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How can content marketing in a tight niche build the audience that launches your book? And how do you decide whether to hand your self-published bestseller to a traditional publisher. Suzanne Smith shares what she learned in four years of going from blog to book deal.

In the intro, how to stand out as a writer in the age of AI [Nathan Barry Show; Interview with Nathan Barry]; thoughts on asset maintenance; Goodreads giveaway on Bones of the Deep (Aug 5-20, 2026)

This episode is sponsored by Publisher Rocket, which will help you get your book in front of more Amazon readers so you can spend less time marketing and more time writing. I use Publisher Rocket for researching book titles, categories, and keywords — for new books and for updating my backlist. Check it out at www.PublisherRocket.com

This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn

Suzanne Smith is the founder of The Independent Landlord, and the bestselling author of The Good Landlord Handbook.

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 free blog in a tight niche built the audience for the book
• Rewriting the book from scratch when the law changed
• Why speed made self-publishing the only option
• Building a paid membership after one audience member asked for it
• Negotiating a Penguin Random House deal with no agent
• Using AI as a business sidekick, with a control room and an engine room

You can find Suzanne at TheIndependentLandlord.com.

Transcript of the interview with Suzanne SmithJo: Suzanne Smith is the founder of The Independent Landlord, and the bestselling author of The Good Landlord Handbook. So welcome to the show, Suzanne.

Suzanne: Thank you.

Jo: Oh, there's so much to talk about today. But first up—

Tell us a bit more about you and your background, and how you got into property and writing after a legal career.Suzanne: Well, I've always loved reading books. In fact, I recently did a French literature degree as a mature student. Being an author was never in the game plan at all. It's not something that I even thought about.

I was brought up in New Zealand, so shout out to all the Kiwis and those across the pond in Australia. The thing about it is, Jo, you've lived there yourself. Kiwis are independent, self-reliant and have this great sense of fair play. So that was a very formative experience for me.

We moved back to England when I was 16, and I have become thoroughly anglicised since then, but a Kiwi at heart.

I always wanted to become a lawyer. New Zealand in some ways on television is quite American, and there was this American programme called The Paper Chase. It was about all of these students at Harvard studying law, and the professor said, “You come here with a skull full of mush and you leave thinking like a lawyer.”

I thought, “Oh, I like the sound of that.” I didn't really know what a lawyer was, but everyone seemed to be very happy that I wanted to become one, and then that was it.

Jo: So you went into law, and then how did you get into property?Suzanne: So I worked for 25 years as a solicitor. That's like an attorney if you're American. Started off in a law firm, and then I went into pharmaceuticals and I worked for big companies like what is now GSK, GlaxoSmithKline, and small companies as well.

When I started out, it was before the internet, before Google. When you're in house, you're very much a generalist. You do a bit of everything. So you help companies grow their business.

You're not business prevention, but you're still bound by the code of conduct for solicitors. You've got this role of keeping the company on the right side of the law.

Then I had twins, who were born about five years after I became a lawyer, and I decided to work part-time for a while and did an MBA when they were little, part-time through the Open University.

I know Jonathan is doing one at the moment.

Jo: Yes. He's finished, so that's exciting.

Suzanne: That was transformational for me, because I had probably been thinking a bit too much as a lawyer, and it helped me to broaden my view of the world and understand all sorts of things.

Sso I continued going up the greasy pole, and then for my last job, in 2015, I joined a biotech company in Cambridge, England, as general counsel and company secretary. It was a long way from home, about two, three hours' drive from home. So I decided to buy a flat, an apartment, and to stay there in the week.

I thought to myself, “Well, when I leave this company, I can let it out as a buy-to-let,” but actually as a landlord. So I stayed there for five years, and then when I left, I let out the property.

The reason why I decided to leave law after 25 years, I had what I call a sliding doors moment, like in the film. I was 50. I was on holiday with my husband, and we'd probably had one too many rum cocktails. And he said to me, “Well, what do you want to be doing with your life? What would you do if you could do anything?”

I was thinking, “Well, I've done law. I want to do something else now.” I didn't really know what that was, and I'd always been thinking about studying French properly, and that's when I left. So I decided, 18 months later, I left to do a French degree at King's College London, full-time.

I was the only old person there with lots of 18-year-olds. When I did that, I was able to cash in my share options because I was a good leaver. I retired, and so I started buying properties to let out and became a landlord, without really thinking too much about it, and I used letting agents.

They were fine to begin with, but I didn't really have a game plan or anything like that. What I realised is that when I tried to research things online, I couldn't really find anything that was terribly helpful. It was either quite general or it was very legal.

So after a while… I became a landlord in 2019. I had the idea, why don't I set up a blog? And this is August 2022, so just four years ago. My husband came up with the idea of the name, The Independent Landlord, because it's that Kiwi spirit, being very independent.

I thought, “Right, I'm not going to charge anyone for it. It's a hobby. It's not a business. I'm going to pay it forward and help, use my legal training, practical legal approach, and practical common sense, by doing this blog.”

Almost exactly four years ago, I sent my first newsletter to 13 people.

Jo: Woo-hoo.

Suzanne: And I sent one last week to over 18,000. So it's been quite a journey.

Jo: Wow, this is so great. I love this. There's so much in there. The turning 50 and then doing a degree. My master's in death is a little different to your French literature, but I like it.

So I love this, and buying properties, starting it on the side, not a business at first, and growing the audience, and obviously you've put so much work in.

Then you decide to write a book. So talk about that, because an online blog, although I'm sure your articles and everything were super useful, it's very different to write a blog than a book. So talk about your challenges in writing.

Why did you decide to do a book in the first place?Suzanne: Again, I was an accidental landlord, is what they call it when you let a property when you didn't intend to buy it as a buy-to-let, which I did with my Cambridge flat. And I became, in many respects, an accidental author.

So I was having a conversation with my husband again and I was saying I'd done this lead magnet to get people to sign up to my newsletter, and a big new law was going through Parliament at the time, called the Renters Reform Bill, that was going to completely transform the way landlords operate.

I was saying to my husband, “Oh, I need to update my lead magnet, a little ebook, to explain the new law.” He looked at me and said, “Well, why don't you do a proper book? Write a book.”

This was on the 29th of September, 2023. The reason why I mention that is that I thought, “Wow, what a great idea,” and my head was bursting. I went onto Google, and guess what I downloaded on the 1st of October?

Jo: My blueprint?

Suzanne: Exactly. I found you immediately, the Author Blueprint, and I downloaded it. I checked: on the 1st of October, 2023.

Then I listened to almost… well, I think I went back several years on your podcast, just trying to understand. I'm like that. When I try and do something, I just try and learn everything that there is to know about it.

So I started writing the book, and I guess the first challenge was I write quickly, and I'm used to writing for people who aren't lawyers, being in-house. So I thought I needed to have a structure. The structure was easy in many respects because, a bit of business at the end, and then you can go through a tenancy.

I thought it was important to have a narrative thread all the way through it, just to bring it together. This is the literature degree coming in here.

I thought that the mission for everything I do, the reason why I started doing this, is to help landlords, but also to help the experience of renting that people have in England. It's very specific for English law. And to help improve the private rented sector.

So that's why I originally set up my blog for free, and I wanted, when people went onto Google, they could find something sensible and very detailed from me. My blog posts were… Well, I've now got over 400,000 words on my blog, so it's a substantial piece of work that is out there free of charge.

So what I decided to do was to bring this narrative thread, I call it the good landlord ethos, to the book.

Then I wrote very quickly, and I had a pretty good draft by April 2024, because we were all thinking that the law was going to change very soon. But then there was an election, and in the end the government changed and the legislation changed completely, so I had to rewrite the book and start again.

So I think that my biggest challenge was that my subject matter, the new law, changed. Because I wanted to publish this book that explained to people practically what they have to do, and make it really straightforward, keeping out of politics, because it is a very politically charged area.

I wanted to write it so it's a manual, somebody could literally follow it. So I used an editor, and I did write the book twice. I had a beta reader who is another lawyer, and a landlord as well. Then I got to the get-the-damn-thing-done stage. The really tedious bit of all the typos at the end.

Jo: Yes, the finishing energy to get it out there. So at that point, obviously you'd found my blueprint, so you were learning about the indie way of doing things.

Did you always decide to self-publish?How did you think about publishing? What were your challenges in publishing?

Suzanne: It never occurred to me not to self-publish, because the new law came into effect on the 1st of May, 2026. The law and the details that I needed for the book were finalised in January, and I published on Amazon on the 5th of March, so I had to go so quickly.

Even though I'd got a lot of it written, the last bit came in January, and so I needed speed. I knew that for landlords to be able to have something that they can use straightaway to help get them ready for it, and then use as a manual afterwards, I had to be first.

Jo: Sorry, just on the year. Was it '24? You said '26. You meant May—

Suzanne: 2024? No, no, because I actually published it this year. What happened in 2024, I had the first draft ready, but then I had to do another draft because the law changed when the Labour government came in.

Jo: Right.

Suzanne: The Renters Reform Bill turned into the Renters' Rights Bill. So I had to rewrite the book. So I finished however many drafts at the end of January 2026. Then it went to an editor, et cetera, et cetera, and I managed to get the book ready for a proof, to get the proof printed, towards the end of February.

So it was really quick to go from the law being sufficiently finalised for me to write a book in January, and then having it ready in just over a month. There is no way that I could have done that if I'd gone to a traditional publisher.

It didn't even occur to me to go, because I didn't want to be going touting around my book and, “Please publish me,” et cetera. It's just not me. I'm the independent landlord, and that moved very easily to being the independent publisher.

So I learnt how to do all the publishing. And a huge thanks: I joined your Patreon and I was a very good student. I went through everything systematically and followed your playbook, and used Vellum and BookFunnel and all the other tools.

So I decided to go on Amazon as well as have my own Shopify store, which just about killed me.

Jo: I was going to say, you are an excellent student. You really like learning, but you also put this into practice, which is why I also wanted to talk to you.

You haven't just talked about all this. You've literally done everything.Suzanne: Sometimes it was like my head was going to burst. Luckily, Claude upped his game earlier this year when we got the Opus 4.5. I didn't use AI really until this year.

I decided I need to do exercise all the time, and have that as a have-to-do, because my head was spinning all the time with all these different things. So I would go to the gym, go to a spin class, and then I would walk out with my phone on, with the Claude app, and dictate a stream of consciousness into it.

“Oh, I need to do this, or what about that? Oh, I just remembered about this. Oh, I've had this idea, blah.” And then said, “Make sense of it for me, Claude.”

So it was very much as a thinking partner, because when you're writing your first book, it's bad enough, but when you're learning how to publish…

Even, like, when I got the first proof of the book back from BookVault, I realised that all the footnotes—I have 114 footnotes in my book, and that, again, is the recent degree there—and the formatting had gone skew-whiff. Apparently it was an issue with Vellum, and they were really lovely and they sorted it straight out for me.

So it shows: always get a proof of the book. They were able to sort that out very quickly, and BookVault were very quick in getting me another proof, because you can shortcut it and just pay to get a very quick delivery.

Amazon, on the other hand, was really slow. It took a week. So I actually published earlier on my Shopify store for my members, of my membership, and I gave them a discount. Then I finally got it onto Amazon on the 5th of March.

There are all these different skills you're having to learn. The Shopify store I found very hard, and there was all the tax, because I'm VAT registered. So I think I'm still recovering.

Jo: You're still recovering. I wouldn't normally recommend a Shopify store for someone with their first book, doing first of everything. But, as you say, you're someone who learns a lot, puts it into practice, and—

I think you were pretty determined to do that because you had a community as well, right?Suzanne: Exactly, yes. The big subscriber list. I think that's why the book did so well. So in the first week, because I met you at the Indie Author Lab put on by—

Jo: Yes, London Book Fair, yes.

Suzanne: Yes, the Alliance of Independent Authors. I met you there, and it was just my first week, and I had 1,000 sales in the first week. That was because of my audience.

I'd been going on about the fact that I'm writing this book for two and a half years, because that's how long it took me to do. So I had a wait list for it, and I had a thing on my website, a landing page on my website, saying how good the book was and why it's the best thing for the Renters' Rights Act.

Then I went onto Google, and I think I sent you a screenshot of this at the time. I put into Google, “What's the best book for the Renters' Rights Act for landlords in England?” And it came up with me as a featured snippet, and I hadn't even published it at that time. It was just about there.

So the blog really helped, because I'd become an authority on the Renters' Rights Act. Even though I'm not a practising solicitor any more, I spent all my time reading the damn thing, and it is a very complicated bit of legislation.

Funnily enough, I have ruffled a lot of feathers. People have even said about me behind my back, “What does she know? She's only got four properties.” But I just took no notice.

I thought, “I'm going to try and use my legal brain and my understanding of what it's like being a landlord, there with the rubber gloves cleaning an oven when people have moved out, and try and write something that's not trying to sell anything else, and to help people.” And then it got picked up.

Jo: Yes. Wait, let's just slow down. Slow down, because we will get onto that in a minute. But let's just come back to that launch.

So as we talked about, you've had a blog for five years—

Suzanne: It was three and a half by then.

Jo: Three and a half years you've been blogging, but hundreds of thousands of words of useful information. So you've essentially done content marketing. You've attracted people. You had a lead magnet. You got them on your email list. You told them that you were writing a book. You got a sort of pre-sales list up.

So that's an email list. You've got a blog. Did you do anything else in terms of marketing?Suzanne: I had YouTube, a big YouTube channel. I'd only set it up at the end of 2024, and I'd had half a million views. And again, just very straightforward advice, and without all the scaremongering and politics. I deliberately keep out of it all. A lot of people joined my newsletter as a result of that.

Also a year ago, exactly today, I was running a Facebook group, which was a lot of hard work. There were a few thousand people in it, but there are often a lot of people going in there trying to sell things: insurance, eviction specialists and things. And there was also a lot of people just being unpleasant to other people.

I was getting fed up with it. It was taking me a lot of time, and I was doing a lot of speaking events and trying to explain what this new law was doing, and wearing myself out. I'm an extrovert, but even I find speaking events absolutely exhausting, because it's like everything gets sucked out of you. It's strange.

Then somebody came up to me in July last year and said, “Suzanne, can you set up a membership?”

I said, “Well, landlords aren't going to pay for that.”

And they said, “Yes, they will. You build it and they will come.”

I asked ChatGPT and thought about it. I asked ChatGPT, who I was dating at the time, now exclusively with Claude, but I know Claude has other people in his life. But I'm very much set with Claude Fable at the moment.

So I asked ChatGPT, how can I go about setting up a membership? And I mentioned your one and said, “Should I do it on Patreon?” And then he came back with: go for Circle. So I set up a membership on Circle, exactly a year ago. In fact, it's the anniversary of my first member yesterday.

hTe rules I had were, no selling. So I don't sell, no affiliate links, no one else can sell anything, and we have to be supportive. No negativity, no politics.

So what it's become, it's like the senior common room of the private rented sector, with landlords, lawyers, letting agents. There's a fantastic forum in there. It's not me doing it, it's peer-to-peer.

I have twice-monthly live streams where people can ask me questions. I wonder where I got that from. No, I very much modelled it on your Patreon, but on a different platform. I have courses in there as well.

So that has really grown. I launched it in July, and by September, October, I'd gone past the VAT threshold, which has complicated everything, but it means my business now is this membership. I really enjoy doing it, and there hasn't been all the negativity that you have in a Facebook group.

So I had them as… talk about your thousand fans. There are about 1,500 in the membership, and their support really helped the launch of my book, as well as the wider people who get my free newsletter.

Jo: Yes.

Suzanne: So it's all different types of content marketing.

Jo: Y, but I do love this. And of course, if people are wondering, I joined Patreon back in 2014, I think it might have even been before that, and there weren't too many places back then to run communities. It wasn't even really a community at the time, it was a sort of, almost a “give me a bit of support for the podcast.”

So things have changed a lot in terms of communities, and obviously you went with Circle, which is great. Patreon is slightly different now, and some people are using Substack for something similar.

So that's just on the platform, but on the business: early on in our conversation you said, “I wasn't going to have a business. It wasn't a business. It was just putting stuff out there, helping other people,” and then your audience asked for this membership. And so now it is a business, right?

Suzanne: Yes, it is.

Jo: And you've got a book and all of this.

So are you happy with the change to a business? Because obviously you have to treat it quite differently.Suzanne: Yes, I am, because I think to begin with, I was just doing it one or two days a week. I was actually studying a master's in French literature part-time, and I then found that I was enjoying the blog more than the master's, so I dumped the master's after the first year.

But after getting 88% for one of my dissertations, which interestingly was on the translation of a Simone de Beauvoir book into English, and the publisher who's got that now is Random House, but that's another thing.

Anyway, so I decided to give up my master's and double down and work full-time on the blog. People were paying to help me with all the big fees and things, the big tech stack, Buy Me a Coffee. I was doing a little bit of consulting and things.

I was working six, seven days a week. I was treating it like a business in terms of quality and my effort, but it wasn't a business in terms of revenue. Then it just all came together, and this person said, “Set up a membership,” and I thought, “That's what I'm going to do. I'm now going to put it on a business setting.”

I've got an MBA, I know how to do it, and people thought I planned it, but I didn't. It just happened.

So now I do very much treat it as a business, but I still don't advertise. I don't allow people to advertise with me, because I want to be independent. If I recommend something, I want people to believe it's me recommending it, not just because someone's paying me, which can be a big issue in the landlord area.

Jo: Oh, in any industry. I get pitched every day with loads of random things that people are like, “Oh, a dollar a click or whatever, if you send this to your list.” And it's like, seriously? Just stop it already.

I did just want to add there: somebody asked you, they said, “You should have a community,” and that sparked that idea. I just wanted to acknowledge that my Patreon came from Jim Kukral. Some of you will remember, who've been around a long time. Jim Kukral came on my blog around sort of 2013.

Amanda Palmer had just put out a book called The Art of Asking, and I was doing a lot of unpaid work on the podcast at the time, and I was either going to give it up or I had to fund it somehow. Jim said, “You should do a Patreon.” And I was like, “Oh, no, I hate asking for money.” So at the time I just felt, oh, weird.

Then I was like, “No, I do all this work,” as you were saying. Now the Patreon has changed so much in terms of what it is, but it is the backbone of my business, too.

So I love that you listened to one of your fans who said what they wanted, and I love that I've listened as well.

Sometimes we just have to listen to those urges, don't we, to take things on?Suzanne: Yes, absolutely. In some ways I didn't really back myself before. I thought, “No one's going to pay for this.” Then the more you give, the more they want.

Jo: Yes.

Suzanne: What I've been really working on now is having boundaries, because there were two big kind of mottos that I picked up when I was working in pharmaceuticals.

One was from a head of the business. He was Canadian, and he was always saying, “You've got to skate to where the puck is heading.”

Jo: That's Wayne Gretzky, is it?

Suzanne: Exactly. Yes. He would always say it, and so that's what I've done with my blog and my book.

When I write things, I don't pay for any tools. I don't do keyword searches and all that. I just think, I do one blog post per topic, and I'm going to guess what people are going to be searching for soon, and I build up all this content around it. That's why most of my blog pages are top five.

I've had no advertising. I haven't asked for any backlinks. I don't do it. People backlink to it because it's useful.

So that was the first thing, is skate to where the puck is heading, and that was my approach with the book. I knew people would need this book from around May, and they'll need it forever, because it is so complicated and regulated, the rules for being a landlord in England.

So that was the first one. The second thing was: when you take something on, you've got to let something go. One in, one out. I found that I was taking on so many different things, and I've just been cutting back, because I can't be doing all the speaking, I can't be answering people's emails.

So I now don't do emails. If people want my advice on something, they ask me in the hub, at the twice-monthly live streams. Sometimes I answer in the forums, but I don't have time.

When there are 2.4 million landlords in the UK, and even with our 18,000 on my newsletter, I could spend, and I did, I used to spend all my time replying to emails.

So anyway, there are the things. Oh, and there was a third one, which is: attract, don't chase. One of my friends gave me that advice and that's exactly what my approach has been. I just don't chase for anything. I just put the stuff there and then build it and they will come.

Jo: Yes, and I think another thing is the power of the niche. It's so clear that what you write about, the people you are aiming at, you have an extremely tight target market.

That is both a strength and obviously a weakness, because they're the only people. But as you say, there's more than enough of those people for a community, for the book you have.

From my own perspective, that's the same for me, the power of the niche. That's how I have a successful podcast, for example, because of that reason.

I think you're like a poster child of what a non-fiction author should do. What I like is that you didn't go, “Oh, where's a niche where I could make money?” and then jump in. You've gone about this in a kind of slightly accidental way, but now you're leaning in and this uses all your skills.

So this really is a great example of the power of the niche and then making the most of it. But let's move on to what then happened, and—

What happened with the book deal?Suzanne: Wow. So you and I met each other on whatever day that was in March at the Indie Author Lab, and the following day I got an email, via my website on a contact form, from Penguin Random House saying, “We love the book. We love the mission, its values,” all this kind of thing.

And I was thinking, “Oh, it's another one of those. Must be an—”

Jo: AI spam bot, right?

Suzanne: Yes, and I remember I sent you a screenshot of it, and then I checked her out on LinkedIn and thought, “Okay, there is somebody with that name there.”

You're always saying, and Orna Ross and everyone are always saying, “Watch out for scams.” And in fact, Penguin Random House even this weekend on Instagram put out something saying, “There are lots of people impersonating us.”

So I didn't take it too seriously, and it was something like, “Oh, would you be interested in us publishing your book?” And I thought, and I laughed. It was like, no, this is too good to be true.

So I replied and said… Oh, I said, “Well, thank you so much. The Renters' Rights Act…” And so this is like the second week in March. “The Renters' Rights Act comes into effect on the 1st of May. If you want to publish it, you're going to need to get your skates on.” I literally did say that.

Then she arranged a meeting with me the next day, on the Friday. I still was very dubious about it, and I had a think about it. What helped me, and I have the little booklet here: at the Author Lab, we did some work at the beginning, and Orna said, “Put your phones away.” And it was like, “What? Put my phone away?”

Then we had to do this definition of success, and our passion, and our mission, and our purpose. I wrote down things like, I want to help landlords, and in so doing, help improve the private rented sector. I get pleasure from helping people. I want to improve standards and use my legal and practical skills, et cetera.

So I thought, “Okay, what is my purpose of doing this book?” It isn't really to make money, because going with Penguin, you wouldn't do that for financial reasons, because you'd make very little money.

So I thought, what is my why? My why is I want as many people to read this book as possible. And I've managed to sell a few thousand copies, but there are 2.4 million landlords, and they all need to understand this book, and the only way that I can get it out there, apart from doing ads, is to get it out in bookstores.

So I thought about it, and then said, “Yes, I will do it, because I want to get the book out there.” So it's distribution.

It's going to be published on the 6th of August, which is really quick, bearing in mind they contacted me in the middle of March.

It's exactly the same book, it's just got different copyright wording and different blurb, different paper. Same cover, because I managed to find a fantastic cover person to do it. So they've kept everything the same.

So we negotiated that book. I have no agent. They came to me. It's the attract, don't chase. I just put my lawyer hat on, and because one licence is very much like another one… I did turn down their first offer.

Jo: Well done. Good negotiation.

Suzanne: My daughter said to me, who's an adult daughter, she said, “But it's Penguin.” And I said, “Well, no, but it doesn't work for me.”

So I had a call with them, and then they came up with something that worked for me a bit more. I did have to concede on a few things, like I can't sell it in my Shopify store. But in some ways, that was a blessing in disguise, because it means I don't get any more “Where's my book?” emails.

Jo: Yes, exactly. Pros and cons of everything, basically.

Suzanne: I have very clear rights to get it back. If I want it back, I can get it back and I don't have to give a reason.

They're lovely. They have been really very wonderful. When I went up there a month or so ago, they gave me this book bag, and it's got on it, “I'm published by Penguin,” and I burst into tears.

Jo: Aw. That's nice.

Suzanne: I don't know, it just seemed like such a big deal. Because up until then I was just being all very lawyerly and task-orientated. Then I thought, “Oh my goodness,” and then it dawned on me.

So I'm now in this interim period where I've taken it off Amazon and off my Shopify store, and I feel very maternalistic towards the book because, you know, it took me two and a half years, which is longer than a pregnancy.

Obviously it's not a child, but it's like my book child. I've sent it off with a backpack and a drink and some snacks, and I hope that they look after him, my book.

The day I took it off Amazon it was still number one. And a big shout-out to Publisher Rocket, by the way.

Jo: Yes. Very, very useful for niche publishing.

Suzanne: Very. It helped me choose the right niche categories. So it was number one on at least one category, often six, all the way through. I thought, “Well, it's over to them now.”

They're very lovely people. They've given me some marketing assets, as they call it, some swanky graphics and things to use. We'll have to see what we do in terms of marketing. I don't mind doing marketing. I'm on LinkedIn quite a bit, and my whole blog is marketing.

What I've been doing is updating my blog to include one of these graphics and to mention the book, and I got Claude to help me draft the code so it looked right. So I've been going through all of my blog posts and sending people to Amazon rather than to my Shopify store.

It is mixed feelings, because I care about my book. I put a lot of effort, a lot of love, a lot of tears. No, not tears, but I put a lot of effort into it, and it's out of my control now.

Jo: Yes, you said it's over to them, but obviously you will still be creating content around this topic, so you'll probably still be the biggest driver of book sales.

Suzanne: Yes.

Jo: Are they also suggesting, for example, a podcast tour, like pitching for podcasts? Are they going to assign you some PR? Because, also if people don't know, as we are recording this, we have a new prime minister who wants to do various things.

You said no politics, but this is obviously a political thing. So you have the potential to go on a lot of different podcasts, media, talking about this, becoming almost a talking head in this kind of area.

So are you angling for all that, and is that in your contract, or is it literally just going to be whatever you want to do?Suzanne: That's not in the contract. What's in the contract is very minimal. I think I've already done what I'm supposed to do. They are pitching for me to go on podcasts and things.

I'll tell you a really funny coincidence. So we now have a new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, and when he was Mayor of Greater Manchester, he set up something called the Good Landlord Charter.

I actually talk about it in the book, and I quote him in my book saying that good landlords mean people trying to do the right thing, or something like that. And I coincidentally came up with the same name, The Good Landlord Handbook. I'd already had the book title for a long time.

So this idea of good and landlord coming together, the adjective good as opposed to criminal or rogue, and the cover being green.

I'm wanting to change the narrative so it's the norm to have a good landlord, and to help people become good landlords. Or if they're good landlords, help them to understand the new rules, because the new rules are very complicated.

So what I don't get involved in is this right or wrong. Is it right that landlords can't do this or have to do this? Because as an in-house lawyer, it doesn't really matter what I think about the law. GDPR, goodness me.

Jo: Oh, dear. Let's not start on GDPR.

Suzanne: No, exactly. Because we've just got to suck it up. I liken it to the grief cycle, that people have been going through so much change and you have the anger, the depression—

Jo: Denial.

Suzanne: Bargaining, the denial, and then you get to acceptance.

For some people, the acceptance means they want to stop doing it. If you want to accept it and stay, you need to understand the rules. So I've deliberately just kept very practical and have kept out of all the politics of it.

I have, funnily enough, become involved because I'm now seen as an expert on the Renters' Rights Act. I've worked behind the scenes with the government to help, and give comment on government guidance for landlords.

I was even invited to a reception to mark the passing of the Renters' Rights Act at Downing Street with the previous prime minister, all whilst staying apolitical.

I won't let anyone make me be a mouthpiece for their political view. It's more, we just have to do this if we want to continue doing it. I've been very clear on that.

Jo: It's interesting you mention the grief cycle there, and you've also mentioned Claude and ChatGPT. I wonder if you might also just comment on use of AI for authors and for marketing and all this. Also with legal stuff, because for me now, if I'm looking at a particular legal thing, I tend to ask Claude.

I'm like, “Can you just explain this?” or upload a contract or whatever. Although it is not legal advice, it can be quite useful.

So give us your thoughts on using AI as a sidekick in your author business and also for wider life.Suzanne: I now struggle to think what life would be like without Claude. I don't use Claude to write, at all, because I have a very particular voice and a turn of phrase, and if ever Claude writes something for me, it doesn't sound like me. It flattens me, and it makes me sound a bit American. So I don't do that.

I've used it in the back end of the business. For instance, my blog was down, and there was something called a recursive bot, which I don't even know what it was, and Claude helped me fix it for free. I went through, I did screenshots.

When I did an ElevenLabs audiobook and did it all myself, I was literally, for every screenshot, showing it to Claude. Claude said, “Do this, press this, press that.”

So I have all these different projects set up. One is the control room, where it's for my strategic thinking. If I have an idea, I want to think about something, I put it in there.

I have the engine room, which is for everything techy. Like when I had the recursive bot, or if I'm wanting to have some code on the website to make it look a particular way. Then I have other things for different subjects, and I put all the resources in there, and I use it a lot as a thinking partner.

I've noticed that Fable doesn't hallucinate as much, but the Opus used to. There's something called rental discrimination, and it was proofreading and said, “No, it's not rental discrimination, it's rental income discrimination,” and that was just a load of rubbish. So I would never let it go and change things without me looking at it.

I went on one of your webinars a month or so ago about MCPs and all the connectors, which is fantastic. It can go into my community and pull out all the questions for one of my live streams and put it into a document in order, by theme, for instance.

It can look at my MailerLite, because that's where my newsletter is with, and analyse the different open rates and click rates and things. It's so good for analysing everything, all the book sales. It helped me with my negotiation with Penguin, and it is pretty good on law.

It has sometimes hallucinated things, but not so much now. I think with anything, you've always got to go back to the primary source, and this is what we learn in academia: you have to check the primary source yourself.

I have a bit of a magpie brain. I'm very much a discovery writer, like you, and things occur to me as I'm doing it. I think that Claude, at the moment, is incredible. I've been quite open about it on social media that I have Claude as a business partner.

I'm a solopreneur, or whatever the word is. I have quite a big business now, and lots of different things, and it's just me doing it, because I can ask Claude how to do this, and how to do that. Claude can go and check my emails and tell me, is there somebody I've not replied to, which helps a lot.

Jo: Yes. I think it's empowering as a solopreneur as such. You talk there about the fixing the tech stuff. I have my web host come to me and say, “Look, you're getting so much traffic and bot stuff, and we need to put this thing in, and it's going to be $120 extra a month.”

I was like, “Can you just give me an hour? I'll get back to you.” And then I just had Claude code up, and I was like, “Analyse this and tell me what we can do.” It was like, “No, you just need to flip this switch and do that.” And I'm like, “Okay, fair enough.” Then the guy said, “Oh, no, okay, actually you don't need it.” Just stuff like that.

As a solopreneur, you're either going to pay somebody technically quite a lot of money, or you can get Claude or ChatGPT. We should say, the ChatGPT Sol is very good, like the Claude Fable, for example. So, yes, using it as a sidekick.

I love your control room and your engine room projects as well. That's a great way of doing it.

Suzanne: I wouldn't be without it now, and I would have published the book a lot later without Claude, because Claude was helping me with the Shopify store and all the many steps of things. It saved me real time. It is just fantastic.

I think, like now when I'm updating my blog, I have a connection between Claude and my blog. Claude can go in, I can give it my Google Search Console results for the page: what should I change, are the headings right? All this kind of thing. And it will give me a view on every single page, which is incredible.

Jo: And YouTube, and just everything. Just super useful for that business sidekick.

That's what I want authors to think. I feel like authors get so obsessed with the creative side with AI, whereas actually, people like you and me, we're using it as that engine room for the solo business, which is what I love.

So we're out of time. I did want to ask one more thing, which is, one of the biggest issues with a specific book like yours is when they change the law again.

So do you have a plan in place for if, say, a new government changes the law again? Will you just be updating the book over time?Suzanne: I think that there'll need to be a new edition of the book in three years' time, and I've spoken to Penguin about it. Not all of this new law has been implemented, and there's going to be case law and things. So I expect that I will update the book every few years.

I have some other ideas for books as well, but for the moment, I'm just taking a bit of a break. You always say we've got to refill our creative well. I really feel like that at the moment.

Recently I've just got myself a personal mobile phone so that I can turn off my work one when I'm on holiday and actually take time off. Because for all the time that I was doing the book, basically from Christmas until May, I didn't have one day off. That is not good. So I'm just trying to be a bit more balanced.

I had an idea to write another book for summer, but I've just decided not to, and I'm going to leave it until I feel the urge again.

Jo: Oh, well done.

Suzanne: Which will come.

Jo: Yes, well done.

Suzanne: I think there's nothing wrong with that. We just need to think what's right for us. I'm 58. So I want to be able to have time to enjoy things and not be working all the time.

Jo: No, that's great. It's a sustainable business.

So where can people find you and the book and your community online?Suzanne: The easiest way to find me is theindependentlandlord.com. Or if you put Suzanne Smith and landlord into Google, you'll find me as well, and there's a link on there to the book, The Good Landlord Handbook. In the community, there's a link to that on my website as well.

Jo: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Suzanne. That was great.

Suzanne: Thank you.

The post From Blog To Community To Book: A Non-Fiction Author’s Journey With Suzanne Smith first appeared on The Creative Penn.

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How can building an audience in advance help your stories reach the people who make movies? And how can you prove there's demand for your book or screenplay before you've written it? Brooks Elms shares his advice after more than 20 years as a WGA screenwriter.

In the intro, what doesn't work for book marketing and what does [Amy Chan SubStack; Unsingle; Rephonic]; Goodreads giveaway for Bones of the Deep; FutureVision XPrize.

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

Brooks Elms is a WGA screenwriter with over 45 scripts, over a dozen sales, and he has directed two indie features. He is the creator of the Answer the Call system and has trained over 1,000 writers.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.

Show Notes

• How to see the opportunity in AI when others only see the threat
• How to test a story with samples, and what a 16-second movie can do
• Building the trailer before you write the screenplay
• Letting your audience finance the film once they have validated the idea
• Why Hollywood still wants existing IP, and what makes them pay attention
• Feeling safe enough to write the truth, and finding a concrete path forward

You can find Brooks on LinkedIn or email him at brooks@brookselms.com.

Transcript of the interview with Brooks ElmsJo: Brooks Elms is a WGA screenwriter with over 45 scripts, over a dozen sales, and he has directed two indie features. He is the creator of the Answer the Call system and has trained over 1,000 writers. So welcome to the show, Brooks.

Brooks: Thank you. It's awesome to be here.

Jo: Fantastic. So first up—

Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into screenwriting.Brooks: I started filmmaking first. A buddy came up to me in high school and said, “Hey, we're making a karate movie, do you want to help us?” I was like, “Oh my God, yes, that sounds amazing.”

So next thing I know, I had this karate outfit on, and we were just making this completely ridiculous and totally fun movie, and it was amazing. It was so fun.

Then it went to a whole other level when we shared it with a friend, this guy Jay Sharon, and he watched the movie and he laughed so hard he literally fell out of his chair. I was like, “Oh my God,” the fun I had making it could actually transfer to somebody else. I was hooked.

So from there I went to NYU film school, and then made a few independent feature films which were good but not great in terms of how they were received.

They were great for me in terms of enjoyment, but I knew I needed to iterate faster at that point. So then I was like, “Well, it's expensive and it takes a long time to make a movie,” at least back then.

So I pivoted to screenwriting, and pumped out two, three scripts a year, got signed at UTA, got writing assignments, and basically launched a screenwriting career. Then I still tried to get some stuff going, but it's hard when movies are so expensive.

It's not hard, it's just that it takes a lot of precision in the marketing, and a lot of conversations to find the right matches to finance something, and you're either interested in doing that or you're not. I just was like, “Well, I'll just mostly write screenplays.”

Then I started teaching at UCLA Extension and then coaching after that, along with writing. Then all the way up to the future.

What's great about moving forward is that with AI, shot-making is becoming very close to cinematic quality. You can actually match cinematic quality in moments in some genres, but probably by next year.

Right now you could actually do a really good horror movie all AI for 10, 20,000 bucks, depending on how much you're doing yourself or getting other people to do.

So the economics are going to absolutely explode. So I'm sitting on dozens of scripts that didn't get through the Hollywood packaging bottleneck because they're too expensive, and I now have this giant slate that's ready to go, and I'm just absolutely thrilled. It's been a lifelong dream for me.

Jo: Oh, so much to come back on there. Where to start?

I do want to talk about what you just said there, sitting on dozens of scripts and now seeing the opportunity. I actually wrote down in my journal about a year ago, I see what's coming with AI, and I think that the best thing I can do is create as much original IP as possible, so that I can make the most of the opportunity ahead.

So let's just get into the AI, because a lot of people feel it's a super bad thing.

Talk about the opportunities and the attitude that you've got [around AI], and that you've seen others have around this, for what is ahead in a positive way.Brooks: It's fascinating to see how people respond to AI. I wonder, when the printing press rolled around, if there was some sort of backlash. Books must be handwritten. They can't be mass-produced.

Here's one of my theories. At a deep psychological level, it's so profoundly powerful that I think the default setting is, “Oh, crap.”

When I was a kid, some things were hard, and that power imbalance, when something big, new and powerful comes along: I'm going to get screwed, and so this is somehow a bad thing. I think that's the base psychological thing going on with most of the noise.

Obviously there are some legit problems, in terms of copyright infringement from learning models, or from some of the environmental situation. So I'm not saying it's all rainbows and butterflies, but I think 90% of the noise around it comes from a fear of change.

Here's the other one—a fear of, “Oh, yikes, I'm going to get taken advantage of somehow by either robots, or the corporations are going to use the robots against me,” or something like that. I have real empathy for me when I feel that way a little bit, but I don't feel it much, and for other people that do feel it.

The other thing is, you know what it is? I think they fear their own empowerment even more.

I had a therapist who was really good. He said, people aren't so much afraid of failing as they are afraid of succeeding. Because if we fail, we're stuck in act one and we don't go anywhere. The fear is answering the call and going to act two, when everything effing changes in the new world.

So I think people are afraid of how goddamn powerful they're going to be when they can have a team of AI agents helping them do everything they want in business or life or whatever.

I think it's the same thing with the internet. People are like, “Oh, I don't like social media, blah, blah, blah.” And I get it. There's a lot of noise and a lot of crap. Yet we have access to billions of people, and the algorithms in social media right now I think are level three out of 10. They're just going to get better and better.

Even as it is now, if I do a post about something and it gets ignored, that's on me. The algorithms are trying to match me to my people. So if I'm not unique enough and authentic enough and aware enough of how virality works, that's on me, and it's a learnable skill that I can embrace and then change and then get better at.

So I think people then resist that change. They resist the empowerment of learning the art of virality, or learning the art of some sort of social media stuff or whatever.

The last thing I'll say about this rant is, I don't want to act like I'm the guru on the hill that has all the answers. I refuse calls all the time. I'm scared about all sorts of things. I'm certainly not perfect. I feel frustrated when I'm trying to put my big ideas into action and I can't get this technology thing to work or that one, and I throw tantrums.

I'm trying to come at it from a real human perspective, but by and large, I've got stars in my eyes. I'm like, “This is amazing. This is going to be so powerful.”

For so many people, you just have to be ready to embrace it and just go along for the ride, because there's going to be some big-ass changes. There already are, and that's going to accelerate.

Jo: You mentioned there learning the art of whatever it is. One of the things is, I've spent 20 years, and so have you, learning our craft and our art, and now it can be done very easily.

I'm generating video, as you mentioned, which is a craft I haven't spent 20 years on, but now I can generate. So things have definitely changed in that way.

Just coming to the screenwriting side. Probably about a decade ago now, I did my first screenwriting course. I've written screenplays.

Then I looked at the game you have to play and, like you said, the conversations you have to have, the events you have to go and network at, all the things that you have to do to put a screenplay in front of the right person at the right time.

I was like, “I cannot do that. It's just not going to happen. I can't do that along with everything else.”

So I put it aside, but now I feel maybe it's time to bring it back because things are changing. So can you maybe talk about, if someone has a screenplay now that they've written, or some IP like a book that they have now—

What would you recommend people do in terms of wanting to get that [IP] in front of somebody, or doing something with it themselves?Brooks: It's such a good question. By the way, not even a screenplay—you could do the same things with a novel. Let me try to be succinct here, which is a good challenge for me.

A simple way to look at it is, you're giving samples. Let's say it's a lemonade stand, and you give out a little shot of your… maybe you have cayenne pepper lemonade, some sort of fun lemonade. If you give out a sample and people are into it, they're going to come back and they're going to tell friends.

If you give a sample of the lemonade and they're not into it, then you go back to the kitchen and you mix up a different flavour.

So that's some basic business, but the internet allows us to do that at scale. So what I like to encourage people to do when I coach them is come up with the minimum viable material. It can be a 10-second clip.

There's a writer in my community who made a really beautiful 16-second movie. It's one shot. I love it so much. It's two wine glasses. There's a lipstick smudge on one of the wine glasses. They're half full, and it's just that shot.

It's sitting there, and all of a sudden you hear this thundering, thumping down these stairs, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun. Then you see out of the corner of the frame one person runs by, and then the other person behind her runs by and goes, “Wait.”

That's it. That's the whole movie. It's 16 seconds. He did that with his phone.

So there's so much going on. There's a couple of basic elements, but he just did it with his phone, and you can evoke enormous emotional impact on people through social media, whether it's just words.

You guys have a big advantage as novelists because you're so good with words. Whether it's a little bit longer, like sudden fiction, that's a couple of pages or whatever. Even just copywriters are really in a good position for the future because they're super potent with two words or three words or 10 words.

Then novelists are probably really advantageous because it doesn't cost anything to just put some words out on the internet. The point is, if you put something out, it's a signal, and you're talking about billions of people who could find that signal.

If you do it and then you look at the response, and then you try again, you look at the response, we can do this iteration infinitely for free.

So you can do it already. You've been able to do it for 10, 15, 20 years, just with words. But now you're going to basically be able to do that with movies or clips or trailers. So the thing that I'm leading in my community of writers is having people build trailers in advance, or clips.

When a book or a movie is done, how the heck do we get people to see it? One way is a trailer or some sort of behind-the-scenes material. You can just do that stuff now before even writing the screenplay.

I saw that you were doing this project, a trailer for this competition. And then you mentioned, “Oh, I've got to write the screenplay.” Not really. You have to develop the story enough to know what you're referring to, and then it's about studying the craft of either trailer construction, or whatever the clips are, or viral clips.

They all have a structure, and then you just test it. If you enjoy that testing process, which I find absolutely thrilling, it feels like the filmmaking version of a stand-up comedian. If I did stand-up, I say a joke, they laugh or they don't laugh.

It's really beautiful feedback from the universe. Nerve-wracking, right? But we can do that now as storytellers. We put a story out there in any format, and the audience responds.

Just like you have to read any room, you have to learn how to read the engagement on social media. What do likes mean? What do shares mean? What do comments mean? How do you deal with trolls? All that is just part of the new art. Once you get good at it, holy smokes, that's the key to the kingdom.

You can build audiences in advance, and for movies you could even have them finance your movie in advance, if you've built an email list of 20,000, 30,000, 40,000 people because you kept putting out all these viral clips around your story, novel, or screenplay.

Then you go, “Okay, now 30,000 people are on my email list and I tell them about me and my perspective and my world. We're going to make this darn thing with AI for 20,000 bucks. You guys have got to pony up some money. Put in a dollar, five, 10, or you get the VIP $500 experience.”

It's like crowdfunding, but much more sophisticated, because most crowdfunding was like begging friends and family to donate to your crazy dream.

What I'm talking about is going to the audience directly, developing enough of the story, then going to the audience second, and then only when they validate the idea, to the extent that you're happy with.

You could do a crazy idea that's going to have a small audience, and you don't have to have a blockbuster audience. You get to pick the audience size that you want, and then put the samples out there and see if you have a relevant audience size for this next project.

Once the audience tells you, “Yes, we want this,” then you go make it. So you're ultimately reducing risk to almost zero. It takes time and you have to learn how to do this stuff, but it's thrilling to me because we just have the capacity to test the material and listen to the audience upfront.

The last thing I'll say, and I've rambled a lot, I'm sorry. When I made a movie in 1994, a feature film right out of NYU, it took me three years to find out what the audience thought about that movie.

I had to make the damn thing, and then I ran out of money, and that took me years to edit it, and I finally got it, blah, blah, blah. And again, I loved it. I loved every facet of it, and it was fine, but it was super inefficient.

Today, I could take those same elements, create an AI trailer this weekend, put it in front of hundreds of thousands of people, and they could tell me right away, “This sucks,” or, “This is interesting,” or, “Holy smokes, this is amazing. I want this.”

If it's not, “Holy smokes, this is amazing, I want it,” I can go ahead and re-edit the whole damn trailer, and just keep reiterating at almost no cost.

Then once the demand is there, I can take that demand and that audience and go to Hollywood, and that's when they're going to want to work with me.

Then it doesn't take a million conversations and finding the needle in the haystack, because Hollywood sees the numbers and they go, “Oh, you're the people we do want to do business with. You've proven demand. We want to do business with you.”

Jo: Yes, it's so interesting. I can hear people listening and they're like, “Easier said than done, getting an email list of 40,000 people.” And in fact—

It's exactly the same as building up a career as an independent author.This is as a filmmaker, as a visual person, and the industry is visual, so doing a visual trailer is the obvious thing. And as you say, the tools I use just to do this one, I use Midjourney, and I've used Seedance as the main video model.

It does take a while, but it is pretty fast now, if you have a visual image of what you want in your head, which obviously you're a visual person as well. But is it…

Brooks: Hold on. I want to push back on that a little bit, because I think it's really important.

So yes, that's true, but underneath that, my friend, it's a relationship. It's the relationship, and the media is secondary. You have been prolific in connecting with your audience, and that's why I think a lot of people like you, because you share and they get to know you in that sort of cadence.

I saw you in another podcast, you mentioned Seth Godin, who just said, “Hey, I want to be the type of person that has this relationship with my audience. I'm going to share some of my thoughts every day.”

He happened to do it with words, with his background in marketing, but you could do the same thing with still images. You could do the same thing with a five-second movie clip once a week. It's the relationship you want with your fans.

I'm not saying you snap your fingers and you have 50,000 people on your email list. What I'm saying is, what else are you doing?

If we're artists and our impulse is to create and share, and if you do it in this way, if I can create and share and inspire trust in this relationship with a stranger because they like my genre thing and they like the way they felt when they experienced my media, words, images, movies, it doesn't matter.

They just like the feeling, and they go, “Ooh, I want more of that feeling. How do I get more of that? Oh, this person has this email list or community.”

If I can do it with one, then I can scale it out. So getting the first one, or the first 5 or 10 samples, that is a whole process. But then once you do that, scaling up is more of a mechanical thing. It's not even that hard, especially when you can do paid ads.

So you can scale up very quickly if you have the sauce. If you don't have the sauce, it doesn't matter who you're related to, you've got to get the sauce right.

Jo: Yes, and again, it's so parallel to the indie author community.

I've just got to ask you, in the olden days, an author might write a screenplay, or a screenwriter write a screenplay, and then they would send it. They'd find an agent. They'd pitch an agent, and I guess then they'd hope that someone would turn that into a movie. So is that just dead now?

Is it realistically that you need to get yourself out there, build the audience in the same way that it often is for authors?Brooks: So, no. I've got two screenplay deals going right now. So here's how it's going to work. Think about Broadway, or the theatre district in Britain. It's like West End or East End or whatever…

Jo: The West End.

Brooks: Sorry for my American ignorance. West End, okay.

So every town on the planet has a stage, but there's only one Broadway, there's only one West End, right? And every town has its own festival, but there are a few significant tastemakers. There's Cannes, there's Sundance, there's Toronto. Hollywood is always going to be a tastemaker in our lifetime, for sure.

What they don't have anymore, what they enjoyed for the first 100 years of the industry, is that they had a stranglehold on basically the equipment, the financing, and the audience, and that's all going away.

Do you want to hear a fun story about the birth of cinema? Do you know why Hollywood started in Hollywood?Jo: No.

Brooks: So Thomas Edison invented the camera, or the type of model camera that they were using in, I don't know, 1910 or something around there.

They didn't want to pay his patent. They didn't want to pay the patent to make these movies, so they went all the way across the country, a bunch of outlaws, and they set up shop in California because he couldn't enforce his patent that they were basically stealing.

And reason number two, LA enjoys amazing weather almost all year round. The weather here is either nice or really nice. You have mountains, you have beach, you have desert, you have all these different locales. So when it was really important to be on location, LA was the perfect place.

Anyway, that is all going away. For many decades, more people could make movies. In the early '90s, Robert Rodriguez made a movie for 9,000 bucks. There was a book in the '80s that I bought that I loved, it was Feature Filmmaking at Used-Car Prices. This guy, Rick Schmidt, I think his name was.

There were the independent filmmakers really in the '60s and the '70s. So the cost has been going down and down and down, and now it's less than ever. Once social media came along, now you have access to the audience, so why do you even need Hollywood?

That being said, there are tons of people. There are 400,000 people already working in the movie and the TV industry here. And they're voracious. We have a voracious demand.

Humans need stories. We need big stories, long stories. We need stories, and Hollywood is so good at giving them stories. And so they have a need for these things, and they're still spending a lot of money on those budgets.

So yes, there's still a demand for turning books and optioning them and turning them into movies. Books are great. Any sort of existing IP is great because there are marketing efficiencies there.

People already know that stuff, know the vibe of it, and so it's easier to market than something that's totally creative and new. When you're spending that much money, you want those marketing efficiencies. They're really important.

So the point being, the power is shifting away from Hollywood. Hollywood will still be a tastemaker, but you and me can reach anybody on the planet now. Almost. Billions of people.

If it's making a movie, right now you could make a movie that most people wouldn't realise is an AI movie. If it was a horror film, I know a handful of people that could make a feature-length horror film right now with AI and 99% of the audience couldn't tell, if it was professionally written.

Jo: I think the point here though is, I'm an author, the people listening are authors, and we don't want to make movies.

We want to license our IP to people who want to make movies.Brooks: Yes. Great. Okay, good. So then you could, if you wanted, build an audience. Hollywood loves when something's already proven, so that's that IP thing, right?

So if you just have a great book, then it's all about the sales. You guys have Dragons' Den, we have Shark Tank here. And what's amazing about that show is these are people or entrepreneurs pitching an idea, and there's an amazing rhythm that happens.

They say, “We've got this great idea. It's this sort of company.” And the sharks, or the dragons, will listen. And there's a huge turning point when they reveal sales.

They're either really excited about the idea and then they go, “Well, how are the sales?” And the person goes, “Well, we don't have any sales yet.” And they go, “Uh,” and they're not interested.

Or they might even be like, “Eh, it doesn't seem like a good idea.” And they're like, “Well, how are the sales?” And they're like, “Oh, well, we've sold through the roof.” And then all of a sudden they perk up. So it's all about the sales.

So step one is writing something that you want. Step two is making sure other people in your target audience are also loving it as much as you do. Step three is proving in some way at scale that there's real demand for it.

So you could do that with trailers, you could do that with clips, you can do that as an indie publisher. There's all sorts of things that you can do. Humans are much more persuaded by concrete data than they are by just vibes.

So if you can bring Hollywood concrete data of any type, like viral videos, like audience, like obviously bestsellers. Awards mean something, but not quite as much as sales. Then you're going to get Hollywood's attention because that reduces risk for them.

So even now, when Hollywood's definitely shrinking and contracting, there's still very significant money being spent because it's a huge demand. If you ever walk around a studio lot, those things are opulent places. It's stunning. Like, how are they paying for all this stuff? These lots are enormous.

It's because humanity is voracious for stories, and movies are one premium type of storytelling. The demand for stories is steady if not going up. It's just that we have a wider variety of types of stories that we can do, whether we're an indie author.

So anyway, did I answer the question? You get me too excited with these questions, Jo. It's a problem.

Jo: Yes. I think there's a lot of opportunity and a lot of ways in, but the parallels with being an indie author I think are quite clear.

One of the things I found interesting about your profile and what you do is that you help clients who are already accomplished but not quite breaking through, and that sounds like a lot of mid-list indie authors, probably a lot of mid-list screenwriters, mid-list filmmakers.

This is a hard place to be because, on the one hand, we are grateful for what we have achieved and what we can do, and yet wanting more, wanting that big Hollywood deal or the Netflix deal, or wanting the massive bestseller or whatever.

So if someone wants to get to that next level, what are some of the ways that they can perhaps try and get there?Brooks: It's a great question. Coaching is a really wonderful way to learn anything of this sort of complexity and challenge, especially if it's a hyper-competitive business. We need two things, I think, to write a great novel or screenplay or both.

A, we need to feel profoundly safe in our space. If we can't really feel deeply authentic about the things that are embarrassing, or that we feel shame about, or just our shadows, or anything that we don't feel completely comfortable saying and sharing in public usually.

We need to be able to touch those things, and be articulate about those things, and that's one part of it. Then we need a concrete path forward. Maybe you're thinking about some tragedy that you had in childhood, and how you dealt with it and how difficult that was.

So you need to be able to be real precise in those observations about what it felt like, and how you tried to compensate for it, and that didn't work and it made it worse.

Whatever your observations are about your life journey, you need to be really specific and really deeply felt. A good coaching relationship allows you to be in that space, to be really honest with yourself and authentic. g

Aood coach will push you back and say, “You know what? That sounds interesting, but maybe not quite as true to you deeply.” So that's one piece of it. Then there's a concrete path forward.

You need to have the emotional access to that truth, and then you need to know what to do with that truth in a step-by-step way. Because most people, the ones that you're talking about, they're accomplished in something else.

What happens is when we first start writing, and maybe this happens with novelists, but for sure it happens to screenwriters, you just start typing words. But you haven't really thought through the theme, the concept, the structure, the character, all the deeper questions that really matter.

The milestones, like a North Star: winning a major award, or getting a publisher. That's the direction that we're heading towards, and then you set it and forget it, but you want to keep checking it every week, every month or whatever. But you want it very specific.

“I would like to sell a book, or sell a book to Hollywood, or write a screenplay, or get a producer attached to a screenplay.”

Whatever the milestone is, make it really specific, really concrete, and then reverse engineer.This is what I do on the concrete path. I reverse engineer every step to get there, starting with a really tiny one we can do today, and I make sure they feel really safe, and then we just walk through.

Then what happens is, if you do that, if you feel safe, if you're showing up authentically and you have a process that's repeatable, not just willy-nilly, it's got to be something that's proven to work. It wasn't an accident I wrote 45 scripts. I've got a whole system.

But by the way, the first five scripts took me forever. The last movie that I made took me three years to write that script. I can write a better script with those same elements in three months now, because I know I have a concrete path.

So if you want to do something new, whether it's playing the piano or getting six-pack abs or writing a screenplay, work with somebody who's got a system that's already proven, and make sure you relate to them, and then just follow the system.

Then when the doubts come up, and they will, that's where the feeling safe is really important. Because, oh, I want the six-pack abs, but I don't feel like going to the gym. I want the extra donut.

If I'm working with a really good trainer, they go, “Dude, do you want the six-pack abs or not?” And then you go back and forth, and I go, “Okay, now I can make peace with myself and say I can take one tiny bite of the donut and then still do my workout,” and then I'm moving towards that North Star. Does that make sense?

Jo: Yes. I think, like many independents, I resist anything that is systematised. I'm a discovery writer, and I follow the muse, and all of that kind of thing.

I think I would say something in a similar vein, which is sustainable creativity for the long term, because your 45 scripts are also years of work, and my books are years of work, and we get better at what we do. So my system, I do have a system really, because—

My system is that I do the work, and I write my stories, and I get them out there, and I do the marketing. So even if it's not as systematised as such, it's still a process that I have repeated over and over again.

Brooks: That's fascinating to me. Would you consider yourself a pantser? You're like, “I've got an idea,” and you just start writing?

Jo: I don't use the word pantser. I guess I call it discovery writing, which is…

Brooks: That's a better term.

Jo: Yes. What I'm writing for this prize, for example, I know the characters, I know now what's happening.

When I had the idea, it was very much a vision and a theme, and the competition has a theme: a positive future with AI and technology. But the things that came around that, I then started playing with ideas around the treatment. I haven't written the screenplay yet.

I don't do a plot, or I don't follow Save the Cat or any of that kind of thing. When I write a novel, I just explore and I never write in order. Then at some point I stop and then I have to think about the structure and putting it all together, so the edits are quite big. But my fun is in that discovery, really.

Brooks: Oh, that's awesome. Okay, so let me ask, that's really fascinating. And by the way, that doesn't, to me, negate the system that I use.

The one that I use is ultimately… the thing is, these questions, the audience is wanting your unique answers to. You don't necessarily need to do it in a certain order. I think that's actually really cool that you write out of order and you have a few elements in mind. All that stuff sounds awesome.

The only thing that then makes me curious is, how's your pace? Are you actually completing novels at a pace that feels good, or do you feel like you go too fast, too slow?

Jo: I do one or two a year at the moment. Well, two a year, really. But I would say I'm not as successful as I'd like to be, so I'm not saying that my system is the best. I'm saying I want to be better.

It's just that my fun is this sort of creative chaos, which I then try and control later.One of the things I really like about screenplays and treatments and doing this kind of thing for film is that it is much more structured, I think, than a 70,000-word novel. You can go in all kinds of directions, whereas with screenwriting you do have to be more disciplined really.

Brooks: Yes, so this is going to be fun probably, to hear my view for your audience, and the differences as I see them.

For starters, you're talking about what, 10, 20, 30 hours reading a novel sometimes, or maybe less, whereas a movie's a 90-minute experience, right? So that's different. Or if it's a TV series, you might see an hour and then an hour. So that's a very different experience.

What happens is when it's condensed like that, you're loading up layers. So every scene is stacked with exposition beneath the drama, and done in a certain way. So specifically, movies are only what you can see and only what you hear. Whereas novels, if you can think it, you can write it, it can be in there.

So you don't need to have a plot, but if you want to sell your book to Hollywood, it helps.

So I was very resistant about structure. I went to NYU film school, where we really just made short films. It was funny, I had friends that were in the dramatic writing department, and I was like, “You guys are wasting your money. You're just learning to write scripts. We learn to write the scripts and make the movies.”

What I hadn't realised is it's a different skill set to hold somebody's attention across an hour-long play, or a 90-minute movie, than it is to make a movie that holds their attention for two minutes or five minutes.

I found out years later when I made a feature that was like a lot of shorts patched together, and people were not… They liked it, but they didn't love it. I was like, “Well, what's going on?” And so then I learned to really love Save the Cat in particular. It completely changed me.

What happened was, I got a big old slice of humble pie. I had made my second feature, and I put everything I had into it, and it had loose structural beginning, middle, end, blah, blah, blah. But I was still, “Eh, Hollywood BS. What do they know? It's all fake.”

So I was very anti-Hollywood structure. Then I was like, now I've got two independent films out there, people saw them, liked them, whatever, but it wasn't getting me consistent work. It wasn't really advancing my career in the way that I wanted. And I was like, “Well, maybe there is something to the Save the Cat.”

So I went to the Save the Cat workshop with Blake when he was still alive, and he was delightful, a really awesome guy. He's got this kind of cutesy style, for people that don't know.

For context, Blake Snyder was a working Hollywood screenwriter, and he had this system called Save the Cat, which actually has some really interesting ideas.

He's got this very light, breezy sort of style. A lot of people don't like him and some people really love him, and everything in between. But I took his weekend seminar, and it completely changed me, because at that point, like I said, I took three years to write a script.

Then once he had a process and he had a way of thinking about craft that was just much more screenwriter-friendly, I was like, “Oh my God.” It was so much easier, because I was just focused on the right thing at the right time. So it just sped everything up.

After that, I was banging out two to three scripts a year, and better and better quality.So for me, because I went from winging it and wrote five scripts in 13 years, and then wrote two to three scripts every year, I became a huge proponent of system and process.

Then my own system really came from that, but it's modular. I have a nine-step system, but you don't necessarily have to go in that order, other than the last three steps, but I won't get into the details. Sometimes you kind of jump from two to three and then back to two and then back and forth.

So I love that you get the feel for those elements, and then you just felt your way through. But writing screenplay pages doesn't make sense until you really understand concept, you get a deep sense of beginning, middle, end, character arcs, and these other threads.

There are just way better tools for those jobs than screenplay format, because it's a really weird format. It's got these weird slug lines at the top that are all in caps, because a screenplay is a blueprint for somebody else to make the movie. It's not an end-user document like a novel.

I don't let my clients even go to that format because it just gets them focused on the wrong things. What they really need to know is, what is your perspective about this theme? What happened in your life that you're fascinated with, that you'd even want to write about this? And tell me what your real life lessons are.

So we go into… again, I go back to relationship. What's your relationship to the universe? And what's your relationship to your best friends, or where you got your heart broken, or whatever you want to write about. And then we get that clarity, and then I show you how to express it in terms of developing a screenplay.

It's really long-form storytelling, and then the structure just makes it build on itself. But with the structure, because you're talking about so much money and people involved to make it, at least traditionally, what ended up happening was narrative structure that was not so much rigid.

Because here's the thing, you can look at 50, 100 years of European cinema and you can look at Hollywood cinema, and Hollywood laps them.

When I taught at UCLA Extension, I had lots of foreign students. Let's say there'd be two or three students… if there were 12 people in the class, two or three people would be from America, and everybody else would be from other countries.

I would go around, I'd be like, “What movies and TV shows have you been watching?” Almost in every single country, they watch half from their own country, half from Hollywood. So Hollywood storytelling works, that's just the data, and they're dominant.

The reason it works is what Aristotle was saying thousands of years ago.. There's a way of thinking about beginning, middle, end that just deeply speaks to the psyche, and you can ignore it if you want. I think Godard said, “You need beginning, middle, and end, but not necessarily in that order,” right? Which is great.

Just the way we experience life, there's a beginning, a middle, an end to this podcast interview. There's a beginning, middle, end to the day, a beginning, middle, end to me eating lunch.

So if you don't lean into the beginning, middle, end psychological aspect of your story, you're going to bore your reader.But to your point, you don't necessarily have to sort that out in the beginning. It's more efficient probably if you do, but you don't have to. Go into it wherever the muse tells you to go, and then at some point, like you do, then you go, “Okay, now I go back and I edit.”

If you're saying there's another level, you have another gear in you, then yes, I'd be curious to slowly go through how you're making those decisions. Because what's happening probably is there are ways you're holding back a little bit. There's maybe something you're afraid of being vulnerable about.

That's usually where me or other writers are holding themselves back, and we can take a look at that. There are different ways I show writers to do it. Then you can go, “Oh, I was doing it here, and now I can do it there.” And it could be with process, or just a certain creative choice.

With story, it's clear and compelling. Those are the simple things. So, is this clear enough? Is it compelling enough? And there are almost always ways to up-level on any facet, whether it's one sentence, or a sentence that describes the whole concept of the book, or a chapter.

Each one of those can be looked at with that lens and we can just say, “Hey, this is 70%, 80%,” whatever, and then we say, “Well, how do we get a little bit more?” And then when you do that enough, it piles up. Then especially if you bring in an audience and people are flipping out for your work, they'll tell you.

Jo: Yes, I love a challenge, so thank you for everything you've shared today.

So where can people find you and everything you do online?Brooks: Well, one way you can find me—if anything I said seemed helpful for you, if you have questions about Hollywood or you have a screenplay in your heart—you can just email me, brooks@brookselms.com.

You could look me up on LinkedIn. I'm at Brooks Elms. I also have a Skool community called Screenwriter Marketing, but it's really for any sort of storyteller, and it talks about my favourite way to engage an audience and get through it. So anybody can jump into that if you like my vibe.

If you really think anything I've said, or the way I said it, seems like it could be helpful for you, just reach out. Let me know what you're up to, and maybe there's a way I can help you.

Jo: Fantastic. Well, thanks so much for your time, Brooks. That was great.

Brooks: You're welcome. It was a total pleasure. It was lots of fun, and I really appreciate you.

The post How To Prove The Demand For Your Stories And Get The Attention Of Hollywood With Brooks Elms first appeared on The Creative Penn.

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How can organic writing and leaning into the pivot help your stories stand out? And how can you pitch a story as a discovery writer if you genuinely don't know what's going to happen next. Steven James gives his writing tips after more than 20 years as an author.

In the intro, Better Than Free in an Age of AI [Kevin Kelly on Tim Ferriss; Kevin Kelly on The Creative Penn]; Future Vision XPrize; A Different Kind of Bucket List.

Today's show is sponsored by Draft2Digital, self-publishing with support, where you can get free formatting, free distribution to multiple stores, and a host of other benefits. Just go to www.draft2digital.com to get started.

This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn

Steven James is the multi-award-winning and international bestselling author of 21 novels across thrillers, YA, and science fiction, with more than a million copies sold, as well as the author of non-fiction craft books for writers, a writing teacher, and the host of The Story Blender 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

• How to lean into organic writing, and what to focus on instead of plot
• How characters unfold on the page, and why an attitude beats a background
• Producing an outline for an agent or publisher when you genuinely don't know what happens next
• Don't pitch the plot, pitch the pivot
• The four choices you have in every scene, and why logic plus surprise is the engine of story
• Faith, moral clarity and big questions

You can find Steven at StevenJames.net.

Transcript of the interview with Steven JamesJo: Steven James is the multi-award-winning and international bestselling author of 21 novels across thrillers, YA, and science fiction, with more than a million copies sold, as well as the author of non-fiction craft books for writers, a writing teacher, and the host of The Story Blender Podcast. So welcome to the show, Steven.

Steven: Thanks for having me, Jo. Good to be here.

Jo: Great to have you on the show. First up—

Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and publishing.Steven: Oh, gosh. Well, the thing is, when I was a kid, I fell in love with stories.

My uncle would always, whenever we got together for the holidays—Christmas, New Year's and so on—he would take my sister, my brother and myself into a corner of the room while the other adults had coffee, and we would just sit there, and he would get this look in his eye and he'd say, “I'm going to tell you a story.”

We were transported to another world. We were swashbuckling with pirates, or facing down a grizzly bear in Alaska, or flying over the desert on a flying carpet, or whatever. I fell in love with imagination and stories and everything.

So I started reading as much as I could, mostly short stories. They had a programme at our library called the paperback book exchange, where you bring a paperback book and you leave it, and you can take any one of the paperback books that they had.

You could keep it as long as you wanted. If you wanted it for your life, that's fine, or you could just bring it back as soon as you finished reading it.

Anyway, I went crazy over the summers reading short stories, mainly. As I got older, I was like, “I think I want to be a storyteller.” So I actually got my master's degree in storytelling.

Then I started to travel and tell stories, but I had three little daughters at home, and I was like, “I don't want to be gone 300 days a year when they are growing up.” So I ended up starting to write stories instead of travel, and then it just kind of shifted in that direction.

That was in '97. Oh my goodness, that's long. '97, '98. So then I started to write books, and then eventually in 2007, I think, my first novel came out. Now, mainly, I've been writing novels ever since.

Jo: It's so interesting.

Was it a job, storytelling? Is that what you did before you became a book writer? Or did you have a different job?Steven: I mostly would go to events, conferences, schools and so on, and do a family-friendly storytelling show. So I would tell personal stories, some folktales reimagined. I would go to different events around the country. Mostly it was that.

Then I started to shift. I wrote for magazines for a while—80 different magazines I wrote for over those years, a couple of hundred different articles, stories.

I was like, “I'm just going to try to make a living telling stories.” So the shift has gone back and forth between actually telling stories and writing stories, but these days, I don't know. I'm still speaking. I'm still out there teaching.

Jo: That's so interesting, because it's obviously a completely different thing to tell a story in person than it is to write a story.

So when you decided to shift that way, what did you have to learn and unlearn? Because your thoughts on the page are so different to when you can make eye contact with an audience.

Steven: That's a good point. I kind of started by telling stories back when I was in college, so I sort of moved from telling to writing. And you're right, there's so much that's lost, whether it's eye contact or pauses.

On a printed page, there's always the same amount of space between every word—a space. But when you tell stories, obviously you pause for effect in different places, different areas, and so it's quite different.

So if I have an idea for a story, I usually have to decide, is this going to be written or told? And then I do it in that medium. Then if I want to, let's say, tell a written story, I almost have to relearn it, or retell it very differently.

You have gestures, body language. All of those things are obviously lost in text, so they are very different.

I think for me it's been good, because when I tell stories, I hear different characters speaking, so that when I write, usually dialogue comes fast to me. I can hear what people are saying.

I don't always know where they are. I don't always know the setting. I don't even know the scene necessarily, but I can hear the dialogue.

Then it also helps me to step into the characters, like when I'm writing different points of view, so that I think I can do a good job of getting into that character's mind, as if I were that person. I think some of that comes from just telling stories.

Jo: You've taught so many writers over the years, and it's interesting you said that you hear characters' dialogue. I see visual film in my mind. I don't hear any voice at all. It's all silent.

I struggle with dialogue, but I do great world building. Do you find that this really is different by the author? I feel like we fall into these different groups.

Steven: Yes, I do. I kind of feel like that's very true as far as what comes first, whether it's a description of a place, whether it's the action.

I mean, basically a story has dialogue, narration—or we call it sometimes exposition—and description. Those three things. Every story has those three things, and those are the three that we use to tell a story, a novel.

So some people tend to drift into one or the other as sort of their default setting: dialogue, description, or action. That's true.

I think also something else that's interesting about writers is they tend to fall into either the camp of being a wordsmith or a storyteller. Not everyone, but I feel like some people are wordsmiths, where I read what they're writing, and I'm like, “Man, this is so powerful, evocative,” whatever.

Maybe there's no story there. It's just really interesting writing.

Other people just are natural storytellers, and they have to really work on the wordsmithing. I think that's me. I'm more naturally just a storyteller, but it takes me a long time to get the descriptions to where I want them, to choose exactly the right word. That takes me more effort.

Some people have to build up the storytelling muscles. I have to build up the wordsmithing muscles.

Jo: Well, part of the reason I wanted to talk to you is because you talk about this thing called organic writing in your book Story Trumps Structure, which is out now in a second edition. I call it discovery writing, so similar to you. But most people in the writing community seem to obsess about plotting and planning.

So talk about your process of organic writing. You say in the book, “Trust the fluidity of the process.” Tell us more about that.Steven: Well, I remember in high school even, when my teacher got up front and he kind of got this very almost wise look on his face, and he goes, “A story is something with a beginning, a middle, and an end.”

I'm sitting there in high school like, “Well, so does a bratwurst. What are you talking about here?” A description of a chair has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The sentence, “Preheat the oven to 450 degrees,” has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

My view is that saying a story is something that has three acts is like saying that a pizza is something with three toppings. It might have three. It might have one. It might have five.

So the idea for me is not to worry about structure, trying to tick off the boxes of a template, a formula you find online, a fill-in-the-blanks kind of a thing. But instead, to actually look at what lies at the heart of the story—the character, the tension, the struggle, the pursuit, the pivots and plot twists, and the payoff at the end.

As you develop those aspects of the story, I feel like you need to worry less and less about following a formula. The more you understand what lies at the heart of a story, I feel like the less you need to plot and the less you need to write by the seat of your pants.

A lot of people say, “Oh, you write by the seat of…” No, I don't write by the seat of my pants, because I know what a story contains, so I know that in a certain scene a character will make certain choices that are unpredictable but that escalate the tension, and different things like that.

I'm a huge proponent of discovery, as you say, or organic writing.

I won't get the quote exactly right, but Ray Bradbury said something along the lines of, “Plot is the tracks left in the snow after your characters have run by on their incredible destinations. It cannot precede action. It is the chart that remains when an action is through.”

So he's saying plot is not what precedes action. After the action, you have plot. So the whole idea of trying to plot out a story before you write it is going about writing exactly backwards. Plot doesn't precede action. It's the result.

So I always tell people, “Don't worry so much about the plot. I want you to look at the pursuit.”

A plotter might say, “Well, what should happen?” And they'll just come up with something. But an organic writer—a pursuit-based question would be, what does the character want? Now, when I know what the character wants, I will know what should happen. So literally, it will lead me to the story.

Focusing on plot will not necessarily lead you to the story. It might lead you down the wrong track.

Jo: Then in terms of your actual writing process—

Do you start writing without knowing the ending? Do you write in order? Is the organic side also in the process?Steven: I've never started a book where I know how it will end. So I usually start with either a character that's fascinating or, in some cases, a premise, a question. Then as I write, I explore the possibilities of where it might go.

I've tried to outline a scene—like one scene, not a whole book—and it never works. I can't even outline one scene. I've tried, and I'm like, okay, that's… What I end up with is completely different from it, so it's just a waste of time and effort for me to try to outline or plot out a story.

I'm much more interested in the pathway the characters will take as they face obstacles and setbacks in their pursuit. As the struggles and the tension develop, what choices will they make? That's how the story will unfold for me.

Jo: I'm similar. Then I also wonder—

Do you do character sheets and character bios, or do the characters also unfold organically?Steven: Absolutely, I don't do any of the sheets and bios and stuff. The characters really come to me as I write. I begin to get to know them.

I always tell people, a character with an attitude is more interesting than a character with a background. So a lot of people will spend a lot of time on, like, where's this character gone to college, and what's their first pet's name, all that stuff.

I'm not trying to dump on that idea. I get that that can be helpful. But I'm like, how would I know that until I've spent time with them?

Then once I begin to spend time with them, I'm writing and I'm like, “Nah, this doesn't seem like what that character would really say or do,” so I have to go back and rejigger the story to hopefully make it fit with that character.

Then I like to give the characters some sort of attitude. I'm not talking about a negative or judgy attitude, but an attitude about something that is unique or different, and that makes them not a template character, not an archetype or whatever, but unique.

Sort of this constellation of unique traits, characteristics, maybe wounds, flaws and so on, that create a character where you're like, “This is a character like none I've ever seen before. I want to spend time with this character.”

Jo: Then you're spending time with the character by writing what's happening, as opposed to writing loads of stuff beforehand and then starting to write.

You're actually finding all of this out during the process of writing.Steven: Yes, and I think it's kind of like getting to know someone. If I were to say, “Okay, I'm going to write down Jo's bio,” or whatever—okay, I'm making stuff up, because I don't know you super well.

If we were to spend time together, hang out, whatever, talk, over the course of time I would start to know, oh, she likes this, she doesn't like that. This is important to her. This is what she would weep or pound the table over—whatever, all of the things that come with time. It's like a friendship in real life to me.

So I can't sit down and tell you what a character in real life would think and say and do if I don't know them, but the more time I spend with them, then the more I'm able to predict that accurately.

I think the mistake a lot of people make is they think, “I'm going to get to know this character with a background,” and then they start writing it, and instead of looking at the context, they look back at the—I don't know what you call it—the background or something like that.

I always feel like what you mentioned earlier is, like, hold it loosely in your hand. Trust the fluidity of the process.

As you're writing, you have an instinct. “Ah, I think this character would say this or do this.” So trust that. Trust that instinct. Trust that moment in the story, instead of trying to go back to an outline, back to a character description, or whatever it might be.

So I'm a big proponent of looking at the context—not just what happened, but what is the result? So looking at the impetus and the implication of the choices and the activities. When something occurs, what would the character naturally say or do or think or respond?

Then what would that cause? What's the implication that that would have on the rest of the story, on the rest of the characters? So, really trying to keep your finger on the pulse of the story, and adapt as you move forward through it.

Jo: I love all of that, but I also am very aware that you've been in traditional publishing for over 20 years, and one of the things with agents and publishers is that they often ask for an outline.

So how do you manage that? Or how did you more earlier in your career, because I imagine they just trust you now.

Earlier in your career, or people listening who want to pitch but they write in this organic way, how do we deal with that kind of thing?Steven: Well, okay, so there's two good questions. One is about producing an outline for an agent or editor or publisher and so on. The other is how to pitch a story.

So the first: I would write the premise down, and maybe a paragraph or two, and then where I think it might go. Basically, I would focus on the questions that the characters will face, maybe the moral dilemmas, the sacrifices they have to make, the world they live in.

I kind of know that stuff, and I can write a couple of paragraphs about that. But beyond that, I just don't know what's going to happen, so I can't really provide more.

I'm looking at my shelf at the books that I've done, and mostly that's what I've done is kind of a couple of paragraphs focusing on the premise and the problem, the struggle, and so on like that.

As far as pitching a story, I always tell people, “Don't pitch the plot, pitch the pivot.”

I think that there's a screenwriter—I think that he talks about this a little bit. I've not read the book Save the Cat, but people have told me, “Oh, he kind of brings this up in that book.”

The idea is to pitch the irony instead of what occurs. So sometimes when I tell people to pitch, or I give them ideas, one process that you can use is: when, must, before, or else. So, when this occurs, this character must do something before this, or else.

So you have the character, you have the struggle, you have the inciting incident, you have the stakes, and you have the countdown. It works well for thrillers.

So for instance, like Jaws. When a man-eating shark starts eating people in a small seaside village, the sheriff must stop him before more people die and the town loses its economy. So there you have when, must, before, or else.

Now, no one's going to buy the story based on that, because there's no irony, there's no pivot. It's just a description of the plot, and that's what most people pitch.

So I always tell people, pitch the part of the story that you wouldn't expect. So for instance, in there you might pitch: when a shark starts eating people in a small seaside village, the only one who can stop him is afraid of the water.

Now you're like, “Oh, well, that's interesting. How does that happen? What happens there?”

With my book Broker of Lies, the pitch was something like, when a high-level Pentagon redactor ends up on the run, he must stop a terrorist attack before he's neutralised by the people he trusts the most.

So the pivot is that the people he trusts at the Pentagon the most are actually trying to neutralise him because he's on the run, and all that kind of stuff. So why would they be trying to do that? Well, that's interesting.

So it's always looking for the irony, the pivot. Why is this character the last one in the world who would ever be equipped to tackle this problem or face this issue?

So that's one way to do a pitch. Obviously there's lots of them, but I think your goal with a pitch is to get them to say, “Tell me more.” It's not necessarily to summarise the whole story.

Jo: That's great advice. So you teach writers—I first saw you at ThrillerFest, I think it was 2012—and you do events, you run writing retreats. So you work with a lot of authors, and I wondered, what are the challenges that you see from authors with, say, five books?

So not the beginner authors, because obviously there's a lot of challenges. But those who, let's say they've got the three to five books, things are going all right, but they're like, “How do I get to the next level?”

What are the craft issues, or the business issues as well, that mid-list authors face?Steven: Well, business, I'm not the guy to ask. I could try to answer that, but I mean, basically: meet your deadlines and write something amazing. Try to be easy to work with, but also stand up for what you wrote as far as working with editors. It's sort of a fine line you have to walk.

The one thing that over the last few years I've really noticed in a lot of writers who are in that space is that they don't have many pivots. They tend to write predictable stories, and that's why they tend to stay where they're at—whether it's because they're following an outline or a plot formula or whatever it is.

So when I talk about a pivot, I mean a moment in the story where something happens that's both unexpected and inevitable.

For instance, if you're reading a story, you want things to make sense. You want them to be logical. That's one thing. But you don't want them to be too predictable. If it's too predictable, it's boring. It's like, I'm not interested.

So we also want surprises. We want these two things. We want logic, and we want surprise. When those two things meet and you have a moment in the story where it's like, “I didn't see that coming, but that totally makes sense,” that's what we want, and we want that in every scene.

I feel like a lot of authors don't have that in every scene. Now, you might say, “Well, every scene?” Well, yes, because basically those two factors, logic and surprise, can only meet in four different ways.

You could have something that's very logical but has no surprises. That's going to be boring. It's going to be too predictable. We don't want that.

You could have something that is very surprising but not logical. It makes no sense. A lot of stuff is surprising, but that's not what we want, because it's unbelievable, and it's like, what is going on here?

You could have something that has neither logic nor surprise, which obviously we don't want that.

The only other option is to have a moment that is both logical and surprising. So you have a choice in every scene. You have four choices, actually. You can have it be predictable and boring. You can have it be nonsensical. You can have it be unbelievable. Or you can have a pivot.

So I find myself trying to really coach people on pivots. They'll say, “Oh, well, do I need it in every scene?” I'm like, “You can choose, but do you want it to be predictable or boring or nonsensical, or do you want it to really drive the story forward?”

I think it's because people have been taught structure and plot and three acts and all this kind of stuff, but they haven't been taught this idea—even though it's not something I made up.

Aristotle, in Poetics, thousands of years ago, put it a little bit differently, but he said, “The reversal of the situation”—what I call the pivot—”is the moment at which the action veers around to its opposite”—that would be what I call surprise—”subject always to a rule of probability or necessity”—which is the logic.

So he's basically saying the same thing in just a little bit different language, but you have these three factors. You have logic, you have surprise, and you have them come together in a specific moment.

I don't know why it's not taught more. I have never found anyone who teaches pivots. I have not found any books, so I wrote a book recently about how to use pivots.

It's so central, and I think great storytellers naturally do it. You'll read a book, or you'll maybe watch a show, and you're like, “Oh, I didn't see that coming. That totally makes sense.” I don't see anyone else out there really focusing on teaching that.

So that's a huge thing for me, really, to help people move up in their writing, elevate it to a different level.

Jo: Is that Delve, Pivot, Propel?

Steven: Yes. That book came out a couple years ago. We just re-released it. I updated it some, but it talks pretty much in depth about pivots and how to actually use those to propel the stories forward.

Jo: Maybe you could just give us one tip on how to do that, because going back to the organic writing—let's say I've been organically writing, and every time a character has a decision to make, I think at that point about what I want to write and I write it.

Are you suggesting that we go back in the edit and look at the end of every scene and redo it?Because I can't imagine that I would get this right every time. I would need to do that in an edit, I think.

Steven: I think for me, when I'm writing, I'm always asking myself a series of questions. One is, what would the character naturally do? I want to make it believable and natural. Let them do it.

I want to escalate the tension, so I'll ask myself, “How can I make things worse?”

Then I'll always ask myself, how can I add a pivot to this scene? So as I'm writing a scene—again, I don't know how it will end when I start it—but if I use the first idea that comes to mind, probably a lot of readers would guess that as well, because it's the first idea that comes to mind. It's probably logical and probably predictable.

That's why most stories end up being too predictable. It's because we go with the first idea that maybe we had. So I try to discard that. Maybe the second idea, just discard it. Then I start thinking, okay, now if I've discarded the obvious, what is going on? What's below the surface?

So to answer your question, I'm looking for what isn't what it appears to be, or who isn't who they appear to be, or a surprising way to bring together plot threads that I didn't see related before. So it's always looking for the unexpected, the surprise, because most of the time that is what we're missing.

Now, if you have a great surprise, then you have to lean into making it believable. So you've got to move into that idea of, well, what would the character naturally do? You can't just have him do something ridiculous and then say, “Oh, it's for my twist.” No, you can't do that. You've got to play fair.

So it has to be believable, causally related, logical, and surprising. That's what you're shooting for.

Those are the questions going through my mind. So as I'm working on a scene, I'm like, “How could I end this?” Or include something that people won't see coming right away. The best ideas always come to me then.

It's so interesting. A lot of people will say, “Oh, don't write organically,” or, quote, “by the seat of your pants,” whatever they'll say, “because then you might write yourself into a corner.”

I'm like, “Yes, absolutely write yourself into a corner. That's what I'm trying to do in every scene.” And then you write yourself out of a corner in a way that's logical and surprising.

The best twists I've ever come up with have been when I'm in a corner. So why would I warn people against going to the place where the best ideas await them? That just seems mean. Why would I do that?

No, I want you to have the best possible ideas. So yes, look for corners, write yourself into them, and then write yourself out of them in a way that's both logical and surprising.

Jo: I guess also it needs to be genre specific. We write mainly thrillers, and there is this fine line, isn't there? I love Stephen King, but one of the most unbelievable endings is Under the Dome. I still remember feeling betrayed. I don't know if you've read that one, but—

Steven: Oh, no.

Jo: I was like, “I'm sorry, you've just changed genre in the last chapter of the book. What is going on here?”

Steven: That's actually interesting. The fourth question I ask… So I ask, what would the character naturally do? How can I make things worse? How can I add a pivot? But the fourth question is, what promises have I made that I have not yet kept?

So genre, to me, is a promise. You build up a promise in your writing at the beginning of the book, and then I feel like as we write, we have to honour that. So if we bring something up that's super interesting, bring it back or whatever. Keep your promises. Keep your narrative promises.

It's true of really any genre. Let's say you're writing a romance. You want to respect the conventions, but not fall into the clichés. So there's going to be a moment where the lovers meet, right? They haven't met before. I don't know what they call it, a meet cute or a cute meet. I think they call it a meet cute, I guess.

Jo: Yes. They do.

Steven: Anyway. So they're going to meet, right? And you're like, “Oh, I'll just have them meet.” Well, try to do it in a way we haven't seen before. Add something else to the scene. Add a third element, as my friend Bob Dugoni likes to say.

Add something a little bit that we're like, “Huh, I've never seen that before.” We know they're going to meet, but let them meet in a way that we don't anticipate, that we can't predict right away, that isn't exactly by the numbers, and then you're going to be on the right track.

Jo: So then, talking about reader expectations and genre, I wondered if I could also ask you about your Christian faith, because many people listening are people of faith, and some people want to write a Christian book.

Other people want to bring their faith into, say, a mainstream type thriller in an authentic way.

So how do you balance your faith and your writing? Because I think you have some series that are more sort of Christian than others.

