: I'm excited to talk to you today. Now, you were last on the show three years ago. It seems so long ago. It was in March 2021. We actually started talking back then about the potential impact of AI in the music industry. So we're going to start there again today. We're going to start with AI, and things have obviously moved on. You specialize in the music industry. Even in the last week, as we record this, I saw Rolling Stone wrote about suno.ai, the ChatGPT for music. Let's start with the current state of AI for musicians in terms of the opportunities. Let's do the positive ways at first. Tristra: Yes, let's start on the positive. So Suno was a really interesting development, in that it was the first general generative-AI, something akin to ChatGPT or Claude, that could make really, really good, convincing tracks. So no offense to all the other large models out there that can generate music from scratch. Usually, they were really short little sections of just like 45 seconds, and they tended to go off the rails pretty quickly. Suno was a little bit different and sounds a little bit better. Now, if we're going to talk about generative AI for music, it's a little bit different, I would argue, than text because there's a lot of different layers to music production and music creation. So for a long time, we've had AI that could generate melodies using the MIDI format. So that's not really like a full-fledged sound or melody you'd hear, but just like the signals that a synthesizer uses to generate a melody. We could generate lyrics, that's been around for a while. Then one of the most commonly used aspects of AI is in mixing and mastering. So mastering is the final set of tasks we do to make a recorded piece of music sound polished and good. So to get the all the levels right, just add a little bit of extra spark and sort of finalizing of that track. So AI mastering has been around for quite some time and has really taken off. People will use it almost at every stage of recording, in some instances, depending on what kind of music they're making. So in a lot of ways, the stuff that gets the news headlines really recently, isn't the stuff that's really for musicians, I would argue. It's more for people who don't consider themselves musicians, or who struggle to make music, because they just don't have the technical background or the musical training. That's what's really interesting, fr

How can you overcome your fears and make a life change towards your dreams? Or tackle the fears that stop you from writing and publishing your book? Rachael Herron talks about creating despite the fear, and getting unstuck in this interview. In the intro, Blackberry movie and IP questions; The Copyright Handbook by Steven Fishman; Co-Intelligence: Living and Working With AI by Ethan Mollick; London Screenwriters Festival; Lessons from my screenwriting course (2018); Catacomb on my store, and on other stores; Spear of Destiny Kickstarter. 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 to get started. You can also Join my community and support the show at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn. Rachael Herron is the internationally bestselling author of more than two dozen books, including thrillers, feminist romance, memoir, and nonfiction about writing. She's the host of the Ink in Your Veins podcast, and her latest book is Unstuck: An Audacious Hunt for Home and Happiness. 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 Tackling fear of the unknown when leaving your job, or making a big life change, or becoming a full-time author, based on Eight lessons learned from eight years as a full-time author. Overcoming the fear of the unknown when writing a book and you don't know the outcome The writing process when writing memoir vs. fiction Fear of judgement when writing memoir Writing as flawed and real humans that readers can relate to Analogue physical IRL experiences in the digital age Different fears that come with launching a Kickstarter You can find Rachael at RachaelHerron.com and her Kickstarter at RachaelHerron.com/Unstuck Transcript of Interview with Rachael Herron Joanna: Rachael Herron is the internationally bestselling author of more than two dozen books, including thrillers, feminist romance, memoir, and nonfiction about writing. She's the host of the Ink in Your Veins podcast. And her latest book is Unstuck: An Audacious Hunt for Home and Happiness. Welcome back to the show, Rachael. Rachael: I am so thrilled to be here with you, Joanna. Thank you for having me. Joanna: I'm excited to talk to you today. Now, you were last on the show in July 2023, not that long ago, talking about publishing options. So we're going to jump straight into the topic today. I wanted to talk to you partly because— You just did an episode on your podcast about eight lessons learned from eight years as a full-time author. Can you believe it's gone so fast? Rachael: No, I cannot. It's literally the blink of an eye. You know. Joanna: I think that is something maybe we'll circle back on, like how fast it comes. One of the things I really noticed as I listened to that episode was how relaxed you seemed in your writing life. You talk about leaping before the net appears, but this is super hard for people. So I want you to start with this fear of the unknown. How did you overcome your fear of the unknown? Both when you left your job and before you write each book? Rachael: I love this question, thank you. Fear is something that is ever present for me. I do suffer a little bit of anxiety. I am not a cool and calm kind of person. I tend toward the worrying spectrum. I have learned over the years that the best things I do are when I do this leap, when I do this jump into the unknown. It is always scary. So we started writing about the same time. I think I started writing seriously about 2006, and then I sold my first book in 2008, and then I was able to leave my day job in 2016. So for 10 years, I wrote and I worked my day job, night job. I worked for 911 for the fire department. It got to a point where I desperately wanted to leave my job and write full time. But I was making six figures as a 911 dispatcher, and I was only making about $30,000 as a writer per year. So it was a huge pay cut. So what we had to do was pay off all the debt, which we did over the course of those 10 years. Then I was able to make the leap. I have never been more sick about anything. I remember going into my manager's office, and she hadn't seen it coming because it wasn't worth talking about before then, and I told her that I quit. She was shocked, and she offered to keep me on as a consultant, like so she could pull me in for overtime kind of thing. I said yes, because I was so scared. So really, I quit, but I didn't quit. I honestly had this backup thing. I think I only worked one or two overtime shifts, and they just stressed me out so much that I didn't do them anymore, but I was terrified that we would end up living under a bridge, I would make no money, and we would lose the house. In that case, I had to cheat. Then my mother-in-law got sick, and if I quit, I could be with her

There are many options for book marketing, so how do you choose the right ones for you? I give my thoughts on the different polarities on the marketing scale to help you figure out what might work for your book, your stage on the author journey, and your lifestyle. In the intro, Storybundle for writers; Seth Godin on Tim Ferriss; Amazon's investment in Anthropic; Claude 3 direct or Poe.com; Claude prompt library; join me and Joseph Michael for a prompt webinar, 4 April, register here; plus, Spear of Destiny. Today's show is sponsored by my patrons! Join my community and get access to extra videos on writing craft, author business, AI and behind the scenes info, plus an extra Q&A show a month where I answer Patron questions. It's about the same as a black coffee a month! Join the 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 thriller, dark fantasy, and memoir 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.  Traditional versus indie publishing Short term versus long term Income versus brand building Paid versus free The book versus you as the author Stand-alone versus series Exclusive versus wide publishing Publish fast versus publish slowly Write to market versus write first, market later Online versus offline. Global versus local Introvert versus extrovert Digital versus physical Data-focused versus intuitive marketing Fiction versus non-fiction Doing your own marketing versus hiring professionals Let me know what you think — leave a comment here or message me on X @thecreativepenn This chapter is from my Author Blueprint, available as a free ebook at TheCreativePenn.com/blueprint or in print and large print from CreativePennBooks.com and also Amazon.  There are more marketing strategies in my book, How to Market a Book, which is a few years old now, but the strategies and mindset are still valid, so I’d say 90% of it is still applicable, even if the tools have changed.  Different ways to market your book I frequently get asked, ‘How do I market my book?’  There is no quick and easy answer, no magic bullet, only various options that you can use at different points along your author journey. There is no ‘right’ way to market a book, and there are as many ways to reach readers as there are writers. We each use a different combination of what works for us, and most successful authors use varying types of marketing tactics, as well as changing things up over time.  You must find what works best for you — for each book and at each stage of your author journey. So instead of giving you a list of book marketing tactics, here are some of the opposite polarities on the marketing scale that — along with your definition of success — will help shape your book promotion choices. Think of each as a continuum: You will move up and down on these scales with every book as your career evolves. You’ll use different elements for each launch, as well as for long-term sales. Here are some things to consider. Traditional versus indie publishing Your marketing options vary based on how you publish and how much control you have over the book. If you’re traditionally published, you might be assigned a marketing team to help you or at least offered some aspects of book promotion as part of your contract. These might include an email blast, paid ads, deals in a store or supermarket, or help with pitching media for interviews and live events.  But unless you are a big name, it’s likely that the promotions team will only be available for the launch period. If you want to keep your book selling over the longer term, you will need to do at least some of your own marketing.  You won’t have control of your pricing, your cover, or the metadata around categories and keywords, and it won’t be financially viable to do paid ads as you won’t be able to measure sales and return-on-investment (ROI). This is why most traditionally published authors focus on marketing through PR, literary festivals, live events, relationships with book bloggers and media, as well as trying to build an email list and social media following. Indie authors are responsible for their own marketing from day one, but also have control of pricing, the book cover, and metadata, and they can measure ROI with daily sales reporting. As a result, they have more freedom with book marketing, and the opportunity to do price promotions, bundling, sales description, category and keyword changes, as well as paid advertising with measurable results. Short term versus long term New authors with only one book will often focus on short-term sales because they can’t yet imagine a future with more books.  Short-term sale

What mindset shift do you need if you want to sell direct? How can you use Meta and AI tools to amplify your marketing? Matt Holmes gives his tips as well as insights from running my ads for my store, JFPennBooks.com. In the intro, how to sell more books at live events [BookBub]; Future of publishing and LBF, includes video of our live panel [Orna Ross on SelfPublishingAdvice]; 5 Trends we learned at the Future of Publishing [Kickstart Your Book Sales]; Author business and Author Nation [Wish I'd Known Then]; Amazon de-lists my Companion workbooks, but you can buy the spiral-bound versions and bundles on my store, CreativePennBooks.com. Plus, Nvidia's Earth2 digital twin development platform for climate science; Moonshots and Mindsets Podcast with Peter Diamandis; Sam Altman on GPT-5 [Lex Fridman] ; Using Claude for Shopify mass upload template [M.C.A. Hogarth]; Plus, join me and Joseph Michael for our AI webinar, 4 April, 8pm UK — register here to join us live or get the replay. 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 Scrivener, ProWritingAid will help you improve your book before you send it to an editor, agent or publisher. Check it out for free or get 25% off the premium edition at www.ProWritingAid.com/joanna Matthew J. Holmes is a book marketing and direct sales specialist and the business partner of fantasy author, Lori Holmes. Matt has a great newsletter and courses for authors around Facebook ads and direct sales. 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 A mindset shift when switching from KU to direct sales Control of your cash flow and customer base with direct sales Email marketing strategies AI automatic targeting vs. manual targetting Tools to create better ads for targeting your ideal reader Matthew's ad testing methodology The influx of print sales when selling direct and how to source them The Direct Sales Blueprint for Authors and Facebook ad courses You can find Matt at MatthewJHolmes.com. Transcript of Interview with Matthew J. Holmes Joanna: Matthew J. Holmes is a book marketing and direct sales specialist and the business partner of fantasy author, Lori Holmes. Matt has a great newsletter and courses for authors around Facebook ads and direct sales. Welcome to the show, Matt. Matthew: Hi, Jo. Thank you so much for having me on the show. It's a pleasure to be here. Joanna: I'm excited to talk to you. First up, just— Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into the self-publishing and book marketing space. Matthew:   Sure. So actually, Jo, it's probably your fault, really. We actually found you, I think it was about 2016 – 2018, somewhere around there. Lori, who as you said, is an author. She had a publishing deal with a publisher that fell through. Then we were deciding, should we go and find another publisher or should we try this self-publishing thing we thought about? We did lots of Googling and came across your blog and your podcast and your YouTube videos. It was through that, that we decided, okay, let's try the self-publishing route. So that's the route we went because all of the content you were putting out. So it's funny to really come full circle and be on your podcast now. So that sort of started off the self-publishing thing with Lori's book. She originally launched it in 2020, but that was after a rebrand before with the publishers, and she expanded that first book. We launched in April 2020, and that is about the time when COVID hit. From about 2010, up to COVID, I ran a video production company. Before that, I worked at the BBC. When COVID hit, my video production company just crashed and burned because you obviously couldn't go out and film people. I couldn't be around people, you had to be in bubbles and all that kind of thing. So that whole business just disappeared overnight, pretty much. We had our first twin boys coming about two months later, and we suddenly found ourselves in this position where we have no income apart from the government furlough. That saw us through the first few months of COVID, really. So I had a lot of time on my hands, and I like to keep busy. So I don't like to do nothing. So I launched myself into learning Facebook ads to advertise Lori's books. That's really how I got started with it all. I found I really enjoyed the Facebook ads dashboard, creating ads and all that kind of stuff, and all that the geeky stuff around ads. So I just launched myself into advertising Lori's books. It was just book one to begin with in April, and then book two came out in May. So a month later, because it was already written. Then we launched like a side novel, which again, was already written. I think it was June or July of that year

How can you use insights from the Enneagram to help you with a sustainable author career? How can you get past your blocks and move towards success, whatever that means for you? Claire Taylor provides her insights. In the intro, will TikTok be banned in the USA, and how will this impact authors and publishing? [TechCrunch; Kathleen Schmidt]; Hugh Howey on the Tim Ferriss show; I, Cyborg: Using Co-Intelligence [Ethan Mollick]; Using AI in award-winning writing [Smithsonian Mag; Editor and Publisher]; Plus, I'm now an award-winning author for Pilgrimage! [Pics on Instagram, Buy the book from me, or on other stores]; Spear of Destiny, Unstuck with Rachael Herron; I'm interviewed on the Casual Author Podcast, and Cops and Writers. 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 to get started. Claire Taylor writes comedy fiction, science fiction, paranormal cozy mystery, and serial killer crime, with more than 40 books under various pen names. She also teaches authors through courses, consulting, and her books for writers, which include Reclaim Your Author Career, and her new book, Sustain Your Author Career. 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 the Enneagram is and how can it help authors Differentiating questions to determine your Enneagram type Dealing with the unhealthy sides of your Enneagram type Overcoming blocks that authors may face Navigating changes in the (ever-changing) indie author industry Building resilience to sustain a long-term author career You can find Claire at FFS.media, and Sustain your Author Career here on Kickstarter. Transcript of Interview with Claire Taylor Joanna: Claire Taylor writes comedy fiction, science fiction, paranormal cozy mystery, and serial killer crime, with more than 40 books under various pen names. She also teaches authors through courses, consulting, and her books for writers, which include Reclaim Your Author Career, and the new book, Sustain Your Author Career. So welcome to the show, Claire. Claire: Hi, thank you so much for having me. Joanna: There's lots to talk about today, but first up— Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and publishing. Claire: Well, I was one of those people who wanted to be a writer since I was like 10 years old. Then I had just years of people telling me that was unrealistic. So that was fun. Luckily, I'm a little bit bullheaded. So I decided I was going to keep writing anyway and studied it in college. All of my professors basically frowned upon the kind of writing that I wanted to do, so I was trying to figure out, well, how am I going to do this anyway? Then I joined a critique group after college. That's where I met Alyssa Archer, who introduced me to all of the options that are included in publishing independently. I knew immediately that's what I wanted to do. So I skipped all the querying and just started learning the skills of self-publishing, and it's basically just been from there. I like being a one woman show and being able to call the shots. So I never looked back once I went indie. Joanna: Just give people a date then. When did you start self-publishing? Claire: Well, I did like a semi-self-publishing thing, one of those hybrid borderline rip off kind of things in like 2012. Then in 2014, I started publishing my own stuff through KDP. Joanna: You mentioned that you're a bit bullheaded and like to be in control. I've been wondering about this, because I feel like I'm similar, and— Do you think that there is a personality type who does well as an indie author, or can anyone be successful in this industry? Claire: I think anyone can find something that really resonates with them in this industry. I think as far as the perspective I come from with all of my training, every personality type, every positive healthy quality we have, can be overdone and work against us. So it's really about finding out the way that you want to go about this indie publishing business and making sure that you're not overdoing it. Joanna: Yes, I do wonder, though, because people email me now, and they say, “Oh, it seems like a lot of work.” I'm like, yes, it's work to do this career. If you don't want to do the work of publishing, then you need a publisher, like a traditional publisher. Claire: Yes, so I would say that if you don't want to do work, this is probably not the path for you. If you don't want to do a whole lot of work, maybe just publish it as a blog or something like that. I mean, I love a good challenge. So I love teaching myself new skills, I find that very engaging. So I think that is probably a necessary thing. Also, I think it's not just the person, I think it's the time of life where you

