The Creative Penn Podcast For Writers

Can book marketing really be gentle, sustainable — and even enjoyable? Sarah Santacroce talks about how to reframe marketing and gives ideas for marketing your books. In the intro, Kindle Vella launches in the US [The Next Web]; A UK report calls for a reset in music streaming revenues to ensure fairer pay for artists [BBC] and how it relates to authors and publishing [The Bookseller]; are you in a mid-year pandemic slump? and a wet adventure walk [Books and Travel] This podcast is sponsored by Kobo Writing Life, which helps authors self-publish and reach readers in global markets through the Kobo eco-system. You can also subscribe to the Kobo Writing Life podcast for interviews with successful indie authors.  Sarah Santacroce is the author of The Gentle Marketing Revolution: A Radical Business Approach to Getting New Clients with Integrity and Kindness. She's also a business coach, podcaster, LinkedIn specialist, and the founder of The Gentle Business Revolution. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. Show Notes How a breakdown led to a breakthrough What does ‘gentle’ mean when it comes to marketing? Why client avatars are overrated Building a brand around yourself so that when you pivot you can take your audience with you Making a book launch about the message, not about you, the author Lessons learned from a Kickstarter book launch Pitching podcasters You can find Sarah Santacroce at SarahSantacroce.com and on Twitter @sarahsantacroce Transcript of interview with Sarah Santacroce Joanna: Sarah Santacroce is the author of The Gentle Marketing Revolution: A Radical Business Approach to Getting New Clients with Integrity and Kindness. She's also a business coach, podcaster, LinkedIn specialist, and the founder of The Gentle Business Revolution. Welcome, Sarah. Sarah: Hi, Joanna. Thanks so much for having me. This is fun. Joanna: Tell us a bit more about you and your background in business and writing, and also where you are in the world as I think people would find that interesting. Sarah: Off recording, we said we're both Europeans, but I guess that's not so completely true for both of us because I'm in Switzerland and we're not part of the European Union and England is a whole other story! I born and raised in Switzerland. That's where I am based now. Still, we did a little exchange in California between 2006 and 2010, and that's where I started my business. I first got into social media in general, and then we came back to Switzerland in 2010, that was still the ice age regarding social media in Switzerland. People were maybe on Facebook, but just about started. So when I came and thought, oh, I'm going to help businesses with their social media strategy, I quickly realized never mind strategy, they don't even understand what social media is. And so I had to pivot into training and then focus mainly on LinkedIn, and that's what I've done the last 10 or so years. I created an online LinkedIn consulting business. A bit more than two years ago, I had this breakdown that led to a breakthrough, how they often go, and really started realizing I can't do this anymore, this whole online marketing thing. Something is just wrong and nobody's addressing it. Am I the only one feeling that way? That's where The Gentle Business Revolution was born and then led me to write this book about gentle marketing. Joanna: Can we explore that a bit more? You mentioned the word breakdown, you said everything felt wrong. I know many authors don't like marketing, but there's also a lot of hype-y marketing in the author space. Tell us a bit more about that process of feeling because I know authors feel it too. How did you know things were wrong or you were feeling it was wrong? Sarah: Through my work, mainly with clients in the LinkedIn space, but they were all online entrepreneurs. I heard it over and over again, this phrase, ‘I hate marketing. I love what I do.' A lot of my clients are in the service-oriented business, so they love coaching. They love creating transformations but marketing their business, they hated that. I think for a lot of authors, that's kind of similar. It's like, yeah, we loved writing our book, but now we have to market it and market it the way the gurus tell us, oh my God, that's just another story! I really felt an ever-growing anxiety when it came to marketing and I started realizing that the anxiety is two-fold. On one hand, there is anxiety from us, the entrepreneurs who are told to market in a certain way, because when you go online there's millions and millions of things that tell you how you should be marketing. So that creates anxieties for entrepreneurs, but there's also anxiety on the receiving end. When I used to open my email inbox and there was all these headlines, like, you know, ‘Have you created your seven-figure business yet? If not, what are you