Steven: It's interesting. When my first novel came out—The Pawn, like a chess piece, The Pawn—back almost 20 years ago. Gosh, 20 years ago. Nineteen. But anyway, when it came out, someone wrote to me and said, “Is this a Christian book?”

I'm like, “What would make a book not Christian?” I'm like, maybe if it has a lot of idolatry, or witchcraft, or maybe sexuality or graphic violence. Then I'm like, oh, wait, that's… No, that's the Old Testament.

So it's interesting, because people have asked me similar questions over the years. My books are not sermons in disguise. I'm trying to write great stories that anyone of any background or faith will enjoy.

I always ask big questions. I let my characters wrestle with questions that matter, I think. Do my choices matter? Is there hope? Is there a God? Is there no God? Do I have free will? Can I find forgiveness? Can I offer forgiveness? Can I extend it, or whatever? So I always try to base the stories on something deeper.

I do believe that there is good and there's evil in the world. That's part of my worldview. So when people talk about moral ambiguity, I don't want to write or read something that's morally ambiguous. I want moral complexity, but I also want moral clarity.

So whenever you write, the question is, what are you justifying and what are you condemning? And if you're justifying something that's morally—I would say wrong, actually—then I don't feel like that's the kind of book I would want to write.

So I want to write stories that explore good and evil, that explore our world, human nature, in an honest way. I feel like when you write honest stories, people, no matter what their background or whatever faith, then they will connect with it.

I think a lot of people, if they start off with an agenda—whatever that agenda might be, let's say it is a Christian agenda, like I want people to trust in Jesus, let's say—so they write a story. Well, what you're doing, you're actually starting your story with an answer, and drama is not built on answers, it's built on questions.

So you're actually diminishing the amount of tension. You're also diminishing the possibility of a pivot, because we all get where you're going. It's predictable, but there's probably no surprise. You're diminishing the payoff at the end, because we're like, “I saw that coming. I exactly knew where you were going with this.”

So instead, I don't start with an answer. I always start with a question, or in some cases a moral dilemma, like, what's more important, protecting the innocent or telling the truth? That's interesting to me. If I had to choose between the two, would I tell the truth or would I protect the innocent?

It's interesting, because people might come down on different sides of it. They might say, “Oh, you should always tell the truth,” or they say, “You always should protect the innocent.” I'm like, okay, well, let's explore it. Let's literally ask the question.

So I come from a certain worldview, but I've written characters who have very different worldviews from me.

I'm always just trying to be honest with the character, ask big questions, tell a story that examines human nature and sort of the paradoxes of the human condition in a way that will resonate with really whoever the readers might be.

Jo: And of course that worldview is part of your author voice and part of what readers come to you for. I also notice that you have some pretty diverse different series.

How do you manage that diversity of series under your one brand? Do you find your readers move from one to the other, or do you have different readerships?Steven: You mentioned the B word—brand. That's what publishers are always telling me: “What's your brand?”

I'm like, “I don't know. You tell me what my brand is.” I've done fantasy, science fiction, conspiracy. I've done spies and police procedurals and crime and suspense, thrills, whatever.

So I would say the one thing that really ties all my stories together is probably just suspense. They are stories with suspense. Some are more high concept thrillers, some are more dark fantasy, but they're built around suspense.

So I guess that would be intelligent suspense, maybe, if I was trying to come up with a brand. Something like that. Because I don't want them to be dumbed down. They're not dumbed down stories, so they're a little bit more complex than you might find in other places, but always built around the idea of suspense.

Suspense to me is basically—my definition is apprehension born of concern. So we're concerned about a character, and we're apprehensive because there's peril around the bend, or right in front of them.

So I want the readers to really care about a character, and then try to build the story and the suspense around that empathy or sympathy that we have for the character.

Jo: I think it's really interesting, because again, you mentioned 2007—we're coming up on 20 years since first published. The publishing industry has changed a lot.

So what do you think has changed most in publishing for you, and what are your thoughts on routes to market for new authors these days? Or even established authors who are finding that things have changed, which they obviously have.

Steven: Well, I'm not a marketer, I'm not a businessman. I'm just a storyteller at heart. So I just keep writing stories that I would be intrigued with reading, stories that I feel like are resonant. Then I look for publishers for those.

I've been to a variety of different publishers over the last decade. I've done some different types of stories. I feel like you have to just write the story instead of trying to write for a specific market trend or something like that.

So I might not make as much as some of my friends, I might not sell as many books, but I feel like I have to write certain stories if they grab ahold of me.

There's a Native American—I think the Pawnee tribe, anyway, in the United States—but they were saying that all the stories that exist are out there already, and when one finds you, it's your job to share it with the world. I think that's kind of interesting.

Sometimes—maybe it's just true for you, I don't know, Jo—but it's like a story will grab hold of me, or an idea, and I'm like, “I can't shake it.” That's a story that I want to tell the world.

I would say that stories are becoming shorter, dumber. People are trying to write faster. They're trying to write several books a year, and as a result of that, some of the quality has gone down. This is all unfortunate.

I'm still sort of a dinosaur. I still tend to write longer, complex stories. But people have shorter attention spans and whatever, and they're not reading as much.

The structure of stories, I think, is changing slightly, where people will have to spend more time on a hook to really grab the attention of the readers. Then there might be a longer slow period, or more info dumping, which I'm not a fan of.

So they kind of look like, “I want to get readers hooked at the beginning, and then get them to flip pages.”

So I tend to set up my stories a little bit differently than that. So I'm not the best guy to ask about marketing and sales and stuff like that.

I feel like, write a story that will not let you go. And if you do that, I feel like that's the kind of story that will resonate with readers, because there's a deep honesty to it. You care, you're passionate about it. It's not just something you're trying to spin out just to sell books. That's my view.

Jo: I guess I also feel that writers are doing other things. So you have non-fiction, you have your podcast, you do events. I see you sell books direct from your website.

It's like the business expands into multiple streams of income, so that the art doesn't have to pay all the bills.Steven: That's interesting. I do love to teach writing at conferences, events, and speak at different things.

So I guess if you think about it that way, my brand might be just story, or storytelling, or something like that. Really trying to get out there, and whether it's speaking or writing, just tell a great story.

So it's so interesting when I work with publishers and they'll ask, “What's your brand?” Basically it's like, “What's your box?” is really what they're asking. What box can we stick you in that will make it easy for us to package you and sell you?

I know myself, and just a lot of authors that I know, we don't think in a box. Every one of my stories is not boxy. It's not the same. They're different. I know a lot of authors like that too.

So it's unfortunate. I get it, that it's part of them trying to market and sell the books. I understand that, but I think being honest, genuine with the story, doing the very best you can, writing a worthy book, and then letting them come up with a way to categorise it, is probably the best bet. I don't know.

Jo: We're almost out of time, but this is obviously a podcast, and you have a podcast.

So tell us about The Story Blender Podcast and what people might find over there.Steven: Yes, I appreciate it. Basically, I interview some of the leading writers and storytellers in the world every week, and the goal is for great storytellers to share the secrets of great storytelling.

So I basically pick their brains, kind of like what you were doing with me today, and find out what projects they're working on, and really just try to get insights into storytelling.

So it's tons of fun. I've been doing it now for a number of years, and I guess I've interviewed over 250 different authors and writers from around the world, and so I always enjoy it. It's a ton of fun. It's The Story Blender, and people can find it anywhere.

Jo: So where can people find you and your books and everything you do online?Steven: Probably the best place is StevenJames.net. I think I'm on different socials @readstevenjames, so you can look me up there—Facebook, Instagram, X, and so on. I think they're all under readstevenjames.

Check out the website, drop me a note. I always enjoy hearing from readers.

Jo: Well, thanks so much for your time, Steven. That was great.

Steven: Thanks, Jo. I appreciate it. Good luck.

The post Organic Writing And The Power Of The Pivot In Fiction With Steven James first appeared on The Creative Penn.

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After more than a decade of releasing this show on Mondays, I’m moving it to Wednesdays, and this is the first episode of the new time slot.

On the one hand, this might sound like nothing at all, but it’s also a big deal, for you and for me, and in this episode, I explain why I'm making the change, and past guests give some tips on sustainable creativity for the long term.

Joanna Penn is an award-winning New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of thrillers, dark fantasy, short stories and travel memoir under J.F. Penn and also writes non-fiction for authors and hosts The Creative Penn Podcast.

• Why the podcast is moving to Wednesdays
• (1) Take time out to question what you’re doing
• (2) Learn to pivot if you want to keep going long term
  (3) Set a sustainable pace, and don’t build reader expectations you can’t deliver on
• (4) Don’t try to do it all, and try to identify the fear that might be driving your choices
• (5) Question what still serves you, especially as things continue to change
  (6) Consider different approaches to creativity. It doesn’t have to be every day, or every week
  (7) Creative humans evolve. Build a body of work for the long term.

You can find the backlist episodes at TheCreativePenn.com/podcast, just click into the episode to find the transcript.

Why The Podcast Is Moving To Wednesdays, And 7 Tips for Sustainable CreativityHere’s my big news! After more than a decade of releasing this show on Mondays, I’m moving it to Wednesdays, and this is the first episode of the new time slot.

On the one hand, this might sound like nothing at all, but it’s also a big deal, for you and for me!

I know many of you have a routine of listening to the show during a certain thing on a Monday, so I’m sorry to have to disrupt that, and I hope I don’t lose you along the way — although I guess you could just save the episode for Monday!

For me, it’s a much bigger deal, because a Monday show has meant I have often recorded the intro and edited and scheduled the episode over the weekend.

The main reason is that I need to record in the mornings when I have energy and when the house is less noisy, since Jonathan is often on the phone since he works from home as well. So I would prepare the episode on Fridays, and I type out this intro before reading it, and source the news and my thoughts and all that — and then I’d record it Saturday morning, or Sunday morning if Saturday was busy — and so recently, I have felt like something has to change.

Moving the show to a Wednesday means that I can prep on Monday and Tuesday, which is perfect.

Its so funny because I agonised over this, in the same way I agonised over changing the theme tune a few years back. Some of you may remember that — and it also turned out to not be a big deal at all. We build things up in our minds and then sometimes the problem can be solved in a different way.

So instead of going to ad hoc episodes, or once every two weeks, I hope that moving to Wednesday makes the show more sustainable again, because let’s face it, there’s a lot going on, and if I did a show every 2 weeks, I might have to make them longer to get through everything!

So, same show, just on Wednesdays from now on.

And this change underscores what today’s episode is about: sustainable creativity over the long term.

How do you keep writing, and publishing, and podcasting — and creating for years — and I am now at two decades — without burning out, and without becoming a slave to the algorithm, or the market, or even your own audience’s expectations?

The goal is not to just survive this year’s release schedule, or to keep feeding the machine until you crumble under the speed of it all.

The goal is to still be creating, and still be enjoying it, next month, next year, in five years, in 10 years, in 20, in 30. Who knows how many years we all have left — but for sure, we are NOT machines, we are not AI — and we cannot churn it out – and what is the point of that anyway?

So in today’s show, I’ll share some thoughts and tips from me and also other authors from the show on this topic, and you can find the full episodes in the backlist, and links as ever in the show notes on TheCreativePenn.com/podcast

(1) Take time out to question what you’re doingIn early 2024, The Tim Ferriss Show, one of the biggest podcasts in the world, hit its ten-year anniversary with over a billion downloads and over 750 episodes, and Tim decided to take a sabbatical.

He paused the show for four months and seriously questioned whether to continue. Not because it was failing, it was hugely profitable and he enjoyed talking to people, but because the landscape had changed.

Podcasting had gone from a wide-open space in 2014 to a saturated market, and his question wasn’t “can I keep competing?” It was “is this still the game I want to play?”

Just a little note here, I started The Creative Penn Podcast in 2009 when there were even fewer shows so I know a lot about a changing podcast market!

After four months, Tim came back from what he called a sabbatical with a blog post on My New Rules for Podcasting — To Keep Things Interesting.

He starts with the sheer number of podcasts, saying,

“Having a good show is no longer good enough. Having a great show is no longer good enough. If you want to survive in the mindshare of listeners, you need differentiation.”

I think this is true for us as authors as well as podcasters, or YouTubers, or social media, or anything. But the good news is that your differentiation can be you.

Regular listeners will know that I have questioned ending the show over the years, worried that I was no longer useful, or that my voice no longer mattered when there are so many podcasts on similar topics. But after your wonderful feedback, and the fact that the show still gets a lot of downloads every week, and the growth in my Patreon Community, I don’t worry about that anymore. It’s unlikely that any of us will have a podcast as big as Tim Ferriss’s or sell as many books as The Four Hour Work Week, but that’s OK, because we are not Tim.

I am Jo Penn and you’re here because you find my take on the publishing industry is still useful in some way. When it’s not anymore, you will go elsewhere, and I find myself at peace with that.

Back to Tim’s article — he asks some questions of himself, including:

If I get to do this for another decade, or had to do this for another decade, what new rules might I create to keep it interesting?

Of course, we all have different ideas of what this means for us. And I have already implemented one of these rules, which is that I interview people on topics I find interesting. I frequently get pitched by more famous authors and bigger names, but most of the time I turn them down, and choose to talk to people who are not famous but are more interested in serving you, my audience, because that is the point of this show.

I also have people on that I enjoy talking to, because checking in with my friends while you listen in, can be useful too, since my friends are often authors who’ve been in the industry a while now. I have to make the interviews time that I find interesting or useful or fulfilling as well.

But the point is to stop and take time to consider what might need to change, even if you are really successful. You cannot be a slave to the algorithm, to the media, to your audience, for the long term. You have to put some circuit breakers in sometimes.

It’s the old adage about the small business. You have to work ON in the business, not just IN the business, which means you need to step away.

This does sometimes mean that you have to get away physically. I had this realisation while we were in Bruges in Belgium talking to Jonathan about what changes I could make because I just felt a lack of freedom — and freedom is my highest value, so I really need to honour that.

So, the first question for you is: If you feel like you need a change, if your routines are becoming too much, or your workload is too much, or you are eating into time you need for rest and recovery or family or whatever you need, can you schedule time out to have a think about what you need and how things can change?

You don’t need to burn it all down. You might find the answer is just moving the show from a Monday to a Wednesday!

(2) Learn to pivot if you want to keep going long termI love talking to authors who have been doing this career for a long time, and in December 2025 in episode 839, I talked to Jennifer Probst, the New York Times bestselling romance author of more than sixty books, about why some authors build decades-long careers while others vanish after one breakout.

Jennifer has been through the indie gold rush, the fallout, traditional deals, Kickstarter, all of it, and I asked her how she thinks about how everything keeps changing, and we start with marketing but it goes much further than that.

Writing Free: Romance Author Jennifer Probst On A Long-Term Author Career

Jo: In terms of how we do marketing, TikTok is still a thing, and we can see maybe generative AI search coming on the horizon and agentic buying. A decade ago it might have been different, more Facebook ads or whatever. Then before that it might have been something else. So there’s always things changing along the way.

Jennifer: Yes, there definitely is. It is a very oversaturated market. They talk about, I don’t know, 2010 to 2016 maybe, as the gold rush, because that was where you could make a lot of money as an indie. Then we saw the total fallout of so many different things.

I feel like I’ve gone through so many ups and downs in the industry. I do love it because the longer you’re around, the more you learn how to pivot. If you want this career, you learn how to write differently or do whatever you need to do to keep going, in different aspects, with the changes.

To me, that makes the industry exciting. Again, perspective is a big thing. But I have had to take a year to kind of rebuild when I was out of contract with a lot of things. I’ve had to say, “Okay, what do you see on the horizon now? Where is the new foundation? Where do you wanna restart?”

Sometimes it takes a year or two of, “Maybe I won’t be making big income and I cut back,” but then you’re back in it, because it takes a while to write a few new books, or write under a pen name, or however you want to pivot your way back into the industry.

Or, like you were saying, diversifying. I did a lot of non-fiction stuff because that’s a big calling for me, so I put that into the primary for a while.

I think it’s important for authors to maybe not just have one thing. When that one thing goes away, you’re scrambling. It’s good to have a couple of different things like, “Well, okay, this genre is dead or this thing is dead or this isn’t making money. Let me go to this for a little while until I see new things on the horizon.”

I love that from Jennifer, because there are always new things on the horizon, and we try new things and we pivot, and we bring in other streams of income as some drop off, and we go again and we keep creating. Authors with longevity are authors who pivot over their careers. They may lament the end of one era, but they don’t stop, they find a new way forward.

(3) Set a sustainable pace, and don’t build reader expectations you can’t deliver onKevin J. Anderson is one of the most productive writers alive, with hundreds of books, most of which he writes with dictation while out hiking, and he has been on this show many times.

In January 2025, in episode 791, we talked about building a long-term author business, and how authors need to be careful about setting reader expectations around pace of releases.

Building A Long Term Author Business, Dictation, Kickstarter, and Short Story Collections With Kevin J Anderson

Kevin: Now, again, we get back to the longevity of a career. It is exhausting to write lots of books a year, and most people can’t keep doing that for 20 years or 30 years.

That’s one of the reasons, especially indie authors, where readers expect you to write several books a year. Some indie authors I know are writing a book a month. I couldn’t do that for any long period. Well, I couldn’t do that probably for a single year.

You start building expectations, and when you fail to meet those expectations, they will leave you very quickly. That’s why you should have Plan Bs.

If you really, really can’t stand writing your steampunk vampire romance series after book number 29, well, make sure that you have some other series you’re starting and building up.

Well, Hugh Howey’s got several series that are going. Michael Anderle has all kinds of series, and Craig Martelle has all kinds of series. You don’t just put all your eggs in one basket. You need to have Plan B and Plan C, to circle around to what I started with.

Whatever cadence you choose, for your books, your email newsletters, or or your podcast, or your social media, choose a pace you can still be keeping up in a decade, because this is a long term career, and longevity in the market is one of the most important things. It’s better to pace yourself than burn out.

(4) Don’t try to do it all, and try to identify the fear that might be driving your choicesI couldn’t do an episode on sustainability without Becca Syme!

Becca is an author coach who has worked with thousands of writers, she is the creator of the Better-Faster Academy and the Quit books, and the QuitCast podcast — and In January 2023, in episode 668, at the end of our conversation about intuitive writing and marketing, I asked her what authors who sustain long careers have in common.

Intuitive Writing And Book Marketing With Becca Syme

Joanna: So in terms of sustainability, let’s talk about that. You coach writers every day, you see writers on every spectrum of every personality type, and people who write differently and release differently and publish differently. So what do you see as your recommendations or, I guess, commonalities for authors who want this sustainable career as a writer for the long term in order not to burn out? What are you seeing in terms of the best way to be sustainable in a creative career?

Becca: Conquering the fear that we have that we’re not going to get what we want out of the career, like 100%. Because the fear is the thing that’s driving us to burn ourselves out.

The fear that if I don’t do it this way, I’m not going to make money. If I don’t do it this way, I’m not going to have a long career. I’m going to miss out on something if I don’t do absolutely everything.

And then I think the most important knowledge that we can have is that everyone in this industry who’s a nonfiction person, including me, is giving you a perspective on how author life can be done.

Every single one of us, not the perspective on how it should be done in order to have success. And if we could just change our expectations of how we look at the people who are helping us who are being good, helpful people who are very sure that their way is the correct way and who should be, again, because like all experts, they’ve had success doing what they are doing.

But the downside is from someone whose job is to sit with authors for 45 minutes at a time, all day, every day, I see the outcome of the people who have tried to “do it all,” in quotes, with capital letters, and who are burned out because they were doing everything out of a fear place.

And I think one of the best things that can happen in our — and what burnout often does is it forces us to reckon with the fact that we were doing all of this because we were afraid. My book isn’t going to sell, I’m not going to be able to do this, I have this dream that I’m holding on to and what happens if it doesn’t manifest itself.

Then we make a lot of our decisions about how much to take on based on fear, and we don’t know it.

Because we don’t realize that our brains are wired for survival, and so anytime fear kicks in, your brain is like, well, we have to do that because if you’re afraid of it, then that must mean that we need it in order to survive. And we don’t.

We will survive if our books don’t sell.

We have to calm that fear and answer the question. Like, what will happen if in five years, I have not sold more than $1,000 on every book that I am writing? Like if each of the individual books that I write have not made more than $1,000. And I have to reckon with what might happen if that happens, because if I don’t, that fear is going to drive me to burnout over and over and over and over again.

That is why we’re making so many of our decisions, including: do I pay for this class or conference? Do I pay for this book? Do I spend money on this advertising? Do I hire this expert consultant?

So many of us are making those choices out of fear and we don’t realize it. And that’s why when we do our public live coaching, and whenever I’m at a conference, I’m always listening for, “but what are you afraid is not going to happen? Or what are you afraid is going to happen?”

Because if we don’t deconstruct that part of yourself and calm your survival mechanism down, you’re going to continue over and over again to make those decisions out of fear.

Then you’re going to not listen to your intuition because you think it’s risky to listen to it. And so I really think, and some of this might include therapy for some of us, I’m just going to acknowledge some of us have trauma around not getting what we want or around not actualizing our desires, and we can’t just talk ourselves into letting the fear go.

But some of us do just need to consistently confront the fear and make a plan for what happens and then act in spite of that fear because we are not making good decisions when we are in survival mode.

Becca is very wise, and also pretty hardcore! So if you feel like you are trying to do it all, and you are on the edge of burning out, can you identify the fear beneath it?

(5) Question what still serves you, especially as things continue to changeSometimes we keep doing things the same way, even when things have changed.

What is lost if we give things up? What is gained? And what kind of game do you want to play?

In episode 845, Claire Taylor, humour and mystery author, owner of FFS Media, certified Enneagram coach, talks about how social media has changed and why she gave it up.

Leaving Social Media, Writing Iconic Characters, and Building Trust With Claire Taylor

Joanna: One thing I know will have perked up people’s ears is: “I left social media.” Tell us a bit more about that.

Claire: This was a move that I could feel coming for a while. I didn’t like what social media did to my attention. Even when I wasn’t on it, there was almost a hangover from having been on it.

My attention didn’t feel as sharp and focused as it used to be, back before social media became what it is now.

So I started asking myself some questions: What is lost if I leave? What is gained if I leave? And what is social media actually doing for me today?

Because sometimes we hold on to what it used to do for us, and we keep trying to squeeze more and more of that out of it. But it has changed so much.

There are almost no places with sufficient organic reach anymore. It’s all pay-to-play, and the cost of pay-to-play keeps going up.

I looked at the numbers for my business. My Kickstarter was a great place to analyse that because they track so many traffic sources so clearly. I could see exactly how much I was getting from social media when I advertised and promoted my projects there.

Then I asked: can I let that go in order to get my attention back and make my life feel more settled? And I decided: yes, I can. That’s worth more to me.

Joanna: There are some things money can’t buy. Sometimes it really isn’t about the money. I like your question: what is lost and what is gained? You also said it’s all pay-to-play and there’s no organic reach. I do think there is some organic reach for some people who don’t pay, but those people are very good at playing the game of whatever the platform wants. So, TikTok for example—you might not have to pay money yet, but you do have to play their game. You have to pay with your time instead of money. I agree with you. I don’t think there’s anywhere you can literally just post something and know it will reliably reach the people who follow you.

Claire: Right. Exactly. TikTok currently, if you really play the game, will sometimes “pick” you, right? But that “pick me” energy is not really my jam.

And we can see the trend—this “organic” thing doesn’t last. It’s organic for now. You can play the game for now, but TikTok would be crazy not to change things so they make more money. So eventually everything becomes pay-to-play.

TikTok is fun, but for me it’s addictive. I took it off my phone years ago because I would do the infinite scroll. There’s so much candy there.

Then I’d wake up the next morning and notice my mood just wasn’t where I wanted it to be. My energy was low. I really saw a correlation between how much I scrolled and how flat I felt afterwards.

So I realised: I’m not the person to pay-to-play or to play the game here. I’m not even convinced that the pay-to-play on certain social media networks is being tracked in a reliable, accountable way anymore. Who is holding them accountable for those numbers?

You can sort of see correlation in your sales, but still, I just became more and more sceptical. In the end, it just wasn’t for me.

My life is so much better on a daily basis without it. That’s definitely a decision I have not regretted for a second.

To be clear, we’re not saying you should give up social media, but it’s about questioning how things make you feel, and what you can sustain and how you want to spend your time.

I did question once again whether to give up this show entirely, but it is an important part of my creative body of work, and quite frankly, I reach more people with the podcast than I do with my books, and I still love talking to people, and I learn, and it underpins my business.

I don’t do much social media though. I learn about AI things on X and I do post photos and things on Instagram but I don’t do much else. You have to decide what is right for you, but also, what is right for you might change over time. If we have a long term career, or a long term anything, things will change, and we will need to move on sometimes, or at least question whether it is still working in the way it used to.

(6) Consider different approaches to creativity. It doesn’t have to be every day, or every week. In April 2026, in episode 858, I talked to Sara Rosett, USA Today bestselling mystery author and co-host of the Wish I’d Known Then podcast, about low-key marketing, and a more seasonal approach, or phased approach to podcasting as well as writing.

Special Editions, Seasonal Podcasts, and the Art of Low-Key Book Marketing with Sara Rosett

Jo: Although I must say I had forgotten about your Mystery Books podcast and going to seasonal. I also had my second podcast, Books and Travel, which is now on a kind of hiatus, but going to a seasonal approach is actually really interesting. Do you find that listeners come back to that podcast?

Sara: Yes, and it surprises me because I’ve always thought you have to be weekly with a podcast to gain any traction at all, which I think is the best way to do it. You can build an audience quickly then, but I just knew I couldn’t sustain that.

So when I set out, I started with maybe seven to ten episodes and I did them each year — each year has had a season — and I do five to ten episodes. Readers find it, and I have highlighted specific books. I think maybe they’re searching for a podcast about the Thursday Murder Club or something like that.

They find it that way, and I get downloads, just steady downloads throughout the year, and I don’t do much. I do some Pinterest pins for that, and that’s about all I do. This is one of those things — it’s the kind of low-key marketing that’s low threshold, but it does work.

I think if your readers are looking for stuff to listen to about the topic you write about, it could be a good way to do some low-cost, long-tail marketing. I love it. I keep doing it because I love it.

Jo: That just seems more sustainable to me. I didn’t like doing everything every day or every single week.

Sara: Me either. I like switching it up, and I do enjoy the different phases of writing. I like the research and then I like doing the — well, I don’t like the drafting that much, but once I get a draft done, I like the editing. And then when it comes time to promote it or do a special edition or whatever, I enjoy that part. Finding whatever I’m going to use for the interior photos and stuff — just things like that. I enjoy each phase and I like switching it out.

Jo: I think that’s really good. Some people think this writer’s life is you write new words every single day and you manage your ads every single day. That seems to be what some people do, but that’s certainly not us, is it?

Sara: No. And that’s great if you want to do that. I just don’t want to. And I think we’ve come to the point now where each person can do this as they want. Hopefully people don’t feel the pressure to meet these self-imposed deadlines or parameters that don’t exist. There’s no rules for writing or publishing. You can do whatever you want.

I am definitely a seasonal creator, I don’t write every day. I never have. I binge write when a book emerges, or binge create. As I record this I am working on the treatment and trailer for what is now called Cathedral Zero, a positive futurist sci-fi feature film that I am entering in the FutureVision X Prize in the next week or so, and then I will move to the next project. I also love Kickstarter launches for this reason. They feel much more sustainable because it’s such a focused marketing push.

My Books and Travel Podcast is still on hiatus, but I may still resurrect that at some point. I still feel the pull of it. And of course, this show remains weekly, but the Wednesday shift will hopefully help keep it this way. I can’t see me going seasonal with this, but never say never!

The main thing is to consider seasonality, or consider phased approaches to your work, rather than trying to do exactly the same thing week in week out.

(7) Creative humans evolve. Build a body of work for the long term.Roz Morris first came on this podcast in 2011, and in March 2026, in episode 853 we talked about her memoir, discovery writing, and slow, sustainable book marketing. Roz is an award-nominated literary author and former bestselling ghostwriter, an editor and I always appreciate her perspective as she has been doing this far longer than I have.

JOANNA: Do you still actively choose indie for a particular reason?

ROZ: I do. I really like building my own body of work, and I’m now experienced enough to know what I do well, what I need advice with, and help with. I mean, we don’t do all this completely by ourselves, do we? We bring in experts who will give us the right feedback if we’re doing a new genre or a genre that’s new to us.

I choose indie because I like the control. Because I began in traditional publishing—I was making books for other people—I just learned all the trades and how to do everything to a professional standard. I love being able to apply that to my own work.

I also love the way I can decide what I’m going to write next. If I was traditionally published, I would have to do something that fitted with whatever the publisher would want of me, and that isn’t necessarily where my muse is taking me or what I’ve become interested in.

I think creative humans evolve throughout their lives. They become interested in different things, different themes, different ways of expressing themselves. I began by thinking I would just write novels, and now I’ve found myself writing memoirs as well.

That shift would have been difficult if someone else was having to make me fit into their marketing plans or what their imprint was known for. But because I’ve built my own audience, I can just bring them with me and say, “You might like this. It’s still me. I’m just doing something different.”

Inspiring words from Roz there —

“It’s still me, I’m just doing something different.”

And indeed, I am a very different Jo from the new author who started this podcast back in March 2009. I have evolved and this show has evolved and this is not the end, it is a new phase. It’s funny because it’s just a shift of two days, but it also breaks a habit, for you listening and for me creating. It changes a time slot, and that itself can be a way to change energy, to change direction, to shift what matters and how we do things.

So that’s what I want to leave you with today. A question around how shifting something, even something small, might make a big difference to your creative body of work, the quality of time you have for yourself or your family, and I’d love to know what you think about today’s episode and what we covered, as well as your thoughts on the Wednesday shift.

Please leave a comment on the show notes, or the YouTube channel, or email me. I will see you next Wednesday, so happy writing and I’ll see you next time!

The post Why The Podcast Is Moving To Wednesdays, And 7 Tips for Sustainable Creativity first appeared on The Creative Penn.

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What's the difference between a bundle, a box set, an anthology, and a collection? How can being part of an anthology be creatively interesting and useful for marketing? With Jamie Ferguson

In the intro, Amazon Kindle increases the 70% royalty share; audiobook marketing tips (Voices by InAudio); The Builder’s Creed [Seth Godin]; Future Vision XPrize; Researching the dark side of travel [Anna Sayburn Lane]; Photos from Bruges @jfpennauthor; Bones of the Deep: A Thriller – J.F. Penn.

Today's show is sponsored by Bookfunnel, the essential tool for your author business. Whether it’s delivering your reader magnet, sending out advanced copies of your book, handing out ebooks at a conference, or fulfilling your digital sales to readers, BookFunnel does it all. Check it out at bookfunnel.com/thecreativepenn

This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn

Jamie Ferguson is a fiction and short story author, editor, and publisher, with over 20 anthologies and multiple ebook bundles through her own press. Her latest book for authors is Bundle Up! A Practical Guide to Anthologies and Box Sets That Sell.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.

Show Notes

• The difference between bundles, box sets, anthologies, and collections
• Why a multi-author project means lots of people promoting the same book, not just you
• How to find and pitch for anthology opportunities, and what editors look for in a contributor
• Contracts, rights, and royalty splits explained for short fiction
• Why Kickstarter and special print editions are changing the anthology game
• Inkwren, the publishing management tool Jamie built for backlists and anthologies

You can find Jamie at JamieFerguson.com.

Transcript of the interview ith Jamie FergusonJo: Jamie Ferguson is a fiction and short story author, editor, and publisher, with over 20 anthologies and multiple ebook bundles through her own press. Her latest book for authors is Bundle Up! A Practical Guide to Anthologies and Box Sets That Sell.

Just for context too, one of my short stories, “The Dark Queen”, is in the Amazing Monster Tales: Into the Briny Deep anthology. So I'm excited to talk about this today. Welcome to the show, Jamie.

Jamie: Thanks for having me, Jo.

Jo: Lots to talk about. But first up—

Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and self-publishing.Jamie: Well, I wanted to be a writer since I was at least six, maybe before then. So it was just something I always wanted to do, but I always did it on the side.

I had a year, many years ago, where I was really busy with work, and I just felt like I didn't write anything the entire year, and I thought, “I'm going to give it up.”

Then the next year—that was 2011—I started seeing more about self-publishing, and that really invigorated me and made me feel like, “No, why am I giving up something I've wanted to do since before I went to school?”

So I got back into a novel I had worked on years before. I went to a writing workshop with Dean Wesley Smith up in Oregon, back in the day, and then I had my energy back. I've been writing ever since. Still on the side, unfortunately, but someday.

Jo: Hopefully!

Tell us a bit more about what kind of genres you write.Because balancing your own books with also doing these anthologies and things is quite difficult.

Jamie: Yes, it definitely is. I'd say I primarily write contemporary fantasy, but I'll write anything in any genre if I'm really excited about it. I also have a soft spot for Westerns. They take a little more time because I like to research all the facts, but those are really fun to write.

Creating anthologies on your own is actually quite a bit of work. One of the things I also do is work with two other authors, DeAnna Knippling and Tami Veldura, and create more anthologies with them.

That's really fun because then we can each take a different piece. There's also always somebody to talk to, as opposed to doing it on your own.

Jo: Let's start with the terminology, because I definitely struggled with this, and I think people still do. We've got bundles, we've got box sets, we've got anthologies, we've got collections—and are these in ebook, audiobook, or print?

Can you start by explaining what all of these words actually mean?Jamie: Yes. In my book I actually use the term “multi-author collection” or “multi-author project”, because there are so many different permutations and it does get confusing.

From my perspective, I think of a bundle as a collection. It could be a collection of ebooks. Technically it could be a collection of print books, although people generally use “box set” for that—but then a box set can also be a box set that's all ebooks.

An anthology, I usually use for something that's a collection of short stories where there's an editor who's actually edited all the stories. I have had stories in anthologies where somebody didn't edit them, and they would technically be called a curator.

So it is definitely confusing. I have not done anything with audio collections, but that certainly is another area that I actually think is pretty interesting.

Jo: I also think that a single author… so I've done a short story collection, but an anthology is multiple authors. Is that right?

Jamie: Yes.

Jo: I think when I came into the indie space, there were a lot more multi-author… we all called them box sets back in the day, when it was just ebooks, right? And now we can actually do boxed sets with boxes through things like BookVault. So it feels like the term “box set” has also gone out of fashion.

So if people listening are thinking of doing any of this, you do have to figure out what is the thing you might be signing up for. So let's talk about the multi-author projects, as that's where you specialise.

What are the benefits for an author to be involved in a multi-author anthology project?Jamie: The biggest benefit is that you are one of multiple people promoting the same project, whether it's print or ebook or whatever. If I put out a short story collection on my own, I'm the one promoting it, and maybe I can get a couple of other people to write about it, but it's really just me.

If I'm part of an anthology with 15 other authors, that's 15 other people who are promoting the same project. That's more newsletters, more Facebook posts, maybe something on their Patreons, whatever it is.

You get more synergy, and you get more touch points with potential readers. Then hopefully that translates into sales as well. So that's definitely the biggest part of it—the promotion.

Then I also personally really enjoy these types of collections because it's just fun to work with other people. There's a nice energy when everybody's like, “Oh, I put this in my newsletter, and I put this here, and I put this here,” and you feel like you're part of something bigger than just your own piece.

Jo: What about the creative benefits? Especially with short stories, often people will write them for a collection or for an anthology project.

Jamie: Yes. I've definitely written some stories that I never would have thought I'd write, because somebody I knew asked if I would be interested in being in their collection—whether it's an ebook bundle or a print anthology. So at least for me, that's been really fun.

One of the ones that stands out is that I was asked to be in a dinosaur collection once, and I was like, “I don't write dinosaur stories.” And then I did. I set a dinosaur story in London, and it was really fun to write, and I never would have come up with that in a million years.

Jo: Let's say we've got 12 authors. They've all written short stories, and now it's in this anthology. But what is the market for these kinds of things?

Have you found that there is a readership for short story anthologies that carries over to the author's longer work?Jamie: There is. I like to think of it as: if I have a story in a collection or an anthology—whether it's one I'm editing or somebody else is editing—that's one more place for people to find me. A lot of times anthologies will take reprints as well, like your story. “The Dark Queen”—that was a reprint.

We asked if you'd be interested in participating in the Amazing Monster Tales series. And I actually really like printing stories again that have already been published, because there are a lot of stories out there that can be hard to find. Or if it's an older book.

I have one author I've known for, like, 30 years. I reprinted one of her stories that was originally published in, I think, 1999, and the anthology it was in was out of print. You couldn't find it, and it was a fantastic story.

So it's fun to be able to give new life to those stories and give them more opportunities, and also just have more ways for people to find you.

Jo: Yes, I definitely think it's a long game. I don't think appearing in a short story anthology in one particular month is going to mean that your whole back collection just sells, right?

Jamie: No, definitely not. It's more about avenues to be found. I know there have been some anthologies that have made quite a bit of money, but in general you're probably not going to make as much money, but you will have those extra places for people to find you.

Jo: I always feel like yes, there is maybe a small amount of money, but it is more about almost a marketing thing in itself.

So let's say an author is listening and they're like, “Do you know, this sounds like a great idea.”

How can they pitch for things like this? How do they find out about opportunities, or get noticed to be asked? And what are the expectations for them?

Jamie: The biggest thing is networking. There used to be a couple of opportunities where you could make people aware that you had stories that you were interested in potentially having picked up for something. I'm not aware of anything like that now.

When I create a collection, I have a mailing list that I send out, and it includes authors I've published before. It includes a couple of extra people who somehow found my mailing list. And I'll publish, like, “Here's what I'm doing.”

There are also authors I've met at writing workshops. I've been able to read some of their work, I'll approach them and say, “Hey, I really liked such and such a story. Would you be interested in writing for this?”

Then there are a couple of other websites, like Duotrope, and places that advertise markets and calls for submissions.

Jo: Yes, I've found them also on small presses that do these kinds of projects. They often put up one call for submission a month or something, and you can write for their particular thing. In general, the short story markets are the places to keep an eye on.

Jamie: Yes, definitely.

Jo: If an author wants to pitch to have their story as part of an anthology, do you want to know things like platform, or is it just the story itself?Jamie: I personally look at the author's platform. I do make exceptions—there are actually two authors I've worked with a couple of times who don't have websites. They are people I know personally and they are very, very good writers, so I'll make an exception for things like that.

But otherwise, if somebody submitted a story to me and I didn't know that person, I would check out their website, I would check out their social media, I would see what else they had done.

Part of what you're doing when you're creating a collection is thinking not just about how you, as the person organising this, will promote the collection, but how the authors who are participating will help promote it as well.

If it's somebody who has a lot of fans, even if they're not very active on social media, that can help a lot too. There are a lot of different factors, though.

Jo: So then talk us through the project timeline.

How long do things take, and what sort of involvement do the authors have along the way? Because it's a lot to juggle.

Jamie: Yes, it is a lot to juggle. I can give you an example with the Monster Tales series. We'll come up with an idea, and we also like to try to get the artwork done early on in the process. We don't need it that soon, but it's really great to have that taken care of.

We'll contact authors. I think for this one we used my mailing list, but we've also contacted a number of people individually that we know who write the style of stories we like.

Then, as the submissions come in, we usually wait until we have a nice chunk of them to start going through, and then we'll pick some right away. Sometimes it'll be like, “Oh my gosh, of course we want this story,” and we'll wait to fill out the other slots.

Then we'll negotiate sometimes. Sometimes it's like, “I want this story.” “Well, I want this other story.” And we have to figure out how the word count works.

Once we finalise the stories, then usually what happens with that anthology is that DeAnna—who is a very, very good editor—will make the first editing pass, and then I'll make the second. And now Tami's involved, so Tami will make the third, and then we'll iterate.

Once all three of us have gone through the first time, then we'll send the story back to the author for edits. So the most the author has to do for most of the process is just wait for us to edit their story, and then work on their edits and get them back.

Then, once we get closer to launch, we'll give them information about what we're going to do. For example, we're going to launch the next issue with a Kickstarter. So our authors know that we have a Kickstarter coming, and we'll give them more information as we get closer to the actual launch date.

Jo: So how long might an author expect before their work is out there?Jamie: It really varies. I've had some collections published very quickly—let's say a couple of months. Some have taken longer just because somebody ends up having some life issue and things get delayed. So I'd say ideally it would be more like three to nine months.

Jo: Yes, I think… depending on the—

Jamie: —collection and the complexity.

Jo: Yes, exactly.

Jo: And you did mention word count there.

Just give us a range of what word count you like to get.Jamie: So these days I'm shooting for between 75,000 and 80,000 for the total word count for a collection. That includes the stories, but it also includes the opening, the introduction.

For one we're working on now, we're going to have some interstitials, where we have little bits of things we're going to write in between each story. So that's the overall size of the collection.

I'll keep track of the word count as the stories come in, and then as we edit the stories, sometimes they grow, sometimes they shrink. Sometimes that's a big enough difference where we're like, “Okay, we need one more story to fill it in.” But that's the target.

Jo: And how much for each individual story?Jamie: That varies. I've done a bunch of different things. These days, what I'm advertising is between 3,000 and 8,000 words. I also always tell people: if you're outside this range on either side, just check with me, and if it's something that's really an excellent fit for the book, I'll make an exception.

The one that's coming out, I think we have a 1,500- or 2,000-word story that was just amazingly perfect for what we wanted. There was another story, actually I think it was the issue that you were in, that was at least 12,000 words, but it also was a perfect fit for the theme. So I will make exceptions, but within reason.

I wouldn't put a novella inside an anthology, because then you'd have a 22,000-word story next to a 3,000-word story, and I personally feel like that's really jarring for the reader. You don't want to go from something super short to something super long. It just doesn't feel like it flows well to me.

Jo: No, absolutely.

Jo: We'll come back to the making of it because you mentioned some really interesting things there.

But just on the contractual side—a lot of indie authors don't necessarily do any publishing contracts for their work, unless it's signing the terms and conditions when uploading on Amazon or Kobo. So tell us a bit about the contract side.

What rights are we talking about here? Any red lines in contracts around this kind of thing?Jamie: For contracts, I would recommend people read Kristine Kathryn Rusch's posts on this. She is way more informed about this than I ever will be, so when I have questions, I'll look at her posts. I've asked her a couple of questions.

What we're doing for the Amazing Monster Tales… this is the first time that I've actually had authors sign contracts. Prior to this, I've used PubShare, which handles royalty splits and all of that, and that was really great.

We want to do direct sales and Kickstarters and have lots of other options. So we did put together a contract this time. I'd have to pull it up, but I think we asked for first worldwide rights in English—I'm getting the terminology wrong here—but that was basically it.

Jo: Or, I guess, reprint rights if the story's already been licensed.

Jamie: Correct. We have two contract templates, one for original stories and one for reprints. We made sure to make that distinction, because it is definitely a distinction.

In the book by Kristine Kathryn Rusch—it's called Closing the Deal… on Your Terms—I highly recommend that for anybody interested in learning more about contracts.

Jo: Yes, that's great. And just for people listening: when you said you didn't have contracts before, you just used PubShare. So in that way, the author still retained the rights and you just split the royalties—it was more of a co-writing thing.

Jamie: Correct. When you publish stories through PubShare, the author signs an agreement with PubShare, and then I, as the editor or organiser, would also sign a separate agreement. So each of us has an agreement with PubShare. We don't have agreements with each other, if that makes sense.

Jo: Yes, so it's very different to move into Kickstarter.

So tell us about what you're now moving into.Jamie: Well, Kickstarters are a new world for me personally. I have many friends who have had Kickstarters. I've supported Kickstarters. I watch them. But it's something where I'm very happy to have two partners who have done Kickstarters before.

I'm not sure how many Tami's done—I think Tami's done the most at this point. So this is all new to me. But it's very exciting.

At this point we have a backlist, so part of the plan, for the Monster series, is to offer issues one through four as part of the rewards when we launch issue number five. That's really exciting, because I never had a backlist like that before.

Jo: Yes, and in fact the money is in the backlist, as ever, and those add-ons or bundles as part of Kickstarter are great.

So are you going to do special print editions, or is it digital only?Jamie: We are talking about special print editions. You mentioned BookVault earlier—we've been looking at BookVault.

Our other anthology series that hasn't come out yet will also launch with a Kickstarter. It's dragon-themed, and Tami actually did the cover work, which is beautiful. BookVault just gives you so many options that we never had before, so I'm very excited about that.

Jo: Yes, I think it's a really good idea. I did gorgeous hardbacks for my solo author collection, so I think it's a great idea.

So from the publisher side, let's come back to that. You've mentioned you have to write things like an introduction and interstitials, and you're trying to balance the stories.

What are some of the other things that people might think about if they want to organise their own anthologies?Jamie: Oh gosh, where to start? There's the basic setting up of the anthology, so you have to define the table of contents.

You might get a bunch of stories that are really awesome, and you might have to tell somebody who has a wonderful story—and maybe even who's a good friend of yours—that you're going to pass on it because their story doesn't fit with all the other stories.

Every time I have to do that, I feel kind of bad. But being on this side, it's really interesting to see how you can tell which stories fit together and which don't.

There's also the editing process, which can be a lot of work. Part of what I like about working with Tami and DeAnna is that DeAnna really loves editing. I feel like I'm a good editor, and I can do it, but for me it's more of a job.

For DeAnna, she loves it, so she does the bulk of the editing, which is great. When I do it on my own, I feel like it's a task I have to do.

There's lots of cat-herding. Sometimes people take a while to get their edits back. Sometimes they have life events, and you have to delay things because you're waiting on them.

There are all the little tiny pieces of organising things—like, if you're reprinting stories, you need to make sure you get the copyright attribution correct. A lot of times I'll have to go and look up where something was originally published.

An author might say, “Oh, it was published in this year,” and I'm like, “Okay, actually it was published in this other year, by this other publication first.” So I'm trying to be organised there.

henT one of the things that very infrequently—I think it's only happened to me twice—every once in a while, you're in the middle of editing a story and you have to pass on it, even though you've already accepted it, because the editorial vision and the author vision for the story are not the same, and you can't reconcile that.

Jo: I think that's really interesting, because so much of what you're talking about there—you mentioned vision—it's almost taste. You're saying which stories fit.

It's not just a case of, I don't know, a pirate anthology and then picking 10 stories about pirates, right? You seem to be thinking about this in a more artistic way. So can you talk a bit more about that?

How do you decide on a theme, and then how do you know that a story doesn't fit?Jamie: In the beginning, I was not this selective. In the beginning I'd say, for example, “Hey, I'm putting out a collection about fairies. Give me a fairy story,” and that was it. As I've edited the stories, it's become easier to see how things fit.

So, for example, if I have 10 stories in an anthology and I have an 11th story, and they have different tones—let's say the 11th story is really funny and all the other stories are very serious—then that would be a fit thing.

That's not necessarily taste; it's just that you don't want one funny story if everything else is really dark and scary or serious.

As far as picking a theme, the theme could be very broad. With this dragon anthology we're working on, we decided we wanted it to be called A Hoard of Books. So the theme was: has to have dragons, has to have books, and that's pretty much it. And then we were like, “Let's just see what we get.”

We were very surprised at what we got. We thought we'd have more serious stories, and it turned out most of them were very light-hearted and really fun. And we're like, “You know what? That actually changes the way we're looking at the whole series,” because we did not expect that.

With the monster series, we'll pick a theme. So, for example, the next issue is Monsters in Love, and for those it's more like, let's just see what happens.

Sometimes I'll have a more specific theme. The next anthology I'm publishing on my own is called Fairy Bargains, and I wanted people to obviously have fairies, but I wanted there to be something related to the mythology and lore of having a bargain with a fairy—and there's a lot of stuff about that.

So for some things like that, when I put out a call, I'll provide information. I might say, “Here's a link to a Wikipedia article. Here's some mythology that might be helpful for you,” just because I want things to stick a little bit more to the theme itself.

Whereas with Monsters in Love, there's a very wide range of stories, and that was very fun to work through.

Jo: Oh, yes. There's a lot of monster, on the spicy side as well. But were you doing a clean Monsters in Love, as opposed to in lust?

Jamie: Yes, this is a clean one. That's pretty funny. But boy, when you give authors the room for these types of things, you get all kinds of stories, and it is super fun to work with those collections.

Jo: As you're talking, I definitely want to do more short stories. It's really interesting, because you can actually generally get paid more for a first print—first print rights on a short story—but I often want to just publish it myself.

Then I was really happy to be in yours, because it was a reprint anyway. So I was like, well, there's absolutely nothing to lose if it goes in as a reprint. So these things can be really interesting.

Talking of the finance from your side of things: you have a small press and you're doing this publishing yourself, but you're paying all these authors and doing a lot of work.

So how does it work as the publisher, in terms of these anthologies, financially?Jamie: With the ones we've published so far, because we've gone through PubShare, it's been a royalty split. As the editors, we would take a percentage, and then we pay for the artwork, and of course all of our time.

I think what we were doing there was saying 70% of the royalties would be split equally between all of the authors and the stories. So, for example, if I had a story as well, I would get part of the author split—the same percentage as everybody else in the collection—in addition to the editor split.

For what we're doing now, we've changed this a little bit, and I believe we said 60% goes to the authors, and then we're going to keep a share of the proceeds for the business because we want to be able to pay for the artwork out of the business account.

We want to pay for advertising, whatever we need to do—like setting up our store, or if we wanted to invest in anything, we want to be able to do that as the business, as opposed to it just being us doing this on our own. We're just trying to treat it a little bit differently.

Jo: And I know it's so much work—a crazy amount of work.

How many anthologies and books do you have to do in a year to make it worthwhile financially?Jamie: Oh, I don't know. I would say, unless you get an opportunity—like, for example, to have an anthology in a story bundle or something like that—you may not break even. But if you're going to do this, do it more for the marketing, do it more because you enjoy it.

Now, going forward, I think that will change, because we are looking at Kickstarters, we are looking at direct sales. We're very motivated to try to make this more of a business thing than a fun side project. So, ask me in a year.

Jo: Yes, hopefully more. I do think Kickstarter is great for short stories. I actually buy quite a few collections on Kickstarter. I think they're actually really hard to discover through, say, Amazon—it's a place that is quite hard to identify short stories.

Whereas I've found I've bought collections on Kickstarter because there's so much more of a sales page—there's so much more rich media that tells me how I'm going to feel about the stuff.

I've bought short story anthologies and collections from people I don't know. So I think it's a really good thing to do. There is an audience there.

Jamie: Yes, definitely. And it does feel like the anthologies on Amazon don't sell as well—you don't make as much as you used to. I've been doing this for, well, gosh, 10 years now, and I feel like the sales numbers on Amazon in the past year were noticeably lower than they would have been six or eight years ago.

So I am very excited about Kickstarter. Plus, Kickstarter just feels really fun. You're not just throwing your book up; you also have all the extra stuff with the page, you have the rewards, and it just feels really exciting.

Jo: No, I agree. I really love it. I didn't do it for a long time, and now I just love it.

Jo: So, staying with the publisher side of things—

Any practical formatting and production tips? Because in these types of projects, all kinds of people just send you different stuff.

Jamie: I have a style guide. So whether it's me or it's the group project, once all the edits are complete, I'll do a formatting pass, and I'll make sure I use curly quotes and the same em dash format and everything, just so everything in the book is formatted the same way.

Every once in a while there's an author who has something particular that they want, and I can work around that, and that's fine.

I also work with a lot of Canadian authors, and I'll let them keep their Canadian spellings. I don't think everybody does that, but I feel like that's their voice in a way, so I don't correct those. I might check some things there.

I think the formatting is important—it makes things look better if everything has the same style. Then I use Vellum, which makes things really easy. I love Vellum.

Because I publish so many authors at this point, I have a Vellum file where I store their biographies and their links, so when I publish a new anthology I'll just go grab, say, Jo's “about the author” page from that collection and put it into the new file.

Then I also track when the last time was that I checked with the author about their biography. If it's been more than a year, I'll check in with them and say, “Hey, do you have an updated biography you want me to use? Here are your links—do you have any different links now?”

So that makes it a lot easier from the formatting standpoint.

Jo: And you mentioned Vellum—having done box sets on Vellum, you can just drag a whole book in there if you want to do a three-book box set, or three short stories, whatever. It's much easier to just drag things in, and it makes it easier to format.

So I would say to people: you don't need to worry too much about that. There are lots of things that can help you.

But even with doing the print stuff for the Kickstarter—people have opinions, don't they? So in terms of authors' opinions and managing—you mentioned herding cats—how do you manage all of that side of things?

Jamie: I haven't actually had a lot of trouble with that. The authors I've worked with seem to feel like they gave me their story, and then once the edits are out of the way… I haven't had anybody have any issues with the covers. Usually they love the covers, especially for the Monster series. So, no problems there.

Jo: Oh, that's good. Well, I would say a tip would be to make sure you're communicating, if you're somebody who's organising.

So talk a bit about communication.Jamie: Communication is very important. What I try to do is send regular updates, especially if I'm in the middle of edits or working on something and I'm not ready to launch. I'll send an update email out to the authors and just say, “Here's what's going on, here's what the plan is.”

Or if the plan has to change, if the launch date has to change for some reason, I'll let the authors know about that.

Actually, with the upcoming Monsters in Love issue, we were originally not going to do a Kickstarter. That was a late decision, so I contacted all the authors and said, “We've changed our plans. We're going to launch this with a Kickstarter. Please confirm that you're okay with this.”

One author was not comfortable with the Kickstarter idea, so he pulled his story, and then we found a replacement story for that. But I just feel like the communication piece is really essential. It's really important for the authors to know what's going on.

Jo: Yes, absolutely. So, we've talked about how marketing is a good thing, in terms of there being lots of people marketing.

How are you effectively marketing these kinds of books, as the premise is quite different to a single author project?Jamie: Right. There's the usual—write a release post, write posts on social. I do additional things, so I'll publish what I call a story spotlight for each story in the anthology. That's just where I talk a little bit about the story, I provide an excerpt, and then I provide the author's bio and links to find them.

Those are really great, because they're very quick to put together. The hardest part is getting a short excerpt that shows enough about the story to be engaging. But that really isn't that much time, either. Then those are also nicely evergreen.

I've actually searched for authors before, when I'm trying to research them for an interview, and I've found my own spotlight posts and my own interview posts with authors come up at the top of the list, which is kind of funny.

I also do interviews with as many of the authors in a collection as are willing to participate. Sometimes people just don't have the time—I don't make this required—but I usually get 80 to 90% of the authors participating.

So, for example, this year I'm in a couple of bundles on StoryBundle, and I'm doing interviews for people there.

It's also really fun, and you're not paying for advertising—you're just creating something that the authors are excited about and they want to share. So it promotes the collection, but it also promotes the author, which I find really nice.

It's a nice networking thing too, and I'm happy if someone wants to interview me. It's like free publicity for each person, in addition to the collection.

Jo: I love that you've used the word “fun” quite a lot, which I find amazing. You're obviously a super collaborative person. I've co-written a number of books—

I've been part of some collections, and I really think that there are two personalities.One is like me, where we really love the creation stuff and the publishing stuff, but we're hyper-controlling. And then someone like you—you're very collaborative, and you're doing such a great job.

To people listening, I would say: if you're more like me, don't organise an anthology. What you want is Jamie, or somebody who actually finds it fun to organise a big group of authors.

Jamie: Yes. It is definitely interesting working with other partners in this, because when I publish an anthology on my own, I make all the decisions. I pick the artwork, I pick the theme, I do everything, I decide the table of contents. But when you're working with other people, you do need to negotiate.

So we've had a couple of times where it's like, “I want this story.” “Well, I want this other story, I don't like the story that you want.” And so we have to barter, in a way.

Aside from that, it is nice, because you get to split up the tasks. I could focus on things like the organising—I do the Vellum files, I do the final cover and everything. For the Kickstarters, actually, Tami's got more expertise, so Tami's going to be working on the Kickstarters for our collections together.

If I had to do all this on my own, it's a ton of work. It's a ton of work. So it is nice to split it up.

Jo: And of course, one of the things is managing so many moving parts—and you've actually built a tool to manage all this.

So tell us a bit about that tool, and how it might be useful for people with big backlists as well as anthologies.Jamie: I built what I think of as a publishing management application. The original idea is that, for years and years, I wanted a software tool that would do catalogue management, because I was managing my own catalogue, and I was also managing—at this point I've published at least 20 anthologies, so that's a lot of authors.

Then last summer, I had an author who I'd published a number of times, who was going to, I think, WorldCon, and she asked if I could give her covers for five anthologies she'd been in, so that she could make some promotional material.

I was like, “Oh, sure, I can do that.” And then I was like, “Well, wait a second—is this in Notion?”—because I started trying to use Notion last year—”or is it in a spreadsheet?”

It turned out her information was in, like, three different places, and I had to work to pull it together. And then I was like, “You know what? That's it. I'm just going to finally write this application.”

So Inkwren manages your stories. As an author, I can manage my stories—I can track which are published, which are drafts, which are just ideas. I can track my publications.

From the publisher standpoint, it's really helpful, because I can track each anthology I've published and what I'm working on. I can track the edits, I can track the contracts.

I can upload contract templates—so we talked earlier about the original and reprint contract templates that I use. I upload those, and they have placeholders in them.

When I generate the actual contract, the author's name will replace the placeholder—I'll have the text “author name” in the contract template, and it'll get replaced by, like, “Joanna Penn” or whatever. So that saves a lot of time.

Then I also added in task tracking, because I started to feel like, well, now all my stuff is in one place, but my tasks are somewhere else. So now I can associate tasks with a publication.

For example, for the book I'm working on right now, I know which tasks I need to do for the cover, and which for the interior, and everything. I have a template of tasks.

Then I can also track tasks related to promotions. For example, the story bundle I'm promoting right now, I have a task for each interview I'm doing with the authors, and I have a calendar view. I can see when I'm going to publish them and know that they're all spread out. It saves me so much time, and it's so much easier.

Jo: I do think building tools when you actually need the tool yourself is very useful. Just say the name again, and spell it out for people.

Jamie: It's Inkwren. My own personal publishing company is Blackbird Publishing, and I wanted something related to birds and writing. So I came up with Inkwren, which is I-N-K-W-R-E-N, and it's just inkwren.com.

Jo: And it is available for other people to potentially buy and use?Jamie: Yes, it is.

Jo: Well, I think that's super useful, because it's very hard when people are starting out and they think, “Oh, I've only got one book—why would I need any kind of tool to manage it?” But over the years, your backlist grows, especially with short stories.

So I love that you've built this, and there's probably more that you can add over time as you expand the business yourself. So much potential. So we are at the end.

Where can people find you and your books and everything you do online?Jamie: My author website is JamieFerguson.com. And then, obviously, I mentioned Inkwren earlier. My publishing company is BlackbirdPublishing.com. And then the projects I'm doing with Tami and DeAnna—we have a couple of websites, but the easiest way to find us is our press, which is BorogrovePress.com.

Jo: Fantastic. Well, thanks so much for your time, Jamie. That was great.

Jamie: Thanks, Joanna.

The post Bundles, Box Sets and Anthologies With Jamie Ferguson first appeared on The Creative Penn.

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What happens to your creativity when you're in pain or sick, and can you ever get it back? How can you find and sharpen your author voice? J. Daniel Sawyer talks about voice mastery, writing with chronic pain, and building an eclectic author business.

In the intro, leaning into your Strengths and deciding what you want to achieve by the end of the year; and Bones of the Deep by J.F. Penn.

Today's show is sponsored by ProWritingAid, writing and editing software that goes way beyond just grammar and typo checking. With its detailed reports on how to improve your writing and integration with writing software, ProWritingAid will help you improve your book before you send it to an editor, agent or publisher. Check it out for free or get 15% off the premium edition at www.ProWritingAid.com/joanna

This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn

J. Daniel Sawyer is the author of over 30 books across science fiction, fantasy, crime, short stories, and nonfiction, as well as being a podcaster and filmmaker. His latest book for authors is The Pitch-Perfect Author: Voice Mastery for Writers.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.

Show Notes

• Writing fiction through chronic pain and re-emerging into health after surgery
• How your physical health shapes (and darkens) your fiction
• Rebooting an author business around a weekly Substack column
• What author voice really is, and why it's fundamentally about sound
• The building blocks of voice: functional vocabulary, dialect, and musicality
• The “crossing the line twice” trick for hearing your own voice objectively

You can find Dan at JDsawyer.net or on Substack.

Transcript of the interview with J. Daniel SawyerJo: J. Daniel Sawyer is the author of over 30 books across science fiction, fantasy, crime, short stories, and nonfiction, as well as being a podcaster and filmmaker. His latest book for authors is The Pitch-Perfect Author: Voice Mastery for Writers. So welcome back to the show, Dan.

Dan: Hello, Joanna. It's good to be back.

Jo: Goodness me, you have been on the podcast a few times, but actually, the last time was April 2017, which is crazy. It's nine years ago. When I saw your book, I was like, “I can't believe we haven't talked for that long.” For anyone who doesn't know you, tell us a bit more about—

What does your creative and author business look like these days?Dan: Oh, well, these days it's in a state of recovery because it basically ground to a halt while I was dying a few years ago. It turned out I had an organ disease from the time I was a kid that I didn't know about, and it just progressively got worse and worse, putting me in more and more pain.

I hit a point around about 2020 or so where I was in so much pain that I couldn't write fiction.

I continued to write nonfiction, but when you're carrying around a lot of physical pain, there comes a point where so much of your brain's activity goes into coping with it that you actually lose the ability to model other people's emotional states—or at least well enough to write fiction.

So I was very frustrated, and I was despairing that I was ever going to be a novelist again. Then suddenly, what I was sick with went acute. I went to the emergency room, and they're like, “Oh, if you don't have surgery in the next 24 hours, you're going to die.”

So I went and got surgery, and there was one bed in the whole state. There was a three-hour drive to get to the one that was available in the time window. I get there. They wheel me into the OR. I wake up afterwards, and I realise that I'm not in pain, and that I had never felt that before in my adult life.

Jo: Wow.

Dan: Just the walls of my whole reality came caving in. Two weeks later, I was back up and working, and since then I've been slowly reacquiring my ability to write fiction.

So now I've got four novels going again, like I used to have going all the time, as well as doing a weekly column and all sorts of other stuff.

Jo: I think a lot of people will be interested in this. A lot of writers have chronic pain issues or chronic health issues, and yours sounds like it was a sort of down, down, down, down—and then more of a sudden up.

Maybe just talk a bit more, because I feel like a lot of the time people are too hard on themselves about, “Oh my goodness, if I can't write fiction, is it the end of everything?”

So how did you adapt to that, with the mental health aspect of dealing with that change in circumstance?Dan: Well, it was happening so gradually, and it happened at the same time that a whole bunch of other weirdly stressful things happened, like COVID and a couple of family emergencies that derailed my whole life for a couple of years. I assumed it was just really bad stress that would pass with time.

So I had the despairing feeling, because when you write fiction, it tends to occupy a central place in your self-concept. I'd also been through very tough times before, so I was like, “Well, got through that then, maybe I'll get through this now.”

I just made sure to keep writing something, because at least you keep the discipline of the words flowing. There was still thought going on, so I would have ideas for novels and write them down. There were good days and bad days.

Occasionally I would sit down and be like, “I feel like fiction today,” and I would write a couple thousand words, and then it would be 10 months before I could do that again.

When you work with your mind, it is really easy to develop or sink into the delusion that your mind is not your body.

Now, if you're paralysed or you're missing limbs, you can still write—but your mind and your body are a single system, and eventually, if something terrible is wrong with your body, it's going to affect your cognition, your emotive abilities, and all the things that we depend on for creativity.

That doesn't necessarily mean that if you're sick or injured, or you've got chronic health problems from birth, that you can't write. It just means that it really is one of the factors that goes into shaping your experience of the world, that goes into shaping the way you process things and they come out on paper.

When there's a massive change in your health, it's going to show up in your fiction somehow. If your health goes way down, especially if you get into a lot of pain or you have a terminal illness, your fiction's going to get darker.

One of the reasons—I discovered this after I got my surgery—one of the reasons is that the sense of impending doom is actually a medical symptom of organ death.

Jo: Well, don't say that to a dark writer like me. I have a sense of impending doom the entire time.

Dan: Well, there's a cognitive sense of impending doom that you get if you're modelling systems and you see how things can go wrong.

But the sense that you feel the claws of demons grasping at your heart all the time—that can be a medical symptom. So pay attention to that. I didn't know that until afterwards, or I'd have gotten looked at a lot sooner.

Jo: That is really interesting. You mentioned there you are reacquiring the ability to write fiction, or that's what you've been focusing on. You also talked about having to reboot the business.

So what are some of the concrete things you're doing to rebuild?Dan: Well, the first thing I did is I allowed myself to get talked into doing a weekly Substack column a couple of years ago, and that's worked out really well.

Pay is pretty decent. I've been posting most everything for free except for some previews of upcoming books, but I'm now learning the art of paywalling, so that also helps.

Getting paid for the weekly column is quite nice, and a side effect is that it does drive people occasionally to the fiction, even though I'm writing nonfiction.

It more frequently drives people to the nonfiction books, but it gives me a good place to announce new releases, to promote book bundles, Kickstarters, and all that sort of thing.

It's a very good place for that because the people who are subscribing there—especially the people who are subscribing and supporting—are interested enough in what I'm saying that they want my email every week. So it's a good filtering mechanism for building the email list as well.

Jo: You used to do a lot of audio. That's how we connected way back, like 17 years ago, I think, when we first connected.

So are you still doing a lot of audio?Dan: I am not at the moment. It's not because of a decision to drop the audio. It's because I am now building my house, and I don't have a place that's quiet enough to record dependably.

I'm living in a little RV at the moment while I build the house. In the deep winter, everything is quiet enough in the forest to record some things, and so I do audiobooks for clients, and I work on audiobooks of my own that are coming out.

It's not quiet enough to podcast, and it's not quiet enough to be recording any other time than when the whole world is asleep. Hopefully by next year I will have the recording studio building built, and then I'll be back at it. Because boy, I miss it.

Jo: I know. So you mentioned there bundles and Kickstarters and things, and we reconnected because I bought a StoryBundle, and your new book, The Pitch-Perfect Author, was in the StoryBundle, which was part of why I bought it anyway. So let's get into the book and what's useful. Let's start with—

What is author voice anyway, and why is it important?Dan: Author voice. Everything about the way that you write is part of your author voice. The themes that you gravitate to, the way that you turn a phrase, the way that you tell a joke, the way that you handle dramatic tension.

When all of that combines, it creates in the reader's mind an emotional fingerprint, a gestalt that says, “This is a Joanna Penn book. This is a Dan Sawyer book,” or whoever.

When you bring the focus down further, author voice is fundamentally an auditory phenomenon. You can see this if you look at the careers of writers who had major worldview shifts during their career, or who shifted genres.

If you read an Isaac Asimov mystery, and you read Asimov's Guide to the Bible, and you read Isaac Asimov's The Robots of Dawn, they're all Asimov. You can hear him talking to you through all of those different venues.

So author voice is not a genre thing. It's not dependent on content. It has to do fundamentally with how your brain processes language and how it comes out of your mouth.

That, in turn, is based on patterns that were laid down when you were pre-verbal as an infant. You learned language by mapping the music of the conversations around you, and then gradually learning that the sing-song you were hearing corresponded to ideas. That's how the brain bootstraps itself into language.

So when you start writing, just like when you start speaking, you wind up imitating a lot—unconsciously—the people you've read and heard, because that's how you develop your voice.

There comes a point at which all the various influences on you, and who you are, and how they pass through you, crystallises into something definite.

By the time you're a moderately competent writer, and you're finishing novels and short stories well, your author voice is pretty well established. But that doesn't mean it's sharp, because most people don't actually concentrate on learning to hear their author voice, so they can't tell when it's off.

This is why new writers who revise a lot tend to revise their voice right out. When they write, they're using language as feels right to them, but when they read, they're reading it like an English teacher, or through the lens of someone who has very definite ideas about how grammar should work in all circumstances.

So they tend to smooth the quirkiness out of their voice, and what you get is something flat. It doesn't feel alive. It may convey information, it may tell a good story, but it doesn't feel like you're entering something that's living.

Jo: I think this is so difficult, especially for people who are new to writing. Because I remember very much spending the first few years going along to writers' conferences, and there were always sessions on “you must find your writer's voice.”

You must find your author's voice, and we publish books because of the voice, and all this. It was very, very confusing to me. As you say, it has to emerge somehow, and yet that emergence seems to be very hard to accept.

So what are some of the ways we can perhaps think about voice?You mentioned there some patterns. You talk about music. So what are some of those angles? In the book, you have different chapters on all of these things, but maybe just talk more about some of the elements.

Dan: The first and most obvious is functional vocabulary. This is not the number of words that you know. These are the words that you can reach for in the moment. You can expand your functional vocabulary by deliberately using more words—burnish your inner thesaurus.

The greater your functional vocabulary is, the more your personality is going to come out through your voice. When you've got more options to do something that's just the way that you want to do it, the closer it's going to be to the way you want to do it.

So there's functional vocabulary. There's your native dialect and accent. You, being British, have a different set of preferred terms for everything than I, being a West Coast American, do.

One of the great differences that's always visible between an English writer and an American writer is that you guys have a different way of speaking.

When you speak of a difference between one thing and another, you talk about how this car is different to that car. And Americans say this car is different from that car. It always marks out a British writer versus an American writer.

There are 100 little things like that. They happen not just between major countries, but within regions in every country. You could tell on paper the difference between someone from Yorkshire and someone from London, just as I can tell on paper the difference between someone from the West Coast and someone from Mississippi.

Even if they're highly educated, the idiom, the preferred turns of phrase, the preferred imagery—all of that is going to be a little bit different, and it conveys that regionality.

There's also the musicality of the language. This is the actual rhythm of the words with which you speak. When you learn to analyse poetry or to write poetry, you learn something called scansion.

How a poem scans is—what are the beats of the lines, how are the beats of the lines related to each other, and how does the rhyme move in and out of that?

A Shakespearean sonnet, or a sonnet from the Elizabethan era, has a specific metre, a specific number of lines, and a specific rhyme scheme, and the metre is iambic pentameter.

An iamb is “bum-bum,” if I remember right. It's the rhythm of the heartbeat. It's “bum-bum, bum-bum, bum-bum.” And you can hear it in the name of the metre, the iamb. The iambic pentameter is where the stressed syllable is the second syllable and the unstressed syllable is the first syllable.

All of Shakespeare is written in blank verse, which is unrhymed iambic pentameter. The pentameter is five feet per line, so one iamb is “bum-bum”—that's one foot—and five of those makes one line of Shakespeare.

We all have inherent rhythms like that in the way we naturally speak, but we can also tweak those rhythms on purpose to achieve dramatic effect.

The iamb has the sound of the heartbeat. It's a very reassuring speech rhythm.

The trochaic is a much more rapid one—it mirrors the rhythm of a rapidly beating heart. So you see this a lot in Edgar Allan Poe, especially in his frenetic poems like “The Bells,” how they jingle, jingle, jangle on a hoary moonless night. There's a rushing sound to that metre.

You're going to find that you will automatically do a little bit of this, just the way that you'll automatically have picked up the convention of breaking sentences up into shorter lengths during really exciting or suspense-filled parts of your book.

Once you know what it is, you can start to use it on purpose. Quite a lot of developing your voice is learning to recognise these latent, existing qualities in the way you communicate, and sharpening them up and making them conscious tools that you can pull in whenever you want.

Jo: On the one hand, there are a lot of technical words there that are really interesting, and maybe poets know a lot more of those words than most other writers. The book is really interesting in that way—kind of learning about these different things.

I guess I want to reassure people as well that, as you said, some of this can be unconscious. So often when I'm self-editing and I'm reading a sentence to myself, there's something that doesn't feel right about it. So I will rewrite that sentence so that it feels right.

Sometimes we do something that might be grammatically less correct, but it sounds better than it did before. So many of these things we almost know instinctively, just from reading so much.

Dan: Oh, yes. From reading so much and talking so much, and again, from the way you acquire language. That gives you a template in your head of what sounds right.

Language is inherently musical. So if you've ever listened to a song—especially one that wasn't recorded by a professional, but someone singing in a church choir, or your kid practising for a recital, or you practising for a recital—you know that feeling that happens when someone hits a wrong note.

There's that little wince down in the core of your being, and then the song carries on and you forget about it, unless there are too many of them, in which case you just sort of cower and ooze out of the room.

That feeling of “Ooh, someone just hit a wrong note”—that's exactly the feeling you get when you're reading through to edit your work and something is off in the technical layer of your voice.

You should pay attention to that and rewrite so that it feels good, or feels great, which is even better.

You've got the opposite of the wince, which is that sense of rapture and joy if you're listening to a professional musician and they go on an amazing guitar solo, or a flautist does an incredible trill that just sends shivers up your spine.

That sense of excitement and joy—that's what happens when you're reading and the author does something with the language that makes the whole piece fly. So you want to be paying attention for those too, because those you'll commit without intending to.

When you're reading back and you find those, you want to make note of them, because that's you seeing where you are at your strongest with your voice.

By learning both where you're making mistakes and where you're being brilliant—just like with anything else—you can start to advance towards being brilliant more often and making fewer mistakes.

Jo: Then there's a difficulty around where the line is, especially when you're an early-stage writer. Many people work with editors, and you mentioned the problem of revising your voice away, and that may also happen if you're working with an editor.

Like you said, as a Brit, I work with an American editor, Kristen, and she's excellent. She's very, very good at letting my voice be my voice, and then fixing things that make it better. But a lot of people don't feel that way about their editors.

So how can people understand where those lines are between being well-edited and becoming a better writer, and then needing to hold the line on their voice?Dan: It really helps if you understand where you are weak. Why are you hiring the editor in the first place?

I'm a big believer in the utility of having other eyes on the manuscript, but it's really important to know what you're looking for from them. You and I have both been to the Oregon Coast writing seminars, back when that was a thing.

Jo: Mm.

Dan: One of the things they would talk about with editors is when you've got a story editor or a beta reader who says, “Hey, something here didn't work in the story for me,” you usually don't want to look at that point. You want to trace back from that point to figure out where you set the wrong expectation.

Any editorial feedback is going to have a gap between what they notice and what really needs to be fixed.

As a writer, learning to interpret the feedback properly so that you actually elevate the material, instead of interpreting the feedback like you're trying to do customer service for an employer, where you just want to make the customer happy, is a really important skill to develop.

That's regardless of whether the feedback has to do with voice or plot or characterisation or whatever. Some editors are really good at back-tracing and actually spotting the real problem.

Editors make their money, or get hired, or get picked by you to volunteer, because they're good at being an audience—not because they're good at being a writer. So learning to interpret the editorial feedback is a really important step in that maturation journey.

Jo: Yes.

I think “maturation journey” is a good way to put it. Personally, I think it was around book five when I really felt, “Okay, now I see what my voice actually is.” Like, it had to be five novels, and then I was like, “Okay, now I know.”

I just didn't get it before then, and then finally—I don't know—a penny dropped or something. Maybe I grew into it, grew more confident, that kind of thing.

Dan: Yes, and that's actually about right. If you look at writers with a big catalogue, five books in is usually where they start really sounding like them. So that's a pretty normal maturation curve.

There is a way to speed it up, which is to read your books aloud—or even better, make audiobooks and then listen to them a thousand times. Listen to them until you are sick of them, and then listen to them until you start to like them again.

Jo: That's a lot.

Dan: It's a lot, but there's a really specific neurological mechanism at work. You're familiar with the comedy term “crossing the line twice,” right?

Jo: Not really.

Dan: Okay. Have you seen the Monty Python Spam sketch?

Jo: Yes.

Dan: Okay. So for those of you who have not seen this—in the Monty Python Spam sketch, there's a couple, they're in a diner, and everything on the menu has spam in it.

They say the word “spam” so much that you just want to shoot your television. But they keep it up, and then suddenly, at some point—it's a different point for everybody watching—they keep it going on long enough that everybody gets there.

At some point, the word “spam” itself becomes hilarious, and you can't stop laughing, and you don't know why, because it shouldn't work, but goddammit it really does.

It's so funny that we named junk email “spam” after this sketch, because it's a whole bunch of stuff that you don't want, but it keeps showing up anyway. That's crossing the line twice.

What's going on is that your brain is getting accustomed to a sound. It has extracted all of the meaning it can, and so it's doing what it does with all sensory input. When it thinks it's got it mapped out, it's trying to filter it.

Unless you are going to sit and concentrate on it, you can't feel the texture of the fabric of your clothing on the back of your legs, because your brain—despite the fact that it's getting that input all the time—is filtering that out, because it needs you to have your resources free for thinking.

When you experience something over and over and over, no matter what it is or how complex it is, the brain habituates like that. But if that signal refuses to be filtered, and the input keeps coming, and it keeps getting more intense, or it stays persistent and it's too complex to filter easily, your brain starts to think, “Oh, maybe I shouldn't be filtering this out.”

“Maybe there's meaning here that's important for my survival that I hadn't extracted.” And so suddenly it starts searching for meaning to associate with that sensation—and that's the point at which the joke becomes funny again, or you start to experience your voice as if it's somebody else's.

When you begin to experience your author voice as if it's somebody else's, you can hear it as a distinct, objective style, rather than just as an echo of the voices that are in your head.

That's why music students practise over and over and over, even on a piece they know cold. They're doing the same trick that I'm advocating with listening to your audiobooks until you're not sick of them anymore.

Jo: I mean, I think that's terrifying, because I just don't want to listen to my books over and over again. I think it's very interesting that you think it could shortcut that voice process.

Staying on audio—since we last spoke, I have done a lot of my own audiobook narration, mainly for nonfiction, but also my short stories. I haven't done my full-length fiction.

What I discovered in doing this is that what read fine to me when I was self-editing my own work on the page—and obviously I'm hearing it in my head—when I perform the audiobook, I actually have to edit things again.

So what are some of your tips for how we can bridge that gap? Because that's kind of strange.

Dan: So what's happening is that there's a much wider latitude of things that work on the page than what works with voice. The reason is that with voice, all of those rhythmic elements I was talking about before are really pronounced, as well as all the sensual elements.

Basically every word and sound has a mouth shape. The mouth shape affects the emotional valence of the sound.

Stuff that's unpleasant tends to have a really close-in feel—I'm trying to scrunch my face up—where you would grit your teeth and scrunch up your face if something is unpleasant. And if something is really pleasant, it tends to have a rounded feel, and our language reflects it.

In fact, all languages reflect this, because language is a physical thing that's based on the sensuality of the body.

So, like, in all cultures “mama” is the word for mother that babies first say, regardless of what it is. It has a round feel, because babies associate their mother with roundness. A lot of language is built up that way, from baseline sensual cues.

When you're working just in text, that aspect is not nearly as obvious to you. When you're reading, it's not as obvious to you. It's still at play, but when you go to do something verbally, and you go to read a text, all of those sensual cues come in at the same time.

Then the rhythm comes in hard, and you suddenly realise that—hey, that conveys the thought, but it doesn't feel right. So you wind up retooling a bit. There's also occasionally tongue twisters, which you have to work your way around. So that's why that happens.

Jo: Then I guess another thing—I hear quite often, people say, “Oh, I don't like my voice.” And they mean, “I don't like speaking out loud. I don't want to be on video. I don't want to be on audio.” I wonder—

Does that sort of resistance potentially affect their writing voice? Are there ways people can get over that feeling?Dan: Yes, for sure. There are a few things that go into that. One is basic self-loathing. A lot of people carry it around. Most people learn to make a decent life even though they kind of secretly suspect that they're not worth anything, or they secretly find themselves revolting.

That kind of thing you can't really fix with exercises. That's something you fix with —

Jo: Therapy.

Dan: Psychological work, or spiritual work, or that kind of thing.

Jo: Yes.

Dan: But the not liking the sound of your own voice—that's easy to fix. Here's why it happens. When you're listening to your voice as you speak, the bones in your head are amplifying the bass signals and attenuating the treble.

It's kind of like if you were to shout in another room and your spouse hears you, but they can't make out the consonants. That's because all the consonants are being filtered out by the wall in between, but the bass is being resonated through. The same thing happens in your head.

So when you get on a microphone—especially if it's an accurate microphone—you're suddenly hearing what everybody else hears when you speak, and it sounds thin and tinny and unpleasant compared to what you're used to hearing.

The really easy way to get around this is to get a microphone that is tuned for singers. The condenser mic that I have isn't made anymore, so I can't really recommend a good condenser mic.

If you're on a dynamic mic, the Shure SM58 is the one to use. I podcasted with that for years before I could afford an upgrade. It is tuned for singers to sound as good as possible without any other help from the sound engineer, which means that the baseline sound for that microphone is what you're hearing in your head.

If you use the right equipment, you get around that problem really quickly, to the extent that you can technically. Then after that, it's just a matter of crossing the line twice.

You listen to yourself enough that you stop hearing, “Oh my God, I'm talking,” and you start hearing, “Oh, that voice is making this sound.” And once you hear, “Oh, it's that voice making this sound,” you don't have that problem anymore, ever again.

Jo: Oh, good. Well, hopefully that's fixed it for people. And of course, there are lots of brilliant things in the book, The Pitch-Perfect Author.

Before we finish up, I did want to return to your Substack. I was having a look at it, and it includes some really interesting things. Like, you're doing this metalwork, which is really cool.

It felt coherent to me, because I know you, and you're a polymath, and you're interested in so many things. So your Substack kind of stood out to me as quite eclectic, compared to, say, other writers who are going on Substack to try and sell specific books.

So is this a deliberate marketing choice, or is it just be an interesting person and you will attract people who are interested more generally?Dan: Well, I suppose it kind of winds up being the latter, but basically it's that I get bored easily. If I'm going to be writing every week, I need to stay interested in it.

One of the books I wrote when I was really sick—that's not out on the market yet, but it is serialised on Substack—is a guide to self-education. It'll be coming out later this year on the general market. It's called Reclaiming Your Mind: An Autodidact's Bible.

I talk in there quite a bit about the illusion of discrete areas of knowledge. There is a level of learning at which the silos of information start to collapse together. Woodworking and writing have a lot to do with each other.

A lot of the terminology we use in writing is pulled from the trades—especially woodworking, and metalworking, and gunsmithing.

As you begin to spot these connections between different areas of knowledge, it becomes really easy to slide between them for your hobbies, for your writing, for just your personal gratification.

As I've gotten older—and also as I've gotten access to a little space that's not contained within a teeny little apartment—I have just gone with it.

As I've discovered, “Hey, this thing is tangentially connected to this other thing over here,” I'm like, “Oh, well, I'm going to go over to this other thing and see what's over there.” It's tremendously creatively fertile.

Since a lot of the things that our language connects us to have to do with trades and crafts and nature, it gets you out in the open air, which is really good for any writer—because sitting at a desk all day is worse than smoking three packs of cigarettes a day for 40 years.

Jo: I love that.

Dan: My curiosity is the chief feature of my Substack, and it kind of works for me as a writer, because it's also one of the chief features of my fiction.

Jo: Me too, and I was actually quite inspired by your Substack. Because I think this happens when you've been in the writing industry long enough.

Substack has become the sort of trendy place to be now.People are going into specific niches, very much like blogging did, and then podcasting had to be on a specific niche, and all this.

Of course, we know logically that, marketing a book—you know, if you had just a Substack on voice mastery, then for sure that would be a better marketing vehicle. But, as you say, how boring.

Dan: Well, it depends a lot on what you're trying to cultivate as an author. If you're a single-genre author with a very narrow niche, and you're really happy writing that kind of stuff, then a narrow column supporting it is not a bad idea.

Especially when you serialise old novels, once you've got 20 or 30 under your belt. That's not a bad idea, because you're trying to attract people who want one thing and want it regularly.

If I were to get a reader who wants one thing and wants it regularly, and finds it, say, in my Clarke Lantham mysteries, and then they hop over to my science fiction—oh boy, are they going to be pissed.

If they're not there for my voice, and they're just there for the way I write a mystery plot, then not only are they not going to get what they're looking for—but they're going to start to doubt whether they can trust that they're going to get what they're looking for in my next mystery.

Whereas if they're coming to me through something where the multiplicity of what I'm doing is on display—whether that's this Substack, or whether that's what I used to do on The Every Day Novelist when I was podcasting that, or whether it's what I did with all the after-shows on my fiction podcast when I was doing that—then they kind of know what they're in for.

The people who stick with me are more likely to be people who are in it for the experience of my voice. And for my bibliography, that's what I've got to offer, because I'm all over the place in terms of genre and subject matter.

Jo: Yes, which is why I find you interesting.

Dan: Oh, why thank you.

Jo: So where can people find you and your books online?Dan: Well, you can find pretty much everything at JDsawyer.net.

I've got the weekly column at jdanielsawyer.substack.com. At jdsawyer.net there's a page with all of my podcasts on it, and there's also a store with all of my books on it. Of course, everything is also available on Amazon and just about everywhere that the distributors take you.

Jo: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Dan. That was great.

Dan: Thank you, Joanna. It was great to talk to you again.

The post Author Voice Mastery, And Rebooting an Author Business With J. Daniel Sawyer first appeared on The Creative Penn.

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How do you write about the most painful experiences of your life without being overwhelmed by them? How can timed writing and a braided story help you untangle your hardest stories? With Nicole Walker.

In the intro, Self-Publishing Pop Up Books [Self-Publishing with ALLi]; New in KU [BookBub]; The solar sail theory of indie publishing [ProductiveIndieFictionWriter]; Bones of the Deep; Selfie Awards Shortlist 2026.