There are more options for publishing and reaching readers than ever before, and the indie author business models are splintering and diverging, so how do we know which path to follow? How do we deal with the changes due to generative AI, and how do we manage the grief and anxiety about these shifts? Becca Syme gives her perspective. In the intro, Kobo Plus launches in Ireland and South Africa [KWL]; Authors Equity [Publishing Perspectives]; Selling direct insights [Kindlepreneur]; Claude 3 [Anthropic]; Spear of Destiny. 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.  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. 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 Saturation causing a shift in the indie author business model The importance of having certainty in your own process An ego shift when selling direct Deciding on a business path amid uncertainty Choosing your ‘hard' Adapting the vision of your future in an ever-changing industry Finding readers in an evolving publishing industry You can find Becca at BetterFasterAcademy.com. 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. So welcome back to the show, Becca. Becca: Thank you for having me, again. I love being here. Joanna: Now, you've been on the show a few times. So we're just going to jump into the topics today, as we've got so much to talk about now. I've really wanted to talk to you about some of the things I'm seeing in the community right now. You're so wise, and I think people need help and guidance. Sometimes I'm just a little bit blunt about stuff, and you have a different manner. So the first thing I want to talk about is a shift in the business model for indie authors. You and I were both at the last 20Books Vegas, the last ever one. It feels like what used to be one clear path is splintering into all different things. What changes are you seeing in the indie author business models? How is it affecting the authors you coach? Becca: The upside, I think, of some of the changes is that we're seeing a real trend away from this expectation of as many books as you can possibly produce — because we've hit the saturation point, basically, everywhere. There are always going to be these niche genres that pop up that aren't fully saturated yet, but they get to a saturation point pretty quickly. So when the whole of the industry is saturated, that changes the problems that readers have. So when readers were having a problem in 2012, there just weren't enough books. Like there weren't enough books for them to choose from, and New York sort of kept it that way on purpose, right. They kept the water blue on purpose. Now that we don't have that problem anymore and readers have different problems, then the way you solve them as a writer is different. So it becomes more and more important to find the people who are going to be your people that you're going to write for and to try to maintain some sense of having people that you are pleasing. Not that you have to write to market, not that you have to write for anyone but yourself, but we've lost this sense in the industry, I think, of like all you have to do is publish a book and it's going to sell. By the way, again, I always like to remind people that still wasn't the case, even in the Gold Rush. There still were plenty of books that weren't selling. We're facing that more now than we ever have because there are so many people who are having the experience of like, “Well, I came in and tried to do this model, and it's not working for me, and so now I have to think of something different.” The indicators are all there that the problems readers are having are different. So there's no more expectation, in my opinion. It's only grown over the last four or five years that what we're seeing are people who are writing fewer books a year and who are selling more. The faster and faster and faster you write, you have to know you can produce a product that people want to read if you're going to write that fast. Otherwise, writing that fast is not the way to go. Joanna: It's funny, I'm actually, as we record this, next week I'm speaking in Seville. I've kind of put a sort of tongue-in-cheek title on one of my slides, which is—“1BookTo50K,” instead of, “20Bo

How can you create more beautiful print books — and make more money with your products by selling direct? Alex Smith explains how BookVault can help with various options as well as helpful resources. In the intro, audiobooks and AI [Frankfurt Bookmesse]; Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, and Virtual Worlds by Joanna Penn; Google's woke AI Gemini [The Verge]; AI solving humanity's hardest problems [NY Times]; Demis Hassabis on Hard Fork [NY Times]; Finding my voice in the AI wars [Talena Winters]. Plus, Author Blueprint (2024) is now in print (or get the ebook here); Spear of Destiny prelaunch page. 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 Scrivener, ProWritingAid will help you improve your book before you send it to an editor, agent or publisher. Check it out for free or get 25% off the premium edition at www.ProWritingAid.com/joanna Alex Smith is the technical lead of Bookvault.app, the independent printer that I use for the books I sell direct on Shopify, as well as for my Kickstarters. 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 Services that Bookvault offers authors in order to make beautiful books and make more money selling direct Common issues to avoid when uploading files Special edition books—ribbons, sprayed edges, foiling options, and more Options for photo books or art books Working with Bookvault to create and fulfill a Kickstarter campaign How to get more help if you need it How the payment and fulfillment process works Connecting Bookvault to your direct online store Find out more about Alex Smith and Bookvault at Bookvault.app, which fulfils the print editions of my books at CreativePennBooks.com, and JFPennBooks.com. Transcript of Interview with Alex Smith Joanna: Alex Smith is the technical lead of Bookvault.app, the independent printer that I use for the books I sell direct on Shopify, as well as for my Kickstarters. So welcome to the show, Alex. Alex: Thank you so much for having us on. Joanna: I'm excited to talk to you. So first up, just— Tell people a bit more about Bookvault. And also how its parent company has been around much longer than people might think, given you kind of came out of nowhere a couple of years ago. Alex: Yes, so Bookvault is part of a large company called Print On Demand Worldwide. So we've been going for just shy of 29 years now. So, longer than me. Joanna: That's really funny. Wait, how old are you? Alex: I'm 24, nearly 25. Joanna: That's a great line. Okay, just so people know, you don't own the company, right? You're the technical lead, and you help all of us authors with all our stuff. Sorry, carry on about Print on Demand Worldwide. Alex: Yes, so we have our own production facility in the UK based in Peterborough, so 70 miles north of London. From there, we've done short run printing for that length of period. It was about 2009 that we launched Bookvault, and that was to serve our traditional publishers that we'd been working with, mainly in the academic sector. So they had a need to print single books on demand and in kind of a simple ordering process. So Bookvault was always kind of fenced off for them. It was an invite-only kind of system. When COVID struck, pretty much as everyone did, we sat back and evaluated our business. It gave us a real good time to kind of see where we're going. So we took those two years to completely redevelop the system, moving it more to kind of a self-sign-up approach and target the indie author market as well. So we relaunched it around late 2021. That's when we popped up on the scene. I think we then met you at London Book Fair in '22, and that's where we've been going since. Joanna: Yes, and as we speak, you're at another conference, and you're at a lot of the conferences. So hopefully, some of the people listening might have met you or Curtis or one of the team. Just in case people don't know— What does Bookvault offer authors right now? What are the main services that authors are using? Alex: So our big focus is to deliver high-quality books to help our authors earn more. So we've got a wide variety of print options. So we currently offer six stocks. So that ranges everything from the kind of similar stuff that you get from KDP and Ingram with those traditional trade papers. Equally, we offer some more kinds of different papers. So a really nice, coated paper for children's books and things like that. So that's something we really focus on. Equally, we've got six different bindings as well. So that allows you to get your traditional paperback or printed case bound. JF Penn signing Pilgrimage hardbacks at the Bookvault printing factory, Peterborough, UK with alex and curtis from the bookvault team We also offer linen

How can you write a memoir that is emotionally honest and revealing enough for readers to care, and cope with the inevitable fear of judgment that evokes? How can you write about real places and people in memoir? Why is editing a memoir so challenging and what should you keep in mind around publishing and marketing choices? J.F. Penn gives her tips after writing her midlife solo travel memoir, Pilgrimage: Lessons Learned from Solo Walking Three Ancient Ways. Thanks to everyone who backed my Kickstarter for Pilgrimage, and to my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn, who help fund the extra time it takes to produce these solo episodes. J.F. Penn is the Award-nominated, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of thrillers, dark fantasy, crime, and travel memoir. Jo lives in Bath, England with her husband and two British short-hair cats, and enjoys a nice G&T. 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 kind of book do you want to write? The particular challenge of memoir Vulnerability and emotional honesty Capture your experience through writing and photos Writing about real people and places Character arc Truth (capital T) vs truth (small t) Specific sensory detail The first draft and killing your darlings Publishing choices and formats Marketing. Finding an audience for a different type of book You can buy Pilgrimage in all the usual formats from my store, JFPennBooks.com as well as the special hardback and paperback with photos from the trips. It’s also on all the usual stores in all the usual formats, or order from your library or local bookstore.  Jo Frances Penn with Pilgrimage If you want to read about the day-by-day pilgrimages, and see photos from the routes — The Pilgrims Way and the St Cuthbert’s Way in the UK, and the Camino de Santiago Portuguese Coastal — go tohttps://www.booksandtravel.page/pilgrimage-resources/ for all the links to my trips, gear list, questions to think about, and interviews. You can find my lessons learned from the campaign and more tips for Kickstarter at https://www.thecreativepenn.com/selldirectresources/  If you want more interviews on writing memoir and book recommendations, go to https://www.thecreativepenn.com/writing-memoir/  Introduction I wrote this little book about writing travel memoir as a stretch goal for the Backers of my Pilgrimage Kickstarter in February, 2023. Thank you so much if you supported the campaign!  I thought I would turn these notes into a craft book at some point, but as I shared in the episode on my 15-year Creative Pivot, I have a lot of other projects on the go, and I wanted to share this information with my wider community in the hope that it will help you if you want to write memoir of any kind, or even just non-fiction with more personal elements. It is designed to be read or listened to after the Pilgrimage book as there may be spoilers, and also it makes more sense to be read in context. You can buy Pilgrimage at my store, www.jfpennbooks.com and also on all the usual stores in all the usual formats, but hopefully the information is still useful even if you haven’t read the book. 1. What kind of book do you want to write? If you feel the urge to write a memoir, it might still take some time to work out what the hell you’re writing!  I’ve been wanting to write a travel book for years, but I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to write. As a discovery writer, I figure out what I’m writing once I actually start writing it, so although I have written journals related to my travels for decades, nothing emerged as a coherent potential book. To take a step back, I have a lot of potential ways into a travel book.  My mum took me and my brother to live in Malawi, Africa, in the early 1980s and my memories of going to school there are full of the wonder of being ‘somewhere else.’ Jo Penn, Early years in Malawi I still remember looking out at the sunrise over the Sahara desert from the plane cockpit back in the days when they let kids go up there. Those were also the days when people still smoked on planes, and I remember how my mum made us breathe through handkerchiefs to save us breathing too much in. Those early years may have triggered my wanderlust, and I started reading travel books in my teens. The Life of My Choice by Wilfred Thesiger, Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T. E. Lawrence, The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin, and so many more. I wanted to be like them and travel the world, experiencing everything and writing about my adventures. Fast forward more than thirty years and I was writing non-fiction for authors, and also fiction as J.F. Penn, incorporating my more recent travels into my stories. Morgan Sierra, in my ARKANE series in particular, is my alter-ego and her adventures and thoughts are often my own. Although of course, I am not ex-Israeli military; I don’t know Krav

How can we focus on the joy of the writing process itself, rather than the outcome? How can we embrace the positive side of being jealous of the success of other writers? How can we deepen our writing with metaphor and sense of place? Co-authors of writing book, Millions of Suns, Sharon and Christine share their tips. In the intro, Findaway Terms of Service; Why Kickstarter is the Most Creative Way to Launch Your Book [Self-Publishing Advice]; Sell direct resources; Why writing books is a career like no other [Roz Morris]; You are not what you used to be [Johnny B. Truant]; OpenAI's text to video tool, Sora; Google's Gemini model; the Vesuvius Challenge; Plus, my updated Author Blueprint; Spear of Destiny; and Pilgrimage is an award finalist for the Selfies [BookBrunch]; 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.  Sharon Fagan McDermott is an award-winning poet, musician, and a teacher of literature. M. C. Benner Dixon is an-award winning author, freelance editor, and writing coach. Together, they are the co-authors of Millions of Suns: On Writing and 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 Finding play and joy in the work of writing How to find joy when writing alone Using metaphor to elevate your writing Bringing place alive on the page Reframing jealousy in a positive way The benefits and struggles of co-writing You can find Sharon at SharonFaganMcdermott.com and Christine at BennerDixon.com. Transcript of Interview with Sharon Fagan McDermott and M.C. Benner Dixon Joanna: Sharon Fagan McDermott is an award-winning poet, musician, and a teacher of literature. M. C. Benner Dixon is an-award winning author, freelance editor, and writing coach. Together, they are the co-authors of Millions of Suns: On Writing and Life, which we're talking about today. So welcome to the show, Sharon and Christine. Christine: Thank you so much. We're so glad to be here. Sharon: We are so glad to be here. Thank you, Jo. Joanna: So we're going to get straight into the book. You talk about the power, the play, the joy of writing. It's interesting because sometimes I feel like that play and that joy are lost in the discussions around publishing and the business of books, and this show is as guilty as any around that. So I wondered if we could start by talking about— What are your tips for finding play and joy in the work of writing itself? Especially if authors feel that it is lost. Christine: Yes, absolutely. So this is Christine. Sharon and I actually met and became friends under very stressful circumstances. We're both upper school English teachers at the same school in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Teaching is one of those jobs, like publishing, that asks a lot of you. There's a lot of little details to keep track of. It's emotionally intense. You're facing months on end of relentless deadlines. Sound familiar? Many days, Sharon and I ended up side by side in our office, looking and feeling a bit like dish rags, just kind of like limp and dripping. In those difficult moments, and this is part of why we became such good friends, we would play together. One of us would start a joke about like how we wished we were ambidextrous because then we could grade twice as fast. Then the other one would suggest like writing with our toes, and we'd consider a pen in the mouth. We'd go on and on and laugh ourselves silly. We weren't playing in those moments because we had lots of free time and light hearts, we were playing because we needed it. It was a way to name the absurdity of the situation and take a little bit of control back. I think that's very often the case with playfulness and joy. These things are a necessity, not a luxury. The book was actually written in the early days of the pandemic. Both Sharon and I, for different health reasons, have to be very cautious about COVID, so we went into intense isolation. The writing was a joy to us, it sustained us, but it was a deep, hard joy that we kind of had to mine out of ourselves. Not because we were living the good life, but because we needed it to survive. I think joy is this kind of radical act of resistance, and play too. You asked about the pressures of publishing, and I think that that fits right in here. It can be incredibly hard to keep the joy and playfulness of writing front and center. Publishing takes time, it takes attention, it's emotionally exhausting at times, and there's periods when it can really take over your writing life. I would say there are a couple of things to do to protect your joy in writing. One is to involve someone else, preferably someone who is committed to celebrating your work. Having Sharon on