How can co-creating with AI tools enhance your writing process — and make it more fun? Shane Neeley talks about his AI-augmented writing and visual art creations. This futurist show is sponsored by my Patrons at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn. If you find it useful and you don't want to support every month, you could Buy Me A Coffee (as I drink a lot of it!). Shane Neeley is a data scientist and software engineer. He's also the author of AI Art – Poetry and Stone Age Code: From Monkey Business to AI. 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 Shane's background in bioengineering and programmingHow co-creating with AI is fun and brings a different spark to creativityThe co-creation process with AI writing and image toolsTips for prompt engineering and how to change your mindset around AIWhy it's important to make art with technologyAI-augmented creativity and how we can work with AI tools You can find Shane Neeley at ShaneNeeley.com and on Twitter @chimpsarehungry Transcript of Interview with Shane Neeley Joanna: Shane Neeley is a data scientist and software engineer. He's also the author of AI Art – Poetry and Stone Age Code: From Monkey Business to AI. Welcome, Shane. Shane: Hey, Joanna. So happy to be here. Joanna: I'm excited to talk to you. So, first up, tell us a bit about how you went from lab scientist to programmer and then author. How does your biological background help you to understand AI? Shane: I worked in laboratories after my undergrad for several years, as one does, looking for stem cells in monkey knee cartilage, engineering new viruses to inject into monkeys, various radioactive things and inhaling formaldehyde, and all of that. I eventually thought, ‘Yuck. I don't want to do this anymore.' I joined a lab that had a lot of data, because they were doing genetic sequencing, and the boss was using an old programming language from the '90s in some scripts, and I was able to upgrade some of his scripts into some more modern Python programs. He was super happy with that, so he had me, instead of doing all the monkey procedures and virus work, he had me sit down and program, and help the lab out with that. So that's how I got started and found out being a coder was a much more preferable job for me. And I've been doing AI writing in the last year, and it's been amazing. It's been, for an engineer biologist like myself, during the pandemic, pretty much exactly when it started was when I had some extra time to become more creative. But I wanted to use the angle of my skills as a programmer in order to do that. And in my day job right now, I'm at a cancer research search engine. We rank the various documents for clinical trials and publications on cancer treatments. And so we have millions of documents of language. We built a search engine so that we could rank the most relevant ones for a patient, the most quality ones at the top of a search, obviously, like Google. You want the best things to come up first. I'm in charge of AI and machine learning at that company. I spent a lot of time in natural language processing (NLP), and a couple years ago, going to conferences and finding out about transformers. And specifically, we use a lot of the BERT model for language understanding, which I want to get back to with AI writing. When I had some extra time on my hands, I was able to use some of these same platforms I use to do the language generation part. And there was a total spark when I started generating language that from a robot that I thought was hilarious. That became my first two books that I wrote and published this year. A lot, thanks to people like yourself in the self-publishing community as well, that showed me how it's possible to, even with a day job, to manage all of these things, and write books and get books out and distributed across the world. So using my skills, and then learning from the self-publishing community, I did some AI writing. Joanna: That's fantastic. You mentioned a few things there, which were awesome. You said you were looking to be more creative, and you used the word ‘spark,' and also the word ‘hilarious,' when it comes to writing with what we're calling robots, but this is all software, right? We're not having the classic big robot with, holding a pen. We're talking about software. I feel like this is something I want to emphasize, is that this is fun. I'm now using this tool, Sudowrite, and I'm just giggling away at what it comes up with. And seriously, in the last decade of writing, I have not been giggling as a writer. Now I spend a lot of time laughing. [Check out the interview on Sudowrite here.] Can you talk about the fun side, the spark, and how you use AI to help you write the book? Shane: I'm glad you're having that experience too. Because, yes, as soon as I turned it on and got a GPT-2 model outputting, some of

What are the key elements of a good crime novel? How can you reboot your author career through publishing and marketing changes? Ed James shares insights on his writing craft and author business. In the intro, Jeff Bezos steps down as CEO of Amazon [The Verge]; Why this is the best time to be in publishing [The Hotsheet]; Why enterprise publishing is on the rise [Mike Shatzkin]; plus I'm on the Intermittent Fasting Stories Podcast. Today's show is sponsored by IngramSpark, who I use to print and distribute my print-on-demand books to 39,000 retailers including independent bookstores, schools and universities, libraries and more. It's your content – do more with it through IngramSpark.com. Ed James is a Scottish crime author with over 20 crime and thriller novels spanning five different series set across Edinburgh, Dundee, London and the Pacific Northwest of the U.S.A. 