This episode is sponsored by Publisher Rocket, which will help you get your book in front of more Amazon readers so you can spend less time marketing and more time writing. I use Publisher Rocket for researching book titles, categories, and keywords — for new books and for updating my backlist. Check it out at www.PublisherRocket.com

This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn

Nicole Walker is a nonfiction author, essayist, poet, and editor, as well as a creative writing teacher. Her latest book is Writing the Hard Stuff: Turning Difficult Subjects into Meaningful Prose.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.

Show Notes

• Why writing helps us understand “the puzzles of the universe” — and when to trust that intuition
• The braided essay: alternating between trauma and an everyday obsession to unlock the hard stuff
• How two-minute timed writing lets you go deep and then safely step back
• Rooting pain in the body, using the senses, scene, and dialogue instead of words like “trauma”
• Truth in memoir, big T versus little t, and the emerging genre of speculative nonfiction
• What actually sells books: pairing up on book tour and getting readers back out into the world

You can find Nicole and NikWalk.com.

Transcript of the interview with Nicole WalkerJo: Nicole Walker is a nonfiction author, essayist, poet, and editor, as well as a creative writing teacher. Her latest book is Writing the Hard Stuff: Turning Difficult Subjects into Meaningful Prose. So welcome to the show, Nicole.

Nicole: Hi, Joanna. It's so nice to be here.

Jo: I've lots to talk about, but first up—

Tell us a bit more about you and your journey into writing and publishing.Nicole: I was always a writer. As all writers say, I've been writing since I was five. I kept little journals and things like that, and I was on the high school literary magazine.

I was an English major in college, but that was always tempered with some serious commitment to the sciences, to English literature, to German, to Spanish.

I had a wide variety of interests, but there was always something that tugged at me about writing that made me feel like, this is where I feel most at home. This is the way I like to understand the puzzles of the universe. This is how I make sense of the world—through writing.

So even though I got my BA in English at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, I stuck around Portland for a few years because I loved it. I worked for various non-profits, and that was great.

At some point I said, “I really want to take this seriously.” So I went ahead and applied to graduate school, and ended up in the University of Utah's PhD programme, where I stayed for eight very lovely years.

I always recommend to my own students: never graduate. Stay in graduate school forever, because it's such a beautiful place where people support your writing. You have professors who support it, but more importantly, you have your cohort.

To this day, I have so many great friends. You make a lot of friends if you stick around for eight years.

That sort of community-building is, I think, the other part of why I became a writer. Writing by myself is obviously a lonely business, and there's a lot of internal struggle that happens with that.

I have found a literary community, both at the University of Utah and then growing from there, serving as president of the NonfictioNOW Conference, teaching my own graduate students, serving as the series editor for Crux, the imprint at the University of Georgia Press.

I feel like my world has expanded because of my writing. So that's been a true gift.

Jo: Oh, I love that.

I love that you said you understand the puzzles of the universe through writing, and that this tugged at you. Could talk about that a bit more?Because a lot of listeners, I think, sometimes mistrust that feeling. They think, “Oh, maybe I shouldn't necessarily lean into that intuition.” It feels like you leaned very strongly into an intuition that this was the way.

Nicole: Yes, and this book in particular, Writing the Hard Stuff, takes that to heart. I think about writing the hard stuff as writing all kinds of tricky things—things that are really hard to communicate.

The book begins revolving around personal trauma. Things that happened in my childhood, as well as difficult subjects that happen to us when we're growing up.

It also includes things like environmental issues and political issues: things that are really hard to talk about, that are philosophically difficult to express, that can be controversial, and that you can put people off by talking about.

One of the goals of the book—one of my own philosophies—is that by looking deeply into the knotted ball of string that is a kind of trauma or a kind of difficulty, and beginning to pull those strings out, that's where you start to not only make meaning out of what happened to you, or what this particular problem is, but those strings themselves become connections.

I talk about Donna Haraway's book Staying with the Trouble. It's primarily about how we can overcome our political differences regarding climate change, and one of her examples is to change the way we think about narrative.

In Western thought, we often think there's a beginning, a middle, and an end, and she brings up the Navajo game that we all know as cat's cradle.

So if you think of that ball of knots—your trauma, your difficult subject—you start pulling out the strings, and then you start playing with it. With cat's cradle, you make one design with your hands, and then a friend pulls it around and turns it into another design.

To me, that's how reading and writing work. We share, and we build on each other's ideas, but we're always connected by those strings.

So if you have this difficult subject and you're shying away from it, you're losing, I think, some of the opportunity to make connections and to make sense of what that nest of string sitting in your stomach actually is.

Jo: I love that metaphor. I think it's brilliant. I've never heard it described that way, and I think it's fantastic. What's interesting is that some people don't have a mind's eye—I know several listeners who don't.

So while in my mind I'm picturing the ball of string and then the cat's cradle, some people won't be able to do that, which is also fascinating in terms of how people's brains work.

In terms of how you'd recommend people think about it: this ball of string that we want to turn into a design like a cat's cradle is a total mess. So where do we even start?

How do we know where to start pulling on the threads?Because it might just feel like it's out of control.

Nicole: Oh, I deeply appreciate both the idea that some people don't have that mind's eye, or just think differently. We all have different ways of imagining what we call our trauma, this nest of problems, this ball of string.

Of course a metaphor does oversimplify in some ways. I say, “Well, you just take one of the ends of the string and start pulling.” But practically, what does that really mean to do? There are a couple of things I suggest in the book and offer at workshops. One is an exercise I call writing the braided essay.

I ask the writer to sit down and think about a scene that was difficult in their life—something that had a lot of tension, that they're really still struggling with, that they don't love thinking about. I'm going to ask them to go there for just a couple of minutes.

Then there's the other side of the braided essay: I ask them to think about something completely different, completely off-topic.

Perhaps a walk they took in the aspen grove, or what they were making for dinner last night, or perhaps they're deeply invested in the networks of the blood in the human body—anything they're fascinated and obsessed with.

I say, “Okay, I want you to write about your difficult subject for two minutes, but then I'm going to give you a break, and you're going to pop over and talk about how you spent all day weeding your garden, and yet there are still weeds.”

Then I'm going to ask people to go back and talk about their difficult subject, and then go back and talk about their obsession with weeds. They write about each of these things for two minutes.

What happens—which I think is a pretty compelling experiment, from my point of view and from theirs—is that they write back and forth, and they're able to take a break from the hard thing. They're also tempted to go back to it once they've had that break in their research.

The other thing that happens—and, you know, every book in nonfiction has to have a colon, so of course it's called Writing the Hard Stuff: Turning Difficult Subjects into Meaningful Prose—is that by going back and forth, you'll see the connections these writers make.

They make connections with word choice, with verbs, with colours and different kinds of imagery. They start to make meaning between those two ideas. What happens to the writer then—and to me, when I'm doing it—is that I now have something that is constructed.

So it's not just this knot in my stomach. It's not just my interest in research. Now I've put these things together, and then I get to play. We get to the cat's cradle part of the metaphor, where I really start thinking about craft issues.

Why did I happen to bring these two ideas together? What might they have in common? What does it mean that I'm telling the story of my parents' divorce and my personal trauma, and in the research part I'm talking about weeds? Well, maybe I felt in the weeds.

You come up with some sort of overarching understanding of why you chose that research story, and it lets you go deeper into that personal trauma, now with some of the techniques of craft, which I think help shield you from some of the trauma and pain of that original hard story.

Jo: Again, I really love that idea.

Do you also think the timed writing actually helps people go deep and then withdraw a bit, which psychologically may help them write about these difficult subjects? People are like, “I need to sit down for two hours and write about this deeply traumatic thing,” which of course feels like it's going to be too hard. So perhaps that two-minute process actually releases people from that.

Nicole: Oh, absolutely. What a great way to think about it. It is prohibitive to sit down and think, “Okay, I'm going to go into the worst thing that ever happened to me and sit with it for two hours.”

Going back and forth, you create energy and tension. But also, nobody wants to sit with something by themselves for two hours. If you think of research as your companion—”I'm coming in there with you, buddy”—you have something to rely on, this other side of the story, and it gives you that space.

The timed writing, the two minutes, two minutes, two minutes, also reminds you that you don't have to write for two hours straight any day. I have a goal where I write 500 words a day, which is mostly true, unless I'm really in the weeds.

We'll use two metaphors today: we'll use string, and now we'll be using weeds. But when I'm really in the weeds teaching, or going around the country talking about books, I really do write 500 words a day. I often try not to write too much more, because sometimes it loses freshness, and it can be overwhelming.

So I really appreciate you saying that having that timed writing is important, but also that having that balance of deep emotional investigation with this more cerebral, informational crutch can really help you get into the subject and go deeper.

Jo: Yes, and perhaps it anchors the writing in something concrete. Because with memoir particularly—having also written one—it can be too easy to lean on big words like “pain” or “trauma,” but that's actually meaningless in a book.

So why is it so important to be specific and concrete in our writing in order to convey these bigger topics?Nicole: I think we know our own trauma. We know how it feels in our bodies, and we've been living with it for a long time. So it's pretty hard to communicate it to others. Why does it matter to other people?

Of course it matters to you, but how are you going to convey the breadth of that trouble with words that aren't rooted in the physical world?

The nice thing about rooting things in the physical world is that every one of us has a body. We have different bodies, but we share that in common. So it's the old trope of using your senses first. What did it feel like?

If you can't think of what part of your body it particularly hurts in, you have the availability of metaphor to describe how that might have felt. You have the opportunity to create scene.

This is particularly difficult for memoir writers, I think, because we imagine it's the fiction folks who have to use dialogue, who have to have a setting, who have to put their bodies in a place.

Thatt's one of my mantras when I teach: we need to be able to see where you are. We need to see what is physically happening, how the interactions work.

Dialogue, I think, is one of the best ways to literally get your body on the page—and to get your other characters, or subjects, on the page—because to speak, you have to have a body.

Once you start having dialogue, you can picture the way the speaker's face moves, the way they cross their legs. You can even picture the colour of the paint behind them, or the kind of chair they're sitting in. So dialogue is one of the first ways you can say, “All right, I must have a scene here.”

I can't go on just telling people, “It was so traumatic. I suffered so much. It was terrible. I felt so much pain.” You can say that sometimes, that's totally fair, but you have to pair it with that physical, concrete imagery, so other people can begin to understand what it felt like for you in your body, so they can feel it in their body.

Jo: Interesting that you bring up dialogue because one of the issues with memoir is—I've had people compare it to truth with a small “t” and truth with a big “T.” So you're telling some kind of big truth about your life.

If you're writing dialogue about something that actually happened to you, in memory, it's very unlikely that it actually happened in that way, so it's not necessarily small-“t” true. So on a practical note, what are your thoughts and tips on truth.

How do we tell our own story even if others don't see it that way?Nicole: This is a subject I'm deeply invested in right now. When I first started teaching creative nonfiction, it was at the height of the John D'Agata and David Shields questions. What is truth? Big T, little t? What am I obligated to do as a creative nonfiction writer?

I had a great friend, Angie Truong, who came to teach one of my classes, and she said, “Nonfiction is a pretty big spectrum. You have journalism on one end, and then you have the lyric essay on the other end.”

You imagine the lyric essay is full of metaphors and things like that, so you can approach truth. You're saying, “This is what it felt like. This is what it seemed like.”

Check out my newest favourite thing. It's called speculative nonfiction, and I use a little bit of this in my book How to Plant a Billion Trees, which Writing the Hard Stuff is somewhat based on.

I wrote them in tandem, which was a very strange and interesting and fun thing to do. But in How to Plant a Billion Trees I use this thing called speculative nonfiction, which goes even further along the spectrum, past the lyric essay, to this opportunity to use language like “perhaps,” “maybe,” “I imagined.”

So I have sections in my book where I can't remember the dialogue exactly, but I know that the dialogue in some sense matters—that what might have been said will do much more to convey what was happening than my exposition over the matter.

By using those turns of phrase, you're alerting your reader: “Dear reader, this definitely is not exactly what happened, but this is how I recall it.”

Then you're being not only honest to the story and honest to your reader, but you're also conveying the feeling and the mood of the event—that other kind of truth that memoir is really trying to get at. It was like this for me, which is why I think this way now.

It's a fledgling genre. I just read a book by Laraine Herring called A Constellation of Ghosts: A Speculative Memoir with Ravens. It's brilliant. It's an amazing book that pairs her actual colonoscopy and discovery of colon cancer with the story of her dad, who has passed already and comes back as a raven and helps her through it.

So you're pulling on some of the tools of fiction, which creative nonfiction already has been doing. But it does so in this bright and, I feel, incredibly ethical way.

You're alerting your reader, “My dad is not really a raven.” But you're also saying, “Oh my gosh, I sensed he was with me. I sensed every time a raven approached that I had somebody's hand on my shoulder.”

That, to me, has been a lot of fun—a much more imaginative way of creating some of those scenes than doing something like, “Well, I don't remember the dialogue.” Or, even worse—and we know people have been unethical in their approach—recreating the dialogue as if they'd had a tape recorder with them when they were 17 years old.

Jo: Mm.

Nicole: So I offer that as an option to your listeners, as something to experiment with. Allow yourself to have that imaginative opportunity to show the reader what it might have been like.

Jo: I love that. It's interesting, you talk there about the spectrum of nonfiction, which is ridiculously big, as is fiction. Obviously these are very big. But I wonder if we do get hemmed in by genre.

I love the idea of a speculative memoir. I'm going to have to go read that book because I can't even imagine what that really means. I feel hemmed in by my expectations of a memoir.

But then, from a business and marketing perspective—because we're all trying to sell our books—

Do we risk not meeting the expectations of a reader of a genre that way?Nicole: Right. One of the good and bad things about my literary career is that I've spanned a lot of genres. My PhD is actually in poetry. Nobody expects the full truth from poetry.

One of my poetry professors once said she wrote this really sad poem about her father's death, and the audience was moved, and then her real father stood up and said, “Good job, daughter.” And someone in the audience was just shocked: “You just read a poem about your dead dad, and here he is!”

We have absolute expectations of genre, and expectations of truth, in everything we read. If you label it fiction, you're kind of off the hook—even though, of course, fiction uses so many elements of nonfiction: so much research, so much information, so much personal memory to create those fantastic landscapes.

So when I think about how one sells one's memoir, I do think you also have to acknowledge what you expect your audience to be. With Laraine Herring's A Constellation of Ghosts, by putting “colon, a speculative memoir,” you're alerting your reader to that possibility.

And because it's a pretty far-out way of thinking right now, it probably does curtail some of the sales.

On the other hand, think of memoirs that are written for celebrities, and how many of them are ghostwritten—or written with other people, where the ghostwriter's not even part of the thing—but it comes across as the most legit of all memoirs, because it's a celebrity and we know them.

We associate their lives with their story, and their story must therefore be true. So I think, with all levels of creative nonfiction, it's incumbent upon the writer to suggest right off the bat what kind of nonfiction they're reading.

Are they reading journalism? Are they reading lyric essays? Are they reading speculative nonfiction?

I think a lot, too—as an editor for a literary series for nonfiction books—about what I look for in memoir. It's something that takes the personal story and connects it into the larger conversation.

Even if the larger conversation is directly about what the main subject is about, to me it's still about the crux of the matter. Why does your story make an impact on the world in this bigger way? How do you let the world inform your story? How does your past and your trauma, or your difficulties, connect to a larger world?

Jo: Mm.

Nicole: To me, that's something some memoirs are capable of doing. Some memoirs are truly invested only in that personal story, which I think is totally legitimate too, because I love learning how people think. I love understanding. This is just how my brain works.

But in terms of sales? I don't know. Again, as the series editor and as the seller of my own books, I think you can't determine it in advance.

So you should probably write what you want to write, what feels right to you, using as many craft techniques as you can hone. But the market, to me, feels very non-negotiable. You never know exactly how things are going to turn out.

So I deeply believe: write the best, most well-crafted book you can, and I do think your readers will find you.

Jo: We'll come back to marketing in a minute, but just returning to your own writing practice. I've got your book page up in front of me, and you've written all kinds of things: your essays, your memoirs, some fiction, and some poetry, as you mentioned.

So I wondered: when you're researching something, or you've got a feeling about wanting to write, how do you choose the type of book you turn it into—or a poem, or an essay? Or do you pitch it as some kind of external work, or turn it into a workshop?

How do you turn an idea into what it will eventually be?Nicole: I love that question because it's somewhat of a mystery to me, but I think I'm getting close to understanding. It really is in those first few words, that first sentence, that I think, “Okay, I know which direction this is going.”

For example, the other day I woke up in the morning and thought, “All right, I'm writing this poem about how man took over for God, and that's how the planet ended up being such a mess.”

So I started writing it, and it was pretty lyrical at the beginning. But then I started making full sentences, and explaining things a little bit more, and I thought, “Okay, this is not a poem. It's going to be an essay.”

When I start writing fiction, I pull on something a little further, a little more distant from my experience, and then I pull it back into something more character-driven. For example, in a novel I'm writing, I begin with this whole story about McDonald's and ravens, and then I pull it back into the character.

If I were to diagram the sentences between a poem, the nonfiction, and the fiction, I think I'd see fundamental differences between the three.

Jo: Do you work on multiple projects at the same time, or once you commit to something, is that what you finish? Personally, I have lots of little things happening, and then a moment comes and I commit to a book, and I won't stop until I've finished that book—the rest will have to wait. It's that decision moment. How does it work for you?

Nicole: My process is pretty similar to yours. I have a number of ongoing projects, percolating here and there. Some days I'll think, “All right, today feels like a fiction day.” But for the most part, you're absolutely right.

There's a bunch of little things I'm writing, or things I'm dabbling in, but once there's a critical mass—which I'd say is around 20,000 words or something—I'm all in, and I've got to focus on this project.

Even though I think I can do whatever multitasking, really it's important to try to maintain some sort of through-line in whatever project I'm working on. If I do that with too many projects, I lose that through-line.

I also worry sometimes that the projects start to sound too similar. So say I'm writing a nonfiction collection and a novel—if I go back and forth every other day, those sentence differences I'm talking about might start to collapse, and they become too similar. Then what the heck would I be writing? I don't even know.

Jo: It's interesting because you span academic publishing and, I guess, trade publishing—whatever you want to call it—where more non-academics read books. I'm just finishing up a master's myself at the moment, and writing academic stuff is completely different to writing my other books.

So when you're deciding on these books, are you aiming for a specific publication market—as in, you want an academic publisher, or you want a trade publisher?

How do you think about publishing in the process?Nicole: As much as I once really wanted to find some ground as a scholarly and academic writer—and I really do love to write reviews of other people's books, and Writing the Hard Stuff is a textbook that relies tremendously on so many other people's books.

That is really important to me because that goes back to how one both creates and thanks one's community for creating the literary world we live in—I feel like there's a smaller audience for that sort of academic writing. But it's something we should do.

As generous as you are here, for example, reaching out to other people about other people's books is probably the kindest thing you can do. So I hope to continue to take time to do that and make it part of my repertoire.

It's not as fun, I'd say, as the imaginative elements of writing creative nonfiction, or fiction, or poetry. That's when I really love to groove and get into that mode of, “Oh, the words are coming. Oh, I never thought about it that way.”

With academic writing, I feel I sometimes write in a slightly more stilted voice. My friend Ander Monson, who teaches at the University of Arizona, has done a really great job of writing—whether it's his personal essays or his critical essays—where he maintains the same voice.

He doesn't move into that super-formal academic speak. He'll literally say things like, “You know,” or, “That's a banger of a sentence,” in the middle of an academic essay, and I really admire him for that.

I feel like maybe if academic writing were more receptive to people writing in their unique voices, then maybe more people would read it.

Jo: Yes. One of the pieces of feedback on one of my earlier essays in my master's year was around my sentence structure—that it would be far more appropriate in a novel than in an academic essay. I was saying to my husband, “I can't believe this, but I'm just going to have to change my style.” It's very interesting.

We're almost out of time, and I also wanted to ask you: you have a recent blog post on how to try to get your forthcoming book attention in 4,231 simple steps, which made me laugh.

We all find book marketing a challenge, so what have you found works best for you? I should tell the listeners—there are not 4,000 steps in your blog post. Although I think people would want them.

Nicole: Exactly. I stopped at 72, but I can go on. That was sort of the pre-publishing process. There have been so many great things that have happened, but a lot of them have been driven by me.

I have a publicist, but he works on a lot of other books, and I have a marketing person at Bloomsbury. They have to juggle a lot. The only person who is really, really, really committed to your book is you.

So I've written companion essays. I haven't had any luck publishing them, which hasn't been true in the past, so I wonder what's going on there. I'll write something for the Huffington Post or Newsweek that's tangentially related to my book.

I also might just write too much in essay voice instead of popular-magazine voice. As we were just talking about, academic voice versus novelistic voice. So that might be part of the problem too. Reaching out to people who might invite me onto podcasts has been really rewarding, and very, very kind.

I think the best thing I did was to put myself on book tour and to pair myself with someone in that community.

I've gone on book tour before by myself, and there have been occasions where there were two to three people in the audience, which can be really disheartening.

The problem wasn't so much the bookstore's fault or my book's fault—it's just that if you go to a bookstore in a town where nobody knows you, they're not going to put a lot of effort into making the date happen, unless you're super famous.

So what I did was find somebody in a community—a friend of mine—who would go with me and be part of the conversation. Even if their book was a couple of years old, we'd still go and have a conversation about each of our books.

This has worked tremendously well. People will come to see their friend, and then they'll be introduced to you, and they'll ask you questions and buy your book. You create new connections and new friends thanks to that friend and that place. So that's my number one recommendation for how to get the word out in the world.

I also did all the social media stuff. It doesn't work as well as it used to. It's kind of a strange time. But because of my suggestion about going to bookstores with people you know… I think we're coming out of our COVID time, where we got so used to doing everything on our computers and just staying in our electronic universe.

People are hungry to get out. So one thing I want to do, and haven't done yet, is throw a big party.

Go to weird places where you don't even do readings—you just offer people snacks and a glass of wine and say, “Hey, here's a book if you want to buy it.” To have these more informal gatherings that bring people together because I do think there's a hankering for people to get out into the world again.

Jo: And just on that—you've got these two books coming at the same time: How to Plant a Billion Trees, which is the memoir, and Writing the Hard Stuff, the how-to book for writers.

When you do these events, are you choosing one or the other depending on the audience? Or are you selling both at the same time? Because they're obviously very different.

Nicole: Yes, I'm definitely selling both at the same time. Although I probably push How to Plant a Billion Trees first, because most of the people I'm pairing with are also writers of nonfiction or memoir.

The other thing is, I can talk about How to Plant a Billion Trees, and if people have a really deep question about, “Well, how did you write this section?” I can say, “Well, if you refer to this book, Writing the Hard Stuff, you'll see.” So it's an easier segue.

I think people aren't used to going to book events for craft books. But in the interview world—where people are reviewing books or interviewing me—Writing the Hard Stuff has definitely been the primary book I've been approached to speak about because people really do want techniques.

So it depends on the context as to which book gets the spotlight, but it's been really fun to be able to talk about both in tandem.

I don't know if they're competing against each other or supporting each other. That's my hope, that people think, “Oh, I read this one book, I might as well read the other one.” But that's asking a lot of people, to buy two books, so I try not to overstate that hope.

Jo: They are very different, and I love the idea of doing that. Absolutely.

So where can people find you and your books online?Nicole: You can find me at my Substack, which is substack.nikwalk.com—N-I-K-W-A-L-K. Or my website, which is the same: nikwalk.com. I might just start going as Nik Walk in the world, so people can find me more easily.

I also really love to support Bloomsbury. They have really good deals, especially on the audiobook for How to Plant a Billion Trees, and they also have good deals if you buy both books, you get free shipping.

So Bloomsbury is probably the number one place to get the books, but of course they're also available on Bookshop.org and Amazon.com, and on Amazon in the UK as well.

Jo: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Nicole. That was great.

Nicole: Oh, it was so fun to talk with you, Joanna. Thank you again so much for this opportunity.

The post Writing The Hard Stuff: Turning Difficult Subjects Into Meaningful Prose With Nicole Walker first appeared on The Creative Penn.

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What if the real secret to a lasting writing career isn't talent or luck, but learning to thrive in the mess? Why are in-person events worthwhile even if the maths doesn't add up? How do you protect your creativity when the machines never sleep and the community is at one another's throats? With Mark Leslie Lefebvre

In the intro, Has AI Already Killed Non-Fiction [Tim Ferriss]; 9 ways that AI would disrupt authors and the publishing industry over the next decade; Pivoting towards The Transformation Economy; and Who do you serve?

This podcast is sponsored by Kobo Writing Life, which helps authors self-publish and reach readers in global markets through the Kobo eco-system. You can also subscribe to the Kobo Writing Life podcast for interviews with successful indie authors.

This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn

Mark Leslie Lefebvre is the author of horror and paranormal fiction, as well as non-fiction travel and books for authors. He's also an editor, professional speaker, and the Director of Business Development at Draft2Digital. His latest book is Stark Realities: Stacked Up Lessons Every Writer Needs to Know About the Business of Writing and Publishing.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.

Show Notes

• Why print and in-person events are making a comeback for indie authors
• The case for (and against) licensing your voice clone through ElevenLabs
• Why we keep selling books in person when the numbers rarely add up
• Measuring success by creative satisfaction rather than money
• Being honest about author earnings and the fear of being truly seen
• Managing stress, divisiveness, and the noise around AI

You can find Mark at MarkLeslie.ca.

Transcript of the interview with Mark Leslie LefebvreJo: Mark Leslie Lefebvre is the author of horror and paranormal fiction, as well as non-fiction travel and books for authors. He's also an editor, professional speaker, and the Director of Business Development at Draft2Digital.

His latest book is Stark Realities: Stacked Up Lessons Every Writer Needs to Know About the Business of Writing and Publishing. Welcome back to the show, Mark.

Mark: Oh, hey, Jo. It's always an awesome time chatting with you.

Jo: You've been on the show lots of times over the years, but the last time was in September 2024, when we talked about selling books in person. So give us a bit of an update.

What does your writing and publishing business look like at the moment? How do you manage it alongside the day job and everything else you do?Mark: Oh my God. Well, sleep is—no rest for the wicked, maybe. I'll sleep when I'm dead.

It's so funny, it was just this last weekend in Waterloo. I was at Waterloo Book Fest, and somebody came up to my table—another author from one of the other tables—and said, “I heard you on the The Creative Penn Podcast. And then when you mentioned something about Waterloo, I said, ‘He can't be from Waterloo.' And then when you mentioned the skeleton, I said, ‘I know where he lives.'”

Jo: That's scary.

Mark: So I love the fact that there are so many of your listeners all over the world, and that's usually how people know me. No matter what else I've done, it's like, “Oh, you've been on Joanna Penn's podcast.” I'll say, “Yes, I have.”

You know what's really funny? The last time I was on the podcast, we were talking about A Book in Hand, which I was supposed to release that year.

Jo: Yes.

Mark: I just added another 5,000 words to it this morning.

Jo: Wait, it's still not published?

Mark: No, and it's so funny. I actually have the first 60,000 words of it with an editor right now, and I told her I'd get her the rest of it, which I thought would be another 20,000 words, by the end of June. But I think it's going to hit 100,000.

Here's the weird thing that happened with this. This is trying to accumulate my life of book selling, as well as doubling down on doing in-person events in the last several years.

I thought I was going to have the book done in 2024. I ran into some issues where I didn't back it up properly. It was an old version, and I accidentally overwrote the only version I had.

Jo: So, for everyone listening, Mark—how many decades have you been an author and a publisher?

How come you're still missing deadlines and still not backing up your work properly?Mark: Yes, this is a lesson: no matter how long you've been doing something, you can still make boneheaded errors. So if you, dear listener, have made mistakes, just know that this old guy who's been doing this since the mid-'80s still makes mistakes like that. Don't beat yourself up. I probably did something worse.

Anyway, that book I thought was going to be maybe 40, 45,000 words, it's going to be bigger than Wide for the Win—close to 100,000 words.

Here's a really important lesson I learned in that, Jo. I thought the book would be something. It became something else. Through my own experiences of doing more in-person events, book signings, and library event.

Also in talking to awesome folks like Johnny B. Truant, Katie Cross, Todd Fahnestock, and so many other authors I know, and seeing what Ben Wolf is up to, and a whole bunch of different people who are doing in-person events.

In creating case studies for how they interact specifically with a bookstore or library, or how they do in-person selling—I really think the book wasn't ready then. It's like the recipe wasn't ready. I still needed to play with some things.

I do sincerely have faith, since I got it into the editorial process, that this will be the year the book actually gets released.

Jo: As you said, there are some really good lessons there around sometimes the book not being quite ready. I'd bought an early version from the StoryBundle, which is how I got this book as well, actually.

Mark: Yes.

Jo: That's another tip for people—storybundle.com. You can go and find some great bundles there.

I was also thinking, as you were talking, that maybe one of the reasons this book about in-person events has got so big is because that's a real trend in the community. It feels like indies, we've moved…

Back in the day, I said, “I'm not doing print. No way.” This was the early days of digital, because print was really hard back then. So I was like, “Oh, and we've got all the advantages doing digital, so I'm just going to focus on that.”

It feels like the pendulum has swung, perhaps even more with the ease of mass production of digital with AI.

The focus on print and in person is getting stronger and stronger. Do you think that's happening?Mark: Oh, yes, 100%. I did print in 2004. It was really hard back then, so that's gotten easier. I think there are a few reasons.

One of the reasons is, yes, digital made it so much easier for indie authors to get out there and break into the community. But the reality is that print books still outsell e-books in general—overall—despite the fact that indie authors can make six and seven figures a year from selling e-books alone on a single platform.

So print has never really gone away. It was just never something indie authors attended to. They were in a different business than traditional publishers were in.

And second, obviously I've got these gorgeous books that you've created on Kickstarter, because I like the beautiful books. I've never stopped buying print books. I actually buy more print books. I read more because of audiobooks and e-books, but I buy more print books, especially when I can get a nice signed copy.

Then the other reason comes back, again, to your advice—something I've been following for the longest time, and you've long been saying.

I do repeat this, and I try my best to offer attribution to you every time I use it: to double down on your humanity, particularly in this age of digital generation and the ability for even non-writers to leverage tools to create content.

I think it's so much more important for me, as a creative who will never be able to catch up with the machines, to exploit my humanity.

I mean, we both have digital voices of ourselves, right? There's a digital Mark Leslie Lefebvre voice that people can use, and I'm making money off it because people are able to license it through ElevenLabs.

But when I'm there in person, so far the holograms aren't good enough to fool people. I think I'm not just selling a book to somebody; I want to create an experience where, “Oh, I'm talking to the author, and we're signing a book together, and we're taking a selfie together.”

For me, there's that tactile experience that's really enriching. And it may not be something that lines my pockets as easily, because the investment is more significant.

For every $10 I make, it costs me six or seven dollars, as opposed to an e-book, where the cost is amortised in the most beautiful way over millions of copies.

Jo: There are a few things there. First of all, let's talk about that ElevenLabs voice licensing, because, as you say, I also have a voice clone. Bones of the Deep, the latest book, that's my voice clone.

I haven't gone with the licensing, partly because you don't have control over what someone can do with it. So, for example, someone could create Nazi content, or content that I might not agree with, in my voice.

So how have you got over that? Because part of me really does want to license my voice, and the other part doesn't.Mark: This is a great question, Jo, and I'm glad you asked it. It's the same reason I don't worry about people stealing my books—adding DRM onto my e-books and things like that.

I may as well make some money off it, because let's be honest: you and I, our voices are out there. Thousands of hours of our voices, right? In your podcast, my podcast, in various interviews we've done over the years.

The technology exists for someone to make a copy of my voice themselves anyway. The tools exist. They can do it easily, so why not do it myself and at least make money? I'm actually getting money deposited into my account. Not a lot—maybe $30, $18, something like that every week.

Again, I've taken a lot of my non-fiction books that I haven't had the time to record myself, as I like to do, and I can at least load those to ElevenLabs and make my voice the default voice.

But wouldn't it be great to be able to listen to my book in your voice? It would sound so much better. Because you can do that. When you listen to a book on that platform, you can choose my voice if you'd rather hear it in my voice, or you can choose Burt Reynolds' voice, or some other folks who've licensed theirs.

Again, for me, the whole concept of wide publishing has always been important. It's another small revenue stream that's adding to my numerous revenue streams.

So I guess that's how I've justified just licensing the voice. If someone's going to do something with my voice that I can't control, they can do it regardless of whether or not I put it out there myself.

Jo: I agree with you. That could happen, and neither of us is famous enough that it's likely to happen anyway. I do quite like the idea of people using our voices, say, for other books for authors, because that would make sense—that's where we fit in the niche. I will rethink that, because I think it's interesting.

I wanted to come back to print books. You said sometimes there are easier ways to line your pockets, and I think that's funny. So, getting into the book, this leapt out at me quite near the beginning:

Why do we keep doing this when the maths almost never adds up?Mark: Oh, I have a perfect example of that from an event I did a couple of weekends ago in Burlington, Ontario. I think it was a $60 table fee. It was a new event. I believe I made $90 or $95 in sales.

So even after the costs of printing and all that stuff, I really didn't make money. I made my table back, which is always a good thing.

There were a few encounters I had with people who were really excited to find my Canadian Werewolf series of books, and just so thrilled to get started. Among the four of them, they bought one copy, but they were going to pass it amongst each other.

You know what? Okay, they bought a single copy, and I was like, “Well, the e-book is permanently free online. You don't even have to buy a copy”—which is anti-selling. I just want them to read the book and enjoy it.

But if they read it and pass it along and start talking about it, they could become readers for a long time. It's an eight-book series, with the ninth book coming out later this year.

There was another encounter I had that day. A woman and her teenage daughter came in, and they were looking at my traditionally published books that I buy at a reduced price from a local bookstore and resell.

They were looking at these true ghost story books I had, and they were pointing: “Do you have that one?” “Yes, I have this one, I have that one.” And the mother's like, “Well, she collects all your books, and she wants to make sure she has them.”

We had this conversation, and she was so excited to meet me in person and to get a signed copy of the book. That experience was such a vanity moment for me as an author. We're lonely. I'm a big loser. Nobody's buying my books. We're always down on ourselves.

So that investment of time and energy, in order to get that little pat on the back or that feeling of, “Wow, I really connected with someone who likes my stuff”—those moments are really precious. They're difficult to explain if you only look at the world in a financial way.

I guess I'm fortunate enough that I do have enough income from numerous streams, including the consulting I do part-time, that it's okay if not every bookish endeavour leads to more money in my pocket at the end of the day.

I can still have these authentic connections with people, which I think is one of the reasons I'm a storyteller. Yes, it's the stories I have to tell, but it's also putting the story into somebody else's hands and eyes and heart and mind.

Jo: You're very giving like that. You have that sense about you, whereas I'm just a curmudgeon in the corner.

Mark: That is not true.

Jo: It is, generally. I don't do events like you do for readers.

Mark: But that's because it takes a lot out of you.

Jo: Yes, but that doesn't matter. Why do I write? I write for me.

Mark: Ah, very good.

Jo: At the end of the day—just being entirely selfish about this—when people say, “Oh, if you won the lottery, what would you do?” I'm like, “Well, I'd do pretty much what I'm doing now.”

Mark: Yes, I'd just do the same. Of course, I'd write more books.

Jo: I'd write more books. So this is where I'm trying to get to for people as well: measuring success in a different way. You were talking about measuring success by how that girl loved your books, and how you feel when someone says they love your books.

With Bones of the Deep, this thriller I've just done, I feel like I had the benefit of that book before anyone even read it.

As soon as it was finished, I made a nice proof copy from BookVault, and I held it in my hand and said, “I made this. I'm proud of the story, I wrote the story, and it's outside my head now.” I feel like I'm creatively satisfied in that moment.

Then, of course, the Kickstarter was great, and I love that the books are going out around the world, but—

I think the happiest I felt was that moment of finishing—that creative satisfaction of holding the book in my hand. You know what I mean?Mark: 100%, Jo. I cannot agree with you enough. I love so many aspects of writing. Yes, the connection with people is amazing. But I often say this when I'm doing my one-on-one consulting with authors: focus on the projects that mean the most to you, those passion projects.

The process of writing, and the painful rewriting and editing and all the things you go through—when you finish that book, like you said, you hold it in your hands and it is a thing of beauty. It's a huge achievement. You've won.

Whether or not you sell a single copy, you've won by doing it. Everything else is gravy: the sales, the money in your pocket or not, the reviews, positive or not, the people who say, “Oh my God, Bones of the Deep, thank you for writing this book. I'm so glad you introduced this into the world and into my life.”

Anything beyond the creation itself, which is a pure joy—I love it so much. It's just why I get up at 5:30 every morning and write for hours before the rest of my day begins. I try to get stuff done before the rest of the world wakes up.

I want to get the writing done first, when I have the most energy to give myself to the page. Then the rest of the day is kind of gravy for me too.

Jo: You talk there about giving yourself to the page, but in Stark Realities—

You talk about the fear of truly being seen. What do you mean by that, and how do you manage that feeling?Mark: For anyone who has written anything—fiction, non-fiction, memoir in particular, since it's a bit more closely tied to reality—it's exposing yourself to the world.

I'll never forget an interview I did with Canadian science fiction author Julie E. Czerneda, who, before being a fiction writer, was writing biology textbooks, but her real passion was science fiction and fiction.

When her first novel came out, she said, “It's like standing naked on the front lawn.” When you release a book, even a novel, people look at it and they're going to judge you and rate you.

I remember early on, Jo—we knew each other through Twitter, I think, where we initially met, and then interacted with and finally met in person at London Book Fair. I think you and I have a very similar reaction.

When people know us as positive and upbeat and out there helping authors in the community, and then they read our fiction, they go, “Well, Jo, you burned a nun alive on page one.” Or, “Mark, what kind of… they're drinking from the skulls of dead people? What the heck is going on with you two?”

We are exposing parts of ourselves in our fiction and non-fiction. That's a fear I embrace, but also never get over, if that makes any sense. I write scary stories because I'm a big chicken. So maybe the entire process is just cheap therapy for me. Or not cheap, because it's an expensive pastime, isn't it?

Jo: It certainly can be, but I agree. I struggle with fear of judgment still. I think it's also because we do this in public, which comes back to the financial side of things. We do a lot of this in public, and then people judge us on our author businesses too.

You could look at Bones of the Deep, which was just on Kickstarter, and compare my Kickstarter to another author's Kickstarter for a fiction book, and judge one or the other person based on numbers.

I feel like this is because you and I have done so much in public—for me, almost 20 years, and for you, like 40 years or whatever. Maybe 30 years. You look that old.

Mark: Listen there, dearie. Get off my lawn.

Jo: Yes, get off my lawn—with those skeletons you have on your lawn.

Mark: Yes. They're no longer in my closet.

Jo: They're not in your closet.

I wonder if that also plays a part of it—the pros and cons of doing this business in public.Mark: Yes, that is a part of it. One thing I try to be very clear about, because there's so much FOMO and so much out there about people thinking that everyone else is making a million dollars from their books and “I'm the only loser who's not”—I try to be clear that I have never made more than a mid-five figures as an author from my author earnings, ever. I haven't yet hit six figures.

One of the reasons I try to be transparent in sharing that is I don't want people to think that everyone else is a six- and seven-figure success story, and they're the only one who's only made $100 last year on their books.

The reality is, 90 to 99% of the people who are writing and publishing are not going to earn a significant amount of money.

I realise I'm also very, very lucky that I've earned this much, and it's taken a long time.

I just shared this in a Substack post I posted yesterday: it was 10 years of rejections before I got $5 for my first short story that was published in '92. It wasn't until 2001 that I finally made pro rate, six cents US a word, for a short story that, ironically, Julie Czerneda bought from me back in the day.

For me, I've been lucky that it's always been a long, slow slog. It's been a marathon, and I've never instantly sprinted across any dramatic finish line. I've had some really phenomenal moments—doing a book signing in a Costco, walking into Walmart and seeing my books there.

Even last night at the Burlington Public Library, going, “Wow, they have eight of my books here—four of my self-published books and four of my traditionally published books, in two different sections.” I was like, “That's kind of cool.”

So I've had these amazing moments as a writer, but I've never had the blockbuster—the Brandon Sanderson, or even the Dungeon Crawler Carl, Matt Dinniman, kind of moments.

I still think I've had a very fortunate and lucky journey. Even if I wasn't making the money I'm making, I'd still be writing, and I'm sure you would be too.

Jo: Oh, yes, for sure.

I actually think the thing most of us would probably let go is the marketing. If we won the lottery, we'd carry on with all the creative stuff, the writing, the community stuff, and we'd just literally do no marketing at all.

Mark: Well, yes, of course. Or potentially say, “Oh, here, ad agency, here's some money. You just run it, whatever. Let me know if it works or not. I don't care.”

Jo: That's a much better idea.

Mark: At least I've got the extra disposable income, so I may as well, because I'm helping the world when my books are out there. I know my books will help people.

I really honestly think that as storytellers—whether it's fiction or non-fiction, we're still storytellers—what we do in writing and podcasting and all the things we do, the re-sharing on social media, is really helping connect people.

I think that is one of the most profound things we can do as writers. And I mean that the writing, in and of itself, is a reward.

Jo: Like you said, we met on Twitter when Twitter was what it was back in the day. I do very, very little social media now. But you just mentioned your Substack, and you also have your podcast, Stark Reflections. So how are you balancing what you put on each?

I only do this podcast now. I don't even blog. I write books, obviously, and then I do the podcast.

So what are you doing differently on Substack to the podcast, and what part do they play in income and marketing?Mark: Great question. I realise most people have never heard of me, or read or listened to the things I put out into the world. And I've been a longtime fan of “reduce, reuse, recycle my IP.”

My podcast is not as long-running as yours, but I'm in my ninth year, and I've not missed a single Friday in the full eight years, or eight and a half by now, that I've been doing this.

Every week I reflect on what I learned from an interview, or I'll reflect on something you've posted and say, “This episode is not an interview, but Jo said this last week, and I'm going to talk about it.”

The podcast itself takes a lot of work. I still do all of it myself, and I know I probably shouldn't, but I like doing it, so it's one of those tasks I enjoy. I also have reflections that aren't going to come out vocally but might come out in writing.

Sometimes in the morning I'm not in the mood to write the novel or the non-fiction book I'm writing, but I'm writing some tangent. I just let the creative monster go.

I find that re-sharing… I might have reflected on something for a couple of minutes at the end of an interview, but I really want to expand upon it, so I write the Substack article. I try to reuse some of that content.

Someone's going to enjoy seeing it on a short video clip I share on YouTube, or whatever the platform is. Someone else is going to listen to it on a podcast, wherever they listen to podcasts, and someone else is going to want to read it.

It could be the same information, just shared in a slightly different way, to potentially get it out to other people. So for me, it's part of that wide publishing mentality. I'm trying not to completely duplicate the work, although I am duplicating some of it.

I'll give you an example. Hey, Canadian listeners—if you have not registered for Public Lending Right in Canada, please put something in your calendar for February 2027, because the deadline's over. It was May 1st of 2026. Put it in your calendar for next year.

I even had somebody at this writers' event I was at this last weekend say, “You mentioned something in a presentation you did for the Canadian Authors Association about Public Lending Right, and thank you, because now I get thousands of dollars a year from this.” So just look up Public Lending Right.

I've been saying stuff about Public Lending Right for at least 10 years now. Every time I get my beautiful multi-four-figure cheque from them in February every year, I post on social media and remind authors to check it out. I know it exists in the UK, and it exists in 36 countries in the world—just not the US.

Jo: Not the US.

Mark: They don't have a programme like this, probably because the big publishers—and probably one of the authors' associations—think that libraries are cannibalising book sales, which is not true. It's been proven time and time again, and that lobbying has prevented it from happening.

Whereas here in Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts and the Writers' Union of Canada worked hard to make this happen.

Anyway, I talk about something like Public Lending Right and I feel like I must have said this so much that people are sick of it, but every single time I mention it, someone goes, “Oh my God, thanks for saying that. I never heard it.”

That's a good reminder, especially for folks like you and me. We know the basics. We know what an ISBN is. We know KDP Select means you can't put the e-book on any other retailer, or even sell it on your own website.

We know all these things, but it's hard for us to remember that there are folks coming to this for the very first time who've never heard it, even though we feel like, “Oh my God, I've said this till I'm blue in the face.”

I think I got that from retail. When I worked in retail, I recognised that somebody's going to come in and ask for “that blue book that Reese Witherspoon was talking about,” or Oprah was talking about, or whatever. And you do your darn best to help them figure it out rather than mock them.

I try to take the same approach when people ask me those questions, because I'm trying to remember what it was like when I honestly did not know the answer, and having someone take the time to help me. I've been very, very lucky that I've had a lot of people take the time to help me.

I'll never forget—God rest her soul—Nancy Kilpatrick, a horror writer here from Canada who passed away a few years ago. She gave me a blurb for my very first book in 2004 because she'd acquired one of my short stories for an anthology she'd edited.

I was trying to call my short story collection an anthology, and she very kindly took me aside and said, “It's not an anthology if it's a single author. An anthology is a…”

Jo: I didn't know that until, like, last year. I got that wrong as well. There are lots of words like that.

I want to circle back, because you didn't really answer earlier about the time management. You just mentioned YouTube, on top of Substack and all the things you do.

You also have a day job at Draft2Digital—it's part-time, right? You also do part-time at the university, teaching publishing, right?

You do all kinds of things. How do you manage your time with all of that?Mark: Well, I mismanage my time more than I manage it, Jo. That's the God's honest truth. Fortunately, most of the things I have that aren't scheduled—like, scheduled to do this lecture at this time, or scheduled to have this meeting at this particular time with Draft2Digital—most of my work is very flexible.

I do not work a regular 9:00 to 5:00, Monday to Friday. Well, I never did. I always worked way more. But I have a very flexible schedule. Every single day is a work day, and every single day is a play day for me. So I'm very, very lucky.

I do schedule in the very important things, particularly where somebody else is reliant upon me—meetings and connections and stuff like that. Then I make the time first thing in the morning to get the writing done. Everything else is not as important, and it's part of… I guess it's part of playing.

You know, like the social media sharing. I don't look at social media as marketing. I just look at it as another way to connect with people, with other creatives, and with readers potentially, all six people who read my stuff.

I probably could do a better job of managing my time. I've tried several times over the years to adapt processes to make it better, but I consistently default back to what I do, and so far I guess I've been getting away with it.

So I was like, “Do I want to waste more time trying to come up with a process, or do I just want to roll with it?” Because so far I haven't killed myself doing it, and I've been enjoying the journey. So, if it ain't broke…

Jo: I think that's the point, if it doesn't feel like it's broken. Having known you for a long time now, and we work together—obviously we co-wrote The Relaxed Author—you do work very, very differently to me. You definitely are a little bit more chaotic. I'm chaotic in some ways too.

Mark: Oh, you're very generous. “A little bit chaotic.” Thanks. That was generous, Jo.

Jo: You're chaotic in your work practices and scheduling and all that, which I couldn't cope with very well. Even though I feel like a part of my brain is very chaotic—the creative side, I guess, can be quite chaotic—I think I'm actually quite controlling and very scheduled in my work practices.

As you say, for someone else on the outside, it might feel to me like you have too many balls in the air. But if you don't feel that, then that's the way of working that works for you. So this is another important thing, isn't it?

You can't adapt to what other people say your life should look like. It's what feels good to you.Mark: Oh, for sure. One thing I know about my procrastination tendency is that panic and fear motivate me. So, a deadline—”I have to get this into a publisher by this date, I have to get this manuscript to an editor by that date”—I'm motivated by fear. And I'm afraid of everything, so I guess I'm always motivated.

Jo: But I also know that when you hear the word “deadline”—and I know a lot of people who do this—the deadline means you get it in on the deadline, or the day before the deadline. To me, a deadline means I have it ready a month earlier.

Mark: I love that. I've done that a few times and shocked myself. I actually had a pre-order up—with the audiobook, the print, and the e-book—a month in advance, and I didn't know what to do with myself. I was like, “Well, what am I going to do now in the next month?”

Jo: Work on the next thing.

Mark: But I'm so used to working on it up to the last second that I was kind of like, “What do I do?” That actually caught me by surprise, and I honestly felt weird. I was like, “I've never felt this before.”

I'm really lucky. I know you have a very supportive and amazing partner, and so do I. My partner, scarily enough, is maybe a bigger procrastinator than me, so she never gives me a hard time.

She supports me, and I do the same thing with her own work. I'm up all night with her at the last minute so we can get something turned in. So, fortunately, we really understand one another, and we don't give each other a hard time. We just go, “Well, got away with it again. I guess I'm not going to change my ways.”

Jo: We made it. And again, that's the point. You and I could stand up in front of people, both hold up the last book we wrote, and say, “We made this,” and our processes are completely different. Our brains are completely different.

We come from different countries. There are lots of things that are different, and yet we both made a book.

So hopefully that encourages people. You don't have to do anything that we're telling you, or anyone else tells you. But if you want to be an author, at some point you have to produce a book.

Mark: Exactly. As Brian in the classic Monty Python film gets them to say: “Yes, we are all different.” Embrace that difference. I think that's such a powerful reminder that there is no one process for getting anything done.

Jo: Given that we co-wrote The Relaxed Author back in 2021—and we did that because we had another show, and we were talking, and we said, “Oh, everyone's stressed and the anxiety levels are really high, and we think there's a better path”—we co-wrote that book, which I think is still a very good book. Definitely people should get it.

Interestingly, I think the stress and anxiety might actually be higher now than it was.

So what do you think the main stresses are in the community now? You also see a lot with Draft2Digital, I guess, as well.

Mark: Oh, for sure. Honestly, Jo, I'm so glad we wrote that book, because I actually pick it up every once in a while to remind myself of the things we tried to help others with. Again, it's therapy for me as well, so I'm so glad we did it.

I think we're 10, if not 100, times more stressed. The world events and things going on, the divisiveness—not just in the world in general, in politics and everything else, but the divisiveness in the author community.

The witch-hunting that happens, people trying to tear down other authors either because they're successful, or because, “Oh my God, you dared use a new technology.” All of these things are happening, and everyone's at one another's throats.

I need to pick that book up and reread it. I'm a lot more stressed than I was. I'm just getting over shingles, which is…

Jo: Oh. Which is actually related to stress as well, isn't it?

Mark: It is, yes. I was in LA for Writers of the Future—I'm a judge for that science fiction and fantasy conference.

I went right from LA, like a week in LA, which was a phenomenal experience getting to mentor the winners. And I mean, come on, it's a free trip to Hollywood, hanging out with Kevin Anderson, having beers and stuff like that.

Then I came back to the Toronto Indie Author Conference, run by Tao Wong, here in Toronto. I went right from the airport—didn't even go home—straight to the hotel, because I kicked into another conference.

We did a display on how to set up an in-person booth, so I ended up having to hand-bomb boxes, blocks down the street from where I was parked.

My chest was really sore when I got home on the Monday, and I thought it was because I hadn't used these muscles, because I'm not in the best shape. Then I took my shirt off and went, “Oh, there's a rash there.”

Liz goes, “You have shingles.” Because the pain in my chest, which I thought was the muscle, was actually underneath. I'm one of those lucky people that it's taken the full five weeks, and I'm still in pain even afterwards.

So, again, public notice: if you're an older person like me, and there's a vaccine available for shingles, you may want to consider it.

Jo: Yep, get it.

Mark: Oh my God, it hurts. But, yes, the stress, I think, is higher—even though I didn't know I was feeling it. It was happy stress, right?

I was stressed out because I'm there in Hollywood, helping people and doing some good things, and then I'm doing the same thing, interacting with some amazing authors at the Toronto Indie Author Conference. I didn't feel anxious stress. I was happy stress. Is that a thing?

Jo: I think possibly… your physical body masks stress, physical stress, because you enjoy all of that stuff. Whereas someone like me, I'll feel it quicker and withdraw.

Although I say that, back probably a decade ago, Jonathan would say to me, “You're going too fast, and you're going to hit the wall. And when you hit the wall, it's not going to be fun.” And I did hit the wall.

Then, probably in 2021—I mean, that was when I just started going into menopause, and obviously we had the pandemic, and I wrote Pilgrimage, and I was doing all those walks, which I think really helped me. I learned a lot about maybe stopping that before it happened.

Becca Syme obviously talks a lot about this too. But I find it interesting with you, because I think you're so positively happy with these events you do that it might mask your physical symptoms in a different way. That's really hard to watch out for.

I'll give a tip to you and everyone else listening: schedule the calendar, and look at your calendar and go, “I can't go back-to-back-to-back. I have to put in some rest days.”

Mark: Well, thank you. You know, Jo, you and Becca Syme are two of my best unpaid therapists. I appreciate that.

Jo: You just don't listen, Mark.

Mark: Or sometimes I do.

Jo: Just coming back to the community, and the divisiveness there is primarily over AI at the moment, I think that's one of the biggest things. And the arbitrary lines as to what you're allowed to use it for and what you're not allowed to use it for, which is just kind of crazy.

Obviously, you know I've opted out of that whole discussion now.

How do you think we can move through this [divisiveness over AI], move on? We remember when it was trad versus indie, and then it was wide versus KU. So this will pass—it's just hard, when you're in it, to know when it might pass.

Mark: Yes. I think the more generic advice—for whatever may come, whatever has come—is: why are you doing this? Why are you a writer? Heads down, focus on what gives you pleasure, and do that, because everything else is noise. All the marketing tactics and strategies, and all the people yelling at one another.

Write your books. Do the things that motivate you. Do the things that give you that intrinsic reward.

It's hard to ignore. I get it, it is hard to ignore. I have difficulty ignoring the haters and the yelling and the screaming that happens, but I do my best.

Like this morning, when I was in the throes of my manuscript and I looked up and went, “Oh my God, I've got to shower. I'm going to be talking to Jo soon, I should comb my hair”—which I have none of. Because I was so in my book that everything else melted away.

That, for me as a storyteller, as a writer, is one of the most beautiful places to be.

Jo: I think you're absolutely right. I have a little thing that pops up in my calendar sometimes which says, “If you're feeling all of these things, just go create something.” The moment you refocus on creation—whatever that means to you—things change. It changes the energy. That, or go for a walk. That's my other tip.

Mark: Outside. And I have to say, Jo, Pilgrimage is still one of the most profound and powerful books you've written, and you've written a lot of amazing ones.

Jo: Oh, you're very sweet.

Mark: That one really resonates, not just for me, but with Liz. Because one of the things we often do when we get stressed is go for a walk, ideally in nature. The vitamin N. I think there's something really profound in that, and it really helps me a lot.

And again, sometimes going for a walk listening to your podcast, or an audiobook, or sometimes just attending to the environment.

A tip I picked up years ago from Brooklyn author Denis Hamill was: go for a walk with your character. Listen to what they see. What do they comment on? How do they approach this environment that you've seen a million times? How do they see it? What do they notice that you don't notice?

That's such an incredible experience of creativity—when you're not writing, but writing. That really helps me a lot.

Jo: Oh, nice one. Okay, so your latest book is Stark Realities, but you have so many more.

Where can people find you and your books and your podcast online?Mark: Jo, you can find everything you want to know about me—and stuff you don't want to know about me—over at MarkLeslie.ca. It links to all the other places from there.

Jo: Brilliant. Thanks again for your time, Mark. That was great.

Mark: Thanks so much, Jo. Bye-bye.

The post Creative Satisfaction, In Person Print Book Sales, And Author Mindset With Mark Leslie Lefebvre first appeared on The Creative Penn.

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How can horror writing help readers — and writers — work through psychological trauma? Why does cross-genre fiction take longer to find an audience, but pay off in the long run? Is running a direct sales store actually worth the inventory, postage, and learning curve? And how can SubStack work for fiction authors? With psychotherapist and award-winning author P.D. Alleva.

In the intro, thoughts on why in-person conferences are still worth it, even when they are a challenge for sensitive introverts! and tips for making the best of conferences [Self-Publishing Show].

Today's show is sponsored by Draft2Digital, self-publishing with support, where you can get free formatting, free distribution to multiple stores, and a host of other benefits. Just go to www.draft2digital.com to get started.

This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn

P.D. Alleva is the award-winning author of horror, sci-fi, thrillers, and fantasy books. He's also a psychotherapist.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.

Show Notes

• Why horror puts the human condition on display better than any other genre
• Emotional trauma as the silent psychological killer most people overlook
• The pros and challenges of cross-genre writing and finding your audience
• Practical lessons from running a direct store, including integration and signed-copy fulfilment
• How a 3 a.m. writing routine keeps the writing separate from the marketing and admin
• Serialising fiction on Substack, multiple newsletters, and avoiding paid subscriber promotions
• Why Facebook groups, TikTok Lives, and the three-to-one rule are working right now

You can find P.D. at PDAlleva.com or on Substack.

Transcript of the interview with P.D. Alleva Jo: P.D. Alleva is the award-winning author of horror, sci-fi, thrillers, and fantasy books. He's also a psychotherapist. So welcome, Paul.

PD: Thank you very much. Thank you for having me. This is a great opportunity. I love doing interviews, and I love talking to great people.

Jo: Oh, good. Well, first up—

Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and being an indie author.PD: So I've been writing since I was a kid, at least second grade and more than likely even before that. I've always had that creative itch.

Getting into indie author publishing, I published my first book in 2011. At the time I was also operating my own business, which took up about 24 hours of my time every single day.

Then I kind of got through that and sold that in 2016, and I'm like, you know what? The time has come. I'd always written books, poetry, short stories, but never really did anything with them because I just didn't have the time. So in 2017, that's when I really came out and said, all right, the time is now.

Indie publishing was doing great. The one good thing I do love about Amazon is they allowed us to come out there and start showing our craft to people. So in 2017, I just started—let's do this. Let's write full time. Let's put books out there. Let's be creative. Let's really get those juices flowing.

Plus, I was getting a little bit old, and I was like, now is definitely the time to do this. Since then I've been publishing consistently, and most of my books are horror books, but I dabble.

I have a sci-fi series, and I'm starting to get into psychological thrillers too. I've got a new psychological thriller that'll be published in early 2027 called Girl on a Mission. For the most part, I'm definitely into the horror genre—books, short stories, all that good fun stuff.

Jo: Right, so a couple of follow-ups. You said you're a bit old. Can you give us what decade you're in at least?

PD: Well, I'm 51, so born in 1971.

Jo: Oh, there you go. Same age as me.

PD: All right, good. See that? So we're going head-to-head there.

Jo: I don't think that's old at all. Also, you mentioned you sold your business in 2016.

So what was your business before? Because I think business experience is so important.

PD: Agreed 100%. So I'm a psychotherapist, and I had owned a treatment centre for mental health and addiction. That was started in 2011, and in 2016 is when it sold. Since then, my wife and I started a private practice. So I still, even to this day—well, about a year and a half ago is when I stopped.

I specialise in trauma, PTSD, and addiction. Trauma mostly. Most of my caseload has always been trauma, PTSD, sexual abuse, psychological abuse, war-type trauma. I was doing that mostly individually since 2016 in private practice, and I'll still go into treatment centres and see patients there too, specifically for trauma.

About a year and a half ago is when I started wanting to do writing 100% full time. I thought about becoming a professor, maybe going to college, but then I wasn't sure if I wanted to get into that full time, as far as a caseload and school and everything like that.

So I decided to just do group therapy, group facilitation, and I've been doing that consistently since then. It may be 15 hours a week. I do love to give back, and to me, it's more what I teach.

I specialise in neuro-linguistic programming, bilateral stimulation or EMDR, hypnotherapy, science of mind concepts, psychopharmacology, biological bases of behaviour—which is pretty much how your brain works—ancient wisdom, quantum physics.

I do this in a drug addiction treatment centre mostly, also mental health. And of course, just living an addictive lifestyle is traumatic, too, in and of itself. So pretty much I'm teaching them. Behaviour modification is a big part of what I'm teaching during that time.

You'll see that, too, if you read my books. There's two things you can figure out from my books. You can figure out how to murder people and get away with it, and two, you can figure out how to overcome trauma as well.

The whole “murder people and get away with it” comes from my upbringing. I have a very sorted past, let's put it that way. My upbringing was very different than what most people grow up in.

Jo: Oh, can you give us any more than that? Now everyone's like, “Oh.”PD: “What's going on with this guy, right?” So I grew up, let's say, quote unquote, “in an Italian New York family.”

Jo: Okay. All right.

PD: That might give people ideas, right?

Jo: That's going to give people a lot of ideas.

PD: If you've ever seen the movie Goodfellas, I kind of grew up in that atmosphere, and with even some of those people too. My family had connections to those people in that movie, which I find very funny. If you watch that movie with me, you get a very different perspective on what's going on in the movie.

Jo: Wow. So you're an interesting guy with an interesting background, with a very interesting backstory job as well.

Some people are like, “Well, of course he's writing horror because horror is just awful and full of slasher gore and all that.” I often have to say to people who don't read horror, “Look, it's not like that.” Maybe some of it is, sure. But most of it isn't.

Could you talk about how reading and writing horror can also be psychologically healthy? How do these worlds intertwine for you?PD: Well, sure. It 100% can be healthy. Especially over the last few years, there's a trend going on out there right now where people are taking their trauma and putting it into a creative process through poems, short stories, and even novels.

They're taking their trauma and giving it a face, like a monster, where people are overcoming that monster within the creative process.

I always say that horror is the genre that puts on display, better than any other genre out there, the human condition. Why is that?

When people are in a terrifying situation, you really see who they are. You get to the heart of the matter of who that person is by putting them in these horrific but undefinable situations where it's like, what are they going to come out as?

That real true personality needs to come out, and that courage comes out. That's huge in horror, and I think horror gets such a bad name.

Now, I know there's the extreme horror and the splatterpunk, and that has its kind of role too in what I'm saying, but that's where horror is getting its bad reputation out there with the over-the-top type of gore.

For the most part, that's a small part of the horror genre. It's a subgenre for a reason. It has its readership, and that's fine. Nothing wrong with it. I read it all the time. I find a lot of joy in it, a lot of excitement.

However, for the most part, any horror novel that is not completely with the gore and stuff like splatterpunk can be seen as a psychological thriller, and a lot of psychological thrillers can be seen as a horror novel.

Look at books like The Silence of the Lambs, Red Dragon. That's horrific as well, but if you read the novel, it's in there. It just gets that bad rap right now, and it's not all gore.

Most horror novels that I read today are psychological horror. It's tame on the gore, and the psychological aspect is there. I always see that psychological aspect—it's like psychological trauma.

Most people, even in my industry, when people are out there and you mention trauma, PTSD, they're thinking about sexual abuse, physical abuse, or war-type trauma.

The silent psychological one—I once wrote an article called “Emotional Trauma: The Silent Psychological Killer.” The one that's out there is the psychological trauma, the emotional trauma that is widespread.

Most people go through that, and it could even be from parent to child, and most people don't understand that that's a traumatic experience. It's like a distortion of reality that you're experiencing that then creates a belief system in your brain, and you're constantly acting out that belief system.

That's where the psychological component of horror really comes out. People breaking through that psychological belief system that was created through a traumatic experience by reaching courage and coming out through a horrific situation.

Jo: Yes, it really annoys me, because with romance, of course people understand that romance is a huge genre. Something like a small town sweet romance is a world away from the bully romantasy, dark, or mafia. Mafia romance is a really big thing with very dark themes.

I'm like, well, how can you understand that romance is a huge genre with all these different subgenres, and not think that horror or thriller or fantasy or sci-fi all have so many different subgenres within them?

I personally read a lot of supernatural horror, but rarely the slasher gore kind of stuff. So I'm really glad you said that, and hopefully more people will open up a bit more.

I did also want to ask you about what you write. You write all these different things. You write standalone—I mean, often horror is standalone—but you also have some series. How do you balance it?

What are the benefits of cross-genre writing, but also the challenges of it?PD: Okay. So obviously I love cross-genre writing. To me, I use fantasy to explain the supernatural elements. I blend mostly a tad of fantasy to help explain the supernatural components in my supernatural novels.

When I write sci-fi, specifically sci-fi, that has the fantasy element in it too, but there's also a tad of horror in there as well.

It's just who I am. When I grew up, I had a lot of different influences. I had Star Wars on one side, and then I'm watching B-rated '80s slasher films on the other side. Those two mixes just kind of followed me throughout my life, and that's why I like putting them into my novels.

As I tell my patients, don't limit yourself. Never limit yourself. If you're just limiting yourself to one genre, you're missing out on so much more that's out there. So I love the blend of mixing genres. It just gets my goat each and every time.

It is a challenge though. I remember when I first started getting into indie publishing, I was never big into Facebook and social media up until I started becoming an indie author.

Before that, with my type of upbringing, you don't advertise yourself. You don't advertise where you're going. That's a big no-no. So I always had this aversion to social media.

I'll tell you a funny story. It was the late 2000s, probably 2006. I was a full-time single father at that time, and I was living in Florida. My family—brothers and sisters-in-law—were living in New York, and my sister-in-law said, “Get a Facebook account so we can see pictures of the kids.”

I said, “Oh.” I didn't want to do it, but I said, “Okay,” so I did it. And I'm thinking, looking at this Facebook thing, “How do I put pictures on here?” So I figured out how to put pictures in folders.

Then I phone called her, and I'm like, “Okay, so they're on there.” And they're like, “Well, where are they?” I'm like, “I put them in these folders. You can go and look at them.” She's like, “No, you've got to post them.”

That to me was like, “I'm not posting pictures of my kids.” That was a big no-no. It didn't click.

When I got on there finally in 2016, 2017, I'm like, “Okay, so I need to figure out social media. As an indie author, I need to be on there, so I need to get through this aversion and get on there.”

I started noticing how people are so particular with their genres. If they're reading a romance, it had to be very specific with that exact type of romance, and if you deviated from it, they're not going to like it. So that was the challenge.

I was like, “All right, number one, I'm not going to dilute myself” and say, “All right, take things out of my writing or out of my novel just so I could cater to a certain type of audience.” I'm like, “I'm not going to do that.”

I know with me, myself, as a reader, I'll read everything. I don't limit myself to a specific genre. I'll read psychological thrillers. I'll read romance. I've been doing that all my life.

So I'm like, if there's a person like me out there—and look at this, I just met like four other people who also read cross genres—then I know that there's at least another 30,000 people, and I know that at least then there's 300,000, then there's three million people out there.

So just write the books that you're writing and find your audience. Now, that takes longer. So you've got to chip away. Chip away. You're going to find readers here and there, and then that reader kind of tells a few people about you, and then you've got a few more readers.

Then you keep going, and you go on these Facebook groups, and you do a whole bunch of different things, and then you gather a few more readers. Then they're telling some friends, and then you've got more. The process takes a lot longer, yes, 100% agreed, but I would say be true to yourself and you can never go wrong.

Jo: Yes, I agree. I write cross-genre as well, and I've browsed your collection. Golem was the one I was like, “Ooh, yes, I like that one.” I haven't read it yet, it's on my list.

I think when you're cross-genre, my people come to my store as well, and it's like, “Okay, I'm interested in lots of things, but this is the one by this author that I'm interested in.” Whereas with other authors who only write one type of thing, then I might not like any of their stuff.

So I think there are definitely pros and cons and different ways into our world.

I also wanted to ask you about the differences in business. Obviously you ran this treatment centre and there were physical humans on all sides, and now you've got a business as an author.

So what have you learned in business from what you used to do and what you do now?PD: Okay. You're right. The treatment centre industry is very different from what I'm doing now, but it's still people.

Treat those people right, have integrity. If you say you're going to do something, follow through with it. My word is my bond type of thing. That definitely has fed into the writing and publishing industry that I'm in now in a huge way. Just connecting with people is, to me, the biggest part of it.

I mean, treatment centres, you've got to connect with people. When I would market the treatment centre, where would I go? I would go to hospitals, residential facilities, detoxes, and talk to them about my programme and why they should be referring clients there.

It's the same thing here. Why should you be reading my books? You get there through interviews like what I'm doing here with you. Other podcasts. You get there by doing Facebook Lives, TikTok.

I haven't started TikTok Lives yet, but I actually love that platform. I'm falling in love with it. IG Lives, anything like that where you're talking to people and you're making a connection with those people.

Through that, I've gathered so many different types of readers who are like, “Yes, I'll give this book a shot.” And then they read it and they're like, “Hey, this is really good, and I'm going to read another book.”

With my books, I have very different books. Golem is my psychological horror novel. It's my slow-burn psychological horror novel, heavily inspired by Frankenstein and the Pygmalion myth. It's my first true horror book that I published.

Then there's Jigglyspot and the Zero Intellect, which is inspired by B-rated '80s horror movies and the old grindhouse movies of the '70s, and it's mind manipulation. It's just wild and bizarre. And then The Sleepy Hollow Incident is my Gothic tale—it's like a dark romance mixed in with Gothic horror.

So I always try to put something for everyone that's out there. To me, when I'm writing, it's got to be about depth, psychological depth. I always refer to my books to be like peeling layers off a Texas-sized onion. The more you read, the more in-depth you get into not only the characters, but the story.

It's just something that comes out of me. It's part of me. That's the way I always have to do it. I always have to put that depth in there. To me, that's good storytelling.

When I grew up, I read a lot of classic literature. Yes, Edgar Allan Poe, but also Dante's Inferno, Milton's Paradise Lost, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the Brontë sisters. Keep going. Ray Bradbury, Ayn Rand, Daphne du Maurier, Shirley Jackson. Those to me are my books that I absolutely love.

So there's a sweet science in today's fast-paced, social media type of world in marrying the depth of the old classic literature and the entertainment value that is required today for being an author. There's that sweet science behind it, and I love just hitting that nail on the head every time.

Jo: So did you ever pitch traditional publishing, or have you thought about going that way? Because I also find that a lot of horror actually sits very close to literary. Like, I read a lot more literary horror than I do in some of the other genres.

PD: Correct. So in the beginning, yes. Not in a long time. I maybe went to a couple of indie publishers, but as far as traditional, the Big Five publishers, I have an aversion to them for a big reason. I know people who have worked in that industry that have told me some pretty bad horror stories about those places.

So I haven't sent anything to that type of place in a very, very long time. Maybe close to 20 years.

Indie publishers, the small presses, yes, here and there, but even then, I'm always moving at a fast pace. So if I've got a book and I'm sending it out as a query letter, by the time that query letter is even read, I'm almost done publishing.

I love that aspect of it. The control of my story, where I know where this character's going. And listen, I've got my beta readers, I've got my ARC readers. They're there to tell me, “Hey, maybe you should change this or change that.” Whether I take that advice or not, of course my editor too, is really up to me.

I always put out the book that I know is the one I want to read. And to me, I haven't gone wrong in doing so. I know with traditional publishing, you sometimes get too many thoughts in the pot there. Let's put it that way.

Jo: Okay, so coming back to being indie then. You mentioned Amazon earlier, but you have a store where you sell direct. Many authors are doing this now, but it can be a challenge.

So what have you found are the pros and cons of your direct store? What's working? Any lessons there?PD: Okay. So I use a place called Big Cartel. They're the platform where the books are on. They're hosting my website, PDAlleva.com.

The big challenge was actually just starting it. It was so overwhelming. How do I put this on there? At the time, I've got all these books, so how do I present them?

I'm even going to be doing another revamp with it too, because I want better pictures—taking pictures of the books, stuff like that, instead of just having the covers on there. I also have a lot of shirts that I'm selling.

So I think the biggest challenge is just getting on there and starting it. Then of course, you've got to learn a whole new platform, and the mechanics, and how people are going to be downloading, and how that's done on an e-book versus a print version of the book.

So it's a huge learning curve that you've really got to put your focus on and give it time.

What most people like in indie publishing is signed copies. It's a huge part of indie publishing, selling those signed copies. People love a signed copy, and that's primarily what my website is for. You can order signed copies from me.

I also use a place called IngramSpark, and they're more like a distributor. They're used by everyone. They've been around for a very long time. Traditional publishing uses them too, and they're just distributing your novel.

I'd say about a year ago, maybe two years ago, they started where you can sell your books on discount through them as well. So I have that on my website too, where you're just clicking on the book and you're pretty much going directly to their site and you're buying paperbacks and hardbacks at a discount. That's going well too.

For the most part, people are definitely coming to my site because they want the signed copies. A good thing with indie publishing is limited editions, first print copies, special editions. That type of stuff really just takes off. People love to see that, especially in the indie community.

You can sell them too. I go to a few different book conventions during the year, and the limited editions are there. Like I said, people love the signed copies. They love being a part of that and getting that signed copy. They treasure it, just like I treasure my books too.

I'm not referring to my books that I've written, but books that I have as well. I love my e-reader, don't get me wrong, but I still prefer the physical copy—the paperback, and even more so than the paperback, the hardback. So people love those signed copies, and that's why I created the website, to sell on there for them.

Jo: Yes, I mean, we're getting to a point now though where I think some people are questioning the pros and cons of it. For example, you doing the signed copies—I don't do that from my Shopify store because I don't want to hold stock and I don't want to deal with postage.

So I only do it when I do a Kickstarter. I've just finished one recently, Bones of the Deep, and I'm going up to the printer, and I'm going to sign a couple of hundred copies and then they do the postage.

That's the only way I'm willing to do it because of the pain of getting books to your house, signing them, getting them in the post.

So how do you manage that practically?PD: Okay, so the inventory's there. I don't go and sign everything right away. I just keep the inventory. Once somebody buys the book, then I'll pull out the book, log it and all that good fun stuff, sign it, and then ship it out immediately.

Here in my country, we get discounts at the United States Post Office because they're books. So they pass that shipping cost over to the reader too, so it's a little bit cheaper for shipping.

I'll just take books once or twice a week over to the United States Postal Service and ship those books out. I don't sign them until I actually get that order.

Jo: How many do you have in your house? It's the holding stock of all the backlist that is the problem.PD: Ooh, gotcha. All right. That's why I have a two-car garage. But here's the thing, I won't order 500 at a time. I'll order 20 at a time.

Jo: Okay. Right.

PD: When I see that inventory's getting low, I'll order another 20 at a time.

Jo: And you get those from IngramSpark?

PD: Correct. When the new one comes out, maybe at that time I'm just selling those, bringing those to conventions that I go to. Or maybe doing a sale on those books at that time to get rid of the inventory so it's not sitting around anymore.

Jo: I think that's so important. Then like you mentioned, you do T-shirts or shirts. That is also really hard because of sizing.

So is that all print on demand?PD: Yes. So I don't really hold the stock on the shirts. When I get an order, whatever the size is at that time, I go directly to the place and order it. I use a place called Sublimation Station that's here in Orlando. They do great all-over print T-shirts. They're fantastic. I just did one for The Sleepy Hollow Incident.

So The Sleepy Hollow Incident is one long story, and it's broken up into four books. Each book has its own. The covers are fantastic. I use a lady named Cherie Foxley. She's a phenomenal cover designer.

So the shirts are, like, book one is on the front of one shirt with book two on the back, and then the second shirt is book three on the cover and book four on the back.

However, I can customise those. I just did a giveaway in my Facebook group and I let people know I could customise them, and she wanted book one and book four, so I just got that and sent it out to her.

Now, if people go ahead and order that on the website, I can just order it right away from them, boom, and that place will get it shipped right then and there.

Jo: Right, so they do the shipping. These are all sort of practical things that people need to answer because I feel like sometimes it's like, “Oh, yes, having a direct store is great,” but there's actually quite a lot of work that goes into it, isn't there?

PD: There is. There's a lot of work. You're pretty much opening almost like your own brick-and-mortar store at that point. You just don't have walk-in traffic coming in—your traffic is all coming online. So there is a lot to it, but it's worth it.

If you're a self-published author or even a small indie press, it's good to have. Because like I said, people love the signed copies.

Jo: When you say it's worth it, is it worth it financially or just because you like to serve the customers in that way?

PD: Both.

Jo: Right. So it is financially worth it for you?

PD: Yes.

Jo: I was talking to a friend of mine and saying, are you valuing your time in terms of things like taking the books to the post office and stuff like that?

Do you find it eats into your writing at all, or do you just manage it all separately?PD: No, I manage it separately. So I'm an early morning riser. I get up at 3:00 in the morning, and that's when I write my books or do editing or brainstorming.

I'm about to write a new novella now called The Adam and Eve Story, which is actually based on a little-known CIA shelved book from the 1990s called The Adam and Eve Story as well. So I've been brainstorming that, and I was doing that this morning.

I get up at 3:00 a.m. and I do my writing, and by the time the kids are up and by the time the wife is up, it's like 8:00 a.m. is rolling around and I'm pretty much done at that point.

Then I have my days. Tuesday I'm completely working from home and I do my thing in the morning, and then the rest of the day is marketing, fulfilling orders, stuff like that.

On the days when I'm going to do group facilitation, I'll of course still get up at 3:00 o'clock in the morning, and then I'll plan out the day. I've got an hour between this group and I can go ahead and do that, and I'm already there so it's not a problem. The post office is right around the corner.

You kind of figure out all the logistics for yourself. There are some days, like on Monday, I don't facilitate groups until the afternoon, so I've got the whole morning to work on marketing and do other things, and fulfilment. Then of course Saturday's a big day for that too.

Jo: Oh, that's good. I feel like people always need to know how to balance their time, but it sounds like you manage, because at 3:00 a.m., as you say, there's not much else to do other than write.

You mentioned marketing, and you have a Substack, pdsalternativefiction.substack.com.

Talk about that and serialising fiction and how Substack works.Because I feel like a load of people are jumping in but might not necessarily know how it works, especially for fiction.

PD: Correct. It is becoming quite popular out there. I think the one before that was Patreon, and Patreon is pretty big for that too, kind of the same thing.

I wanted to start something and just get the work out there. I was very interested when Amazon came out a few years ago with what was called Vella.

They kind of started that. I was like, “This is kind of cool.” Couple chapters at a time. I'm writing the books anyway, so why don't we kick this off and see how it goes—a type of experiment.

I had a lot of fun doing it. I started on October 4th, 2024. I've done four novels so far. One is still going, which is Volume 3 of my Dark Veil serie— that's a sci-fi series.

I wrote three other novels. The Hypnotist, which is a thriller, heavy on the sci-fi and a tad of horror in there too. And then I wrote Girl on a Mission, which is my psychological thriller, and then Cat Fight, which is a horror novel—all within that time.

I think I finished all three of those novels in January, and then the first week of February they were all pretty much done. Now what I'm doing is, I went paid recently on the Substack. It's like everything else that's out there—chip away, chip away.

I fell into that hole where they say, “Hey, we can promote you and get people to sign up for your newsletter.” And I'll be honest with you, don't do it. It's not worth it.

You spend money, and what happens is they're what I refer to as dead leads. They don't click. You wind up shuffling them off after three to six months, because they're just not clicking. Everybody gets a star rating, so you know—are they clicking, are they staying on, are they not?

So I got rid of pretty much all of those people, and I'll never do that again. It's got to be done organically. That's why when you read my books, especially the new books, towards the end it'll say, “Sign up for my newsletter.”

I do more with that newsletter too. If you're on the free tier, every month I do a monthly newsletter, which is just me talking about updates, things going on in the publishing industry, things going on with me.

My daughter puts together a weekly Horror and Sci-Fi Chronicles newsletter, which gives what's going on in new releases in the industry—sci-fi, horror, books, movies, television. She does deep dives into industry tropes, historical tidbits, and a weekly quiz.

I also do a monthly Terrors and Tales newsletter. I started this last year, and it was a quarterly newsletter. It's other authors who are new, upcoming, never been published before, looking to get published.

It's a chance for them to be on the newsletter where they have a flash fiction story or poem or even a short story that I publish for them. It's called the Terrors and Tales newsletter.

What happened is I would put out calls for submissions. And a place called Duotrope—I don't even know who these people are, but all of a sudden I got an email from them stating, “Hey, we found that you're looking for submissions, and we posted your link. We hope you don't mind.”

I'm like, “No, of course I don't mind.”

I got so many submissions from that one link. I'm like, “Okay.” Do I really want to deny people? I'm not like that. I want to help promote other authors. I know what it's like when you're new and upcoming, no matter what age you are, to say, “Hey, here's a platform for you to see your stuff in print.”

Obviously, I read through them just to make sure they're up to a certain standard, but for the most part, if you submit, you're getting in there.

With Duotrope, I'm like, I have enough here to put out one a month. So in May 2026, the first one goes out, and then I'll have one each month until December, and then who knows? In 2027 I might go back to quarterly. I might get enough submissions to just keep it going once a month.

So that's the Terrors and Tales newsletter, and it usually comes out towards the end of the month—the last two weeks. I have nothing to do with it in terms of content. None of my stories are on there. None of my poems are on there. None of my flash fiction.

It's all other authors, just for them to see their name in print, see their work in print, share it with their friends, and put something on their resume, and to encourage people to keep reading and keep the craft going.

Jo: When you say in print, you don't mean in physical print?PD: Oh, I mean in the newsletter. I'm sorry.

Jo: I think that's important, or you're going to get a lot more submissions, and you will need to do publishing contracts and all that kind of thing.

I think that's the difficult thing with a Substack newsletter approach—it's difficult to know where to categorise it. Is it marketing? Is it publishing? It's all of these things, I suppose. A bit like this podcast, it's all kinds of things.

In terms of Substack actually making money on its own or leading to book sales that make money, do you think it does serve that purpose?PD: I think I've gotten more book sales through it, and also ARC readers who are enjoying the books and giving reviews.

As far as the paid tiers, that's kind of a little bit slow, and that's where I'm saying chip away at it. Keep it up there. Keep it going. Over time, you're going to build that type of audience where it's going to be like, “Hey, this is financially feasible for me to continue to do this.” That's the response that I'm getting out there.

Jo: Yes. Before, you mentioned you were doing Facebook Lives and you're looking at TikTok, but—

Is anything else working for you in book marketing? If people have a few books and they're like, “What is working for book marketing right now?”—what do you recommend?

PD: Okay. For me, the thing that has made the most sense is making sure the reader knows the book is out there through some sort of social media. I've had really good success on TikTok since the beginning of this year especially.

I started it about a year ago, year and a half ago, but then my father got sick and passed away, and it was a new venture and I put it off to the side. I really got the flavour going at the beginning of this year. February, March of this year.

It seems to be going really well, and I've noticed an uptick in sales from just getting the videos out there and getting it in front of people's eyes.

There's an event I'm going to in August called ShiverCon, which is a pretty big event. After that event, I'm going to look to see what type of inventory I have left over from the event, and I'm going to start doing TikTok Lives. I'm very comfortable being on camera. So I'm like, “Yeah, that seems like a good way to go.”

I know there's a few other horror authors who are doing it and having good success with TikTok Lives as well. A guy named Jason Davis is doing really well with TikTok Lives, and a few other authors too.

I'm like, “Yes, I could definitely do that.” I want to get up to a certain number of people, and I want these events. I'm going to one in July, and then ShiverCon in August. Once those are done, I'm going to have more time to do the TikTok Lives.

As far as Facebook is concerned, what I've had really great success with on Facebook is being in the groups and meeting other authors. That's not always about my book per se, but whatever books I'm reading, I'm posting my reviews about those books in those groups and meeting readers.

Then obviously, they always say the three-to-one rule. Post about three different books and then post about your own book, whether you're doing a sale or a new release or a re-release or whatever.

I've found success through that just by interacting with readers. When they post a book, I'll comment, “Hey, I've read that book,” or, “Hey, that book looks really cool. I like the review.” Commenting on it so you start these relationships with people who are out there in these Facebook groups.

I've recently started my own Facebook reader group. I kind of go with the same thing. Last night, we did a live reading for another author. I like other authors to be on there. I always like to think, what does the reader need? What do I want to see as a reader?

I would love to hear live readings from authors. So I kind of learn about them, learn about the book, and get a live reading. To me, that's a good way to go. So I started that recently, and it seems to be going well.

I've got a new folk horror coming out soon, and I put out a call for ARC readers and got a fantastic response from that.

That kind of drives the sales anyway, because when you get those reviews, then people see it gives credibility to the book, and then other people see it, and then they're buying it too. So that comes from the groups.

There's so many wheels to spin in this industry as an indie author when you're doing this, especially when you're doing 99% of it on your own. You've got to get out there. No one's going to know your book exists if you don't get out there and tell somebody about it.

Jo: Brilliant. Well, tell us—

Where can people find you and your books online?PD: All right. Perfect. So obviously I'm on Amazon like everyone. Most of my books are worldwide, so you'll find them in Barnes & Noble as well. And of course, if you want the signed copies or discount print books, I always lead people straight to my website, PDAlleva.com.

Then, of course, if you go to my Substack, you'll get all the updates, and you'll get all the links to purchase or find out where they are on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and things like that too.

Jo: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Paul. That was great.

PD: Thank you very much for having me. It was great chatting with you.

The post Writing Cross-Genre, Selling Direct, And Serialising On SubStack With P.D. Alleva first appeared on The Creative Penn.

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Have you ever lost the joy in your creative work — that sense of fun you had when you were starting out, before the admin and the algorithms drained it away? How do mid-career creatives get it back, and what can a four-year-old teach us about play? Austin Kleon talks about productive procrastination, silly rituals, the case for paper reference books in an AI world, and how his newsletter went from a marketing cost to the day job that keeps the lights on.