How can you pick yourself, rather than wait for someone else to pick you? How can you take control of your independent career and bring your creative vision to life? Jeffrey Crane Graham talks about his experience as an indie filmmaker, with lots of tips for indie authors. In the intro, 6 Types of Submission Comments BookBub Editors Love to See [BookBub]; Author platform is not a requirement to sell your novel or children’s book [Jane Friedman]; Your Author Business Plan and/or Business for Authors 50% off with discount coupon PLAN on CreativePennBooks.com; Spear of Destiny; Ruby Roe rainbow foil hardcover Kickstarter; Updated Author Blueprint coming soon; I'm interviewed on writing memoir [QWERTY 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 to get started. Jeffrey Crane Graham is a writer, director, and podcast producer. He wrote and directed the multi-award-winning film Always, Lola, and has also written comedy shorts. He produces and co-hosts The Screenwriting Life 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 Choosing yourself, rather than waiting for someone to pick you The process of creating a micro-budget feature Writing screenplays that are “practically shootable” Tips for authors who want to get their books on screen Marketing a film in a crowded market How the film festival circuit works for indie filmmakers Possible uses of AI in the filmmaking process that are not the act of creation You can find Jeffrey at JeffGrahamDigital.com. You can find Always Lola at AlwaysLolaFilm.com. Transcript of Interview with Jeffrey Crane Graham Joanna: Jeffrey Crane Graham is a writer, director, and podcast producer. He wrote and directed the multi-award-winning film Always, Lola, and has also written comedy shorts. He produces and co-hosts The Screenwriting Life podcast. So welcome to the show, Jeff. Jeffrey: Thanks, Jo. I'm honored to be on the show. As I told you before we went on air, I'm a fan of your podcast. So I am glad to be here. Joanna: Oh, good. Well, lots to talk about. First up— Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into screenwriting and film. Jeffrey: So I'm from Cleveland, Ohio. I feel like I got especially interested in writing in middle school, I was writing a lot of short stories. Then I feel like in high school, I got the ambitious idea of like, “I'm going to try to write a novel.” That's something I would still like to do before I die. I always think of novelists as like real writers, and screenwriters are aspirational novelists. Just because the idea of a novel, I think, is so intimidating. The idea to first kind of start writing for film and TV—I think most screenwriters can point to a movie that feels pretty definitional for them—I think for me, that would have been Little Miss Sunshine. It was the first movie I watched where I really subconsciously thought, somebody wrote this. I feel like film culture, especially feature films, are so built around the idea of directors being the author of the movie. Whereas I'm always most interested in who penned the script. Little Miss Sunshine, I remember watching it and specifically loving the dialogue and the twists with the characters that you learned throughout the journey. I distinctly had the realization that somebody literally wrote words on a page that these actors are saying, and I have to know who that writer is. Of course, that writer is Michael Arndt, who in such a cool full circle way I got to interview on the show I co-host, The Screenwriting Life. I did my best to maintain professionalism as I told him he was one of my heroes. Then from there, I just started writing more and more scripts. I ended up optioning a half hour pilot, which kind of got me excited to move to Los Angeles. And here I am now talking about my debut feature film, which is called Always, Lola. Joanna: A few things I want to follow up on there. First of all, it's so interesting, you talk there about when you notice the writer. I was just thinking about the TV show Succession, which I love. Jeffrey: It's one of the best of all time. Joanna: Yes, and the dialogue is so good. It's so cutting. It's the most violent family dialogue, but not in a violent way. You know what I mean? Jeffrey: Of course, yes. Joanna: It's one of those shows where I'm, like, wow, these writers are really good. Then the other example I was thinking of recently, we were watching season two of Reacher the TV show. Season one—I don't even know if this is true—but we were like season one had great writing, season two had terrible writing. Jeffrey: Interesting. It happens. Joanna: It's interesting because often we don't think about the screenwriter, or t

How do you find the story behind all your stories? Who are you at the heart of your books? Isabelle Knight talks about the importance of author brand in an age of limitless content, and gives tips on how to discover yours. In the intro, 20 new miniature books added to Queen Mary’s Dollhouse [BBC]; Amazon announced Rufus, a new generative AI-powered conversational shopping experience; How generative AI will impact book discoverability; Amazon AI Ready Initiative free AI training; NY Times is hiring for their own AI initiatives [The Verge]; “There’s nothing wrong with the tech, but it has to be legal and licensed.” [Hollywood Reporter]; Tools & Strategies you must use to survive the 2024 revolution [Marketing Against the Grain]. Plus, I recommend Forever Strong by Dr Gabrielle Lyon; my Kickstarter pre-launch page is up for Spear of Destiny; Vienna, Nuremberg, and Cologne: My Five days Research Trip notes and pictures. 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 Scrivener, ProWritingAid will help you improve your book before you send it to an editor, agent or publisher. Check it out for free or get 25% off the premium edition at www.ProWritingAid.com/joanna You can also support the show and join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn Isabelle Knight is a professional publicist, speaker and PR & brand mentor to authors and business founders. She is also adjunct professor in MA, PR & Advertising at the American International University of 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 Brand and it's importance in the age of AI Is human connection more important than content? How to draw an emotional connection with your unique story Creating and controlling your author brand story Dealing with the fear of vulnerability Tips for pivoting your author story At what stage could a publicist be helpful for an indie author? You can find Isabelle at BuildYourBrandWithPR.com. Transcript of Interview with Isabelle Knight Joanna: Isabelle Knight is a professional publicist, speaker and PR & brand mentor to authors and business founders. She is also adjunct professor in MA, PR & Advertising at the American International University of London. So welcome to the show, Isabelle. Isabelle: Thank you very much, Jo. It's pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me. Joanna: I'm excited to talk about this topic. Before we get into it— Tell us a bit more about you and your background in the publishing industry. Isabelle: So my background is a publicist, the bulk of my career was in film. So I was a film publicist for a long time. Then I moved into TV, and this was film production and TV production as well. So I was a publicist who goes on set and works with the actors and the directors and the writers and that kind of thing, as well as publicizing releases of films and TV shows. Through that time, I also worked on some book releases with authors, but particularly towards the end of my kind of traditional publicist career, I worked with JK Rowling and the production team that produced the Strike series of books for TV. So it wasn't JK Rowling, it was JK Rowling writing as Robert Galbraith. So I was on that for a few years, which was all very exciting. Then the pandemic hits and everything kind of changed, in terms of mostly the way that publicists were able to work and that productions were able to work. So I took my business online. So now I do everything online. I started working with—because I'd come from the creative industries—I was working with people who are writing books. So this was kind of business owners, but then also, fiction writers. I discovered that lots of people were writing books but didn't have any idea of how to bring those books to a readership or to find an audience and grow an audience, and perhaps actually become known as authors and sell books. I'd spent a long time, 20 years or so, working with people to essentially make them famous and make their creative output famous. So I thought, well, loads of these people just don't have any of the kinds of resources and tools and knowledge that as a publicist working in those big industry, that you kind of start to take it for granted that people know what to do when it comes to promoting themselves. Of course, I quickly realized that many people don't know what to do. So now, rather than doing people's PR, or publicity for them, which, you know, for most indie and self-published authors is a very expensive thing to do. What I do now is I mentor, and essentially teach, authors how to go about building their brand, promoting themselves, creating a name for themselves, and creating a readership, a fan base, growing that readership, and selling some books. So that's

What are the benefits — and the challenges — of crowdfunding on Kickstarter? How can you fund successfully, as well as make a profit with your campaign? Paddy Finn gives his tips. In the intro, you can find more selling direct resources here; Streaming due for a streamlining [FT]; Authors Guild explores AI licensing deal [Hollywood Reporter]; Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI on Bill Gates' podcast, Unconfuse Me; AI audio company ElevenLabs in funding deal [TechCrunch]. Plus, follow my book research trip for Spear of Destiny on Instagram @jfpennauthor or Facebook @jfpennauthor. 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.  Paddy Finn is the author of science fiction and fantasy novels, the CEO of Penny Dragon Games and Starcane Press, and is a Kickstarter expert. 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 Harnessing the popularity of Dungeons and Dragons on Kickstarter Offering physical objects to accompany your book campaign Why are direct sales and Kickstarter taking off now? The importance of audience ownership Pre-launching your Kickstarter campaign Costing out your campaign to make it profitable Shipping tips, tools, and manufacturing recommendations How to plan a six-figure campaign You can find Paddy at PaddyFinn.com. Transcript of Interview with Paddy Finn Joanna: Paddy Finn is the author of science fiction and fantasy novels, the CEO of Penny Dragon Games and Starcane Press, and is a Kickstarter expert. So welcome to the show, Paddy. Paddy: It's awesome to be here, Jo. Thanks for having me. Joanna: I'm so excited to talk to you about Kickstarter. But before we get into that− Tell us a bit more about you, your writing and publishing background, and how the hell you manage your time! Because you have so many companies doing a lot of products. Paddy: First of all, I don't know how I manage my time. It's a strange one because I started writing fantasy and science fiction novels back in like 2015/2016. Like lots of authors, I've been writing ever since I was a kid and could pick up a pen or a pencil. I started to hear about this self-publishing thing, and I may have started listening to The Creative Penn podcast and a few other podcasts around that time as well. So that kind of gave me some impetus to take this thing seriously. Then I went to a few conferences, and they really encouraged me. Come 2018, I went full time as an indie author and did very well for a few years. Then I saw another opportunity in a slightly, let's call it an adjacent market, I guess, where Kickstarter was doing very well for some people who were creating content for Dungeons and Dragons. I'd been playing Dungeons and Dragons for like seven or eight years at that stage. I figured, hey, I like this thing. It's writing plus a little bit of game design. It's similar, but also different, and it's a new challenge, so let's give that a try. It exploded as soon as we tried it, really. So that was kind of an indicator that, hey, we should keep doing this thing because it's working. So we kept doing that thing. Joanna: So Starcane Press is your publishing house? Paddy: That's correct. So Starcane Press is kind of like a combination of star and arcane because we like to work on science fiction and fantasy. To be honest, when we started with the whole Kickstarter thing and the new industry, really, it took us away from novel publishing. Only in the last kind of 6 – 12 months have we started to circle back to that. It's been a bit slow going, but 2024 is going to be a year where we will really focus again on novels. So we're looking forward to that. Joanna: So for someone like me who, I mean, obviously, I've heard of Dungeons and Dragons, but I don't really understand what kind of products you're creating. So tell us like, what are the products you have been doing for the games? What is the thing you're actually selling with the D&D games? Paddy: It's primarily books. Hardcover books, but also PDFs. We've been leaning very heavily on digital content, specifically PDFs in the past 6 – 12 months. However, the industry does love a hardcover book. The great thing about those two things is that, generally, they're a much higher ticket item than a novel. So a hardcover game book could be anywhere from $40 to $60. If it's a special edition, or like a premium cover, it could be over $100 per copy. Then your PDFs, they can be anywhere from $5 to $35 to $40, just depending on what's in there, how big it is, and whatever the content is. But essentially, it's just a book. Dungeons and Dragons, when I describe it to people, it's like writing, only you're doing it with four or five other people. One pers

I really enjoyed this laid-back discussion around AI tools as part of the creative book cover design process with James Helps from Go On Write. We discuss how generative AI tools can help make more unique and interesting cover designs, and how designers can have a more imaginative time making them. This episode is supported by my Patreon community, who fund my future-focused thinking time. If you join the community, you get an extra solo Q&A show monthly, as well as behind-the-scenes videos on planning for the year ahead, AI and creative business, plus discounts, early access, and more. Join the community for the price of a coffee a month at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn James Helps is a book cover designer at GoOnWrite.com, offering pre-made covers and custom cover design. He also writes articles for authors about the impact of AI at his blog, HumbleNations. 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 James' history with computers, AI, and art Various tools for AI-generated images and the rise of text to video Midjourney vs DALL-E and how being an artist makes Midjourney easier to use as you have the language to use it How James uses Midjourney as part of his creative ideation process with a client and how it gives him more scope for imaginative designs, and how it takes more time Is AI a threat to cover designers and/or authors? How our human creative drive and connection is our real differentiator. You can find James at GoOnWrite.com, HumbleNations.wordpress.com, or JamesHelps.co.uk. Transcript of Interview with James Helps Joanna: James is a book cover designer at GoOnWrite.com, offering pre-made covers and custom cover design. He also writes articles for authors about the impact of AI at his blog, HumbleNations, which we're talking about today. So welcome to the show, James. James: Hi there. Joanna: Hello. Tell us a bit more about your book cover design business and how you became interested in generative AI. James: I guess the first thing I'd probably say is I don't really like the word business. It's more that I make covers for people that I like. They come in and chat to me, and I'm just a designer that really enjoys doing covers. I guess when it comes down to the AI stuff, I got interested in that probably around two years ago when there was a lot of stuff in the air. There was like the DALL-E and Imagen that I was reading about quite a lot. I've always been sort of somebody who's looked at technology as a thing. In my history, I did a computer science degree back in the early 90s. As a kid, I was always interested in technology and design. So it's something that I always read about. So I knew AI was coming, but I didn't realize that it was coming that fast. It was actually a friend of mine who's another designer, Craig, who told me about Midjourney. For me, it wasn't completely perfect, but I felt, well, it's time to actually start looking at this and learning about it. So it's about two years, 18 months ago now, that I started playing around with it. Joanna: It's interesting though, you said back in the 90s that you did a computer science degree and that you knew AI was coming, but you didn't know it was coming that fast. Of course− People have been talking about AI since the 90s. So do you think it's all just sped up in the last couple of years, as you say? Because it feels like people think, oh, it's come out of nowhere, but of course, it hasn't, has it? James: No, I mean even in the 90s they were talking about neural networks and how machine learning was working. I think Google, at a certain point, scanned all the books, and all those books that were scanned were used for machine learning to do things, to understand the structure of text. So anybody who's used Google Translate, that's basically AI. I guess the thing that sort of surprised me, looking back on it now, is the fact that it happened just after the pandemic. That's sort of interesting. I've got a theory, which I've told the same theory to my friends, my more tech friends, and they said the same thing. They agreed with me. It's the fact that there was a certain point in the pandemic where everybody was putting money into Bitcoin, and Bitcoin was shooting up and up. So then everybody was trying to mine Bitcoin, and the technology that they needed was graphics card server farms. Then obviously, the pandemic finished, Bitcoin crashed, and there was all these sort of empty server farms, graphics card server farms, so they all became available. I think that was what actually sped up it all just happening at once. There was cheap computing power to actually start playing around with these things. Joanna: That is interesting. I have also heard that, that they need a lot of these types of computers. It is interesting, isn't it, how we need this hardware to make the software to make things like nice images, and o