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 differences between crime audiences in the US vs UKThe essential elements of a crime novelHow Ed’s engineering background influences his writing and plottingWhere ideas come from and how to keep things original while adhering to genre tropesCuriosity as a muscleDifferent publishing choices for different books at different timesThe importance of book covers for book marketing You can find Ed James at EdJames.co.uk and on Twitter @EdJamesAuthor Transcript of interview with Ed James Joanna Penn: Ed James is a Scottish crime author with over 20 crime and thriller novels spanning five different series set across Edinburgh, Dundee, London and the Pacific Northwest of the U.S.A. Welcome, Ed. Ed James: Hi, Joanna. It's good to catch up again after so long. Joanna Penn: Indeed, and we see each other in person occasionally at events. Tell us a bit more about you, and how you got into writing. Ed James: My path to writing was because I was looking for a creative outlet as I was growing up, and it used to be music, and I was in bands and so on and so forth, and then that all died a bit in about 2005, 2006 time. I was very angry about music, and how much time I'd spent on it and a lot of other things, so I just started channeling my energies into writing. And over that next four years, it was a case of writing what people call practice novels, I suppose, over various genres, sending them off to agents, getting absolutely nothing other than maybe a few little leaflets back, saying yeah, no, thanks for sending, it's not for us kind of thing. And then I think about 2010 I finished the first Scott Cullen book, and actually had some interest from agents there. And that was quite exciting, because everyone I knew who'd been involved in writing had never even got that far, so it was like three months you wait when you send off the full manuscript, and then another not quite a form rejection, but just saying, yeah, it's not for us. That was a bit dispiriting, and I gave up writing about that point, for about a year and a half. My day job got a bit hectic as well, and then I remember reading lots of stuff late 2011, about how the Kindle was taking off, and I thought, right, I've got that book, I think it's probably got a lot of potential, so I'll finish it, publish it and see how it goes. And that took me a bit longer than expected because it needed a lot of work, so maybe the agents weren't so daft. Then my dad did the copyediting and proofing for it, and I got it up in the middle of April 2012. And it took me quite a while to get any sales to come in, and that was, like, I think you talk about the flip of being an author to being the publisher, and it's understanding that side of it. I knew absolutely nothing, no understanding of what publishers even did around editing or marketing, all that kind of stuff. And actually, just having to get a handle on marketing, and then start to sell books, that was in those days you got a lot of stuff free from Amazon, I think it's fair to say. They used to present your books to people, and that was always quite nice. And once you got enough traffic on, you'd get quite a lot of traction off that. Joanna Penn: So that takes you up to sort of 2012, 2013. What happened with your day job? Ed James: Around that time, I think I published five books in about a year, maybe… a year and a half, and it started creeping up to being quite a good monthly income. And at that point I was working in London, and I was actually traveling from my home near Edinburgh every week on a 6:30 flight down to London in the morning, and then back up on Thursday night and working from home on Friday. I was basically either working or writing when I was down there, occasionally seeing friends. I started to get quite a bit of money coming in from having a decent start to a series, so four books in that, and a vampire thriller that didn't exactly set the world aflame. I had back pai

Your personal story can change other people's lives, but only if you get your words into the world. In this episode, Gin Stephens shares how she self-published her first book on intermittent fasting and went on to get a traditional deal for more books, and lead a community of people into a healthier way of life. [For more on my IF journey, listen to Intermittent Fasting Stories episode 155.] In the intro, Jane Friedman on SPS; my 2021 book sales revenue breakdown; my Author Timeline; Clifton Strengths Assessment. Plus, I recommend Undisruptable: A Mindset of Permanent Reinvention. 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 www.draft2digital.com/penn Gin Stephens is the New York Times bestselling author of Fast. Feast. Repeat., Delay, Don't Deny, and Feast Without Fear. She's also a podcaster with three shows, including Intermittent Fasting Stories, which is one of my favorites. 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 Getting over fear of judgment when writing a personal storyWriting with the aim to teach and help othersThe pros and cons of self-publishing vs. traditional publishingHow podcasting sells booksDon't depend on one platform! The importance of owning the tools you use to reach your community and followers. Why Gin gave up Facebook. You can find Gin Stephens at GinStephens.com and at The DDD Social Network and on Twitter @gin_stephens Transcript of Interview with Gin Stephens Joanna: Gin Stephens is the New York Times bestselling author of Fast. Feast. Repeat., Delay, Don't Deny, and Feast Without Fear. She's also a podcaster with three shows, including Intermittent Fasting Stories, which is one of my favorites. Welcome to the show, Gin. Gin: Thank you for having me. And I'm so glad that's one of your favorites. Joanna: Oh, it is. Gin: I love doing it. Joanna: I love to hear all the stories about everyone's different pathway, but today we're talking about you. Gin: Yay. It's odd to be on this side of the microphone, right? Joanna: Oh, absolutely. I want to start with why did you decide to write a book in the first place and how did you actually get through to the end? Because so many people say, ‘Oh, I'm going to write