In the intro, Does social media still sell books? [Self-Publishing with ALLi]; Trial by algorithm [The Bookseller]; Publishing’s AI Hypocrisy Problem [The New Publishing Standard]; ALLi AI survey for authors; Brave New Bookshelf Podcast, and Pics from signing at BookVault.

Today's show is sponsored by ProWritingAid, writing and editing software that goes way beyond just grammar and typo checking. With its detailed reports on how to improve your writing and integration with writing software, ProWritingAid will help you improve your book before you send it to an editor, agent or publisher. Check it out for free or get 15% off the premium edition at www.ProWritingAid.com/joanna

This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn

Austin Kleon is the New York Times and international bestselling author of nonfiction books, including Steal Like an Artist, Show Your Work!, and Keep Going, as well as an artist, professional speaker, and poet. His latest book is Don't Call It Art: 10 Ways to Create Like a Kid Again.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.

Show Notes

• Why Austin wrote Don't Call It Art now, and what his kids taught him about creative joy
• Productive procrastination, silly rituals, and treating writing like Lego
• Comedy as a philosophical position, and giving yourself permission to be bad in private
• Sharing process in the algorithm era, and why your whole life is the process
• Bibliomancy, paper reference books, and what AI can't give you that a dictionary can
• Style, the Taco Bell distinctiveness rule, and how Austin's newsletter became his day job

You can find Austin at AustinKleon.com.

Transcript of the interview with Austin KleonJo: Austin Kleon is the New York Times and international bestselling author of nonfiction books, including Steal Like an Artist, Show Your Work!, and Keep Going, as well as an artist, professional speaker, and poet. His latest book is Don't Call It Art: 10 Ways to Create Like a Kid Again. So welcome back to the show, Austin.

Austin: Thank you for having me back. It's nice to talk to you again.

Jo: You were on the show in March 2020, and at the time, your book was Keep Going, which was prescient considering the pandemic and politics. So I wondered, why this book, Don't Call It Art, now?

Was this something you see in the creative community or your own life that made you want to write this book?Austin: Keep Going is a book about what happens when the world goes crazy around you and you're still trying to do your creative work. This is a book about what happens when inside has bottomed out.

Keep Going is a book about the world bottoming out, and you're worried that your own creative work is going to bottom out too. How do you keep pushing through and keep making stuff?

This book, to me, is about what happens when you bottom out inside—when you've lost that love and feeling for the thing that you wanted to do, and you're just not connecting with it in the way that you used to or the way that you want to.

How do you get back? How do you return to that sense of joy and wonder and fun that we have when we're starting out? And for me, it was being around my little kids that taught me how to tap into that.

My kids were natural—they didn't have any creative hangups. I would spend all day talking to people who had creative hangups, and then I'd get back in the house, and I'd just be around these beings who didn't have any of them.

It was really instructive. I felt like, if I could bottle the energy of my kids when they were about four years old and try to put it in a book, I think it could really help a lot of the people that I run into, and the people with the kinds of problems I hear from.

Jo: You mentioned bottoming out. How do people know when they've hit that point?Austin: You just don't want to do it anymore. You're kind of like, “This just isn't giving me back what it used to.”

When we start with our creative work, that's the thing that juices us. We come away from it feeling full up. I think you hit a certain point where you start to feel drained after it. Or maybe you don't feel drained by the thing itself that you're doing—maybe it's all the stuff around it, which is more often the case.

For example, if you're a mid-career writer like me, who's been publishing books for 16 years now, I still really like writing. I still really like drawing. I still really like cutting and pasting and putting things together.

It's the admin around the work—the emails, the meetings, the running-a-business part of it—that's super draining for me, and that stuff can start to bleed over into the creative work.

So it's really important for me to make sure that I'm having some playtime, some R&D, some research and development time, to make sure it's not just all business. When you take the thing that you love and you turn it into the thing that you make a living from, you can really run into a lot of problems.

Jo: I'm at 20 years, so I know exactly what you're saying, and a lot of listeners are the same. We love writing books, but it's all the stuff that goes around it.

So for those of us who do this for money as well as passion, what are some practical ways to have more fun with our creativity?Austin: Something I learned from my kids is that you really are your most creative when you're supposed to be doing something else. So one of the things I use a lot in the studio is productive procrastination. Whatever I'm supposed to be working on, I start another little project, and that's my little naughty fun time.

When I first come into the studio, I try to do something that I'm not supposed to be doing—something that I won't have much to show for. That could be making one of my blackout poems. That could be making a collage in my notebook. It could also be sitting here.

I have a bass in the studio now, so I can practise my bass guitar. Sometimes I'll do that for the first 15 minutes just to get in that headspace of, “Hey, what's it like to do something just for yourself? Just because you want to do it?”

The juice that you get from that little naughty “I'm going to do what I'm not supposed to be doing right now” thing, that carries into the rest of the day. It's like a nice start to things.

Jo: Do you think that play could be something different to what we make our money with? For me, writing novels and stories is great fun in one way, but it's also what I then publish and make money on. So writing stories is more serious, I guess, than playing with Lego or something.

Austin: Right. So the trick is, how can you make writing your stories like playing with Lego? That's kind of been my whole career. I hate staring at Microsoft Word and that blinking cursor, taunting you like, “Come on, what have you got?”

A lot of my creative life has been about trying to make it more playful, trying to make it feel more like a game. That's how I came up with my blackout poems. I take an article from The New York Times and I black it out until it only has a few words left behind.

It sort of looks like if the CIA did haiku, for some people listening. That was one little exercise.

Then weirdly, that side thing that I thought was just play, just fun—that turned into my first book. So then it's, okay, what else can I mess around with and play with?

I do a lot of collage work in the studio, and I rarely actually use that for any of the books. Sometimes I use it for my newsletter to illustrate the newsletter. But it's always about trying to figure out, how can I make writing a game? How can I make it more playful?

There are different things that I do to make it feel more playful. One of them's really stupid. I really believe in silly rituals because I think silliness is really powerful. People talk about their daily rituals—Mason Currey has that great book, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work.

When I was reading that book, I realised it was really the silly stuff that I really liked. There was, I think it was Balzac counting out coffee beans or something before he got to write. Or Steinbeck sharpening 12 pencils or something goofy like that.

So one of the things I like to do before I write is that I have these cigarette pencils. They're pencils that look like cigarettes in the studio. I put one in my mouth before I start writing, and I pretend to be some old '40s writer on a typewriter.

I like doing goofy stuff in the studio because I think when you do goofy stuff—stuff that you'd be embarrassed if anyone else saw it—it gets you in that playful state.

Jo: It's interesting. In your book, you have a section that says, “Don't take things too seriously.” For many of us, we write memoir for example, and that is very close to us. It's like the deepest expression of what we want to say in the world. It feels very serious.

So how can we hold things more lightly and not take things so seriously?Austin: For me, comedy is actually a philosophical position. What I mean by that is, I think a lot of people set out with a tragic model of creative work.

They think, “Oh, I have this special gift,” or, “I have this thing that I really need to do, and I need to put it out into the world, and I need to make the world look more like I want it to look.”

They have this idea that, “Through blood and sweat and tears, I'm going to see this thing through, and I'm going to push it into the world, and I'm going to have my way.”

I think there's another way of working where it's more like, “I'm just a normal person trying to play with my environment, and take my experiences and put them into something interesting. So I'm going to play and use my wits, and we're going to see what we come up with.” Those really are two modes of life.

The pandemic taught me that it was really when we were keeping our sense of humour, when we were having a laugh and keeping our egos in check around the house and just acknowledging how goofy we all were and how ridiculous the situation was, that seemed to be when we were really thriving.

Versus, “Well, we're in this tough situation. We've got to make it into what we want it to be.” That felt really bad. But when we cruised along and we were just improvisational, when we went at things with a kind of lightness, that worked.

There's a great Italo Calvino essay about lightness in Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Lightness is really underrated. Even when we're going about heavy work, having a sense of lightness and play with it just makes the work better.

That's a philosophical position of mine. I aspire to comedy. I aspire to a comic outlook on life. I'm just a creature with a body who's going to die, and I'm fundamentally ridiculous. Life is pretty absurd. You just make the best of it.

Jo: There's certainly some truth there. Staying on a similar theme, you have a chapter in the book on permission to be bad.

Many of the listeners also have your book Show Your Work, and it shaped many of us into sharing our work in progress. It feels quite dangerous now, in a world where judgment is much louder than it maybe was when you wrote Show Your Work.

So tell us a bit about permission to be bad versus should we keep some of this private?Austin: Permission to be bad is about the making part of things. It's the private part. It's permission to be bad when you're in private, when you're actually doing the work.

Show Your Work is a book about what you do after you've done the work, or while you're doing the work. It was never about putting up a webcam and running a 24/7 feed. It was more like, hey, what are the ways that I can connect with the kind of audience I can build while I'm making the work itself?

So the way I see permission to be bad is, you really have to give yourself permission when you're not sharing, when you're off screen, to really be as bad as you want to be. It doesn't necessarily mean quality-wise.

I think it also means letting yourself write stuff that you would never say on social media. Letting yourself read stuff that you wouldn't admit you were reading on social media. Letting yourself listen to stuff. Letting yourself really be that unfiltered, unhinged, private person that you want to be.

Then when it comes to sharing, you put some time in between that input time, that making time, and the sharing time, and then you share what you think is going to be useful or helpful or interesting to other people.

Jo: I think you wrote that book before TikTok, and how fast people are moving.

Do you think people need to slow down a bit in what they share, maybe?Austin: I don't know. I obviously had a lot more faith in social media back then. I use all the principles from Show Your Work in my newsletter.

Newsletters are very much the new kind of great thing. They're doing a lot of the work that social media used to do, in that you're still able to have this direct connection with the people that you're trying to reach.

The big problem with social media now is that it's all algorithmically tuned, where the people that are following you don't see the stuff that you're doing most of the time.

What you have to do now, if you want the people who are following you to see your stuff on social media, is you have to make stuff that the algorithm likes. That's a whole different thing.

As far as the Show Your Work principle—which is share your process as much as your product—that carries over to any platform. In my newsletter every Friday, I share a list of 10 things that were going on behind the scenes here.

It might have been what I was watching on TV, what I listened to, a new pen I was trying out, or something like that. The Friday newsletter is almost always process stuff.

When I talk about process, my definition is actually very broad. For a lot of people, it's drafting, editing, whatever. For me, the process is the whole life. The process is almost everything except the finished thing.

A writer's life is 24/7. My friends who have real jobs really are like, “What do you do all day?” And I'm like, “Well, what do you mean?” They're like, “Well, I see you out on your bike ride.”

I'm like, “Yes, when you see me out on a bike ride, I'm thinking through something half the time.” If I'm watching TV, I'm thinking, “Hey, would this be good in the newsletter?”

I'm never off. My whole life—everything is copy, as Nora Ephron said. That's part of the job. It's very hard to turn off. So I see the whole life as process, and the question becomes, what little bits and pieces of that life and that process can you share with people while you're making the things that you hope to sell them later?

Right now, I'm in a cycle where I'm selling this book, but all these people have showed up because I've shared my process every week for the past seven years since I put out a book.

Jo: It's funny you say that. I was at the dentist yesterday, and—

My dentist literally asked me, “So where do you get all your ideas?” This is a common question for all of us, right? And it just becomes so hard to explain that to people who don't walk around in the world just constantly getting ideas.

Austin: I can't believe I'm going to tell this story. I was getting my vasectomy after my second kid, and I was talking to this doctor just before the operation.

He said, “So what do you do for a living?” I said, “I'm a writer.” He said, “Oh, that must be cool. You get to use your brain.” And I said, “That's everything that you want your doctor to say.” I was going to say, “Please use your brain,” before he's about to cut into you.

He said, “Oh, no, no. What I mean is, I know what I'm going to do every day for the next 10 years.” He knew exactly what his day was going to look like. He said, “You have to use your brain. You've got to figure out new stuff.” I was like, “Oh, that's really interesting.”

That's the trade-off, right? He's got the job security. He knows what he's going to do. Every writer has a moment where they have to talk to a normal person about what you do.

Jo: I was going to say, I'm married to one.

Austin: Now, my wife, on the other hand, grew up the daughter of a writer, so she knows exactly what it's like. Nothing ever phases her. She's totally used to it.

She's used to me staring off into space, completely checking out of a conversation. She's used to me using lines on her that I'm going to put in a piece later. She's used to the whole rigmarole. It's very handy. I've been very lucky in that sense.

Jo: Coming back to the book, you talk about your use of bibliomancy for inspiration. Since we're talking about that, tell us about it. I think all the book people listening will be happy.

Austin: I'm a person who still keeps a dictionary nearby—a paper dictionary. I keep a big old American Heritage. It's just a big, thick book.

When I really don't have any ideas, I will turn at random to the dictionary, close my eyes, stick my finger down the page, open my eyes, and just see what I come up with. Sometimes just that act will give me an idea.

I also do that with books. I'll go around the studio, pick up a book, flip to a random page, and just see what it says there, or read an old piece of marginalia that I've left in a book. I believe deeply in the power of bibliomancy, and I think it's a case for paper books.

I'm one of those people that still really believes in reference books. I've started collecting more and more of them. I have an old, big dictionary that's always open on my desk, and I look up words.

I learned from John McPhee, the writer, that you should look up words that you think you know. That was the first time I'd ever heard anyone say that. So I look up words that I think I know.

Instead of reaching for a thesaurus when I need a different word, I actually just look up the definition of the word that I already have. That's another McPhee tip.

The other thing that happened that I thought was really interesting is, I got a Roget's for the first time—a thesaurus. I don't think most people know what an actual thesaurus is.

Most people think of a thesaurus as a synonym finder, and that's not actually what a thesaurus is at all. A thesaurus is more like an encyclopaedia, weirdly. You look up things based on big concepts, and then it gives you a bunch of words to look up later. It's a very strange thing. It's not what most people think it is.

I have a couple of editions of Roget's in here. I like the really old Roget's from the 1900s because they actually have opposing ideas facing each other on the page. Do you have an old-school Roget's? Have you ever looked through one?

Jo: I don't have one now, but I certainly grew up with them. I was literally just thinking, I wonder if there are ones for Americans and ones for British people, because so often we say different things and mean different things.

I always hear Americans say, “Oh, that's a doozy,” or something, and it means the complete opposite thing here.

Austin: Like if you say “fanny pack” over there. That means something very different than it means here, right? Chips or fries, that kind of stuff. So I wonder if there are different ones for different cultural references.

Jo: I don't know.

Austin: As people, with ChatGPT and all these LLMs and stuff, people are like, “Why would you ever pick up a paper reference book?” And I'm like, “I actually like the friction.”

I like having to move in space and go over to my dictionary. I like flipping the pages. I like having to scan a page for the word I'm looking for, because—

This marvellous thing happens when you're looking for the word, where you bump into all these other words.If you're a word nerd, you get to start thinking about the root of the word—oh, why is this word next to this word? Well, it's because they share the same root. Then you're going down all these fun rabbit holes.

The thing that I'm trying to do as a writer and a creative person is, I'm trying to get to the thing that I didn't know I was looking for.

The thing that people misunderstand about AI, I think personally, is that it's a great tool if you know what you're looking for.

If you're like, “Find me this thing. I want exactly this. I want to see a picture of a dog wearing a king's costume,” or some crap like that, then it can spit that picture out for you. Or, “I want to know what happened on this day,” and whatever. It can do that.

But that's not actually what I'm doing most of the time when I'm writing or making something. I start with an idea, but what really happens—the magic of writing and the magic of making stuff in general—is when you discover something that you didn't even know you were headed for. That's the real magic for me.

Sometimes I have an idea and I want to articulate it for people, but more often than not, there's something that bothers me or something that I want to talk about, and I sit down and write, and I figure out what it is that I actually have to say and what I actually think.

Every writer really knows this, and that's why the dictionary, stuff like that, those are ways of training you to get in that discovery mode. “Well, let me—oh, I bumped into this. I went looking for this one thing and then I ran into this other thing.”

That's why I love the library. I don't know what system you use over there, but you look for one book in the Dewey Decimal System over here, and then, okay, here's all these other weird books next to it. Then you end up with three other books other than the one that you were looking for. That's the magic.

To me, that's the magic of creative work, discovering what you didn't know you were looking for.

That was particularly important for me when I was writing this book because we discovered that my wife has a condition called aphantasia. It's very rare in the population, about 2 to 3% of people. There's probably some people listening to this right now who are like, “What is this? Tell me.”

Jo: Aphantasia actually more common in the creative industries.Austin: Yes. What it is, is that you don't see—when I say close your eyes and picture an apple, you don't actually see the apple in your head. You can think about an apple and the qualities of an apple, but you don't actually see it.

Some people, and it's a matter of degree—some people like me, I can close my eyes, I can tell you what the apple looks like, I can tell you what colour it is, I can tell you where the shading is. Someone like my wife doesn't see the apple. She can tell you what an apple is.

It's really interesting because she has a degree in architecture, which is known as a very visual field. But the thing you discover about aphantasia is, it doesn't keep people from becoming artists. In fact, it's the opposite.

Someone like Ed Catmull, who co-founded Pixar, writes about it in his book, and so many of the great animators at Pixar are actually aphantasics. The reason is that they learned that they had to draw in order to see things.

When you don't have a picture in your head of what you want something to look like, things appear in the drawing, and you find things that you couldn't even picture.

A lot of writers actually are aphantasics. John Green discovered recently that he has aphantasia. It turns out that it's a superpower for writers, because if you don't have a picture in your head, then you don't have to translate that picture into words. A lot of writers talk about thinking in radio, like they have a constant narrator.

My wife—she's probably going to kill me for talking about her this much—when she describes it to me, she's like, “Oh, it's like a radio in my head. I'm constantly hearing a voice, and it's a narrator.”

I was like, “Holy shit, that would be really helpful to me.” I don't have anything like that in my head. I read Mrs Dalloway for the first time, and I gave it to her and I said, “You've got to read this book. I think this must be what it's like in your head.” And she said, “Oh my God, it is.”

Part of the thing that I took away from that experience—this is a long-winded way of getting here—is that I take a lot of inspiration from people with this condition.

Most of the people I know in the arts or the creative fields, they set out with this grand vision, and then they start working on the thing and it's nothing like what they had in their head, and they get really depressed: “This isn't what I had in mind.”

Whereas if you set out without a picture in your head, and you just start manipulating things and you see what appears, that's more of the comic mode I was talking about earlier.

What would happen if we just sat down with our materials and we started playing and we saw what appeared on the page? What if we started typing and saw what appeared, and then we played with that?

That's the kind of joy. That's more like how kids operate. Kids are better at that. They're better at reacting to what's actually in front of them, instead of having these grandiose visions about what they're trying to achieve.

Jo: Just coming back on the longevity of a creative career. Your books are very distinctive. You have a very distinctive visual style, your handwriting and the way the books are done.

I wondered if another part of the ennui, perhaps, or the draining of the later career is that we get trapped into doing something that feels like it looks the same. Or we have a voice, and we're happy in that voice, but sometimes we want to do something completely different.

For authors, we have different names. I write under two different names, and that helps. But equally—

How do you define author voice, and do you ever feel like doing something completely different to your normal style?Austin: Style, in a lot of ways, is self-plagiarism. Style is the repeated things that we notice in people's work. Hitchcock talked about this in films. Wes Anderson is someone like that—Wes Anderson has a style. I'm sure that he gets really sick of it too sometimes, but you also can't help it in some ways.

I thought a lot about this because people worry about style so much. A lot of the time, what we call style is what Adrian Tomine one time said: “Style is just the distance between what's in my head and what comes out of my hand.” I really like that definition.

With this book, I was trying to think, “Okay, if I do another book in this series, how can I push things a little bit?” And then I was reading this article about Taco Bell. You guys have Taco Bell over there, don't you? Do you have Taco Bell?

Jo: No.

Austin: So Taco Bell, for people who don't know, is this American Mexican chain, and they have tacos and burritos and stuff like that. They're well known for making these really insane… it's so American, this company. They make a taco with a Doritos as a shell. Doritos are crisps, I guess.

Jo: Yes, we have Doritos.

Austin: Okay. I spent time in England, I just don't remember if I ate Doritos when I was in England. Anyway, I was reading this article about Taco Bell. It was really funny. They have an innovation kitchen at Taco Bell, and they have a rule about new products.

The rule is called the distinctiveness rule, and the rule is: you can change the flavour or you can change the taste, or you can change the form, but you can't change both at the same time.

I got really obsessed with this concept because I thought, “Well, this could be kind of interesting.” If you're someone who's had success and you're known for something, this presents an interesting thing. You could do a complete break and do something completely new, or you could try the distinctiveness rule.

Okay, well, what if I play with this idea of taste versus form? What if I change the taste and keep the form?

So the idea for Don't Call It Art was, what if I do another one of these books, but the taste is more like if my kids made it? It had the texture of kids' art, it had lots of scribbles in it, it was loose and messy. That was kind of the idea.

The actual book ended up being more like the other books. It ended up looking like an Austin Kleon book, because I just can't help that.

The thing you said about having multiple names that you write under, that's kind of what I do with the newsletter. I think of the newsletter as very different from the books. The newsletter is this twice-weekly thing where I can be a little bit more of myself.

In the books, I'm this very helpful, happy version of myself. It's me, but it's me on my best day. I'm really helpful and interesting for you. The newsletter is still a highlight reel in a sense, but it's a little bit more of my weird everything-I'm-into. It's more of the unclipped version of me.

The newsletter becomes a place where I can do a lot of the weird stuff that's much different from the books. I have these little projects going all the time.

Sometimes I'll make a bunch of prints and put them online. Sometimes I'll make a bunch of zines on a topic I haven't covered in the book. Sometimes I'll do a mixtape.

As someone who's interested in a lot of different forms and genres and just different modes of output, having something like a newsletter has been really creatively fruitful for me.

It's kept me from getting too bottomed out with the books because the books do a certain thing for the reader, and as much as I'd love to do a book that was radically different, I also think I've been given a real gift with the form of my books, in that I kind of own the way that they feel and look.

There aren't a lot of books that look like those books and feel like those books, and so I like playing with that form. It would be hard to get rid of it now.

The pseudonym for me is kind of like the newsletter in a sense. The newsletter is a little bit more of where I get to be wild and wacky. Then the books are a little bit more of a chiselled thing.

Jo: The books are perfect examples of the form, as you say, but it's interesting about the newsletter. You mentioned at the beginning that we can be drained by the admin around the work.

For many people listening, a newsletter becomes admin. So how does the newsletter fit into your business? The books are traditionally published, they're very professional.

How do you have your independent side, and how does all of that work together in your business?Austin: Thank you for asking that question. I run the whole show at the newsletter. The newsletter is just me, and then my wife edits it, and no one else is involved.

I don't have an assistant. I don't have a team. It is just me, and that's why I love it. I control everything. I pick who gets in there. I pick everything. I love that.

I grew up watching David Letterman over here, and Letterman had a nightly show, and I always thought that was killer. I thought, “Man, what a fun job. You have a show every night where you have a new guest, and you have all these wacky things going on.” It was like a variety show.

I always thought that would be really fun, so the newsletter is my version of that. I started the newsletter in 2013, and it was just a Friday newsletter. It quickly became a list of 10 things I thought were worth sharing.

I had a friend, Hugh MacLeod, who was like, “Hey, I have a newsletter. It's bigger than any conference you've ever gone to.” He was talking about South by Southwest here in Austin. He's like, “I have a newsletter now, and it's bigger than South by Southwest.”

Jo: Oh, I remember him.

Austin: He would say, “Every time I have a new print, I put it out, and there's a button, and then they buy it.” He was like, “You've got to get it. This newsletter thing is killer.” This was in 2011 or something.

Jo: Yes, I still have his books. Blogging in Your Underwear or something.

Austin: Totally. So Hugh's a whole different story, but I was just like, “Oh, I should really get a newsletter.” Letterman always had a top 10 list on his show. I just always thought a 10 list was really fun. And of course the books are lists of 10 too.

So it just worked to have a weekly list of 10. It felt good, and it felt like an infinitely repeatable format. What I'm looking for as a creative person is an infinitely repeatable format that can go on and on and on and be new every time. So the list of 10 is something that people know the form of.

It goes back to the Taco Bell thing. They know the form, but they're not sure what's going to go inside. They know it's going to be a burrito, but they don't know what's going to be in the burrito, and that's the exciting part.

The newsletter, business-wise, was always a marketing cost for about the first eight years of its existence. I paid MailChimp to send it out.

Then in about 2021, when I hadn't done a book for a while, my agent said, “You know, you should really think about doing a paid tier of your newsletter.” And this is to his credit, because he doesn't make anything off the newsletter. He said, “There's this thing called Substack now that makes that really easy.”

So we moved to Substack in 2021 in October, and I started doing a Tuesday edition of the newsletter that was just for paid people. That grew enough that it's gone from a marketing cost to something that's almost—it's not quite as much as I make on my books, but it's close. And to be candid, my books sell pretty well.

So suddenly the newsletter has become this really healthy income stream. The newsletter to me is actually the day job now. The newsletter is what really keeps the lights on.

It's also the perfect mix. It's the day job, it's the thing that keeps income coming in on a regular basis, but it's also the thing I like to do the most.

I'm not like a traditional writer who likes to just get lost in their book and take years and years and go away. I'm someone who loves to be doing a lot of different things. The newsletter is a perfect format for me. I'm talking myself into not quitting, actually. It's funny.

It's gone from this thing that was a marketing cost to now it's a significant part of our income. That journey—such a bad word, journey—that trip has been very interesting. It's been really cool. But I'm also just lucky. I've been really lucky, and I think part of my thing is, I'm always just trying not to squander my luck.

Jo: Well, the book is fantastic, and I know people are going to love it. And the newsletter, of course. So tell us—

Where can people find you and your books and newsletter online?Austin: The easiest thing to do is to just go to AustinKleon.com, and that has links to everything—the books, the newsletter.

I do actually keep an old-school blog still. I'm one of the few people that still maintains their blog and keeps it up to date. I'm hedging my bets because I think in the end everything will come back to a self-hosted website. I think in the end everyone's going to just go back to their little websites, or at least I hope so.

Jo: Well, that was great, Austin. Thanks so much.

Austin: Oh, thank you.

The post Don’t Call It Art: Rediscovering Creative Joy With Austin Kleon first appeared on The Creative Penn.

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How do you write when your heart is broken? How do you go back into the publishing business after years away, knowing it's a very different industry to the one you left? With Jami Albright.

In the intro, InAudio is now distributing audiobooks to BookShop.org;
The Feedback Loop that Makes Better Writers [Author Nation Podcast]; Bones of the Deep on Goodreads.

This episode is sponsored by Publisher Rocket, which will help you get your book in front of more Amazon readers so you can spend less time marketing and more time writing. I use Publisher Rocket for researching book titles, categories, and keywords — for new books and for updating my backlist. Check it out at www.PublisherRocket.com

This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn

Jami Albright is the bestselling author of the Brides on the Run romances and the co-host of the Wish I'd Known Then Podcast. Today we're talking about her new novel, The Summer That Changed Us.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.

Show Notes

• How Jami started writing fiction at 47 and waited a year before publishing her first book
• Why she fictionalised her sister's terminal cancer story rather than writing a memoir
• The difference between writing as therapy and writing for the reader
• Reactivating an email newsletter after almost two years of silence
• Going wide with a standalone women's fiction novel after years in KU and rom-com
• Letting go of the frantic hustle of indie publishing and redefining what success looks like

You can find Jami at JamiAlbright.com.

Transcript of the interview with Jami AlbrightJo: Jami Albright is the bestselling author of the Brides on the Run romances and the co-host of the Wish I'd Known Then Podcast. Today we're talking about her new novel, The Summer That Changed Us. So, welcome to the show, Jami.

Jami: Thank you, Joanna. I've made it. This is my first time on The Creative Penn, so I can retire tomorrow.

Jo: And we were saying before the show, I really thought you had been on the show before, because over the years we've connected a lot. We met over a decade ago, didn't we? At the Smarter Artist Summit. I was like, “I'm sure you've been on the show,” and you haven't. So, yes, welcome.

Jami: Thank you. You've been on our show, though. We did an interview with you a few years ago.

Jo: Yes. Well, anyway, for anyone who doesn't follow your show—

Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and publishing.Jami: Okay. So I am the co-host of the Wish I'd Known Then Podcast for Writers. Sara Rosett and I have been doing that podcast since January 2020. Little did we know what was coming, and it really saved me, just mentally, being able to talk to people every week.

I never wrote a word of fiction until I was 47. I'd never really written anything. I have really bad grammar. I tell a lot of stories, and I would make up stories, but I'd never write them down because of the grammar thing.

But my reading buddy had her birthday coming up in about three months, and I thought, “You know what? I'm going to write Jennifer a book for her birthday. She doesn't care if I have bad grammar.” I just thought it would be on brand. It was so hard. I wrote myself into a corner very fast.

When I told her, she said, “Well, now you have to.” So I got Writing a Romance Novel for Dummies, I read that, and I started writing what is now Running from a Rock Star. But then my computer crashed and I lost it, and I was like, “Well, I'm not a writer.” So that was fine.

Then I turned 50, and I told my family, “I think the only thing I regret is not finishing that book.” Of course they were like, “Well, you need to just do it again.” I was like, “No, I had 30,000 words.”

A few weeks later my daughter came in and said, “Mom, I found this flash drive in my car. I think it has your book on it.” And it was 20,000 of the 30,000 words. So I was like, “Well, it's now or never.”

So I joined Romance Writers of America and got involved in a critique group, and they absolutely kicked my butt for a good six months. I think every week they were surprised I came back, because it was so brutal. I knew I didn't know anything, and they taught me to write.

Six months after I joined that first critique group, I won my first contest with the first 10 pages of that book. Then I just continued on. Three years later, I published Rock Star.

I was going to publish it two years later, but I went to the Smarter Artist Summit, where I met you. I was advised by Julia Cant and Sean Platt and some other people to wait—preferably to have more books written. I had the second book written when the first one came out, but it still needed to be edited.

So I waited a year, learned this business, and sold plasma to pay for my edits because I was poor. It was the best decision I ever made. Going to that conference, first of all, was the best $500 I've ever spent, and waiting that year really helped me learn this business.

When I published the book, I had an email list of 1,200 people before the book ever came out. None of those things would have been set up had I published right after the Smarter Artist Summit, which is what I'd thought I would do, in the summer.

So waiting gave me time to get everything set up so that when I published that book, it really took off from day one.

I had 1,200 people on that newsletter list who wanted that book, because I had done a preview promo. Instead of putting out the whole book, I think I put out four chapters, and then people signed up. I don't know that that works anymore.

Jo: I was going to say that. We should say to people, what was that, around 2016?

Jami: 2017. Things have changed.

Jo: Yes, things have changed, and I think this is so important. I had a question about this, and what they were implying was things that, like you said, we learned a decade ago. Things have changed.

We'll come back to how you're doing it now, but just in terms of finishing off how you got started—those books did really well, didn't they? You had a couple of years there.

How many books did you do? How did that go? Because you did have real success.

Jami: Yes. From 2017 until really the beginning of 2021, if you look at my sales graph and my income, it just increased, increased, increased. 2019 was my very best year, but 2020 was only slightly lower as far as book sales and income.

I only put out a book a year after the second book. The second book came out about six months after the first one, and after that it was about every nine months to a year that I put a book out. Everyone said you can't make money doing that, but I did.

I think those books are very tropey. They're very hooky. That helped. I also think the timing of those books was really good. Rom-com was really coming up, and my rom-com is pretty wacky, but it's also really emotional too.

If I get any critiques about them it's usually that “this book was way more emotional than I expected, and I was looking for something a little lighter.”

They're just really wacky. They're rom-coms. Wacky circumstances. Small town, so there's all these small-town people. I just think it was a good time to release those. Those were good years. I miss those years.

Jo: It's a good lesson, because it's not always up and to the right, is it? We're going to come back and revisit that.

So then the pandemic hit, and on a more personal level, over the last few years, you've had a deeply difficult time that has led to The Summer That Changed Us, your latest book.

So talk a bit about what's happened, why this book, and also why fictionalise it rather than write a memoir? I had that question.

Jami: Okay. So 2021, my income was dropping, but it was still okay. I was still making more than enough that—thank God I don't have to make all the money in our household—but there was a level that I wanted to.

At the end of 2021, my sister, who was the fourth of five sisters, had lived with cancer—non-smoker's lung cancer—for 10 years. She had the kind that, if you had a certain mutation, there were medications that worked amazingly well. Until they didn't, and then they put you on another class of that medication.

So for 10 years, that's what she did. She missed work maybe three times in 10 years. People who met her never knew she had cancer unless they knew us. She just never acted like she had cancer. We would have to say, “Remember, you have cancer.”

At the end of 2021, they ran out of that class of drugs. There were some being tested, but none had been approved. When she was diagnosed, she was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer. You don't survive very long having stage four lung cancer with no medication.

So I saw the writing on the wall pretty much at the end of 2021, but of course I was very hopeful that they could do something. By May of 2022, it was clear things were not going well. In July of 2022, she got a six-to-twelve-week diagnosis.

She just went in one day thinking she was about to get radiation, not knowing anything, and they were like, “No, we can't do radiation, and you should get your affairs in order because you have six to twelve weeks to live.”

Jo: Oh.

Jami: People who've been through it know this feeling. It's like being hit by a wrecking ball. It just knocks everything off your axis. Your whole world implodes into this one moment, this person that you love.

I live four hours away from my family. They all still live in the same small town. I was in Dallas at my daughter's at the time, and they live about 30 miles outside of Dallas. So I went to my mom's, and I stayed there.

I was there for almost six months, if you count the time I was back and forth, because she was not doing great but she was still okay. She had always rallied and come back.

But once she got the diagnosis, I stayed. She would go home, but she would come back to my mom's during the day, because her husband worked. She was a teacher, so she was off during the summer. I was just there, and we all just took care of her.

When she decided to go on hospice, she wanted to be at my mom's. She didn't want to be at home—they lived out in the country. She wanted to be at my mom's, so we set her up in the living room.

We're redneck country people. We bring our crazy people in, our sick people, just out for everybody to see. She was just in the middle of the living room in her hospital bed, and the world just revolved around that hospital bed.

Once that happened, once I knew at the end of 2021 that things were not going to go well—I really did not believe she would die. But she died a month after she went on hospice in October of 2022.

That whole year, I was useless. I could not write. I couldn't think of anything to write. I write funny. How do you write funny when your heart's broken? I couldn't do it.

After she died, I knew it would take a while. I knew it would maybe even be a year. But as the weeks turned into months and the months turned into years, I haven't written—except for her obituary—I've not written a word since she died until I started writing this book a year ago. I started it on April 19th.

Jo: I mean, the stories of grief—there seems to be no way of escaping whatever it ends up being. You didn't choose your response. Your deep grief was just there, and you couldn't write. I feel like sometimes people just try and force it. It sounds like that's what you needed, and you have done that.

So what then gave you the impetus to finally write—and to choose fiction?Jami: I didn't write memoir. I did think about doing a memoir, but I don't read memoir, and I don't know how to write it.

I was already behind the eight ball, trying to write a book at all because it had been forever. I don't need to learn how to write something completely different. Plus, it just felt too close to write the memoir.

I had been in Mexico City with my daughter, who has an event planning company, and we were there scouting locations for one of her events. Janet Margot lives in Mexico City, so I reached out, and we had dinner.

We were talking, and she had had two big losses about the same time that my sister passed away. So we were talking about how difficult it is afterwards, just getting your head back into a space of being creative at all.

She said, “You really should write this book. You should tell this story. It hits everything: middle-aged women dealing with middle-age things. You've got your parents that you were dealing with, and then your sister. You should write this story.”

I said, “No, thank you. I lived it. I don't want to write it.” But it just wouldn't go away. I couldn't figure out how I would tell it. Whose point of view? I couldn't do it from the dying sister's point of view because I didn't think I could be authentic.

I was afraid to tell it from multiple POVs because the book has a lot of characters in it. My family is gigantic—my immediate family, my sisters, husbands, nieces and nephews, my kids, my mom and dad—there are 35 of us. Almost all of those are in and out of my mom's house all the time. So I knew I couldn't do multiple point of view.

One day, I was driving home to my mom's house, and it just hit me. The whole story laid out in front of me, and that's what I did. The first draft was pretty much just a retelling of what happened to us. I added some fictional elements, but I just wanted to get the story out. It was hard.

I started Adderall on April 19th of 2025—I know that, because that's the day I started this book. I do call this the book that Adderall wrote, because I could sit and focus for three or four hours, which I'd never really been able to do.

I would come to Starbucks and I would sit and write this book, and I would cry sitting in Starbucks, like a crazy person. People would walk by and slide a napkin onto the table and just keep walking, because I'm sitting there crying like crazy.

I was so superstitious, and things were working so well, that I was afraid not to come and write at Starbucks. Staying at home, I think, would have been really hard. I would maybe have sunk into a depression had I done this at home. So I just wrote the whole book at Starbucks.

After I wrote the first draft, I went back in and made it more fictional. But a lot of the book—especially her stuff—is a lot of what happened. She was just crazy. I tell a story in the book that, this is the absolute truth, this happened.

She was in college, and she had convinced my younger sister to go to a honky-tonk club because they were having a Miss Honky-Tonk contest. Before she could get up on stage to compete as Miss Honky-Tonk, she got in a fight with some girl, and the girl hit her in the head with a bottle and split her head open. She was bleeding.

My youngest sister was like, “We've got to go to the ER.” And she just refused, because there was a $300 cash prize for winning, and she needed it to make rent. So she borrowed a towel from the bartender, wrapped it around her head, competed with that bloody towel on her head, and won that stupid contest.

That story in and of itself was my sister. Everything about her is in that story. So a lot of the stories in there happened to her in one way or another. What happens to June in the book happened to my sister.

Jo: This is interesting, because the same thing memoir writers face is something perhaps you face: how much of the writing is therapy and how much is for the reader?

You said you sat there crying. Absolutely, writing for therapy is very important—but when you come to edit, there might be things that your therapy side of you is like, “That's so important to me.”

How do you kill your darlings when you're editing your sister's life?Jami: That was hard. I had to take out a lot of what was in the first draft, mostly the stories. Once she came home on hospice, it was just a steady stream of people coming in, and everybody had a story about her.

What I found in editing was that Hope, the main character, was mostly a spectator in those scenes instead of being actively part of them. So I had to take those out, because they didn't serve the purpose of the book.

I committed early on to: while I wanted to tell the story, I did not want it to be self-indulgent. I did not want it to be a therapy session that I sold to people as a story. Because of that, I think that really helped. I really did think about that as I was revising.

I sent it to a developmental editor, and I don't know how great she was, but she gave me some really good advice about a couple of things.

One was, “There's just not enough conflict in this book. You say that Hope and the father have this really contentious relationship, yet we don't see it. There's a little bit of it here and there, but you're not really digging into that.”

It's hard, because while the rest of the world doesn't know, my family knows that this is a lot of our story. I just had to let that go and not worry about what my family thought.

They had all given me permission. I'd sort of said, “I want to do this. Are you guys okay with that?” I talked to her husband, and everybody was okay with me doing it. But I couldn't worry about what they were going to think.

I would repeat to myself: if they want to tell this story, they can write their own book. I'm writing what I saw and telling a fictionalised story that will hopefully honour her, but also help other people feel like they're being seen, and also be entertaining. If you're going to write a book, it needs to be somewhat entertaining.

Jo: I don't think you can help yourself. You're funny.

Jami: Yes. The book is really funny. I tell people that and they're like, “Hmm, really?” And I'm like, “It is really funny.” But it's also really sad.

Jo: Well, I think that's the truth—to defend myself. There is a lot of humour in grief. There is death and dying, and it's a human condition.

Jami: It is a human condition, yep.

Jo: There's comedy in all of the human condition. That's just the way it is, right?

I heard you mention on an interview, I can't remember where it was, that you feel very connected to this book, and you're worried that people judging it or giving it a bad review might feel like an insult to your sister.

How are you dealing with these kinds of fears about how to separate ourselves from our books?Jami: I've been in therapy—like, literal therapy—for that, because I felt like that would be hard. So far, I've only gotten a few reviews back. They've all been good reviews. I haven't had anyone say they hate it.

I just have had to separate myself. It's not personal. Reviews are never personal. People not liking your book is never personal.

That's just a mindset. I've had to change my mind about that. Knowing that's a pitfall I could fall into, I really keep it top of mind. My family knows that's an issue, so they know they have to pull me out of that hole if I drop in. So that's really how I've handled it so far. We'll see.

Jo: Maybe it's time as well. You're almost back to the “book is your baby” situation. As the years pass, the book almost becomes separate, doesn't it? How you feel about your first bride book is probably like, “It's not even me anymore.”

Jami: Right. I learned early that your book isn't really your baby. Once you publish it, it's your product. So that has never been very hard for me. I still hate bad reviews, and I take them personally like everybody else does, if I let myself.

But ultimately, this is a book that I'm putting out for entertainment. Yes, it's very personal. Yes, it means a lot to me. But if people don't like it, it isn't because they don't like my dead sister. They just don't like my writing.

Jo: It's tough, but it's good to talk about, because this is something many people feel. My memoir Pilgrimage—it's not the same at all—but I was just so scared of judgment. The fear of judgment. What people would think of me. That's kind of different, but—

It's this question of how it'll land. The reality is, not many people read these books anyway.

Jami: Well, I have worried about how it would land, but mostly I worry about how it would land with the people I love. My mom read it last week. I was there while she was reading it. That was no fun. She laughed, but it was devastating to her.

She's like, “It's great, and I hate it.” Because it is so raw and real to her still—well, to all of us. That's where I worry, how it's going to land with them. But again, I've had to let that go. I had to let it go during the writing, because if I worried about that, then I would not have told an honest story.

That was another thing—I didn't want it to be self-indulgent, and I wanted it to be honest. As honest as I could make it, even to the point of making people uncomfortable.

There's a line. Once you cross it, there's no getting you back after that. So I walked that line really carefully, because I did want it to be honest about how I felt, how other people I know who've been through something like this feel.

Also, just relationships. Because when you're in a big family like my sisters and I—we adore each other, but we can also go toe-to-toe real fast. It can get ugly, because we know each other really well. We're also a little bit redneck, so we don't pull any punches.

Your sisters are always the most honest people in your life. I wanted that to be true in this book too—both sides of that story.

Jo: Let's circle back to the business stuff and some of the things we talked about, because obviously this has been a really difficult time. There was no way to deal with it in any other way, but your business has changed. You had these great few years, good sales, and then you had other priorities.

So how are you rebooting the business? Lots of people end up taking a few years out for whatever reason.

How are you rebooting the business to try and sell some books?Jami: To be honest, I have the remnants of a business. I have tried over the last four years to run some ads to get the Bride's books going, but here's something that's very interesting, and if somebody can tell me why this happened, I would love to hear it.

These books that have sold so many books—I mean, so many books—I could not give them away. It didn't matter what I did. I changed covers, I changed blurbs, I put them on sale, I took them off sale, I ran ads. Ads wouldn't really move the needle.

I know that at a certain point, when you haven't published and your books get pushed down in the algorithm, that is an uphill battle. But it was almost like, one day they just fell off, and once they started falling, I could not get them back. I just couldn't.

So that I didn't make myself crazy—because also during this time, I was just trying to keep my head above water—when I would deal with my books or go into my dashboard, I would feel horrible. I was already feeling horrible, so I didn't need to feel more horrible. So I just sort of let them go after a certain point.

I've now started running some Facebook ads. I have one Facebook ad that's working really well, knock on wood, right now for my first Bride's book. The problem is, this book and my Bride's books are different. The voice and the tone are the same, but they're really different in a lot of ways. They're the same in a lot of ways.

This book doesn't have any sex; the other books don't have anybody dying. But some of the things are really similar. So I may have some crossover.

For whatever reason, this ad is working. My book one is ranked better than it's been ranked in forever—really good. I'm not spending a ton of money to do it. So I don't know what changed. I don't know if I'll ever know.

I've revised my newsletter, and that's worked well. I still have around a 35 to 40% open rate on a newsletter that I didn't send out for almost two years. I was sending it out, but then I kind of stopped, and then I started again.

Jo: I was going to ask you about that, because I often get people emailing me. They're like, “I have a really old newsletter from several years ago. I haven't emailed them for years.”

So what did you say in that first email? Like, “Hey, I'm back”?Jami: I mean, I'm just like, “Remember me?” It really was kind of like that. Just, “I'm back. You guys know life has happened. I'm sure you understand. If you're still here, thank you so much. I have been writing. I have this book that I think some of you will really love.”

That's really how it was. From the first email, even that first email had a higher open rate. I think it was close to 45%. I had not sent out a newsletter in two years literally.

Jo: People were like, “What happened?”

Jami: They're like, “Oh, she didn't die. That was her sister, not her.” But I've just been really fortunate. They've been really encouraging. Every time I send one out, I get really encouraging emails back. So I've sent out about the book.

The majority of my readers are KU readers because my books are in KU. But this book is going wide. One of the things I'm doing because I have been a little concerned about… Janet Margot does a lot of Amazon ads stuff and she knows a lot about Amazon.

We've talked a lot about whether I should use my real name, my pen name, or come up with another name. Should I worry about my readers buying the book and messing up my Also Boughts?

All of those things, because my readers are romance readers. Some of them read women's fiction, but for the most part, they're romance readers.

I've decided to stick with Jami Albright and not worry about it. There are just things you can't control, so I've had to hold everything with a really open hand with this book.

I am offering the book on my website. I'm selling it at $7.99—I chose a high price point, because I just feel like, to sit with the other books that I want it to sit with, I need that price point.

So I'm offering it on my website, starting at the end of this week, for $5. If they're KU readers and they don't buy books, but they want the book, they can get it for $5 on my website, which I think is reasonable.

Jo: Mm. Absolutely.

Jami: If that's too much for them, I understand and I get it. Time, things are hard right now, and if they can't do that, it's going to be in libraries, so they can request it at their library. But right now that's the plan.

Hopefully that helps with the Also Boughts a little bit too. Even though, again, I just can't worry about those things. As a gift to my readers, I want to do this for them as well—give them a discount.

Jo: And obviously this is a standalone, right? This is not—

Jami: Yes, it is.

Jo: Again, a bit like memoir, all the book marketing we talk about in fiction is “write a series.” It's much easier. So it is difficult to market a standalone in general. And this is something that happened, so it is a standalone situation.

So do you feel like you're back in terms of writing? Have you got plans for more books, or is this a business for you going forward?

Do you feel like you want to re-enter this whole world?Jami: I do. I have an idea for a book similar to this one—not in the same kind of genre, I mean, of women's fiction, kind of midlife fiction stuff. I have an idea.

I had nothing for months and months and months, and a couple of months ago, this idea kind of came to me. I was like, “Oh, that's not bad.” So I'm mulling it over—I do a lot of mulling—and that's the next book I think I will write.

I don't know that I'll write rom-coms again. Not because I don't love them. I do, and I love my rom-coms. But I'm just different. You do not go through something like this and come out on the other side the same.

I don't know that I could carry an entire rom-com through without it being even more emotional than mine are now. So for right now, I'm going to write another one of these kinds of books where it's got a lot of emotion, family dynamic, tension and dynamics.

Jo: That's great. I do feel like once you've written the book that was waiting—your sister's book—then more things arrive, and it's great to hear that that is arriving for you.

And of course, we change. One of the nice things about writing for the long term and building more of a name brand is that you change, and your readers either follow you or they don't, but it's your life.

So I think that's a good reason to have one pen name. I obviously have two, but my fiction pen name I've written all kinds of genres under.

Why else would we keep doing this? I don't want to write the same book over and over again.Jami: Right. Believe me, I've had to eat a lot of crow over the last four years, and it's tasty with ketchup.

I have decided that a lot of the stuff I said is true: about you write in one genre, you give the people exactly what they want, and you give it to them over and over again. I believe all of that. I still believe those things. It's just that I don't know that I'm capable of doing that right now.

Also, I'm older. I am about doing the things that bring me joy and are not a drudgery. I want to say this, because I miss the success. I miss who I thought I was during that time. I miss the recognition. I'll freely admit it.

I miss being the person doing the thing that everybody said couldn't be done. “You can't make money with one book a year.” Well, watch me. And I did. I miss that.

What I don't miss, and I've had to be really, really honest with myself, which has been difficult—I don't miss the anxiety that came with that. There was a lot of franticness. I think that if you are in a lot of groups, you see that franticness.

I've had to step back, like I've had to step back, and then go back into these groups, you hear authors and see authors, and there's just this frantic sense that we're losing everything, and we have to hold on so tight to everything.

I was like that. I checked my ads constantly. I checked my dashboard constantly. My mom used to say, “This should be fun.” I'm like, “Mom, it's a business. It's not fun.” But I recognise that I loved that so much that I held onto it so tight. I don't want to go back to that. I don't have the energy for that.

Since this all happened, I've gained four more grandchildren than I had. I have six grandchildren now. I want to spend time with them. I want to spend time with my adult children. I want to spend time with my mom and dad.

So I can't be frantic about my sales—are they going up, are they dropping?—and give emotionally to the people I love in my life.

If the last four years have taught me anything, it is that the one thing you can never get back is time. You can never get it back, and that is so important to me right now.

With this book—and one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you when we were talking about when I would do it—I wanted to do it before it came out, because I've already won.

Writing this book, writing a book that honours the bravest person I've ever known and doing the second-hardest thing that I've ever had to do, is the win. That's the win. Whatever happens with this book afterwards is just what happens with this book afterwards.

It doesn't change who I am, and you told me that when we were in Vegas two years ago. That conversation really changed a lot for me, because you said, “You are a successful author.”

I was still trying to come up with a plan to be a successful author again, and you were like, “You are a successful author. You've had success. That makes you a successful author. You don't have to chase that.”

That changed so much of my thinking. If I could leave listeners with anything, it is that we need to recognise the things we can't control and just deal with the things we can control.

That's kind of how my sister lived. She could not control her cancer, but she could control how she responded to it and how she went forward.

I think a lot of times, when bad things happen, we want to make sense of them. We want a reason for them. And a lot of times there's just no reason. There's no reason my sister died. There's no reason she left two kids and a husband devastated and a family that just has a giant hole in it. There's no reason for that.

What defines us is not figuring out why that happened. It's what we do with that going forward. I think that's important for me to remember when I start getting caught up in all the franticness of this business.

Jo: Yes. Or not, as the case may be. You can just let the book be what it is. And I do feel like these deeper books, they're more slow burn. You wrote books that ran, ran like the bride. Now we're not running like the bride.

Jami: I'm tired. I don't run unless a wild animal's chasing me.

Jo: Exactly. Look, we're out of time, but just tell people, if they haven't listened, a bit about your podcast, Wish I'd Known Then with Sara Rosett.

Tell people what they can find over on that podcast and why you're still doing it. You've been doing it throughout the whole time. While not writing, you've still been podcasting.

Jami: It absolutely saved my life. It's kept me in this business. While I haven't been publishing, I still know what's going on. I know about direct sales, I know about what's happening behind the scenes, with Facebook ads. I've kept in touch with those things because of our podcast.

It's an interview podcast like yours, but we talk to people about what they wish they'd known about indie publishing. Most people have some certain thing that they've been working on or doing, and we talk to them a little bit about that too.

We ask the same questions every week to every guest, and it's so interesting how different the answers are, and yet how similar they are.

I think that helps when you're going through it and you're like, “God, I must be the only one feeling this way.” But you tune into a podcast, and you hear week after week, “Oh, no, there are other people feeling the same way I'm feeling, or struggling with the same things I'm struggling with.”

Hopefully we give people things to shoot for and to aspire to. We have some amazing guests. They've all been really gracious and really honest. I don't know if it's the questions, or just because Sara and I are our style, but they're really honest with us when they answer the questions.

Jo: It's a great show. I recommend it a lot.

Jami: Thank you.

Jo: Where can people find you and your books online?Jami: You can find me at JamiAlbright.com—that's J-A-M-I-Albright.com. I'm on all the socials as Jami Albright Author. My books are on Amazon right now, but this book is actually now on all the retailers. So that's where you can find me.

Jo: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Jami. That was great.

Jami: It was an honour. Thank you so much.

The post Writing Through Grief And Rebooting an Indie Author Business With Jami Albright first appeared on The Creative Penn.

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How is AI transforming accessibility for indie authors — and why should you care even if you consider yourself able-bodied? What happens when the tools designed to help people with disabilities end up making everyone's creative business better? Jeff Adams, accessibility expert and romance author, explores how AI is opening doors that were previously closed.

In the intro, Spotify Audiobook Innovations; The Economics of Convention Life [The Indy Author]; Friction in your Author Business [Self-Publishing with ALLi].

Today's show is sponsored by Draft2Digital, self-publishing with support, where you can get free formatting, free distribution to multiple stores, and a host of other benefits. Just go to www.draft2digital.com to get started.

This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn

Jeff Adams is the author of YA thrillers and gay romance, and the co-author of Content for Everyone, a practical guide for creative entrepreneurs to produce accessible and usable web content.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.

Show Notes

• How ending a long-running podcast made space for more writing — and how to know when it's time to let go of a good thing
• What accessibility really means for indie authors and why your digital content might be excluding part of your audience
• How AI agents like Claude Cowork are removing physical and cognitive barriers for authors with disabilities, chronic pain, or limited energy
• The culture of shame around AI use in the writing community and why blanket anti-AI statements can be ableist
• Practical tools including NotebookLM, ElevenReader, and ChatGPT for marketing copy, metadata management, and multimodal research
• Exciting futures in personalised reading, real-time translation, and AI browser agents that could change how everyone interacts online

You can find Jeff at JeffAdamsWrites.com. Jeff also now has a SubStack at
contentforeveryone.substack.com

Transcript of the interview with Jeff AdamsJo: Jeff Adams is the author of YA thrillers and gay romance, and the co-author of Content for Everyone, a practical guide for creative entrepreneurs to produce accessible and usable web content. Welcome back to the show, Jeff.

Jeff: Thanks so much, Jo. It's good to be back.

Jo: It is. You were last on the show in March 2023, so over three years ago now.

Give us a bit of an update on your writing and publishing business and what it looks like at the moment.Jeff: Sure. I think the biggest thing that happened is that my husband Will, who is also a writer, we ended the Big Gay Fiction Podcast at the end of 2024, after 470-something episodes. It was basically time to do that. So we both focused on writing from that point.

In 2025 we had some of our biggest successes in getting writing out into the world. I refound my groove—my difficulty in writing went away finally. We talked a little bit about that back in 2023 too.

Will started a new pen name and started producing again, and it was really good to be able to move in that direction.

Jo: Was this the hockey romance that really hit at the right time?

Jeff: You know, I wish I could have capitalised more on Heated Rivalry when it came out, but I did get hockey books out, and I think I did get to ride that wave a little bit there too.

Jo: Yes, and if people don't know about that, that was a super popular streaming series. Was that based on a book?

Jeff: It was, yes. Rachel Reid was the author of that book and that series that then Jacob Tierney optioned and made into what fairly turned into a global phenomenon at the end of 2025.

Jo: Yes, absolutely. Although I particularly liked Red, White and Royal Blue. That was the one I liked. Not so much into hockey.

But anyway, I just wanted to ask you about the Big Gay Fiction Podcast. As you say, you did hundreds of episodes over many years. You and I met over podcasting. You've had lots of connections with people. You ended it, and I know you struggled with ending it, but it sounds like it went really well for you. So maybe you could talk a bit about—

How do you know when it's time to end something—a good thing rather than something bad? Does that make more space for writing, essentially?

Jeff: It absolutely did make more space for writing for both of us, in particular for me because I have a day job. I balance everything on the creative side with the day job.

Will and I had been talking about it for over a year. It just was like, it's really time. After nine years, getting to that 470 mark, we thought about trying to get to 10 years and we thought about, if not 10, then getting to 500 and ending on a milestone.

As we looked at everything in our creative business, it was like, this is fun, we enjoy it, but we're not getting as much out of it as we might be if we were actually also writing books, which we also really want to do.

It became a time thing and what was the best use of the time. We absolutely miss it occasionally. The whole Heated Rivalry thing, I would've loved to have had episodes to talk about that on, but in the long run, it was worth it.

Jo: I mean, one of the things with a podcast, particularly around fiction, was that it was a marketing angle for your fiction. This show is a marketing angle mainly for my nonfiction.

So what did you replace the podcast with, in terms of book marketing?Jeff: It was really stepped-up email marketing. I'd always had a list. Will started a list, of course, as he started his new pen name. So it was really turning on that, focusing on that, getting some email marketing with a Bargain Booksy and a Fussy Librarian and a BookBub occasionally to do that work.

To be honest, even though we covered things in our genre that if you like what we're talking about, you should like our books, there was never as much of a connection there as you'd want there to be.

Even from that book marketing angle, these other things that we can do, it's also a better spend of the money to get those types of promos than it was to continue running the show.

Jo: Yes, that is interesting. I mean, obviously I think about podcasting a lot since I have this one, and I put Books and Travel on a hiatus and that was meant to help my fiction and definitely didn't help my fiction sales. But I want to bring it back again because I love doing it.

Do you have this hankering sometimes? Do you think you'd ever do the podcast again? Because you are also quite into all the technical stuff and all that.

Jeff: It's possible. I've toyed with the idea of doing a short accessibility podcast geared towards creatives, tilting to the same audience that Content for Everyone does.

Then I come back and look at the time—is my time better served writing new fiction or perhaps starting a Substack, which I also toy with the idea of, for accessibility stuff?

So it bounces around in my head to do another show, but I haven't really decided to jump on that yet.

Jo: Yes, and I think that waiting is really good. As you say, you quit a big thing and you don't have to rush to fill it again.

I love that you guys are writing more books. So I wanted us to talk about that up front because I know people who listen to this show—I encourage people to start podcasts if you want to, but equally it can take a lot of time. So that's fantastic.

Now, you mentioned accessibility, and I feel like the word can be quite difficult for people. So let's just start with a definition.

What is accessibility? Why do you care and why should we care?Jeff: So accessibility is really about making sure that whatever the thing is, whether it's something out in the physical world or in the online world, that everybody has access to it.

Access to the information, access to getting into a building or being able to cross the street appropriately, whatever that is—that the accessibility of the thing is high. So that regardless of who is approaching it, they can interact with whatever the thing is.

If we put that into the digital world, it's about making sure that text on a screen can be perceived by anybody, whether they're trying to read it visually or if they're trying to read it through a screen reader or through a braille monitor.

Whatever that is, they need to be able to interact with it, get the information they need, do all the functions of whatever it is on the screen. Check out on Amazon, check out at their favourite e-commerce place, be able to get the products in their cart, check out, et cetera.

For creatives, it's about the things that we do: the websites that we build for ourselves, the e-commerce platforms that we use, our email marketing, our social media posts.

Making all of that as accessible as we can so that we're not perhaps missing a part of our audience or our prospective audience from being able to engage with our work and in turn, hopefully, buy our books and enjoy our books and become a fan.

This became important to me because of my day job. I hadn't really considered this—like, I think most people don't—until I started working at UsableNet. It's going to be 15 years I've been at that company come this autumn, and I really started to see the impacts because UsableNet is all about accessibility on the digital front.

I really started to learn, being a project manager for them, what all of that meant and how it impacted people who couldn't buy something online, couldn't book a hotel room, couldn't book an airline ticket. It just really became something I got passionate about.

I ended up writing the book because I realised that nobody talks to creatives about this. Nobody tells the independent author what they should do to help make their digital stuff accessible so that they don't miss people.

I never expected my day job to interact with my creative side so much, but this certainly has over the last few years.

Jo: I mean, has it got better? Like we said, you were on here three years ago. We did talk about some of the things around EPUB formats and taking off DRM and what we need to do on our websites—labelling images, for example, and that kind of thing.

Do you think accessibility has gotten better?Jeff: I think the awareness of it has improved, both within the creative community and in the broader web ecosphere, that the awareness is better.

There's so much knowledge that needs to go into creating something that is accessible. Sometimes there's so much that you have to think about with colours and alt tags on images and all the little bits and pieces, if it doesn't really come to muscle memory, it's easy for it to fall off.

There's a survey that's done by WebAIM every year about the top one million homepages out in the universe, and they surveyed those for just the things that an automated scan can detect, which is a small portion of overall accessibility, and the number of errors across that top million actually ticked up this year.

Even though there's all these laws around the world—people get sued all the time in the US—the number of errors ticked up for the first time in a few years.

So I think the awareness is up, but I think being able to take action on it and make the time to take action on it isn't where it needs to be.

Jo: So last time you gave us all those tips. I'll refer people back to that and also to your book Content for Everyone, which has got loads of great stuff in.

I wanted to talk to you for this show because I was sitting watching Claude Cowork—now I use Claude Code a lot more—but updating 140 titles on IngramSpark, where me clicking things and there's like 15 clicks per record on IngramSpark updates for pricing, is an absolute nightmare.

I was watching the AI do the work and I realised this isn't just saving me time, it's actually saving my wrist and my arm from repetitive strain injury. That's when I thought about this accessibility thing.

As you mentioned, for example being physically accessible into a building, say someone's in a wheelchair, they can't necessarily get into a building if there's no ramp.

I was thinking that for many years, being an indie author, being a writer online, there's also been these physical barriers because there's a lot of plumbing and clicking for us. So I wondered, starting with an attitude around a shift in who this is opening up to—

How is AI starting to help people with these accessibility issues?Jeff: Yes, there's so much opportunity around this. We should note, just to timestamp this, that we're talking on 14th April 2026, because who knows what will change, even in an hour from now.

I think Cowork was one of the first things that we saw, and that's only been out since the very top of this year. Being able to do actual agentic tasks. Other things have sort of gotten there, but Cowork really opened it up.

You mentioned the repetitive stress that you would've had clicking all of those forms on IngramSpark across 140 books. But there's that type of stress, chronic pain, cognitive drain for somebody who may have some cognitive disability and trying to work through that form.

The cognitive energy just might drain out and maybe knock them out for several days after trying to get through that, or the tasks take them multiple days to do. Someone who has lower vision, someone who's trying to work through that form with a screen reader—all of that draws energy, draws focus.

Now we've got something where, with plain language, we could say something like: here's all my pricing information, I've logged into IngramSpark, go update these books. Obviously the prompt's going to be a little more than that, but in broad terms, that's what we're going to tell it.

Jo: Hmm.

Jeff: And being able to have it go through and do the thing. If it gets stuck, have it come back and say, “Hey, I've got trouble with this. Please help me.”

That can just free up so much of the drains that people can have—the things that can take them out of doing the part of the work that they need to do for an author business.

They can go write the book through whatever process you're going to use to do that, rather than getting caught up in something like having to update all those books on IngramSpark.

Jo: You mentioned writing the book there. I have this real sense of being an able-bodied indie author in terms of my computer use and my ability to write a whole book, a 70,000-word thriller that I write regularly.

We're all special in some way, but I do have a reasonably normal brain where I can do this work without too much strain. It's hard work, but I can do it.

I meet people who are now using AI to help them write, to help them organise their work—maybe someone has dyslexia or ADHD or cognitive issues or pain—there's just so many things that I take for granted that don't affect me.

I hear from people who, at this point in time in the community, are almost shamed for using AI to write.

So I wanted to bring this up to discuss it under the terms of accessibility. Do you have any thoughts on that?Jeff: I have real difficulty with people who will say anything in the broad range of, “I don't need to use this thing, and therefore you should not either.” Which is adjacent to indie anti-AI speak that there is out there.

Certainly we're living right now at probably the highest point that it's ever been, where more and more there's a sentiment towards not using AI for whatever the reason is.

I totally respect that people can have concerns about the environment and about energy use and water use, et cetera. Not to mention all the other things that are on the more difficult side of AI.

To shame someone who may not be able to put their story out there without the use of that AI, whichever one they're using, or to shame them because they're using AI to run part of their business—updating IngramSpark, doing other things like that—I think it can come down to there being some ableism there.

Ther is some privilege behind that too, where they're just like, “I don't need this, and you shouldn't have it either.”

I want to give people just a sliver of an idea of what this can mean for someone who is disabled and what AI can unlock for them. There is a person on LinkedIn that I follow whose name is Hannah Desmond. She's an ADHD coach and a former software developer, and very recently she posted this on LinkedIn.

This is a paraphrase of what she said, but: having something that can meet you where you are and help you bridge that gap is what I think I have found so helpful about using AI.

Here's what I keep coming back to. Without that support, I wasn't more motivated or more capable. I was just stuck. That's the bit that gets lost.

We've been taught that struggling is how you know you're doing it properly. So when something reduces the struggle, it can feel wrong—even when it's the thing that actually makes the work possible. Because there's a difference between avoiding thinking and being able to think at all. I think that rounds it up.

She's talking about her time as a software developer, but you can apply that to any realm of AI when we're thinking about trying to shame someone for why they may be using it.

We may not know that they have a disability because we don't always share that part of ourselves. So I really feel strongly about that and how we are in this culture of shame.

Jo: Yes. It drives me up the wall, actually. But I will also say: you don't have to have a disability or accessibility issues in order to use AI in whatever way you personally decide is okay—talking to the listeners now.

I think Orna Ross from the Alliance of Independent Authors says it well, which is you should have your own AI policy. So you personally decide where your lines are, how it helps you, what you want to keep for you, and what you want help with.

I was also thinking in terms of accessibility around money. Again, for many of us, professional cover design, professional editing, professional human-level translation, these are things that are pretty pricey for many people. So again, this makes it more accessible.

One of the reasons we got into the indie way and being indie authors was to try and remove the barriers to entry to people who have been excluded from the environment of publishing.

So, yes, it is really hard to talk about this, and yet that's why I wanted to talk about it, because—

There's so many variables for each individual and there's no situation that's the same, really, is there?Jeff: No, not at all. The things that I may need to do my work in the most efficient way possible is different from the way that you're going to work, is different than the way my husband's going to work, is different than every other person and the way that they're going to work.

Which is why any kind of blanket statement about “I don't need something and therefore you shouldn't need it either” can just be so problematic, because we have no idea what someone else is going through.

Either it's a permanent part of their lives or maybe it's something that is happening temporarily with them where they might need to leverage other tools.

Jo: Yes. Talking about that temporary, I think I really got the first sense of this when I had COVID the first time, which was really bad. I remember I was so sick, the only thing I could do was listen to an audiobook. I couldn't think, I couldn't read. It was really probably months of not having my brain back.

Then the other thing that's happened as I age, as women age, is menopause kicks in and the brain fog is a real thing. I've heard from other people too who've said having Claude or whoever, an AI tool, to help with the brain fog is so important because otherwise I just wouldn't be able to gather my thoughts. Again, as you said—

Even if we don't need these things now, it's quite likely we're going to need them at some point, given ageing, given the potential for injury and disease. I mean, we don't escape this alive, do we?

Jeff: Yes, that's a great point because unless we're extremely lucky as individuals, we're all likely to have some sort of a disability in our lives at some point.

I know for me, as I age and my eyes get more and more tired after being in front of a screen all day for work, and then whatever creative stuff I do in the afternoon on a book—when it comes near bedtime and I do want to read, I probably want to do that with an audiobook, much more audio, especially for any long reading project.

That can also be like, if I have a long document or a long article to read, I am likely to give it to ElevenReader, let it load itself up, and then listen to it, because I take the information in better than trying to follow words across a screen.

Jo: Yes. Jonathan, my husband, now also listens to a lot of academic papers on ElevenReader. Most of us will know it as where we publish some audiobooks from ElevenLabs, or you can also publish other things there. So it is super useful to think about what we can do with ElevenReader.

Another thing that I found really useful recently is NotebookLM. On NotebookLM, there is a free tier. You can put various things in there and then create a custom audio.

So this is something I've been doing as part of research. You can put in, say, 10 YouTube videos or some PDFs or your book or whatever, and then you can create a custom audio. Then I'll go for a walk and I'll listen to the custom audio, and then I'll go back and look at the detail of what it was.

It gives me the framework of whatever I'm thinking about on a broader level, and then I can come back to the details. So again, it's this multimodal approach that can help us manage our energy, I guess.

Jeff: And it's all about the managing of the energy, I think, too. That is a great way to think about the accessibility of it all.

You mentioned a great use there for NotebookLM. That could also be putting your book in there and having it help you build a world bible or something like that. Or building marketing materials off of that.

There's a lot of things now that NotebookLM can do in terms of helping you create FAQs maybe for a newsletter or for your website, and building video stuff off of the material that it has.

So there's a lot of options there, and ever-growing options that can be useful for someone to manage any number of the things that they may need in their creative business.

Jo: Yes. In fact, talking about Claude, there are a lot of Claude plugins now, skills and integrations. Shopify just released a Claude plugin and many of us now have Shopify stores.

I have a lot of products with a lot of different variations and the metadata. There's so much metadata. And again, I'm just so pleased now that I can work with Cowork and get it to actually update directly into Shopify.

In fact, coming back, you mentioned updating alt tags earlier. That's something again that AI could help you update—the back list of your alt tags on a website. I've now got my Cowork doing EPUBs so I could finally update all my EPUBs with back matter and all of this kind of thing.

So I feel like perhaps we could go beyond accessibility to talk about amplification.All the things that we didn't do because it was too tiring and we just couldn't be bothered, or it would just be way too much work, that now it's opened up as a possibility because of these tools.

Jeff: Absolutely. I mean, you look at a backlist as large as yours and the things that you're now able to do. I didn't know that Claude had a Shopify plugin. So the abilities that we have now to maybe do things in the business that we hadn't before.

One of the things I've been working with Claude on is rewriting my website and creating a more proper website for Will.

I'm really making sure that it is not only SEO prepared but also GEO prepared, with all the metadata and all the backend code schema that it needs so that LLMs can find me, can understand what I do, can understand the books, branch out to the other areas that it needs to.

Doing that through WordPress would've been so much more difficult, even with Claude, that to be able to rewrite the site in a way that is going to let me manage it better so that I will do it on a more consistent basis.

Whatever that thing is, we're now able to do these things. That could be updating keywords in Amazon or making sure we're aligned across all of the sales platforms that we might be on and things like that, that Claude can do and do well.

Jo: Yes, I think marketing is just the killer app really for people, isn't it? I think most authors do not enjoy marketing. I find Claude better for creative work, for strategic work, for doing work through Cowork or Code, but—

ChatGPT with marketing copy is very, very good.So I've actually been using that as we record this. I've got a Kickstarter launching next week, so I've been getting it to do ad copy and social media copy and all that kind of thing.

This is stuff when you have to produce—give me 20 taglines, give me 20 hooks, give me another 20 and another 20. I mean, we just cannot do it as humans, right?

Jeff: Yes, I have found GPT wildly helpful. I mentioned trying to get Bargain Booksy and Fussy Librarian promos.

Jo: Mm.

Jeff: And you have to give it the marketing hook, and it can't just be the blurb that's on Amazon—it's got to be something fresh, and they each have slightly different requirements.

Having GPT—here's the blurb, give me a dozen different options—and then I may take pieces of all of them and create one of my own. But it reworks that much faster than my brain was ever going to try to find the right thing I want to give to Bargain Booksy.

Jo: Yes, you are right. Or it says write this in 300 characters or less.

Jeff: Yes.

Jo: I do exactly the same. That kind of transformative work can be really good.

In fact, there was somebody I know who has been rampantly anti-AI for years and then said, “Would this help me? I have to do a synopsis for an agent, so I've got this 100,000-word book and it needs to be a 10-page synopsis. How would I do that with AI?”

So I was encouraging her to take each chapter and ask it to summarise the chapter, and of course read through it and everything. But I mean, doing a synopsis once you've actually written a book—that can be super useful. So I think what we're saying is—

There are levels of need in terms of both the author and the audience. Then there are levels of your personal use from one end of the spectrum to the other in terms of how far you want to go in every area of the business. And in that way, it's just different for everyone.

Jeff: Yes, and I think getting to that mindset shift that we were talking about a little bit—it can be so easy to dip your toes in. That one author came to you and said, “Do you think it could do this?” And I think that's the beginning exploratory area for perhaps anyone.

People are going to hear us talk about this and it might inspire them to go try something that we've talked about.

But these things, whether it's Claude or GPT or Gemini or whichever one it is, you can come to it and say, “I'm an author, I have X, Y, Z going on in my life”—whether that's a disability, whether that's a time constraint because you have a day job and maybe you have kids and a family that need your attention—”I have these time constraints, I want to do X, Y, and Z in my business. How can you help me with that?” It's going to tell you what it can do to help you with that.

I would even say, if you have the ability to have multiples of these, you could ask the same question to GPT and Claude, and they're going to give you similar answers in some instances, but they may also have different ones because of the abilities that the different platforms have around these things as well.

That can help you make that mindset shift of, “Well, now I see that it can do that. Could it also do this?” And then ask it if it could do that. Because I know for me, Jo, I've taken so much from you and your journey with Cowork that it's like, “Oh, she did that. I wonder if I could do this.” And all of that piles on top of itself.

Then eventually I think your brain starts to think on its own, “Oh, I have to do this task. Can Claude maybe do this for me? Let's go find out.”

Jo: Yes, and if it couldn't do it for you yesterday, you never know, it might be able to do it tomorrow.

Jeff: Right? Because I haven't tested yet its new ability to actually use your computer.

Jo: Mm.

Jeff: And I'm curious what that might open up. Because one of the things that I've seen that I wish it would do is be able to take the EPUB that's on my drive and actually put it into a platform I'm trying to upload to.

Cowork on its own hasn't been able to cross that barrier, but I wonder if with computer use added to that, if it could. Like, “here's the EPUB, upload that over there,” be able to pick it from the file picker, essentially.

Jo: Yes. I think, well, a little tip for everyone:

I wouldn't give access to your entire file system to the AI.Jeff: That's a good point too.

Jo: Yes. I have a Claude folder in my drive and it only has access there. So if you put files in that drive, it might be able to do that. But I know what you mean. I have been using it to help me publish things in German on KDP. Now I can use the browser, so you can actually do that.

In terms of uploading the actual file, I know what you mean. These things will change.

As we record this, again middle of April, we are almost about to get the next models being Mythos, which might be Claude 4.7 Opus, or also ChatGPT has a new model coming, and these models are getting very powerful. With every shift they can do more things.

So as you say, the very first thing to do is ask it, “I want to do this—what are my options?” And some of them, for example, doing an AI-narrated audiobook, ChatGPT and Claude don't do that. You want ElevenLabs or one of the other services for that, but they can tell you what your options are.

So that's one thing, but I wondered if you have any thoughts on the gaps that you are seeing. You mentioned one there around file uploads, but—

What do you hope might come and some of the things that might be exciting if they arrive? Because you never know, they might be here already.

Jeff: There's certainly some movement in some areas. One of the things I'll share is, in March I was at the 2026 CSUN Assistive Technology Conference—CSUN is California State University, Northridge—and they've run this conference for some 40 years now.

One of the sessions I went to was from Tara Maisel—I hope I'm pronouncing her last name right. She's a senior project manager in books accessibility at Amazon, and she was doing a session specifically on readability. She had all kinds of statistics and information about what goes into making something readable.

One of the things she talked about with AI was the future of personalised reading. If you think about the Kindle app, for example, there's a lot of settings you can make there—font size, colours, brightness, text spacing. There's a lot of tools in there.

She was pointing out that potentially readers don't even know what they actually need for the optimised visual reading experience. She sees a world where AI can perhaps do an analysis of your reading behaviour and then help you find the optimal settings.

Maybe even multiple optimal settings for, say, if you were reading in a room that had daylight versus at bedtime, and the ways you might shift it. I was almost thinking of this like when you're at the optometrist and they're like, “Which lens is better—this one or that one?”

Jo: Oh, sometimes that is very hard.

Jeff: Yes. It's that AI could step you through that a little bit to help you find that optimal reading experience in that moment. And then it might even notice, potentially, if you're changing something in the way that you're moving through a page, that it might flag to say, “Hey, do we need to adjust something?”

Some other areas that I think are really exciting, for everyone and perhaps particularly for people who are disabled and needing the support of some assistive technology, is what we're seeing in the browsers.

OpenAI's Operator has been out for quite a while now, since sometime I think autumn of last year. Perplexity Comet has been around even longer. Then we've got browser extensions from Gemini and Claude that are available, that can let you just type natural language.

You know, “Please go find for me jeans in this size that are on sale on this website. Find me the best price for blue jeans on this site and this size,” and it'll just go do it.

Which can certainly speed things up for people in the disabled community to find things quickly, to spend time navigating less, and maybe ending up with the AI coming back and saying, “I found these five things. Which one would you like me to buy for you?” Or, “I found this one thing that you do need and it's waiting for you in your shopping cart.”

The ability for that on the horizon is an amazing jump from an accessibility point of view. But really it's one of those things that accessibility will then help everyone because we can all just shop that way, if we choose to. These are early days for these browsers and these extensions.

The other side of it comes back to basic web accessibility too, because I've seen these types of activities not work so well on a site that may not actually be accessible on its own.

A great example is something I ran into with Claude Cowork about a month ago. I was testing to see if it could help me navigate and get things uploaded together for a site where I wanted to upload books, knowing again that it's not going to upload the actual file, but it could fill in the metadata from my master database of metadata stuff.

There were areas on the site that it actually couldn't hit the button, because the site itself was also not functional to a screen reader. So there are gaps there. It's early days, but I really see that as an interesting future that'll really help people with disabilities—but again, help everybody too, just manage time better.

Jo: I know exactly what you mean there. I've done some collaborative work with Claude Code when it's like, “I can't click the button,” and I'm like, well, I'll click the button—you fill in everything else.

Jeff: Exactly.

Jo: It's actually quite a funny situation. But goodness, coming back to IngramSpark again—these things need APIs. We need better functions.

It's funny because I think a lot of traditional publishers have these APIs or backend upload things that you can do. I'm like, well, we need to get to that with these systems. But I think things will change.

Another thing that I think has also shifted is the use of voice. Voice for dictation—it used to be with dictation that you would have to say “comma,” “open quote,” “new line,” and all of that. And you'd also have to make sense.

Whereas now I feel like you can just dictate a whole load of things to these AIs and then say, “Tidy that up,” and they will do a lot more than the old situation. So I think voice will also help.

Also automatic translation. I don't know if you know this about X, and if you're on X anymore, but just this week they've made it multi-language. So I can read tweets by people who've posted in another language in English.

I can read something from Korean or read something that someone French has posted and it gets translated. It has made a huge difference to the content I'm seeing, which is fascinating because I don't think we've ever had this kind of automatic “everything is translated into your language” situation.

It's really got me thinking about how [automatic translation] might work for eBooks or other things if the rights are there. I don't know. Have you seen stuff like that?

Jeff: There's so much available now with voice and the ability to not have to speak all the other stuff that went with it—comma, full stop, next line. It was a little mind-bending sometimes, trying to think about quote marks and all that stuff. And now it's so good. Different platforms do it to different degrees of ability.

Even being able to speak your prompts into the very platforms themselves without having to type all of it. Chronic pain comes to mind, any kind of mobility thing—all the typing would be a drain or maybe even impossible. So the voice ability is so powerful there and unlocks more things.

At the same time, those translation abilities—I believe AirPods now have the ability, if you've got the right stuff on your phone, that you could be talking to somebody, they may speak back to you in a language you don't speak, but your AirPods will give it to you in your language.

Jo: Hmm.

Jeff: Google has, I believe, a live captioning app that you can use. I think there's even a split screen—I don't know if that's available now or something in their future—where you could put the phone on the table and tell it who's looking at what side of the screen, and it'll put the language that I need on my side and the language the other person needs on the other.

So there continues to be such a shift in how we're being able to translate stuff that really opens up communication and can open up our books to so many more people.

I'm very interested to see—I haven't pulled the trigger on this yet—but how Amazon's auto-translation rolls out and how that's received in terms of the accessibility around our books and being able to put it in someone's hands who doesn't speak—I think it's only English to other languages right now—but who doesn't speak the language it was written in but wants to read that book.

We could never, as indies, or really even big five publishers, wouldn't have the money to create custom translations everywhere. But if the AI can help do that and spread those books around so that everybody could have the story they want to read, I think that's such a win for the reading audience.

Jo: Yes, I think it's so exciting to think what might be coming, and that's what I want to stay on the side of on the AI discussion. There's enough negativity out there and you can get that information somewhere else, but for me I want us to stay on the positive side of how this helps both the author and the reader.

And hopefully the community, to create more and read more and enjoy being human more. Right? Because I find that I do get out more and listen to stuff, or I'm out walking instead of at my desk, and I mean, that's what it's about.

I'm pretty excited about the future. How about you?Jeff: I am. I think there are, quite honestly, some scary things that could be out there in the future. I mean, there's been a lot of talk about what Mythos is capable of. But on the other side of it, there are all these advances. I also look back at Google and AlphaFold and what DeepMind was able to do there for science.

There's more of that stuff out there, and individually for each of us, spending a little bit of time—and I do have to say, I think you need to spend time on a paid plan because the free stuff doesn't give you the idea of what these platforms are actually capable of.

So if you only drop in, even briefly, to experiment on one of the $20-a-month plans and give it your situation, ask it what it can do for you, I think you'll see where, on a personal level, AI will help you unlock some things.

It can help you move some things to the next level in your business that for whatever reason you haven't been able to do.

You don't have to use it for everything. You may decide that it's still not for you for whatever reason, and that's fine. But I think there's so much to explore here and to let your curiosity run for a little bit to see what's possible and what you might unlock with it.

Jo: Brilliant.

So where can people find you and your books and everything you do online?Jeff: So pretty much everything lives at JeffAdamsWrites.com.

Jo: Well, thanks so much for your time, Jeff. That was great.

Jeff: I loved it, Jo. Thanks for having me..

The post Accessibility And AI: How New Tools Are Opening Doors For Indie Authors With Jeff Adams first appeared on The Creative Penn.

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How can you supercharge your creativity in an age when AI is reshaping everything — including how we write, edit, and market our books? What does it look like to use AI as a genuine creative partner rather than a shortcut? And could professional speaking become an income stream that complements your writing career? With James Taylor.

In the intro, Audible's new royalty model; New royalty model details [ACX; Kindlepreneur]; Public Speaking for Authors, Creatives and other Introverts; Why Indie Authors Should Ignore the Market’s Mood and Focus on their Mission [Self-Publishing with ALLi]; Lichfield Cathedral;

This podcast is sponsored by Kobo Writing Life, which helps authors self-publish and reach readers in global markets through the Kobo eco-system. You can also subscribe to the Kobo Writing Life podcast for interviews with successful indie authors.

This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn

James Taylor is a nonfiction author, professional speaker, podcaster, and entrepreneur who helps people unlock their creative potential. He hosts the SuperCreativity Podcast and his latest book is SuperCreativity: Augmenting Human Creativity in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.

Show Notes

• How to define creativity and why it's becoming the most valuable skill in the age of AI
• The five stages of the creative process — and the stage most people skip
• Three types of creative purpose: play, self-expression, and legacy
• How James used multiple AI tools alongside human collaborators to write, edit, and market SuperCreativity
• Bulk book sales, industry-specific editions, and revenue models for nonfiction author-speakers
• Practical tips for authors who want to break into professional keynote speaking

You can find James at JamesTaylor.me.

Transcript of the interview with James TaylorJo: James Taylor is a nonfiction author, professional speaker, podcaster, and entrepreneur who helps people unlock their creative potential. He hosts the SuperCreativity Podcast and his latest book is SuperCreativity: Augmenting Human Creativity in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. Welcome to the show, James.

James: Well, thank you for having me as a guest. I'm looking forward to this conversation today.

Jo: It's going to be really good. First up—

Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and publishing.James: Well, today I'm a professional keynote speaker, so I deliver about fifty to a hundred keynotes per year in twenty-five-plus countries. Primarily I speak on creativity, innovation, and artificial intelligence.

Go back into my deepest, darkest history—I actually used to manage rock stars. That was my old job. I used to be in the music industry for many, many years. I worked with members of The Rolling Stones, and for our listeners in the UK, I managed bands like Deacon Blue.

Then I went to the dark side. In 2010, I moved to California to work in Silicon Valley, to work in the world of tech. That got me involved in artificial intelligence.

Right about 2017, I was speaking at an event in San Francisco and someone came up to me and said, “You realise you could probably speak for a living, you could do this for a living.” So I thought, well, how does that work? And he told me.

Then I embarked on the career that I have today, which is primarily as a speaker, with writing now coming a bit more to the fore.

Jo: Wow, I remember Deacon Blue.

James: Yes.

Jo: “Dignity.” That's crazy. Very, very cool backstory there, but we'll come back to the career side of things.

Let's get into super creativity, because my listeners are certainly creatives. Most of the listeners will have a book either on the way or they might even have lots of books. So we all do want to be super creative.

How do you define creativity, and why is it important to keep focusing on this even if we do identify that way?James: For me, creativity is about bringing new ideas to the mind. Innovation is about bringing new ideas to the world, but without creativity, there is no innovation. So creativity is really the engine of innovation. Whether that is designing new products, new services, or creating new works of art and new books.

The reason that creativity is becoming more important is because of what we're seeing right now in terms of artificial intelligence. AI is going to replace a lot of the non-creative tasks that we currently do in our jobs.

If you look at things like the World Economic Forum, there was recently a study with a thousand global business leaders, and work from companies like LinkedIn—they all highlight that creativity is going to be one of the foremost important soft skills for this new future.

So creativity, strangely, will actually become more important, not less important, as we go ahead. That's the creativity side. Probably for many of the listeners here, they'll consider themselves to be creative. That is not the norm.