What are the benefits and challenges of selling direct? How can you use limited edition merchandise to add more value to retailers and make more money on a launch? Alex Kava talks about her author business. In the intro, award-winning Japanese writer, Rie Kudan, used ChatGPT to write parts of her prize-winning novel and judges lauded the work as ‘flawless.’ [The Telegraph]; Personal news about my pivot, the Blueprint rewrite, and cleaning up the backlist; plus, I'm on The Alignment Show. Today's show is sponsored by Draft2Digital, self-publishing with support, where you can get free formatting, free distribution to multiple stores, and a host of other benefits. Just go to www.draft2digital to get started. This show is also sponsored by my community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn. Alex Kava is the multi-award-winning New York Times and USA Today bestselling thriller author of the FBI profiler Maggie O'Dell series and K-9 handler Ryder Creed series, amongst other 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 The struggles that come with traditional publishing Becoming an indie author and taking back control Direct sales as part of the author business model Sourcing and selling quality merchandise Merchandise as an extension of the reader experience The technical side of selling personalized books and merchandise Building your newsletter and marketing your direct store You can find Alex at AlexKava.com. Transcript of Interview with Alex Kava Joanna: Alex Kava is the multi-award-winning New York Times and USA Today bestselling thriller author of the FBI Profiler Maggie O'Dell series and K-9 Handler Ryder Creed series, amongst other books. So welcome to the show, Alex.  Alex: Thanks, Jo. I'm so excited. Thank you for inviting me.  Joanna: Oh, yes, well, we have lots to talk about. But first up–  Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and self-publishing. Alex: Well, I've been in the business now for over 20 years. So I guess as a kid, I was like all the other authors, but for me, I never dreamed that you could actually make a living by writing up stories and writing books.  Both my parents were children of Polish immigrants, and they instilled a very strong work ethic. I went to college on an art scholarship, and at 26, I started my own graphic design company. I was designing anything from corporate brochures to food labels. I still remember spending a weekend in grocery stores, looking to see what colors worked best in the refrigerator sections of the grocery stores.  I still dreamed of writing. That still nagged at me. Remember, in the late 90s, there really wasn't any other way to publish except traditional publishing. I remember somebody telling me that it was easier to win the lottery than it was to get published in fiction at that time.  So after 116 rejections from literary agents for my first novel, I put that aside, wrote a second novel, and found an agent. My first book was published in 2000, A Perfect Evil, and that quickly became an international bestseller.  I quickly learned that in traditional publishing, it's almost as difficult to stay published as it is to get published. You always seemed to be depending on the next contract, and the next contract, and having your publisher define what you were worth.  In the course of 16 books in 16 years, I went through nine editors, three Big Five publishers, and three agents.  Joanna: Wow.  Alex: Yes, I went through the merger of Penguin, Putnam, and Random House. That's where I lost one of my editors who had just brought me over from Doubleday. She was literally gone a week before my first book with her came out.  So that was the second time that I had been orphaned at a publisher. The contract had just started for three books. It was a major contract for $600,000 for three books, but that doesn't mean anything. You know, we always thought that meant something, that they would take better care of you.  Finally, in 2016 at the end of that contract, my publisher said to me, “Well, we're going to have to pay you 20% less this time because paperback distribution just isn't what it used to be.” That's in 2016, and I'm thinking, “Really, paperback distribution suddenly isn't what it used to be?”  The deal breaker for me was that they wouldn't drop the non-compete clause. So I couldn't even go write a book for someone else, or indie pub anything to make up that loss of income. So by everybody's standards, they were offering me still decent money, but they wanted to split it in five payments, which made another difference.  They held onto the non-compete clause. I just walked away. My literary agent thought that I was crazy. I decided that I'm going to trust my readers to tell me what I'm worth. That was in 2016. I releas

How can we move past our fears to write the books that mean the most to us? How can we write unique and compelling characters that keep readers coming back for more in a series? Barbara Nickless talks about mindset and writing craft in this wide-ranging interview. In the intro, Planning for a Creative 2024 and Trends for Independent Authors [ALLi]; Reflecting on 2023 and self-publishing trends for 2024 [Draft2Digital]; Launch of GPT store [The Verge]; check out the Jo-bot for writing advice; Innovator GPT; Getty launches their own generative AI [The Verge]; Microsoft announced an AI key on their new keyboards [BBC]; Open AI responds to the NY Times lawsuit. Plus, thoughts on shifting to mixed grip and why taking a step back is so important to moving forward; History Quill conference; sort out your DMARC records; my book trailer for Beneath the Zoo, and re-assessing my timeline for 2024, a big election year for the US and UK. Join the community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn 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 Scrivener, ProWritingAid will help you improve your book before you send it to an editor, agent or publisher. Check it out for free or get 25% off the premium edition at www.ProWritingAid.com/joanna Barbara Nickless is the multi-award winning and international bestselling author of the Sydney Rose Parnell crime thrillers and the Dr. Evan Wilding serial killer thrillers. 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 Tackling fears in order to write The research process for fiction writing Writing for therapy vs. for an audience Tips for writing original characters The writing process of a discovery writer and tools for writing non-linearly Book marketing as a traditionally published author You can find Barbara at BarbaraNickless.com Transcript of Interview with Barbara Nickless Joanna: Barbara Nickless is the multi-award winning and international bestselling author of the Sydney Rose Parnell crime thrillers and the Dr. Evan Wilding serial killer thrillers. So welcome to the show, Barbara. Barbara: Thank you. I'm so happy to be here. Joanna: Oh, yes. I'm so excited to talk to you. But first up— Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing. Barbara: I have wanted to be a writer for as long as I can remember. I think it gelled for me when I was three years old. I had eye surgery when I was three, and when I was in the hospital, we weren't allowed visitors. I just, I took these get-well cards I got from my mom and I started making up stories to write on the back. I just imitated her handwriting, because I didn't know how to write, and then when she could visit me, I would tell the stories as if I were actually reading my writing. So even at that point, I think writing was a healing process for me, and I could escape into the stories.  My first story, I had grand ambitions, Joanna. I intended to write a story about slavery and coming to deal with that. It was a historical novel. I started out with my heroine on a horse, she was going to go to the auction and try to rescue some people. Then I realized I had no idea what I was doing, so she fell off the horse on the second page and died. I had to change the title from “Road to Freedom” to “Trampled by a Horse.” Joanna: That's awesome. Wait, how old were you when you decided to tackle slavery as a topic? Barbara: I think I was about eight. Joanna: I love that. And actually, before we move on there, this is such a common issue, and I've definitely been there too, which is that I'll care so much about this topic, I want to write this really important book that helps people with this topic. And yet, I mean… Have you yet to do your massive book on dealing with slavery? Barbara: I have learned to not overreach, but I have a few books on the backburner I hope to get to. Joanna: Exactly. Okay, so jumping forward from eight— How did you get into professional writing? Barbara: It was a long and varied path. I wrote off and on, and then it when I got my undergraduate degree in English literature, I wrote a fantasy novel as my independent project. Then I went into high tech and spent years working as a technical writer. Oh my gosh, I did so many things. I was piano teacher, I was a cave rescuer, I did this and the other thing and kind of ignored that voice that was telling me to write. Then in 2012, we lost our house and pretty much everything we owned in a wildfire, the Waldo Canyon wildfire. At that point I said, either do this, Barbara, or go work for Amnesty International. I mean, do something. That's what launched the Sydney Parnell series and turned me into a professional writer, much to my amazement. Joanna: Then

Wherever you are on the author journey, there are some important questions to consider along the way. Joe Solari outlines a strategic step forward for new authors, midlist indies, and those with ambitious financial goals. Plus, what is Author Nation? In the intro, Top 10 trends for publishing [Written Word Media]; Indie author predictions for 2024 [ALLi]; Book publishing predictions [Kathleen Schmidt]; AI in 2024 [MIT Technology Review]; Chat to the JoBot on ChatGPT; Midjourney and video creation [Decrypt]; Business as usual is not an option [TNPS]; Beneath the Zoo in audio and ebook; The Comfort Crisis by Michael Easter. 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.  Joe Solari helps authors build great businesses through books, courses, and podcasting, as well as strategy and operations consulting. He's also the managing partner of Author Ventures, which organizes Author Nation, coming to Las Vegas in November 2024. 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 Business strategies for authors at different stages Allocating time and money as a new author Branding for a midlist indie author Financial freedom vs. business expansion. What do you really want? What to expect from Author Nation 2024 Why getting out of your comfort zone is the way to success You can find Joe and Author Nation at AuthorNation.live or AuthorVenturesLLC.com Transcript of Interview with Joe Solari Joanna: Joe Solari helps authors build great businesses through books, courses, and podcasting, as well as strategy and operations consulting. He's also the managing partner of Author Ventures, which organizes Author Nation, coming to Las Vegas in November 2024. So welcome back to the show, Joe. Joe: Thanks for having me back, Joanna. This is awesome. Joanna: I'm excited to talk to you. This is going out as the first interview episode of 2024, so we're going to start with business strategy for authors who want to have a successful year because you're so good at this. There's always so much to do as an author, so we're going to break it down. First of all, for a new author who is just starting out, maybe they have one or two books, they might just even be writing their first book— What are your tips for authors just starting out? Joe: Sure, sure. So I think there's also those that haven't even written a book. This may be the year that first book comes out. I think that for all those people, having a budget is really critical. Understanding the money it's going to cost and time, what it's going to be to get you to that first book and to the point of profitability. So that might be thinking all the way through, say, the next three years. It's a plan, it's not carved in stone. Just by doing that, you're going to have a better idea of your overall costs that you're gonna need to have, and you're going to have something to measure yourself off of. So, I've never had a plan go 100% right. It's really for when you do find that things aren't going the way you thought they were, you can go back and look at that and figure out how far off the rails are you, what could be causing that, and get yourself adjusted. Sometimes that adjustment is, oh, there's this really great opportunity that's presented itself that is better than my plan, and when I evaluate this opportunity against my plan, I should adjust to this. If you don't have that plan, then you could go all over the place. Everything looks better than your non-existent plan. Joanna: I love that, actually, because a lot of people ask me this question. I think understanding it in terms of budget of money and time, and time, in particular, at this point in an author journey. I feel like so many people will have all their questions about how do I get published, or how do I publish a book, and how do I market a book. Then you're like, so have you finished a book? And often they haven't. So, I mean, people only have a certain amount of time to budget for this whole year. What are the things that they should put into that time bucket? And also, I guess, that money bucket, when they're just starting out? Joe: I think the two are intertwined. You know, you've been around this a while, so you've seen it, there tends to be the sense of urgency to get the books published. Like, if I get them out in the market, then they're gonna sell and I'm gonna know something, which is true, but you could publish too quickly. You know, if you're writing certain genres where part of what you have to deliver to the market is a reliability of production, right. So certain genres, it's not just about putting out a book, it's about putting out books in a series. If you don't do that, t

Happy New Year 2024! 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 measure it in years. At the end of each year, I make a photobook, and I publish an article here, which helps keep me accountable. If you’d like to share your goals, please add them in the comments below.  2023 was a year of change, culminating in my 15-Year Pivot, and so 2024 will be a year of consolidation and optimization of my new creative and business processes — as well as writing and creating, plus surfing the wave of more change ahead. Joanna Penn writes non-fiction for authors and is an award-nominated, 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.  Show Notes J.F. Penn — Spear of Destiny, and the Gothic Cathedral project The Creative Penn Podcast and Patreon Community Streamline The Creative Penn website, redo my Author Blueprint, and update my backlist books Optimize my Shopify stores and Meta ads Experiment more with AI tools that allow me to do more human creative things Speaking and travel, health and fitness Financials As ever, I am a full-time author-entrepreneur and this is my job, so I have a lot of goals. If your goals are simpler — like finishing your book, or publishing for the first time, or selling 1000 copies, then fantastic! You don’t have to have such extensive goals as me.  Please share your goals in the comments so we can keep each other accountable. J.F. Penn — Spear of Destiny, and the Gothic Cathedral project I’m planning on two major book projects, both launching with a special edition high-quality hardback and other exclusive products on Kickstarter, then selling the main editions on my JFPennBooks.com store before publishing wide to all the usual places.  Spear of Destiny, An ARKANE Thriller book 13 will be first, possibly launching in April/May. I’ve already started the research in terms of reading and thinking, and I have a trip booked to Vienna, Nuremberg, and Cologne at the end of January for more in-depth research and story hunting.  Spear of Destiny, cover mockup, jo penn on DALLE3 The Gothic Cathedral project is a chaotic mess of ideas right now, which I absolutely love. I have some vague thoughts on what it might turn into. I trust emergence! There will certainly be a gorgeous limited edition hardback of my photos of Gothic cathedrals which I’ve been taking for over a decade alongside essays on various aspects that go alongside it — beauty, cathedral thinking (long-term thinking and building something that lasts), memento mori, craftsmanship, harmony, gothic sensibilities, and much more.  It will be a non-fiction book under J.F. Penn that aligns with elements of Pilgrimage, and since many of the cathedrals feature in my novels, it also resonates with my fiction. It is very me, and hopefully interesting enough to some of you, too! festive Gloucester cathedral cloisters, photo by J.F. Penn There may also be a mystery novel alongside it, based on a stonemason character I am researching, but I am a discovery writer. I don’t know what I am writing until I commit time to the project and get into it, so that will become clearer as the year goes on. I also want to narrate more of my fiction as part of my ‘doubling down on being human’ approach. I need to do Beneath the Zoo, a short story, as well as the two new books above. I also still need to do Catacomb, but it has a male protagonist so I am hesitating about doing it personally as a female voice.  The first three ARKANE thrillers haven’t been in audio since I re-published the books in 2022 with substantial edits, so I am also considering narrating those, too. But audiobook narration is a big job, and there are other options. I could hire the narration out, and there are also more AI narration options emerging. Somehow I will get everything in audio in 2024. I have sooooooo many other projects in my J.F. Penn folder and I would love to get to a few more of them, depending on how the time goes. I have several stand-alone novel ideas, and also many short stories, so there are lots of options to choose from. But two books could well be enough for my creative bandwidth and I want to give them both time and breathing space. I’m aiming for a short story collection in 2025 or 2026, so I need to be writing them regularly, as they won’t all go into the collection. I really enjoy short stories and have a ton of ideas for them, so I’ll aim to write at least one or two in the year. Learn how to make beautiful physical books In 2023, I published two physical hardback editions I am super proud of. The color photo edition of Pilgrimage, and the gold foil/black rib