a book,' and never actually finish it. How did you do that and why did you decide to do it? Gin: That's a very interesting question. I actually have had ideas for books as far back as I can remember. I wrote as a child. I think every writer probably has stories like that. But getting published is so tricky, especially now it's even harder than ever, because just because you have something good to say doesn't mean that a publishing house is going to take a chance on you. Because unless you have a big audience, a big following, they're like, ‘Sorry, I'm not interested.' So, really, all that has changed with the advent of self-publishing and the ability for anyone just to get their message out there. But I didn't really know what would happen with self-publishing. I had a couple of Facebook groups that were really small, although they didn't feel small to me back at the time, it was 2016, and I was supporting people who were doing intermittent fasting. Actually, at that time, before I wrote the book, I only had one Facebook group and we were probably right around 3000 members when I started writing Delay, Don't Deny, my first book and the one that I self-published first. It all started because people would join the group and they would be like, ‘How do I get started?' Or my friends, people that I knew. I lost 80 pounds with intermittent fasting and have kept it off since 2015, and so people wanted to know what to do, what did I do. And there weren't any books that I could send them to. Dr. Jason Fung had just released The Obesity Code in 2016, but he didn't really say, ‘Here's what you do.' It wasn't a plan for how to get started. At the end, he had a little bit of alternate daily fasting with a 36-hour fast, but I was like, not everybody wants to do 36-hour fast. I prefer a daily eating window approach where I eat every day. I like to eat every day. And there were several books that were good, but they missed some of the important information like fast and clean, which is something I realized over time was so very important. So I would tell people, ‘Well, you can read this book over here, but ignore what he says about drinking diet soda. Don't do that. And let me tell you why.' I really need a book that I can send people to, so I'm going to write it myself. And maybe nobody will buy it, but I'm just going to put it up on Amazon. That was back in the days of CreateSpace when, if you wanted to publish on Amazon, you did CreateSpace for the paperback, and then you did KDP, Kindle Di

How can you write funny characters and make readers laugh with your writing? Plus the importance of long-term thinking and multiple streams of income when it comes to a career in comedy (or any creative field!). Scott Dikkers talks about these things and more in this episode. In the intro, Draft2Digital announces distribution to library service BorrowBox; a thought experiment on the US Bills to break up Big Tech [Sway Podcast; Politico; Kris Rusch]; Can you really make passive income as an author? [6 Figure Authors]; List of money books; Wanderland on Books and Travel. 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. Scott Dikkers is the number one New York Times bestselling author of non-fiction books, including How to Write Funny, How to Write Funny Characters, and Outrageous Marketing, as well as other non-fiction, fiction, and satire. He co-founded The Onion satirical news site, and he's a podcaster, screenwriter, cartoonist, voice actor, speaker, and teacher of comedy 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 Experiencing failure on the way to success — and the contract that cost Scott a lot of money! Why is writing humor difficult? What authors get wrong when trying to write humor The importance of feedback Different approaches to humor and ways to make something funny Is humor country or culture-specific? Examples of funny character archetypes Long term mindset and multiple streams of income You can find Scott Dikkers at HowToWriteFunny.com and on Twitter @ScottDikkers Transcript of interview with Scott Dikkers Joanna: Scott Dikkers is the number one New York Times bestselling author of non-fiction books, including How to Write Funny, How to Write Funny Characters, and Outrageous Marketing, as well as other non-fiction, fiction, and satire. He co-founded ‘The Onion' satirical news site, and he's a podcaster, screenwriter, cartoonist, voice actor, speaker, and teacher of comedy writing. Welcome, Scott. Scott: It's so nice to be here, Joanna. How can I possibly fit all those things into my life routine? Wonder how I got here. Joanna: That might be one of my questions! But let's start. Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into all of this and your creative journey. Scott: It started very young, before I could read or write. I think I figured out that being funny was a way to get love and attention. And so, I started doing things. I started acting funny and drawing things that were funny and showing them to my grandma, and she loved it. I got that thing that comedians always talk about where they first performed on stage and got a laugh and they heard it and they were like, ‘That felt amazing. I know what I need to do with my life.' That happened to me when I was, like, three or four. So, what you do then is you keep doing it, because it's now your strategy for living. I made little skits on tape recorders, and I made little plays, and I wrote little books. I stapled together pieces of paper and wrote funny stories, and any kind of entertainment, comedy, anything I could possibly think of. Did that throughout