As I mentioned, I speak in about twenty-five countries a year, and if I ask the audiences—primarily corporate audiences—to put their hands up if they consider themselves to be creative, only between ten to forty per cent of the audience will raise their hands.

So part of my job is to show them why they are more creative than they think they are and why we're all born with this creative potential.

Then moving into the super creativity side, it's really to show them how they can augment that creativity by collaborating more deeply with other people or machines—things like artificial intelligence.

So SuperCreativity, the book that I've written and the speeches I give on it, is really about how we can augment our individual creativity by collaborating more deeply with other people or artificial intelligence.

For me, that's been the thing I've been fascinated by for the past few years, and probably for many of our listeners who are now using AI in their writing, their researching, and their marketing of their books, they're probably getting into this space as well.

I really wanted to dive into that—both the collaboration with other people and with machines and AI.

Jo: In terms of the super creativity then, do you have any practices or ideas? Before we get into collaboration, many of us authors work alone—and of course we can come back to the AI stuff in a minute—but in terms of super creativity, are there ways that we can even supercharge what we do already?

Then, of course there are people listening who might not feel creative.

So give us a few tips on how we can potentially change our mindset or become even more creative.James: In the book I talk about what I call the eight Ps of super creativity, which are purpose, personality, practice, people, process, place, product, and persuasion. Persuasion is really the marketing piece at the end.

Probably the one that could be most useful to many listeners today is the practice piece—the practice or the process side of things.

For many of us, what that usually consists of is just having some type of daily creative practice. Different people do it in different ways. Many of your listeners will know the works of people like Julia Cameron—the morning pages style of having some type of daily practice. Other people do it in slightly different ways.

The process bit is really interesting. I talk about this creative process that we all have, and I talk about these five stages of the creative process.

The first stage, let's say if we're writing a book, is really that preparation stage. That is usually the stage where we are trying to absorb as much information as possible about the thing that we're going to be writing about.

The topic, if it's nonfiction, or going to the places, visiting the scenes that we're going to set certain things within for the book. So that preparation stage is really about absorbing as much information as possible from the outside. It's not going to look very creative. We're just absorbing at that stage.

Now the mistake that a lot of people tend to make is they immediately try to jump from that preparation stage to looking to generate ideas. But what all the studies show us is we should spend a little bit of time in what we call the incubation stage.

This is where it's often very useful if we've done some research, that we put things to one side for a little while, maybe a few weeks, move on to another project, think about something completely different.

Your brain will continue to work in the background. Your unconscious brain will work on that content you've been absorbing.

Then what often happens as a result of that is we come to this third stage, which is that insight stage—that aha moment. That happens for various different reasons and you can seed that in slightly different ways so you're more likely to get inspiration in your day-to-day work.

Then as we know—as you are a writer of many, many books—many people think, “Well, that's it. I've done it. The idea for that book or that chapter has come to me.” That is really just the first five per cent of the process.

The next stage is where we look at all the different ideas we have and decide which ones we want to pursue, which ones are going to make the grade. This is what we call the evaluation stage.

Once we've done that, we move to that final stage, which is the elaboration stage. If it's a startup, this is when you're building your minimum viable product. As a writer, this is where you're actually doing the work, putting those words out onto the page.

It's a very iterative process, so it's not necessarily linear. You'll go back and forth.

Even as you're getting input from readers and audiences in that last stage, that is then giving you the material to move back to the preparation stage and think, “Oh, I wonder if this next book in this series, maybe I go in a slightly different direction with this character.”

So each of those different stages, you can do different things to increase your levels of creativity.

Jo: I love all of that, but can we go back to purpose? Because you mentioned that as one of the Ps and I think this is something that a lot of us need.

As we are recording this in April 2026, the world is an interesting place. There are lots of things going on that have people worried.

Well, we are not talking about politics, but I think one of the things that people struggle with is, what's the point in writing this story, for example, or what's the point in trying to get my words out there when things are difficult?

I feel like coming back to purpose is perhaps the thing that helps people even take it into the process as you were talking about. And then of course, just from a practical angle—

Is purpose about making money or reaching people? So maybe you could talk about the purpose side of things.James: Yes. So I talk about three different purposes, and it's not that there's just one that predominates, but usually there's one that maybe predominates on different projects.

The first one is creativity as play. It's what we're basically, as humans, hardwired to do—this instinctive joy that we get just for creating for its own sake. There's nothing that really sits beyond that. We just have fun. We find pleasure in creating something.

That could be a musician creating a piece of music, a sculptor creating a sculpture, an entrepreneur creating a new business or product or service. There's just this sense of play.

One of the things I talk about in the book is this idea of being childlike, not childish. If you look at children, you see this very instinctively. If you see a three-year-old or a five-year-old, you give them some crayons and they will just naturally create. That's part of who they are and it's pretty abstract.

Then what happens is they go to school and they're taught useful conventions—”this is how you should do it.” You even see their work start to change. You start to see them move from abstract paintings to more formal structures.

Then you get your peer group, then you go to college or university and the world of work, and you're taught all these useful conventions.

That's fine, but as adults, it is our responsibility to become what we call post-conventional, where we see these conventions as a useful signpost but we're willing to challenge them. We're willing to have a playfulness in what we do. So the first one is just this hardwired thing—creativity as play.

The second one, and this is maybe for a lot of your listeners the reason that they are writers, is self-expression. It's a way of placing something out into the world.

I was actually just in France recently, and I was talking to a young visual artist, a painter from Hungary, and she had to go up and give a speech. She really hated doing it. She was having to talk about her work and she was really uncomfortable.

I could see the discomfort and my heart went out for her, because that is not the way she primarily expresses herself. She expresses herself through her art form, which is painting.

For many of us, we might struggle to get on a stage, but we can express ourselves in the written word. We have something we want to say, a position we want to have, and we want to express that and get that out into the world.

The final one is just this idea of legacy. That is not going to be for everyone. I can tell you, for me personally, legacy is not the reason that I write and do a lot of the stuff that I do.

Maybe that changes—maybe as we get a bit older, we want to leave a body of work. So those are the three main purposes that we tend to see.

Then you mentioned the financial side of what we do as well. This starts to come into that self-expression, because we need to be able to get people to buy our books or download our books and read our books in order to give us the ability to write new works and create new things.

The financial side is an important component of it, but it is not the only one. I think there's a great question any writer should ask themselves. One of the first questions that I asked myself as a relatively new nonfiction writer is: why am I writing this book? What is the purpose of this book?

For me, primarily it is a form of self-expression, and then you have to go, “Well, that's fine, but I also need it to have some type of financial basis for it.” It doesn't need to be the main driver of my income, but I need to have some type of revenue model.

I'm happy to talk about revenue models, because probably the type of revenue model that I have as a writer is going to be different from other listeners. I tend to focus more on bulk selling of books rather than individual selling of books.

Jo: Yes, I definitely want to come back to revenue models and business, but a few other things first.

I want to circle back to collaboration, because I've certainly co-written with some humans, and I know a lot of listeners either have co-written or collaborated with other humans—and some of it works and some of it doesn't. You have some great information on human-plus-human creativity and collaboration.

So maybe you could give us some tips on how we can be more effective collaborators with other humans.James: So there's a whole section about this idea of creative pairs. Often if you look at great creative work or innovative companies, very often when you strip it all back, you'll find at the core lots and lots of creative pairings.

That is usually two different but complementary personalities who are willing to develop and challenge and improve each other's ideas.

We think of Jobs and Wozniak in the world of business, or Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger. For authors, often that relationship is the work with their editor.

There was a documentary I saw—I think it was a New Yorker documentary that came out a while ago—talking with a writer of history books about his relationship with his editor. It was a really beautiful relationship. These were two very different personalities, but what worked was the fact that they were different.

A core component of having these creative pairings is a sense of trust—or what some people today would call psychological safety—that you are willing to challenge someone's ideas, but in a space of trust. The Germans have a great phrase for it. In English it translates as “someone to steal horses with,” which I love.

Hopefully our listeners have that person where you can go to them and say, “I had this idea for a book or a chapter or a character,” and that person is a “yes, and.” Like, “Yes, and have you thought about doing it this way?” or “What would happen if you did this?” They stress test your ideas. They make your ideas better.

For many of us, maybe it's our husbands or wives, our partners. Some of us are lucky enough to have editors.

When I started rewriting this latest book, I actually had someone like that—a human, not an AI—that I worked with, especially on taking all these random thoughts and ideas I've been expressing in keynotes and putting them into more of a book form.

The format and the structures that we use for telling stories in a speech are quite different from the structure that we would use for a nonfiction book. I didn't have as much experience there, so I wanted someone who could say, “Have you thought about structuring it this way?” or “This is a great story arc you might want to think about.”

So I don't know, for you, who is your creative pairing? Who is your “someone to steal horses with”?

Jo: Well, it's funny. I really think since the arrival of Claude Opus 4.6, it is absolutely Claude.

James: Yes, yes.

Jo: All the way. I mean, so we could come onto that next in terms of how AI has changed, because I do still work with a professional editor for both fiction and nonfiction, but it is very much in the “make my finished work better” stage. It is not in the exploratory phase.

I find particularly the latest reasoning models to just be fantastic at this. And my Claude is not sycophantic. The Opus 4.6—I'm sure you've been using it too—it just doesn't behave in the way that a lot of people think these AIs did. They did behave like that, and now it's changed. So let's talk about that.

What are your thoughts on collaborating more effectively with AI tools, especially as they become more and more powerful?As we record this, Claude Mythos has not come out, but it's certainly rumoured to arrive. I'm pretty excited.

James: So because I've been doing this AI thing for a little while, it's given me the ability to experiment with things—the early versions of what many people are using today.

I'll give you an example. Even before I started writing the book, I decided to write a book proposal.

Even though I could pretty much sense I wanted to independently publish this book through my own publishing company, I thought it's a good practice to put it down into a proposal form, even though I don't go to a traditional publisher or a hybrid publisher.

One of the things I did within that was get a sense of who my ideal readers are. I used a very early version—this was a few years ago—of an IBM AI tool, creating what we call a psychometric map of my ideal reader.

This basically tells me, over about seventy-two different factors, how this person thinks, how they feel, what their value system is, very broadly for my ideal reader. I pulled in different sources. I knew the kind of magazines and books they were reading and what their general worldview was.

So I created this—going one step beyond just creating your ideal reader to really understanding their psychometrics.

I do this in my keynotes too. Before I ever give a keynote or an important pitch or a presentation, I use AI to analyse the psychometrics of the audience I'm going to be speaking to.

This might tell me, for example, this audience values humour a little bit more, or this audience values a bit more practicality so they want actionable next steps, or this audience is going to be a little bit authority-challenging so they're going to push back.

So even in those very early stages, just starting to think about the book—who was I writing this book for, what was the purpose of the book—I was using AI to understand the psychometrics of my absolutely perfect, ideal reader.

I gave her a name. It was a female reader. There was someone similar to her that I already knew.

Probably for some of your listeners, they do this instinctively anyway. They maybe have a person or a few different people they think of in their head.

Then from that stage, because I've been delivering lots and lots of keynotes—and this may be an important distinction in the way that I have decided to write books as opposed to how other people write books—my family were all jazz musicians.

The difference between a rock musician or a pop musician and a jazz musician is this: a rock or pop musician will go into the studio, create this opus, this work, and then tour that for the next two years.

A jazz musician, on the other hand, goes out and performs the songs and the things from the album that they're eventually going to create hundreds of times, thousands of times, to find out what works with audiences, and then they go into the studio and record the stuff that works best.

So I created a book more like a jazz musician. I'd delivered keynote versions of the book hundreds of times before I ever decided to actually write the book. So it had been stress-tested with real people to a certain extent.

Then, getting into it, I thought—well, what works as a keynote is not necessarily going to work as a structure for a book.

So what I did was start using ChatGPT models at that point to think about the structural edit of the book. What was the structure going to be?What was great is you can basically feed it every single keynote you've given over the years, all the notes, everything you've done, and it could start to give me something to riff with and really get into thinking about how I was going to create this. I was using it a little like that creative pairing we spoke about earlier.

Then once I'd done that—so I've now got an idea of a structural edit essentially—I then go back and speak to some humans about it. “What do you think about this?” “What do you think about that?” And try some things out over dinner conversations. “I'm thinking about doing this—what do you think?”

Then once I did that, I just did the thing that I really didn't want to do, but I guess you absolutely have to do: sit in a seat for multiple weeks and just get that crappy first draft done. That was just me writing, from my voice, in my way of doing things.

Every so often I would use an AI to research a particular thing, but I didn't want to slow down the pace too much. I was focused on getting that word count done.

Once I had the first draft, I then brought the AI back in. In this case, I was still using OpenAI at this stage, to act more like an editor. To tell me what was weak about the book. At this point I was starting to give it the overall framing. What was weak, what chapters needed to be improved.

I then went back, started reworking each of the chapters, and worked chapter by chapter using that AI as a sparring partner. But once again, the AI is not really writing my words for me.

It's maybe saying, “This part could be said better. You might want to think about doing it this way,” or “You are missing a really powerful case study or example here,” or at the very end of each chapter, I have actionable next steps, and “You're missing some things here.”

So I've gone through that entire process of writing, and now I'm essentially at the second draft. At this point, what I'm doing is using another AI tool—Claude, in this case—to have a different perspective on it. I gave it the work.

I mentioned a couple of editors that I really respect and different writers I respect and said, “I'm going to create a virtual beta readers group. Give me feedback on this now.”

For someone that's listening to this, and we're recording this in April 2026, here's some good news for you. There are now a bunch of tools out there that use AI swarms, as we call them.

You can basically feed it your book and it will create synthetic readers—thousands and thousands of synthetic readers that read your kind of style of book—and it will then give you feedback from these synthetic readers.

Essentially, I was just doing an early version of that. So I got the feedback from the synthetic readers, the AI readers, and then reworked a little bit. Some of the stuff I just decided not to do because it didn't align with what I was trying to say in the book.

Then the next stage was I had a beta reader group of about thirty human beta readers—my ideal readers. I sent the book to them, they gave me feedback. I then used AI to give me an overview report of all their feedback, and then I was able to go back into reworking the book.

That's still really just draft three of the book, not the final book at this stage. But just to give everyone a sense of opening up the process: you could see how the human and machine were working together.

Jo: Yes, I love that. I also often say to people who are speakers first that you can, if you have recordings of your talks or if you use your slide decks to record them as MP3s and then just use that transcript as the basis of a draft.

Obviously it's not the book or a chapter, but it can actually preserve your voice—your speaking voice—which I think can be really effective for speakers.

I like your multi-step process there. And then of course, if you have audience avatars in AI, that can help you design your book marketing.

So take this into book marketing and how you're doing that.James: So I still decided to go old school with a human editor—a book editor that someone had recommended to me. I used that human book editor just to go through the book. At that point we're talking about style, some stylistic things that we wanted to do, and they can pick up other things as well.

So I've got that book, and then I'm obviously starting to use AI to understand what tags, what kind of copy do I want to have in terms of putting it onto Amazon, putting it onto IngramSpark, and all these other platforms I want to put it out into.

I'm using Claude here in particular—and with Claude, you have something called Cowork. It wasn't quite fully happening at that point, but there were early versions of it and Claude Code—to almost start working with and creating a virtual marketing team.

I give it the book and then they could start thinking about: what is the marketing strategy for this book? What does the campaign look like? What are the things that we need to do?

That was then starting to break it down. We're now three months out or so before the book is due to get released, and I'm starting to deploy that particular campaign.

So for example, I'm on a podcast right now, and we try different versions. We have a human going out and reaching out to potential shows for me to be a guest on, but I also have an agent.

There's also one going out and finding and researching podcasts and reaching out to those podcast hosts to have me as a potential guest. So they're doing some of the tactical work there at the same time.

One mistake I made—and I don't know if you've experienced this as well—if I was to go back, one thing I would do differently is this: I decided to record the audiobook version after the physical book was already committed and ready to go out.

Jo: Mm-hmm.

James: And I noticed so many small errors or things I would change after having spent two days in a studio recording the voice for the entire book—changes I would have made.

This is something other people did ask me: why are you not using ElevenLabs or an AI clone of your voice to read the script? There are some things I feel quite personal about, and my voice is one of those things. As a professional keynote speaker, I decided I wanted to keep that and have it in there.

So it's going to be different for everyone which things they decide to offload to AI, which things they decide to give to a human member of their team, and what they decide to keep to themselves.

Jo: Yes, I mean, I human-record my nonfiction, but I have an AI voice clone with ElevenLabs for my fiction now. But obviously, for people listening, you can't put an ElevenLabs voice-cloned audiobook on Audible, and a lot of your sales will be on Audible, especially for a book like this. So I think that's also important.

I agree with you on doing the audio edit. There's always things you want to change.But as you mentioned, you're self-publishing this, so you can just go in and change your files.

James: Yes, and that was the other reason, and this was part of the marketing—now we're moving into the marketing and the business model behind the book. For me, the book doesn't have to be a financial driver in its own sense.

The way that I sell books, and usually people like myself—professional speakers—is we bulk sell books to our clients. Let's say I'm speaking at four different events this month. Each has about a thousand people at them. Those organisers will buy, say, a thousand copies of the book.

So at the end of that month, you might have sold four thousand copies—not individual copies. Anything that sells on Amazon or in other places is almost like a positioning piece.

Obviously you want people to buy the book and learn things from the book, but in terms of the distribution model, it's slightly different because I'm primarily selling through bulk sales.

Now, here's a little twist you can do on this, and this is a decision I made even before we released this version of the book. I speak to lots of different industries.

There was a speaker and author—I've forgotten his name now, I think he was from Florida—and what he decided to do was to write a slightly different version of his main book every year, but for a different industry.

So what this allows him to do is, let's say in my case, I'm doing a version of the SuperCreativity book just for legal professionals because I speak to a lot of law firms and legal groups. I've already started working on a version of the book which is a little bit more attuned to that audience.

As a speaker, it allows me to go to all these law firms and legal associations and bar associations and say, “Hey, I've just written the book on creativity and artificial intelligence for the legal industry.”

That makes you a very bookable proposition for a client. And then obviously you can sell books from that as well. And that's before we get into the foreign language versions.

That's just a model that happens to work pretty well for my part of the industry, but obviously it's going to be very different for other types of authors.

Jo: No, I think that's great.

For nonfiction authors, as you say, there are different revenue models. Your income, I guess, would be what, eighty, ninety per cent speaking revenue? Or do you have other things as well?

James: Yes, primarily it's the keynote speaking, and anything that comes from the back of that. Sometimes it's boardroom advisory work that I do as well. But primarily it's the speaking side. So really the book is just the simplest form to get my ideas out and the most affordable form.

Jo: Mm-hmm.

James: Because the other thing is, you want as many people getting your ideas as possible, and there is no better, more affordable way of getting someone's ideas out there than in the form of a book.

I think it's just the most unbelievable transmitter of knowledge—a book. That's why I love to write the book as well. A lot of my friends say, “Listen, books are old hat. You don't need to do a book any more. You can do these other things, other forms, online courses.”

I've done lots of online courses in the past and membership sites and all those things, but there's just something that is great about a book—to be able to summarise your ideas at a particular point in time.

It's also a great transmitter of value to other people. And it is affordable. Any book, someone can download a book on Audible or wherever they want—that's just an affordable way of absorbing that content.

Jo: Yes. Well, of course we are all fans of books here. I do speak—I don't tend to do keynote speaking. I do more content speaking at conferences.

For people listening, keynote speaking is where you tend to get the higher revenue. So if people listening have books already—let's say they have nonfiction books or even fiction books that could be turned somehow into different topics—if people want to get booked for speaking gigs, preferably ones that pay—

How would you recommend authors think about moving into speaking if that's something they want to do?James: So obviously it's much easier for nonfiction authors to do that. I mean, I'll give you an example. I was speaking at an event last week in New York for L'Oréal, the hair care and cosmetics company.

They had six different speakers. One of them was a speaker on macroeconomics and geopolitics. Another was an expert on communications. Another was an expert on AI. Another was an expert on storytelling.

So you have to think: does my topic have value for that type of audience—that corporate audience?

An easy way of finding that is if you just go onto any of the speaker bureau websites, type in “speaker bureaus,” look for the speaker bureaus, and then type in your topic area—emotional intelligence or whatever the topic area is—and look at the other speakers.

See if there is obviously a number of speakers talking on this area. Importantly, look at how busy they are and look at their fee levels as well.

I did an online summit a few years ago called the International Speakers Summit, where I interviewed a hundred and fifty of the world's best professional keynote speakers.

I interviewed Sally Hogshead, who's an author and a speaker, and she said to me, “James, you're going out speaking about creativity, but if you just twisted it a little bit and spoke more in terms of innovation rather than creativity, you would earn an extra five thousand dollars per keynote.”

So creativity and innovation—an extra five thousand dollars. That's just a simple thing that, as you get to understand the industry, you learn.

Then once you do that, it's like any business—you have to treat it like a business, obviously. What makes someone a great storyteller on stages is not the same as what makes a great storyteller on the written word. So depending on where you're at, you might need certain training and skills development.

If you are listening to this from America, there are things like the National Speakers Association, the NSA. If you're living in the UK, the Professional Speakers Association. These are great ways just to develop your skill set and learn from other professional speakers.

Here's the good news, I didn't know anything about professional speaking until 2017–18, and it was only from having a conversation with someone who said, “Listen, you have some original thoughts. You can get paid to speak about this on stage.”

Then I spent the next year really researching and understanding and looking at how to do it and creating a minimum viable product—a speech—that was a very short period of time, a year.

Most of the listeners here have gone through that process of writing a book, which takes many, many months. So you have the stamina to do this type of work. You just need to find out where you fit.

I thought I was going to be a speaker in marketing. I thought that was going to be my thing. And it turns out that's not what the market wanted from me. They wanted me to talk about creativity and artificial intelligence.

So you have to listen to the market, like you have to listen to your readers.

Jo: Yes, I think that's really interesting. I was also a member of the PSA here, and I learned in Australia with the NSAA as it was.

James: Yes.

Jo: And that thing about who you speak to—I mainly speak to author conferences, who, I just want to be frank, don't pay very well, if at all. So exactly what you said there—

If you want to be a highly paid speaker, you have to pick the audience who's going to pay, as well as a topic that works with them. It is a very different thing to writing a book, I think.

James: It is a different model. This is what was interesting when I interviewed those hundred and fifty professional speakers—the thing that came back loud and clear is there is a model to suit everyone.

Jo: Mm.

James: So the model that works for me—getting paid high fees to go and travel around the world, speaking on stages to primarily corporate audiences—that is not the only model.

There is another model, which is called the “sell from the stage” model, where you maybe don't get paid anything to go and speak on the stage, or very little, but what you're doing is you're selling your consulting, your online course, your books, your other products from the back of the stage. That's another model as well.

I have friends who have young families and they are writers and they don't want to schlep on planes like I do. I know one speaker in particular who never leaves his own city.

He is a very successful professional speaker. He happens to live in Orlando, Florida, which is one of the busiest cities for conferences. So literally, he's home with his kids every night. He gets to do all this cool stuff he wants. He never has to step on a plane if he doesn't want to. That just shows you the range.

I remember I once interviewed a person whose title was a Buddhist monk, French speaker, and author. He figured out he could live very affordably by living in Thailand. So he lives in Thailand for part of the year and he's very into meditation, mindfulness, yoga, and writing.

He figured out he only had to give two keynotes per year to pay for his entire lifestyle. That was it. So that gives him a lot of freedom.

He does those two corporate keynotes a year and for the rest of the year he's doing his yoga, his meditation, his writing, and surfboarding, whatever he's into as well. So you can see there's a whole range of different ways you can design that life.

Jo: Yes, we talk a lot about definition of success and it's great to hear those different examples. So before we finish up, I just want to come back to your journey into the writing side, into books and self-publishing.

We all understand, me and the listeners, how hard it is to write a book and also to market a book, but we've got the bug. So we wonder: how much have you got the bug?

Do you plan on doing more writing, more books, or do you still want to lean more heavily into speaking?James: Primarily the income for me will still come from speaking.

I remember listening to Elizabeth Gilbert once when she talked about her writing. She said she always wanted to have other things, so she never had to push onto her writing that it had to be the income stream for her. If it was successful, great, that's fantastic. So I have a little bit of a similar view to that.

In terms of my own writing, I've got about five different nonfiction book ideas I'm now looking at. Some of them relate to speeches that I already do. Some don't.

I'm looking at different versions of the SuperCreativity book, so there'll be other versions coming out—different industries, different languages. That gives you a few years of work.

The other side that I want to develop is the fiction writing side. I'm already starting to work on a fiction book at the moment—a little bit like this idea of one for them, one for me.

Jo: Mm-hmm.

James: So one for them is for the corporate audience, that world that I live in, and the other one is for me, for my own creativity.

My hope—and I don't know, maybe we need to speak in a year's time when I've written and published it—is that by doing the fiction side, it will make me a better storyteller on stages as well for my corporate audience.

It will help me understand story arcs, slightly different ways of expressing stories, building emotion, building the anti-hero characters within a book, for example. So I'm hoping that they both feed off each other. But we will see.

Jo: Yes, we will. All the best with that.

So where can people find you and your books and everything you do online?James: The easiest place to go is JamesTaylor.me, and you can find the book, which is called SuperCreativity, there. Or just go to wherever you buy your books—your local independent bookstore—and get a copy of SuperCreativity. The audiobook may already be out by the time you're listening to this as well.

If you want to learn a little bit more, we also have a podcast called the SuperCreativity Podcast, where I interview lots of wonderful guests talking about this area of super creativity.

Jo: Well, thanks so much for your time, James. That was brilliant.

James: Thank you, Joanna. Thanks for having me as a guest on the show.

The post SuperCreativity And KeyNote Speaking With A Non-Fiction Book With James Taylor first appeared on The Creative Penn.

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How can upgrading your verbs transform flat writing into vivid, page-turning prose? Why do so many writing problems turn out to be verb problems — and how can you fix yours? Sarah Kaufman explores the art of the verb and shares practical tips for making your writing stronger, clearer, and more alive.

In the intro, writing as a caregiver and grief [Stark Reflections; The Creative Penn episode]; Beyond Bookshops — Bulk Sales, Gifting and Alternative Distribution [Self-Publishing Advice]; list of money books; London walk along SouthBank; Bones of the Deep: AI-Assisted Artisan Author webinars.

Today's show is sponsored by ProWritingAid, writing and editing software that goes way beyond just grammar and typo checking. With its detailed reports on how to improve your writing and integration with writing software, ProWritingAid will help you improve your book before you send it to an editor, agent or publisher. Check it out for free or get 15% off the premium edition at www.ProWritingAid.com/joanna

This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn

Sarah Kaufman is a Pulitzer Prize–winning critic, an award-winning author, and a writing teacher. Her latest book is Verb Your Enthusiasm: How to Master the Art of the Verb and Transform Your Writing.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.

Show Notes

• Why verbs are the most versatile and underrated tool in a writer's toolkit
• How to replace flat, explanatory sentences with vivid, action-driven prose
• The power of physical and metaphorical verbs to show emotion instead of telling it
• When passive voice works, and when it's hiding something
• Balancing beautiful language with the demands of storytelling and deadlines
• How to broaden your writing expertise into a sustainable portfolio career

You can find Sarah at SarahLKaufman.com.

Transcript of the interview with Sarah KaufmanJo: Sarah Kaufman is a Pulitzer Prize–winning critic, an award-winning author, and a writing teacher. Her latest book is Verb Your Enthusiasm: How to Master the Art of the Verb and Transform Your Writing. Welcome to the show, Sarah.

Sarah: Thank you so much. I'm delighted to be with you.

Jo: This is such a great topic, but first up—

Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing.Sarah: I got into writing in a backwards way, I guess. The romantic, wonderful thing about writing is the freedom that it gives you, right? That's what we all think about—this freedom to address the world.

Then the practical, wonderful thing about writing is developing a focal point, which I had to do in order to write in the first place. I'll explain a little bit about that.

I became a dance critic, which is what I did at the Washington Post for 27 years, to have something to write about. That was necessary because, though I've always known that I wanted to be a writer ever since earliest childhood, I just didn't really find things to write about when it came time to actually try to make a living at it.

As I was approaching leaving college as an English major, I was getting very anxious about what I was actually going to do, and I didn't have this burning desire to write about any certain thing.

I happened to be working as a full-time secretary at a ballet school because I had been a ballet nerd all through my youth. I knew quite a bit about doing ballet, about the steps and about the lingo, so I was a suitable candidate to work at a ballet school.

I was learning so much from the teachers there—who had all been professional dancers—about the aesthetics of ballet and how you shape the steps into art and into a performance. I was getting more and more interested in dance.

One day the director took me out to lunch and she said, “You should write about dance.” I had seriously never considered that before, but she knew that I was an English major, that I wanted to write. She said, “Look, you know so much,” and she really encouraged me.

So I said, “Well, okay, I'll give it a go,” because I had been reading dance criticism. I just started picking it apart and seeing how critics put their reviews together, called up a local paper, took on some freelance assignments, and did a lot of freelancing for years and eventually landed at the Washington Post.

So the point I want to make is that I had that thing to write about. Now I had a focal point, and my books grew out of that.

The first book I wrote is The Art of Grace: On Moving Well Through Life. That was an exploration of aspects of grace stemming from physical grace, which I knew about from dancers, and looking at connections there with social grace and spiritual grace.

Then this verbs book likewise grew out of my work as a dance writer because my goal in writing about dance was to capture the experience of it. I didn't want to be a scholarly type of critic, though I do love that kind of criticism and I read it and learn so much from it, but I knew that was not going to be my style.

I wanted more to primarily recreate the experience for the reader, as well as then coming in with analysis of it. I was just so fascinated by the look and the feel of what I was seeing on the stage. I wanted to be able to share that with the reader.

So I had to lean on verbs to capture the action, and people occasionally would say, “Oh, you're so good with verbs, Sarah,” which I thought was kind of interesting. It's like, oh, so this is a strength I had developed. I didn't really realise it.

Then that, coupled with my teaching experience, is what led me to think I have some things to talk about regarding verbs. I'd like to share with the world because, as a teacher, I often see that writing issues my students have are actually verb issues.

They get into a corner with a lot of explanation or clauses on top of clauses, and they get lost. Where is the point that you want to make here? What is the meaning? What is it you want me to take away from your work?

Well, if we pare that back and look at the verbs and try to get some direction in the sentences, that often brings clarity. Suddenly the student will say, “I was thinking more about adjectives and nouns. I didn't realise that verbs were really something to focus on.” I thought that would be an interesting challenge to bring that out.

Jo: It's so fascinating. I love how your career has emerged and that you've leaned into different things. It has a kind of dance to it itself.

We're going to come back to your career, but let's start with that, because you mentioned that with many of your students you are reading their work and you think, “Oh, we can fix this with some verbs.”

Let's get into that because you talk about weeding and this verb-first editing process. Most of the listeners will have some kind of writing already—either they've got a lot of books or they've got a draft in progress. This is the kind of thing we struggle with: how do we make our work stronger?

Talk about why you are so obsessed with verbs some tips for making our work stronger.Sarah: Yes, I am obsessed with verbs. I will cop to that. They're so interesting and I felt like they were a little underrated as a writing tool.

Verbs, as we learned in school, drive your sentence forward. They're the engine. Really, I feel like they are the secret soul of language, because they're so versatile, they're so essential.

First of all, they hold it all together. They're the only part of speech that in itself is a full sentence. You can have a full sentence that's a verb. “Watch.” “Look.” “Continue.” You could go on and on. That is a full grammatical sentence. You can't do that with any other part of speech.

They're so essential. The word “verb” itself comes from the Latin verbum, which means “a word.” So verbs became that name for all words. Our literary ancestors understood this—that they're really the beginning and the end as far as words go.

They can add to your work when you start thinking about verbs in this way, and you start thinking about how can I elevate my writing—well, verbs are very efficient and very evocative. They can add not only clarity to your work, but a kind of elegance. They can say so much in such a little amount of space.

For example, say you have something like this: “The cook was facing the dinner rush, and so she decided to put together something quick and easy so no one would know how nervous and unprepared she was.”

In that sentence, I'm doing a lot of explaining and describing. I'm just explaining to you the situation, but I haven't really brought it to life much.

A better way to do it might be something like this—and you can see it comes a little bit more active: “The dinner rush pressed upon her. To hide her nerves, she whisked eggs and milk into omelettes, shredded parsley with her bare hands and flung it all onto plates like Jackson Pollock splashing his canvas.”

I show you what her nerves and the pressure resulted in. I show that manifesting. Or you could even shorten it and just say: “Dinner rush loomed. She whisked and whipped, chopped and dripped and masked her nerves with glistening omelettes.”

There are stylistic differences there, but it's just to give an example of how you can take something that, on the face of it, sure, it makes sense—it's perfectly fine as a sentence—but it just lies there. It's flat. Maybe it's not very exciting. It doesn't really move the story forward.

You can bring it to life by showing us. You show us with the action.

Jo: You haven't really specifically said what a verb is in that sentence you just had around “whisked” and all of those things. Those sentences were actually quite different in a lot of the different words you used. You didn't just swap out for stronger verbs.

Could you just point out what the verbs were, in case people are confused about which words are which?Sarah: Right. Great. In the first, inferior example I have: “The cook was facing the dinner rush.” So then I amended it to: “The dinner rush pressed upon her.” I'm giving the dinner rush itself a verb—”press.” It weighed on her, it pressed on her.

Also, in the third example—”the dinner rush loomed”—so that's even shorter. “Loom” is a wonderful verb. I love it because it conveys a sense of threat. That's what I mean by verbs being so efficient and evocative in one word.

“A storm loomed.” “The dinner rush loomed.” You convey the emotion around the whole event.

“To hide her nerves, she whisked eggs and milk into omelettes, shredded parsley.” So “hide”—she's hiding her nerves rather than just saying she felt nervous. You give it a little bit more action, you give her a little bit more character by saying she's doing this to hide her nerves.

Then whisking the eggs, shredding the parsley, flinging it onto plates—that shows how she's being creative and surmounting this problem, right?

Instead of simply describing—”So she decided to use her expertise and create a nice dinner”—you show that in motion with things like whisking and shredding and flinging it onto plates. That's an example of how you can slide in upgraded verbs to lend a sense of energy and life.

Jo: I think this idea of motion is so great, and you tie this in a lot to your work. You've written a lot about physical action, and in the book there is a chapter on physical action. I think this is so important because many authors will say, “Use the word ‘said'” without thinking about dialogue within a pattern of action.

Your chef there could say something as she flung the parsley on the plate, rather than “the chef said this.” Get moving as she flung the stuff onto the plate. The action verbs are so important.

Could you talk a bit more about [action verbs] and the physical action side of it?Sarah: Yes, and that's so right. When you have a scene really rolling, you don't need to do so much explaining about the way a person says something with those dialogue tags. It's very interesting.

I feel like words are alive—they're living, breathing things—and the more that we let them come to life on the page, the more you can draw your reader into the story.

The reader gets a sense of that life and wants to come into the story with you. You've really created a scene that your reader feels immersed in. And that's so exciting as a reader to discover. Writing about movement is part of that.

Of course writing is very vast—it's hard to say, “Well, you should always write about movement.” That would be silly.

If we think about movement and action and action verbs as being effective not only for the actions that we see around us, but for inner actions—the subtle feelings, thinking, non-action, but internally what's going on—that's also space for effective verbs.

For churning emotions, for metaphors about fright and what that feels like in the body. Or despair. Or regret. I have a lot of examples of that in the book.

It's another beautiful use of verbs where, instead of explaining what someone is feeling, you can show it through metaphorical verbs and actual physical changes—things roiling inside the body.

Jo: For example, someone in their draft has “she was afraid”—

How could they make that much stronger and use a lot of those things you were just talking about?Sarah: That's an excellent question. Instead of “she was afraid,” you might say something like: “She felt her chest fill with ice, freezing her lungs and choking her breath, and her heart bashed around as if to tear itself from her body.”

We could get very dramatic about it, but you can play with that. What I like to encourage readers to do is open their minds and open their imaginations. When you have a pretty standard phrase like “she was afraid” or “she felt too frightened to move”—well, put yourself in that position.

What does that feel like? What does that really feel like inside when you're too frightened to move? Is it an icy feeling or is it a burning? Is it a numbness? And what verbs might help with that? Is it thrashing? Is it raging? Is it paralysing?

How can that type of expressiveness fill in the picture and make it palpable to the reader—what it's like to be in the room with this person?

Jo: Do you recommend using a thesaurus? I try to do this myself, and I often use Power Thesaurus, which I just find so useful, because as writers, when we are writing novels or books in a similar genre, we often reach for the same words.

Are you a big thesaurus user?Sarah: I am a huge thesaurus user. I have a stack of actual book-type thesauri, but I do like, as you mentioned, Power Thesaurus.

I like OneLook, which is an interesting resource. I think it's OneLook.com and you can go in the other way—you can use it as a thesaurus, but you can also use it to find one verb that combines a couple of words.

Like “walk clumsily,” for example. You could put that into OneLook and it would come up with lists and lists. And among them might be “hobble” and “limp” and other words to say what a weak verb plus an adverb can say.

Online resources are wonderful. I like Merriam-Webster.com—that's what I rely on a lot. Cambridge too. A thesaurus is wonderful.

Now, the caution with the thesaurus, however, is that I would like to urge people to be mindful about just swapping in one word for another, or one verb for another, because even though they may appear in the same groupings, there are going to be subtle differences among them.

I find it fascinating to really investigate the subtle difference between, say, “limp” and “hobble” and “stumble.” Those all mean slightly different things.

So the finishing tip is just to make sure the word you choose is going to be right for the context.

Jo: And also perhaps the audience. I mean, you are a Pulitzer Prize–winning critic, which is amazing, and you were writing for an audience who wanted dance pieces. The audience for dancing in terms of the words you would use—I'm not really into it myself, but I would know the word “pirouette.”

I imagine there's a ton of words that you would know and use in your writing that wouldn't be so relevant for a wider audience.

So we have to think about the audience as well.Sarah: Yes, absolutely. We want to be very thoughtful in our choice of words. If you distilled my book down to one single message, it is to think carefully.

Not in the first draft, perhaps, and certainly not when we're speaking, because we speak so spontaneously. But in writing, where you put your thoughts down and then—hopefully, if you're not under too much deadline pressure—you can come back, give it another look, shape it, refine it, and really make sure that you've chosen your words with care.

I feel like that's really what writing is all about—communicating one mind to another through this magnificent medium of language.

Language is intentional, and having that intention in mind about what you want to share and what you want to communicate and how you want your readers to approach your work—well, that's up to you.

That's the freedom I hope to be able to present to people who check out my book: here are some ways, here are some suggestions, here are some techniques and tips for issues that can arise.

Really, once you've taken these in, I hope to fire your imagination and inspire you with being able to communicate what it is that you really have inside that you want to share.

Jo: I think it is a book for falling in love with the joy of words again. You did mention deadlines, though, and the pressure.

Especially for those of us who write genre fiction series, which is a lot of people listening, sometimes we might feel that we don't have the time for that. Do our readers appreciate it, or do they want story first? Sometimes is it too much?

Where do you come down on balancing getting story over words? How long can we spend on finding beautiful words when we are writing another 70,000-word book?

Sarah: I think that's an excellent point. I think story comes first. That's probably what first drives you to your desk—telling a story. Although it may not. The realities of writing are so vast and unlimited that it's very hard to come out with rules, and I don't write about rules.

I really want to give suggestions and examples and insights, but I do think that story is absolutely tops. And that's the power of verbs, in fact. They can help us tell the stories with clarity and with efficiency.

I do want to make sure that I'm being clear. I'm not advocating that before you ever sit down and write, or you write one sentence, you then go back and check every single word, because that wouldn't make any sense at all.

The idea is to free yourself, free your imagination. These are ways to open your imagination up that maybe you haven't thought about before. But storytelling is primary, and the way that you tell it is going to be individual to every writer.

It's useful to bear in mind that there are a lot of avenues one can take in terms of creating a scene or building a character and even evoking the landscape and the atmosphere, and we can look at verbs to help us do that.

Jo: One of the biggest problems, I think, especially for new writers, is the passive voice versus more active voice.

Can you give some examples of passive voice? Often in editing we're told to get rid of passive voice, but of course you do need it sometimes.

Sarah: Yes. There's understandably a lot of confusion about passive voice. Just to have a tiny tidbit of grammar nerdery here: the voice of a verb refers to a very specific construction. It doesn't simply mean that the writer is expressing something in a boring way or taking on a dull subject.

The voice of the verb tells you how it relates to the subject of the sentence. When the subject does the action—when it's doing the verb—then you have a verb in the active voice. But when the subject of the sentence is receiving the action, then it needs a verb in the passive voice.

Here's an example. If I said, “Hey, Jo, guess what? My grandmother walked on the moon.” That's active voice. “My grandmother walked on the moon”—it's interesting, right?

But if I said, “Hey, Jo, guess what? The moon was walked on.” You might be left thinking, “What? What am I supposed to take away from that? Is there more to the story?”

“The moon was walked on”—well, that's the passive voice construction. There's no subject who did the walking. I haven't told you, and yet the subject was actually pretty important. My grandmother was the one who walked on the moon.

So that's the frustration that often comes when we read the passive voice. We don't know the full story, and we might suspect: are they hiding something? Do they not really know who did the thing? It brings up a lot of questions.

Especially in official situations. The classic example is “mistakes were made.” Officials love to say that because it puts nobody on the hook. Nobody is responsible. “Mistakes were made.” Well, who were they made by? They're not telling us.

I heard this just recently, by one of the representatives here. This phrase is still being used: “Mistakes were made.” I think most people understand there's a bit of obfuscation. There is something being hidden.

Now, there are times when the passive voice is perfectly fine. It's not necessary to say who did the action. If you say, “Joe Blow was arrested and charged with murder,” you pretty much have the full thing there. You don't need to say, “The police arrested him. The prosecutor filed the paperwork.” It's kind of assumed.

If you just want to get to the point—he was arrested and charged with murder—that's sufficient. Maybe further down in the story you'll explain the circumstances, but you don't need them right there.

Or say, “Fires are still being reported throughout the region.” In a news story, that's perfectly fine. We just need to know that fires are still happening. We don't necessarily need to know who's reporting it. More details may come later in the story, but right then it's perfectly fine.

In news reports, in historical situations when we're giving a history, in scientific data and scientific reports, you often see the passive voice.

It can be a perfectly good and oftentimes even more efficient way to tell something, but you don't want to lean into it and overuse it because it becomes very dull. When you don't have someone doing an action, it becomes very dull.

Jo: As you've mentioned the legal side of things, and I'm reading a lot of academic papers at the moment. I'm doing another master's degree, and goodness me, I feel like sometimes it's designed to turn you off.

Sarah: You are exactly right. I've come to that feeling too, and especially in seeing student work, where I feel like there is so much of that in academic writing, which students are reading and digesting. It naturally comes out of them, and it's a kind of cycle that's hard to break.

Jo: Do you think it's a form of hedging? “Mistakes were made”—or anything legal—you are hedging it so it can be ambiguous. Whereas a strong verb—and you mentioned “your grandmother walked on the moon”—you are really making it very clear.

If you want to hedge things, then using passive voice might be more appropriate.

If you want to make it stronger, the activeness is important.Sarah: Yes. And it makes such a difference. I discovered this in my own work. I would read other critics, for example, and I would think, “I feel like the piece I've just written is kind of flat. It doesn't really have the effect I want, doesn't have any zip.”

I would go and read other critics—not just dance critics, but other critics. It's so useful to just read other people in any type of writing that you're doing. I advocate doing a lot of reading.

I would see that the pieces that really touched me, that really inspired me, had a lot of active voice constructions. They're not turning things around passively, which I think, as a young critic, I may have been doing because I was a little bit afraid to take a stand.

Jo: Mm.

Sarah: I think I see that in student work, that sometimes we don't want to take a stand, and so we hedge. But writing is intentional, and readers can pick up on that hedging.

If you don't intend to hedge—in many cases it can be perfectly appropriate to be fuzzy for an effect that you want, or something like that in the context—but if you are hedging and you're trying to get away with it, like you don't want anyone to notice that you don't really want to give an opinion on this matter, it's going to be very clear. So it's better to address something directly.

Jo: And make it stronger. I also wanted to ask you more about the writing career, because I, perhaps like many people listening, was like, I didn't even know you could make a career as a dance critic.

Now I know you are not at the Washington Post any more, and it's possible that that role no longer exists—like a lot of writing roles.

How has your writing career changed over the years? Do you have these various aspects of a portfolio career? We often talk about multiple streams of income on this show and how, as writers, we can't necessarily rely on one thing.

Sarah: Yes, exactly. It's true, there is no longer a dance critic at the Washington Post. The position was eliminated. It's a shame, and it's happening to critics in all fields, in all media organisations, sadly.

That's where, for me at least, having that focal point was very key. A thing that I became comfortable writing about, that I could then spiral out and use the eyes and the brain that I had developed from writing about this certain focus for a while. Where can I take that?

Oh, athletes. They also move. I began writing stories and pieces and essays about athletes that moved beautifully, beyond racking up statistics about winning. They were just gorgeous to look at, just so pleasurable to watch.

I started writing about the body language of political candidates in debate situations and so forth. Using my focal point to then widen my lens, to mix a metaphor, I guess.

Having that subject matter and then broadening it out beyond the limits of the actual subject matter, broadening it out imaginatively into where I could find other places to use this perspective. That was really key for me.

Say you are writing historical fiction or you're writing thrillers. I would imagine that you would develop a kind of expertise in things that I would find very difficult. Suspense, maybe, or political or police procedure, or what exactly was the weaponry in seventeenth-century France.

How can you take that expertise and use it either in an aesthetic way or an actual factual way to address other topics? I think there are so many people that would be interested in what writers who have knowledge and expertise in anything can then use to show us something that we've overlooked.

Something we always thought we knew, but that really, when you look at it this way, is reminiscent of how the scabbard was used in seventeenth-century France—or whatever it is, in whatever way.

People are craving a new perspective on something they've overlooked or taken for granted. And that's where writers who have a body of work, or are interested in pursuing a certain topic. That's the promise that they have.

They can work towards being able to enlighten us on so many other things that maybe only have a tangential connection, but they can make that connection for us.

Jo: Fantastic.

Where can people find you and your books online?Sarah: I am at SarahLKaufman.com. That's my website. My books are available on any website or bookshop that you want to order them from. Verb Your Enthusiasm comes out April 28th. I am not much on social media at the moment, but I do enjoy hearing feedback from readers, and there are ways to do that on my website.

Jo: Well, thanks so much for your time, Sarah. That was great.

Sarah: Thank you very much. I've enjoyed it.

The post Verb Your Enthusiasm: Transform Your Writing With Stronger Verbs With Sarah Kaufman first appeared on The Creative Penn.

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Is AI really the end of creativity, or the biggest emancipation of creative energy we've ever seen? How can authors thrive in a time of super abundance, when anyone can make anything? What happens when publishers become technology providers, and agents start shopping for books on our behalf? With Nadim Sadek.

In the intro, my AI-Assisted Artisan Author webinars.

This show is supported by my Patrons. Join my Community and get articles, discounts, and extra audio and video tutorials on writing craft, author business, and AI tools, at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn

Nadim Sadek is a serial entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of Shimmr AI, an AI-powered book marketing company, as well as the bestselling author of children's books and non-fiction books, including Quiver, don't Quake: How Creativity Can Embrace 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

• Using AI as a research partner, editor, and constructive critic when writing a book
• The ratio of dreaming to execution
• Why publishers still draw red lines at AI-written words, and why that may change
• Inside Shimmr's three-engine advertising system: Strategizer, Generator, and Deployer
• Multimodal interactivity, agentic purchasing, and the idea of the Panthropic

You can find Nadim on LinkedIn or at NadimSadek.com.

Transcript of Interview with Nadim SadekJo: Nadim Sadek is a serial entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of Shimmr AI, an AI-powered book marketing company, as well as the bestselling author of children's books and non-fiction books, including Quiver, don't Quake: How Creativity Can Embrace AI. So welcome to the show, Nadim.

Nadim: It is lovely to be here. I feel very privileged to be invited onto this. Thank you.

Jo: Oh, I'm excited to talk to you today, and we're really talking about AI. I wanted to start with the fact that you do seem to have a sort of relentless optimism.

How do you remain so optimistic about AI when the publishing industry that we both work in seems so overwhelmingly negative? Lift our eyes to the horizon—what is the bigger picture?

Nadim: Oh my goodness. That is a big one. I think my optimism is quite confined actually in the area of publishing. If you were to ask me to speak about AI more broadly—which you're not, but I'm going to give you a little bit of it—I've got lots of concerns.

That includes the advent of autonomous weapons and economic singularity, where the wealth from AI as an industry is going into just a few hands, and energy usage, and cultural homogenisation, I suppose, and the potential for brain rot.

There's a whole pile of stuff which is really not very good about AI, and all the normal things about fraud and theft and so on.

However, if you recognise that and then you say what's going on in publishing, then the obvious thing that you first have to deal with is what did happen with copyright. Is it appropriate to say that things have been stolen and taken without permission and so on? It is.

It's going through the American courts at one pace. I saw that Penguin Random House have started a case against OpenAI in Germany, where there will be a much faster legal conclusion—a judge's conclusion, I think.

This will begin to put parameters on how copyrighted materials can be used, and possibly also some retrospective judgment about what has happened to this point and what can be done about it.

So it's good that you've asked questions so early in our conversation, because I think —

It's important to contextualise my optimism. It is whilst noting with regret the behaviour of the AI industry—the models themselves—in not dealing with copyright in the most generous or appropriate fashion.

I think we should also recognise that copyright probably wasn't designed for machine learning in the way that it is. Probably the industry wasn't terribly well prepared to note, negotiate with, and navigate the very fast-moving technological culture of AI companies. So I think lots of mistakes have been made on both sides.

When you put all that to one side, what's left for me is an amazing emancipation of creative energy and also a huge efficiency being brought to the publishing industry. We can talk about both those things further, but for me that is what's going on.

The efficiency of bookmaking and publishing generally—the whole workflow of getting a book out of somebody's head and into a reader's hands—I think is immensely streamlined and improved by AI.

Actually, if you talk about it carefully, which I'm sure we will do, the ability of creators to share and let others experience their creative endeavours becomes so much better, so much fuller, so much richer. So that's why I'm excited about it.

Jo: Well, let's get into those two things then. You mentioned the emancipation of creative energy, and you've worked with various AI tools as part of your creative and business processes. You've said that AI can be a creative companion. So specifically when it comes to Quiver, don't Quake, for example—

How are you using the various tools in such an emancipated way?Nadim: Well, just to put a bit of a broader context on it, we're an AI-native company at Shimmr, and separately I wear a hat as an author.

You mentioned the AI books and the children's books. I'm also writing a book about the psychology of motorcycling. So it's a very odd authorial footprint, but it means that I kind of tramp around the place and learn different things.

What I've noticed, even within Shimmr, is that the whole team has been using AI tools very differently. Lots of people are very bright in the company. They're all brighter than me, and I salute them and love them. But they've all used AI to become more creative in their own ways.

For example, our Chief Commercial Officer is very numerate and logical, and not loquacious. She prefers to say things straight and simply. She has become an unbelievably creative financial modeller and analyst because she uses AI in lots of different ways.

So she has flourished and grown so much, and is creative in a way that she never could be before—not only around numeracy and financial matters, but in thinking through new concepts for sales and marketing and for our commercial development.

I've just noticed all around me this going on. When it comes to me, I prefer to express myself through writing. I talk a bit as well, as you can tell, but my favourite means of communication is just writing.

When I was writing Quiver, don't Quake, I would use AI in a number of different fashions. One would be for research. One of the chapters is about the psychology of creativity. I'm a psychologist, so I tend to come at things from a psychological perspective. What is the psychology of creativity? Well, here comes a million-word answer from an AI—this person said this, this person said that.

Then I kind of focused my research in particular areas and assembled them by drawing from the outputs of several AIs about what has been said about AI, what the science says about it, what sociology says about it, what particular creatives that we're all aware of say about it, whether they're in the advertising industry or musicians or artists or whatever. So that was a very rich way of researching things.

I would often put a chapter in—this is a slightly different use—a manuscript that I'd written and say, “Read this as if you're somebody just coming across my book, and tell me where the reader might struggle between one paragraph and another, or where there's a logical fallout, or where the concept isn't really very fully excavated and developed.”

It would occasionally prompt me to say, “You could probably do with a line that brings the reader from this point to that point.” And usually I listened to that and then wrote something new.

In another use case, I eventually gave it the whole book and said, “I think I've done an okay job here and I quite like the flow and I'm sort of satisfied enough, but before I send it to the publisher and say, ‘there you go,' what do you think? Are there any ways in which this book could become a better and more interesting read?”

It came back fairly promptly and said, “Well, what you haven't really done is considered what all the naysayers would say. You've done your dark moments of militarism and all that stuff, but what about some of the other stuff closer to publishing or creativity?”

So off I went on a new round of research, and did some myself and used the AI for other bits.

The funny thing, really the ironic thing here, is that the book is much better, and most people salute the book for the eighth to ninth chapter that talks about the constructive critics.

I assemble them all and articulate all their arguments and say how hideous AI is and how terrible it is for the world and all of us. And then I try to repudiate some of them, not in a defensive way, but just to say, actually, yes, that's one perspective and here's another one.

That chapter, ironically, about how AI is terrible was prompted by AI. It said, “You should really have a go at me.” And so I did. So that was another use case.

Then finally—perhaps I'll say this—I have a friend who is, I think, the Editor-in-Chief of Penguin in India. I got to know her at a book fair or something. We started chatting, and I told her about my kids' books. I said, “I could really do with an editor on these ten books that are due to be published.”

She very generously, amiably, and very constructively gave me feedback on each individual book and then on the whole set. I was really happy with it. I said to her, “That was a delight.”

She said, “You'd be much better off working with Editrix.”I said, “What's Editrix?”

She said, “Well, it's an AI platform I've created where you can go and self-edit.”

I said, “You must be kidding. I'd much prefer chatting to you and our interactions.”

She said, “Yes, well, go and try it.”

So I got an account for the Editrix AI. Off I went, gave it my books, and lo and behold, it came up with some incredibly sophisticated and subtle observations on the books that neither Meru nor I had seen.

For example, there's a story where a boy who lives in a house on a hill meets another boy on a bridge, and they end up in a silly confrontation. They're young and foolish, and it sort of transpires that the other boy lived in a local village.

Now, I suppose in retrospect, it's pretty obvious that this could be seen to be colonialist, imperialist, and a sense of entitlement from the boy at the top of the hill crossing the bridge first and so on. Hadn't crossed my mind.

The AI said, “I can tell from the rest of your writing that you don't really have a sort of racist or imperialist or superior attitude to things, but in this story, there could be a misapprehension that you do.” I thought, wow, what a great warning. So I changed it.

There are almost endless ways—and I can tell you others, because I'm writing a book about clouds at the moment—in which AI can help you as an author. I've just shared some of those with you.

Jo: Yes, well, I love that. I also use it for research. I definitely use the “give me feedback as a reader avatar, as a reader of this type of genre” or whatever.

Nadim: Yes.

Jo: I use different tools as well, so I agree with you. All of that is, I think, what a lot of people are doing. You also said you did a lot of the writing and rewriting, so the human was very much there.

This was not an AI-generated work in any way. It was using an AI as a sort of collaborator—a creative companion, to use your words—which I think is great.

One of the things that AI-positive people like us are finding is that there's so much negativity around the traditional publishers, around other authors, around supposedly negative backlash from readers. I think there's a lot of very noisy people who are probably making this sound worse than it is.

Since you are so embedded in traditional publishing in so many ways, how are publishing people thinking about this?Do you think it's just different in terms of the creative side versus say the marketing side? What is happening there, and what do you recommend for authors?

Nadim: What I'm observing is that there is increasingly confident adoption of AI for corporate efficiency, which is a polite way of saying where one can see profitability being improved.

Could you streamline legal contracting? Yes. Can you manage royalty payments better? Yes. Are there better sustainability prospects with managing a warehouse and distribution and so on with AI? Yes.

Could you improve your marketing by looking at competitive titles and trends, and optimising your metadata and your SEO and now your GEO, all using AI? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. All of these things can be assisted.

Can you manage much more of your backlist, where you don't have the human or financial capital to manage all of those titles in a truly respectful and invested way? Yes, yes, yes. So wherever there's corporate efficiency, I see publishers being increasingly bold about saying they have integrated AI into their workstreams.

What's much more tentative and hesitant is where there's discussion of authors—and I do hesitate to use the right words here—being assisted by, employing, working with AI. I kind of shorthand it as creative emancipation. It really means very many different things.

Let me give you the example that I referred to briefly a second ago of Cloud Land, which is probably my first real novel. I'm very lucky. I sit working every day at a desk that's got three windows, and I look at the sky, and every day it's different, and I'm fascinated by it.

I've been flying around the world since I was very young—my father worked for the World Health Organization, we moved between many countries—so I've also seen clouds from the sky a lot. I've noticed that in different parts of the world there are different cloud formations.

It came to me one day that it would be very interesting if the clouds were somehow sentient, and that there is a cloud society, and that Cloud Land lived above human land and absorbed and observed us.

Actually, the more I started thinking about it, the more I thought, well, we kind of evaporate. We give off vapour all the time and it rises up to clouds and maybe we're sending DNA signals to it, and it condensates and sends rain and storms and winds and lightning and thunder and all.

There's a huge amount of interaction between Cloud Land and human land if you think about it.

So I went into an AI. I said, “Hey, I've been thinking about this, blah, blah, blah. Any observations on what I've been saying so far?” I think one of the first things it said to me was, “You are actually playing with quantum physics.”

I had no idea what quantum physics were really. I thought, well, this is interesting. I went and researched quantum physics, and actually there is some of that in it. If you count Cloud Land as a creative notion—

The original idea, the creativity, came wholly from me, and then the development of it has been assisted by working with AI. I as a creator have spent much more time originating ideas about a story than would historically have been true.

I probably would have gone to a library, tried to find the right geography textbook, read up about clouds, discovered what the nomenclature is, thought about whether I could put characters to cumulonimbus versus stratus something or other, and kind of worked my way gradually through it.

There is something that I refer to in Quiver, don't Quake, which is what I call the ratio of dreaming to execution.

I think previously, without AI, creators would probably spend 80% of their time researching and trying to get information and assembling things and editing documents and spell-checking and doing a whole pile of different tasks

None of which I actually dismiss, because I think sometimes those difficult and
“menial” tasks give you time to let ideas percolate and flourish and grow. It's just part of the process.

But whereas before, I think we probably spent 20% of our time originating and 80% of our time assembling, I think it's inverted now. You can probably do 80% of the time you want creating and 20% of the time fiddling about getting your act together.

So I feel that that's a huge emancipation of individual creativity. There's also—and we can talk about this if you wish—I think a much broader sociological phenomenon going on, which is really about every person in the world, all 8 billion of us, being creatives. That's the way I see the world.

I think that only a minority of that 8 billion have the gift of craft that we recognise—of writing or drawing or making music or being an architect or a biomedical scientist or something that's creative and assembling things. And AI gives you courage and helps you to identify what you wish to make.

I really don't mean creating the artefacts. I don't mean painting or making a song or writing a book. I just mean helping one to express and articulate oneself so that one's creative idea is shareable and experienceable by others.

Jo: Well, it's interesting. I mean, everything that we've discussed, you're really saying that the main line is the actual writing of the words, because none of us can articulate how ideas come.

Especially with Claude, we might have a creative spark, but I'm sure you've found the same: if I go to Claude, which is my favourite, with my creative spark, by the time we've discussed it, possibly over days, I've lost track of who said what.

The idea definitely started with me, because the AI at the moment doesn't have its own creative spark in terms of its own drive to write a book, for example. So it starts with me, but then it goes back and forth, back and forth—sparks new ideas, something it wrote makes me think about something else.

I think the difficulty with how publishing seems to be doing this at the moment is that it is just the written words on the page that is their red line around “have you used AI to generate a book?” But even that, I just think, surely that will change.

For example, in the publishing industry, ghost writing—or writing dead authors, like Wilbur Smith—I was going to say Wilbur Smith is a good one. I mean, we've seen them, just different dead authors essentially writing in the voice of those people.

So I just see that there are many possible places where publishers might want this kind of tool. I don't know—

Do you see any openness to the actual words themselves?Nadim: I think you're right to identify that that is the place that it gets stickiest. What you kind of do in your private time—imagining and dreaming things up and interacting—it's a facsimile for talking to your friends or another author or something. It's just an AI companion.

So I think that that is, you're right, less scrutinised. It is when one examines the words on the page.

It's funny—it's almost as if it's a measure of how hard did you work to do this? Or did you just splatter it down on the page by pressing a button somewhere? It's almost as if, as creatives, we have to evidence that we have suffered, you know?

I think there's a different form of suffering when you write with AI. It's true that if you command AI in some way to write for you, the default writing will be pretty anodyne, pretty bland, pretty mundane. It is deliberately so.

AI is created and it is tuned to be inoffensive, to please most people, to be accessible to most readers and consumers of it.

So it's another thing that I encourage people to do: don't approach AI with a kind of Google mindset where you just do a question and answer—”what time is it in New York now?” “Well, it's five hours behind” or whatever.

Instead you say, “Hey, listen, I'm thinking about clouds, but I want a bit of spittle going up and down between the two, and I'd quite like a crazy cloud that harasses us.” Well, now I'm putting in some of my idiosyncrasy and my eccentricity and my personal perspective.

The more you do that, the more that even if you did press a button and say, “Command, I want you to write this book,” that will no longer be a bland and mundane bit of output. It'll be very tuned by your interactions, and it'll exhibit some of your nature.

So I think there probably are factories—there's always factories. They're probably—and actually I know this—writing a lot of romance, writing a lot of porn, things which are fairly well parametered.

You know what happens in both of those genres more or less, so it's pretty easy for a machine to emulate what an author might write there and go and do it.

But if you get into something like, “a sand dune was my cousin”—like, okay, well that's a bit different. What do you mean? And there it becomes a much more interesting bit of writing. So I think we're going to see a spectrum.

To come back to your question about where publishers draw red lines, I think it's where they just see straight away mundane output that doesn't feel like it had a lot of craft or ingenuity or hard work to it. But I believe that as we go on, that's going to become harder and harder to establish. As we become more sophisticated users of AI, and AI's capabilities to understand us and to work with us become better, then I don't think it'll be such a big question where the words came from.

What we'll feast on with each other is our creative ideas and how they're expressed, but not how they were produced.

Jo: I mean, I always say to people, I'm not a word generator. That's not what makes me or my books worthy. It is what I do with it. It's the stories I tell, or it's the personal things behind it.

So generating millions and millions of words, whether you generate them by typing or handwriting or AI or whatever, it isn't the word generation that is the point. It's all of the things that make that finished thing what it is.

So anyway, let's come back to the other thing, because you mentioned that publishers seem very happy around corporate efficiency, anything that drives profitability. You also mentioned that Shimmr is an AI-native company.

Now, I, and many people listening—we are a one-person company. So I run my own company. It's a publishing company. I do all my publishing, I do all my marketing, I do all my business as just me. So I also use AI for a lot of this stuff. I wondered—

How do you see publishers changing to become more AI-native? How can we as individual author-publishers do that too?Because it feels like a massive mindset shift, not just plug in Opus 4.7 here.

Nadim: I have been found saying at various publishing events—and it is deliberately a little bit provocative—that I believe that publishers have always been technology providers to creatives. It's not only what they do, but it is a part that they don't seem to embrace very hard.

Even if you just go back to Gutenberg—I mean, here's a printing press, it's a bit of technology. “I'll make your book, I'll make your words into books.” It started there, and it's always been. That applies to distribution and e-commerce and audiobook manufacture and all sorts of other things along the way.

So I encourage publishers to accept the notion that what they should do to attract authors in the future is partly—only partly—develop their own house AIs. It can be as ethically trained as that house wishes to deal with the copyright furore.

It can be tuned to do editing in a particular way. It can have a specific way of copy editing. It can have a collaborative notion. It can have an assistant that helps you understand genres and hotspots and competitive titles.

It can help you to think about, as Americans might say, what's hot and what's not in the world at the moment. So you might be more attuned to what the market demands, if that affects you at all. Some writers don't care, and that's fine.

It can certainly help with all the marketing then. How can you produce social media content that's appropriate to your book, and all the rest of it. So I think there's a way in which publishers could massively enable authors.

I talk to tons and tons of authors clearly about Shimmr, and what they all resent, I would say, is finding their time stolen by trying to flog their work rather than make it.

Jo: Yes.

Nadim: So the marketing process is just theft of creative time for most authors, and they hate doing it, and they're often not very good at it, because it's a completely different skillset from creating great stories or writing non-fiction books about particular subjects.

So I believe that authors should be embracing the notion that publishers will create their own house AIs. And goodness me, we might even decide which publisher we prefer to go to on the strength of their AI position. Wouldn't that be interesting? But that is what I see the future being.

Jo: Yes. I mean, definitely there's some quite significant authors—Dean Koontz, probably one of the biggest—who went to Amazon because of their technical ability around publishing and marketing.

He was like, “Yes, I want this because of this.” Not that he'd be in bookshops or whatever—of course Dean Koontz is—but yes, so I think you're right there.

For individuals also, as you know, we can use AI to help us market. I upload my books to Claude when they're finished, and I've just been marketing today. I'll say, “create 10 Midjourney images based on this book and give me all the marketing copy.” So I think we can use it now to help us be more efficient.

On the other side of that, I think the bigger thing that's starting to happen is marketing is now much easier in one way.

Nadim: Yes. Mm-hmm.

Jo: So it's getting fuller, or even more.

Nadim: Yes.

Jo: So how do we deal with this? Because Shimmr is an AI marketing company.

How are you thinking about the predominance of very, very good AI marketing now?Nadim: Yes, and it gets better all the time. It's a great question. Obviously, strategically, as an enterprise, we've really had to think about this one. If I go back one step, I always believe that innovation succeeds when it starts in a narrow space.

So when Shimmr launched, we put ourselves forward and were quickly embraced, I have to say, as automated advertising that sells books. Nothing particularly more complicated than that. “Okay, you do ads, you automate it for me, and it'll help flog my books. Yes, that's it.” We had a rush.

We've worked with about 250 publishers. As you might anticipate, it started with smaller ones, then got bigger. We now work with the biggest as well.

That notion of automated advertising selling books was successful. Actually, that was about three years ago—a bit shorter than three years ago. What's happened in that time is that we have now collected a ton of data, and meanwhile the AI models have become more sophisticated and competent.

Maybe I should just pause briefly and say what Shimmr actually does. We've got three main engines that are all chained together, to use pretty old language.

The first one is what we call the Strategizer. It reads the book, it understands what we call its book DNA. So it's the structural elements of what the narrative is, who the protagonists are, and all the rest of it.

It's also a psychological study of it—what's going on, what are the emotions or the values, what are the interests, how they intersect, where are the tensions, all those sorts of things.

The Strategizer decides, “Well, reading everything between the covers of this book and understanding the author's intent, this is the best way to put this book forward because here are its strong points.”

It hands that off to the second machine, which we call the Generator, which says, “Thanks for the creative brief. I'll make you the ads now.” It does videos and music and captions and all the rest of it.

Then it presents its newly baked campaign to the third machine, which is the Deployer, that says, “Okay, well, I know where to find the audiences for this. If that's the DNA of the book and this is the campaign that manifests it, then I know where to find these people.”

It goes and autonomously deploys it in various media channels to specific audiences who might be interested in that content.

So that's what we started doing, and that generated a huge amount of data. Where we've got to recently—really in the last six months—is understanding that, as you've just said, most people can generate their own stuff. So in some ways they can look just like a mini Shimmr.

The thing that differentiates the content is always the strategy. What we have learned to do now—and it's because of an agentic framework—is we've moved beyond what's between the covers of the book to look at life. We look at culture, what's going on, what are the trends, what's in and what's out.

Even if you take a particular trend—let's say, fascism—what's the language associated with it that's being treated positively and respectfully, and what's the stuff that leads to it being dismissed straight away? All those sorts of nuances around everything.

But equally, as well as going deep with a set of agents on what fascism might be in today's culture, we also go wide and say, “Well, how does that sit next to loyalty or hedonism or ambition or something else?” So we get this very, very circumspect analysis of the market.

Then, indeed, if you do write a book about—I'm really going off-piste here, but you know, the hedonism of fascism, like, God, that would be a weird book—you discover that actually you're not really competing with another book, but you are competing with that specific podcast and this movie that came out, and another movement that's born in Italy but it's moving across Europe now or something.

So we were able to produce strategies which now lead to a much broader offer, one which is much more sophisticated and much more likely to drive success in a book or in a creative enterprise.

It informs product listings, metadata, author communications, PR, SEO, GEO, and of course the thing that we started with, advertising.

So things that you see made by Shimmr should be much more resonant and much more attuned to the world, and commercially much more likely to drive success, than simply saying, “Here's a book, make ten Midjourney images out of it.”

Jo: Mm-hmm.

Nadim: It's really about the quality of the briefing and the quality of the assets that you're able to produce by having a much more sophisticated Strategizer.

So we've gone back into the intellectual property and the human analysis, in a way, of the world. To understand where a specific piece of creative work sits in culture and society has become a much bigger proposition.

Jo: Right. So you did mention podcasts there. So as in, you might present to a publisher “these are the podcasts that they should pitch” for example?

Nadim: There's that, of course, but it's also, don't think that this book is competing with these three titles which your team put together. It's more that, if people want to listen to hedonistic fascism, they can listen to that podcast before they read this book.

Jo: Okay, that's interesting. Interesting times.

So we don't have much time left, but I think one of the biggest questions that people have—even if they're AI-positive, as I am and many people listening are—it's not that we're worried about AI replacing us, because we know we're individuals and all that, but we are slightly concerned about the volume of books in the market.

And not just books, but TV shows and YouTube and TikTok. It's very hard to stand out.

You do say in the book: “When anyone can make, maybe creativity lies not in the making, but in making others care.”

How can I move up the value chain? So for many of us who make an income this way, what are your recommendations?Nadim: Great question. And actually I think it's really central. My latest catchphrase is that in a time of super abundance, we need super discoverability.

So it's exactly as you just said—tons of work, tons of movies, tons of podcasts, and tons of everything. If you believe in what I've been saying, which is that we're emancipating the creative spark of 8 billion people, there's going to be even more.

So I believe that the solution is what I call multimodal interactivity. That doesn't mean multimedia—it means multimodal. Multimodal means you can engage with an experience in different modalities—the same idea.

So my conviction is that if you write a book or make a painting or have a piece of music that you've come up with—or anything really, creatively—and you wish it to both survive the first six weeks of its birth and then thrive in a more perpetual way in society and culture, then people have to be able to experience and engage with your idea in multiple modalities.

I would always write a book, because that's what I do. Others produce a podcast or write a piece of music—whatever the same sort of things. Any one of us needs to make sure that that reappears and is experienceable and interactable with in different modalities.

So my book should have some Instagram reels. There might be YouTube shorts, there might be a podcast, there might be a piece of music associated with it, it could be a movie. It could be a game, it could be an app.

You really have to think about allowing your creative idea—more than your creative artefact—to live in culture. Sure, you want to make an income from the artefact that you are good at producing.

As many of your listeners, and I, would be writers of books, we want that to persist as a revenue stream, and it should do. I would simply argue that making sure that whatever you've produced in your book is manifest, and people can interact with it in other modalities, is the surest way to get it seen and discovered.

Jo: Yes, it's interesting.

I've actually started looking at making my non-fiction books into skills.Nadim: Yes.

Jo: And also making markdown MD files—books as markdown files for agents to buy.

Nadim: Very good. You are way ahead of the curve.

Jo: Well, I sell on Shopify, as do many listeners, and Shopify, as I'm sure you know, is now enabled for agentic purchasing. We are in ChatGPT. So it's really interesting to think, well, if the agents go shopping for people now and in the future, what you want is to be able to find it.

Also, I haven't actually put an explicit licence, but people email me and say, “Can I upload your books into an LLM?” And I'm like, “If you buy a copy from me, then yes, you can.”

Nadim: Yes.

Jo: So I think it's changing. And as you say, I do think that people are more and more going to want to say “buy the PDF and put it in NotebookLM” or use it as a skill.

Nadim: That's right.

Jo: That kind of thing.

Nadim: Yes, and then they go on a walk with their dog and they listen to the podcast about your book, which they've created on NotebookLM. It's exactly that.

I think my worst fear for publishers is that they lose so much of the value chain—distribution, creative collaboration, all sorts of things along the way—that the worst position they could end up in is simply as book manufacturers, which would be just one small manifestation of a creative idea.

Jo: Well, I'm excited about the future. I hope you are too. I think you are.

What are you particularly excited about in terms of the changes coming?Nadim: Well, if I can be my most extravagant now, my greatest excitement about AI and the changes that are coming are that it'll produce what I describe as the Panthropic.

The Panthropic is a way of seeing AI not as a companion or some anthropomorphic being, but instead the repository of everything that humans have ever thought or felt or created or shared, accessible to us all in an anonymised way. It's just a repository of interactable information.

My excitement about it is that the liberation that that gives to information—which becomes knowledge, which of course we all know leads to some power—should result in truly new thinking, new philosophy, new spiritualism, possibly new questions about what it is to be a human being and what life on Earth is all about. New economics, new employment, new education.

I think one can too easily underestimate the massive liberation of intellectual consideration and creativity that's about to surf across the globe, and I'm so excited by it.

Jo: Mm-hmm. Yes, me too. Very interesting times ahead.

So where can people find you and your books and everything you do online?Nadim: I think the easiest thing is just to go to LinkedIn and find me there as Nadim Sadek.

You can also go to my personal website, which is NadimSadek.com, and that'll take you wherever you want on different journeys and different parts of my career. It'll also give you links to books.

Of course, they're available in all formats—audio, paperback, ebook—and in many different languages, all through Amazon and other platforms, and Spotify and Audible and all the usual things.

Jo: All the usual things. Well, thanks so much for your time, Nadim. That was great.

Nadim: It's a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

The post AI, Creativity, And The Future of Publishing with Nadim Sadek first appeared on The Creative Penn.

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How is the German market different to English speaking markets, and why might it be worth looking into translation? What are the best ways to translate, self-publish and market your books in German? With Skye MacKinnon.

In the intro, thoughts on feeling empty after a book, and the benefits of SubStack for authors [Stark Reflections; Wish I'd Known Then]; AI-Assisted Artisan Author webinars 16 and 23 May.

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

Skye MacKinnon is the award-winning, USA Today bestselling author of over 70 books across romance and children's books under multiple pen names, most of which are also available in German, which is her bestselling market. Her latest book for authors is Self-Publishing in German: How to Translate, Publish and Market Your 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

• Why the German-speaking market is much bigger than just Germany, and which genres sell best there
• Title protection laws, the Impressum, and translator copyright
• How to find and vet human translators, and what a quality translation actually costs
• The current state of AI translation for fiction, and why quality assurance passes are essential
• Distribution decisions: the Tolino Alliance, Skoobe, libraries, and why IngramSpark doesn't work in Germany
• Marketing in German: BookDeals, LovelyBooks, ads, BookTok, and why pre-orders matter even more

You can find Skye SkyeMacKinnon.com and her children's books at IslaWynter.com.

Transcript of the interview with Skye MacKinnonJo: Skye MacKinnon is the award-winning, USA Today bestselling author of over 70 books across romance and children's books under multiple pen names, most of which are also available in German, which is her bestselling market. Her latest book for authors is Self-Publishing in German: How to Translate, Publish and Market Your Books.

Welcome, Skye.

Skye: Hi. Thank you so much for having me.

Jo: This is such an interesting topic. But first up—

Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and publishing.Skye: I've always loved writing, but I was always told, “Well, you can't be an author. Get a proper job.” So I became a journalist and did that for a few years, but there was always that love of creative writing.

At some point when I was getting more active on social media, I was following some other indie authors and realised they're just like me. They're not special people. I had always pictured authors as these mythical beings high up above the rest of us.

That gave me the courage to put out my own book. I self-published from the start, never even looked into trad publishing, and that was in 2017. I was really lucky because my first series totally hit it off. I was able to quit my job a year later and I have been a full-time author ever since.

I started with romance and then, by accident, got into children's books. Which has been great fun. I don't even have children myself, but it's just that palette cleanser in between. Writing about cute animals and unicorns and just bringing some fun into everything.

Nowadays I have about five or six pen names, depending on how you count, across genres, although most of it is romance, and that's my bread and butter really.

Jo: Yes, I'm certainly one of those people who wish I could write romance. It always just seems to be the most profitable market in any language, I guess.

Let's get into the book. It's a fantastic book. I've been through it myself. It's really packed full of everything you need, so we can't cover everything.

Let's start by considering the German language in general.

Why is German a good language market to consider expanding into? And for anyone who might not realise, why is it more than Germany?

Skye: Well, Germans love to read, and depending on the statistic that you look at, they're generally seen as the third largest book market in the world after English and Mandarin Chinese. So it's a huge market, even though you think of Germany as a small little country in Europe.

As you said, it's much more than Germany. Yes, you've got about 83 million people in Germany, but then you've also got Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, parts of Belgium, Luxembourg, and even Italy. So if you look at the whole footprint on the map, it is much bigger than just the one country.

A lot of young people there still read and go to bookshops. There's a huge bookshop culture. You will find, if you go to a high street there, way more bookshops than you do here in the UK, for example.

There's demand for quality and for really gorgeous books. They have been way ahead of the curve when it comes to special editions and sprayed edges, and they also like translations.

I found one statistic where about two thirds of all newly released titles in German are actual translations. Readers are used to translations, but until a few years ago it was all trad-published translations. So this transition is coming now. It's coming very, very fast, especially with AI.

They generally are very open to translations as long as the quality is there.

Jo: So what about specific genres then? Obviously we mentioned romance there, and romance is not just one genre anymore. Whatever they're writing—

How can somebody tell if it's worth expanding into German? How do we do this? It takes time and effort and money, potentially.

Skye: It can take a lot of money, so it is worth doing research. There's one easy way, which is just looking at your current sales and looking at how many books you're selling in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland at the moment in English.

That can give you an indication of which of your books might be already quite popular there. Sometimes it's quite surprising.

A lot of my books sell very differently in German than they do in English. I've got one series that did okay in English, and I almost didn't translate it. The German version is, I think, my second bestselling series in German and has completely surprised me. So sometimes it's worth just experimenting a bit.

Otherwise, obviously as you said, romance is doing really well. There are a few surprises though. I had a chat with Draft2Digital and they gave me lots of information from their statistics, and they said about 40% of all the western title sales on Draft2Digital are actually in Germany, which is just a huge percentage.

Jo: In English?

Skye: Across languages.

Jo: Mm-hmm.

Skye: Germans, to be fair, they love their westerns. My dad in Germany, he has been watching westerns for I don't know how many decades. It is one of those things that is just really popular there.

Another thing is anything that is set in other countries and really has the location as almost like a character. There's lots of Cornwall, Scotland, different islands, but also mountains and cities.

So if your book is set in, even in New York City, if it has a clear setting—if it's not just that it could be any city—then that's a good one to think about translating.

In general, most genres can do well. There's a few where you have to be a bit careful. Second World War books, for example. If you have a book that portrays every single German as a Nazi and as evil, it might not do as well in Germany. So some common sense when it comes to historical books.

Otherwise, just look at German retailers, look at what is selling there—and not just Amazon. Places like Thalia, which is part of the Tolino Alliance, and they have about 40% of the market. So it's really important to look at them too, and not just at Amazon.

Jo: We'll come back to the distribution in a minute.

There are some important differences between the German market and the US/UK market. Obviously we're talking about a different language, but of course there are a few things that are different that some people might not think about. So give us a few of those things that people definitely need to think about.

Skye: Okay, so even before you start publishing, you need to be aware that title protection is a thing in Germany. Your book can't have the same title as an already published book. That is a law that is basically there to avoid readers being confused.

So if you had five books with the same title, readers might not realise which book is by which author. You have to do your research and check if anyone else is using your title.

There are some exceptions—if it's a completely different category, so if there's a children's book with that title but you write spicy romance, then the chance that the reader gets confused is much lower.

Quite often you can then contact either the author or the publisher and ask, “Can I get written permission to use that title?” I did that for one of my series and it was totally fine. Just be sure to get it in writing, because if your book suddenly becomes a huge bestseller, they might reconsider.

So title protection is an important one. You need to research that before you publish.

One thing that people sometimes get confused about is reusing their English title. That's totally fine because it's your own title. So if your English title hasn't been used and you want to keep that same title, that works. It's just about other people's books where you can't use those titles.

Another important legal bit is the Impressum. It's the copyright page. To be fair, websites that are targeting German readers or a German audience have to have that Impressum.

It's usually on page two of the book, and it has things like your legal name, your address, and then the usual things like the translator's name, cover design, and other things you would usually put on a copyright page.

The problem is that technically you need to put your legal name in there unless you have a limited company, in which case you can also put the business name there, and your address.

A lot of people obviously don't want to do that for privacy reasons, especially romance authors where it's sometimes a bit sketchy when it comes to some readers who get a bit too obsessed.

There are services where you can pay a monthly or yearly fee and then use their address. It's a bit of a legal grey zone, but a lot of German authors are doing it because—especially as indie authors—we don't always want to put our legal address out there.

Jo: Just for people listening, I use my accountant's address. That's quite common. I mean, you have to share your address on your email for anti-spam laws and all that kind of thing. As you say, there are ways to use other addresses. That just needs to happen.

What else then do we need to think about?Skye: There are things about the translator. A lot of things that people are sometimes scared about is when they hear that there is a copyright issue with translators and they think, “Oh, my translator has the copyright. I can't do anything.”

Actually, the translator is seen as an author—almost like a co-author of the translation in German law—because, to be fair, it's not just putting one word into another. Translation is quite a creative job, especially when it's fiction. It is a very creative job where the translator has to put a lot of their own creativity into it.

So in German law, they're recognised as the creator of that translation and therefore have certain rights. But you as the author, as soon as you have a contract with your translator—which is why you always, always, always have to have a contract—you get the usage rights.

This means it's exactly the same as with your English books. You can do with them what you want. You can get audiobooks, you can do print books, you can do whatever you want in different formats. It just needs to be clear in a contract that the translator is giving you the usage rights of that translation.

That's something that people sometimes find a bit scary, but actually it's really simple. Translations have been done for so long. It's a normal thing. It's just called slightly different. It has to be set out in a contract.

Jo: Just on that, that's when the translator themselves is in Germany, because if they are based somewhere else, still doing a German translation, that's not necessary. So that's something else for people to consider.

Skye: Yes, definitely. To be fair—

I would always try to get a translator based in the country. I mean, I'm a native German speaker, but I've been in Scotland for so long now that I am not confident enough to translate my own books anymore because I'm not surrounded by German 24/7 and my grammar is slightly off and I don't have that up-to-date, modern lingo.

So if it's a translator who's only just moved somewhere else or a few years, that's fine. But if it's someone who's been in the US or UK or somewhere else for 20 years, I would be a bit more hesitant. That's just a personal perspective on that.

One other thing that's different is Sie and du. There are two different kinds of “you” when you talk to someone. There's the formal Sie, which you use basically amongst adults, in business contexts.

But even my German grandma—she had a friend and they used the formal Sie for about 10 years as friends because in German etiquette, the older person has to offer the younger person the informal du, and they never did that for some reason. We found it hilarious as kids that they were still using the formal Sie as really good friends.

So there's an entire culture there that people who haven't been to Germany or haven't lived there for a while just find a bit difficult, because there are so many different unwritten rules about when you use Sie and when you use the informal du.

It's weakened a bit over the years and nowadays even strangers would sometimes use the informal du depending on the context. It really depends. A good translator will usually handle that themselves.

They will find a scene where, for example, especially in romance, you meet as strangers in the beginning, so you use the formal Sie, and then at some point that formality turns to informality.

The translator will usually choose that moment and add a little extra scene or a sentence where they either offer it to each other or they just naturally switch into it. But then there might be an internal little monologue of, “Oh, he just used the informal du—I guess we're at that stage,” or, “I really appreciate that.”

Just to make it more natural, because that's something I quite often see with AI translation where that doesn't happen, and readers get confused. Why did they just switch from Sie to du without any kind of acknowledgement of that?

Jo: This is the same in Spanish and other languages, I imagine.

Skye: Yes, French as well. Italian too, I think. A lot of European languages have this.

Jo: I think that's something that English speakers just don't get. It is a really interesting moment. I guess that might not happen so much in other genres—that really is a thing in romance.

I was just thinking about some of my thrillers. They may never have time to get to du.

Skye: But then sometimes using du can also be a rude thing. So if you have an antagonist who really doesn't like your protagonist, they might just use du as a rude sort of address. Again, that's something that English speakers just wouldn't understand or even think of because we just have the one “you.”

Jo: We just have the one.

Jo: It's the tone. Of course, it's the tone.

Skye: Exactly, yes.

Jo: Okay, well let's get into the actual translation of the books themselves. Over the years I've worked with lots of humans. I've also licensed my rights. I've used different AI tools. I mean, there are tons, but as we record this—

What are the options that are available for translations? Give us some tips on working with humans and finding humans.Because it can be super pricey. And of course most of us will never know about the quality until we publish it.