Another year ends, and once more, it's time to reflect on our creative goals. I hope you will 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. In the intro, 2023 was the year that Twitter died — and became X. What that means for me, plus The Verge does an overview. Thoughts on lighthouses and what yours might be, from The Comfort Book by Matt Haig quoting Anne Lamott; “We’re in an artist’s age now,” reflections on the changing author business model from Johnny B. Truant; The Future by Naomi Alderman. This episode is supported by my Patreon community, who fund my future-focused thinking time. If you join the community, you get an extra solo Q&A show monthly, as well as behind-the-scenes videos on planning for the year ahead, AI and creative business, plus discounts, early access, and more. Join the community for the price of a coffee a month at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn Joanna Penn writes non-fiction for authors and is an award-nominated, 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.  Show Notes You can read my 2023 goals here and I reflect on what I achieved below. J.F. Penn — Pilgrimage, Catacomb, and short stories Up-skilling into direct sales with Kickstarter and Shopify, and building a fiction-first store Joanna Penn — Writing the Shadow The Creative Penn Podcast and Patreon move to monthly Community Experiment with futurist technologies and share what I learn along the way  Financial goals Travel, speaking, health, and other things Let me know in the comments below how your 2023 creative goals went. J.F. Penn — Pilgrimage, Catacomb, and short stories  Although I wrote and edited Pilgrimage in 2022, the publishing, launch, and marketing all happened in the first quarter of 2023. The Kickstarter for Pilgrimage: Lessons Learned from Solo Walking Three Ancient Ways absolutely exceeded my expectations. It had 692 backers and funded at £25,771. After the initial Kickstarter, I published the book on my Shopify store for a couple of months and then released it wide. You can find it here on my store, here on all the other retailers, or you can order it through your local bookstore or library.   I wrote and published a stand-alone novella, Catacomb, and two short stories, With a Demon’s Eye, and Beneath the Zoo.  I narrated the audiobooks for Pilgrimage, With a Demon’s Eye, A Midwinter Sacrifice, and I need to do Beneath the Zoo and Catacomb in early 2024. I'm committing to narrating as much of my fiction as possible (as human me!) as well as my non-fiction in order to ‘double down on being human.‘ I didn’t write action-adventure thriller ARKANE 13 as intended, but it’s first on my list for 2024. My creative process involves travel to specific locations to find stories, and I didn't make it to Vienna this year, but I have a trip planned for the end of January 2024. Up-skilling into direct sales — Kickstarter and Shopify I’ve significantly upskilled this year in direct sales. I've done two successfully funded Kickstarter projects, learned a lot of lessons, and improved my book marketing for launches. I built a new fiction-first Shopify store, www.jfpennbooks.com and I did a Shopify accelerator with Pierre Jeanty. I’ve added lots of bundles and box sets for both fiction and non-fiction for digital and print products, which makes a huge difference in terms of being able to offer options to readers, and also make advertising worth it. Click here for fiction bundles and box sets by J.F. Penn Click here for bundles and boxsets for authors by Joanna Penn I’ve worked with Matt Holmes on AI-powered Meta advertising direct to my fiction store, and I only use Amazon auto-ads now on a few of my non-fiction books.  Joanna Penn — Writing the Shadow  After more than a decade of working on this book on and off, I finally wrote and published Writing the Shadow: Turn Your Inner Darkness Into Words.  The Kickstarter had 1,059 backers and made £36,454 on launch. I am really proud of the limited edition, gold foil hardback with black ribbon, and I’m encouraged that people want these premium products. I also did a normal paperback, large print, ebook, workbook, and narrated the audiobook. All the usual formats are now out on all the usual stores (but the limited edition was only for the Kickstarter).   It was my biggest book signing ever, with over 430 books signed at the Bookvault factory in Peterborough, UK.  As part of the Pilgrimage Kickstarter, I wrote and recorded a course on Writing Settings and Sense of Place. The Creative Penn Pod

In this episode, I reflect on 15 years of TheCreative Penn, and outline how I will reposition myself for the next 15 years of being an author entrepreneur. In the intro, We used to do that [Seth Godin]; Penguin Random House has acquired Hay House [Publishing Perspectives]; Business for Authors; Your Author Business Plan; OpenAI has announced a partnership with Axel Springer, the first publishing house globally to partner with them to integrate journalism with AI technologies. This episode is supported by my Patreon community, who fund my future-focused thinking time. If you join the community, you get an extra solo Q&A show monthly, as well as behind-the-scenes videos on AI and creative business, plus, discounts, early access, and more. Join us for the price of a coffee a month at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn Joanna Penn writes non-fiction for authors and is an award-nominated, 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.  Show Notes From Joanna Penn to J.F. Penn  From creating alone to the AI-Assisted Artisan Author From digital-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 From distance to presence  Pivoting a business is always a risk Will I still be here in another 15 years? Let me know what you think. Are you pivoting your author business? What changes are you making to stay nimble in a fast-moving industry? Do you have any questions? You can leave a comment below, or email me here. Introduction On 8 December 2008, I published my first blog post on www.TheCreativePenn.com. I had already self-published a book earlier that year and wanted to share my lessons learned. The Creative Penn home page in 2008 This is my third website. The first was based on my first book, How to Enjoy Your Job or Find a New One (later rewritten and re-published as Career Change), and the second was on learning about money and investments. I abandoned both when I ran out of things to write about. But 15 years later, I still haven’t run out of things to write about here!  I left my job to become a full-time author entrepreneur in 2011 and I’ve changed my business model several times over the years as technology, new service providers, and a growing market have expanded our options as indie authors.  I still love what I do. I measure my life by what I create. I love holding my books in my hands and saying ‘I made this’. But the pace of change is accelerating and I need to pivot and reinvent myself in order to keep creating and writing, as well as remain useful to my community and the wider indie author industry. I also need to keep myself engaged. I’m certainly not the same person I was when I started out, and the last few years in particular have been a period of personal change (as discussed in Pilgrimage and Writing the Shadow). So I found this quote useful from Barbara Bradley Hagerty in Life Reimagined: The Science, Art, and Opportunity of Midlife, “Pivoting on your strengths beats starting from scratch. Redefine success according to your values, not those of the rest of the world.” I’m not going to burn it all down and start anew. I am pivoting! From Joanna Penn to J.F. Penn For the last 15 years, I’ve put my Joanna Penn brand first, writing useful books for authors as I’ve learned, and sharing my journey in order to help other authors along the way Long-time listeners to the podcast and email subscribers will know that I’ve been talking about the Shadow book for almost the entire time, and in 2023, I finally wrote and published it. Writing the Shadow: Turn Your Inner Darkness Into Words is the fulfillment of a long-term creative promise, and alongside How to Write a Novel, and How to Write Non-Fiction, it represents everything I have to share on craft — at least at the moment. When I started out as an indie author, there were very few voices sharing the way ahead, and all the existing writing industry books were for traditionally published authors, so my books were needed. But things have changed and there are many wonderful authors sharing tips and strategies and ‘how to’ information these days. I also think the market for ‘how to’ nonfiction is shifting, which I discussed at length in last week’s episode on the impact of Generative AI Search, so have a listen or a read if you want to learn more. All this means that I don’t plan to write any new ‘how to’ books for authors. I do intend to make my existing backlist more evergreen, so there will be future editions of some existing books, and I want to re-record some earlier audiobooks as (human) me, so expect those at some point.   Many of

How will changes to the way people search impact book discoverability? What can authors and publishers do to ensure their books are still found in the new form of generative AI search? While it's still early days for this technology, I share my thoughts in this article, with the hope that we can surf the wave of change, rather than drown in it. In the intro, Launching a series [Wish I'd Known Then]; Selling direct on TikTok Shop [Rebel Author]; Bookbub Best Ads; The State of Indie Authorship [Written Word Media]; Authors can now distribute Google Play Books’ auto-narrated audiobooks with Findaway Voices by Spotify; How to use Google Play Books auto-narration, episode 642; Amazon KDP AI audio narration beta. Plus, History Quill online conference; Beneath the Zoo [JFPennBooks; Other stores]; A Midwinter Sacrifice [JFPennBooks; Other stores]; This episode is supported by my Patreon community, who fund my future-focused thinking time. If you join the community, you get an extra solo Q&A show monthly, as well as behind-the-scenes videos on AI and creative business, plus, discounts, early access, and more. Join us for the price of a coffee a month at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn Joanna Penn writes non-fiction for authors and is an award-nominated, 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.  Show Notes How does search work now? How does generative search work with Google Bard and Microsoft Bing Chat? Generative search in ChatGPT — and will Amazon search change in 2024? Part 1: How generative search might change book discovery (1) The text of the book will be used in analysis and discovery (2) Readers will be able to discover cross-genre and niche books more easily (3) Non-fiction that answers questions may be replaced by generative search (4) ‘Generate to market' apps may produce books based on search terms (5) Advertising will become more granular and managed at scale by AI Part 2: What can authors and publishers do to maximise potential book discovery? (1) Make sure your books are discoverable (2) Consider how LLMs get their data and make sure it's up to date (3) Connect with readers on a more personal level You can find more of my episodes, articles and resources on AI here. This is an emerging area, so I certainly don’t have all the answers. I'd love to know what you think in the comments. Thanks to Orna Ross for reading in advance, and also J. Thorn who commented on the draft article to make sure I wasn't off track. J. reports on weekly AI news for creatives at Creative AI Digest, a free weekly email. Introduction Book discovery is going to change over the next decade, and in this article, I share my thoughts on how it might shape out so we can prepare and make sure our books can be found in an ever-growing sea of content.  I’ve been using Google Bard and Microsoft Bing, both generative search engines, in the last few months to see how things might play out. I also increasingly use ChatGPT as a search and discovery tool, both through text and voice, and I used all three services as part of preparing this article. In terms of my personal experience, I’ve been interested in AI for creatives since AlphaGo beat Lee Sodol at the ancient Chinese game of Go in 2016, and I’ve been sharing interviews and resources here ever since. I’ve been experimenting with ChatGPT since it launched in November 2022 as well as using Midjourney, DALL-E, Claude, Sudowrite, and other tools, and I set out my position in The AI-Assisted Artisan Author. As I’ve used the various tools, my search behaviour has changed and I’ve also monitored news and opinion pieces on this topic from others. We are the early adopters for sure, and most people are not even aware of how these AI tools can be used. But it’s clear from the speed of development that the platforms themselves are going to drive the change, and once the most powerful search engines incorporate generative AI, adoption will happen more quickly. We need to be ready for this change. [Note. This article will not cover aspects of copyright, or legal or ethical concerns around generative AI. I’ve covered these in other interviews and articles and in my book on AI – add links] How does search work now? For the last two decades, we have used various search engines to type in a couple of words or a question and then hit enter. This search process works the same way whether you search on Google, YouTube, Amazon, Instagram, Spotify, or any other search engine, and over the years, we’ve learned the best way to phrase our searches to get the best results. The search engine lists pages of links related to the query, and we usually go into the first couple to see if they have what we want. I

Do you want to publish an image-heavy book like a cookbook? How can you navigate the challenges of photography, book design, and publishing choices to make the best product possible? Jane Dixon-Smith shares her lessons learned from her first cookbook. In the intro, Brandon Sanderson's predictions about publishing [Daniel Greene]; Craig Mod talks about walking and beautiful books [Long Form, Things Become Other Things]; Writing the Shadow [CreativePennBooks; Other stores]. Today's show is sponsored by Draft2Digital, where you can get free ebook formatting, free distribution to multiple stores, and a host of other benefits. Get your free Author Marketing Guide at draft2digital.com/penn Jane Dixon-Smith is a historical fiction author, an award-winning book cover designer, graphic designer, and adventurer. Her latest book is The Great Adventure Baker. 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 adventure can keep your creative side alive Making a cookbook personal and unique Editing and testing the recipes Tips for producing the best photos without professional equipment Choosing the images for a photo-dominant book Choices in design and publishing Working with designers to incorporate AI into your designs You can find Jane at JDSmith-design.co.uk. Transcript of Interview with Jane Dixon-Smith Joanna: Jane Dixon-Smith is a historical fiction author, an award-winning book cover designer, graphic designer, and adventurer. Her latest book is The Great Adventure Baker. Jane also designs my book covers and print interiors, so I am a huge fan of her work. So welcome back to the show, Jane. Jane: Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. Joanna: It's gonna be exciting to talk about this because so many people want to do cookbooks, but there are many challenges. Before we get into that— Tell us a bit more about your adventuring side of your life and why you decided to do a baking book at this point in your creative career. Jane: Well, I got into adventuring properly, probably about five years ago. I needed a bit of time away from my desk because I just sit here all the time designing and all of that kind of thing. And living in the lakes, we have just tons of stuff right on the doorstep. I joined some groups on Facebook and started walking with different people and taking tray bakes along with me, which everyone seemed to really love. I'd get asked for the recipes, and I'd quite happily give my recipes out. I wasn't particularly protective of them, like some people I've come across in the past have been. So I'd just quite happily send the recipes to people and they can make them themselves. Taking the bakes on adventure days meant that I didn't get fat! You burn the calories off so you get to eat the cake. So it was kind of guilt-free baking for me. Then last year, my mum passed away at the beginning of the year. I think that was the spur really for me to actually do a book on baking. I had thought about it in the past, but I didn't have a real reason to do it. I thought there's so many baking books out there, and why would I do one? But when I combined it with the fact that it was aimed at people going into the outdoors, and I could include some of my mum's recipes as well and dedicate it to her, that's what really sort of got me going with it. And obviously, it's quite an easy thing for me to do, in terms of already being a book designer, to actually put it all together. Joanna: I think you're right. There are family reasons, a lot of people hand down recipes. I know some of your mum's recipes are in there as well as your own. I just wanted to come back on the adventuring. So you mentioned the lakes, so for people listening, that's the Lake District in the UK. Can you also maybe comment on how— How has getting away from your desk and doing the adventuring helped your creative side? And how does being active play this really important part in your life now? Because it does seem like this is so important to you. Jane: Yes, I think it's just getting that balance right of spending time sedentary at your desk, and also spending time doing something really active, and especially getting outdoors when I sit inside all the time. My kids got a little bit bigger and went to secondary school, and I had a lot more time on my hands. Because I work for myself, I can manage my time and go out in the week when all of the busy places and the popular mountains are really quiet. So that was a really nice aspect of it. I've got up to Scotland, I do a lot in Wales, even went out to the Alps last year as well. So it's sort of really taken on a life of its own. I've got to meet loads and loads of lovely people as well. So it's been really nice. Joanna: I think that's really encouraging. Just so people know, you've got what, three kids? Jane: Yes. Joanna: So you're a busy working m