my early life in school. I was the class clown and all that. And then by the time I'm getting out of high school, I know I need to do this for a career somehow. I just had no idea how to do that. My family didn't really have any connections. They didn't have any money. We lived in the middle of nowhere. There was no internet, so you couldn't look up how to do this stuff. And so that's where it all started. But by that time, if you believe that Malcolm Gladwell 10,000 hours thing, I was an expert. But I will say, my comedy was still terrible at that time. I was not funny at 18 or whatever, and it took a lot more practice to get good at it. Joanna: How did you go from being an amateur to co-founding ‘The Onion'? I think a lot of people would have heard of ‘The Onion' and then obviously you do all these other things. Did you ever have a normal job, or did you create this different thing? Scott: No, I had some normal jobs. I worked at McDonald's fresh out of high school and I did a lot of temp work and I worked at a radio station, and my focus was always on the comedy. Every spare moment, I was making comedy movies, writing comedy books, drawing comic strips, doing voice acting. But I always had these easy fallback jobs, minimum wage, whatever. The first thing I got into was voice acting. I just sent a demo tape because I had done all these skits on cassette tape as a kid, and had gotten pretty good at it, and put together a demo tape, sent it to a local studio in

What if you could use an AI writing tool to help you come up with ideas for sensory detail, character descriptions, story twists, and more? Amit Gupta explains how authors can use Sudowrite in this episode. In the intro, I explain how I'm using Sudowrite, plus AI for Authors: Practical and Ethical Guidelines from the Alliance of Independent Authors; Wu Dao, 10x bigger than GPT-3 [Towards Data Science]; Open source model by EleutherAI; The Computers are Getting Better At Writing [The New Yorker]. You can find other AI episodes here, and a list of AI writing tools here. This episode is supported by my wonderful patrons at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn. Thank you! Amit Gupta is a science fiction writer and entrepreneur. He's the creator of Sudowrite, an AI creative writing tool. You can watch a demo of Sudowrite here on YouTube. 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 GPT-3 is a significant step forward in tools for writersFeatures of Sudowrite including the character generator, Describe function, Twists, Expand, Wormhole, and moreTips for how to use Sudowrite to help your writingAvoiding copyright and plagiarism issuesWhat the future might hold for writing with AI You can find Amit Gupta at sudowrite.com and on Twitter @superamit Transcript of interview wth Amit Gupta Joanna: Amit Gupta is a science fiction writer and entrepreneur. He's the creator of Sudowrite, an AI creative writing tool. Welcome, Amit. Amit: Thanks, Joanna. I'm glad to be here. Joanna: I'm so excited to talk to you. Before we get into the more technical stuff, tell us a bit more about you and your background in writing and technology and how it led you to creating Sudowrite. Amit: I have been involved in technology most of my life. Years ago, I started a company called Photojojo that was all about helping photographers be more creative and have more playful fun with their work. I sold that company several years ago. At that point, I decided to make more time for writing science fiction, because it was something I'd always been interested in. In particular, I'm really keen to explore ways technology can improve our lives to push back against the dystopia that's become so common in science fiction these days. So when I was starting, that is when I met my co-founder, James, he had also been in tech, and we both independently left that world behind. And we both ended up reading science fiction, which is fun to find someone else who's like, on the same journey. We ended up forming a writing group with a few friends. [Sudowriters] We were all getting started around the same time, dealing with the same issues like imposter syndrome and how do we do this? How do we learn how to do this from the ground up? And slowly, but surely, we started getting better, started getting published in different places, and nominated for awards and all this stuff. And then last year, when the pandemic hit, like so many people, we were looking for ways to both connect with others, and also to write our ways out of the confusing mess the world was in. It was around that time that a few of us started hosting this thing called Short Story Club, where we brought these prominent authors together to raise thousands for social causes, COVID-19 PPE, stuff like that. Which is all to say, I think we were all looking for ways to contribute to the writing community, and eager to play with new ways of doing things. And when we came upon the idea of using AI in writing last year, it just felt like it could fit both of those things. Early experiments were really promising. We started sharing what we were working on with some of the writers we respect in the field. And it became clear really quickly that there was something exciting here that could really benefit writers. So James and I started working on what became Sudowrite back in August of last year, 2020. Joanna: I've been trying out in the beta and I love it. I'm also in the beta of the standard GPT-3 and listeners know, I've explained GPT-3 before, so we don't need to go into that technical side. What did you see at this point that was different to you before? Because obviously, you've been in the writing space, the technology space. The GPT-3 and the stuff that open AI is doing. Was GPT-3 the catalyst that made you think it might work this time? Amit: I think GPT-3 is definitely the catalyst. I think it showed us that the technology had gotten to a point where it could really do something for writing that I think many of us had started to assume was true in all these other creative fields. You can't really be a photographer today without using digital editing tools. You can't be someone who makes video or someone who makes music without a vast array of tools to help you make the sound and the video that you were creating to execute on your vision. But as writers, we've really had pen and paper, we'd ha