Skye: Oh, yes, definitely a note on that. I found that quite often you will already have German people on your newsletter list or on your social media, and most of them will be super happy to give you some feedback on your translation.

That's something I've used a lot. Not for German, because I speak the language, but when I did French and Italian translations. My French is—well, it used to be quite okay. It is passable at best now. So I would never feel confident enough to rate a translation.

So I asked my newsletter list, “Are there any French people here who would be happy to read the book? I'll send you a free copy at the end, and some swag.” There were a surprising number of people who got back to me.

The same applies to German and other languages, because if you don't speak the language, you sometimes lack the confidence of knowing if this is any good. Getting some reader feedback is super helpful.

For finding human translators, the easiest of course is word of mouth, and I'm a big fan of that because you get instant feedback on whether someone is good or not and whether it's easy to work with them.

Then there are freelancer platforms. Reedsy is one where everyone is vetted, so that's pretty good. But there are tons of other ones like Upwork and Fiverr, though there you have to do all the vetting yourself, so that takes a lot more time and effort.

There are also more and more agencies—translator agencies who specialise in doing indie book translations. There's Literary Queens, there's Valentine Translations, there are tons of them.

Then there's also, which I think a lot of authors ignore or don't know about, translation databases. There are two databases for German translators, for example, where you can search and you can usually narrow it down to whether you want literary translators, what kind of fiction or nonfiction you want.

An important thing is that a literary translator is very different from a standard translator who translates birth certificates or formal documents. You want someone who has experience with fiction if you write fiction. Someone who knows about adding drama through language.

Sometimes, for example, when you have an action scene, you might have shorter sentences. If you have someone who doesn't know about stuff like that, they might just think, “Oh, in German it sounds really nice to have this really long sentence.” Those little nuances are where having an experienced literary translator is a big bonus.

There are some platforms that do royalty-split translations that have been quite popular in the past. Most of them I wouldn't really recommend because you just don't get those professional translators there.

You usually get people who speak the language but don't really have much experience. So you might end up with a pretty bad translation, or people might just be using AI translations without telling you.

If you use a human translator, always, always get a sample, because yes, they might have amazing credentials, but until they've actually translated one of your books or a scene from your book, you don't really know how good they are.

I like to always use, if I write romance, a slightly sexy scene, because sex seems to show you if someone can translate or not. It's just what I've found, because if it sounds absolutely awkward or more like mechanical rather than an emotional, spicy thing, then that's a clear point for me to say, “No, thank you. I'll look for someone else.”

Action scenes, sexy scenes, really emotional ones, dialogue that has a bit of colloquial language or humour—those are good scenes to choose as a sample because that really shows you if a translator can do their job or not. Then, again, have some German people from your list give you feedback on that.

Also, if you work with human translators, always try to make sure that they will be available for your entire series. And not even just a series—if you have lots of books, try to grab that translator, lock them in your basement, and never let them go, because you want their style for all your books.

Just like you have a style as an author, translators have a style and that will always shine through, as much as they try to be as close to your original. A bit of their style will always come through. It helps to have the same translator for at least the same series, preferably for as many of your books as possible.

You really want to tell them in the beginning, “This series has nine books. I want you to do all of these, even if we only do a few of them at the beginning. Are you available to do the rest later?” Because you don't want to end up having to find a new translator in the middle of the series.

That gives you a whole lot of extra work with trying to have a world bible that explains which words get translated and which get left as the original, and stuff like that.

When it comes to non-human translation, it's very different because of course you don't need to do all that vetting.

Tools have different capabilities and abilities, but in the end, if you put your book into a translation tool, you will always get a slightly different output. So it's not quite the same where you need an entire vetting process.

Jo: Just on the human translation, I think I'd be right in saying that every single author in the world would love to have the best human translator translating their book, whatever genre it is. That would just be amazing for all of us. But let's face it, that's extremely expensive.

So if I've got, let's say, a 70,000-word thriller, how much money are we talking about? An approximate number, so people know what that might be.

Skye: Usually it goes by the word, but by the target language word count. Although it depends on the translator, traditional translators usually go by the target language because that's what they actually produce as their output.

The average at the moment is anything from about seven to nine euro cents per word as the medium price. You will find cheaper people.

You can go up as high as you want really. I have definitely seen translators who charge 15 cents and above per word, but those will usually be the ones who have worked with a lot of trad publishers who are used to being paid like that.

Although even in trad publishing, the rates are going down. With more and more authors wanting translations, I think in general rates are going down. Good for us, not so good for the translators.

You're definitely looking at thousands, even if you translate novellas. Then it depends—some translators have editing included, sometimes they don't.

A lot of them will have arrangements with other translators where they give the translation to another translator for them to edit it. Sometimes that's included in the price, sometimes it's extra.

Always make sure it gets edited, because just like when we write a book, it will never be exactly perfect. I say that as someone who writes very clean because I have a journalism background, so I'm used to writing really fast and clean for deadlines, but there will always be a few typos that just wriggle their way in.

Typos are evil like that. It's the same with translations.

Jo: So we are probably looking at 2,000 to 10,000 pounds, dollars, euros. We are talking about quite a lot, and this is the main reason I think that now, with AI becoming a lot better, people are looking at this.

Originally—and I don't even know, probably eight years now since I did my first, might even be a decade or more—I did at some point do a version in DeepL, which was an early AI translation tool. This was nonfiction, and then paid an editor, a German editor, to then edit that in German. Those books still get good reviews.

But now people are looking at options like GlobeScribe and ScribeShadow, or even just using Claude or ChatGPT. I'm actually working at the moment on a Claude Code pipeline through lots of different QA passes.

That's been really interesting for me, because I can say, “Okay, now you are a reader who likes these kinds of books. Read it for that.” And because we can now put really big books in, I can actually get a lot of really interesting feedback.

So I feel like there's a lot of potential with AI—potential for good stuff, potential for bad stuff too.

So talk a bit about that and what to watch out for with AI.Skye: Okay, so I'm very much pro-AI and I use AI in lots of different things in my business, just to preface that. However, with translations, I'm still a bit wary, just because I have seen a lot of bad AI translations.

To be fair, I've experimented with it myself for one of my other pen names. It was readable. It was definitely readable. It had sometimes beautiful, gorgeous prose. Really. But there were, occasionally—quite often even—bits where I stumbled as a native speaker.

It's readable and, if I just need a little quick book in between, I would be mostly happy with that. I would read it.

It's the same as some of the early KU days where you found a lot of bad quality writing, but you just wanted to read it because the story was pretty good or because you were reading it in KU and so it didn't really matter that much.

There is that spectrum of quality where you have the, “Yes, it's good enough to read,” but, “Is it good enough to be up to your standards?” That's a decision that everyone has to make for themselves.

If they want the same quality that they put into their English book, or if they're fine with just offering that book to a new audience because maybe you wouldn't be able to do it otherwise.

I totally see that. Translation is so expensive. I don't even know how much I have spent on translations over the past few years. I'm lucky that most of my books make it back within the first weeks or months. I've never had a book that didn't make its money back, but I have heard a lot of people where that's not the case.

It is a lot of investment and I would never tell someone to go into debt or anything to do translations. Do it when you're at a time where you can afford it, or where you can also afford the loss if it doesn't work out.

Now, AI has changed that slightly because it now opens it up to almost anyone. Some of the AI translation tools are a few hundred pounds, but if you do it in Claude or ChatGPT or something where you already have a subscription, it can actually be quite cheap. You can do it for a few dollars or pounds.

I love, by the way, having someone in the UK. I'm so used to automatically saying everything in dollars, but actually I should be using pounds.

I think if you know what you're doing—and you clearly do, with your several passes, you know what you're doing with AI—but if someone just puts their book into Claude or ChatGPT or some random tool, it might just not be good enough.

Jo: Let's say it won't be good enough if you just do that. We know that.

You have to have QA passes—quality assurance. You have to have rules per genre. There are ways of doing it. It's kind of like you have to get to know how translation works. It's a process. It's not just a translation, like you put something in Google Translate or a menu or something, because we do care. I think that's really important.

Skye: Yes. I think if you don't know how AI works—that you need detailed prompts, that you need a style guide, that you need all that extra material and not just your book, all those rules—then please don't do it.

If you value your German readers—and I think sometimes when I see people just churn out those translations without doing any quality control, using exactly the same cover or even just putting a German flag on it or something—I really feel bad for German readers because they're not being valued as having the same sort of value to us as authors as our English-speaking readers.

Maybe I'm a bit biased there because I read in multiple languages. I want to be able to get the same sort of quality in all languages. I want the author to think of me as being special because I'm their reader and I'm their customer.

I think we are on the way where AI translation can be almost autonomous. I would personally always have a human look over it. I know what I'm doing, and I'm almost happy with my translation system that I've built now in AI, but it still needs that human touch for a few things.

It still needs me to tell the AI, for example, “This is where we switch from Sie to du.” This is where I need to keep certain words in.

For example, I write a lot of Scottish books, and so words like “glen” or “loch”—they are words I want to stay the same in my German translation. I don't want to translate it to the German equivalent of “lake” because that just misses that Scottish context.

Things like that need instruction. A human translator will usually know that and chat to you about which words you want to keep and which ones you want translated. AI just needs our guidance, our helping hand, and if we don't know enough about the target language, we just miss knowing that.

Now, a lot of tools do it all for you basically, and they set up all these rules. I think many of them are at a very advanced stage now. But AI isn't perfect and it likes to hallucinate, it likes to add random things. So I will always still have a human touch at the end, even if it's just a quick edit.

A lot of people think that they just need a proofread after an AI translation, but AI doesn't really make typos—or not to an extent that humans do.

So proofreading isn't really what's needed for an AI translation. It is actual editing where you go for the style, the phrasing, and sometimes the context.There's one example I always like to give. I have an alien romance where they go on a honeymoon, and because he's an alien and she's human, he misunderstands and thinks she wants to go to an actual moon. So it's a little pun in the book.

It doesn't work in German at all because the word “honeymoon” has nothing to do with moons or planets in German.

An AI would probably just try to translate that in a way that's quite close to the original. But my German translator, she had to come up with several different ways of fixing that issue, because humour is hard. It's hard even for humans to get the humour translated in a way that is still funny but also culturally appropriate.

If you have a book that is full of puns, it gets harder with AI. I am not saying it's impossible, but it needs a lot of handholding.

Jo: Yes, I think humour is hard to translate in general, isn't it?

Let's move on to the distribution, because again, having done quite a lot of different languages over the years, I do use Amazon KU for my books in German and Italian and Spanish and some French.

So I haven't gone wide in terms of ebook and print or audio, in fact, because I have a lot of books and it is hard to go wide in English, let alone in other languages. But you mentioned earlier that Thalia has 40% of the market or something, and that special editions and print books are important.

So what are the decisions we have to make around the actual publishing?Skye: In Germany they did a really cool thing, and I wish they'd done that in other countries. When the bookshops saw that Amazon was growing and posing a threat to them—not just with print books but also with ebooks—a lot of the German bookstores got together and they formed the Tolino Alliance.

They have big book chains like Thalia, but also I think it was over 1,500 indie bookshops that all got together. They all support this ecosystem for ebooks, which means they all share the same e-readers. They share the same sort of backend for the shops, which made it really easy for them because they didn't all have to develop an ebook system.

It saved them a lot of money. It made it really easy to tell readers, “This is the Tolino system. You can get your books at our bookshops, but you can read them on your Tolino e-reader no matter where you get the books from.” The Tolino e-readers are actually the same as Kobo e-readers, just rebranded.

They've got that big advantage there—these independent bookshops and book chains all got together. Now it's hard to find numbers because Amazon doesn't really like to share their numbers, but it's about 40% of the German ebook market, which means it rivals Amazon. They have about the same.

Then the rest is split by Apple Books, Google Play, and some of the smaller players. So it is a huge chunk of the market.

I'm wide with pretty much all my English books. So for me, I looked into KU, but when I saw that I was going to miss out on 60% of the market—even if Amazon has 45%, that's still a big chunk—I decided to go wide.

To be fair, I haven't regretted it, because Tolino are amazing to work with. I like to compare them to Kobo because they have a really lovely human team where you can just email them and tell them, “I've got a new release coming up,” and they will put you into different promos and it's all free.

Jo: Do you publish direct to Tolino, or do you use Draft2Digital?Skye: Yes, you can publish direct to Tolino and that's actually the best way of doing it. You don't have access to their marketing opportunities if you use a distributor.

The Tolino dashboard is annoyingly all in German, but by now every browser has a translating plugin built in. I know lots of authors who don't speak a single word of German who navigate Tolino very successfully.

They started with only ebooks in the beginning, and then about two weeks after the first edition of my book on German translations was published, they introduced print books, which meant my book was immediately out of date. I was fuming.

But this time they introduced audiobooks a few weeks before my Kickstarter launch for the second edition, so this time the audiobook part is included. I was very happy about that, because it was a pain to just tell everyone, “Well, this book is out now but it's actually missing a big part of how to do print books in Germany.”

So Tolino does print, ebooks, and audiobooks. And just because you're in KU with your ebooks doesn't mean you can't publish your print books via Tolino. I highly recommend that, because IngramSpark—which most of us indies use for distribution for print books—doesn't get you into the German bookstores.

They used to. Then German stores have fixed price laws where books have to be the same price in all stores, and IngramSpark kept going against that. They kept sending them the wrong prices. So German bookstores at some point just said, “Nope, we've had enough of this. We no longer take books from IngramSpark.”

So now Tolino, in my opinion, is the best way of getting your books listed in German online bookstores, but they can also help you get into brick-and-mortar stores.

One of my books was featured by them, I think two years ago, and it was in about 300 of their shops all across Germany. It had its own little pedestal and it was amazing.

Tolino love working with their indie authors. They also love romance, which is always a bonus because some stores are more prudish than others. It's really easy to work with them. They speak perfect English, so you can do all your communication outside of the dashboard in English.

Their audiobooks feature is very new. Until they did that, it was much harder for German audiobook distribution because places like Findaway Voices and other distributors wouldn't get you into the Tolino Alliance stores for audio. That's a big chunk that we were missing out on.

I was always looking for ways to get my German audiobooks into those stores, but the German distributors that I found were really difficult to upload to, to be honest. I'm a very technical person, but it challenged even me.

I did not like that experience at all. At some point I really just gave up and wanted to throw my computer out of the window.

So when Tolino introduced that, I was celebrating internally. The only problem with their distribution at the moment for audio, because it's so new, is that you can't exclude any shops. So it's all or nothing.

They will get you into all the different places, including Audible, Spotify—you name it, lots of different streaming services and retailers—but you can't exclude any.

So while they don't actually want exclusivity, if you published it yourself at the same time through ACX or Findaway Voices or something else, you would have duplicates, and of course, we try to avoid those.

Jo: Is it human narration only, or do they also accept AI narration?Skye: They accept AI narration. The thing with Tolino is that they want everything made very clear. If you publish any books with them that have an AI production aspect, you need to put that into your Impressum. For audiobooks, there's a box to tick to make it clear.

Jo: Hmm.

Skye: So they are open to it all. You just need to declare it.

Jo: Which I think should be true everywhere, to be fair.

Skye: Oh, definitely. And a lot of German distributors—while I was researching for this book, one thing I always looked at is, “Do they need you to declare your AI use?” More and more German distributors and retailers now want you to do that. I think that's the way it's going.

It's not a judgement thing. I think it's just making it clear to readers. In Germany, it's all about transparency. That's why there are all those laws with GDPR—everyone will have heard about that one by now. But there are lots of other laws where it's all about consumer rights and transparency, and that's one of them.

Jo: Is there anything else on the distribution side we need to think about?Skye: One thing I like to highlight is libraries, because that's quite a big thing in Germany too. They love books and bookstores and they love libraries. Some of the ways we get our English books into libraries—like a distributor like Draft2Digital for OverDrive—OverDrive is growing in Germany.

There are other systems like Onleihe, just to name one. You can't get into those through, for example, Draft2Digital or PublishDrive or StreetLib. Tolino gets you into those.

There are also subscription platforms that are growing. I think it's the same as in the English-speaking market. People love a subscription, and I love them. I just don't like exclusivity. So I very much support any subscription platform that doesn't require me to be exclusive to them.

Skoobe is one of them. They used to be an independent platform, and then the Tolino Alliance bought them. So now they're integrated into the Tolino stores. That means it's really prominent.

Basically, any time you go to an ebook on, for example, Thalia, it will have a banner there saying, “You can also get this in our subscription.” So it's taken a while to grow, but actually in December I now made more with their subscription programme than I made in book sales.

I think three of my books were in their top 10 in December. To be fair, that was a pretty good month. But it definitely shows that it can take a while to grow these subscription platforms, but when you do, it can be really successful and very much worth it.

So I highly suggest looking into those sorts of platforms too, not just the standard retailers and the platforms that you're already used to.

Jo: Fantastic. So we've now got translations, they're on the various stores, and then just like in English, one of our next challenges is actually marketing the books.

Now this becomes another challenge, because one of the reasons I am in KU for foreign languages is because you get the five free days and you can do Amazon ads. I mean, you can do Amazon ads for wide books too, but it's easier to know that there are some options for marketing at all.

I don't do email marketing. I don't do social media, so I'm pretty bad at marketing in foreign languages.

So what are your suggestions for those who want to do more active marketing in German especially? Or even if we don't speak German, it can't be all the personal stuff. But are there also advertising things like BookBub? What are our options basically?

Skye: There are quite a few things. It's not quite as easy as in English, of course, but I think sometimes you have to remember that you already have most of the material for marketing when you've released a book.

You will have made graphics in English, you will have written a newsletter, you will have done some social media posts. All that material is already there, so you don't have to reinvent the wheel.

You can just translate that, and for that, AI translation is really good because it's very quick. You don't have to bother your translator. You can just get that done. That's what I had to remind myself, because in the beginning I did everything from scratch and it took me forever and I was hating it.

Then I realised, well, I could just look at the newsletter I wrote three years ago when that book released in English and translate that. That's done within a minute and I can send that out. So remember that you have a lot of content already.

There's no BookBub or nothing as big as BookBub. There is a site called BookDeals, which sends out newsletters for both reduced or free books and also for new releases. I use them for pretty much all my new releases, or at least always the first in series.

They're nowhere near as big as BookBub, so don't expect miracles, but I generally always break even or a bit more. It's hard to tell, of course, especially if you do several things for a new release. But my instinctive look on this is that it's worth it.

BookDeals is the big one. There are a few other promo sites, but to be honest, I've not really found any of them to give me a positive ROI. I experiment with them occasionally and I listed them all in my book just for completeness, but BookDeals is the big one.

Then there is LovelyBooks, which is the German Goodreads.Some Germans also use Goodreads, so always make sure to have all your German books listed there. But LovelyBooks is the big one.

I love that place because people are so much kinder than on Goodreads. I avoid Goodreads completely. If I need a review, I send my assistant there to look at reviews. I don't go there. It is scary.

LovelyBooks—the name is kind of telling. It is a more lovely place. People are generally more friendly. They are probably a bit more critical when they write reviews than they are on retailers, but I have found it really nice to build a community there.

You can do these book clubs where you give away a copy of your book, either as print books—or I always do ebooks because I don't want to send books to Germany. Then people discuss the book as a sort of book club and then they review it at the end.

I have had great success with that. I've built up a community of readers who will now buy my books too, even if they don't get them for free. I found some beta readers through that. So I love LovelyBooks.

The annoying thing again is it's in German. However, their support all speaks English and you can email them with questions. They're really good.

Even if you don't plan to run any book clubs or anything like that because you don't speak the language, I would always advise just setting up an author profile there because it makes it easier for your books to be found.

You can track reviews, you can track reads, and that just gives you an extra place to get more visibility for free.

Ads—there's not much difference compared to what you do for your English-language books. The one thing is with Facebook ads, now because of EU data protection laws, it's much harder to target because people can opt out of ads and targeting.

In general, cost-per-click ads are cheaper than in the US or the UK, so that's a bonus.

BookTok is big and only growing there. I don't really do social media for my German books because I just don't have the bandwidth. I wish I could, and I know some people who outsource that.

In an ideal world, I would have a social media account for every single language, but it's not an ideal world and I just have limited hours in the day. But even just creating an account so that people can tag you, so that people can find you, can already be a good start.

One thing that's not maybe a marketing strategy as such, but something I like to highlight, is pre-orders. If you write in series, always, always make sure that the next books in your series are up for pre-order, because—

German readers have been burned so many times by authors or even publishers who just translate book one in a series and then stop.They are quite hesitant sometimes to start a new series when they see it's book one of something and they don't see the next book up for pre-order. To be fair, it's similar in English.

I always make sure to have a pre-order up for the next book. Because people would just not read the series until it's complete or until they know it will be complete at some point.

So always set up a pre-order if you can. Don't set it up when you don't actually know when your translation is being done, or choose a date far in the future.

Just make it very clear to your readers that you are intending to translate the entire series, that you're not going to disappoint them, that they're not just wasting their money on a book one only to never find out what happens next.

Jo: Fantastic. Well, this is a big decision for people to make, I think, because there's no point in doing one book in German and then not doing anything else, in the same way as doing one book in English or any language. You have to think about investing in an audience. So lots for people to think about.

The book is fantastic. It's called Self-Publishing in German.

So where can people find you and your books online?Skye: For my author-facing things, just go to SkyeMacKinnon.com/authors, and there you find the book about German translations. You also find more information on what I do.

You can book consultations with me. I love doing those one-to-ones, especially about translations, because you can really dive into someone's catalogue and look at what would be a good strategy for someone, rather than just in general.

Otherwise, it's SkyeMacKinnon.com for all my romance. If you want adorable children's books, it's IslaWynter.com. That's Wynter with a Y.

Jo: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Skye. That was great.

Skye: Thank you so much for having me.

The post Self-Publishing in German: How to Translate, Distribute, and Market Your Books with Skye MacKinnon first appeared on The Creative Penn.

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How can you navigate uncertainty in a constantly changing market? Why is persistence the key to a sustainable creative career? Plus why distribution is so important, and the four ways to monetise your creative work. All this and more with Adam Leipzig.

In the intro, my reflections on running an author-publisher business after a fantastic e-commerce workshop run by Blubolt, and why you will always pay for marketing with either your time or your money; AI-Assisted Artisan Author webinars; and last call for my Kickstarter Bones of the Deep – J.F. Penn.

Today's show is sponsored by Draft2Digital, self-publishing with support, where you can get free formatting, free distribution to multiple stores, and a host of other benefits. Just go to www.draft2digital.com to get started.

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Adam Leipzig is a producer, former studio executive, and educator whose work spans film, media, and technology. He served as a senior executive at Walt Disney Studios and as President of National Geographic Films.

His film credits include March of the Penguins and Dead Poets Society, with projects recognised by the Academy Awards, BAFTA, the Emmys, and Sundance. He is the author of several books on filmmaking and his latest book is Fearless Persistence: Creative Life, Creative Work, and the Ten Laws of Culturenomics.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.

Show Notes

• Why writing books still matters in a world saturated with visual media
• The Jeffrey Katzenberg “next” lesson and the power of fearless persistence
• How uncertainty and the “long middle” are essential parts of the creative process
• What film editing can teach writers about cutting, shaping, and refining their work
• The 10 Laws of Culturenomics, including why awareness is not desire and why distribution is everything
• How generative AI is changing filmmaking — and why creatives should be the architects, not the tools

You can find Adam at AdamLeipzig.com.

Transcript of Interview with Adam LeipzigJo: Adam Leipzig is a producer, former studio executive, and educator whose work spans film, media, and technology. He served as a senior executive at Walt Disney Studios and as President of National Geographic Films.

His film credits include March of the Penguins and Dead Poets Society, with projects recognised by the Academy Awards, BAFTA, the Emmys, and Sundance.

He is the author of several books on filmmaking and his latest book is Fearless Persistence: Creative Life, Creative Work, and the Ten Laws of Culturenomics. Welcome to the show, Adam.

Adam: Thank you so much for having me, Jo.

Jo: I'm excited to talk to you today. You have written several books, but you have worked on many more films. So I wondered, why do you think books still have a part to play in reaching people?

What do you love about writing books that is different to your filmmaking work?Adam: You can put so much information in a book, and the beautiful thing about a book is that you can pick it up wherever you want, whenever you want, and leave it off and go back to it. It's just waiting for you and it's there.

It really allows me, and other authors like me, to share information in a different way, with more details and more stories and more specificity. I love the ability to just share that information and have it always available. You don't need a device, you don't need to have a subscription. You can just go to it whenever you want.

You asked me what I love about writing. Like a lot of writers, I'm not sure I love writing, but I do love having written. The thing about a book is that it's a very solitary exercise.

A film is a highly collaborative exercise. No movie gets made by one person. It's made by hundreds or sometimes thousands of people. But this book is just me and a laptop and notes and a lot of thought.

It's a very introverted, almost monkish existence while you're doing that, and then it has to go out into the world—and that's when it really starts to interact with people.

So there's this huge difference between being alone and being always in a collaborative environment, which is what happens when I'm making a movie.

Jo: Most listeners will be independent authors in some way, and a lot of us do this because we're control freaks. We like being the only people.

So how is that different? You mentioned collaboration in the film industry, but is it almost freeing to do a book without having that? I mean obviously you have editors and publishers and stuff, but—

Is it freeing in some creative way?Adam: It is really nice, because there is not another point of view in the room and I can just say what I feel and know that that's there.

At the same time, you're right—I have had some amazing editor help and I've had some great early readers that have given me feedback on it and helped me make it so much better than it was when I finished the first draft.

I knew that going in. I always test and share what I'm doing to make sure that it lands in the way that I wanted it to land, and it can be helpful for people.

Jo: Getting into the book, you have a chapter on “what you do matters.” I feel like this is super hard. This is not a political show, so we're not doing politics, but there are a lot of big things going on in the world.

It can be very hard as writers to think, is writing my book actually going to make a difference? So how can you encourage people?

Adam: That's the hardest thing, Jo, because there is a lot going on in the world right now. Everything that's going on in the world right now exists because it's following a certain narrative. I don't believe that narratives are come up with because people look at things that are happening and say, “Oh, well let's just write what happened.”

I think that we do things from micro experiences that we have with ourselves, our relationships, our families, to the macro experiences of politics and global situations. I believe that happens because there is a narrative that is being followed.

So what I say to all creative people is that it's our job to craft and express the narratives that matter—and different narratives—so those narratives can be followed.

One of the points that I make in the book is that poets are not overtly really dangerous people. Poets are generally lovely people, a lot of them don't talk too much.

They're great to have dinner with, and they just work with words—and often not a lot of words, right? Because beautiful poetry is often concise and simple and spare.

Yet there are places where poets are in jail. Because the narratives of those concise, spare, gorgeous idealistic words matter so much that those voices need to be silenced, which means those narratives are dangerous sometimes. Those narratives present an alternate world, an alternate view of reality.

I think it's really our job as creative people, as entrepreneurs, as people who are essentially creating narratives out of the soul of our lives and our experience—we want to express those to the world. It's really important for us to express those to the world, especially now, especially because so much is going on.

Those narratives are going to become pathways that others can look at and maybe follow. I think that's really important. It's the reason why we do our work.

Jo: I absolutely agree with you around writing the narratives that we want in the world. “Be the change you want to see in the world” and all that.

I also want to call out the fact that there are hundreds of thousands of books now published, and you come from the film industry, and many more people really watch films or play games than read books.

I've wondered about this myself. I've written a few screenplays and sometimes it feels that wouldn't it be better to try and put our words into a visual medium? A lot of authors listening will do micro video like TikTok and all of this. So this is back to the question of—

Why books? How can we change these narratives when we feel like we're drowned out by all the media?Adam: I think it's great for authors to express themselves in other media. I have a pretty active Instagram channel, and I love doing that, but it's a really different thing. I'm talking to people in two-minute bursts with very specific things. It's not the same and not the same detail as a book.

If we let our understanding of the ocean of content that is always coming to us stop us from doing anything, we wouldn't do anything. That's also true about movies. There are probably 10,000 movies made every year. There are a few hundred that are released.

So if every day I thought, “Oh, the movie that I'm working on is maybe not going to be released because there's only a small percent of movies that are made that are released.”

Or worse than that, “Of all the movies that are made, there's 500 different shows on Netflix and Apple and Amazon and there's so many choices.” If I thought that everything I was going to do is going to be drowned out, I wouldn't do anything.

I just don't believe that's true. I think it's our job to do things. Yes, there's an ocean of content out there, but what we do really matters, and it doesn't have to matter at gigantic scale. We don't know the scale that our work is going to achieve over time.

One of the early films that I worked on is a film called Dead Poets Society, and that script was passed on by every studio at least three times. It's probably a film that I couldn't get made now for all kinds of reasons, because it's not a sequel and it doesn't have superheroes or visual effects.

When we made that movie, we didn't know the impact it was going to have. It could have been drowned out by things, but it rose to a level that everywhere in the world I go, someone has seen that movie, including people who were not born when that movie was made.

We don't know the long arc of our work and the people that it affects.

Jo: I love that movie too. “Oh Captain, my Captain.” I can hear everyone saying that behind the screens.

This brings us to the title, Fearless Persistence, because of course Dead Poets Society ended up being an incredible success, but not everything turns out so well. I wondered if you could talk about this persistence.

How do you keep creating after something you perceived as a failure, or perhaps all the things that didn't get made?

Why is persistence so important that you use it in the title?Adam: I've been super fortunate. I've worked with amazing people and on great projects. I've made 40 films at this point, and I'm making more. I've tried to make 400 films. I failed at getting them made 90% of the time, and that's okay. I just keep going.

When I was working at Disney and I was an executive at Walt Disney Studios for seven years, there was one movie that we were opening and nobody had really high expectations for it. But it opened huge on a weekend and it beat the competition.

We were in our Monday morning meeting and we were dancing on the tables and we were so excited. Jeffrey Katzenberg, who was running the studio at that time, came in, looked around the room, put his hands on his hips, and said, “Next.” We just had to move on.

I really learned the meaning of the word “next” about four months later when we had a film that we all knew was going to be hugely successful and make a lot of money and give everyone their bonuses, and it completely bombed at the box office. It was like you gave a party and nobody showed up to eat the hors d'oeuvres.

We were in the Monday morning meeting, very glum and not sure what was going to happen. Were we going to be fired? What was going to happen? And Jeffrey walked into the room and said, “Next.”

Jo: Mm-hmm.

Adam: And we just keep going. I think that is the great and defining quality of people who really have sustainable lives, either as creatives or business people or entrepreneurs. We're persistent. We're just like those little birds—you put their beak in water and they just keep bobbing up. We just keep going.

It's not about the people who are the most talented, because I'm certainly not the most talented. I'm certainly not the smartest. I'm certainly not the most creative.

There are people who are smarter and more talented and more creative than me all the time, and I get so much energy in being able to know them and work with them. But I am super persistent. I don't stop.

If there's something that I really believe in, I'll just keep going. I started taking notes on this book 10 years ago. There are movies that took 12 years to get made. You just keep going.

There are times, as a producer, where everybody's fallen away. There was a director attached, there was a star attached. They all left, they did other projects. The material is no longer under option. You don't even have legal rights to it anymore.

You just keep blowing on the embers and then eventually maybe it gets made. That's what it's about.

Jo: Do you think there's some kind of serendipity or something more that makes a book or a film? Is it timing? Is there just some chemistry?

You talked earlier about testing and sharing things to see if they're going to work, but as you mentioned, some films you think are going to be amazing and they bomb. Other things are a slow burn.

How do you know when to make a film if you just can't predict this stuff?Adam: You can never predict it, but I think you start with: do you really, really think about it all the time? Do you really care about it? It's not like you're in a meeting or you read a script or you hear an idea and you're super excited about it—but are you still excited about it tomorrow morning? The next day and the next?

If you keep waking up every morning thinking, “Wow, that's great, I've got to get that forward,” then I think that is the first indication for me that it's going to have some staying power.

I don't think I am that different from everybody else. So if it's something that consistently excites me, I feel like there's going to be at least some other people in the world that it's also going to excite.

Jo: Do you think you have a voice, I guess, as a filmmaker as much as a writer?

Are there things that excite you consistently that you're drawn to? Or do you think it's much wider as a filmmaker than a writer?Adam: I think it's a lot wider as a filmmaker. Part of it's also just my capacity right now as a writer. I really like the writing in Fearless Persistence and I also recorded the audiobook. I love listening to the audiobook experience. I think it's some of the best writing I've ever done.

I have not yet found the capacity to write a novel or to write fiction in the way that other people can. So part of it's just my skill and capacity at this point in my writing career, where I think I'm pretty good at expressing ideas in a nonfiction setting, but I haven't developed the skill set for fiction.

In movies, I make documentaries. I make fiction feature films. What attracts me is character. It's always the character, the people, the journey.

Are the people really interesting? Do I want to spend two hours of my life in a cinema with them, or 10 hours of my life watching those episodes on a streaming channel? That's what always starts with me. If the character is interesting, then I'll keep going.

Jo: I think the book, Fearless Persistence, has a lot of your character in it and your experience. It's not just a nonfiction book of prescriptive rules. You did bring a lot of voice into it, I think.

Adam: Thank you. I try to make it be like we're sitting down and we're talking and we're having a conversation.

Jo: Coming back to the book—a quote from the book: “Uncertainty isn't the enemy of creativity. It's its greatest ally.”

You talk about these messy and unpredictable times. I'm what we call a discovery writer. Some people say “pantser.” It mostly is quite chaotic and unpredictable.

Could you talk about this uncertainty and messy creativity?Adam: One of the things I really try to do in Fearless Persistence is give support to all of us in this messy, unpredictable—what I call “the long middle”—where stuff is happening, but you're not seeing obvious results out there. You're either in the world or in your project, and you're just in this mess.

That mess is a beautiful place, and I'm trying to give support to the fact that that mess is gorgeous and it's part of the process. It's part of everybody's process. We shouldn't feel as though we are not doing our job when we're in that long, unpredictable, uncertain middle.

Because out of that, we discover what we actually want. It gives us a way to refine our taste and refine our direction because we are so uncertain.

Then there's this moment—and I don't know if you find this in your own writing, Jo—but there's this moment where that uncertainty changes into: there's no choices here at all. This is just what I have to do.

I actually think that the greatest freedom is when there's no choices. Where the path is just there, but we've got to get through the thicket to get to that path. And there's always a thicket.

Jo: There's a moment for me where the chaos becomes more certain and I'm like, okay, that's the story. I thought it might have been something else, but now that's what it is.

I often have too much material as well. So I wanted to ask you about this too, because as an author with a book, editing is hard for us. Of course there are lots of words and we have to go through it all, but editing on a film—I can't even imagine how hard the editing process is.

Could you talk about editing and how you cut and organise these massive projects?Adam: Yes, editing is really hard, but it's also so fun. I think being on a set is great. It's the most fun a kid could have. But being in an editing room is also the most fun a kid could have, because you have all of the pieces and there are so many ways to do it. This is where a film is actually made—in the editing room.

Probably the way books are made also is in the editorial process between the writer and your own brain as the editor, or if you have someone who's helping you edit it.

Editing is really interesting because it's the only craft that did not exist before filmmaking. Everything else existed, right? There were scripts, there were actors, there were costumes, there was art direction, there was production design, there was music.

Editing was a craft that had to be invented for film. So it's a craft that's only about 120 years old.

When we make a film, the first thing that the editor does is just put all of the scenes together in a first editor's cut, a rough assembly. It's basically every scene that was in the script as it was shot, and the editor just tries to choose the best angles.

That generally comes out maybe a week or two after we wrap photography, and that first cut could be three or four hours long because it's got everything in it.

Then the process is: let's take that out. Let's take that out. You don't need this. You can move this scene here and move it there before the other scene. We don't really need that shot. Or can we get to a closeup there? And you get it down, down, down—just like in writing where you kill your darlings.

I actually find editing the most fun I have. “Oh, I don't need that sentence.” Or, “I can take out three words here and the sentence is better.” We go through exactly the same process in film editing and squinch it all down to the most compelling and efficient way to tell the story.

Jo: I'm glad you say it's fun because I also like editing. I find the editing much more creatively fulfilling because I actually can figure out the book that way. It's so funny, I think as writers, many people either love the editing or they love the first draft. It seems like you enjoy the whole process.

Adam: I like the editing so much more than the first draft. I feel like I had to get through the first draft. That was my long middle, that was my uncertain period, that was my thicket. Then my editing was, “Oh, great. Let's cross this out. Let's change that word. Let's lose that paragraph.” That was fun.

Jo: So let's say we now have a book or we have a film. In your book, law eight of culturenomics is that “without distribution, there is nothing.” So now we have to get this out there, and this is really difficult.

Can you talk about how film distribution has changed? Can you also reflect on how it is for writers, because our distribution has changed a lot too?Adam: So, as you mentioned in the last section of the book, I've observed over the past 30 years that when a work is both aesthetically really excellent and also economically viable and sustainable for the creators, it always observes these ten principles. I call them the 10 Laws of Culturenomics.

One of them is “without distribution, there is nothing,” by which I mean: unless your audience, your market, the people that you are seeking to share or serve with the work—unless they can get it, it doesn't really matter. It's like that tree falling in the forest and no one's around to hear it.

I always think about my market and my distribution before I start making the movie. I was thinking about that as I was writing the book, because I really want it to be there to meet people where they are and I want them to be able to get it.

Film distribution has changed a lot, especially during the pandemic. People stayed home and cinema admissions have fallen off 30% from pre-pandemic levels, so people are going out to cinemas less.

That means fewer films are being distributed in cinemas for any viable period of time. Sometimes some movies will be out there for one or two days, literally, in cinemas, and then they go right to streaming.

On the streaming side, there was a glut of streaming content. All the streaming channels overinvested in streaming. There were too many shows. I don't know about your Netflix queue or your Amazon queue, but it's unnavigable. There is so much stuff. Now they've cut back a lot—they're just doing a lot less.

We're in a situation now where anything can get out there somehow. The question is, does your market, does your audience know about it? Do they want to invest the time to experience it?

One of the other Laws of Culturenomics is that “awareness is not desire.” There's a lot of things that we're aware of that we don't want to spend our time with. Everybody was aware of Disney's new Snow White movie. Nobody wanted to go see it.

Jo: I must say, I'm not the key demographic for that!

Adam: But you knew about it?

Jo: Was that a live action one?

Adam: Yes.

Jo: I don't understand those live action ones, to be honest. Maybe that's why—

Adam: I think we are sequelled out. I look at the movie business and I just think what audiences really want is something new, please. Something we haven't seen before. We don't want the 95th iteration of something from the MCU.

The studios, because the movies cost so much and they're so risk-averse, talk a lot about “pre-aware titles.”In other words, titles that you've heard of before, so you're going to go see the movie.

It works to a certain extent, but I just think it's cinematically boring. In that world, you never could have predicted Oppenheimer. You never could have predicted Barbie. Movies that really don't have a precedent, but they did so well because they're different. I think audiences are craving something different right now.

Jo: It's interesting though, isn't it? I agree on one level, but then I also watch Bridgerton and we watched the latest series as soon as it came out. I guess that is pre-aware to a point. I don't read historical romance, yet I really like the show. I think it's because of Shonda Rhimes. I watched Grey's Anatomy for about 20 years.

Adam: She's great.

Jo: She's amazing. So I feel like this is why it's hard, isn't it? It's hard to know. As fiction writers particularly listening, we have very specific genre audiences, and they often don't cross over into other genres. They love their genre fiction. So it is hard to balance original work that may not be easily sold and the other stuff.

I guess that's why the studios do it, right, because they think they can make enough money with the next Marvel movie.

Adam: Yes, but I'm curious to know what you think about this, because even within a genre, a really good genre movie or a really good genre book is not the same as all the other books or films in the genre. It's familiar in that it does what the genre says you have to do, but it's different.

It's got those unique things that make us feel like super fans, that we really love it. It's familiar enough to fall within the genre—and yes, genres have rules that you've got to follow—but then there's something unique and different that's exciting. And that's why we say, “Hey Jo, you've got to read this book.”

Jo: I agree with you. I love that you said “awareness is not desire.” This is another problem with our creative work, right? We have to do marketing. We can throw all this stuff out there, and yet it may or may not work.

So let's talk about your book marketing. Obviously you are on this podcast, and I presume your publicists are pitching lots of podcasts, but—

What are you doing to promote the book that might be different to a film release?Adam: Well, I don't have a hundred million dollars.

Jo: Surprise!

Adam: Right? I've got a few hundred dollars, so we're just doing it this way.

As you know, once upon a time, legacy publishers actually did marketing. Legacy publishers barely do any marketing now. Every author has to do it themselves. So we have to do this ourselves.

It's been the hardest thing. I think it's the hardest thing that we've all had to adopt, that we have to do this thing where there used to be a marketing department and you just hand it over to them and we could just be in our own little creative space. But no, we've got to do this also.

So what am I doing? I've amped up my social media. I'm speaking. I am on podcasts like this. I'm sharing as much as I can.

I'm asking circles of people who have been early readers of the book. I'm really grateful because I've had really enthusiastic response to it, both from creatives and also some business people, which was surprising to me, but really great.

Someone said, “This is the best business book in the past 10 years,” which is really interesting, right? Because you read it, Jo, as an author, but she read it as someone who sits on the board of major companies. That was a pretty interesting response.

I'm just asking them to be advocates and share it around. I'd just like to be those people who blow on the embers and let's see if we can make a fire.

Jo: We talked about the fun bits earlier. I'm enjoying our conversation, but I know that marketing is not necessarily in the fun bucket.

Are you finding bits of the marketing you enjoy?Adam: Yes, I love meeting the audience. I love meeting the people that I'm writing the book for and sharing it with.

I've been fortunate enough to be asked to run a writer's workshop in Greece for the past few years. It's a retreat centre called Rosemary's House. It's on the east coast of Greece. A dozen writers.

I work with writers all the time, but they're always writing a specific thing, like a screenplay or something. This was a dozen writers all writing different things, and I'd never done that before. I had an extraordinary time.

The first year I went, I'd had all these notes for this book, Fearless Persistence, that I'd been compiling for some time. But there I was in the room and I was with the people that I was really intending to write the book for, and that kicked me in the butt and I wrote the book.

Then the next year I was back and I finished it while we were there at the writer's retreat. So that was great, and I was with another group of writers. I'll be back there again later this year and the book will be out.

So it's this fabulous continuation of really engaging with and meeting the people that I'm seeking to serve with this book.

I really enjoy encouraging and mentoring and sharing the systems that are undergirding the creative process, and then the process of how do you build a sustainable life, including all these super practical things that they don't teach you in art school or writing school or film school or even business school.

How do you actually build a sustainable life in this practice? I love that. I guess that's marketing, but it's also just being with the people that you're there to serve.

Jo: I love that you use “serve.” I use the same word. I say, “Who do you serve?” And that can help people, because I feel like creative people are like, “We don't want to be marketers, we don't want to be salesy.” So if you reframe it as service—who are you trying to help, who are you trying to entertain—that actually helps.

Coming to the business side, you mentioned systems. You are right, the book has a lot of business in it, which I love because we talk a lot about business on this show. In one section you say there are only four ways to monetise your creative work.

So could you talk a bit about those different ways to monetise your creative work?Adam: Yes. This has been true for maybe 5,000 years because it's not about technology, it's just about how work is monetised. There are only four ways that any piece of work is monetised.

1. For sale. You have a book, and you go to your favourite bookstore and you buy the book, and now you own the book.
2. For rent. You could rent a book from your library, or in a movie context, what you're really renting is the seat for two hours to watch the movie.
3. On subscription. People have subscriptions to Kindle Unlimited or other platforms, or people have subscriptions to a streaming service.
4. Free. When it's ad-supported. That's like linear television where there's ads, or Amazon where there's ads and you don't pay for it.

For sale, for rent, on subscription, or free—those are the only ways anything is ever transacted.

When it's ad-supported, for example, some people have YouTube channels that are very successful. YouTube is free, and then YouTube is making money from the ads and the creators are getting a tiny little slice of the ad revenue.

Jo: Like this podcast. I have sponsors who pay, and they're all related to the author industry. They're companies that I use and work with. I personally recommend them, and that means this podcast is free.

Adam: Thank you, sponsors.

Jo: Yes, thank you, sponsors! I also have patrons—people who subscribe to the show to support it as well. So I guess we don't have to be in one bucket or another.

We can have our work in different buckets.Adam: Ideally, you can have your work in every single one of them. Not always, not necessarily always at exactly the same simultaneous moment, but at a certain point as the work gets out there into the world, as it's lived long enough, it probably will be in every bucket.

That's great because we want our work to be as accessible to the people that we're serving in any way they want to get it.

Jo: I totally agree. And your audiobook, as you mentioned, will be available in those different formats as well.

Adam: Yes.

Jo: I find that, especially with nonfiction audio, what I love is being able to listen to just a chapter, just a chapter in a specific part. Someone could actually listen to the 10 Laws of Culturenomics separately to some of the rest of the book. I love that.

Adam: I'd never done that before. It was so powerful to record the audiobook because up until that moment, my relationship with this book was fingers typing keyboards, electrons on a screen. It was a completely silent experience.

Then I was in this recording booth in Los Angeles and I started speaking the words, and I was visualising the people that I was writing it for as I was doing it. It was so powerful. Then I listened to it and I thought, wow, this is actually a really good experience.

It was so powerful that I was recently in Paris because I'm working on some films that are in Europe, and I decided to create a special advanced listener edition of the audiobook, where I took the chapters and put them into individual or grouped listening units.

In a recording studio in Paris, I recorded some prefaces and reflections on those listening units, which are now thematic.

I'm really proud of that edition. It's not for everybody. The regular Audible audiobook is going to be out there, but this version, which is on my website, I think is a really wonderful version for someone who just wants me to walk with you as you go through the experience of the book.

Jo: Are you selling that direct from your website?

Adam: Yes, I'm selling it direct on the website.

Jo: Brilliant, because we all do that too. You can actually make more money selling audio direct than you do from the streaming.

Adam: Yes.

Jo: I realise we don't have much time left, but I need to ask you this because the film industry and publishing are in this great time of change with the advent of generative AI.

We've seen in the last week the actor Ben Affleck's company, InterPositive, has been acquired by Netflix. So it seems like technology is disrupting a lot.

How do you think we can navigate this time? What are your feelings around this new wave of generative AI?Adam: It's a great tool. It's not a great writer. It's actually really a terrible writer. You can always tell when generative AI has written something because it has a certain very annoying style, but it's a great tool. I use it in my production.

I teach at the business school at UC Berkeley. We train people on how to use it for various kinds of problems and solutions. But the important thing is that you are the architect of the machine. It's a machine. It is like a paintbrush, but it is not the hand that holds the paintbrush.

So I am not concerned that AI is going to go make movies that we all care about, and I am not concerned that it's going to disrupt, in the largest sense, the employment picture. Certainly some jobs are being lost, but new jobs are being gained. It's really interesting.

For example, you mentioned Ben Affleck's company, which Netflix just partnered with. It's not making new content. It's creating a better production workflow. It's taking what is shot or what is planned in the production workflow and just making it better and more efficient and implementing it and adding to it.

That is a really good use of AI. All the creative power retains within the hands of the creative humans, but it's giving the humans more tools.

Jo: I've been reflecting on the idea of the film director, in that people often know their names and they win awards, and yet they didn't necessarily write the script. Some do, obviously, but they didn't act in it, they didn't do all the editing, they didn't do all the different jobs, but it's their creative vision.

So is that how you see us playing that part?Adam: I do. I think that's a really good analogy. And look, AI—it's good. It's going to keep getting better. It still has massive error rates, so we still have to be very careful about what we attribute to it and what powers we give it, and what facts we believe from it.

Jo: So what are you excited about next? Obviously you are promoting this book, you are doing speaking things, but are you looking to your future continuing to work across film and books?

What are you excited about in terms of your creative projects?Adam: The big arc of my creative life is creating ecosystems where creative people can do their best work. This book is part of that.

With the movies that I make, as a producer, I try to create the ecosystems where people can do their best work. I envision, and I'm excited about, continuing to do that. Whether it is in a book or in a workshop or in a film that I'm making.

I just want to keep doing that: creating these ecosystems where people can really do great work and express themselves creatively, entrepreneurially, and with a positive view of the world to come. Because that is a responsibility, coming back to the first question you asked me.

Jo: Brilliant.

So where can people find you and your book and everything you do online?Adam: You can find me at my website, which is AdamLeipzig.com, just like the city. Of course, the book is available wherever you buy your books, and the Kindle and the audiobook are exactly where you would expect to find them.

You can also find me on Instagram at @AdamLeipzig, and you can find me on LinkedIn as Adam Leipzig. I love interacting with people, so come and find me. AdamLeipzig.com is the best place to find everything.

Jo: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Adam. That was great.

Adam: Jo, thank you so much for having me. It was great talking with you.

The post Navigating Uncertainty And Fearless Persistence In A Long Term Creative Career With Adam Leipzig first appeared on The Creative Penn.

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Kickstarter has become a key part of the author business for those who want to make more money per book, connect directly with readers, and produce beautiful editions they're proud of.

In this episode, I share excerpts from interviews with Oriana Leckert, Head of Publishing at Kickstarter, Russell Nohelty, and Sacha Black, alongside my own hard-won lessons from six campaigns that have now made over $140K combined.

Whether you're considering your first campaign or looking to refine your process, we cover everything from overcoming your fears to rewards, fulfilment, shipping, marketing, and why I keep coming back for more.

In the intro, Writing StoryBundle; Spotify Expands Audiobook Features and Printed Books; Draft2Digital Activation and Maintenance Fees; comment by Kevin McLaughlin; and Barnes & Noble Press change to Minimum Retail Price for Printed Books; AI-Assisted Artisan Author webinars.

This show is supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn

Joanna Penn is an award-winning New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of thrillers, dark fantasy, short stories and travel memoir under J.F. Penn and also writes non-fiction for authors and hosts The Creative Penn Podcast.

• What Kickstarter is and why it works differently from a normal book launch
• The fears that held me back for almost a decade — and whether they were justified
• Starting small: Why you don't need sprayed edges and special hardbacks to run a successful campaign.
• Creative reward ideas beyond merch: digital rewards, experiential rewards, naming rights, and bundling your backlist
• Common mistakes that sink campaigns: overestimating your reach, getting shipping costs wrong, and not allowing enough time
• Fulfilment realities, printing timelines, and reinvesting profit into future stock
• Marketing your campaign: pre-launch signups, content marketing, email lists, social media scheduling, and Facebook/Meta ads
• My update for campaign #7, Bones of the Deep: what's changed, what I'm doing differently, and how AI tools are part of my process now
• Why I now love Kickstarter campaigns and how the spike income model fits a sustainable creative career

You can find my Kickstarter campaign for Bones of the Deep here (until 5 May, 2026) and all my previous campaigns here.

IntroductionJo: In this episode, I've included excerpts from my own previous solo show about Kickstarter, as well as excerpts from interviews with Oriana Leckert, the Head of Publishing at Kickstarter; Russell Nohelty, who has done lots of successful Kickstarter campaigns and teaches direct sales; and Sacha Black, who did a six-figure campaign last year.

I've also added my updates to the end of the episode filling in any last thoughts. You can listen to the full episodes here:

• Kickstarter for Authors with Oriana Leckert
• The Mindset and Business of Selling Direct with Russell Nohelty
• Lessons Learned and Tips from Pilgrimage, My First Kickstarter Campaign
• Two Different Approaches to Selling Direct with Sacha Black and Joanna Penn

What is Kickstarter, and why use it instead of a normal book launch?Here's Oriana Leckert, Head of Publishing at Kickstarter — and the numbers she shares will be higher now, as the episode is from February 2025.

Oriana: Kickstarter is a crowdfunding platform. We are unique in the crowdfunding landscape for a few reasons. We are only for creative projects, so you can't use Kickstarter for medical bills, investment funding, or charitable donations. Every project has to create something new to share with the world.

Jo: Have you got any numbers on how big the Kickstarter industry is now with publishing, or anything you can share around that?

Oriana: Yeah, I would love to. First I'll tell you Kickstarter overall by the numbers. Since our inception, there have been 273,000 projects funded, eight and a half billion — with a “b” — billion dollars pledged, from more than 24 million backers. In publishing specifically, we've had 69,000 projects launched, 3.2 million unique backers, and over $380 million pledged to campaigns. I have lots of other stats, but a few things I'll share.

The publishing category keeps growingThe publishing category has grown year over year, every year since 2017, in terms of number of projects launched, number of projects successful, and the overall success rate. There has never been a dip since 2017.

Another stat I really love about the publishing category: if you look at campaigns that have at least 25 backers, the overall success rate is 84%. I think that's really telling, because 25 backers is a little bit more than your mum, your best friend, the folks who are essentially obligated to support anything you do. So if you can get a little bit beyond that inner circle, your chances of succeeding on the platform are tremendously high.

Backers are paying more — and waiting longerAnother thing I wanted to call out — I just got some new numbers around this. The average backing amount per backer across the whole category has nearly doubled since 2020. We used to see an average backing around $40, and it's currently at $72 per backer. I think this is clearly around the trend of special and deluxe editions, but it's a great indication that backer behaviour on Kickstarter is just very different from your general book-buying public.

People don't come here looking for 99-cent ebooks — the lowest bargain-basement prices. Folks are really willing to pay more because they understand this is a different kind of thing. It's not exactly a purchase. It really is supporting, bringing a strange and wonderful new thing into the world that wouldn't exist before.

People are also much more forgiving about timelines. If you buy something from most online booksellers, you're expecting to have it in your hands within a couple of days. People wait months and sometimes years to get their Kickstarter rewards, and they don't mind if the creator is clear and transparent. You're also doing the work of demystifying the publishing process. Why does it take so long? Where are books printed? How long does it take them to ship via freight over the ocean? What do all these things really look like?

So it's really interesting just figuring out what your backers want and will bear versus the general book-buying public out in the world.

Kickstarter is not just for “desperate” authors anymoreOriana: People used to think Kickstarter was just for desperate folks who couldn't get a book deal through the traditional systems. The change has been so dramatic — people now understand that Kickstarter can be transformative for an author's career, and that it can work for traditional publishing, indie publishing, hybrid publishing, all kinds of authors.

Kickstarter is really about collapsing the boundaries between a writer and their readers, a publisher and their fan base, any creative person and their audience. And there are so many benefits to doing that. You get to really thrill your backers with new and exciting rewards. You get to turn what can be a standard book release into a moment. You get to build your brand, your profile, get press, test out ambitious projects.

You get to understand so much more about your audience and what they want and how you can give it to them. It's been really marvellous seeing the great success that people can have on our platform and outside of it.

Why do a Kickstarter campaign?Jo: Why Kickstarter and not a usual book launch?

Benefits for backersIf you back a Kickstarter, you get special editions, bonus content, interesting merchandise, bundles, digital specials, print specials, early access. All of them pretty much are really cool books from creators you either already love or those you've never heard of, because you just want to see their cool stuff.

I've started buying books from people I have never heard of because I think their books are really cool. Once you start supporting campaigns on Kickstarter, the algorithm will recommend campaigns for you. It's essentially a different way of shopping for great books and other products, and it's just another part of my ecosystem for how I shop.

It's a form of direct sales, so you also have a closer connection with the creator. You can message them, for example, and they get it — rather than buying through an online retailer or bookstore.

Benefits for creatorsIn terms of benefits for creators, you get to know people in a more personal way through the campaign, messaging with people and connecting more than you would when selling through a retailer, when you don't know who is buying your books.

As an author, you can make more money more quickly and retain a higher percentage of the royalties, rather than wait months or years to get paid and have a large percentage taken out by everyone down the chain — publishers, platforms, distributors, and retailers. Brandon Sanderson's $41 million Kickstarter was clearly the pinnacle of what can be achieved, but many authors are happy making a few thousand for their book project upfront and use campaigns multiple times during the year.

Kickstarter takes 5% for their fee, although of course you have to factor in the cost of production and marketing. But even then, I make more profit on my book sales through selling ebooks and audiobooks direct, and also printing with BookVault, than I do with KDP Print or IngramSpark print on demand.

Higher average order and faster paymentAnother way you make more money is that the average order per customer is higher with Kickstarter than sales on the usual stores. The average order on my campaign was £37.24 — that's around $45 US — which is at least four times higher than I might have made selling Pilgrimage in the usual way on the major retailers.

You get paid two weeks after the campaign finishes, so the money is in your bank account much faster than if you sell on retailers. In terms of cash flow, make sure you time your campaign so you get the money before you have to pay for printing, shipping, and other significant bills.

Spike income vs monthly incomeThere are many creators who now make Kickstarter the core of their business. It's a spike income model rather than a monthly income, which most indie authors are used to. The monthly income model is fantastic — I love getting money every month — but it also has the effect of making indie authors behave as if this is a normal job: work every month, get paid every month, put out another book so you get paid in another few months' time.

With the Kickstarter model, you can get a bigger chunk of money in one go, so you could potentially move to a big launch and then take more time off before ramping up to the next launch months later. And amusingly, this sounds a bit more like traditional publishing. It's just that as an indie author, when you get that amount of money, it's much bigger. So that kind of launch tempo is an attractive prospect if you think about it: if I just get this big spike of money even once a year, that's really cool. And then of course you can sell it later.

What are some of the fears that might stop you?Jo: I held back from doing a Kickstarter for years — almost a decade, in fact — where I backed campaigns and resisted doing a campaign for my own books. Here are some of my fears.

Prepare to face your fearsJo: This entire experience thrust me out of my comfort zone and into a new way of creating, launching, and connecting with readers. Pilgrimage is my first memoir, my first special hardback with colour photos, and my first Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign. So I had a lot to learn.

The book is very personal and I bare my soul about some dark times, so that was terrifying in itself, let alone trying a new product edition and publishing platform. On the evening I clicked the launch button — and yes, you have to actually click an actual launch button — my heart was hammering out of my chest. I have not felt that nervous since probably the first time publishing on Amazon.

I was afraid of failure. I was afraid of being embarrassed if my campaign didn't fund. I wrote a book on marketing — how to market a book — so I would be mortified if I had not funded. In fact, I even changed my target from £5,000 to £1,000 the night before, as I was so terrified it wouldn't fund.

I was afraid of getting something terribly wrong and ending up out of pocket through issues with printing and shipping. I was afraid of letting backers down by promising something I might not be able to deliver. I was afraid I had overcommitted myself to a whole load of work I might even resent doing.

I am a one-person business, and although I work with freelancers, I still do pretty much everything myself. I am a control freak — you might have noticed. So yes, there was a lot of apprehension and fear.

You don't have to go hugeAnother fear might be the fear of failure — that you'll put up a campaign and no one will buy from you. But one answer is just to do a modest campaign. You don't have to do special hardbacks or merchandise. As Russell says:

Russell: Somehow all of the teaching that we have given over the last two years has been executed in a way that makes it seem like you have to do this enormous campaign with sprayed edges and big, beautiful hardcovers and interior illustrations and vellum and all of that stuff. And I want to say first: that is absolutely not true. You don't have to do any of those things.

If you look at two of the last three campaigns I've done, all I was offering was paperback books and ebooks, and then audio commentary for one of the campaigns. You can do a Kickstarter — and I often will tell people, especially if they're not an already successful author — do a campaign that is small and easy to get data on before you do something big.

The direct connection is actually the pointJo: One of my resistances to this was a sort of, “Oh, I'm actually going to have to do a more higher-touch thing.” But as you say, the reframe is: oh my goodness, this is amazing, because I actually do get to connect with people.

Just yesterday I sent a signed book — Pilgrimage, which I did my last Kickstarter on — and this guy was like, “I bought it for myself. Can you sign it to me, because I'm going to do the Camino in a wheelchair?” And I was just so touched. Emailing him back, I just felt, oh my goodness, I'm having a connection with this person that if they'd just bought a book on Amazon, I would not have had.

So now it's almost like — it's this totally different view of my business, which is that direct-first means a much more personal way. It really is like we're in that thousand true fans moment that we first talked about 20 years ago.

Were my fears realised?Jo: Just to recap, I was afraid of failure and embarrassment if I failed to fund, of getting something wrong and being out of pocket, of letting backers down, and of overcommitting myself and resenting the workload. Really, the only thing that happened was overcommitment and a lot more work than I expected.

But the time I put in was also likely the reason for the campaign's success and the reason that the other things didn't happen. I had to learn a new platform and a new approach to publishing and book marketing, so it was kind of a mini degree at the same time.

So yes, I will do another Kickstarter — but only for special projects that are suited to this kind of intensive campaign.

Tips for campaignsIn this section, Oriana shares her thoughts on rewards, and then I'll go into some more of my tips.

Thinking beyond merchOriana: The rewards are really at the heart of the Kickstarter proposition and what makes this kind of fundraising so interesting and thrilling. Basically, your process is you're inviting people on a creative journey. You're saying, “I'm going to make this cool thing. I want your support, and in exchange, you're going to get stuff, you're going to get to be part of my process.”

Obviously your main reward is going to be your book, or your series, or if you're a publishing company, your season — whatever it is. That's your main tier. Then you're going to build everything else out above and below that.

A lot of people think rewards means swag and merch. Which is fine, but merch can add a lot to your production costs. It's causing you to learn how to produce all kinds of things that maybe you've never done before. So that's not the only way to do it.

If you're going to do some merch, I think it's nice to come up with some custom items that feel really related to the work that you're doing. If you've got a romance novel with a pivotal scene on the beach, maybe you'd make some candles that smell like the ocean. Maybe you do some kind of handkerchief that's printed with the pattern of the dress your heroine is wearing.

Digital and experiential rewardsOriana: But you can really think beyond merch into digital rewards and experiential rewards. There are a lot of parts of the writing process that can be pulled out and packaged as rewards — things like notes from the field, outtakes, deleted scenes. I've had people write bloopers, as if it were a comedy movie, added new scenes or novellas, other pieces from different works that you've done. Certainly your backlist and other books you've written can all be included.

We've seen people do tours of the writer's studio, things like that. Also think about what skills you have in addition to your writing. Perhaps you're excellent at marketing or social media or poetry — you can offer webinars on those sorts of things. Other kinds of ways that people can experience your creative practice.

High-end and naming rewardsOriana: Then you can get into high-end, one-off, crazy rewards. One whole section of rewards I love is naming rights. We've seen all kinds — “We'll name the dragon after your dog, or after your mother-in-law. We'll name the hero after your son.”

There's a LitRPG novelist named Matt Dinniman who does this really well. He writes these big-cast novels — there are dungeons, and you're in an intergalactic reality TV show with hundreds of characters. In his last campaign, for $666 he would kill you off in his next book, and for $777 he'd let you live and write a whole scene around you personally.

You can also do book release parties. You can do book clubs. If you're writing children's books, you can do colouring pages or supplemental material for teachers or other educators. The sky is really the limit, and it is based on your creativity and the things that both you can make and that your audience wants.

This is another opportunity — talk to them. Ask them: if I'm going to do a piece of swag, would you rather have an enamel pin or a makeup bag? If I'm going to do alternate covers, would you like the blue cover or the red cover? See what your people are interested in, and then figure out whether it's possible for you to deliver it to them.

Learn about the platform from expertsJo: I've been publishing and selling books through online retailers, as well as my own store, since 2008. I know what I'm doing, but I still had a lot to learn. With Kickstarter, it's essentially a completely different ecosystem, with different rules and a different audience, so you have to learn the ropes.

Even if you're super successful in other places, you might crash and burn on Kickstarter unless you understand how it works and change your approach accordingly.

Start backing campaignsJo: See how it feels to back Kickstarter campaigns and discover what draws you in as a reader and a fan of specific things. You might find projects you love outside of books — there's plenty of other projects outside of books. You can browse the publishing category to find new books, and also use the search to find things you might like. In this way, you can support fellow creators and learn how the Kickstarter site works for discoverability and marketing.

Make sure you go through the Kickstarter.com resources — they have a creator pack which will give you direction on the campaign. Also, their terms of use are really important to read, as there are some assumptions you'll have because you've published on another platform that are incorrect. So do not assume you know what you're doing if this is your first campaign.

Ask for feedback before launchJo: Once you have a draft of your campaign, ask specific people to review it before it launches. You can share a preview prior to launch and get feedback on your page. This helps you refine your story and the rewards, answer any questions before the campaign goes live, and it can also help pique the interest of your audience. I asked specific people who had done Kickstarter campaigns for help at different stages of the process, and this was really useful too.

Review common mistakes from other campaignsJo: If you examine how others made mistakes, you can learn from them. The most common seem to be:

• Not finishing the book before the campaign
• Getting the financials wrong for production, shipping, and any other rewards. I know some authors who have ended up breaking even, or sometimes even out of pocket from campaigns. Don't do that.
• Not making the most of the story sales page and not including everything necessary, so backers don't understand and don't want to support the campaign — essentially, not being clear enough
• Setting unrealistic goals, like expecting to make six figures on a first campaign
• Not allowing enough time for everything
• Not seeking feedback from people who have done it before
• Not marketing the campaign enough
• Overpromising and under-delivering
• Poor communication with backers about the status of rewards

Set aside more time than you think you needJo: The campaign ended up being far more significant than I expected in terms of workload and time to complete. Everyone told me that beforehand, but it was still a surprise.

It took time to prepare the multiple editions for the rewards. I usually produce an ebook, paperback, and a large print edition, and I narrate my own nonfiction audiobooks. But for this Kickstarter, I also wanted to do this special hardback with colour photos, a flyleaf cover and silver foil. I wanted to create a special print product I could be proud of.

I'm proud of all my books in terms of the content, but the usual paperback print-on-demand books are more about the content than the true beauty of the product. For Pilgrimage: A Book of My Heart, I wanted a special edition, so I worked with Jane on the design, going through my photos from the various pilgrimages to find those that resonated with the content — for example, the cadaver tomb at Canterbury, and my Compostela from the Camino de Santiago.

Once we finished, I had that proof copy rushed so we could turn around everything. And I love, love, love the hardback. It has a silken-finish cover and it feels lovely and weighty. The pictures came out well, as the paper is of a higher quality and weight to allow for colour printing. Overall, I am incredibly proud of the finished product. I even sent a copy to my mother-in-law, which I have never done before. And yes, she thinks it's good.

I definitely should have allowed more time, as I spent most of the Christmas and New Year period working on the book, recording and editing the audiobook, and preparing for the campaign. I also didn't have time to prepare, record, edit, and produce the Writing Setting and Sense of Place course until after the campaign, and it was really hard to find the energy to do this afterwards.

Building the campaign pageJo: It took time to build the Kickstarter campaign page, create the video, and incorporate feedback. Most authors don't write sales pages anymore. Sure, we write a sales description for the book page on the retailers, but we don't often do a whole page for multiple editions. On Kickstarter, you are basically writing a sales page for your campaign, which they call a “story.”

Some of your existing audience might just click through and back the campaign without reading it, but most backers will check out the details to find answers to any questions they have. It is a very long page, and you also need a video — or you don't need one, but it's highly recommended. It's best to record the video at the last stage when everything else is done.

You can still see my Kickstarter video on my campaign page, so I won't go through everything in detail. But the key aspects are:

• Who the campaign is aimed at
• Why the campaign is important to me and the book
• What products are available
• Pictures of everything — the page should be really visual — and I included the images in the video as well
• Sample chapters and sample audio
• Specifications, with weight, pages, listening time, table of contents
• About me, the author
• Stretch goals
• Add-ons
• Any questions, risks, and challenges

So it's pretty long. Then the reward levels have to be set up carefully for each pledge level with shipping costs, and specific details about what's included. Eventually, I felt like my page had way too much information, but since I didn't really get many backer questions, I guess it did what it was supposed to do.

I rewrote and edited that page so many times — adding and changing the order of things, responding to feedback, switching things around. But hopefully I can use that as a template for other campaigns.

Marketing takes time tooJo: It took time to prepare the marketing for the campaign. I'm pretty low-key for most launches these days — I publish a book, send a few emails to my lists, announce it on the podcast, do a little social media, update my websites, and move on to the next book. So this was probably my biggest effort in terms of a launch since my first novel back in 2011.

I only had a two-week campaign, so I needed to make the most of that window. I'm going to detail the marketing in a separate section, but it took a lot of time to prepare the various things and execute them, as well as keep the energy up for promotion during the campaign. Two weeks was definitely the longest I would want to do — I was really over it by the end.

Delivering stretch rewardsJo: It took more time to create and deliver the extra stretch rewards I promised. Since I had pretty low expectations of funding, I set my first stretch goal at £10,000 for “Lessons Learned from Writing a Travel Memoir.” When I promised it, I thought it might be a few pages of tips, and I didn't even think we would get there.

But I'm incapable of delivering something that is half done. So when we did hit £10,000, I wrote essentially a short book on the topic, which I then formatted as an ebook and recorded as an audiobook. I'm actually going to turn that into a proper book at some point, so the content will get reused. But that definitely took more time than I expected, because I hadn't prepared it in advance.

The backer spreadsheet and fulfilmentJo: It took time to figure out the backer spreadsheet and check all the fulfilment details. Once you finish your campaign, you send out surveys for mailing addresses and to fulfil rewards. I also needed to turn the backer report into a printing order for BookVault, and that was nerve-wracking.

The spreadsheets were different formats, and then we spot-checked the orders to make sure people got the right books based on their orders. I was petrified that some people might get the wrong book, and I checked and checked and checked — both on the spreadsheet, and then once the orders were loaded, I checked BookVault as well.

I was worried I'd have to resend the right book, which would end up with me out of pocket because they'd have to do double printing and shipping. But thankfully, all the checking made everything good, and I haven't heard from anyone who got the wrong book.

Following up with backersJo: It took time to follow up on failed payments and address issues. Most backers were easy to deal with — they received the updates and Kickstarter emails, they filled in the surveys, and I didn't have any problems. But there were problems with about 5% of backers, most of which were not their fault.

There were failed payments when banks thought Kickstarter might be fraud. There were missed emails because of issues with deliverability, so backers didn't receive the rewards, or they didn't fill in the survey and return their address, which meant I couldn't do the order with BookVault — I had to do it later or manually.

I had to follow up with every single one of these, some of them multiple times, and I slowly reduced my list of outstanding backers.

A tip: If you back a Kickstarter campaign, please log on to Kickstarter a few weeks after the campaign has finished and check for updates. It's possible that you're not receiving the emails from Kickstarter, and the creator may need details from you in order to fulfil your pledge.

Tax implicationsJo: It took time to figure out the tax implications. This is not legal or financial advice, and your taxes will vary by jurisdiction. Please ask your accountant how you need to treat Kickstarter or any other book-related income.

Wherever you are in the world, you will need to pay tax on the income, because we all have income tax, but the complicating factor is whether you also need to consider sales tax. And this definitely differs by jurisdiction. I went to my accountant, who said we should handle it as per any other book sales. I followed my accountant's advice, which treats backers the same way as my customers who buy on Shopify. Ask a professional in your jurisdiction about taxes and finances, even if you are in the UK. I cannot answer any questions. I'm not an accountant.

Closing the loopJo: I haven't had much time to do anything else, as I felt like I couldn't start anything new until everything in the campaign was finished. As soon as the campaign window closed, I felt like I had an open loop in my brain. I desperately wanted to close it in order to say the project was done.

I have now delivered all the book and course rewards, and these lessons learned are really the last part of it. I've talked before about the different kinds of energy you need as an author — starting energy, pushing-through energy, and finishing energy.

Once the campaign was funded, my finishing energy kicked in and I was driven to get everything finished as soon as possible. I sent the digital rewards out within a few days of the campaign closing, and also shipped the unsigned books, ordered the print books, then went and signed them, and then recorded the course. It has been my primary focus for the last few months, and I haven't been able to do much else except the podcast, which is my weekly commitment to you.

Once again, I should have blocked out the time. Bonus tip: Don't plan an international speaking and book research trip during the campaign.

International shipping and fulfilmentJo: Be careful with international shipping and fulfilment of signed books or products. Shipping costs can sink your campaign if you get them wrong, so be very careful with this area.

I have sold books in 175 countries, and this podcast has a listenership in 228 countries, so I really wanted to have a completely international campaign. I wanted to ship Pilgrimage in any format to any country. Originally I thought I would just charge a bit extra for the book and include shipping.

But once I set the book editions up at BookVault and I had the weight and dimensions sorted, I started checking the shipping costs to different countries. For example, we lived in New Zealand for seven years — my husband is a New Zealander, so we go back — so I definitely had to sell in New Zealand. And of course the shipping to New Zealand is very, very different to the US, for example. It is crazy how much shipping costs vary.

I discovered I couldn't just assume it would all wash out and I'd end up making a profit somehow. I had to be a lot more careful with the calculations. So I focused on my biggest markets, which in terms of my book sales are the US, UK, European Union, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. I added a note on the campaign to say I would add any other country for print shipping if people contacted me. As it turned out, no one asked for any other countries, so that was the best way to go in the end.

If you're in a country where the shipping is outrageous — if you're willing to pay for the shipping, then that's absolutely fine. It's just that for the campaign, I had to focus.

When the unexpected happensJo: Of course, you can try to prepare for everything and then something unexpected and out of your control happens. A big spanner in the works for my campaign was the Russian hack, which took down the UK Royal Mail just before my launch. If you're not in the UK, you wouldn't have heard about this, because in some ways it's a very small issue — but it basically took down Royal Mail and a lot of shipping went into flux.

It specifically hit the international side, and other shipping firms ramped up to take the slack. But it made planning for the launch difficult, as the prices were shifting and I didn't know how delivery was going to work. Even for posting in the UK it was hard, because the mail offices were getting backed up.

Once again, I'm grateful for BookVault's adaptability, because I could check different addresses and shipping prices even as things changed, and they added new providers for shipping. About 95% of my shipping ended up being within an acceptable range of what I charged.

So do your research, weigh and measure your items so you can get exact quotes for each. Check what kind of packaging you need. If you're doing your own shipping, you have to actually type in the shipping costs per reward and per country — it's a lot of manual setup to get it right. But this is critical, so check and double-check — and in fact, I triple- and quadruple-checked, then went to sleep, and then the next day checked again.

Having spent 13 years as an IT consultant prior to this career as an author, I will always remember and have learned from the fact that something just might not be working, and then literally if you just go away, go to bed, come back the next day, it'll probably just be working. Sometimes it actually works.

So yes, I did that, and every time I checked, pretty much I found something I'd typed in that didn't quite match, because you also have to retype — if you include all the books in the add-ons, you have to type it again. I didn't stop checking until the day before the launch, and then it was right. I was happy, and everything seemed to be fine.

Shipping is always a moving targetJo: Revisiting this section made me laugh, because as I record this, in the week before I launch Bones of the Deep, international shipping is disrupted again — by the war in Iran, and the Strait of Hormuz being closed, which is affecting fuel prices. This underscores yet again how important it is to check your shipping.

Of course, you can add shipping on later — Kickstarter allows this, as does BackerKit and other services. But as a backer, a customer of people on the platform, I hate being asked to pay shipping later. And since I hate that myself, I don't want other people to feel the same way.

So just add a little buffer in, as asking people to pay an extra dollar in their pledge is not that big a deal, but you being out of pocket for every book shipped may well be.

Sacha Black on pre-launch and fulfilmentIn an interview I did with Sacha Black, who writes as Ruby Roe, in December 2025, we talked about her issues with fulfilment. Sacha does a lot of complex printing, shipping, and custom book boxes and more. Her last campaign made over six figures, but of course it had its challenges. Here's Sacha with some of her tips, and then Oriana to close out this section with some other mistakes.

Sacha: The first thing is — even before you start your Kickstarter — the pre-launch followers are critical. A lot of people think, “Well…” I guess there's a lot of loud noise about all these big numbers about how much people can make on Kickstarter, but actually a lot of it is driven by you, the author, pushing your audience to Kickstarter.

You need more pre-launch followers than you think you do. Lots of people don't put enough impetus on the marketing beforehand. Almost all of our Kickstarter marketing is beforehand, because we drive so many people to that follow button.

The other thing we do is early-bird pricing. We get the majority of our income on a campaign on day one. I think it was something wild, like 80% this time was on day one, so that's really important.

Fulfilment takes longer than you thinkSacha: The second thing is, it takes so, so very much longer than you think it does to fulfil a campaign, and you must factor in that cost. Because if it's not you fulfilling, you're paying somebody else to fulfil it. And if it is you fulfilling it, you must account for your own time in the pricing of your campaign.

The other thing is that the amount of time it takes to fulfil is directly proportionate to the size of the campaign. So you do have to think about that.

The other lesson we have learned is that overseas printing will drag your timelines out far longer than you think. So whatever you think it's going to take you to fulfil — add several months more onto that, and put that information in your campaign.

Reinvesting profit and exclusive rewardsSacha: The last thing — if you have some profit in the Kickstarter, because not all Kickstarters are actually massively profitable. They either don't account enough for shipping, or they don't account enough in the pricing. Thankfully, ours have been profitable, but we've actually reinvested that profit back into buying more stock and more merchandise, which not everybody would want to do if they don't have a warehouse.

However, we do have one. We are stockpiling merchandise and books so that we can do mystery boxes later on down the line. It's probably a year away, but we are buying extra of everything so that we have that in the warehouse.

So it depends on what you want to do with your profit. For us, it was all about buying more books, basically.

The other thing to think about is: what is it that you're doing that's exclusive to Kickstarter? Because you will get backers on Kickstarter who want that quirky, unique thing that they're not going to be able to get anywhere else. But what about you? You've done more Kickstarters than me — what do you think is the biggest lesson you've learned?

Tiers, bundles, and AI for planning rewardsJo: Well, I think all of mine together add up to the one you just did. Although I will comment — you said something like £75 per pre-launch backer. That is obviously dependent on your tiers for the rewards, so most authors won't have that amount. My average order value, which I know is slightly different, but I don't offer things like book boxes as you have — so a lot of it will depend on the tiers.

Some people will do a Kickstarter just with an ebook — just with one ebook and maybe a bundle of ebooks — so you're never going to make it up to that kind of value. So this is important too: have a look at what people offer on their different levels of Kickstarter.

In fact, here's my AI tip for the day. What you can do — what I did with my Buried and the Drowned campaign recently — is, you know, I'm happy uploading my book. I uploaded it to ChatGPT and said, “Tell me, what are some ideas for the different reward tiers that I can do on Kickstarter?” And it will give you some ideas for what you can do, what kind of bundles you might want to do.

So bundling your backlist is another thing you can do — as upsells, or you can just do it like I did for Blood Vintage, where I did a horror bundle of four standalone horror books in one of the upper tiers. Bundling is a good way to do it, and also upselling your backlist is a really good way to up things.

And also, if you do it digitally — for ebooks and audiobooks — there's a lot less time in fulfilment.

Oriana on the biggest mistakesJo: What are some of the top mistakes you see that mean the campaign doesn't fund, or there are other issues?

Oriana: Totally. I mean, the biggest mistake I think authors make — or any creator — is overestimating their ability to reach their crowd. Making sure that your ambition matches your reach is the number one most important thing to come close to guaranteeing that you will be successful.

If you're an emerging writer and you're still building your audience and you don't have that many followers or subscribers out in the world, you should not try to fund a multi-volume leather-bound omnibus. Do a real honest assessment of who's in your crowd, how to find them, what percentage of them are likely to support what you're doing, and then find a project that feels realistic based on those numbers. That's really the biggest thing, conceptually.

Building a strong project pageOriana: As far as tips for a project page — again, back campaigns and look at what other people are doing. A project page can be either as simple or as complicated as you want to make it.

You definitely want to talk about the book: what is in it, what you're writing. Do a trope card if you want — we're seeing those all over the site. Say what kind of book it is, and the specs: page count, trim size, cover design. Obviously if you're doing a special edition, exactly what sorts of bells and whistles, with a prototype if you can.

But you can be really expansive from there. What are your inspirations? Who are your collaborators? What brought you to this work? What are some of the things that make you excited about your writing practice, your timeline, your budget? What made you choose these rewards and how you're going to produce them? All those sorts of things will make backers feel both more trusting that you will do the things you're promising, and just more excited to be part of your journey.

Marketing your Kickstarter campaignLet's talk about marketing. First, a snippet from Oriana, and then I'll share specifics around marketing tips — many of which are useful if you're launching in any other way.

Kickstarter's algorithm rewards attentionOriana: Being on Kickstarter will help you grow your audience, but it's definitely not everything. You really do need to bring your people first. Our algorithm works on attention, so any project that's getting clicks, getting backings, getting comments — our algorithm says, “Oh, people want to look at this. We will expose it to more and more people.”

That means raising it up in search results, slotting it into various of the macros and carousels around the site. Our recommendation engine powers recommended projects on the top of campaigns and at the bottom of emails. We are doing a lot to make sure that projects are being surfaced to folks who want to see them.

Talk about the book while you're writing itJo: Talk and share about the book while you're writing it, even though you might not know what it will turn into. I always share my book research and projects in progress, so this was nothing new. But Pilgrimage was years in the making, so I had years of sharing aspects of it.

I've shared pictures from every pilgrimage walk on Instagram at @jfpennauthor and Facebook at J.F. Penn Author, and sometimes Facebook The Creative Penn. I've talked on this podcast about each walk, and I've done solo episodes and blog posts about each on my Books and Travel podcast and blog.

I also did a poll and shared my book cover design process, and then I did an article on why I ignored target-reader feedback in the end. All this meant that many in my community — including you listening — became aware of my solo walking and also my ecclesiastical interest, my architecture interest, and you enjoyed my photos along the way if you follow me on social media.

So when I announced the launch, it was the culmination of years of build-up.

Use the pre-launch page earlyJo: Set up the Kickstarter pre-launch page as early as possible, and keep promoting it. You can launch a pre-launch page once Kickstarter has approved your project, and you don't have to have finished everything to make it available — just complete the personal and business setup, and fill in enough detail so they can verify your identity and judge the campaign to be real and within the guidelines, and not a scam or spam campaign.

I started to promote my pre-launch page, and by the time we went live, I had people signed up on launch. Those people get an email from Kickstarter. Those people were responsible for my campaign funding within the first few minutes, and then taking it to 5x the target within the first 24 hours. Then I started to email my lists, and all of this type of thing. But it was those pre-launch signups that really kick-started — see what I did there? — the whole thing.

The benefit of using Kickstarter for multiple projects is that previous backers are notified of your new project. This compounds the effect over time, and is why those who use Kickstarter successfully do multiple campaigns.

Kickstarter SEO and on-platform marketingJo: Kickstarter has its own ecosystem. There's a discovery algorithm that can help you find projects you might like as a backer, and there are different ways to search, but only certain aspects appear in the search. So your title, subtitle, and your header image need to be optimised so people can find you.

Your story sales page needs to be clear, with a compelling pitch. People also have to want your rewards, so marketing has to be baked into the products you're offering and who you're trying to attract.

Your video doesn't need to be a professional-level product, but it does need to connect with potential backers, so take the time to make a good one. If you've never made a video before, you will need time to upskill.

Kickstarter also has social media. Use #KickstarterReads and tag @KickstarterReads. If your project funds quickly and has a good trajectory, you might get picked for the “Projects We Love” badge, which also gives you better discoverability. I got that pretty fast. You can also tag Kickstarter on social media and inform them of your campaign.

Content marketingJo: Content marketing is offering something useful or interesting or inspiring or funny or entertaining for free, in order to attract your target market so they buy your book. This might be an article or blog post, video, audio, podcast, social media, whatever. For fiction, it's usually a free book or a short story or other free examples of your writing that draw people in.

Content marketing is my favourite form of marketing, as it is about attraction, not interruption. It also involves creating something in the world that lasts over time, as opposed to an ephemeral spike ad or a social media post that quickly disappears. Each has its place, of course, and I use them all.

This podcast is content marketing, although it now also provides direct revenue in the form of corporate advertising and Patreon support. Thank you, patrons and advertisers — and I consider this to be part of my creative body of work. My Books and Travel podcast is also content marketing.

Guest appearances for the launchJo: For this launch, I did content marketing on my own sites and shows, as well as other people's, which I arranged and recorded in advance. I've also mentioned the campaign in the introduction to every one of these shows leading up to the launch and during the launch.

I was on some podcasts: Sacred Steps with Kevin Donahue, Wish I'd Known Then… For Writers with Sara Rosett and Jami Albright, Travel Writing World with Jeremy Bassetti, and Into the Woods with Holly Worton.

I also did several of my own. I did one on this feed. I did another on the Books and Travel feed. I also included two chapters from the audiobook on the Books and Travel podcast. All of these took time to prepare and produce, but each is a chance for another person to hear about the book. Plus, they're evergreen, and Pilgrimage is available for everyone to buy now, so I can point people at Pilgrimage on other stores.

Use a redirection URLJo: For all my marketing, I used JFPenn.com/pilgrimage, which I can redirect using the Pretty Links plugin on WordPress and point to wherever I want it to go. Before the launch, it went to the pre-launch page; then the campaign itself; and now it goes to the book page. Once I build a special landing page, it will go there.

Depending on where you're listening will depend on where it goes, but that's JFPenn.com/pilgrimage. The URL needs to be easy to say out loud for use in podcast interviews and audio-first media.

Email your list multiple timesJo: Some things change in book marketing — like the emergence of new platforms like TikTok — but one thing has stayed the same for decades: if you have an email list, you can always sell books. Your email list consists of people who have opted in to hear from you, so you can email them about normal launches as well as your Kickstarter campaign.