How might subscriptions help expand your author business ecosystem? What are some tips on encouraging readers to buy direct? Why is the future looking positive for authors in the creator economy? Michael Evans gives his thoughts. In the intro, marketing for multi-genre authors [Self Publishing Advice]; Same as Ever: Timeless lessons on risk, opportunity, and living a good life by Morgan Housel; Year of the Locust by Terry Hayes, and what we can learn from both of these books. Plus, join me and Joseph Michael for a free webinar on Using AI as an author, 5 Dec 2023. Click here to find out more. Today's show is sponsored by Ingram Spark, which I use to print and distribute my print-on-demand books to 40,000 retailers including independent bookstores, schools and universities, libraries, and more. It's your content—do more with it through IngramSpark.com. Michael Evans is the author of science fiction thrillers, as well as Subscriptions for Authors and Creator Economy for Authors. He's also the co-founder of Ream, a subscription platform that helps authors create a thriving paid membership for their readers. 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 the courage to try something new What subscriptions are and how authors can use them Who does well on Ream and other subscription-based platforms Creating incentives for readers to join subscription-based models Monetizing the idea of exclusivity and scarcity The importance of building trust with your audience Michael's optimism for the future of publishing You can find Michael at ReamStories.com and SubscriptionsForAuthors.com Transcript of Interview with Michael Evans Joanna: Michael Evans is the author of science fiction thrillers, as well as Subscriptions for Authors and Creator Economy for Authors. He's also the co-founder of Ream, a subscription platform that helps authors create a thriving paid membership for their readers. So welcome to the show, Michael. Michael: Thank you for having me. It's so wild, but really cool, to be on this end of the mic. I've been listening to you since the beginning. Joanna: Thank you so much for coming on. So first up— Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and publishing. Writing's been an instinct for me since the youngest age, where I've just loved storytelling, mainly through fanfiction. I didn't realize I was writing fanfiction at the time because I was writing it in journals. I was a little insecure about my writing — it was my journal.  I didn't start to think of myself as an author, didn't start to actually start to write my own worlds and stories, until I got into middle school. My parents had gotten divorced, and for me, just coping with what was a very disruptive time my life was writing. It was my escape. I had simultaneously become super passionate about technology in the future, but also disillusioned with it, and kind of felt like the answer to creating a better world wasn't just creating new technologies, but was instead like trying to figure out what is actually best for people. That's where stories came in. So I started writing, and I wrote for two years, between 13 and 15, very seriously religiously, and had kind of written two books by the end of that. I didn't like even think of it like in terms of publishing. That wasn't even a thought of mine. It was just for fun. But when I got to the end of the second book, I was like, maybe I could get this out in the world. My mom, she was like, let's see what's even possible. She looked up like self-publishing, and basically, your name came up. So she actually bought your book and gave it to me, and I read it. Then we discovered the Sterling & Stone guys, and they were great. That kind of got me into the world of like, oh, okay, I can do this. Then basically, in high school, I was like, okay, I'm gonna work a part time job during school, I'm gonna save up all my money. My mom, normally I would have had to spend money on getting a car and things like that, but my mom was like, I'll drive you to work. She was the most supportive person ever, like I love my mom. So she's like, okay, I'll drive you to work, you can have this job, so you can save up all of your money. And I was like, okay. So I did that, I worked as a pool attendant at a resort. I just put all of it into editing, cover design, we all know the expenses that come with being an author. I published my first book going into my sophomore year of high school. I guess I caught the bug, I fell in love, not only with obviously writing itself, but also the business of writing. I got the idea that maybe I could be a full time author. That actual adventure, I cannot even dive into full detail right now, but over the next few years I ended up publishing 12 books, I ended up getting super deep into KU, Facebook ads, Amazon ads, learning

How can you transition into being an author after a long-term career elsewhere? How can you adopt an attitude of service in order to build your network in an authentic manner? Patrick O'Donnell shares his tips. In the intro, Spotify subscribers in the US now have 15 hours of free audiobook listening [The Verge] — you can find most of my books there if you want to give them a try! Plus an update from 20BooksVegas, which will now be Author Nation; and signing my gold foil hardbacks of Writing the Shadow. In AI news, ChatGPT is now multi-modal, and can also be fine-tuned as GPTs and made into agents. You can try out Creative Writing with The Creative Penn, or Write Thrillers like J.F. Penn, trained on my books. Plus, join me and Joseph Michael for a free webinar on Using AI as an author, 5 Dec 2023. Click here to find out more. 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.  Patrick O'Donnell is a retired police sergeant with 25 years’ experience. He's now the author of nine books, including police procedurals and the Cops and Writers reference guides, as well as a podcaster, screenwriting technical consultant, and organizer of the Cop Camp Conference. 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 Becoming a writer after a significant first career Dos and don'ts of finding a mentor Being of service and volunteering with purpose Knowing when an author relationship clicks Writing entertainment vs. writing for therapy Cop Camp — What it is and why host it? Managing different energies in an author conference You can find Patrick and CopsandWriters.com. Transcript of Interview with Patrick O'Donnell Joanna: Patrick O'Donnell is a retired police sergeant with 25 years’ experience. He's now the author of nine books, including police procedurals and the Cops and Writers reference guides, as well as a podcaster, screenwriting technical consultant, and organizer of the Cop Camp Conference. So welcome back to the show, Patrick. Patrick: Well, thank you so much, Joanna. It's an honor and privilege to be on your show. Joanna: I'm excited to talk to you again. Now, you were last on the show in 2021, where we talked about your background in the police and also tips on writing authentic crime fiction. So we are not talking about that today. Patrick: Okay, good. Joanna: Exactly. We've done that already. People can come over to your Cops and Writers for that. Your second career is really taking off, and I wanted to start with this because, obviously, you were a police sergeant for 25 years. Then you decided not to retire, you decided to really go for it in your second career. So I wonder— What are your tips for people who want to be writers after they've had such a significant first career in a different industry? Patrick: Well, I'm a big fan of the saying, “Dig the well before you're thirsty.” I had the luxury of knowing when I was going to retire from law enforcement. My first day in the police academy was January 16, 1995, and I knew January 16 of 2000 that I was eligible to retire, and I did. I knew that I was going to do that pretty fairly early on because I didn't get into the police academy and become a cop until I was 30, which is a little bit on the older side. So you don't want to be too old doing police work. That's a young person's job. It's not an old guy like me job. So I knew that. I absolutely loved law enforcement, I loved what I did, I loved where I worked, but I knew the time was coming. So it was looming on the horizon. So a few years before I knew I was going to leave, I was thinking about what I wanted to do, or more importantly, what I didn't want to do. Law enforcement is very regimented. Lots of rules, lots of SOPs, and all that kind of good stuff, and I wanted freedom. I wanted freedom of work and freedom of when and where I work. With writing, there's still deadlines, and there's things you have to do, but there's a lot more flexibility and that had a huge appeal to me. So that was the precipice of that. I really enjoyed that idea. So as far as learning, that's ongoing. I believe if you're a writer, you should be a reader, and reading with purpose. So if you want to write sci-fi or post-apocalyptic, start reading some good books in that genre. You'll start to pick out tropes and how the author is doing what they're doing. You can buy courses, books, listen to podcasts, and get some mentors. A lot of it's on-the-job training. Hopefully, the more books you write, the better you get. Joanna: I think one of the difficult things for people who are later on in life is this feeling of, I've just climbed this ladder, and now you're telling me I've got to g

How can you shift your mindset from catalog sales to selling direct? How can you reframe the direct author business model to take advantage of creative possibilities for different kinds of products and long-term marketing? Russell Nohelty gives his tips in this interview. In the intro, Top 10 tips for indie authors [Clare Lydon]; 10 years lessons learned [SJ Pajonas], My timeline of being an author; Using AI tools for fact-checking [The Blue Garret]; Today's show is sponsored by Draft2Digital, where you can get free ebook formatting, free distribution to multiple stores, and a host of other benefits. Get your free Author Marketing Guide at draft2digital.com/penn Russell Nohelty is the USA Today bestselling author of fiction, graphic novels and comics, nonfiction, and books for authors, including This is NOT a Book: Musings on living a writerly life. His latest book is Direct Sales Mastery for Authors, co-written with Monica Leonelle, launching as this goes out on Kickstarter. 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 mindset shift of selling direct Catalog sales vs direct sales The benefits of a direct relationship to customers and reframing the more personal touch experience Creativity in campaigns and print possibilities with direct sales Direct book marketing Keeping a long-term perspective and the flywheel concept of an author business You can find Russell at RussellNohelty.com and his Kickstarter at WriterMBA.com/DSA Transcript of Interview with Russell Nohelty Joanna: Russell Nohelty is the USA Today bestselling author of fiction, graphic novels and comics, nonfiction, and books for authors, including This is NOT a Book: Musings on living a writerly life. His latest book is Direct Sales Mastery for Authors, co-written with Monica Leonelle, launching as this goes out on Kickstarter. So welcome to the show, Russell. Thank you so much for having me. It's been a career-long dream to be on this show because I've been listening to it for so long. So I'm very excited. Joanna: Oh, I'm super excited to talk to you. You're kind of one of my gurus at the moment. You and Monica are doing such a great job of educating people on this. But first up— Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and publishing. Russell: Sure. So I started my first creative business in 2004. I went out on my own as a freelance camera operator after graduating from college, and that didn't really work very well. It turns out, there's a lot of technical stuff you have to know about cameras and editing and all sorts of things. I was very good at visually seeing an image, but like doing all of the actual recording of video and such, it wasn't really what I truly loved. Then I moved to doing directing, and then I realized no one hired directors, they all wanted to direct their own stuff that they wrote. So I was like, well, I've read a bunch of the scripts that I've been on camera with, and they're all not very good. So I could probably do at least this good. That's kind of been the thing of my entire career. It was not saying I could do this really well, it's like, well, I can do at least this well. I had a bunch of publishing contracts, and they all went very badly. I found out that they were just putting my books on Ingram Spark and stuff, and I was like, I could do that. I don't know if I can release this book any better than these publishers, but I know for sure I can release them just as bad. So that's how it sort of was a career of going from photography, to directing, to writing movies and TV. Then I got into comics when the movies and TV thing didn't really work out. Then comics are really expensive, and they take forever, so I started writing books in the interim between comic projects. Then I fell in love with books, and then books turn into conventions, and conventions turned into me writing nonfiction books, and nonfiction books led to courses. It just kind of was an organic snowball effect that I come back and say, wow, I don't think I would ever tell any other human to do it that way, for sure. Joanna: I love that though. I mean, I did do a plan back in the day, but a lot of this career is just taking the next opportunity and sort of deciding to take the next step. So it's interesting, you mentioned you started off in visual creativity with camera operator and script writing and that kind of visual sense. Is that why you favored graphic novels and why you still do a lot of very visual projects? Do you think you're much more of a visual person than a lot of the text-based writers? Russell: I think that it just makes sense to me how visuals work. So yes, like my manager at the time told me I should do comics, and I was unconvinced until he handed me a whole stack of like new indie comics that were coming out at the time. I fell in love with them, and like it just immediate

How can using Pinterest more like a search engine help you sell more books? What are some of the ways to use Pinterest most effectively for book marketing? Trona Freeman gives her tips. In the intro, KDP announce an Invite-Only KDP Beta for Audiobooks; How to Double Down on Being Human: 5 Ways to Stand Out in an Age of AI; Creative Planning with Orna Ross; Pathfinders edited by JL Collins; Kickstarter fulfillment for Writing the Shadow; In-Person Conference Tips for Introverts and Highly Sensitive People. Today's show is sponsored by Ingram Spark, which I use to print and distribute my print-on-demand books wide to 40,000 retailers including independent bookstores, schools and universities, libraries, and more. It's your content—do more with it through IngramSpark.com. Trona Freeman specializes in Pinterest services and marketing for small business. She has a Master's in History of Art and lives in Scotland. 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 Pinterest and how can authors use it for book marketing Utilizing keywords and SEO for your books Integration between Pinterest and Shopify Recommended tools for scheduling on Pinterest How engaging should you be? Do you have to reply to comments? How AI will be incorporated into the future of Pinterest You can find Trona at services.ayelined.com Transcript of Interview with Trona Freeman Joanna: Trona Freeman specializes in Pinterest services and marketing for small business. She has a Master's in History of Art and lives in Scotland. So welcome to the show, Trona. Trona: Hello, thank you so much for having me. Joanna: Oh, I'm excited to talk about this. Before we get into it— Tell us a bit more about you and why you focus particularly on Pinterest. Trona: So I did my master's in history of art about 10 years ago now. Then I was going to do a PhD, but I fell pregnant with my son who's now nine. So I thought, I'm going to take something up that isn't too overwhelming, but will still keep my mind taken over, so I started blogging.  From that, I really fell in love with Pinterest and SEO, and I started learning more about it and helping other people use it. I started a newsletter, which then turned into my business, which I've had now for five years. I think it's just an incredible way to connect with people online. So these people are actually looking for you. You're not disrupting them on their social media or anywhere else, they're actively looking for you. So that's why I love it. Joanna: So it's really interesting, you know, Pinterest has been around for a long time, but social media has changed so much in the last decade. Like you mentioned your son is nine, I think social media has changed as much as your son has since he was born. What is Pinterest like now? And how can authors think about it as part of their marketing ecosystem? Trona: I think the best way to think about Pinterest is that it's actually more like a search engine than social media. Pinterest, themselves, describe it as a visual search and discovery engine. So people go there to search for visual imagery, but it's also connected to keywords, which are really important to help you get found on there. So it's like, if Google and Instagram had a baby, you kind of get Pinterest. So I think a lot of people still see it as social media, and there are still elements to it. So you can comment on pins, you can like pins, and so on, but in the end, it's actually a really powerful search engine. Joanna: So I guess the other thing there is you said people are looking for things. So I think about it as how it comes up in terms of, oh, if you're doing interior design, you can find really nice bathrooms on Pinterest. It's like we don't hear about it much in terms of book marketing anymore. So can you maybe go into some more detail in the different ways that authors could think about and use Pinterest? Trona: So I think even as a means to storyboard your work, like on a personal level you can use it. I recently read that Stranger Things writers used it to storyboard the whole series from the looks, the inspiration. That's how a lot of other people use it as well. But for you to attract people to you, you have to think about how people are searching for whatever you write. So if you're a nonfiction writer, people will search things like, “how to start writing,” “writing tips,” “writing prompts,” and so on. There's actually lots and lots on there.  Journaling is really huge on Pinterest as well, which I know a lot of authors use as a means to keep up their ideas. So that's a really good way to share how your story develops, but also to attract people to your website, which then can get email signups, sales, and just more eyes on your work in general. Joanna: Okay, so that's a nonfiction example. So let's talk a bit abo