How can you write a useful self-help book with actionable tips, but also bring it to life with personal stories? How can you use a book title to attract your target market? Natalie Sisson shares her experience in writing her latest non-fiction book. In the intro, 94% of the world’s internet users are not in the USA — what does that mean for your international author business? [The New Publishing Standard]; Marketing tips for driving sales internationally [BookBub]; Facebook brings podcasts onto their platform [The Verge]; plus I answer some questions about the NFT for authors episode, and Tim Berners-Lee's NFT [The Verge]. Today's show is sponsored by Draft2Digital, where you can get free ebook formatting, free distribution to multiple stores, library distribution, and a host of other benefits. Get your free Author Marketing Guide at www.draft2digital.com/penn Natalie Sisson is an entrepreneur, author, speaker, and host of the Untapped Podcast. Her books include The Suitcase Entrepreneur, The Freedom Plan, and her latest is Suck It Up Princess. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. Show Notes How to know what medium an idea is suited for — book or courseKnowing what to share (and what to leave out) in memoirThe balance between sucking it up and practicing self-careHow to spot burn-outThe importance of taking time off and how to plan for that as an entrepreneurPivoting to focus on a specific type of client or customer — and how book titles can helpLessons learned from crowdfunding a book’s publication You can find Natalie Sisson at NatalieSisson.com and on Twitter @nataliesisson Transcript of Interview with Natalie Sisson  Joanna: Natalie Sisson is an entrepreneur, author, speaker, and host of the ‘Untapped Podcast.' Her books include The Suitcase Entrepreneur, The Freedom Plan, and her latest is Suck It Up Princess. Welcome back to the show, Natalie. Natalie: Thanks. I love the way you were grinning when you said the last one. I'm glad it brings a smile to your face. Joanna: Oh, it does. Absolutely. And we're going to talk about the book very soon. You were on the show in episode 495. Not too long ago. And we talked about your journey. So we're just going to dive straight in today. I wanted to ask a question that comes up a lot, which is people write their non-fiction book and then they're like, ‘Never again.' Why did you decide to write another nonfiction book, when, let's face it, you have other products and courses are more profitable. How did you know it was the right time to write another book and that this topic was something you wanted to explore? Natalie: First of all, it's news to me that people do say that. I'd love to know if there's some more research behind people who write non-fiction versus fiction and then put off the writing process. I wouldn't even say it was necessarily the right time, but I think part of it was a story sometimes just comes out of you or a book idea comes to you and you just feel like it needs to be written. As an upholder and somebody who likes deadlines and timelines, I really like pushing myself to get things creatively done. I know you turn around books incredibly fast, but I think I'm not too far behind you in there. And then when I have an idea, I really want to take action on it. This one was a little bit different because the circumstances were, over in Australia, my partner's father was dying. I was at the hospital. I decided to crowdfund for the book because I almost needed a distraction and I'd been thinking about this idea since January. So we're talking about, this is in March when I blurted out, ‘Suck it up, princess,' to myself in a park when I was in a funk and a friend said, ‘You should write a book about that. It's a great title.' And I couldn't let that rest. And I was like, ‘It is a great title, but how do you reverse engineer and write a book about something you just came up with the title for?' So it was maybe good timing, I think, and not obviously a very easy time to get a book written. Yes, lockdown helps, but also just we know what was happening in the world at that time. I had been wanting to write another book since The Freedom Plan and actually, my partner had also said, ‘Hey, aren't you writing another book? You did talk about it for the last year or so.' So whenever somebody issues that challenge to me as well, I think it was a combination of all those factors coming together that I just decided, ‘Well, there's no better time than now.' Joanna: Right. And then more specifically on the why a book and not another product because we both know you can make more money by doing a course. You could have done more like a self-help course. I'm not sure the title would have worked for a course, but it is motivational. You could have done a summit, you could have done lots of