I have two email lists: one for The Creative Penn around writing, and the other around J.F. Penn for my fiction. I emailed both lists multiple times at different times in the campaign. I use ConvertKit for my email, but there are other options for authors.

Use referral links for trackingJo: Use specific referral links for different aspects of the campaign for tracking returns. Kickstarter allows you to create different tracking links so you can link revenue to specific marketing events. For example, I used one link for my Creative Penn email list, another for my J.F. Penn email list, and yet another for my Facebook advertising.

You can also add the Meta pixel and Google Analytics code to the campaign, which can also help with figuring out advertising. And if you don't know what those are, don't worry — you don't have to use them.

Book images and social mediaJo: I initially mocked up the book using cover images on MockupShots.com, and then resized them in Canva in order to create social media images. I later did a book photo shoot with the hardback in different places to give me more marketing assets to play with — all of which I will use over time as part of ongoing marketing.

I prepared and scheduled social media posts to go out every day, and I did that in advance, primarily for Twitter at @thecreativepenn, my Instagram and Facebook at J.F. Penn Author, and also Facebook at The Creative Penn.

It was a lot of work, but I really enjoyed it — weirdly — and I need to do more of this for my other books, especially as with Shopify, Facebook, and Instagram link directly into my store, so I can tag books. These days social commerce is a lot smoother through mobile, so someone can see an image on social, click through, and buy immediately.

I also did some quotes from the book — so I did pictures, I also did quotes — and I blatantly used our cute British Shorthair cats, Cashew and Ramen, for marketing reasons. I use Buffer to schedule my social media, but there are other tools.

I also asked some friends who are travel influencers to share the book, and I sent them the hardback in advance so they could review if they liked. Thanks to Sarah Baxter and Alastair Humphreys for sharing the book, and especially a big thank you to Anna McNuff, who gave birth to twins that week and still managed to share about Pilgrimage.

Backer engagement and stretch goalsJo: Let's be clear — it was not natural for me to push a book every day for two weeks. I also felt awkward about engaging with backers multiple times, let alone the wider community who I was sure was sick of my book, but I did it anyway, as it was only a short campaign of two weeks.

I sent four updates during the campaign to backers, some of which are visible to the public on my Kickstarter, and then I sent updates afterwards with delivery of the rewards.

Although I did resist the stretch goals, as I mentioned earlier, I went with “Notes on Writing a Travel Memoir” and the backer live Q&A. I did scramble to decide on and deliver those, as I really didn't think I would need them — which is crazy. I had such low expectations of what I might achieve. But next time I would definitely plan stretch goals in advance and in more detail.

Facebook advertisingJo: I did some Facebook ads for the campaign — although I should call them Meta ads, because they're also on Instagram. I primarily aimed them at my email lists and people who follow my pages, but also some wider reach using lookalike lists and walking interests. I used a tracking link, so I know that the revenue that came in through people backing it more than paid for the ads. So I would do more of this next time.

Marketing things I didn't doJo: I didn't try to get any press or traditional media attention, mainly because I would have had to approach outlets much earlier in the process. I didn't have the hardback finished until a few weeks before the campaign, rather than a few months before, which is when pitching for press is a better idea.

I also didn't collaborate with other creators on Kickstarter, even though I knew other authors doing campaigns at the same time. A couple of people asked me about cross-promotion, but their campaigns were not at all related to Pilgrimage. As with all book marketing, there is only a point to cross-promotion if you target the same readers.

I had intended to do some Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube Live videos, but I struggle with live videos in general — and especially when I'm tired — so I didn't go ahead with those. I might consider more of those next time.

Do a survey for everyoneJo: My tip is — do a survey for everyone. As part of a campaign I previously backed, I noticed that I didn't actually need to do a survey for the digital backers, because they could just get the rewards if I emailed through Kickstarter. And sure enough, you can just email the BookFunnel links, the course discount code, etc., through the campaign.

But this was a mistake. I should have done a survey for everyone. If you do a survey, you can get the real email, as some people use a cloaked email. You can also include a checkbox asking people if they want to sign up for your email list.

Respecting backer dataJo: So while you do get the email addresses of everyone who backs your campaign in your backer report, you cannot just upload them to your email provider and start emailing them about your other books. Kickstarter's terms of use include the following:

When you use Kickstarter, and especially if you create a successful project, you may receive information about other users, including things like their names, email addresses, and postal addresses. This information is provided for the purpose of participating in a Kickstarter project. Don't use it for other purposes and don't abuse it.

This is about data protection and privacy laws. Basically, Kickstarter is the platform in this instance, and people have signed up to receive emails from Kickstarter, but not from you. All emails about the campaign go through Kickstarter, and you don't have permission to just upload that list to your own email system and start sending more emails. They have not specifically said they want that, unless they have in a survey with opt-in — which I didn't do.

Of course, there are indirect ways to attract people to sign up for your list. My book Pilgrimage includes ways to hear from me further, so some backers will go on and sign up for my free thriller ebook at JFPenn.com/free, or my Author Blueprint at TheCreativePenn.com/blueprint. You can also do updates later, for example when you have a new campaign, and in this way Kickstarter acts as a different ecosystem for email.

Should you consider a Kickstarter campaign for your book?Jo: To be honest — only if you consider this to be a career you want to invest in, and a platform you want to do more than one campaign with.

If you just have one book or a couple of books, or you're just starting out, or you don't want to do marketing and connect with readers, then definitely don't do a Kickstarter. It is not some magic button that will make you money — like uploading to Amazon is not a magic button that will make you money. It takes time and effort to have a successful campaign.

But if you do want to build a long-term author business, then selling direct should have some part to play, and Kickstarter is a great way to make more money per book and connect with readers. It's really only the beginning of the trend of authors selling direct, so don't worry — you can learn how to do this over time.

Update for Bones of the Deep, my 7th campaign in April 2026Jo: It was interesting to revisit my lessons learned and other people's tips, and really, there are only a few things that have changed.

I love doing Kickstarter campaigns nowFirstly, I absolutely love doing Kickstarter campaigns. I am not nervous at all anymore, and I am just so thrilled to produce gorgeous hardback editions of my books this way. I love delivering beautiful books and new stories or nonfiction to my readers. I love doing the discovery writing webinars and the coaching, and just in general, I appreciate the opportunity to publish this way.

I feel like a “real author” — with beautiful hardbacks, doing a signing, getting photos and emails from readers who receive the books.

Custom printing keeps expandingIn terms of other changes, over the last few years since Pilgrimage, BookVault has expanded their custom printing, so now I have custom endpapers, sprayed edges, different kinds of foil, as well as the silken paper and the ribbon and photos inside. These gorgeous editions are my personal creative reason to keep doing campaigns. I love saying “I made this!” And over time, I would love to get all my backlist into special editions.

A repeatable processI'm still doing similar kinds of rewards — the book in all editions — and it's all finished so it's lower stress. Even the audiobook narration is done, so I can fulfil immediately. There's just the live discovery writing webinar to do, and stretch goal Q&A and consulting sessions.

I'm also doing bundles, and all my backlist gets bundled in the add-ons, so I have a repeatable process, which makes things easier.

Using AI in productionI'm using more AI, specifically in the images and video. I love making book images with ChatGPT and Gemini's Nano Banana, and story images with Midjourney, and I use ElevenLabs with my voice clone for audiobooks. I fill in all the details in the AI section of the Kickstarter page, so you can go have a look at that and model it as you like.

Spike income, realistic expectationsI still like the spike income — but to be clear, my campaigns have varied in terms of financial success, as would be expected given they are all so different. My highest was Writing the Shadow at over £36,000 ($48,000), and my lowest was The Buried and the Drowned, a short story collection, at just under £8,000 ($10,700) — not a surprise at how different they are, given the audiences.

Together my campaigns have now made £105,868 (just over $140,000), which I am very happy with. And of course, that's just the beginning, as then I put the books on my stores — JFPennBooks.com and CreativePennBooks.com — and on the usual platforms.

A sustainable launch rhythmI still like the project approach — the short-term campaign focus — as I am good at sustaining marketing energy for a short period, and then I can drop off again. As I discussed with Sara Rosett last week as well, it feels sustainable for my career, unlike constant social media or ads.

Lower-key marketing this time aroundI'm putting a lot less energy into marketing in general, relying on pre-launch signups over months of build-up as I talk about my writing process on the podcast, then emailing my lists, announcing it here, and scheduling some social media. It's pretty low-key these days, and that is a happy thing.

However, for this campaign, I am planning to run some Meta ads direct to the campaign page, since I have Claude Code/Cowork to help me set them up and run them and crunch the data — and that takes the strain off considerably.

More campaigns to comeI will definitely be doing more Kickstarter campaigns, most likely a nonfiction one next. I am so glad I was able to get over my fears and do that first one, and I hope that encourages you to consider what might be possible for you and your book.

So, if you'd like to check out my campaign for Bones of the Deep — even if you don't want the book, you can always model the sales page, or check out the book trailer — it's at JFPenn.com/bones.

That link will go to the Kickstarter campaign from 20 April until early May 2026, and will then redirect.

The post Kickstarter Tips for Authors: Rewards, Shipping, Marketing, and Lessons Learned first appeared on The Creative Penn.

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Are you tired of the hustle-harder approach to book marketing? What if a quieter, more creative strategy could work just as well — and feel a whole lot better? How can special editions, physical letters, and library outreach bring readers to your books without the daily grind of ads and social media? Sara Rosett shares her low-key approach to marketing, direct sales, and the creative business of being an indie author.

In the intro, dealing with uncertainty, and Becca Syme's Quit books; The Successful Author Mindset; Building resilience and the creative lies that writers tell themselves [Wish I'd Known Then]; On Writing – Stephen King; Big Magic – Elizabeth Gilbert;

This podcast is sponsored by Kobo Writing Life, which helps authors self-publish and reach readers in global markets through the Kobo eco-system. You can also subscribe to the Kobo Writing Life podcast for interviews with successful indie authors.

This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn

Sara Rosett is the USA Today bestselling author of over 30 books across 1920s mysteries, cosy mysteries, and travel mysteries, as well as nonfiction for authors. She's also the co-host of the fantastic Wish I'd Known Then podcast.

In this episode:

• Why low-key, personality-driven marketing can be more sustainable than aggressive advertising
• How to pitch your books to libraries using a simple email strategy
• The pros and cons of special editions, physical letters, and Kickstarter campaigns
• Shifting from retailer-first releases to direct sales through a Shopify store
• Co-writing nonfiction and the power of series bundles for reader discovery
• Drawing creative inspiration from other industries and international storytelling trends

You can find Sara at SaraRosett.com and at WishIdKnownForWriters.com

Transcript of the interviewJo: Sara Rosett is the USA Today bestselling author of over 30 books across 1920s mysteries, cosy mysteries, and travel mysteries, as well as nonfiction for authors. She's also the co-host of the fantastic Wish I'd Known Then podcast. Welcome back to the show, Sara.

Sara: Hi, Jo. Thanks for having me. It's great to be back.

Jo: It is great to have you back. You were last on the show five years ago, around February 2021, and we talked about writing a series — and you have a great book on that. But first up, give us an update. What does your author business look like right now, and what are you up to with your writing?

How Sara's author business has evolvedSara: Well, it's changed a lot.

I sat down to think about this and I thought, yes, I have got into direct sales. I've done Kickstarters. I have a Shopify store now. I've really shifted from releasing first on the retailers. I don't really do that anymore. I've done some special editions, some physical things — I'm sure we'll talk about those later.

Still doing the podcast with Jamie, the Wish I'd Known Then podcast, we're still doing that. I also have a Mystery Books podcast, which is an episodic podcast that comes out in seasons. I do a short season, about one a year, so I keep doing that. Writing some nonfiction.

I did the trope book with Jennifer Hilt for mystery and thriller. And writing-wise, I've created a spinoff, a short spinoff in the 1920s series. I'm still loving the 1920s timeline. But I've slowed down a little bit on the releases. Busy, but good.

Jo: Busy, but good.

All right, we're going to get into all of those things. Although I must say I had forgotten about your Mystery Books podcast and going to seasonal. I also had my second podcast, Books and Travel, which is now on a kind of hiatus, but going to a seasonal approach is actually really interesting.

Do you find that listeners come back to that podcast?

The power of a seasonal podcastSara: Yes, and it surprises me because I've always thought you have to be weekly with a podcast to gain any traction at all, which I think is the best way to do it. You can build an audience quickly then, but I just knew I couldn't sustain that.

So when I set out, I started with maybe seven to ten episodes and I did them each year — each year has had a season — and I do five to ten episodes. Readers find it, and I have highlighted specific books. I think maybe they're searching for a podcast about the Thursday Murder Club or something like that.

They find it that way, and I get downloads, just steady downloads throughout the year, and I don't do much. I do some Pinterest pins for that, and that's about all I do. This is one of those things — it's the kind of low-key marketing that's low threshold, but it does work.

I think if your readers are looking for stuff to listen to about the topic you write about, it could be a good way to do some low-cost, long-tail marketing. I love it. I keep doing it because I love it.

Jo: That's great.

Low-key marketing that fits your personalityJo: As you mentioned, I really wanted to talk to you about this low-key, non-hype marketing. We've met in person a number of times, and I think we're quite similar — we're quiet, reserved.

We are quite low key. I just put content out, and yes, I do some paid ads or whatever, but I just don't find the hype marketing something I want to do. I like the attraction marketing, and I feel like I do intuitive marketing.

So how does your low-key marketing fit with your personality?

Sara: Well, I did try some of the more promotional marketing. I tried to have a street team back when I heard authors talking about that.

I thought, oh, I'll do a Street Team, and that doesn't really match with my readers. My genre — that's just not a thing that happens a lot there. So I backed off of that, and I've tried ads. Not really interested in those. I'm not really good at them, and I don't really want to get good at them.

So I've searched for ways that I can find readers that don't rely on ads. I've really focused on my newsletter, and I have two of those. I have a main one that goes out to my readers who sign up in the back of the book. And then I have a New Release in Historical Mysteries newsletter that goes out about twice a month most of the time.

That's just curation. I'm saying, hey, these are the new books that are out. I feel like those are easy to do. They fit with my personality, which is like, here, let me give you some information about what's going on in this genre. I do newsletters, the promo sites, the smaller promotional paid ads — I do those occasionally. I have a rotation that I go through, and I try to get a BookBub. If I can, that's great.

I've just done things that are leaning into what I feel comfortable doing.

Pitching books to librariesSara: A lot of it is finding small sites where I haven't run an ad. Let me see if there's anybody who wants to sign up or get a free book through me here. I've done some BookFunnel marketing, where you can join the group promos. I like those.

And I've reached out to libraries because I feel like my books appeal to libraries. They like the 1920s historicals. It's an easy way to reach people — it's attractive to libraries.

So I had a list of libraries in my state, and I have an assistant who helps me out. She emailed down the list. She picked a few every week and messaged them and said, hey, this is a local author. She lives in this state. Here are some books you might enjoy from her.

And I have, because of you, large print — I got into that when you started talking about large print a couple of years ago. So I have large print case laminate books that libraries like. I just do things like that, things that are not the norm.

Hardly anybody is talking about marketing to libraries. But I try to do that. Sometimes I'll just think of something. I was at the library and I thought, wow, look at all these hardcover case laminate books they have in this large print section. Maybe I should try that. And then I search out and try to figure out if I can do it.

Jo: And just for people who don't know, case laminate is a hardback.

Sara: Yes.

Jo: That's really interesting. You mentioned the libraries and the list. Was that a list you were able to buy? I remember years ago I had someone on the show who was doing that kind of thing. Or was it that your assistant had to go through and find all the libraries, find an email address, that kind of thing?

Sara: I think I found it through Sisters in Crime, which is a mystery writers' organisation, and I think they had a contact list — you could get libraries and bookstores in your area.

I think I started with that and then just research. And I'm sure now with AI, you could put in where you are and say, in a radius of 250 miles, what is near me? And you could probably get a great list.

Jo: Absolutely. And when the assistant is emailing, is it just information about you and then saying, would you like to buy? Because you have a big backlist, and we don't want to be sending loads of expensive hardbacks to libraries unless they're actually going to buy. What's the process to actually sell to them?

The library email approachSara: I wrote up an email and introduced myself. I leaned into the “I'm local — I live in the same city or state that you're in.”

Then I described my most popular series and said the first book is this. I put a link to a PDF that they can go look at. I think it's on my website, and they can go see the books. They can print that out, of course, and it has the ISBNs. I make sure they know they can order them from Ingram, and that's all I do.

Then when I had a new release, we switched it up and put that at the top. But I have all the books in the series so they know it's a series.

Jo: That's fantastic. I love that.

Set-and-forget promotional marketingJo: A lot of what you were talking about was newsletter, email marketing, some ads, but nothing aggressive — as in you're not monitoring it every single day. The email pushes, like a BookBub or free books, bargain books — you can book it and then it's almost set and forget, isn't it? You don't have to log in every day to check the results. Is that what you mean?

Sara: Yes. And I like those because they are set and forget. You just have to remember to drop the price and then reset it on Amazon, and then they send it out to their list and hopefully you get some traffic from that.

I like that much better than Facebook ads, because with ads I feel like you have to go in and monitor the comments and check on how they're doing. It's a more full-time type job. If you're doing a lot of ads, it's a couple of hours — for me anyway, because I'm not very savvy with it and I'm not as experienced. So it would take a long time to increase my knowledge there.

Jo: To be fair, both of us have had many years when we could have become experts, but the fact is it doesn't suit our personalities.

I am now working with Claude Code a bit more to do Amazon ads, but even then we go in once a week and Claude does a few things and then we log out again. I'm not doing this daily stuff, and I may eventually get back into doing it for Meta. But in terms of what I mean by low-key marketing — it's lower stress when you don't have to do stuff every day.

And I guess what you're doing with the Mystery Books podcast, with the library pitches, with the batching — is that what you're doing? Putting aside time for marketing occasionally?

Sara: Yes. And that's what I do. I'll think, oh, I haven't checked Kobo promos, so let me go check that, because I do use those too.

I'm wide, so I'm trying to find things that bring my books to readers everywhere. I use the Kobo promos, I use Kobo Plus, I use Draft2Digital to get digital books into libraries. I'm always running — if they have a library sale anywhere, I sign up for it and I just do these occasional things.

It's not every day, and I like doing things in phases. I like doing a special edition and working on that and then being done with that and putting that away and going back to writing or whatever. I don't mind doing promo for a little bit, but then I don't want to do it every day.

A project-based approach to the author businessJo: We are similar in so many ways. I also have this project approach to life and business. If I'm writing a first draft of a new book, pretty much everything else goes out the window.

Sara: Yes.

Jo: Exactly. I just don't have the bandwidth. I'm not in that head space.

And then, as we record this, I've got a Kickstarter coming up for Bones of the Deep and yesterday I did the book trailer, and I'll do the push for the Kickstarter and then I'm just going to stop.

Sara: Well, the positive way to look at that is it's focus, right? We can focus for two weeks or a month or whatever — two months doing a Kickstarter or whatever — and then we're done with it, and then we move on.

Jo: That just seems more sustainable to me. I didn't like doing everything every day or every single week.

Sara: Me either. I like switching it up, and I do enjoy the different phases of writing.

I like the research and then I like doing the — well, I don't like the drafting that much, but once I get a draft done, I like the editing. And then when it comes time to promote it or do a special edition or whatever, I enjoy that part. Finding whatever I'm going to use for the interior photos and stuff — just things like that. I enjoy each phase and I like switching it out.

Jo: I think that's really good. Some people think this writer's life is you write new words every single day and you manage your ads every single day. That seems to be what some people do, but that's certainly not us, is it?

Sara: No. And that's great if you want to do that. I just don't want to. And I think we've come to the point now where each person can do this as they want. Hopefully people don't feel the pressure to meet these self-imposed deadlines or parameters that don't exist. There's no rules for writing or publishing. You can do whatever you want.

Social media — or notJo: Let's just mention social media then. What are you doing for that?

Sara: Not much!

Jo: Nor me!

Sara: I'm dabbling in Pinterest because I think that could have the longer tail. I do a little Instagram, but that is about it. And I really considered just leaving it altogether.

I'm never on Facebook. We were talking earlier about saying no, and I don't want to join any more Facebook groups. I don't care what information they have. I figure I'll hear about it on a podcast if it's great.

I think social media has changed so much. In the beginning, it was great — you could find readers. Now it's just much harder to connect with readers there. I want to have a presence so that if people go look for me, they'll find my books and hopefully find a link to download a free book and read it or an audiobook and listen to it. Then they can get on my newsletter and connect with me there. That's my philosophy.

Jo: I think so too. I am on Instagram @jfpennauthor in that I do post pictures there, and even very recently I've discovered how to do a reel, which is just hilarious — I'm only about seven years late.

But I don't check my DMs, so if anyone messaged me on Instagram or Facebook, I'm just not getting them.

Sara: I know. And I feel like there's so many places people can connect with you. I put up a post on Facebook and said, I'm not going to be here much anymore. If you're looking for me, you can find me on Instagram maybe, or sign up for my newsletter to really stay in touch.

Jo: I think that's what we have to do. But our idea of this project-based approach to the author life and the author business doesn't suit social media, because the people who are really good on social media are on it multiple times a day, creating content multiple times a day. It just suits some people and not others.

Sara: I do things and I take pictures and think, oh, I'll put this on Instagram. And then I don't ever do it. One time we went on a road trip and I took a bunch of paperbacks and dropped them off in the free little libraries. I took a picture at each one and I never posted those ever. I ran across them years later and thought, oh yeah, I did it but I didn't post it on social media. That's just not my thing.

Special editions and physical designJo: Although you did just say that you like doing the art and the photos, and you've done some beautiful special editions. You've done letters, you do a lot of physical design for your books. So talk about that — why you're doing that, why it's fun, and the pros and cons, because it can be a time suck and a money suck.

Sara: Yeah. I think you have to figure out where your gauge is for that, because you can go all in and do everything for the special editions.

I've come to the conclusion I'm going to survey my readers before I do another one and say, what do you really like about them? Because I do mine and release them on my Shopify store first — is it just that you're getting it first, or do you like all the bells and whistles?

I enjoy doing the endpages and the ribbon, and I've done character art for them. But since my books are set in the 1920s, there's a lot of photos from that time period that are available. In Deposit Photos, you can go in and search for those.

The last two books I did, I used photos that I thought captured what the characters would look like. That was a lot of fun to find and just include photos instead of character art. And it was a lot faster than waiting for character art too.

The pros are that it's fun and you get to do things you don't normally get to do — finding beautiful illustrations for the endpages, doing the sprayed edges, just making it really special.

Storytelling through lettersSara: I enjoy doing things that you can't do on Amazon. You just can't do letters on Amazon.

With both Kickstarters, you could get three physical letters in the mail. They were a story told through letters, and they had art. The first one was black and white, and then the second set was colour.

Since then, I've done colour, and it's a challenge to write those because it's a totally different type of writing. It's a 1,000 to 1,500 word little snippet, and where you end is important so that readers will be looking for the next one.

Including art — whether it was a map, illustrations of what the view looks like, what the house looks like. Not that I illustrated it — I had somebody else help me do that.

It's fun to think about how stories can be told in different ways. I love novels, but 70,000 words is a lot of words. That's a big project. Sometimes it's nicer to have a shorter project. The letters were shorter and a shorter time investment. I enjoyed them for that.

For the cons — it's just a longer ramp up to get it going. If you want to do a special edition or letters or book boxes or anything like that, just estimate how much time you think you need and then multiply by three or five, because it's going to take so much longer than you think. Would you agree with that, with your special editions?

Jo: Yeah. Although I think now I've got a process for it.

Although, I did my book trailer for Bones of the Deep yesterday, and it reminded me — the book trailer is 30 seconds, and it took me nearly ten hours!

Sara: I do believe that though. I completely believe it.

Jo: Because I'm a bit of a control freak. I love working with Midjourney. I say I think I'm a control freak — of course I am. We all are as indie authors.

But I'm a very visual author, and you sound like you are as well. I see the book, and if I'm generating pictures of the characters or the ship or what happens in the storm or whatever, then it needs to look like what's in my head. So I end up generating and generating, and then I did music and then — yeah, it's very creative, but it takes a heck of a long time.

From Kickstarter to Shopify storeJo: Coming back to your letters and your Kickstarters — I did go check. It's been a while since you've done those. Have you changed to using your Shopify store, and will you do another Kickstarter?

Sara: I may do another Kickstarter. I do feel like I found new readers on Kickstarter. That's a pro definitely — people will see your work that maybe would never see it on Amazon.

It's a much smaller pool to stand out in. Whereas on Amazon there are thousands and millions of books, on Kickstarter there might be five historical mysteries or two at that moment. So it's easier to stand out.

I'll probably do another Kickstarter, but to me it was difficult with the prep that went into it. Then the launch, and the launch kind of stressed me out. I know we talked to you on our podcast before your first Kickstarter and you were a little stressed, so I'm not as stressed as I would be with the first one.

But it is a lot to prepare, and I do feel some pressure that I want this one to do well. And then the fulfilment — I like to do things in phases, so I felt like it was hard for me to move on to anything else while I was waiting for the books to arrive, because I didn't feel done with that until I had sent out the books. It just seemed like it took quite a bit of time.

So with my next release, I thought, I'm going to launch this on my Shopify store and see how it does.

I still did the special edition and I still did a lot of the things I learned to do with Kickstarter, like emailing my list a little more often and highlighting these special things. And coordinating with a couple of other authors in my genre to say, hey, I have a book out and it's a special edition — you might be interested. And then share their stuff when their book comes out.

The first one I did, I had the book sent to me. I signed them, packed them, and sent them out. But the second one, I said, to save time and money, we were just going to do a digital signature. I had them shipped directly from Book Vault to the reader, and that just helped simplify things so much.

Launching on my store, I didn't see quite as many sales or bring in quite as much money as I did on Kickstarter, but it took a lot less time. I feel that was a good trade-off. It simplified the time it took to do it, so I was able to get back to writing more quickly.

The second one I launched on my store as well. I've done the spinoff series on my store — it's a three-book series — and I'll probably do the third book on my store too.

Then maybe when I go back to my original 1920s series, which is the one that does the best and is my most popular, I may go back to Kickstarter with that one. I think it's nice to have the choice to launch on my store or Kickstarter. I can choose — do I have enough time to do it the way I want to on Kickstarter?

Scarcity, direct sales, and training readersJo: I feel like launching on my store, there's less of a time pressure. We don't really have scarcity in our business, and the only way to make it scarce is to have a limited-time offer. Which to me, Kickstarter by its very nature is a limited-time offer.

Obviously it's easier for me because I'm near BookVault, so I go up there and physically sign the books, and I like doing that occasionally. But I hear you with the direct store, and I also presume it trains people to buy from your store.

So how has your revenue shifted from the big stores like Amazon, Kobo, to Shopify, Kickstarter, direct sales?

Sara: It's shifted a lot. I do the Shopify store just like I do everything else — in phases. I'm like, hey, I have a new release. Go buy it at my store. And I have a lot of sales.

I also launched a third set of letters last year around October, leading into November. I said, you can get this series of letters — two a month all year in 2026. Go to my store, sign up for it, buy it there. They'll be launching in December.

I push it, I talk about it. I do a podcast about the letters or the special edition on Mystery Books podcast. I ran a couple of ads, got the word out, saw some sales, got everything done, and then it just kind of tapers off.

What I need to do is continue to market it, especially to my list — hey, did you know I've got these bundles? Did you know you can get bundles of paperbacks or audiobooks over here from me at a discount? I need to work that into my newsletter strategy.

It's kind of like I use it in phases. I still have books on all the retailers and still promote those and link to them. But that's not my focus now. If I'm going to send traffic anywhere, I'm going to send it to my store.

My mindset is more on direct sales and the special things I can do — the special editions, the unique things they can only get from me. I'll still do a BookBub if I can get one, and push that to the retailers. The smaller newsletter sites — I use those to reach readers there. But my focus is definitely on the special editions and doing things on my store that you can't get anywhere else.

Beyond ebook, audiobook, and paperbackJo: A lot of people, new authors particularly, are thinking about ebook, audiobook, paperback. And all of those you can get anywhere — for both our books, you can get them in those formats anywhere. And large print as well.

I have large print paperback, and I actually remember, it was probably five years ago when you were here and you mentioned large print hardback. And I was like, oh yeah, I should do that. Of course, I never did. You can't do everything.

Sara: You can't do everything.

Jo: You can't. But I think you probably can do a large print hardback on Amazon now with KDP Print — you can do hardback — but none of them are as good quality as the printing we get elsewhere.

Also, as you say, all those special things — you actually can't sell them on Amazon. People can sell them secondhand or whatever, but you just can't do that. So I think that's the creative fun of having your own store or doing Kickstarters or selling direct — just all the other fun things that satisfy us creatively too. Because it's not all about the readers, is it?

Sara: Right, because we want to be enjoying what we're doing. We don't want it to be a slog.

Jo: What's the fun in that?!

How long Sara has been an indie authorJo: Just remind us how long you've been doing this now.

Sara: My first book came out in 2006. It was traditionally published, and I had a series of ten books with a traditional publisher.

Then as that one was getting near the end, I was experimenting with indie — was a hybrid for a while. Then I went all indie pretty much.

Jo: In what year?

Sara: That was probably — I think my first indie book came out in 2012. So for a while I was trying to do indie and a traditionally published book, and that was very — I felt like I was torn in all kinds of different directions. I thought it was going to be so much simpler just to do this all myself. Maybe not, but —

Jo: Pros and cons, as we said.

Co-writing the Mystery and Thriller Trope ThesaurusJo: One of the things you've done recently is co-written a Mystery and Thriller Trope Thesaurus with Jennifer Hilt, who's been on this show as well as your show. Tell us about co-writing, because I don't think you've done much co-writing.

Sara: No, I hadn't. That was the first co-written book I'd ever done. And it was a great experience. Jennifer Hilt made it so easy. She has several books in this Trope Thesaurus series, so she had a format and we just used her format.

We took the tropes and divided them up. She took half and I took half, and we went off and wrote on our own and came back together and then we would trade.

It was really easy. I don't know that this is the way co-writing usually goes, but we did have a contract and we started out with all the normal things — a plan and a contract. We had to decide who was going to coordinate everything for the cover and the copy editing and all that.

When we got done, we used Draft2Digital and did the payment splitting, which made that part easy. It's been a great experience, and I think it's just because Jennifer has done this before and she's really easy to work with. I highly recommend co-writing if you can find somebody like Jennifer who's already done it and can take you through the system.

Jo: I think that's the point — if you have someone like Jennifer who has a layout, it's a bit like the For Dummies series. I had an opportunity to do something with them at one point, and it's so formulaic in terms of doing it, and then you're filling it in. Clearly Jennifer's managing that really well.

The co-writing I've done with various people has been pros and cons, but it's not been in an established series. I love that you say that, but just to warn people — that might not be your experience.

Sara: Yes. And I think it's so much about personality and how you work together, how you each write, and your deadlines. If you try to set a really close deadline — we pushed our deadline out. We had planned to do a Kickstarter with the launch of the trope book, and then she ended up moving and I had a bunch of stuff going on. We were like, you know what, that's fine. We won't do a Kickstarter. And it was okay.

You just have to figure out how it's going to go. And if you have someone that's flexible when you need to be flexible, that's so important.

Jo: Adjusting is the reality of life, isn't it? And I feel like the Trope Thesaurus — it's not going to necessarily have a spike sale and then disappear. It is an evergreen book, right?

Sara: Yes. People will find it when they find the series. It's not something that has to be pushed during a certain time period and then we're done. It's a long-term, evergreen type book.

The role of series and bundlesJo: Talking of series, you've obviously got multiple series. People should definitely go look — you've got great branding and your series are so clear. What part do series and bundles play in marketing in general, and in your direct sales?

Sara: I like to bundle them for my direct store because I figure I need something special about my store — a reason for people to go there. They can get the books on Amazon and Audible and Spotify and all these places, so why would they go to my store?

I've really leaned into bundles for the store, so they can get a three-book audiobook bundle or the whole series in pretty much all my series. They can do the paperback bundling.

I've done a paperback starter series bundle where they can get each book one in my first three series bundled together through Book Vault. I thought I really need to do that with the audiobooks. That's on my list — to create a starter audiobook bundle.

Bundles do well on Kobo. They draw readers in over there. And for the rare times I can get a BookBub, I think bundles seem to appeal to BookBub. If I'm going to pitch something, it seems like they like bundles.

Readers like them too. Part of it is the convenience. You've got the whole series together and you can just read one after another. You don't have to go find it and figure out what order they're in.

Jo: They do. And I love offering bundles in the Kickstarter as add-ons and on my Shopify stores as well.

Because I'm always surprised — somebody's just found me and then they order the 13 ARKANE thriller paperback bundle, and I'm like, okay, wow. That just feels like a win.

Sara: Yes. I love to see those come in and you think, oh, I wonder how they found me. Why they would dive in with the seven-book series. That's fantastic.

Jo: It is interesting. With the paperbacks and the shipping, you drop some money for a complete print series. And then obviously it's usually a bit less on things like audio and ebook bundles, but it's still a real commitment.

So yeah, everybody, we love bundles.

Sara: We do.

What Sara is excited about nextJo: I wanted to come back to the podcast, Wish I'd Known Then, which is brilliant. I often refer to it on this show. Hopefully we share quite a few listeners, and you and Jamie talk about industry changes, personal things. Given all the stuff that's going on, what are you excited about? What are you experimenting with? What changes are you seeing that you're enjoying?

Sara: We appreciate the shout-out. Every time you give us a shout-out — and I do think we share a readership. I think you are our most frequently mentioned other podcast. We are always referring to you on Wish I'd Known Then.

What I'm looking forward to is — I like seeing what other businesses or industries are doing and seeing if I can apply that to writing and books. That's how I came up with the letter idea. I saw some people doing that. I found out later there were some mystery-related mystery letter subscriptions, but I didn't know about them and they weren't well known.

I thought, oh, I could try that. So I'm looking forward to doing more creative things that we haven't had the opportunity to do, but now we are going to have the tech and the fulfilment to do.

Merch could be fun. I haven't ever delved into that. Translations — I didn't even mention translations earlier. I've done a couple of languages in my historical series, and I think it's really interesting the options we have now in translation. The books could go into so many more languages, so much easier. So I'm looking into that.

Just reaching out and trying some of these new things that are on the horizon. You're much more futurist than I am. I'm much more about looking back at the past and going, oh, that was cool. Maybe we can do something similar, but different now.

Finding creative inspiration from other industriesJo: That's interesting. How are you finding out that information about what other industries are doing? Because the curation of the information stream is hard for all of us.

Sara: I don't know. I seem to run across things. I'm always reading and browsing online and seeing what people are talking about.

I did see a post years ago about a company that was doing special edges — limited-edition special edges. When I saw that, I thought, oh, I wonder if I could do that. And I hand-stamped snowflakes on a Christmas book.

Jo: Oh, I remember that. I actually bought a stamp. I got a (skull) stamp made.

Sara: Oh, awesome.

Jo: I never used it!

Sara: Well, it's a lot of work. It takes time. But they're very special. Each one is unique, just like a snowflake. Each book has all these different types of snowflakes and ink colours on it.

I'll see something and think, oh, I wonder if I could do that. And then I'm always consuming really quirky media. I'm into Asian dramas — Korean dramas, Japanese dramas — and I'm seeing trends over there for storytelling. The vertical dramas they're putting out, super short.

I just wonder what that's going to turn into in the future. I'm not a video person, but in the future I think there could be short little videos that we could make of our books. That would be just crazy. I don't know that I would have the skills to do that, but we might be able to hire somebody to do that for us.

Korean dramas and new storytelling trendsJo: There are lots of AI apps that are already helping with that. I do love making book trailers.

And I have also thought about my short stories particularly — turning them into short videos. I've written a few screenplays, so I'm also thinking about that kind of visual-sized content. I also watch a lot of Korean shows.

Sara: Oh, do you?

Jo: I love Korean shows.

Sara: Oh, we have to talk later.

Jo: They're very good. I also like the Korean sports stuff and the cooking stuff, and they're just so good at hooking you in.

Sara: Yes, they are.

Jo: They are so good.

Sara: They're really good at blending genres. And I've noticed with their storytelling, they're doing a lot of these stories they call isekai stories, where the main character falls into a story. I heard somebody talking about it, saying they think that's popular because we're so familiar with media entertainment — we kind of know where the story's going. So that's a new way.

If your character falls into a fictional mystery and knows who the bad guy is and is trying to prevent a death or something, that's a completely different story than just a straight mystery.

Jo: That's interesting. In a way, the LitRPG genre where the character goes into a game, or the character is in a game — I suppose it's got some relationship to that. But I think K-Pop Demon Hunters is like the most successful film and music and all of this kind of thing. It's clearly coming to more Western audiences.

Sara: Yes. It's becoming much more mainstream than it used to be, I think.

Jo: That's really interesting given that you're mainly a historical author. Are we going to get 1920s Korea?

Sara: Oh, maybe. That's an interesting time period. Maybe my character needs to travel there.

Jo: You have a travel series, don't you?

Sara: Yes. I have a modern, cosy kind of travel series, and then in my 1920s series, it takes place mostly in England, but I have a spinoff with a character who's gone to Egypt, and I have three books set in Egypt.

Jo: Well, you never know.

Sara: I know. Maybe they need to travel.

Jo: I love it. Okay, where can people find you and your books and your podcasts online?

Sara: Thanks for having me. This has been so much fun. You can find me at SaraRosett.com. My store is SaraRosettBooks.com. You can find the podcast with Jamie and me, Wish I'd Known Then — it's everywhere, Apple, Spotify. We're even on Substack now. Yeah, that's where everything is.

Jo: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Sara. That was great.

Sara: Thank you.

The post Special Editions, Seasonal Podcasts, and the Art of Low-Key Book Marketing with Sara Rosett first appeared on The Creative Penn.

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How can you improve your self-editing process? How can you find and work with professional editors and beta readers? How do you know when editing is done and the book is finished? With Joanna Penn

In the intro, Poetry craft and business [The Indy Author Podcast]; A Mouthful of Air; How to get your book featured in local media without a publicist [Written Word Media]; thoughts on faith and code; Wild Dark Shore – Charlotte McConaghy; Bones of the Deep – J.F. Penn.

Today's show is sponsored by ProWritingAid, writing and editing software that goes way beyond just grammar and typo checking. With its detailed reports on how to improve your writing and integration with writing software, ProWritingAid will help you improve your book before you send it to an editor, agent or publisher. Check it out for free or get 15% off the premium edition at www.ProWritingAid.com/joanna

This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn

Joanna Penn is an award-winning New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of thrillers, dark fantasy, short stories and travel memoir under J.F.Penn and also writes non-fiction for authors.

• Overview of the editing process
• Self-editing
• How to find and work with a professional editor. My list is at www.TheCreativePenn.com/editors
• Beta readers, specialist readers, and sensitivity readers
• When is the book finished?

These chapters are excerpted from How to Write a Novel: From Idea to Book by Joanna Penn, available direct or on all the usual stores.

Overview of the editing process

“Books aren’t written. They’re rewritten.” —Michael Crichton

Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles is a classic of English literature. I studied it at school and the scene at Stonehenge still haunts me. Hardy’s Jude the Obscure influenced my decision to go to university in Oxford, a city Hardy called Christminster. His novels are still held in great esteem, which is why it’s so wonderful to see his hand-edited pages in the British Library in London, displayed in the Treasures collection. You can visit them in person or view them online.

Thomas Hardy's edited manuscript of ‘Tess of the D'Urbevilles, one of England's greatest writersWhile his handwriting is a scrawl, it’s evident from the pages just how much editing Hardy did on this version of the manuscript. There are lines struck through, whole paragraphs crossed out, arrows moving sections around, words and sentences rewritten, and comments in the margins. Even the title is changed from A Daughter of the D’Urbervilles to Tess of the D’Urbervilles as we know it today.

Those edited pages gave me hope when I saw them for the first time as a new fiction author. Not that I thought I could write a classic of English literature, but that I could learn to edit my way to a better story.

There are several stages in the editing process, which I’ll outline here and then expand on in subsequent chapters. As you progress in your craft, you won’t need every stage every time, so assess with each book what kind of editing you need along the way.

Self-editingThe self-editing stage is your chance to improve your manuscript before anyone else sees it. For some authors, this stage might mean rewriting the entire draft. For others, it involves restructuring, adding or deleting scenes, doing line edits, and more.

Developmental or structural editAn editor reads your manuscript and gives feedback on specific aspects, character, plot, story structure, and anything else pertinent to improving the novel. It is sometimes described as a manuscript critique.

You will receive a report, usually ten to fifteen pages, with notes on your novel, which you can then use in another round of self-editing.

While this is not always necessary, it can be a valuable step and something I appreciated particularly for my first novel when I had so much to learn.

Copyediting and line editingThis is the classic ‘red pen’ edit where you can expect comments and changes all over your manuscript. This edit focuses on anything that enhances the writing quality, including word choice and phrasing issues, as well as grammar, and more.

Some editors split this edit into two, and there are differences between what this edit is called between countries. For some editors, a copyedit includes only attention to grammar and correctness, while a line edit focuses on improving and elevating sentences. Be clear about your expectations and that of your editor upfront.

You will usually receive an MS Word document with Track Changes on as well as a style guide or style sheet and other notes, which you can then use to make revisions during another self-edit.

This is the most expensive part of the process, as editors usually charge per 1,000 words based on the type of edit you want. If you need to cut your story down by 20K, then do it before you send your manuscript for a line edit!

Beta readers, specialist readers, and/or sensitivity readersSome authors use different types of readers as part of their editing process.

Beta readers are often part of the author’s community and are certainly fans of the genre. They read to help the author pick up any issues pre-publication.

Specialist readers are those with knowledge about a topic included in the story. For example, a vulcanologist read specific chapters of Risen Gods to check that the details about volcanic eruptions were correct.

Sensitivity readers check for stereotypes, biases, problematic language, and other diversity issues.

You will usually receive comments or an email with page numbers or chapter numbers, or sometimes an MS Word document with Track Changes, which you then use to make revisions.

Many readers provide services for the love of helping their favorite author with a novel and a mention in the acknowledgments, but there are some paid services for specialist and sensitivity readers.

ProofreadingProofreading is the final check of the manuscript pre-publication for any typos or issues that might have been introduced in the editorial process. For print books, this can include a review of the print proof with formatting.

You should only fix the last tiny changes at this point. Don’t make any major changes this close to publication or you may introduce entirely new errors.

Do you need an editor if you intend to get an agent and a traditional publisher?You will go through an editorial process with your agent and publisher. But if you want the best chance of getting to that stage in the first place, it might also be worth working with an editor before you submit your manuscript to an agent. Look for an editor who will help you with your query letter and synopsis as part of their edit.

Self-editing I love this part of the process! My self-edit is where I wrangle the chaos of the first draft into something worth reading. I have my block of marble and now I can shape it into my sculpture.

The mindset shift from writer to editor, from author to readerIn the idea, planning, discovery, and first-draft writing phase, it’s all about you, the writer.

You turn the ideas in your head into words that you understand, characters that come alive for you, and a plot that you’re engaged with. In that first rush of creativity, you can banish critical voice and ignore any nagging doubts.

But now you need to switch heads.

That’s how I prefer to think about it, but you might consider it as changing hats or changing jobs. Anything to help you move from the creative, anything goes, first-draft writer to the more critical editor.

There is one overriding consideration in this shift. As Jeffery Deaver says,

“The reader is god.”

With the editing process, you need to turn your story from something you understand into something a reader will enjoy.

Writing is telepathy. It connects minds across time and space.

You are reading these words and the meaning flows from my brain into your brain — but only if I craft the book well enough. The same is true of your novel.

Yes, of course, you want to double down on your creative choices and make sure you achieve everything you want to with your story. But you also need to keep the reader in mind as you edit because the book is ultimately for them.

• Will your story have the desired effect on the reader?
• What might help improve their experience?
• How can you make sure that they are not bored or confused or jolted out of the story?
• What will make them read on and, at the end, close the novel with a sigh of satisfaction?

My self-editing processAt the end of the first draft, I print out my manuscript with two pages to each A4 page, so it looks more like a book. I put it in a folder and leave it to rest. You need fresh eyes for your edit and this ‘resting’ gives you some emotional distance.

In On Writing, Stephen King suggests leaving a manuscript to rest for at least six weeks. While that is a great idea if you have the time, most authors work to deadline, whether externally set or their own timetable.

Many authors — including me — are also impatient! I love this first self-edit, and as I’m still crafting the story as a discovery writer, I usually rest the manuscript for a week or two.

I schedule blocks of time for editing in my Google calendar and (when not in pandemic times) I go to a café when it opens first thing in the morning. I put on my BOSE noise-cancelling headphones and edit by hand with a black ballpoint pen from page one to the end.

I usually manage ten to twenty pages per editing session of a couple of hours each, but it will depend on the amount of restructuring I need to do.

I scribble notes in the margins, draw arrows to move paragraphs around, write extra material on the back of pages, or add where I need to write more later. I change words, rewrite and delete lines, and pick up any issues around lack of sensory detail, character problems, and more.

You can see an example of a page below:

Some pages end up a mass of black; others are relatively clean. But in this first hand edit, no page goes untouched as I hone my manuscript into something closer to my creative goal.

You can edit on a computer or a tablet, or whatever else works for you, but at least change the font or the spacing, or something to make it a different experience to reading the first draft.

Most writers have a tendency to either overwrite or underwrite, and so will either need to cut words or add words at this stage. I’m in the latter camp so I usually have to add scenes or deepen characters or theme at this point.

Once I have hand-edited the whole manuscript end-to-end, I make the changes in my Scrivener project. I change the color of the flags along the way and, as ever, I back up the session. I also use ProWritingAid at the sentence level to fix up things I missed, because we all miss things!

When all the changes have been made, I print the complete manuscript again, and read end-to-end and edit as before. This time, it’s usually a lot cleaner and there may only be a few things to fix in each chapter.

Once I’m finished, I’ll update the Scrivener project once more and then decide whether it needs a third pass. Mostly, two full end-to-end hand edits are enough for me these days, but sometimes I’ll do a third or go through specific chapters one more time.

This messy editing process is fun for me and it’s hugely satisfying to see my story come to life.

What to focus on in the self-editSome authors will go through the manuscript multiple times, focusing on different elements with each pass using the aspects covered in Part 3 and Part 4. For example, they’ll do an edit based on character and dialogue, followed by another pass for plot, then theme, and so on.

Personally, I try to keep the reader in mind and focus on the story as a coherent whole. That’s just how my mind works.

I jump from fixing a plot issue to deepening a character to adding foreshadowing and so on as I read and edit. I’m confident that my editor will find a lot of the smaller things that I might miss, so I concentrate on trying to achieve my creative vision with the story.

You will find your own way of figuring out your process. It’s much better to jump in and have a go at editing rather than trying to work out the best way before you have something to work through.

Lost the plot? Try reverse outliningIf you’re a discovery writer like me and you’re struggling with the edit and you feel you have lost the plot (which definitely happens sometimes!) then consider a reverse outline as part of your editorial process.

Go through the manuscript and write a few lines per scene. Include character, plot points, conflict, setting, open questions and hooks, and any other notes.

This will help you step back and hopefully see the entire story from a high level. Then you can dive back into rewriting each chapter.

Read the book out loud or use a text-to-speech reader to do it for youMany authors read their book aloud end-to-end, which is a helpful step once you’ve been through any major rewrites.

There are also plenty of text-to-speech tools that can help, for example, Natural Reader or Speechify, and some are built into devices or applications. MS Word includes a Read Aloud tool in the Review tab. This will also help you edit for audio as you’ll hear issues you can’t see on the page.

Editing for audioAudiobooks are a huge growth market and many readers will listen to your book rather than read it, so it’s a good idea to consider editing with audio in mind at this stage. Here are some tips.

Watch out for repeated sounds.

The editorial process will usually catch repeated written words, but similar sounding words can hit the same audio note in narration. You might not notice them in the text, as they are spelled differently. The words ‘you,’ ‘blue,’ ‘tattoo,’ and ‘interview’ all start and end with different letters. They look different on the page, but they strike the same audio note when read aloud.

In the same way, repetition can work if you have a point to make, but sometimes it jars the listener if it is overused.

A classic recommendation for writing dialogue is to use ‘said’ with a character name rather than other words like ‘uttered’ or ‘pronounced.’ This is because ‘said’ disappears for the reader on the written page. But with audio, the repetition of a word is highly noticeable, and repeated sounds can dominate a passage.

Rewrite with synonyms for ‘said,’ or use action to make it clear who the speaker is without resorting to dialogue tags, as described in chapter 3.5.

Contractions — or the lack of them — can also become more obvious in audio.

“I am not going to the park,” might be spoken as “I’m not going to the park.” When we type dialogue, it is often more formal than the way someone speaks, so check if you can contract it in your edit.

Accents can be an issue with fiction narration.

There are plenty of narrators who do a ‘straight read,’ but if there are accents within dialogue, make it clear where the character comes from. Make sure the narrator knows about the accent choice upfront, otherwise you might not like it in the finished audio. Remember my friend whose novel had an Irish character narrated like a comedy leprechaun instead of the soft lilt she had in mind?

Don’t confuse the reader.

If you have a lot of characters appearing in a chapter and no clear character tags, you might lose the listener in the detail.

When reading on paper or a screen, your reader can quickly flick back and see that George was the butler and Angus was the dog, but that’s harder to do when listening to an audiobook. Make sure it’s clear who is who. You may have to remind listeners occasionally by adding character tags. For example, ‘Angus ran alongside the canal’ could become ‘Angus, the golden cocker spaniel, ran alongside the canal.’

For more on audiobooks, check out my book, Audio for Authors: Audiobooks, Podcasting and Voice Technologies.

How many drafts do you need?The word ‘draft’ means different things to different authors. Some only apply this term to a complete rewrite end-to-end, while others will shift paragraphs around, change some lines, add a new scene, and call that a new draft.

Nora Roberts said in a blog post on her writing craft,

I work on a three-draft method. This works for me. It’s not the right way/wrong way. There is no right or wrong for a process that works for any individual writer. Anyone who claims there is only one way, or that’s the wrong way, is a stupid, arrogant bullshitter. That’s my considered opinion.

I love Nora’s no-nonsense approach and she is right that there is no single correct process. You have to find your own. But beware of comparing what you call a draft to what another writer calls a draft. It may be something completely different.

Use editing softwareOnce I’ve finished my hand edits and updated the Scrivener project, I use ProWritingAid on the manuscript. It integrates with Scrivener, so I open my project and go through each chapter.

ProWritingAid picks up passive voice, repetitive words, commas and typos, suggests rephrasing, and even picks up culturally problematic language.

Yes, these are the type of things that an editor will pick up, but I want to hand over a manuscript that is as clean as possible so my editor can focus on other issues. I don’t make all the suggested changes, but it certainly helps improve my writing, and I learn as I go through. You can even create your own style guide so you spell things the same way throughout.

This is also a good chance to check typos according to the version of English you want to use (or any other language). I’m English and based in the UK, but when I published my first novel, I received complaints about typos from my readers, who were mainly in the USA. These were not typos, they were just British spelling!

I decided to use US English in my books because US readers complain about UK spelling, but non-US readers will rarely complain about US spelling because they are used to it. You can set ProWritingAid to the type of English you want to use, and if you specify this later, your editor can pick up on word usage rather than typos, for example, using the term ‘flashlight’ instead of ‘torch.’

• You can find ProWritingAid at:
• www.TheCreativePenn.com/prowritingaid
• You can find my tutorial on how to use ProWritingAid at: www.TheCreativePenn.com/prowritingaidtutorial

When is your self-edit finished?You will be utterly sick of your manuscript by the end of the self-editing process.

You have read your words so many times you can’t see them clearly anymore. You are so over the whole thing that you want to forget the book altogether. If you don’t feel this way, you probably haven’t self-edited enough!

When you really feel you can’t do any more, it’s time to work with a professional editor.

If you are putting off the end of self-editing, then remember that nothing is ever perfect. You can edit forever if you keep obsessing over changes and going over and over the same material. If your self-edit goes on too long, consider whether perfectionism is holding you back. Set a completion date and hold yourself to it.

How to find and work with a professional editorIf you want your book to be the best it can be, then working with a professional editor is the next step.

An editor’s job is to take your manuscript and help you improve it through structural changes and story development, line edits, suggestions for new material or sentence refinement, and so much more. Different kinds of editors can help you in different ways from constructing the overarching story to eliminating the final typo.

In my experience, good professional editors are well worth the investment as they help improve your book and your craft, especially in the initial stages of your writing journey. They have read so many early-stage manuscripts that they understand the most common problems and know how to help you fix them.

Some experienced authors only use proofreaders for their novels, but personally, I still work with a professional editor on every book and I learn something every time. I am a super-fan of editors!

How to find a professional editorConsolidation in the traditional publishing industry over the last decade has resulted in many more editors working as freelancers, so authors have a wealth of professionals available for hire in every genre.

You can find lists of approved editors through author organizations. The Alliance of Independent Authors has a list of Partner Members, many of whom are editors. You can also use author marketplace Reedsy.

Many editors use content marketing to find clients — for example, blogging about editing tips, writing books on editing, or appearing on podcasts. I have had lots of editors on The Creative Penn Podcast over the years, so you can listen and see if they resonate with you.

Most authors credit their editors and proofreaders in the acknowledgments of their books, and many authors happily share recommendations on social media in various author communities. If you enjoy a certain novel, it might be worth reaching out to that editor, as you know they are a specialist in the genre.

Check out my list of editors at: www.TheCreativePenn.com/editors

How to assess whether an editor is right for youI frequently get emails from writers asking me to recommend an editor for their book.

But finding an editor is like dating.

You have to do it for yourself, and it’s likely that you will try a few before you find your perfect match. You may also change editors over your writing life as your craft develops and your needs shift, and that’s completely normal too.

Make sure the editor has experience in and enjoys your genre. You don’t want a literary historical fiction editor working on your YA paranormal romance or your hard sci-fi adventure.

Ensure that the editor has testimonials from happy clients, and check directly with a named author if you have doubts.

Some editors will offer a sample edit for one chapter. This helps both parties decide whether working together is appropriate. The editor can assess what level your manuscript is at, and you can decide whether their editorial style is right for you.

How to work with an editorWhen you engage an editor, you will receive a contract with a timeline and a price for the work.

You agree to deliver the manuscript on a particular date and will usually pay a deposit, especially if this is the first time you’re working together. The editor agrees to deliver the edits back on a certain date and also to keep your manuscript in confidence.

You can avoid issues later by communicating expectations up front, so if you have questions about the editing process, ask before you sign a contract.

Many editors are booked months in advance, so once you know your schedule, contact them early and book a slot. Update them if your timings change. Most allow minor slippage, but since editors plan their work around contractual dates, it’s important to be timely with delivery. As a discovery writer, I only book my editor when I am sure of my dates.

Submit your manuscript and, once the edit is complete, you will receive whatever has been agreed. That might be a structural report, line edit, or proofread manuscript, along with a style sheet. It’s usually in the form of an MS Word document by email.

Some editors may offer a call to discuss, but I have never spoken to an editor as part of my process. It has never been necessary. It’s all about the words on the page. If you want a call and it is not specified, then include it in the contract up front along with anything else you’re concerned about.

I consider my editors to be an important part of my team. They help me turn my manuscripts into books that readers love, and I rely on them as part of my business. This is a two-way relationship, and you need to behave as professionally as the editor should. If you find an editor you love working with, pay them quickly and respect their time, and you will hopefully have a long-term business relationship that benefits you both.

How does it feel to go through an edit?It’s probably going to hurt, especially in the beginning, when your craft is in its early stages. You need fresh eyes on your work, especially at the beginning of your author career. You need feedback to improve.

When I received notes back on my structural edit for my first novel, I didn’t open the email for ten days. I was so scared of what it would say because my novel meant so much to me, and yet I knew it had problems. Of course it did, it was my first novel! So I let the email sit in my inbox until I was ready to face it, and like many things, the fear was worse than the actual event.

Even many years and many books later, I still don’t open emails from my editor until I am mentally ready to face criticism.

Because that’s what it feels like.

It is not the editor’s job to pat you on the back and say, ‘Well done, this is perfect.’

Their job is to help you make it the best book it can be. They are experts and have honed their advice over many manuscripts, so they can spot an issue a mile off.

When you receive that email from your editor, particularly if it’s your first book, make sure you are well rested and in a positive frame of mind. Set aside a good amount of time and read through the comments and the manuscript as a whole.

If you have an emotional reaction, do not email back immediately!

Let the feedback sit with you for a few days, and you will find it easier to see what might need to change.

Once you’re ready, go through the manuscript and work through each change. Don’t just click Accept All on the Track Changes version for a line edit. This takes time, but it’s well worth it because you will learn with every step and you’ll be able to spot your common issues in the future, and hopefully fix them next time. You also need to examine every suggestion to see if you want to make the change.

Do you need to make every change that an editor suggests?No, you don’t.

You are the author, so your creative vision is the most important thing. But try to get some distance and assess whether the change truly serves the book, or if you’re just having an emotional response. Remember what Jeffery Deaver said: “The reader is god.”

Consider each editorial suggestion on its own merit. Does it help take the story in the direction you want it to? Will it improve the reader’s experience?

What if my editor wants me to change everything?Perhaps they are not the right editor for you.

The editor should not fundamentally change your story or alter your creative vision. Their job is to help you shape your manuscript into a better version of itself, and retain your voice and ideas while at the same time improving it for the reader. This is a skillful balancing act, which is why experienced editors are so highly sought after.

How long will the editing process take?This will depend on the type of writer you are in terms of the first draft. If you outline in great detail and spend time up front making the first draft the best it can be, then editing might take less time than for a discovery writer who only figures out the book after the first draft.

The more books you’ve written, the more you understand how to shape a novel, the more you can write a clean draft, so editing speeds up. That doesn’t mean it gets easier to write a book, but it does mean you know how to find and fix issues.

It will also depend on the length of the book. A 50,000-word romance with one protagonist will be a faster edit than a 150,000-word sprawling fantasy with multiple point-of-view characters.

It will also depend on your experience, so don’t compare your editing time to someone who has written a lot of books.

Give editing the time it needs. You want your book to be the best it can be. But also remember Parkinson’s Law, which I discussed in chapter 4.7 on writing the first draft: “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” This law also applies to editing.

Set your deadline and schedule your editing time accordingly. Don’t book a professional editor until you’ve been through at least your self-editing process, as it may take longer than you think.

How much does an editor cost?This will depend on the type of edit, your genre and word count, how experienced you are as a writer, and how much experience the editor has.

Editors usually quote a range on their website and you can also email and ask for a more detailed quote based on your manuscript length and sample.

Every dollar I have spent on editing has been worth it as an investment in my writing craft and the quality of my finished novels. Although my requirements are different now, I continue to use editors and proofreaders for all my books. The more eyes on your novel before publication, the better it will be on launch.

What if you have a tight budget?When I started out as a writer, I had a day job and I saved up for the editorial process. It was an investment in my craft and a possible future creative career.

If you already have or intend to set up a business as a writer, then you can offset the cost of editors against any profits. But when you’re starting out, you can’t necessarily see that far ahead.

If you’re on a tight budget, then find or set up a writer’s group with others in your genre and work through one another’s manuscripts. You might also have other skills you can barter for editing services, but remember that bartering is subject to tax in many jurisdictions, so don’t assume that it is ‘free.’

What if my editor steals my ideas or my manuscript?This is a common concern of new writers who think that editors might run away with their book and make millions with their idea.

But don’t worry, editors are professionals. They work within a contractual framework that protects both parties. So make sure you are happy with the contract before you sign it.

If you are really worried, you can register your copyright before you send the manuscript to anyone else. While it is not legally necessary to register copyright — it exists the moment the work is created — there are registration companies in every country that can provide peace of mind. Just search for ‘copyright registration’ within your territory.

Will I need different editors when I’m further along in my writing journey?Yes, as your craft and experience improves, you will likely work with different editors. You might also choose to use a new editor for a different genre, or work with recommended professionals to take your craft to the next level.

Resources:

• My list of recommended editors: www.TheCreativePenn.com/editors

• Alliance of Independent Authors — www.TheCreativePenn.com/alliance

• The following editing associations offer directories and job posting services: The Editorial Freelancers Association (US), the Chartered Institute for Editing and Proofreading (UK), the Institute for Professional Editors (Australia and New Zealand), and Editors Canada.

Beta readers, specialist readers, and sensitivity readersProfessional editors approach your manuscript with a critical eye based on their knowledge of language, story structure, and genre. But sometimes, it’s a good idea to gain perspective from readers who are not experts on sentence structure or grammar, but comment on the story itself, and their experience of reading it as a whole.

Beta readersBeta readers are a trusted group of people who evaluate your book from a reader’s perspective before publication. The term comes from the software industry, where early versions are tested in beta before being released to the public.

While there are some paid beta reader services, many authors find people from their existing readership, or from among genre fans in the writing community. Authors usually thank their beta readers in their acknowledgments.

Specialist readersSpecialist readers are experts on a particular topic who read with their expertise in mind. This might be a police officer who checks a crime novel, or a physicist who reads for a science-fiction author.

Sensitivity readersSensitivity readers check for cultural and diversity issues, lack of or clichéd representation, and insensitive, inauthentic, or uninformed language, characters, or situations.

This type of feedback can help an author before publication, and can be particularly useful if you are tackling more controversial topics. It can also be valuable when reviewing older manuscripts if you want to republish a new edition, as gendered language has changed, as well as the need for representation, diversity, and inclusivity.

While some criticize sensitivity reading as a step toward censorship, most authors want to make their books the best they can be, and ensure the reader experience is excellent, whatever the genre. Being a fiction writer is also about empathy — with our characters and with our readers — so improving our ability to write about diverse characters is important.

However, authors cannot be experts on what it’s like to experience every race or religion, every body type or disability or mental health issue, or understand every country or culture. Feedback from different kinds of readers can help us write better stories, and it is the author’s choice whether to implement suggestions in the final manuscript.

Do you need all of these types of readers?No. You don’t need any of them, or you can choose to use some of them for different books, depending on the need.

It’s up to you (and your agent or publisher if you choose to go that route).

At what stage in the editorial process should you use these types of readers?The book should be as close to the final version as possible. These people are reading with fresh eyes; if they read again later, they can never approach the story with such an open mind.

Most authors will send the manuscript to a select group of readers after the main editorial revisions, but before the proofread. Some authors with more developed careers even use their team of beta readers instead of editors at different stages of the process.

What should you provide to readers?Provide the manuscript in the format the reader prefers. This could be an MS Word document or PDF. Many established authors use Bookfunnel, which allows you to create a version that can be read on any reading device or phone.

Specialist readers and sensitivity readers have their specific expertise, but for more general beta readers, you need to provide some direction as to what you expect. For example:

• Did you skip over anything? Did anything bore you?
• Was anything confusing? Did you have to reread any parts?
• What did you like?
• Was there anything you hated or objected to or had a problem with?

How long should you give them to read?Allow at least two weeks for readers to assess and provide feedback. Be clear on the timeline when you send them the book..

Do you need to make all the changes they suggest?No, and if you try to, you will end up straying from your creative goal, messing up your author voice, and likely pleasing no one!

Keep your number of early readers small and specific to what you want to achieve. Assess each comment and suggestion on its own merit and decide whether or not to make the change.

Be confident in your creative vision and beware writing by committee, which becomes a problem if you ask too many people for feedback. Only you can decide what you want for your novel.

Resources:• The Reedsy marketplace includes different kinds of editors, beta readers, and sensitivity readers — www.TheCreativePenn.com/reedsy

• Directory of sensitivity readers — www.writingdiversely.com/directory

• Editors of Color — editorsofcolor.com

When is the book finished?

“I have not yet found words to truly convey the intensity of this remembered rapture—that moment of exquisite joy when necessary words come together and the work is complete, finished, ready to be read.” —bell hooks,Remembered Rapture

You can edit a book forever if you want to.

Every time you read it, you will find things to change. Every time you hire another editor, they will find more. If you work with beta readers, they will also offer opinions.

Your novel will never be finished — until you decide it is.

Nothing is ever perfect. Even if you hire three separate editors and use multiple proofreaders, you will still find a typo or an error in the published novel. Pick up any bestselling book from a traditional publisher, and you will still find an issue somewhere. It happens to everyone.

Look at any prize-winning or bestselling book on Amazon and check the reviews. The more popular the book, the more issues people will find with it. There will never be a novel that satisfies everyone, and that’s fine.

Of course, you must make sure your book is the best it can be, but set boundaries for yourself so you do eventually finish.

• Have you self-edited your manuscript?
• Have you worked with a professional editor, or at least worked through the manuscript with other writers to improve it?
• Have you used editing tools and/or a proofreader?
• Have you set a deadline to move into the publishing process so you are not editing forever?

If you have been through this rigorous editorial process and you still feel the itch to edit again, be honest with yourself.

Is another round of changes really going to make a substantial difference to this book?

Would it be better to work on the next novel instead of constantly reworking this one?

Are you struggling with fear of judgment, fear of failure, procrastination, or other mindset issues that you need to work on instead of editing? Check out my book The Successful Author Mindset if you think this might be the case.

Strive for excellence, do your best, and then release your book out into the world.

“Set a limit on revisions, set a limit on drafts, set a time limit… The book will never be perfect.” —Kristine Kathryn Rusch, The Pursuit of Perfection and How it Harms Writers

These chapters are excerpted from How to Write a Novel: From Idea to Book by Joanna Penn, available direct or on all the usual stores.

The post Editing a Novel: Self-Editing, And How To Work With A Professional Editor With Joanna Penn first appeared on The Creative Penn.

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What if the source of your best writing isn't something you control — but something you learn to collaborate with? How can ancient ideas about the muse, the daimon, and creative genius transform the way you approach your work? And what might happen if you stopped fighting the silence and let it become your greatest creative ally? With Matt Cardin, author of Writing at the Wellspring.

In the intro, thoughts on bookstores and Toppings; 20 ways authors can signal humanity and build reader trust [Wish I'd Known Then]; Learning from Silence – Pico Iyer; ProWritingAid spring sale; Bones of the Deep – J.F. Penn.

Today's show is sponsored by Draft2Digital, self-publishing with support, where you can get free formatting, free distribution to multiple stores, and a host of other benefits. Just go to www.draft2digital.com to get started.

This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn

Matt Cardin is the multi-award-nominated author of eight books at the convergence of horror, religion, and creativity. His latest book is Writing at the Wellspring: Tapping the Source of Your Inner Genius, which is fantastic. I actually blurbed it as follows:

“A guide for writers who welcome the dark and hunger for meaning. . . . If the page is a threshold, this book will show you how to cross.”

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.

Show Notes

• How Matt balances a full-time academic career with his creative writing life
• The ancient concept of the genius, the muse, and the daimon, and why creativity is about collaboration with something beyond yourself
• Why the silences that come into our creative lives, including writer's block and inertia, might actually be gifts rather than obstacles
• The stages of the creative process
• Living into the dark, and embracing uncertainty
• How Substack and blogging can organically grow into books

You can find Matt at MattCardin.com or www.livingdark.net.

Transcript of the interview with Matt CardinJoanna: Matt Cardin is the multi-award-nominated author of eight books at the convergence of horror, religion, and creativity. His latest book is Writing at the Wellspring: Tapping the Source of Your Inner Genius, which is fantastic.

I actually blurbed it as follows: “A guide for writers who welcome the dark and hunger for meaning. . . . If the page is a threshold, this book will show you how to cross.” It is a great book. So welcome to the show, Matt.

Matt: Well, thank you, Jo. It's really a pleasure to be here, especially since, as you and I were briefly acknowledging before we started recording, we have overlapping interests to a great degree. So it's really great to make official contact with you.

Joanna: Indeed. So, first up, before we get into the book itself—

Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing.Matt: Well, I'm one of those people whose story is probably typical in some ways, in that I really wanted to do it from the time I was a child. My father was a great writer, although he was an attorney. He wasn't a professional writer.

Something about books and reading when I was a child really seriously enchanted me. I was very frustrated when I was so young—and I vividly remember this—that I couldn't read, because I loved the books that were read to me.

I craved being able to read them for myself. So as soon as I gained that ability in school, it was off to the races, so to speak, and for some reason, a desire to tell stories myself came along with that.

Being a “writer” was one of the earliest life desires, job or career desires, that I expressed. I was one of those young people really into fantasy, horror, and science fiction. So I was reading a lot of it and trying to emulate it and write a lot of it. There was a cinematic component—I was a movie fanatic as well.

I won a local Authors' Guild short story writing contest when I was a senior in high school and began trying to write stories seriously in college. Then my interest in horror and religion became dominant over time, and that's what I ended up writing about.

Joanna: Has your interest turned into paid work?That's the other thing, because there's an interest and then there's making writing more of your income and your business.

Matt: Right. Well, actually, although I have made and do make money from my writing, it has always, always, always remained on the side. My main career, as far as my moneymaking life, first started off in video and media production, which is formally what I got my undergraduate college degree in.

Then I switched into education. I taught high school for some years, and then now for the past, good Lord, 18 years, I have been in higher education. First as English faculty who also taught some religion courses, and then now for the past several years in the administration. I'm Vice President of Academic Affairs at a college.

My writing has been something that I pursued as an avocation. As far as earning money from it, that didn't happen even with my first publication, which happened on the internet in 1998, I believe, with a horror story titled “Teeth.” It was just free—I didn't get paid.

That led to paid publication of that story three or four years later, when it appeared as my very first print publication in a Lovecraftian horror anthology from Del Rey titled The Children of Cthulhu. It appeared as the final story, and that was the first time I had received a paycheck. It was a professional per-word rate.

Since then I've had several books published and more stories and essays and that kind of thing. I've had income sometimes from writing and sometimes I haven't.

My first book came out of that story. I attended the World Horror Convention in 2001, actually before that Lovecraftian anthology was published, but it had been placed.

At the World Horror Convention, which was in Seattle that year, I met one of the two editors of that book, and that led to me having my first short story collection, Divinations of the Deep, which was not for much money, but it attracted a lot of good attention and some good reviews.

So it's been like that all along. I mean, I've made a couple of runs at saying I would love to just be an author, as it were, but that doesn't seem to be in the cards for me. And honestly, I'm glad it's not.

I have made the most money from some academic editing projects that I've done. I created and edited a two-volume encyclopedia of the history of horror literature, for instance, for a big academic publisher. Those are work-for-hire projects that I get paid for.

Making money on my own creative vision and my own creative work has been intermittent. It really has proven over time that not having my primary creative, spiritual, and philosophical drive hooked to what I earn my bread by has been a blessing.

I don't want to take this thing I love and make it be how I have to grind to earn my money. I want to keep it in a protected space. That has been spontaneously what's happened with my writing career.

Joanna: Yes. I think as you say, there are a lot of benefits of that, especially where you are writing at this convergence of horror, religion, and creativity.

Your writing is very deep. I would say it's on the edge of academic. I don't want to say it's completely academic, because a lot of people will find that difficult. But I think Writing at the Wellspring goes very deep while still being open to non-academic readers.

As you say, I think if you had wanted to make a living with your books, you would've had to have gone in at a lighter level, perhaps. Do you think that makes sense?Matt: Yes, I know what you mean. I want to specify, I know that neither you nor I are saying anything about this as any kind of criticism or condescension to anyone who does make their living as a writer. I mean, I believe you do.

Joanna: Yes, exactly.

Matt: And that's fine. There really are people who have had significant commercial success from books or other things they've written that don't appear to be making huge concessions to being commercial.

You can make a living as a writer, I think, and really follow your muse and not feel like you have to pander or cater or cheapen it.

Then there are people who have perfectly happily decided to commercialise their work and tune it in whatever way is currently popular. That's fine. Every writer, every creative person should do what is right for him or her, in my opinion.

In my particular case, I think what you said is right. I do think that I might have needed to change some things, to back off, to word them differently.

Whenever I've tried to exert deliberate control like that, it just turns out that it's not something that my creative spirit wants to do. I don't really feel like I'm in contact with the work anymore. I'm fine with that. I don't think I'm doing a sweet lemons type thing. It really is the way it just needs to be.

If it ever proves that me doing it strictly the way I want to do it, going however deep I want regardless of trying to appeal to a paying readership—if it turns out that at some point aligns with boatloads of money coming in, that's fine. That's perfectly fine. I'd be open to that.

Joanna: Yes.

Matt: I would be open to that.

Joanna: You mentioned muse there, and with Writing at the Wellspring, the subtitle is “Tapping the Source of Your Inner Genius.” So I think this is a good place to talk about it. As you mentioned, you are leaning into your muse and your inner genius, and you use other terms—daemon or daimon.

I think sometimes people find the word “genius” particularly very difficult because it has the connotation of brilliance in some form. So how can people think about this?

How can we lean into this [genius] side of ourselves?Matt: Honestly, one thing that I would suggest people do is I would refer them to the TED Talk that Elizabeth Gilbert gave some years ago—was it 2009, 2010, 2011? It's one of the more popular TED Talks. Elizabeth Gilbert spoke about. I think it's sometimes given the title “Your Elusive Creative Genius” or something like that.

Her whole talk is about the way in her own creative life, and as she recommends to others, it has been very important for her to seize on the older model that we're talking about.

The most clear articulation of it is that it used to be the case—and we're talking about in ancient Western history, back to the Romans and even earlier to the Greeks—that genius was not something that you identified a person as being. It was something that a person had. And I would also say importantly, maybe had them too.

In ancient Roman culture surrounding art and poetry and that kind of thing, the genius was the spirit that might, say, live in an artist's studio and would provide the same service to that artist as the Greek muses provided to someone who was writing epic poetry or history or something like that.

That understanding of it has continued in various ways down through history. But there was a fateful transition as Western culture went through what we commonly call the Enlightenment and the Renaissance as well.

This was where the term “genius,” while it didn't lose all those connotations of being an inspiring spirit—something that a person both has and maybe has hold of them—did become internalised to the point where we speak of people as being geniuses., which is exactly what you're talking about.

I agree, some people listening to this probably have some reservations about this. They don't want to call themselves a genius because we tend to mean that's a super brilliant person, some kind of prodigy who is possessed of amazing artistic, creative, or intellectual skills.

Again, that is the result of a cultural, philosophical, psychological, historical transition that occurred several centuries ago. And you still see the older meaning of it being attached sometimes. You think of people who we call geniuses being touched by something.

Well, the older version—where you think of the genius, which in the way I use it in this book and also in my first book on creativity, A Course in Demonic Creativity—the genius is equivalent to the muse, which is equivalent to that other figure that you mentioned, the daemon or the daimon.

It refers to a separate—what seems for all the world to be a separate—centre of intelligence or entity or influence. The thing that gives you both your creative drive and also your ideas, and serves as the source of what comes to you naturally to write. It's more than just ideas.

When you talk about the ancient Greek daimon, there was a whole well-developed tradition of that in ancient Greek philosophy and religion. A daimon was, in one famous sense, a spirit that you were born with, that the gods had given you. It was like your double, your higher self.

It was the thing that represented your character, your interests, the blueprint and the outline that your life was supposed to follow.

There are great books written about that. There's a book by the psychologist James Hillman titled The Soul's Code. A lot of people have read it. It lays out the daimon theory and gives it application to modern instances. The idea is that everybody has a genius or has a muse or has a daimon.

For writers, my recommendation is to say, whether you believe it or not, whether you take it as a metaphor—which is fine—or whether you want to get somewhat mystical and delve into the idea that maybe there's really a spirit or something, it doesn't matter.

Productively, with practical, measurable results, you can learn to relate to your creative impulse as if you are collaborating internally with someone else.

It's the centre of why you're interested in writing what you want to write, why you want to write the way you want to write, and even the types of things that unfold in the course of your career—both your creative career and the rest of your life, in the mould of the ancient daimon.

I have found that to be a vein of great power and meaning in my own life. I do it exactly the way I'm describing. I don't actually believe it, but I don't disbelieve it. I find that in experience, it really doesn't matter. It works and it may as well be true.

Joanna: I mean, obviously the book has a whole load of ways we can tap into that, but I did like that you talk about stillness and silence, because I feel like that is actually increasingly difficult as authors.

Obviously it's noisy online and we're meant to be doing things like social media or interacting with people online. And then the world is just noisy. The news is noisy. There's lots of things.

How can we use this idea of stillness and silence? Also, any other ways we can practically tap into this side?Matt: Sure. One thing that wanted to say itself in this book was some things I had been thinking and feeling about silence for a long time. As you say, it can be difficult these days to find what feels like the silence that we need to even get our work done.

We're talking about the muse or the genius. How can we even hear it when it seems like the clamour of all the pulls that we have on our outward attention has become truly a cacophony?

We have opted for this in many ways through our engagement with social media or other things, but in other ways seems like it's been thrust upon us. What I want to point out, that has been of extreme importance to me, is that many silences come into our lives as creatives that we resist.

It's not just that we can't find the silence and the space that we feel like we need so as not to drown out our creativity. It's that we have unwanted silences come in, like writer's block. Or even if it doesn't feel like a block, just inertia. Just stasis.

I don't know about you, but I have many, many times found myself grappling with what, for all the world, feels like a totally natural, organic sense of wanting to slip into complete inertia, just total stillness. And that feels like it has been in conflict with my creative drive.

It's like I have this residual desire and also a sense of duty that I really should be writing. Maybe I have an idea in mind and I'm just not working on it. Or maybe I'm in the middle of a project and I feel like I'm abandoning it. Or maybe nothing's coming up, but I feel like it should be.

I'm pushing myself, but there's a division in me where I also just want to leave it alone. Whether that means actually just sitting there silently at my writing table or in meditation, or maybe just going about regular daily life and forgetting about trying to fulfil this creative calling.

I really think there's a vein of gold to be tapped in the silences that come to all of us. Because as I said, that can be in the middle of daily activity. We have this kind of franticness, some of us, about our creativity. We get wrapped up in it. We feel bound to it.

The thing that so much of the time we want to think is a gift—we're proud of it, we cherish it, we like our writing—also becomes a burden.

This fantasy of just chucking it all, of just saying, “I would love to be free of it. It's like something that's weighing me down. I'm sorry that I roped myself into it. I would love to just sink into complete silence.” This sort of meditative thing, or just muteness—hey, that is valid to hear. That's valid to heed when it comes up.

I mean, sometimes we have gotten ourselves into situations where we have external responsibilities and deadlines, and it's important to try and honour those and not be a bad person on the level of just fulfilling practical obligations.

It's also important to recognise you've got silence offering itself to you in all kinds of ways. The more important silence is paradoxically the one that we so often resist if we're creative people and feel like we have to be making.

The more important silence is not whether or not your outward conditions seem like they're a clamour and they're chaotic and they're distracting and they're full of pressure. It's that inner silence.

So I recommend paying attention to when it comes up. And for practical ways—they are endless. Take advantage of early mornings. A lot of people have found great value in getting up earlier than they are used to and making a practice of that, and either just meditating or free writing.

Maybe using, for example, Julia Cameron's famous practice of morning pages, which has been valuable to me sometimes.

Or doing things like—as I've said about the muse and the genius and the daimon—personify your unconscious mind and maybe write down a dialogue between yourself and your creative spirit, whether about your current project or just about your life and your creativity as a whole.

There are various tricks to get in touch with this unconscious part of you, and I really am convinced out of practical personal experience that it's not necessary to have outer silence and outer spaciousness when you can find it within yourself. You can find it through some of these exercises for getting in alignment with what your creativity wants to do.

You can get in touch with it if you're paying attention to what you might not recognise as a gift—offering it to yourself. If things go quiet and you think, “Oh no, I should be doing something”—why not let that be a place where things can germinate? Why not let that be the silence that you might not be able to find on the outside?

Joanna: Yes, and I'm feeling guilty here because of course we are producing a podcast episode for people to listen to. I find personally that one of the places I can find silence is when I walk. It's not obviously silent outside, but I am definitely guilty of always listening to podcasts, often at very fast speed as well.

Sometimes when I go for a walk, I just deliberately do not listen to anything—don't listen to an audiobook, don't listen to a podcast—and a lot comes up there.

I have my phone with me, and when I get back from those walks and jot down things that come up in my mind, I will have so many notes of things that have come up in my brain during the walk.

It's really difficult, isn't it? Because I know you also love input. You do a lot of research. As I said, your books have a lot of research in them, and so we both like doing the research. But also I definitely find that has to be balanced with the time for letting it come out again in some form, with that mental silence.

You also talk about being uncomfortable, and I feel like sometimes that silence can be uncomfortable as well.Matt: Yes, it can be. There's no telling what might come up when you are faced with silence. Again, it's one of those things—even the outer kind that we think we crave. Sometimes it's a bit frightening when it comes up, which is why we try to fill it with things, like this podcast episode for example.

There's a threshold that you can notice you cross sometimes, where what was a natural desire to connect with something that you heard about and found interesting becomes a bit frantic.

Where now, really, what might be good is if you shut off—didn't go for the next podcast episode or didn't go for the next click to the website—if you just shut the browser and just sat there and did something else.

You're kind of, with a little desperateness, trying to fill the void. What you described about needing to get quiet and let things happen—yes.

I love reading and research, but the classic stages of the creative process—first codified, I think, by Graham Wallas, if I remember correctly—they still work. It's really good sometimes to have a model and understand how it works.

You have what's sometimes called the preparation stage. All the input, all the research, all the brainstorming, all that kind of thing.

Then the incubation stage can be vastly important. That can get frightening, both because the silence seems somehow threatening, like something about you is going to be exposed. Or maybe that you're going to lose the thread of whatever it was and it's never going to come out.

But really, if you just stop and let your muse, let your genius do its thing, let your unconscious do its thing, it will suggest itself again. It will come up on its own. Ideas will come back.

You'll realise, “Oh, I didn't know what I was going to do with that character. I didn't know how these ideas were going to come together. I didn't even know what this idea for a story, a book, or an essay was going to be.” It comes back up, and with you working with it, it shows what it wanted to be all along.

This whole thing about doing the preparation and then allowing it to incubate and germinate and then sprout when it wants to, that still works.Part of the reason that we're scared of the silence, I'm convinced, is because each of us operates in our psychological selves as a closed system. It's like we each comprise our own cosmos, so to speak.

I know you know that I have worked in horror literature, the literature of cosmic fear. In cosmic horror, as laid out by the likes of Lovecraft and others, the basic effect has been analysed as constituting a disturbance of the universe.

That's the horror of cosmic horror—the world is transformed into this nightmarish thing in a cosmic horror story, where there's a haunting, threatening presence that's out of the ordinary and it's somehow bound up with the narrator's interior world.

Life reveals itself as supernaturally or ontologically something nightmarish—there are awful forces that are about to erupt all the time. And whether anybody's into cosmic horror or not, I think it's pretty accurate to say that we each constitute our own world, our own cosmos.

A lot of the noise that we make—the mental noise and the complications we introduce into our own lives—is, usually unconsciously, trying to stave off confrontation with the otherness that is outside the barrier of our personal sense of self.

The weird thing is that that otherness is actually in us, and in fact, we can approach it in the figure of the daemon or the daimon or the muse. So creativity is fraught.

You're dealing with something that you might want to think, “Oh, this is great, it's going to be the source of my ideas, it's going to fulfil my creativity.” Well, yes, but it is frightening to think about the fact of something about yourself being beyond yourself and perhaps being out of your conscious control and somehow guiding your destiny.

A lot of people have trouble getting along with their own unconscious, which is another way to put it. There's a horror, a fear, a dread effect that comes when we feel like we are out of control.

We all face that ultimately—when it comes to our death, for example. There are some spiritual traditions that talk about dying before you die, that being basically the way to enlightenment in those traditions.

Recognising and coming to terms with the fact that this thing that is you, that you call yourself, is transitory. It is only there by being enclosed within and swamped from without by this thing that is not you, which is a sort of void to which you'll return.

In the book, I deal with some of that, and I talk about it from a non-dual spiritual viewpoint, because ultimately for me, these creative questions have become inseparable from spiritual questions.

Joanna: Yes. And obviously people know about my book Writing the Shadow, which is how we really connected around this Jungian idea of the shadow and the darkness. I agree with you—there's some really interesting things at the juxtaposition of all of these topics, which we could talk about for a long time.

I do want to ask you around your idea of “living into the dark.” Because I feel like you do take things beyond just the writing into this idea of living into it. So maybe talk a bit about that. And obviously synchronicity, which is a Jungian psychology concept.

Matt: Living into the dark is the thing that forms the overarching ethos or perspective for me of all this. I got the term from “writing into the dark,” which actually comes from the American science fiction and fantasy author Dean Wesley Smith. He wrote a book titled Writing Into the Dark, subtitled “Writing Without an Outline.”

It's a great book. I recommend it to anyone. It is about forsaking and foregoing the felt need to outline writing in advance and trusting your creative mind to be able to make up a story in real time. That draws on the deep nature of storytelling to come out right.

Therefore you write into the dark, as if you're walking down a road where you have a lantern and you can only see one step ahead. You haven't mapped out the territory.

It was a great metaphor. I had already been thinking in that direction about life and about creativity for some time when I first came across that book. I devoured it and recognised it described how I had already been writing anyway, which is one reason it was so powerful for me.

Then it edged out into a broader understanding for me that I had also been coming up with, that I just ended up calling “living into the dark.” None of us knows where anything is going, that much is obvious. But living into the dark goes farther than that, to embrace this understanding.