How can you reinvigorate your writing process, breathe life into your backlist, and prepare your author business for the rollercoaster that is publishing? Tracy Cooper-Posey gives her tips. In the intro, Authors Guild results [The Hotsheet]; more Promo Stacks with Written Word Media; Amazon's robot [BBC]; Amazon's generative image AI for products [Venture Beat]; Shutterstock's new AI image option; Writing the Shadow Kickstarter finishes (thank you!), and on pre-order. Plus, join my Patreon Community / TheCreativePenn and get AI tutorials plus other benefits. 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.  Tracy Cooper-Posey is the multi-award-winning author of over 200 romance novels. Today, we're talking about her first non-fiction book for authors, The Productive Indie Fiction Writer: Strategies for Writing More, Earning More, and Living Well. 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 Changing as a writer and reinvigorating writing habits with a new genre Deciding what to focus on when there seems to be limitless options How a backlist underpins an indie author business Deciding when to update books or retire books Stash the cash, stash the books, stash the email list Tips for dealing with discouragement Utilizing BookFunnel promotions as a discovery tool You can find Tracy at StoriesRulePress.com Transcript of Interview with Tracy Cooper-Posey Joanna: Tracy Cooper-Posey is the multi-award-winning author of over 200 romance novels. Today, we're talking about her first non-fiction book for authors, The Productive Indie Fiction Writer: Strategies for Writing More, Earning More, and Living Well. So welcome to the show, Tracy. Tracy: Thanks, Joanna. It's absolutely fabulous to be here. Joanna: Oh, it is. And of course, you and I met years ago now in Oregon. I don't even know what year it was. Tracy: I have forgotten too. I think 2017, or something like that. Joanna: Something like that, so we've known each other a while. But first up— Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and publishing. Tracy: Well, honestly, the first thing I wrote was the unofficial sequel to Star Wars when I was in high school in the late 1970s. My English teacher read it, she found it, told me to write something original, so I did. I kept on scribbling after that, but I hid it from everyone because, well, I came from a working-class Australian family who thought a reliable job after high school should be the sum total of my ambitions. I was basically in my mid-30s and a single mum before I took writing seriously and started aiming for publication. I sold my first two books in one week in 1999. After that, because traditional publishing was the only option back then, I had 35 books traditionally published. It's such a soul-destroying industry, I ended up angry and frustrated most of the time. I switched to indie publishing in 2011. It was like thank god, there is an alternative. Now I have more than 200 titles under three different pen names, spanning romance, science fiction, fantasy, historical suspense, and a lot of stuff in between. And now, of course, non-fiction, The Productive Indie Fiction Writer book, and most recently, I've done a memoir. Joanna: Oh, wait, I didn't know about the memoir. I just have to ask about that, then we'll come back to the other stuff, because you've had some health issues the last year or so. Tracy: Yes. Joanna: And obviously, sometimes this is when we do write this kind of work. What is that memoir about? Tracy: Well, obviously, yes, it's a cancer memoir because I've been dealing with cancer. It's called Cancer Curated, and it literally came about because I have readers that were looking for my next book when I was dealing with the cancer. We ended up updating people in public on Facebook and stuff like that, letting readers know about what my health status was all the way through the cancer treatments and stuff like that. There was a lot of stuff that didn't hit the public announcements, the public updates. So basically, the book is everything that happened up to the first of the public updates, and everything that happened in between. So it's really a story of my journey through the cancer and exactly what I thought about it, exactly what I thought about the consequences of the cancer, which in some ways are very unexpected. Especially, like getting older, you sort of age overnight with cancer, which for some people, including me, because of my huge vanity, is a bit of an issue. So yes, it was the book that I sort of wanted to write because it filled in all the gaps. I was getting a lot of feedback from people with the public updates say

How do you keep up with everything you need to do as your author business grows? How do you decide what to focus on as the industry changes — and you change, too? Patricia McLinn discusses her challenges with a big backlist of books and a mature indie author business. In the intro, Self-publishing's ongoing evolution [Publishers Weekly]; Audiobooks on Spotify and how my listening behavior is changing [FindawayVoices]; Author ecosystems, and an overview on the Kickstart your book sales podcast. Plus, How to double down on being human: 5 ways to stand out in an age of AI; Writing the Shadow: Turn Your Inner Darkness Into Words; Let your dark horse run; Halloween Horror Bundle including Catacomb; The Wrong Planet autism book by Holger Nils Pohl; Join the community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn 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 Scrivener, ProWritingAid will help you improve your book before you send it to an editor, agent or publisher. Check it out for free or get 25% off the premium edition at www.ProWritingAid.com/joanna Patricia McLinn is the award-winning and multi-USA Today bestselling author of over 60 books across mystery, contemporary and historical romance, women's fiction, and nonfiction. 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 Dealing with difficulties of changing business technology How to re-sane in a long-term author career Streamlining, outsourcing, and letting go The change in social media platforms over the past decade AI and its effect on discoverability What retirement may look like for an author You can find Patricia at PatriciaMcLinn.com Transcript of Interview with Patricia McLinn Joanna: Patricia McLinn is the award-winning and multi-USA Today bestselling author of over 60 books across mystery, contemporary and historical romance, women's fiction, and nonfiction. Today we're talking about the challenges of a long-term career and how to re-sane yourself. So welcome back to the show, Pat. Patricia: It's wonderful to be here with you, Jo. Thank you. Joanna: Oh, I'm excited to talk about this. You were last on the show in May 2021, talking about discovery writing and sustaining a long-term writing career. So we're going to jump straight into the topic today, and I'll link to that interview in the show notes. Basically, you emailed me, and I am quoting from your email, you said you've had, “Cascading failures and issues in business technology and infrastructure.” “It has not been fun. It has cost a lot.” And we want to talk about the difficulties today. So first up, tell us about those difficulties. Patricia: Well, some of them are things that everybody has experienced. Like a little over a year ago, I had just finished redoing the Amazon categories for all of my books, and you know, there are 65 different titles, but there's paperback and there's large print. There are a lot of, as people say, products, more than the titles of the book, so about 200. I had just finished that when the word came out that Amazon had changed the categories. Now, as we know now from a year looking back, that was the first of about three changes. So I had all that work that was wasted, which was very frustrating. I have not done anything else with those categories since then because I've been occupied with other things. I was working on AI audio, so I was doing some AI audio on Google Play with romances that were not otherwise ever going to be in audio. So that was occupying a lot of my time last fall. Then I also had ActiveCampaign as my newsletter server, and I had been with them for six years. I was frustrated and felt that I was never getting from it what it could do. I could see all this functionality, but boy, it just did not mesh with me. So I decided, okay, I am not going to be defeated, I will not give up. So I went out and found somebody who was an expert and spoke author, and he spent the month of January straightening out my ActiveCampaign, getting it where it should be, doing the things that I had sort of piecemeal done—piecemeal is going to be a theme, I think, in this conversation—that I had done. It cost a couple thousand dollars, and a lot of time and effort, mine as well as his, but we had that set. Then in mid-March, ActiveCampaign, which is already expensive, sent me an email and said, “We're gonna raise your rate by more than 33%.” And I said, oh, no, you're not. It was what had finally pushed me over the edge. And, yes, there were some costs in what I had had him do and some time, but what I should have done, and this is also going to be a theme, is I should have listened to my gut. Six years of trying to get ActiveCampaign to work for me the way I felt it sho

What is soul of place or genius loci and how can you write it in a more immersive way in your books? How can you discover it closer to home, as well as write real settings more authentically, and invent it for your fiction? Linda Lappin gives some tips in this interview. In the intro, 140 Book Marketing Ideas from BookBub; JA Konrath on AI and The Authors Guild. Plus, Writing the Shadow: Turn Your Inner Darkness Into Words, and I'm on lots of podcasts: The Rebel Author Podcast, Stark Reflections on Writing and Publishing; How Do You Write?; The Secret Library; Self-Publishing Show; Hybrid Author Podcast; Self-Publishing Advice Podcast; Novel Marketing Podcast. For a great ebook deal, check out the Halloween Storybundle Today's show is sponsored by Draft2Digital, where you can get free ebook formatting, free distribution to multiple stores, and a host of other benefits. Get your free Author Marketing Guide at draft2digital.com/penn Linda Lappin is the award-winning author of historical fiction and mystery, as well as The Soul of Place: A Creative Writing Workbook: Ideas and Exercises for Conjuring the Genius Loci. 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 soul of place or genius loci? How to know when you feel the soul of place Using soul of place across genres Noticing your local environment in a different light The importance of sensory detail Experiencing sacred places Writing characters' homes to create more personal stories Writing as an outsider You can find Linda at LindaLappin.net. Transcript of Interview with Linda Lappin Joanna: Linda Lappin is the award-winning author of historical fiction and mystery, as well as The Soul of Place: A Creative Writing Workbook: Ideas and Exercises for Conjuring the Genius Loci, which we're talking about today. So welcome to the show, Linda. Linda: Thank you. Joanna: Oh, I'm excited to talk to you about this topic. But first up— Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and publishing. Linda: I'm an American author based in Italy, and I've always written ever since I was a small child. I did a creative writing minor with an English major at university. Then I went on to the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop to do a graduate degree MFA in fiction, poetry, and also, literary translation. Thanks to the literary translation, I was able to get a Fulbright grant to Italy to participate in a translation workshop, and I managed to stay on here. It was sort of an interesting thing because when I was in university, I was writing primarily poetry, but after I moved abroad to Italy, I kind of gave up writing for five years because I was really focusing on learning the language and translating. When I started writing again, it was prose and short stories, which then got longer and longer and became novels. I've also been teaching. I taught 39 years in Italian universities as a teacher of English Language and Literature. Joanna: So you said there, 39 years. So how long have you been in Italy? Linda: 40 years. Joanna: Oh, wow. That's crazy. Do you consider yourself Italian now? Because you must have lived in Italy longer than the US. Linda: No. I have lived here longer than I lived in the US because I was only about 25 when I left, but your roots sort of stay with you, which is also part of the soul of place. They do stay with you. So I'm perfectly bilingual, my husband is Italian, we speak in a combination of English and Italian, but I still feel very American. Joanna: That is interesting. I'm just fascinated with place, and I know people listening are too. Where in the U.S. do you come from? And where are you living in Italy? Linda: Well, I originally come from Kingsport, Tennessee. My parents were from the Chicago area. I was living in Iowa City before I moved to Italy. Now, I'm in Rome. Actually, I have a second home in a small village near Rome, and so we go back and forth. Especially during the pandemic, we've been in our second home a lot. So back and forth, Rome and a small village called Vitorchiano. Joanna: Wow. Okay, so this actually gives me much more of an insight into why you wrote this book in the first place. Tennessee, Rome, Chicago, Iowa — I've been to Chicago—I've been to Rome many times, but these places all have a very specific sense of place, which is kind of what we're talking about. Why don't we get into the book, and you pronounce this differently, but— What do you mean by genius loci or soul of place? Linda: Well, most people think of soul of place as being a synonym for sense of place, meaning the atmosphere of a place or a locale, but the term genius loci, or as I pronounce it with the Italian, genius loci, refers to something much more specific and harkens back to ancient Rome. The ancient Romans, as well as Greeks, and also various other populations around the world in different er

How can you let your creative dark horse run? What is the Shadow — and why explore your Shadow side? This episode features excerpted chapters from the audiobook of Writing the Shadow: Turn Your Inner Darkness Into Words, written and narrated by Joanna Penn, available on Kickstarter until 25 October 2023: www.TheCreativePenn.com/shadowbook (link will redirect if you're reading/listening in the future.) 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. Let your dark horse run Introduction: What is the Shadow? Why explore your Shadow side? Let your dark horse run Although much has changed over the last two thousand years, human nature remains the same. Around 370 BC, the Greek philosopher Plato composed The Phaedrus, which includes an allegory of a chariot that has helped me frame the Shadow. Perhaps it will help you, too. Imagine a Roman chariot drawn by two horses — a white horse and a dark horse. I am the Charioteer, and I am in the race of my life. The white horse represents my rational self, the one society sees. My good behaviour, my industry, my hard work, my productivity, my scrubbed-clean, well-mannered good girl self.  She helps others. She’s a peacemaker. She doesn’t like conflict. She says the right things, reads the right books. She needs to be liked. My white horse trots delicately along paved roads, aware of the fences and boundaries, never needing to cross them, remaining within the lines drawn by others. My dark horse is a wild animal, wreathed in smoke and ash and flame.  She gallops across wide open spaces, leaps obstacles, smashes through fences, and avoids the paved and cornered world.  She runs free and will destroy herself, rather than be caged. If both horses run together in the same direction, I can fly along, whooping in delight at the speed and power. But if they become unbalanced, the chariot begins to wobble.  When my dark horse stumbles, my white horse drives us hard along the highway, never stopping for rest.  But if she dominates for too long, my dark horse rears up and runs out of control, driving us towards the cliff edge. My white horse has often been stronger.  I’ve always worked hard, got good grades, behaved well, earned enough money to support myself, paid my taxes early.  But the more I let my white horse dominate, the more my dark one rears up unexpectedly and takes over until she exhausts herself with all the things that nice girls shouldn’t do.  When I became a writer, these two horses drove me once more.  My white horse writes non-fiction, helps others, wants to be useful, and responsibly manages a professional business. I’m grateful to have her! My dark horse writes stories that tap into untamed darkness.  I’ve tried to muzzle her, strap her down, regulate her chaos.  But she rears her head, shakes her mane, stamps her hooves, paws the dirt.  Let me run. Questions: What are the key aspects of your white horse?  What are the key aspects of your dark horse? What happens when one or the other becomes dominant? How could you let your dark horse run creatively? How does it make you feel to consider that prospect? 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 Shad

How can you establish a creative routine that enables you to write the books you want to write without burning out? How can you balance a sustainable work ethic as an author as well as spending time away from the desk. LA Witt talks about her strategies. In the intro, Spotify introduces 15 hours of audiobooks for premium subscribers in limited countries [FindawayVoices]; Spotify auto-translates podcasts into other languages in the host's voice [Spotify]; Amazon invested in Anthropic, which includes generative text model, Claude [The Verge]; ChatGPT goes multi-modal [OpenAI]; DALL-E 3 launching which includes text with images [OpenAI] Writing the Shadow: Turn Your Inner Darkness Into Words is now live! I'm also discussing the book, selling direct and other things on the Everyday Spirituality Podcast; Two Indie Authors; Becoming an international bestselling author; Plus, check out the Halloween Storybundle and Becca Syme's Energy Pennies Kickstarter. This podcast is sponsored by Written Word Media, which makes book marketing a breeze by offering quick, easy and effective ways for authors to promote their books. You can also subscribe to the Written Word Media email newsletter for book marketing tips. L.A. Witt is the author of nearly 200 romance novels and novellas, and today we're talking about her book for authors, Writing Faster for the Win. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. Show Notes Writing in multiple subgenres Tips for utilizing your space and time for writing effectively Discovering your sustainable word count Using brackets and placeholders to write faster Trusting your story intuition The toll burnout takes on your health and tips to avoid it Managing a massive backlist and multiple streams of income Switching from KU to wide and how to ramp up sales You can find L.A. at GallagherWitt.com or on Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook. Transcript of Interview with L.A. Witt Joanna: L.A. Witt is the author of nearly 200 romance novels and novellas, and today we're talking about her book for authors, Writing Faster for the Win. So welcome to the show, Lori. LA: Thanks for having me. Joanna: It's great to have you on the show. So first up— Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and publishing. LA: I mean, I'm kind of the cliche writer who's been writing since I could hold a pen up right. I always wanted to write stories when I was a kid and was learning for years and years. Then I kind of fell backwards into writing romance and into publishing because my husband was in the military, we got sent to Japan, and there are no jobs there. I couldn't work. I said, what am I going to do? And he said, well, when we got married, you said you always wanted to take some time off and try writing full time—like six months, twelve months to see if I could pull it off—and he said, now you have three years. Joanna: No pressure! LA: But that was the deal. He said, I have three years, don't worry about getting a job, don't worry about finding some kind of other hustle. He said, just focus on writing. We agreed that if I could get a part-time income going that I didn't have to get a full-time job when we went back to the US. I mean, I had just gotten out of nine years of customer service, so that was some serious motivation.  It happened that NaNoWriMo was like right around that time. I think we moved in October, so NaNoWriMo was the next month. I just said, okay, well, I'm going to do NaNoWriMo to get into the groove. And I thought, well, if I'm going to plot something in two weeks, a romance is probably—I don't want to say simpler, as in like, oh, they're just simple, ridiculous—but they are simpler than epic fantasy, which is what I was writing at the time. So I threw one together and wrote it, and it was like, this is actually a lot of fun, I'm going to do it again. That was 2008, and it just never stopped. Joanna: Wow. Okay, so that's interesting. You're right about epic fantasy. Obviously, they're much longer books, but also multiple characters.  Do you now write epic fantasy? Or have you stuck with romance? LA: I've stuck with romance and also romantic suspense, but I do still write fantasy. I have one that I'm working on on the side, it's just not where I want it to be yet. But I really enjoyed writing romance. Like when I got into it, I was like, this is actually a lot of fun. Then I, again, stumbled into writing gay romance, and that turned out to be even more fun. So I just said, well, I'm gonna keep doing this. 15 years and 200 books later… Joanna: Wow. How many subgenres in romance do you write in? So you mentioned there the gay romance, but what else do you have? LA: I've written suspense, science fiction, steampunk. I did a modern retelling of The Little Mermaid. I've kind of gone all over the place. I, again, sort of accidentally started writing

As much as we try to plan for things, sometimes life happens and we have to adapt to a new situation. Jessie Kwak talks about adapting to life as a freelance writer and author after being injured, and her tips for managing work and energy. In the intro, I mention Accessibility for All, the interview I did with Jeff Adams about how we can make our content more accessible to people with injuries and disabilities. You can also check out KWL Podcast episode on Accessibility for Authors. Plus, Writing the Shadow: Turn Your Inner Darkness Into Words is launching soon on Kickstarter, register your interest in the launch here. 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.  Jessie Kwak is the author of gangster sci-fi supernatural thrillers and nonfiction for creatives. She's also a ghostwriter and freelance marketing copywriter, and her books include From Big Idea to Book and From Chaos to Creativity. 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 Adapting to changing circumstances When medical situations affect your author business How changing appearances affects us at a deeper level The importance of accessibility tools for authors Prioritizing your use of energy when you only have a finite amount Ways to future-proof your business Healthcare costs for freelancers The Author Alchemy Summit hosted by Jessie Kwak You can find Jessie at JessieKwak.com and her upcoming summit at AuthorAlchemySummit.com. Transcript of Interview with Jessie Kwak Joanna: Jessie Kwak is the author of gangster sci-fi supernatural thrillers and nonfiction for creatives. She's also a ghostwriter and freelance marketing copywriter, and her books include From Big Idea to Book and From Chaos to Creativity. So welcome back to the show, Jessie. Jessie: Thank you for having me. Joanna: It's good to talk to you again. Now, you were last on the show in 2022, and this is just over a year later. So we're gonna jump straight into the topic today, which is adapting to change even when it's outside of your control. Tell us what happened to you back in July? Jessie: It's been kind of a wild few months. Back in July, I was selling books at a street fair with my friend Mark, and as we were leaving the fair, the car in front of us open fired into the street, and a bullet ricocheted through the windshield and into my eye. So fortunately, we were super close to the hospital, so Mark was able to get me there really quick. For a writer, he was an amazing getaway driver. Since then, I have had a couple of surgeries to reconstruct the eye and remove the bullet fragment, and it's been a lot of healing since then. I'm on a really good trajectory. My energy is mostly back and my right eye I can see perfectly well out of now, that was a little touch and go for a minute. But yeah, it brought everything to a screeching halt. We'll just say that. Joanna: I'm on your Facebook page, and your husband put a thing up, and it was so shocking. I know, obviously, you're used to telling the story now. But there are people listening who are like, what you got shot? And being in England, this is not very usual. I mean, we hear the news about America, and there always seems to be a lot of shooting, but this is a really big deal over here. It's like holy crap, that is just crazy. I mean, so it's a couple of months now, and there's healing and everything, but the immediate shock and injury and trauma of this. Did everything stop in your life? Jessie: Yeah, of course. I am always a go-go-go person, so it took me a minute to internalize that I wasn't going to be able to go, go, go. I do a monthly writers' social at my house, and that was coming up on that Tuesday, this was a Saturday, and I remember being like, “Oh, this is going to be a crazy story to tell everyone on Tuesday.” Then my husband's like, “You're not hosting a social in a few days, what are you thinking? We have to cancel that.” And I was like, oh, you're right, I'm going to have to cancel a lot of things. So it just took a while for that to sink in. Joanna: And then of course, you're a freelance writer and an author, and your sight is a necessary part of this. I think this really freaked me out big time because I do have some risk factors for macular degeneration. So I thought a lot about what would happen if I lose my sight suddenly because that's kind of how it how it happens. How did you deal with the immediate effect of thinking, ‘how is this going to affect my business?' Jessie: Yeah, well, so I have actually been dictating for quite a few years. So that's a big part of my writing process now. I was like, okay, I can keep dictating things. Edit

How can you create a high-quality photo book and publish it on Kickstarter? How do you market a beautiful, high-value book? Jeremy Bassetti talks about his photo book project, Hill of the Skull. In the intro, Slow release book strategies [ALLi]; Seth Godin on how he is using ChatGPT; Consultants using AI worked faster and produced higher quality results [Ethan Mollick]; DALL-E includes text and consistent characters [OpenAI, Examples on X]; More authors suing OpenAI [The Verge]. Plus, Writing the Shadow Kickstarter; Gold cover video; Wing of an Angel Kickstarter; Pics of Norway on Instagram @jfpennauthor Today's show is sponsored by Ingram Spark, which I use to print and distribute my print-on-demand books to 40,000 retailers including independent bookstores, schools and universities, libraries, and more. It's your content—do more with it through IngramSpark.com. Jeremy Bassetti is a travel writer, editor, teacher, and author of historical fiction, as well as the host of the Travel Writing World Podcast. His latest project is The Hill of the Skull: A Photobook Memoir, launching on Kickstarter. 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 Tips for capturing travel experiences for later reference Legal and ethical concerns in publishing photos of people The multilayered editing process of a photo book Sourcing a printer for high-quality books Adding different levels and products to a Kickstarter campaign Why Kickstarter vs. other publishing methods The importance of marketing You can find Jeremy at JeremyBassetti.com, his podcast at TravelWritingWorld.com, and his Kickstarter here. Transcript of Interview with Jeremy Bassetti Joanna: Jeremy Bassetti is a travel writer, editor, teacher, and author of historical fiction, as well as the host of the Travel Writing World Podcast. His latest project is The Hill of the Skull: A Photobook Memoir, launching on Kickstarter. So welcome back to the show, Jeremy. Jeremy: Thanks for having me. It's good to hear your voice again. Joanna: Absolutely. Now, you were on the show talking about the wider aspects of travel writing in September 2021. So we're gonna just jump straight into your new project today. The tagline for The Hill of the Skull is — “A professor visits a sacred mountain in Bolivia and gets pulled into a world of ritual” — which sounds super cool. Tell us about the trip that inspired the book. Jeremy: So in, I guess, the fall of 2022, I went on sabbatical from my work, I'm a professor by day. Part of the mission for me during my sabbatical was to do research on mountain cultures, and you know, how people around the world think about mountains. Leading up to that trip, I read from Victoria Preston, somebody who I know you've spoken to before about pilgrimages. I read in her book many years before that something about a community and a pilgrimage in the Bolivian Andes, in some kind of remote region in a town that many people haven't heard of. So I made it kind of my mission to go to this town during this pilgrimage to see what was going on there and to do research. The name of the town is called Quillacollo, and it's not a small town, but it's a town that many people haven't heard of.  There's this kind of incredible festival there every August. On the surface, it's to celebrate the ascension of the Virgin Mary, but when you see what's going on, in terms of the rituals and the ceremonies around this kind of sacred hill, you can see that there's this incredible fusion of native Andean ideas and traditions and rituals blended and fused with Catholic. So you have this kind of fusion of pagan and Catholic practices happening during this pilgrimage. It's quite incredible. So that was the motivation for me to go to this corner of the world. Joanna: I mean, it sounds very cool. But Bolivia, what's your attraction to South America? Have you traveled there before? Because, obviously, there are pagan and Catholic rituals all over the world. Why Bolivia? Jeremy: Well, frankly, I had never been to South America. I'd studied about colonial Latin America and Bolivia in grad school, especially around silver, and Bolivia is the place when you're talking about silver during the colonial era. So it's always kind of been on my radar. This place in particular was just so fascinating to me because, well, frankly, I'd never heard of it. There's this big celebration, there's a lot going on, there was just something that was kind of magical that pulled me in that direction. I wanted to go far field. It was my sabbatical, so I wanted to go someplace that would be challenging for me to visit and something that would kind of tie into my larger research interests, which involves looking at the ideas of mountains around the world. So, Bolivia, of course, is like a mountainous region, right? The city that I visited, Quillacollo, by no

In this solo episode, I talk about my lessons learned from 12 years as a full-time author entrepreneur. You can read/listen to previous updates at TheCreativePenn.com/timeline. In the intro, Finding readers [ALLi blog]; Writing the Shadow Kickstarter. 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 Scrivener, ProWritingAid will help you improve your book before you send it to an editor, agent or publisher. Check it out for free or get 25% off the premium edition at www.ProWritingAid.com/joanna Joanna Penn writes non-fiction for authors and is an award-nominated, 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. Show Notes Memoir is one of the hardest and most rewarding genres Disruption is inevitable. If you don't disrupt yourself, you will be disrupted. Disrupting my creative process with generative AI tools Disrupting my publishing and marketing process with Kickstarter and Shopify How much do I rely on Amazon for book sales and total business income? You can support the podcast on Patreon.com/thecreativepenn and get a lot more behind-the-scenes business and AI insights. You can sign up for my Author Blueprint here. You can buy my books for authors at www.CreativePennBooks.com and my fiction and memoir at www.JFPennBooks.com. Sign up for my next Kickstarter here: Writing the Shadow: Turn Your Inner Darkness Into Words. Lessons Learned from 12 Years as an Author Entrepreneur Twelve years ago, in Sept 2011, I left my day job to become a full-time author-entrepreneur. Every year since I have reflected on the journey and what I learn along the way. My challenges change and grow along with the business and you will likely be at a different stage, but I hope that you find my lessons learned useful along your own author path. You can read all my lessons learned from previous years on my timeline so far – and remember, just like everyone else, I started out by writing my first book with no audience! But with time and continued effort, everything is possible. Lesson 1: Memoir is one of the hardest and most rewarding genres I've been flirting with the idea of writing memoir for years. I've done many interviews on it (linked here), and I have reams of more personal writing in my journals and also in various draft Scrivener projects. I have shared personal anecdotes in all my non-fiction books, but the closest I've come before to memoir-ish writing is The Successful Author Mindset, which is a very personal book in many ways. But Pilgrimage: Lessons Learned from Solo Walking Three Ancient Ways is my first true memoir, combined with some practical lessons for solo walking, and tips for tackling multi-day pilgrimage walks. That book was years in the making, and the draft was around 100K, so I cut over 50% of it in the end (as I discussed more with Marion Roach Smith in a recent interview). I was so scared of publishing it and when I was about to hit Launch on the Kickstarter back in February, my heart was hammering. I was scared of judgment, I was scared of being ‘seen,' and also scared that no one would buy it, as it didn't fit with either of my brands and existing body of work. But I am so glad I gave Pilgrimage the time it needed — the years of preparation, the years of writing, and also launching it in a way that honored the book, as well as the chance to make the physical product so beautiful. It's been transformational to write and marks a new focus for my writing. It released me so I could finally write my ‘shadow' book which I've been talking about for years. Writing the Shadow: Turn Your Inner Darkness Into Words is with my editor and will launch on Kickstarter on 9 October — you can sign up for the pre-launch here. It also made far more money than I expected. The Pilgrimage Kickstarter made £25,771 (around US$32K) and I've sold 1350 copies across all the stores so far (Mar -August 2023). It's an evergreen book so that's just the beginning. The special hardback with color photos is selling well direct from my store, and given the title, you either know you want it, or it's not for you. This makes advertising it that much easier and cheaper, especially as it's not a ‘popular' genre crowded with advertisers. Writing this memoir has been rewarding creatively, emotionally, and also financially. If you have a book of your heart, a book you know only you can write, whatever the genre — please make the time to write it. You never know how it will turn out. Lesson 2: Disruption is inevitable. If you don't disrupt yourself, you wil