I think of this in connection with what so many people, either personally or because of jobs they have where they're required to think like this. I think of this in terms of the famous five-year plan that so many of us want to draw up.

There's nothing wrong with a five-year plan or a ten-year plan or a one-year plan. You can come up with that for practical purposes and try and chart where you're going, but we too often forget that that's just a fantasy exercise.

We are not actually thinking into the future, nor are we ever actually thinking into the past. Remembering the past, predicting or projecting the future—both are events that are happening right now, in this moment, which is always now. It's no less now than it was when you and I first started this conversation.

Past and future are projections—mental projections right now. And everything is unfolding in the present in real time, which effectively means what's going to come next is coming out of—well, we don't know where it's coming out of. Darkness.

Living into the dark is living with full-on contact with, and awareness of, and embrace of this fact that we don't know what's coming up. That encompasses all of life and all of creativity.

That same darkness, if it's helpful for you to take on this emotional tenor—which it is for me—can relate to the darkness in cosmic horror fiction, or to some of the rich traditions of darkness, like in Daoism with the yin contrasted with yang. Yin is the dark, moon, feminine aspect of things—the receptive source of the universe.

This idea of living into the dark, of just accepting that we're all on this journey on a path where we can only see one step ahead, even if that far, has been meaningful to me. It's been meaningful to my creativity, and I recommend it to anybody to whom it appeals.

It takes a lot of pressure off. I think that's a guiding meta-theme for me—trying to take the pressure off us from trying to control things that can't be controlled, and more stepping into that flow of understanding: what's going to come to me is going to come to me, and my posture toward it, whether I align with it or not, is what's going to determine my experience of it.

You mentioned synchronicity. It's interesting. It's verifiable.I know a lot of people have verified it for themselves. Maybe some people listening to this have too.

It's verifiable that when you really get in tune with this present-moment thing and get in tune with your creativity—and you can tell when you're aligned and not, when you feel blocked or when you feel resistance or not—when these things align on their own sometimes, strange coincidences do happen.

Jung talked about synchronicity as an acausal connecting principle. That was probably due to the fact that the psyche is not separate from the fabric of the world that gives rise to it, so that we might have subjective things—impressions, fantasies, dreams—that we rather uncannily see mirrored in objective events.

Like the famous thing that clarified and coalesced that for him: a psychotherapy session with a patient who was describing a dream she'd been having about a scarab beetle.

Then he heard a tapping at the window of his office and he went there and opened it, and there was a European beetle—a kind of scarab beetle, much like the Egyptian scarab—that was there.

He held it up and said to the woman, “Is this your beetle? Here is your beetle.” It just blew her mind. It opened new levels of the therapy that she was receiving. Those kinds of things happen. I've had them happen.

Joanna: Me too.

Matt: If you're a long-time writer or reader, you're familiar with the library genie—the library daemon, we sometimes refer to it as—the book that, just at the moment you think of it and realise, “Oh yes…”

You're doing your study, and it doesn't have to be a library, it could be on the web or whatever. You finally realise what it is that you need, what you've been looking for, and in some cases it literally falls off the shelf onto someone's head.

What do you make of those when they happen? At the very least, it rattles your cage. You might enter a state of suspended judgement about whether we really are living in a kind of magical cosmos full of real correspondences.

It's a bit like the daimon or the muse: is it a metaphor? Is it just an interpretation, or is it something real? Probably the best place is one of profoundly, actively embraced agnosticism, and just take it for what it is.

Joanna: Yes, and leaning more into your intuition. I think you definitely demonstrate that in the book as well, really exploring a lot of very interesting topics.

Now, we are almost out of time, but you do have a Substack, The Living Dark, where you publish essays, and you've also got all kinds of really interesting books. I want people to go have a look at some of the other stuff you've written, especially if you enjoy horror and religion and all of that kind of thing.

So just to ask, how do you decide when something is an essay on The Living Dark, and how do you decide when you are going to put it in a book or in some other way?

I feel like a lot of authors are thinking about Substack but don't necessarily know what to put on it. I think I first connected with you on your Substack, where I was like, “Oh, this guy's writing interesting, weird stuff.”

How do you use Substack as opposed to writing for your books?Matt: Sure. Let me answer by first talking about what happened previously with that first book on creativity that I mentioned, A Course in Demonic Creativity. I had all kinds of thoughts and ideas coming up, seeded over many years of practice and reading about the daimon and the daemon and the genius and the muse.

In 2009 I founded a blog—it was just a WordPress blog—and I titled it Daemon Muse. I attended to it for two to three years. A lot of people ended up reading it. I really did not have any plans, not even any back-burner plans, of taking the material that I published in posts there about this way of creativity and making it a book.

I did realise about a year and a half in that essentially I had a book I had already written in those posts. So it took some work, and I spent six months making it all into a coherent book.

By the way, that book was only ever published as a PDF, which is still free on my website, MattCardin.com—although plans for the first-ever print edition of it are in motion right now. That was published in 2011.

When I went to Substack and started my newsletter there in 2022—and by the way, it wasn't originally called The Living Dark; my first title was “Living Into the Dark,” and then I changed it about a year, year and a half in—I kind of am doing the same thing.

It's been a while since I took anything and thought, “I'm writing a book with it.” I write what comes to me to write. You know how Substack Notes is Substack's own version of social media, kind of like Twitter used to be or like X kind of is now.

It happens all the time that I write things that just stay in contact with people as a Substack Note—some short thing. And then I realise I wanted to say more about that.

Or you have what happened just this morning. Three or four hours before you and I were talking, I started writing a Substack Note and it got so long I realised I had something that could be a post to The Living Dark. So I switched over and finished it that way.

The book Writing at the Wellspring came together after I had written things for a couple of years at The Living Dark and realised that I could trace a path through about a third of the posts that I had ever published there, and had the makings of a book.

So that, plus other material from earlier in my life—there are things from my private journals from years ago in Writing at the Wellspring—plus some new material, ended up turning into that book.

So I'm not thinking about the difference, is what I'm saying. I find writing at my Living Dark newsletter to be a needful and enjoyable creative outlet, partly because I have some 3,800 readers now and it feels good to be in contact with them and to have that audience and to know that there's that eye on what I'm writing.

That's partly because I just have the freedom to work it out to my satisfaction and publish it there. I'm already halfway forming another book that will be of a different focus, to come from things that I have published there.

So for me, there's an organic relationship between Substack writing, or any kind of blogging, and the writing of books.

If people haven't thought about that, they might want to consider it. If you have one already or if you're thinking of starting a blog on Substack or anywhere else, maybe you have things that can guide you to a book that already exists and you just haven't realised it.

Joanna: So where can people find you and your books and everything you do online?Matt: Well, The Living Dark that we're talking about is at www.livingdark.net—and it does require the three Ws at the beginning to get there. Then my author website is MattCardin.com, and you can go to the books page there to get a link to all the books I've published and read about them.

Joanna: Great. Well, thanks so much for your time, Matt. That was fantastic.

Matt: Thank you, Jo. I really appreciate the invitation.

The post Writing At The Wellspring: Tapping The Source Of Your Inner Genius With Matt Cardin first appeared on The Creative Penn.

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What does it take to write strong sentences? How do you keep writing when the world feels dark? How do you push past self-doubt, build a sustainable writing practice, and trust that your voice is enough? Anne Lamott and Neal Allen share decades of hard-won wisdom from their new book, Good Writing.

In the intro, Hachette cancels allegedly AI-written book [The New Publishing Standard]; How Pangram works; Publishing industry insights from Macmillan's CEO [David Perell Podcast]; Photos from Notre Dame and Saint Chapelle; The Black Church; Bones of the Deep coming in April.

Today's show is sponsored by ProWritingAid, writing and editing software that goes way beyond just grammar and typo checking. With its detailed reports on how to improve your writing and integration with writing software, ProWritingAid will help you improve your book before you send it to an editor, agent or publisher. Check it out for free or get 15% off the premium edition at www.ProWritingAid.com/joanna

This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn

Neal Allen is a spiritual coach, former journalist, and author of non-fiction and flash fiction. Anne Lamott is the New York Times bestselling author of memoir, spiritual and creative non-fiction, and literary fiction, including Bird by Bird: Instructions on Writing and Life, which many authors, including me, count as one of the best books on writing out there. Neal and Anne are also married, and their first book together is Good Writing: 36 Ways to Improve Your Sentences

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.

Show Notes

• Why strong verbs are rule number one
• How Anne and Neal's contrasting styles created a unique call-and-response writing guide
• Practical advice on finding and trusting your authentic voice across genres
• Why award-winning novelists typically write for only 90 minutes a day — and what that means for your writing practice
• How to keep writing during dark and discouraging times without giving up
• The uncomfortable truth about publication, longevity, and why nobody cares if you write

You can find Neal at ShapesOfTruth.com and Anne on Substack.

Transcript of the interview with Neal Allen and Anne LamottNeal Allen is a spiritual coach, former journalist, and author of non-fiction and flash fiction.

Anne Lamott is the New York Times bestselling author of memoir, spiritual and creative non-fiction, and literary fiction, including Bird by Bird: Instructions on Writing and Life, which many authors, including me, count as one of the best books on writing out there.

Neal and Anne are also married, and their first book together is Good Writing: 36 Ways to Improve Your Sentences

Jo: Welcome to the show, Neal and Anne.

Anne: Thank you so much, Jo. We're happy to be here.

Neal: Hi, Jo.

Jo: Let us get straight into the book with rule one, which is use strong verbs.

How can we implement that practically in our manuscripts when most of us don't start with the verb?We're thinking of story or we're thinking of message?

Neal: Throughout the book, it's pointed out that these are rules for second drafts, right? So you've put it down. You've already got your story down, you've already got your piece down—your email, your text, it doesn't matter what.

Then you stop, you pause, you go back to the beginning and you go sentence by sentence and look at them.

Anne: I'd like to add that there's a lot in the book, usually on my end of the conversation, that has to do with really using these rules anywhere and everywhere.

Whether you're writing a memoir or a grant proposal, I believe these rules apply to getting everything written at any time, in any phase of the work because, from Bird by Bird, I'm all about taking short assignments and writing really godawful first drafts.

What is fun about writing is to have spewed out something on the page and then to get to go back right then and just start cleaning it up a bit, straightening it out, probably inevitably shortening it. One place to start is to notice how weak our verbs are.

If I say “Jo walked towards us across the lawn,” it doesn't give the reader very much information. But if I say “Jo lurched towards us across the lawn,” or “Jo raced towards us across the lawn,” then right away you've improved the sentence with really two or three quick thoughts about what you actually meant with that verb and a better one.

So it really applies to every level and stage of writing, but Neal's right—this is really about going back over your work sentence by sentence and seeing if you can make it stronger and cleaner and clearer. The reason it's rule one is to write strong verbs.

Neal: A nice thing about strong verbs is that they often preclude the need for an adjective or an adverb, right? If I say “I trudged,” it's shorter than saying “I walked slowly and depressed.”

Jo: Absolutely, and how you answered that question is kind of how the book works, right? Because Neal does an outline of the rule, and then Anne comes in and comments.

Maybe you could talk a bit about that process. You are both strong characters, obviously you've been writing a long time.

Talk a bit about how you made the book and how that worked as a couple as well.Neal: I'd had these rules collected for a number of years and I had them on my website. When I met Anne, she liked them and would hand them out when she was doing writing sessions.

I was intrigued at some point a few years ago and looked around to see whether there was a list like mine out there. I noticed that all the other lists I saw were much shorter.

Hemingway had his four rules for rewriting. Elmore Leonard, his eight, which are wonderful. Margaret Atwood has 10. The longest I saw was Martin Amis had, depending on what year it was, 14, 15 or 16—he'd go back and forth with a couple of them.

I had 30-some and I wondered, well, 30-some might be enough for a book. I didn't want to write a scolding book like on grammar. I didn't want it to be academic or written like “I'm the expert, I know.”

I'll just let my mind range. I'll explain the rule and then let my mind go where it went. Which, by the way, is one of the rules—show then tell. Not “show, don't tell.” It's show, then tell. Let your mind riff after you've explained something to the reader or shown something to the reader.

So I wrote the book. It was too short to be published, and I showed it to Anne and I asked her, “What do I do with this?”

Anne: I said, “Hey, I know something about writing, Bub,” and I asked if I could contribute my thoughts and retorts and examples and prompts to each of his rules. We were just off and running because his stuff was so solid.

Mine is more maybe welcoming and giving encouragement and hope to writers because writing's hard. It's still hard for me. This is my 21st book and I'm only a third of it.

Writing's hard, and what we hope is that our conversation can help people understand: a) it's hard for everybody, and b) it'll work if you just keep your butt in the chair and do the best you can, and then go back one day at a time and try to make it a little bit better.

Neal: It turned out to be pretty serendipitous because just naturally I'm more of an explainer and Annie is more driving toward catharsis. So the call and response is always: I set out the rule, I explain the rule, and Annie drives it toward catharsis and usefulness.

Jo: In some chapters you do disagree in some form. How did that work in the process of writing?Anne: Usually I disagree because Neal might be using words that are too big, or it might be a little bit elitist, I would think. Or of course I would point out that he's completely overeducated, whereas I'm a dropout and so I have a much plainer, more welcoming version of the rules.

All of the rules are so strong, but I would feel that the way he explained it was beyond me. So I would come in and try to explain what Neal had been explaining. It was actually really funny and fun.

We do come from really different directions. Neal is an explainer. He's like an ATM of information, and I am the class den mother who brings in treats and party favours on everybody's birthday.

My message is always: you can really, really do this, I promise, trust me. But you start where you are, you get your butt in the chair, and then Neal comes along and says what has worked for him.

He was a journalist forever, so he writes in a very different way than I write. It just turned out that the two of us together kind of make a whole. People have asked us if there were a lot of conflicts or if we really objected to the other person's take.

I can tell you, Jo, there wasn't a day when we had only conflict. We were just laughing and we were excited because one of us would remember a great example from literature. We came to believe that these two very distinct voices would form one voice of encouragement for any writer.

Jo: That brings us to rule number eight, which is trust your voice. I feel like this is easier when you've been writing a while.

We're told to find our voice, but I remember as an early writer when I read Bird by Bird and other books and I was like, “How on earth do I find my voice?” Maybe you could talk about this more for early stage writer.

How do you find and trust that voice?Neal: Boy, that is a halt for almost all of us. This follows from any intellectual pursuit that requires lots of practice and repetitions.

Malcolm Gladwell's great statement, or discovery, or restatement from somebody else who discovered it, that the human brain requires 10,000 hours of repetitions before something can be allowed to just flow without thought. Flow as if intuitive rather than thinking.

I don't think that's any different in writing than it is in basketball or football or anything else—sports, creative pursuits, everyday pursuits. There's just a lot of repetitions required.

Some people have the experience that I did, where you're just going along getting better and better, doing it over and over again, learning this, learning that, adding in this, adding in that, moving toward a goal of virtuosity or whatever. And all of a sudden, bang, one day, it all works and your voice emerges.

Other people don't have that experience, don't have that one day that it happened or that feeling that it suddenly happened. For some people it takes less than 10,000 hours, but for most people it is a hell of a lot of repetitions.

Anne: I think for me, the most important aspect to finding your own voice is noticing how desperately you don't think your voice is good enough and that you want to write like somebody else.

I always mention that when I was coming up, at about 20, I wanted to sound like Isabel Allende because I loved her work so much. Or Ann Beattie, who was writing those wonderful short stories in the New Yorker. Or Salinger, who I'd started reading probably at 10 years old.

I had to come to the understanding that I can't tell my stories and my truth and my version of life—which is really what writing is—in somebody else's voice. Unless it's a kind of advanced writing exercise to write in the voice of an alcoholic billionaire in Spain.

For most of us, it's about finding out that our voice is what people want to hear. It's hard to believe, but it is absolutely true. If you have a story to tell me, Jo, I just want you to tell me your story. I don't want you to try to sound like Virginia Woolf or Margaret Drabble. I want you to be Jo.

If it's the written version you're sending me, I can probably go through and help you maintain your voice while making the writing stronger by following certain really basic rules. But spiritually and psychologically, this is just about the most important rule of all because that's why we're here.

That's why we are on this side of eternity—to discover who we are and why we're here. Part of that is discovering who, deep down, when all the layers are peeled away, we are, and then how to communicate that to a reader.

Without trying to sound more impressive or more brilliant or more ironic than we actually are, our voice is good enough. It's hard to believe. Our voice is what we want you to tell us your stories in.

Neal: I distinctly remember the day I found my voice, for odd reasons. I just can remember it, and the first thing I did when this story felt like it had written itself to me was look at it and go, “Crap. That doesn't sound like Faulkner.”

Jo: It sounded like you.

Anne: Or bad Faulkner.

Jo: Do you think we have to find our voice maybe multiple times, depending on genre? For example, I recognised that feeling with one of my novels. It was novel number five. I was like, “Oh, that's my voice.” But then it took me a lot longer to find that in memoir because, well, I think memoir is super hard.

Do you think we have to go through these 10,000 hours in different genres?Neal: Not for me. I don't think any differently about how I'm entering into a business letter, a text, a novel, a self-help book, or any of the things that I do. I feel like I just have to turn this switch and let it go, and I can trust myself.

So that's interesting. I can imagine you could develop a second voice. I haven't ever needed to.

Anne: I would agree that I write my novels and my nonfiction really from a kind of central bus station deep inside of me.

One of our rules is write the hard things—write about life and death and loss and grief and relationships and getting old and being here during these incredibly cold, dark times. Because the reader, i.e. me, is just desperate for truth and for real.

I started out wanting to sound like John Updike or sound like a New York glitterati male writer, and I can't tell you what is really real in somebody else's voice. I disagree with Malcolm Gladwell. I think it's 10 hours—a little bit different there.

But when I'm writing autobiographical spiritual pieces or my novels, I have to kind of settle myself down, like gentling a horse, and find that bus station inside of myself where I'm observing and I'm tugging on the sleeve of the person sitting next to me and saying, “I just saw something really interesting. Do you have a minute?”

That's really what writing is. I just saw something or thought of something or imagined something or remembered something really interesting. Do you have a minute? If I'm talking to the person next to me, I'm not going to try to sound like Laurence Olivier or anybody else. I'm just going to tell them my story.

The best four or five word great quote is from our screenwriter friend, Randy Mayem Singer, and she said: “Tell me a story. Make me care.” Those six words really transcend all genres. It's just: I can tell you a story my way if you're interested. Got a minute?

Jo: You mentioned that, really interesting, you said, “I need to settle myself down,” particularly in these dark times. This is not a political show, and obviously we're all from different countries here and we all have different views of what difficult times are, but we all go through them.

When big things in the world make us feel like perhaps what we are doing is not so important, how do we get through that? That “shouldn't I go do something more important than writing a story” feeling?

Neal: Everybody is encouraged to be a political scientist nowadays, or to be an ethicist or to be a moralist as their job, and that's kind of ridiculous, right?

We've been handed our role. By the time you're 30, you've been handed your role in the world, and that's your productive role.

You have certain citizenship requirements, which might include voting or marching or watching the news every day. That's not the rest of your day unless you actually work in parliament as an aide or doing some kind of social policy work.

I am not going to let the external world ruin my day. I'm going to keep that to a certain number of minutes of my day that is appropriate to my role in the world. I am perfectly productive in the world. I have lots of things that I do. I work hard. Everybody works hard.

There are no lazy people in this world any more—civilisation's too difficult. You want lazy? Go back to 300,000 years of tribal life, where as soon as you had fulfilled your last need for calories for the day, you made it back to camp slowly so you didn't burn calories, and lulled from about 10:00 AM to 2:00 PM.

The rest of the day you reclined so you weren't burning calories and gossiped with your fellow tribespeople. None of us is like that now.

I'm perfectly productive without having to say I should be more productive and more concerned about the foibles of the species.

Anne: Neal does something with his clients, with whom he does this work on taming the inner critic. It's about having them make a list of what they do every day.

Rain or shine or catastrophe or peace or war or whatever, you just do it. I wake up, I pray, I put my glasses on. I get a little bit of work done every day. I meditate for 15 minutes every day. I get outside every day because that is the most nourishing, spiritual reset button I can get to. I catch up with my friends.

We have a grandson here. We hang out with him. I do certain things every day, and one of them is I get a little bit of work done.

Of course what I'd rather do is just stay glued to CNN and have my tiny opinions on every single thing that is happening and how things would be better if they followed my always excellent advice.

Instead, what I do is I will meditate for 50 minutes a day and it won't be really beautiful and inspiring—it'll be like a monkey at the mall who's over-caffeinated.

I will also get outside. I don't know if I'll get a really good long walk with 10,000 steps in, but I will get outside and I will pay attention. I will breathe in fresh air. I will have moments of wonder.

I will also sit down, and I will be doing it after we talk. I'm going to get my own writing done for the day.

I really recommend that to writing students: write down what you do every day. And in it, figure out at least one pod—a 45-minute pod—where you can get a little bit of writing done.

Something that may serve the writers in your audience is that I make long lists and I encourage all beginning writers to make long lists of every memory and thought and idea that they've had. But mostly memories, often starting very young.

Thinking about early holidays and school are great prompts. Make a list of 25 memories you have that you've told people over the years that are meaningful to you. If you remember them, they're meaningful.

You may think that they're meaningful because of this or that, but you sit down and you write about them for 45 minutes and you're going to discover that there was a kernel of insight, or even healing, in them that you hadn't known when you set out to write them.

I taught writing forever at this bookstore called Book Passage in Marin. We would spend a part of every hour having the writers, the students, explain to me why they weren't getting any writing done, and they were excellent ideas.

Any excuse your listeners have about why they're not getting any writing done—believe me, it's a good excuse and I've heard it 10 times.

If you are committed to writing, you have to meet us halfway, and that means that you set aside 45 minutes or an hour and a half or whatever you can give me to get a little bit of writing done. Get one passage written—the first or eighth thing on the list of really important memories that you've carried in your pocket all these years.

Neal: The typical amount of time that a Booker Prize winner, or a National Book Award winner here in America, spends writing—a novelist—is one to two hours in the morning, getting 45 minutes to an hour and a half of work done, a thousand to 1,500 words. And then they stop.

The reason they stop is it's really brain-consuming. To do this is hard work, and it's intellectually vigorous. High-end programmers can work two and a half hours on average before they have to stop because they've used up their brain energy—the blood going to the brain and expending calories and whatever is going on in there.

It's not a long time. It's just repetitive time. The Booker Prize winners, they typically work six days a week, not five days a week. An hour and a half a day is about the mean. About 1,200 words is about the mean.

Jo: It's interesting because you mentioned what's stopping people from writing, and you also mentioned it's hard work.

One of the things I've heard a lot recently is: “This is really hard. I thought writing was meant to be this romantic myth where I would sit down and things would stream into my brain and it would be easy. And if it's not easy and fun, then maybe it's wrong for me.”

So maybe you could explain more about the hardness and why hard is still good. Hard doesn't mean it's a bad thing.Neal: The interesting thing about writers is that they are really interested in very complex thinking about sentences.

A few things distinguish a writer from a subject matter expert or a plotter—who either writes plots and is interested in the movement of plots, or who is a subject matter expert in something and either novelises it or writes nonfiction.

It's that a writer is first concerned about the puzzle of a sentence, second concerned about the flow of a paragraph really, and only thirdly concerned about the subject matter.

I don't care what the subject matter is. What I want to concentrate on ultimately is the sentence. And getting a sentence to look right in context requires building sentences upon sentences upon sentences. It's more like painting than it is like writing in that sense.

If you look at a painter, once they've put one brushstroke down—and usually it takes them a while to figure out what that brushstroke is, how big it is, how wide it is, how thick it is, how grainy it is—then the second brushstroke becomes a puzzle based on what they just did with the first brushstroke and the remaining canvas.

A writer thinks that way about each sentence and realises that each sentence has layers of information in it—diction, colour, rhythm, harmony, melody, plot, all sorts of things are happening. How many of those are taken care of in that sentence? Well, that becomes the interest.

It's hard in the sense that to be virtuosic at it, to be really good at it, requires a lot of study and a lot of mistakes. Most of the mistakes are getting rid of clichés and finding your way past them, and that's a long, long process.

This isn't something that can be just picked up because you have a talent. You were told at a certain time you were a talented writer, so you can just pick it up. As soon as you get into it, you see that the sentences are demanding a heck of a lot of work.

Anne: I would add that I don't find it all that fun and easy—I never find it fun and easy. I've been doing this professionally for 52 years now, since I was 20, when I worked at a magazine.

I think that's an illusion. So much of becoming a writer is unlearning what you thought it meant and how it would go. That you would sit alone like Bartleby the Scrivener, hunched over working on your ledger.

That was not true at all, because a lot of our book, Good Writing, has to do with the collaboration between you and a writing partner, a writing group or a writing collective, and eventually an editor.

It's not about that lonely, hunched-over romantic, Wuthering Heights sense of seriousness. And it's also not giddy. It's not Walt Disney. It's just very real.

It's one human sitting down at the desk with paper or at the keyboard, and it is just trying, one day at a time, to write what's on your heart, what's on your mind, what's on your scribbled notes, what you're trying to transcribe from this little bit of a flicker of an idea about something that you've always meant to tell on paper. And then writing it.

Some parts of the day's work will be pulling teeth. The secret of writing—and I write about this a lot in Bird by Bird, I write a lot about it in Good Writing—is you just don't give up. Because you wanted to be a writer when you grew up.

What that means is that you write a little bit every day and you read about writing. You read good books on writing. You read Stephen King. You read William Zinsser. You read all the Paris Review interviews of writers at work.

You enter into the writing life because it's a calling, like a monk to a monastery. You've gotten into the water, it's a little cold at first, and you stay in it. And it starts to be something that is so fulfilling, if maybe not fun. It's fulfilling.

You will feel this rare excitement that you're doing what you have put off for so long, or that you're re-entering it in a new way with a different sense of commitment and maybe a little bit more wisdom and probably a lot more stories to tell.

Jo: I did want to ask Anne, because coming back to Bird by Bird, many writers listening will have read it. I've also read over the years about your son and your faith. These are really personal things that you have shared.

It feels like we live in this age of judgement and cancellation, and writing what you call our truths can be very difficult. People are afraid. What would you say to them? And obviously also rule 33 is “write hard stuff”, so I guess that gets into it too. How do we do this?

Anne: A lot of people don't have the calling to write personal stuff or autobiographical stuff or stuff about spiritual or emotional or psychological healing. They want to write about England in the 1300s.

I've always told my writing students to write what they would love to come upon, because then they're creating it.

If they love to read historical romances, or they love to read journals—I have to say, I read every single journal of Virginia Woolf's in my early twenties, and I read every single volume of her letters in my early twenties.

It was thrilling to be in that intimate, umbilical connection to a writer that I loved so much, and into the world of Bloomsbury, and into the world of England between the wars. People may not want to write like I write, and I would assume they don't.

My calling is that I love to write about real life and I use my immediate experiences of daily living and my family and my husband and our animals and my nation and my recovery and my church. All of that is the stuff that I love to come upon in other people's work, and so I write it.

Neal writes differently. He is a journalist and a novelist, and he is writing a lot in a much more sociological way than I am. He is writing with this font of knowledge about socioeconomic and historical understanding of the world.

Yet he's just raggedy old Neal Allen, but he loves to come upon different stuff than I love to come upon. Does that answer your question?

Neal: I think one thing to notice is that the whole bully-victim cycle that we are promoting and living in now—and it's a cycle because if somebody claims that they have been bullied, then their only defence is to become a bully themselves. The victims become the bullies. It just gets worse and worse. It's the old revenge story.

What I've noticed when I think about it is the authors who I respect the most tend to be humanists. Humanists tend not to be cancelled, and I've never felt a great danger. Of course, I watch my words in certain ways that are fashionable—you can't use this word any more, and all of that.

But in terms of ideas, humanists embrace the world in a funny, different kind of way than people who chase after conflict, chase after separation of people from each other, tribalism, all of that.

When I look back, my heroes were always humanists. Some of them might be cancelled now, but just for the weirdest reasons—like Henry Miller or Mark Twain might be cancelled for very strange reasons. These are absolute humanists who love everybody in the world in a certain kind of odd way.

Virginia Woolf is the most incredible humanist in the world. She's not going to be cancelled.

Jo: She cancelled herself.

Neal: There we go.

Jo: As we come towards the end, I do want to return to something—you've both talked about calling and you've been handed your role, and this sort of “we are writers now.”

Both of you have had great longevity in the career, and I've been doing this now 20 years. I've noticed so many people who leave the writing life, so I wondered what tips you had on making it long term.

How do we do this long term, assuming we are feeling a calling? People have to balance the money side, they're balancing book marketing, which is always a nightmare for all of us, and the writing.

Any tips for longevity?Neal: I have no idea. I have lived outside of the writing life, just kind of using it as a secondary skill, for half of my life.

I left journalism because it didn't pay well enough to support a family of six. I moved into the corporate world. I loved the corporate world. I didn't have any problem with it, but it wasn't the writing world.

When I came out of the corporate world, I first went into “tame your inner critic” sessions with people—executive coaching, other kinds of coaching. Only lately, only in the last 10 years, have I really resumed my writing career.

I think maintaining a writing career, like anything in the arts, is incredibly difficult financially. It just will be. Annie will tell you—you were, what, 15 years into your career before you had your first home office?

Anne: Yes.

Neal: Right.

Anne: More than that. I was 20 years in before I had a door I could close to keep the Huns out—i.e. my child.

Here's the thing: nobody cares if you write, if you hate it, or if you've given up.

It might be that you would find your creative soul, your imaginative, creative life force at ecstatic dancing on Saturdays in the town park, which we offer here in our tiny town. It might be that you're a painter. My best friend started painting several years ago and she's incredible.

If you want to write, the horrible thing is that you just have to keep setting aside a pod. I keep using the word pod because that's how I get any work done at all—an hour.

Now, Neal and I can both tell you, and Neal alluded to this: you set aside an hour and that will give you maybe 40 minutes of actual writing. And we'll give the Booker Prize winners 40 minutes of actual writing. You have two hours and that gives you an hour and 15 minutes. That's how it works.

If you care and if you long to be a writer, to immerse yourself in the writing life—I hate to sound like a Nike ad, and I don't know if you have this in England—but you just do it.

One thing that gets in everybody's way is this fantasy of getting published and how if they get published, it will be like the world has stamped “validated” on their parking ticket and their self-esteem will now be much, much better and more consistently excellent than it ever was before.

We can tell you: we've got this book that's out, brand new, and it makes you much more insecure and much more anxious than you were before it got published. Because how's it going to do? Is it going to get reviewed? There are very, very few places reviewing books any more.

Carol Shields, who wrote an incredible book 30 years ago called The Stone Diaries. She was teaching large, large writing retreats, a thousand people at a time, and she would tell them that five to 10 of them will be published.

Getting published means that you get your book out and you have one week to make it. You have one week in the bookstores for it to get noticed. And there are 180,000 hardback books published in America every year in general interest.

So you write a novel that's about a small town. You have great dreams that it's going to be an Oprah book and that this is going to happen and it will lead to a second contract, and then you can start investing in diamonds or buy a set of fish forks.

It doesn't happen. My first book that made any money at all for me was my fifth book. It was a journal of my son's first year called Operating Instructions, and it was the first time that I didn't have to have a second job. I was 38, and I had been writing—and writing full time—since I was 20 and publishing since I was 26.

If the carrot that is enticing you to get any new work done is publication and finding an agent and getting published, it's not going to happen for you. I can just promise you that.

If your dream is to become a writer and to become a member of the writing community and to write—and it will be discouraging—but if you want to write, you just keep pushing back your sleeves. You don't get up. You sit down and you keep your butt in the chair.

If your work is really good, it may get published. If your work is excellent, it may not. But that can't be what gets you to commit to being a writer when you grow up.

Jo: Fantastic.

So where can people find Good Writing and all your books and everything you both do online?Neal: On March 17th the book comes out. You can get it online, anywhere online. It's published by Penguin Avery. March 17th, it gets released.

Anne: As we said, it'll be in the bookstores for a while.

Neal: It'll be in the bookstores in America. You might have to go online in Great Britain at first.

Jo: Oh yes, it's definitely there. And what about your websites as well?

Anne: I don't have a website.

Neal: I have a modest website at ShapesOfTruth.com. That tells you about my other books also.

Anne: I'm at Substack, Anne Lamott. I'm on Facebook, Anne Lamott. I'm kind of all over the place. But this is kind of terrifying: 80% of books bought in America are bought at Amazon on cell phones.

Jo: Yes, absolutely. Actually, I was going to ask—have you recorded the audiobook as a pair?

Anne: Yes, we have. It's available if you go—I hate to always be plugging Amazon, but it's so easy. If you go to Amazon, it'll give you a choice of hardback or audio or Kindle.

Neal: And if you don't want to go to Amazon and want to find another place to buy it that you feel more comfortable with, go to Penguin Random House and just put in “Good Writing, Anne Lamott.” I think it'll take you to a splash page that gives you a choice of a half dozen online places to order it.

Jo: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much, both of you, for your time. This has been brilliant.

Anne: Oh, Jo, thank you. Pleasure and an honour. Thank you for having us.

Neal: Thank you, Jo. As you can see, we really get turned on talking about this!

Anne: Yes, we do.

The post Strong Verbs And Hard Truths. Good Writing With Anne Lamott and Neal Allen first appeared on The Creative Penn.

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What makes a character so compelling that readers will forgive almost anything about the plot? How do you move beyond vague flaws and generic descriptions to create people who feel pulled from real life? In this solo episode, I share 15 actionable tips for writing deep characters, curated from past interviews on the podcast.

In the intro, thoughts from London Book Fair [Instagram reel @jfpennauthor; Publishing Perspectives; Audible; Spotify]; Insights from a 7-figure author business [BookBub].

This show is supported by my Patrons. Join my Community and get articles, discounts, and extra audio and video tutorials on writing craft, author business, and AI tools, at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn

This episode has been created from previous episodes of The Creative Penn Podcast, curated by Joanna Penn, as well as chapters from How to Write a Novel: From Idea to Book. Links to the individual episodes are included in the transcript below.

In this episode:

• Master the ‘Believe, Care, Invest' trifecta, how to hook readers on the very first page
• Define the Dramatic Question: Who is your character when the chips are down?
• Absolute specificity. Why “she's controlling” isn't good enough
• Understand the Heroine's Journey, strength through connection, not solo action
• Use ‘Metaphor Families' to anchor dialogue and give every character a distinctive voice
• Find the Diagnostic Detail, the moments that prove a character is real
• Writing pain onto the page without writing memoir
• Write diverse characters as real people, not stereotypes or plot devices
• Give your protagonist a morally neutral ‘hero' status. Compelling beats likeable.
• Build vibrant side characters for series longevity and spin-off potential
• Use voice as a rhythmic tool
• Link character and plot until they're inseparable
• Why discovery writers can write out of order and still build deep character
• Find the sensory details that make characters live and breathe

More help with how to write fiction here, or in my book, How to Write a Novel.

Writing Characters: 15 Tips for Writing Deep Character in Your FictionIn today’s episode, I’m sharing fifteen tips for writing deep characters, synthesised from some of the most insightful interviews on The Creative Penn Podcast over the past few years, combined with what I’ve learned across more than forty books of my own. I’ll be referencing episodes with Matt Bird, Will Storr, Gail Carriger, Barbara Nickless, and Sarah Elisabeth Sawyer. I’ll also draw on my own book, How to Write a Novel, which covers these fundamentals in detail.

Whether you’re writing your first novel or your fiftieth, whether you’re a plotter or a discovery writer like me, these tips will help you create characters that readers believe in, care about, and invest in—and keep coming back for more. Let’s get into it.

1. Master the ‘Believe, Care, Invest’ TrifectaWhen I spoke with Matt Bird on episode 624, he laid out the three things you need to achieve on the very first page of your book or in the first ten minutes of a film. He calls it “Believe, Care, and Invest.”

First, the reader must believe the character is a real person, somehow proving they are not a cardboard imitation of a human being, not just a generic type walking through a generic plot. Second, the reader must care about the character’s circumstances. And third, the reader must invest in the character’s ability to solve the story’s central problem.

Matt used The Hunger Games as his primary example, and it’s brilliant. On the very first page, we believe Katniss’s voice. Suzanne Collins writes in first person with a staccato rhythm—lots of periods, short declarative sentences—that immediately grounds us in a survivalist mentality. We care because Katniss is starving. She’s protecting her little sister. And we invest because she is out there bow hunting, which Matt pointed out is one of the most badass things a character can do. She even kills a lynx two pages in and sells the pelt. We invest in her resourcefulness and grit before the plot has even begun.

Matt was very clear that this has nothing to do with the character being “likable.” He said his subtitle, Writing a Hero Anyone Will Love, doesn’t mean the character has to be a good person. He described “hero” as both gender-neutral and morally neutral. A hero can be totally evil or totally good. What matters is that we believe, care, and invest.

He demonstrated this beautifully by breaking down the first ten minutes of WeCrashed, where the characters of Adam and Rebekah Neumann are absolutely not likable, but we are completely hooked. Adam steals his neighbour’s Chinese food through a carefully orchestrated con involving an imaginary beer. It’s not admirable behaviour, but the tradecraft involved, as Matt put it—using a term from spy movies—makes us invest in him. We see a character trying to solve the big problem of his life, which is that he’s poor and wants to be rich, and we want to see if he can pull it off.

Actionable step: Go to the first page of your current work in progress. Does it achieve all three? Does the reader believe this is a real person with a distinctive voice? Do they care about the character’s circumstances? And do they invest in the character’s ability to handle what’s coming? If even one of those three is missing, that’s your revision priority.

1. Define the Dramatic Question: Who Are They Really?Will Storr, author of The Science of Storytelling, came on episode 490 and gave one of the most powerful frameworks I’ve ever heard for character-driven fiction. He explained that the human brain evolved language primarily to swap social information—in other words, to gossip. We are wired to monitor other people, to ask the question: who is this person when the chips are down?

That’s what Will calls the Dramatic Question, and it’s what he believes lies at the heart of all compelling storytelling. It’s not a question about plot. It’s a question about the character’s soul. And every scene in your novel should force the character to answer it.

His example of Lawrence of Arabia is unforgettable. The Dramatic Question for the entire film is: who are you, Lawrence? Are you ordinary or are you extraordinary?

At the beginning, Lawrence is a cocky, rebellious young soldier who believes his rebelliousness makes him superior. Every iconic scene in that three-hour film tests that belief. Sometimes Lawrence acts as though he truly is extraordinary—leading the Arabs into battle, being hailed as a god—and sometimes the world strips him bare and he sees himself as ordinary. Because it’s a tragedy, he never overcomes his flaw. He doubles down on his belief that he’s extraordinary until he becomes monstrous, culminating in that iconic scene where he lifts a bloody dagger and sees his own reflection with horror.

Will also used Jaws to demonstrate how this works in a pure action thriller. Brody’s dramatic question is simple: are you going to be old Brody who is terrified of the water, or new Brody who can overcome that fear? Every scene where the shark appears is really asking that question. And the last moment of the film isn’t the shark blowing up. It’s Brody swimming back through the water, saying he used to be scared of the water and he can’t imagine why.

Actionable step: Write down the Dramatic Question for your protagonist in a single sentence. Is it “Are you ordinary or extraordinary?” or “Are you brave enough to love again?” or “Will you sacrifice your principles for survival?” If you can’t answer this with specificity, your character might still be a sketch rather than a person.

1. Get rid of Vague Flaws, and use Absolute SpecificityThis was one of Will Storr’s most important points. He said that vague thinking about characters is really the enemy. When he teaches workshops and asks writers to describe their character’s flaw, most of them say something like “they’re very controlling.” And Will’s response is: that’s not good enough. Everyone is controlling. How are they controlling? What’s the specific mechanism?

He gave the example of a profile he read of Theresa May during the UK’s Brexit chaos. Someone who knew her said that Theresa May’s problem was that she always thinks she’s the only adult in every room she goes into. Will said that stopped him in his tracks because it’s so precise. If you define a character with that level of specificity, you can take them and put them in any genre, any situation—a spaceship, a Victorian drawing room, a school playground—and you will know exactly how they’re going to behave.

The same applies to Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, as Will described it: a man who believes absolutely in capitalistic success and the idea that when you die, you’re going to be weighed on a scale, just as God weighs you for sin, but now you’re weighed for success. That’s not a vague flaw. That’s a worldview you can drop into any story and watch it combust.

Will made another counterintuitive point that I found really valuable: writers often think that piling on multiple traits will create a complex character, but the opposite is true. Starting with one highly specific flaw and running it through the demands of a relentless plot is what generates complexity. You end up with a far more nuanced, original character than if you’d started with a laundry list of vague attributes.

Actionable step: Take your protagonist’s flaw and pressure-test it. Is it specific enough that you could place this character in any situation and predict their behaviour? If you’re stuck at “she’s stubborn” or “he’s insecure,” keep pushing. What kind of stubborn? What kind of insecure? Find the diagnostic sentence—the Theresa May level of precision.

1. Understand the Heroine’s Journey: Strength Through ConnectionGail Carriger came on episode 550 to discuss her nonfiction book, The Heroine’s Journey, and it completely reframed how I think about some of my own fiction.

Gail explained that the core difference between the Hero’s Journey and the Heroine’s Journey comes down to how strength and victory are defined. The Hero’s Journey is about strength through solo action. The hero must be continually isolated to get stronger. He goes out of civilisation, faces strife alone, and achieves victory through physical prowess and self-actualisation.

The Heroine’s Journey is the opposite. The heroine achieves her goals by activating a network. She’s a delegator, a general. She identifies where she can’t do something alone, finds the people who can help, and portions out the work for mutual gain. Gail put it simply: the heroine is very good at asking for help, which our culture tends to devalue but which is actually a powerful form of strength.

Crucially, Gail stressed that gender is irrelevant to which journey you’re writing. Her go-to examples are striking: the recent Wonder Woman film is practically a beat-for-beat hero’s journey—Gilgamesh on screen, as Gail described it. Meanwhile, Harry Potter, both the first book and the series as a whole, is a classic heroine’s journey. Harry’s power comes from his network—Dumbledore’s Army, the Order of the Phoenix, his friendships with Ron and Hermione. He doesn’t defeat Voldemort alone. He defeats Voldemort because of love and connection.

This distinction has real practical consequences for writers. If you’re writing a hero’s journey and you hit writer’s block, Gail said, the solution is usually to isolate your hero further and pile on more strife. But if you’re writing a heroine’s journey, the solution is probably to throw a new character into the scene—someone who has advice to offer or a skill the heroine lacks. The actual solutions to writer’s block are different depending on which narrative you’re writing.

As I reflected on my own work, I realised that my ARKANE thriller protagonist, Morgan Sierra, follows a hero’s journey—she’s a solo operative, a lone wolf like Jack Reacher or James Bond. But my Mapwalker fantasy series follows a heroine’s journey, with Sienna and her group of friends working together. I hadn’t consciously chosen those paths; the stories led me there. But understanding the framework helps me write more intentionally now.

Actionable step: Identify which journey your protagonist is on. Does your character gain strength by being alone (hero) or by building connections (heroine)? This will inform every plot decision you make, from how they face obstacles to how your story ends.

1. Use ‘Metaphor Families’ to Anchor Dialogue and VoiceOne of the most practical techniques Matt Bird shared on episode 624 is the idea of assigning each character a “metaphor family”—a specific well of language that they draw from. This gives each character a distinctive voice that goes beyond accent or dialect.

Matt explained how in The Wire, one of the most beloved TV shows of all time, every character has a different metaphor family. What struck him was that Omar, this iconic character, never utters a single curse word in the entire series. His metaphor family is pirate. He talks about parlays, uses language that feels like it belongs in Pirates of the Caribbean, and it creates this incredible ironic counterpoint against his urban setting. It tells us immediately that this is a character who sees himself in a tradition of people that doesn’t match his immediate surroundings.

Matt also referenced the UK version of The Office, where Gareth works at a paper company but aspires to the military. So all of his language is drawn from a military metaphor family. He doesn’t talk about filing and photocopying; he talks about tactics and discipline and being on the front line. This tells us that the character has a life and dreams beyond the immediate scene—and it’s the gap between aspiration and reality that makes him both funny and believable.

He pointed out that a metaphor family sometimes comes from a character’s background, but it’s often more interesting when it comes from their aspirations. What does your character want to be? What world do they fantasise about inhabiting? That’s where their language should come from. In Star Wars, Obi-Wan Kenobi is a spiritual hermit, but his metaphor family is military. He uses the language of generals and commanders, and that ironic counterpoint is part of what makes him feel so rich.

Actionable step: Assign each of your main characters a metaphor family. It could be based on their job, their background, or—more interestingly—their secret aspirations. Then go through your dialogue and make sure each character is consistently drawing from that well of language. If two characters sound the same when you strip away the dialogue tags, this is the fix.

1. Find the Diagnostic Detail: The Diagonal ToastAvoid clichéd character tags—the random scar, the eye patch, the mysterious limp—unless they serve a deep narrative purpose. Matt Bird on episode 624 was very funny about this: he pointed out that Nick Fury, Odin, and eventually Thor all have eye patches in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Eye patches are done, he said. You cannot do eye patches anymore.

Instead, look for what I’m calling the “diagonal toast” detail, after a scene Matt described from Captain Marvel. In the film, Captain Marvel is trying to determine whether Nick Fury is who he says he is. She asks him to prove he isn’t a shapeshifting alien. Fury shares biographical details—his history, his mother—but then she pushes further and says, name one more thing you couldn’t possibly have made up about yourself. And Fury says: if toast is cut diagonally, I can’t eat it.

Matt said that detail is gold for a writer because it feels pulled from a real life. You can pull it from your own life and gift it to your characters, and the reader can tell it’s not manufactured. He gave another example from The Sopranos: Tony Soprano’s mother won’t answer the phone after dark. The show’s creator, David Chase, confirmed on the DVD commentary that this came from his own mother, who genuinely would not answer the phone after dark and couldn’t explain why.

Matt’s practical advice was to keep a journal. Write down the strange, specific things that people do or say. Mine your own life for those hyper-specific details. You just need one per book. In my own writing, I’ve used this approach.

In my ARKANE thrillers, my character Morgan Sierra has always been Angelina Jolie in my mind—specifically Jolie in Lara Croft or Mr and Mrs Smith. And Blake Daniel in my crime thriller series was based on Jesse Williams from Grey’s Anatomy. I paste pictures of actors into my Scrivener projects. It helps with visuals, but also with the sense of the character, their energy and physicality.

But visual details only take you so far. It’s the behavioural quirks—the diagonal toast moments—that make a character feel genuinely alive.

That said, physical character tags can work brilliantly when they serve the story. As I discuss in How to Write a Novel, Robert Galbraith’s Cormoran Strike is an amputee, and his pain and the physical challenges of his prosthesis are a key part of every story—it’s not a cosmetic detail, it’s woven into the action and the character’s psychology.

My character Blake Daniel always wears gloves to cover the scars on his hands, which provides an angle into his wounded past as well as a visual cue for the reader. And of course, Harry Potter’s lightning-shaped scar isn’t just a mark—it’s a direct connection to his nemesis and the mythology of the entire series.

The rule of thumb is: if the tag tells us something about the character’s interior life or connects to the plot, it’s earning its place. If it’s just there to make the character visually distinctive, it’s probably a crutch. Game of Thrones takes character tags further with the family houses, each with their own mottos and sigils. The Starks say “Winter is coming” and their sigil is a dire wolf. Those aren’t just labels—they’re worldview made visible.

Actionable step: Start a “diagonal toast” notebook. Every time you notice something strange and specific about someone’s behaviour—something that feels too real to be made up—write it down. Then gift it to a character who needs more texture.

1. Displace Your Own Trauma into the WorkBarbara Nickless shared something deeply personal on episode 732 that fundamentally changed how I think about putting pain onto the page. While starting At First Light, the first book in her Dr. Evan Wilding series, she lost her son to epilepsy—something called SUDEP, Sudden Unexplained Death in Epilepsy. One day he was there, and the next day he was gone.

Barbara said that writing helped her cope with the trauma, that doing a deep dive into Old English literature and the Viking Age for the book’s research became a lifeline. But here’s what’s important: she didn’t give Dr. Evan Wilding her exact trauma. Evan Wilding is four feet five inches, and Barbara described how he has to walk through a world that won’t adjust to him. That’s its own form of learning to cope when circumstances are beyond your control. She displaced her genuine grief into the character’s different but parallel struggle.

When I asked her about the difference between writing for therapy and writing for an audience, she drew on her experience teaching creative writing to veterans through a collaboration between the US Department of Defense and the National Endowment for the Arts. She said she’s found that she can pour her heartache into her characters and process it through them, even when writing professionally, and that the genuine emotion is what touches readers. We’ve all been through our own losses and griefs, so seeing how a character copes can be deeply meaningful.

I’ve always found that putting my own pain onto the page is the most direct way to connect with a reader’s soul. My character Morgan Sierra’s musings on religion and the supernatural are often my own. Her restlessness, her fascination with the darker edges of faith—those come from me. But her Krav Maga fighting skills and her ability to kill the bad guys are definitely her own. That gap between what’s mine and what’s hers is where the fiction lives.

Barbara also said something on that episode that I wrote down and stuck on my wall. She said the act of producing itself is a balm to the soul. I’ve been thinking about that ever since. On my own wall, I have “Measure your life by what you create.” Different words, same truth.

Actionable step: If you’re carrying something heavy—grief, anger, fear, regret—consider how you might displace it into a character’s different but emotionally parallel struggle. Don’t copy your exact situation; transform it. The emotion will be genuine, and the reader will feel it.

1. Write Diverse Characters as Real PeopleWhen I spoke with Sarah Elisabeth Sawyer on episode 673—Sarah is Choctaw and a historical fiction author honoured by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian—she offered a perspective that every fiction writer needs to hear.

The key message was to move away from stereotypes. Don’t write your American Indian character as the “Wise Guide” who exists solely to dispense mystic wisdom to the white protagonist. Don’t limit diverse characters to historical settings, as though they only exist in the past. Place them in normal, contemporary roles. Your spaceship captain, your forensic scientist, your small-town baker—any of them can be American Indian, or Nigerian, or Japanese, and their heritage should be a lived-in part of their identity, not the sole reason they exist in the story.

I write international thrillers and dark fantasy, and my fiction is populated with characters from all over the world. I have a multi-cultural family and I’ve lived in many places and travelled widely, so I’ve met, worked with, and had relationships with people from different cultures. I find story ideas through travel, and if I set my books in a certain place, then the story is naturally populated with the people who live there.

As I discuss in my book, How to Write a Novel, the world is a diverse place, so your fiction needs to be populated with all kinds of people. If I only populated my fiction with characters like me, they would be boring novels. There are many dimensions of difference—race, nationality, sex, age, body type, ability, religion, gender, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, class, culture, education level—and even then, don’t assume that similar types of people think the same way.

Some authors worry they will make mistakes. We live in a time of outrage, and some authors have been criticised for writing outside their own experience. So is it too dangerous to try? Of course not. The media amplifies outliers, and most authors include diverse characters in every book without causing offence because they work hard to get it right. It’s about awareness, research, and intent.

Actionable step: Audit the cast of your current work in progress. Have you written a mono-cultural perspective for all of them? If so, consider who could bring a different background, perspective, or set of cultural specifics to the story. Not as a token addition, but as a real person with a real life.

1. Respect Tribal and Cultural SpecificitySarah Elisabeth Sawyer on episode 673 was emphatic about one thing: never treat diverse groups as monolithic. If you’re writing a Native American character, you must research the specific nation. Choctaw is not Navajo, just as British is not French.

Sarah described the distinct cultural markers of the Choctaw people—the diamond pattern you’ll see on traditional shirts and dresses, which represents the diamondback rattlesnake. They have distinct dances and songs. She said that if she saw someone in traditional dress at a distance, she would know whether they were Choctaw based on what they were wearing.

She encouraged writers who want to write specifically about a nation to get to know those people. Go to events, go to a powwow, learn about the individual culture. She noted that a big misconception is that American Indians exist only in the past—she stressed that they are still here, still living their cultures, and fiction should reflect that present reality.

I took a similar approach when writing Destroyer of Worlds, which is set mostly in India. I read books about Hindu myth, watched documentaries about the sadhus, and had one of my Indian readers from Mumbai check my cultural references. For Risen Gods, set in New Zealand with a young Maori protagonist, I studied books about Maori mythology and fiction by Maori authors, and had a male Maori reader check for cultural issues. Research is simply an act of empathy.

The practical takeaway is this: if you’re going to include a character from a specific cultural background, do the work. Use specific cultural details rather than generic signifiers. Sarah talked about how even she fell into stereotypes when she was first writing, until her mother pointed them out. If someone from within a culture can fall into those traps, the rest of us certainly can. Do the research, try your best, ask for help, and apologise if you need to.

Actionable step: If you’re writing a character from a specific culture, identify three to five sensory or behavioural details that are particular to that culture—not the generic version, but the real, researched, lived-in version. Consider hiring a sensitivity reader from that community to check your work.

1. Give Your Protagonist a Morally Neutral ‘Hero’ StatusMatt Bird was clear about this on episode 624: the word “hero” simply means the protagonist, the person we follow through the story. It’s a functional role, not a moral label. We don’t have to like them. We don’t even have to root for their goals in a moral sense. We just have to find them compelling enough to invest our attention in their problem-solving.

Think of Succession, where every member of the Roy family is varying degrees of awful, and yet the show was utterly compelling. Or WeCrashed, where Adam Neumann is a narcissistic con artist, but we can’t look away because he’s trying to solve the enormous problem of building an empire from nothing, and the tradecraft he employs is fascinating.

As I wrote in How to Write a Novel, readers must want to spend time with your characters. They don’t have to be lovable or even likable—that will depend on your genre and story choices—but they have to be captivating enough that we want to spend time with them. A character who is trying to solve a massive problem will naturally draw investment from the audience, even if we wouldn’t want to have tea with them.

Will Storr extended this idea by pointing out that the audience will actually root for a character to solve their problem even if the audience doesn’t actually want the character’s goal to be achieved in the real world. We don’t really want more billionaires, but we invested in Adam Neumann’s rise because that was the problem the story posed, and our brains are wired to invest in problem-solving.

This connects to something deeper: what does your character want, and why? As I explore in How to Write a Novel, desire operates on multiple levels.

Take a character like Phil, who joins the military during wartime. On the surface, she wants to serve her country. But she also wants to escape her dead-end town and learn new skills. Deeper still, her father and grandfather served, and by joining up, she hopes to finally earn their respect. And perhaps deepest of all, her father died on a mission under mysterious circumstances, and she wants to find out what happened from the inside.

That layering of motivation is what turns a flat character into a three-dimensional one. The audience doesn’t need to be told all of this explicitly. It can emerge through action, dialogue, and the choices the character makes under pressure. But you, the writer, need to know it. You need to know what your character really wants deep down, because that desire—more than any external plot device—is what drives the story forward.

And your antagonist needs the same depth. They also want something, often diametrically opposed to your protagonist, and they need a reason that makes sense to them. In my ARKANE thriller Tree of Life, my antagonist is the heiress of a Brazilian mining empire who wants to restore the Earth to its original state to atone for the destruction caused by her father’s company. She’s part of a radical ecological group who believe the only way to restore Nature is to end all human life. It’s extreme, but in an era of climate change, it’s a motivation readers can understand—even if they disagree with the solution.

Actionable step: If you’re struggling to make a morally grey character work, make sure their problem is big enough and their methods are specific and interesting enough that we invest in the how, even if we’re ambivalent about the what.

1. Build Vibrant Side CharactersGail Carriger made a point on episode 550 that was equal parts craft advice and business strategy. In a Heroine’s Journey model, side characters aren’t just fodder to be killed off to motivate the hero. They form a network. And because you don’t have to kill them—unlike in a hero’s journey, where allies are often betrayed or removed so the hero can be further isolated—you can pick up those side characters and give them their own books.

Gail said this creates a really voracious reader base. You write one series with vivid side characters, and then readers fall in love with those side characters and want their stories. So you write spin-offs. The romance genre does this brilliantly—think of the Bridgerton books, where each sibling gets their own novel. The side character in one book becomes the protagonist in the next.

Barbara Nickless experienced this firsthand with her Dr. Evan Wilding series. She has River Wilding, Evan’s adventurous brother, and Diana, the axe-throwing research assistant, and her editor has already expressed interest in a spin-off series with those characters. Barbara described creating characters she wants to spend time with, or characters who give her nightmares but also intrigue her. That’s the dual test: are they interesting enough for you to write, and interesting enough for readers to demand more?

As I wrote in How to Write a Novel, characters that span series can deepen the reader’s relationship with them as you expand their backstory into new plots. Readers will remember the character more than the plot or the book title, and look forward to the next instalment because they want more time with those people.

British crime author Angela Marsons described it as readers feeling like returning to her characters is like putting on a pair of old slippers.

Actionable step: Look at your supporting cast. Is there a side character who is vivid enough to carry their own story? If not, what could you add—a specific hobby, a distinct voice, a compelling backstory—that would make readers want more of them?

1. Use Voice as a Rhythmic ToolVoice is one of the most important elements of novel writing, and Matt Bird helped me think about it in a technical, mechanical way that I found really useful. He pointed out that the ratio of periods to commas defines a character’s internal reality.

A staccato rhythm—lots of periods, short sentences—suggests a character who is certain, grounded, or perhaps survivalist and traumatised. Katniss in The Hunger Games has a period-heavy voice. She’s in survival mode. She doesn’t have time for complexity or qualification.

A flowing, comma-heavy style suggests someone more academic, more nuanced, or possibly more scattered and manipulative. The character who qualifies everything, who adds sub-clauses and digressions, is a different kind of person from the character who speaks in declarations.

This is something you can actually measure. Pull up a passage of your character’s dialogue or internal monologue and count the periods versus the commas. If the rhythm doesn’t match who the character is supposed to be, you’ve found a mismatch you can fix. Sentence length is the heartbeat of your character’s persona.

And voice extends beyond rhythm to the words themselves. As I discussed in the metaphor families tip, each character should draw from a distinctive well of language. But voice also encompasses their relationship to silence. Some characters talk around the thing they mean; others say it straight. Some are self-deprecating; others are blunt to the point of rudeness. All of these choices are character choices, not just style choices.

I find it useful to read my dialogue aloud—and not just to check for naturalness, but to hear whether each character sounds distinct. If you could swap dialogue lines between two characters and nobody would notice, you have a voice problem. One practical test: cover the dialogue tags and see if you can tell who’s speaking from the words alone.

Actionable step: Choose a key passage from your protagonist’s point of view and read it aloud. Does the rhythm match the character? A soldier under fire should not sound like a philosophy professor at a wine tasting. Adjust the ratio of periods to commas until the voice feels right.

1. Link Character and Plot Until They’re InseparableWill Storr made the case on episode 490 that the number one problem he sees in the writing he encounters—in workshops, in submissions, even in published books—is that the characters and the plots are unconnected. There’s a story happening, and there are people in it, but the story isn’t a product of who those people are.

He said a story should be like life. In our lives, the plots are intimately connected to who we are as characters. The goals we pursue, the obstacles we face, the same problems that keep recurring—these are products of our personalities, our flaws, our specific ways of being in the world.

His framework is that your plot should be designed specifically to plot against your character. You’ve got a character with a particular flaw; the plot exists to test that flaw over and over until the character either transforms or doubles down and explodes. Jaws is the perfect example. Brody is afraid of water. A shark shows up in the coastal town he’s responsible for protecting. The entire plot is engineered to force him to confront the one thing he cannot face.

Will pointed out that the whole plot of Jaws is structured around Brody’s flaw. It begins with the shark arriving, the midpoint is when Brody finally gets the courage to go into the water, and the very final scene isn’t the shark blowing up—it’s Brody swimming back through the water. Even a film that’s ninety-eight percent action is, at its core, structured around a character with a character flaw.

This is the standard I aspire to in my own work, even in my action-heavy thrillers. The external plot should be a mirror of the internal struggle. When those two are aligned, the story becomes irresistible.

Will also made an important point about series fiction, which is where most commercial authors live. I asked him how this works when your character can’t be transformed at the end of every book because there has to be a next book. His answer was elegant: you don’t cure them. Episodic TV characters like Fleabag or David Brent or Basil Fawlty never truly change—and the fact that they don’t change is actually the source of the comedy. But every episode throws a new story event at them that tests and exposes their flaw. You just keep throwing story events at them again and again. That’s a soap opera, a sitcom, and a book series.

As I wrote in How to Write a Novel, character flaws are aspects of personality that affect the person so much that facing and overcoming them becomes central to the plot.

In Jaws, the protagonist Brody is afraid of the water, but he has to overcome that flaw to destroy the killer shark and save the town. But remember, your characters should feel like real people, so never define them purely by their flaws. The character addicted to painkillers might also be a brilliant and successful female lawyer who gets up at four in the morning to work out at the gym, likes eighties music, and volunteers at the local dog shelter at weekends.

Character wounds are different from flaws. They’re formed from life experience and are part of your character’s backstory—traumatic events that happened before the events of your novel but shape the character’s reactions in the present. In my ARKANE thrillers, Morgan Sierra’s husband Elian died in her arms during a military operation. This happened before the series begins, but her memories of it recur when she faces a firefight, and she struggles to find happiness again for fear of losing someone she loves once more.

And then there’s the perennial advice: show, don’t tell. Most writers have heard this so many times that it’s easy to nod and then promptly write scenes that tell rather than show. Basically, you need to reveal your character through action and dialogue, rather than explanation.

In my thriller Day of the Vikings, Morgan Sierra fights a Neo-Viking in the halls of the British Museum and brings him down with Krav Maga. That fight scene isn’t just about showing action. It opens up questions about her backstory, demonstrates character, and moves the plot forward. Telling would be something like: “Morgan was an expert in Krav Maga.” Showing is the reader discovering it through the scene itself.

Actionable step: Look at the main plot events of your novel. For each major turning point, ask: does this scene specifically test my protagonist’s flaw? If not, can you redesign the scene so that it does? The tighter the connection between character and plot, the more powerful the story.

1. The ‘Maestra’ Approach: Write Out of OrderIf you’re a discovery writer like me, you may feel like the deep character work I’ve been describing sounds more suited to plotters. But Barbara Nickless gave me a beautiful metaphor on episode 732 that reframes it entirely.

Barbara described her evolving writing process as being like a maestra standing in front of an orchestra. Sometimes you bring in the horns—a certain theme—and sometimes you bring in the strings—a certain character—and sometimes you turn to the soloist. It’s a more organic and jumping-around process than linear writing, and Barbara said she’s only recently given herself permission to work this way.

When I told her that I use Scrivener to write in scenes out of order and then drag and drop them into a structure later, she was genuinely intrigued. And this is how I’ve always worked. I’ll see the story in my mind like a movie trailer—flashes of the big emotional scenes, the pivotal confrontations, the moments of revelation—and I write those first. I don’t know how they hang together until quite late in the process. Then I’ll move scenes around, print the whole thing out, and figure out the connective tissue.

The point is that discovery writers can absolutely build deep characters. Sometimes writing the big emotional scenes first is how you discover who the character is before you fill in the rest. You don’t need a twenty-page character worksheet or a 200-page outline like Jeffery Deaver. You need to be willing to follow the character into the unknown and trust that the structure will emerge.

As Barbara said, she writes to know what she’s thinking. That’s the discovery writer’s credo. And I would add: I write to know who my characters are.

Actionable step: If you’re stuck on your current chapter, skip it. Write the scene that’s burning in your imagination, even if it’s from the middle or the end. That scene might be the key to unlocking who your character really is.

1. Use Research to Help with EmpathyResearch shouldn’t just be about factual accuracy—it’s a tool for finding the sensory details that create empathy. Barbara Nickless described research as almost an excuse to explore things that fascinate her, and I feel exactly the same way. I would go so far as to say that writing is an excuse for me to explore the things that interest me.

Barbara and I both travel for our stories. For her Dr. Evan Wilding books, she did deep research into Old English literature and the Viking Age. For my thriller End of Days, I transcribed hours of video from Appalachian snake-handling churches on YouTube to understand the worldview of the worshippers, because my antagonist was brought up in that tradition. I couldn’t just make that up. I had to hear their language, feel their conviction, understand why they would hold venomous serpents as an act of faith.

Barbara also mentioned getting to Israel and the West Bank for research, and I’ve been to both places too. Finding that one specific sensory detail—the smell of a particular location, the specific way an expert handles a tool, the sound of a particular kind of music—makes the character’s life feel lived-in. It’s the difference between a character who is described as living in a place and a character who inhabits it.

As I wrote in How to Write a Novel, don’t write what you know. Write what you want to learn about. I love research. It’s part of why I’m an author in the first place. I take any excuse to dive into a world different from my own. Research using books, films, podcasts, and travel, and focus particularly on sources produced by people from the worldview you want to understand.

Actionable step: For your next piece of character research, go beyond reading. Watch a documentary, visit a location, talk to someone who lives the experience. Find one sensory detail—a smell, a sound, a texture—that you couldn’t have invented. That detail will make your character feel real.

Bonus: Measure Your Life by What You CreateIn an age of AI and a tsunami of content, your ultimate brand protection is the quality of your human creation. Barbara Nickless said that the act of producing itself is a balm to the soul, and I believe that with every fibre of my being.

Don’t be afraid to take that step back, like I did with my deadlifting. Take the time to master these deeper craft skills. It might feel like you’re slowing down or going backwards by not chasing the latest marketing trend, but it’s the only way to step forward into a sustainable, high-quality career.

Your characters are your signature. No AI can replicate the specificity of your lived experience, the emotional truth of your displaced trauma, or the sensory details you’ve gathered from a life of curiosity and travel. Those are yours. Pour them into your characters, and they will resonate for years to come.

Actionable Takeaway:

Identify the Dramatic Question for your current protagonist. Can you state it in a single sentence with the kind of specificity Will Storr described? Is it as clear as “Are you ordinary or extraordinary?” or “Are you the only adult in the room?”

If you can’t answer it with that kind of precision, your character might still be a sketch. Give them a diagonal toast moment today. Find the one hyper-specific detail that proves they are not an imitation of life.

And then ask yourself: does your plot test your character’s flaw in every major scene? If you can align those two things—a precisely defined character and a plot that exists to test them—you will have a story that readers cannot put down.

References and Deep DivesThe episodes I’ve referenced today are all available with full transcripts at TheCreativePenn.com:

Episode 732 — Facing Fears, and Writing Unique Characters with Barbara Nickless

Episode 673 — Writing Choctaw Characters and Diversity in Fiction with Sarah Elisabeth Sawyer

Episode 624 — Writing Characters with Matt Bird

Episode 550 — The Heroine’s Journey with Gail Carriger

Episode 490 — How Character Flaws Shape Story with Will Storr

Books mentioned:The Secrets of Character: Writing a Hero Anyone Will Love by Matt Bird

The Science of Storytelling by Will Storr

The Heroine’s Journey by Gail Carriger

How to Write a Novel: From Idea to Book by Joanna Penn

You can find all my books for authors at CreativePennBooks.com and my fiction and memoir at JFPennBooks.com

Happy writing!

How was this episode created? This episode was initiated created by NotebookLM based on YouTube videos of the episodes linked above from YouTube/TheCreativePenn, plus my text chapters on character from How to Write a Novel. NotebookLM created a blog post from the material and then I expanded it and fact checked it with Claude.ai 4.6 Opus, and then I used my voice clone at ElevenLabs to narrate it.

The post Writing Characters: 15 Actionable Tips For Writing Deep Character first appeared on The Creative Penn.

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How do you capture something as enormous and personal as the feeling of “home” in a book? How can you navigate the chaotic discovery period in writing something new? With Roz Morris.

In the intro, KU vs Wide [Written Word Media]; Podcasts Overtake Radio, book marketing implications [The New Publishing Standard]; Tips for podcast guests;
The Vatican embraces AI for translation, but not for sermons [National Catholic Reporter]; NotebookLM; Self-Publishing in German; Bones of the Deep.

This episode is sponsored by Publisher Rocket, which will help you get your book in front of more Amazon readers so you can spend less time marketing and more time writing. I use Publisher Rocket for researching book titles, categories, and keywords — for new books and for updating my backlist. Check it out at www.PublisherRocket.com

This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn

Roz Morris is an award-nominated literary fiction author, memoirist, and previously a bestselling ghostwriter. She writes writing craft books for authors under the Nail Your Novel brand, and is also an editor, speaker, and writing coach. Her latest travel memoir is Turn Right at the Rainbow: A Diary of House-Hunting, Happenstance & Home.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.

Show Notes

• How being an indie author has evolved over 15 years, from ebooks-only to special editions, multi-voice audiobooks and tools to help with everything
• Why “home” is such a powerful emotional theme and how to turn personal experiences into universal memoir
• Practical craft tips on show-don't-tell, writing about real people, and finding the right book title
• The chaotic discovery writing phase — why some books take seven years and why that's okay
• Building a newsletter sustainably by finding your authentic voice (and the power of a good pet story)
• Low-key book marketing strategies for memoir, including Roz's community-driven “home” collage campaign

You can find Roz at RozMorris.org.

Transcript of the interview with Roz MorrisJOANNA: Roz Morris is an award-nominated literary fiction author, memoirist, and previously a bestselling ghostwriter. She writes writing craft books for authors under the Nail Your Novel brand, and is also an editor, speaker, and writing coach.

Her latest travel memoir is Turn Right at the Rainbow: A Diary of House-Hunting, Happenstance & Home.

Welcome back to the show, Roz.

ROZ: Hi, Jo. It's so lovely to be back. I love that we managed to catch up every now and again on what we're doing. We've been doing this for so long.

JOANNA: In fact, if people don't know, the first time you came on this show was 2011, which is 15 years.

ROZ: I know!

JOANNA: It is so crazy. I guess we should say, we do know each other in person, in real life, but realistically we mainly catch up when you come on the podcast.

ROZ: Yes, we do, and by following what we're doing around the web. So I read your newsletters, you read mine.

JOANNA: Exactly. So good to return. You write all kinds of different things, but let's first take a look back. The first time you were on was 2011, 15 years ago. You've spanned traditional and indie, you've seen a lot. You know a lot of people in publishing as well.

What are the key things you think have shifted over the years, and why do you still choose indie for your work?ROZ: Well, lots of things have shifted. Some things are more difficult now, some things are a lot easier.

We were lucky to be in right at the start and we learned the ropes and managed to make a lot of contacts with people. Now it's much more difficult to get your work out there and noticed by readers. You have to be more knowledgeable about things like marketing and promotions.

But that said, there are now much better tools for doing all this. Some really smart people have put their brains to work about how authors can get their work to the right readers, and there's also a lot more understanding of how that can be done in the modern world.

Everything is now much more niche-driven, isn't it? People know exactly what kind of thriller they like or what kind of memoir they like. In the old days it was probably just, “Well, you like thrillers,” and that could be absolutely loads of things.

Now we can find far better who might like our work. The tools we have are astonishing. To start with, in about 2011, we could only really produce ebooks and paperbacks. That was it. Anything else, you'd have to get a print run that would be quite expensive.

Now we can get amazing, beautiful special editions made. We can do audiobooks, multi-voice audiobooks. We can do ebooks with all sorts of enhancements. We can even make apps if we want to. There's absolutely loads that creators can do now that they couldn't before, so it's still a very exciting world.

JOANNA: When we first met, there was still a lot of negativity here in the UK around indie authors or self-publishing. That does feel like it's shifted.

Do you think that stigma around self-publishing has changed?ROZ: I think it has really changed, yes. To start with, we were regarded as a bit of the Wild West. We were just tramping in and making our mark in places that we hadn't been invited into.

Now it's changed entirely. I think we've managed to convince people that we have the same quality standards.

Readers don't mind—I don't think the readers ever minded, actually, so long as the book looked right, felt right, read right. It's much easier now. It's much more of a level playing field. We can prove ourselves. In fact, we don't necessarily have to prove ourselves anymore. We just go and find readers.

JOANNA: Yes, I feel like that. I have nothing to prove. I just get on with my work and writing our books and putting them out there. We've got our own audiences now. I guess I always think of it as perhaps not a shadow industry, but almost a parallel industry.

You have spanned a lot of traditional publishing and you still do editing work. You know a lot of trad pub authors too.

Do you still actively choose indie for a particular reason?ROZ: I do. I really like building my own body of work, and I'm now experienced enough to know what I do well, what I need advice with, and help with. I mean, we don't do all this completely by ourselves, do we? We bring in experts who will give us the right feedback if we're doing a new genre or a genre that's new to us.

I choose indie because I like the control. Because I began in traditional publishing—I was making books for other people—I just learned all the trades and how to do everything to a professional standard. I love being able to apply that to my own work.

I also love the way I can decide what I'm going to write next. If I was traditionally published, I would have to do something that fitted with whatever the publisher would want of me, and that isn't necessarily where my muse is taking me or what I've become interested in.

I think creative humans evolve throughout their lives. They become interested in different things, different themes, different ways of expressing themselves. I began by thinking I would just write novels, and now I've found myself writing memoirs as well.

That shift would have been difficult if someone else was having to make me fit into their marketing plans or what their imprint was known for. But because I've built my own audience, I can just bring them with me and say, “You might like this. It's still me. I'm just doing something different.”

JOANNA: I like that phrase: “creative humans.” That's what we are. As you say, I never thought I would write a memoir, and then I wrote Pilgrimage, and I think there's probably another one on its way. We do these different things over time.

Let's get into this new book, Turn Right at the Rainbow. It's about the idea of home. I've talked a lot about home on my Books And Travel Podcast, but not so much here.

Why is home such an emotional topic, for both positive and negative reasons? Why did you want to explore it?ROZ: I think home is so emotional because it grows around you and it grows on you very slowly without you really realising it. As you are not looking, you suddenly realise, “Oh, it means such a lot.”

I love to play this mind game with myself—if you compare what your street looks like to you now and how it looked the first time you set eyes on it, it's a world of difference.

There are so many emotional layers that build up just because of the amount of time we spend in a place. It's like a relationship, a very slow-growing friendship. And as you say, sometimes it can be negative as well.

I became really fascinated with this because we decided to move house and we'd lived in the same house for about 30 years, which is a lot of time. It had seen a lot of us—a lot of our lives, a lot of big decisions, a lot of good times, a lot of difficult times. I felt that was all somehow encapsulated in the place.

I know that readers of certain horror or even spiritual fiction will have this feeling that a place contains emotions and pasts and all sorts of vibes that just stay in there. When we were going around looking at a house to buy, I was thinking, “How do we even know how we will feel about it?”

We're moving out of somewhere that has immense amounts of feelings and associations, and we're trying to judge whether somewhere else will feel right. It just seemed like we were making a decision of cosmic proportions.

It comes down so much to chance as well. You're not only just deciding, “Okay, I'd like to buy that one,” and pressing a button like on eBay and you've won it. It doesn't happen like that. There are lots of middle steps.

The other person's got to agree to sell to you, not do the dirty on you and sell to someone else. You've got all sorts of machinations going on that you have no idea about. And you only have what's on offer—you only get an opportunity to buy a place because someone else has decided to let it go.

All this seemed like immense amounts of chance, of dice rolling. I thought, yet we end up in these places and they mean so much to us. It just blew my mind. I thought, “I've got to write about this.”

JOANNA: It's really interesting, isn't it? I really only started using the word “home” after the pandemic and living here in Bath. We had luckily just bought a house before then, and I'd never really considered anywhere to be a home.

I've talked about this idea of third culture kids—people who grow up between cultures and don't feel like there's a home anywhere.

I was really interested in your book because there's so much about the functional things that have to happen when you move house or look for a house, and often people aren't thinking about it as deeply as you are.

So did you start working on the memoir as you went to see places, or was it something you thought about when you were leaving?

Was it a “moving towards” kind of memoir or a “sad nostalgia” memoir?ROZ: Well, it could have been very sad and nostalgic because I do like to write really emotional things, and they're not necessarily for sharing with everybody, but I was very interested in the emotions of it.

I started keeping diaries. Some of them were just diaries I'd write down, some of them were emails I'd send to friends who were saying, “How's it going?” And then I'd find I was just writing pieces rather than emails, and it built up really.

JOANNA: It's interesting, you said you write emotional things. We mentioned nostalgia, and obviously there are memories in the home, but it's very easy to say a word like “nostalgia” and everyone thinks that means different things. One of the important things about writing is to be very specific rather than general.

Can you give us some tips about how we can turn big emotions into specific written things that bring it alive for our readers?ROZ: It's really interesting that you mention nostalgia, because what we have to be careful of is not writing just for ourselves. It starts with us—our feelings about something, our responses, our curiosities—but we then have to let other people in.

There's nothing more boring than reading something that's just a memoir manuscript that doesn't reach out to anyone in any way. It's like looking through their holiday snaps.

What you have to do is somehow find something bigger in there that will allow everyone to connect and think, “Oh, this is about me too,” or “I've thought this too.”

As I said, we start with things that feel powerful and important for us, and I think we don't necessarily need to go looking for them. They emerge the more deeply we think about what we're writing. We find they're building.

Certainly for me, it's what pulls me back to an idea, thinking, “There's something in this idea that's really talking to me now. What is it?”

Often I'll need to go for walks and things to let the logical mind turn off and ideas start coming in. But I'll find that something is building and it seems to become more and more something that will speak to others rather than just to me.

That's one way of doing it—by listening to your intuition and delving more and more until you find something that seems worth saying to other people.

But you could do it another way. If you decided you wanted to write a book about home, and you'd already got your big theme, you could then think, “Well, how will I make this into something manageable?” So you start with something big and build it into smaller-scale things that can be related to.

You might look at ideas of homes—situations of people who have lost their home, like the kind of displacement we see at the moment. Or we might look at another aspect, such as people who sell homes and what they must feel like being these go-betweens between worlds, between people who are doing these immense changes in their lives.

Or we might think of an ecological angle—the planet Earth and what we're doing to it, or our place in the cosmos.

We might start with a thing we want to write about and then find, “How are we going to treat it?” That usually comes down to what appeals to us. It might be the ecological side. It might be the story of a few estate agents who are trying to sell homes for people. Or it might be like mine—just a personal story of trying to move house.

From that, we can create something that will have a wider resonance as well as starting with something that's personally interesting to you. The big emotions will come out of that wider resonance.

JOANNA: Trying to go deeper on that—

It's the “show, don't tell” idea, isn't it? If you'd said, “I felt very sad about leaving my house” or “I felt very sad about the prospect of leaving my house,” that is not a whole book.

ROZ: Yes. It's why you felt sad, how you felt sad, what it made you think of. That's a very good point about “show, don't tell,” which is a fundamental writing technique.

It basically tells people exactly how you feel about a particular thing, which is not the same as the way anyone else would feel about it—but still, curiously, it can be universal and something that we can all tap into.

Funnily enough, by being very specific, by saying, “I realised when we'd signed the contract to sell the house that it wasn't ours anymore, and it had been, and I felt like I was betraying it,” that starts to get really personal.

People might think, “Yes, I felt like that too,” or “I hadn't thought you'd feel like that, but I can understand it.” Those specifics are what really let people into the journey that you're taking them on.

JOANNA: And isn't this one of the challenges, that we're not even going to use a word like “sad,” basically.

ROZ: Yes. It's like, who was it who said, “Don't tell me if they got wet—tell me how it felt to get wet in that particular situation.” Then the reader will think, “Oh yes, they got wet,” but they'll also have had an experience that took them somewhere interesting.

JOANNA: Yes. Show me the raindrops on the umbrella and the splashing through the puddles. I think this is so important with big emotions.

Also, when we say nostalgia—we've talked before about Stranger Things and Kate Bush and the way Stranger Things used songs and nostalgia. Oh, I was watching Derry Girls—have you seen Derry Girls?

ROZ: No, I haven't yet.

JOANNA: Oh, it's brilliant. It's so good. It's pretty old now, but it's a nineties soundtrack and I'm watching going, “Oh, they got this so right.” They just got it right with the songs. You feel nostalgic because you feel an emotion that is linked to that music.

It makes you feel a certain way, but everyone feels these things in different ways. I think that is a challenge of fiction, and also memoir. Certainly with memoir and fiction, this is so important.

ROZ: Yes, and I was just thinking with self-help books, it's even important there because self-help books have to show they understand how the reader is feeling.

JOANNA: Yes, and sometimes you use anecdotes to do that.

Another challenge with memoir—in this book, you're going round having a look at places, and they're real places and there are real people. This can be difficult.

What are things that people need to be wary of if using real people in real places? Do you need permissions for things?ROZ: That book was particularly tricky because, as you said, I was going around real places and talking about real people. With most of them, they're not identifiable. Even though I was specific about particular aspects of particular houses, it would be very hard for anyone to know where those houses were.

I think possibly the only way you would recognise it is if that happened to be your own house. The people, similarly—there's a lot about estate agents and other professionals. They were all real incidents and real things that happened, but no one is identifiable.

A very important thing about writing a book like this is you're always going to have antagonists, because you have to have people who you're finding difficult, people who are making life a bit difficult for you. You have to present them in a way that understands what it's like to be them as well.

If you're writing a book where your purpose is to expose wrongdoing or injustices, then you might be more forthright about just saying, “This is wrong, the way this person behaved was wrong.” You might identify villains if that's appropriate, although you'd have to be very careful legally.

This kind of book is more nuanced. The antagonists were simply people who were trying to do the right thing for them. You have to understand what it's like to be them.

Quite a lot of the time, I found that the real story was how ill-equipped I sometimes felt to deal with people who were maybe covering something up, or maybe not, but just not expressing themselves very clearly.

Estate agents who had an agenda, and I was thinking, “Who are they acting for? Are they acting for me, or are they acting for someone else that we don't even know about?” There's a fair bit of conflict in the book, but it comes from people being people and doing what they have to do.

I just wanted to find a good house in an area that was nice, a house I could trust and rely on, for a price that was right. The people who were selling to me just wanted to sell the house no matter what because that was what they needed to do.

You always have to understand what the other person's point of view is. Often in this kind of memoir, even though you might be getting very frustrated, it's best to also see a bit of a ridiculous side to yourself—when you're getting grumpy, for instance.

It's all just humans being humans in a situation where ultimately you're going to end up doing a life-changing and important thing. I found there's quite a lot of humour in that.

We were shuffling things around and, as I said, we were eventually going to be making a cosmic change that would affect the place we called home. I found that quite amusing in a lot of ways. I think you've got to be very levelheaded about this, particularly about writing about other people.

Sometimes you do have to ask for permission. I didn't have to do that very much in this book. There were people I wrote about who are actually friends, who would recognise themselves and their stories. I checked that they didn't mind me quoting particular things, and they were all fine with that.

In my previous memoir, Not Quite Lost, I actually wrote about a group of people who were completely identifiable. They would definitely have known who they were, and other people would have known who they were. There was no hiding them.

They were the people near Brighton who were cryonicists—preserving dead bodies, freezing them, in the hope that they could be revived at a much later date when science had solved the problem that killed them.

I went to visit this group of cryonicists, and I'd written a diary about it at the time. Then I followed up when I was writing the book to find out what happened to them. I thought, I've simply got to contact them and tell them I'm going to write this. “I'll send it to you, you give me your comments,” and I did.

They gave me some good comments and said, “Oh, please don't put that,” or “Let me clarify this.” Everything was fine. So there I did actually seek them out and check that what I was going to write was okay.

JOANNA: Yes, in that situation, there can't be many cryonicists in that area.

ROZ: They really were identifiable.

JOANNA: There's probably only one group! But this is really interesting, because obviously memoir is a personal thing. You're curating who you are as well in the book, and your husband. I think it's interesting, because I had the problem of “Am I giving away too much about myself?”

Do you feel like with everything you've written, you've already given away everything about yourself by now?

Are you just completely relaxed about being personal, for yourself and for your husband?ROZ: I think I have become more relaxed about it. My first memoir wasn't nearly as personal as yours was. You were going to some quite difficult places.

With Turn Right at the Rainbow, I was approaching some darker places, actually, and I had to consider how much to reveal and how much not to. But I found once I started writing, the honesty just took over.

I thought, “This is fine. I have read plenty of books that have done this, and I've loved them. I've loved getting to know someone on that deeper level.” It was just something I took my example from—other writers I'd enjoyed.

JOANNA: Yes. I think that's definitely the way memoir has to happen, because it can be very hard to know how to structure it.

Let's come to the title. Turn Right at the Rainbow. Really great title, and obviously a subtitle which is important as well for theme.

Talk about where the title came from and also the challenges of titling books of any genre. You've had some other great titles for your novels—at least titles I've thought, “Oh yes, that's perfect.” Titling can be really hard.

ROZ: Oh, thank you for that. Yes, it is hard. Ever Rest, which was the title of my last novel, just came to me early on. I was very lucky with that. It fitted the themes and it fitted what was going on, but it was just a bolt from the blue.

I found that also with Turn Right at the Rainbow, it was an accident. It slipped out. I was going to call it something else, and then this incident happened. “Turn Right at the Rainbow” is actually one of the stories in the book. I call it the title track, as if it's an album.

We were going somewhere in the car and the sat nav said, “Turn right at the rainbow.” And Dave and I just fell about, “What did it just say?!” It also seemed to really sum up the journey we were on. We were looking for rainbows and pots of gold and completely at the mercy of chance.

It just stayed with me. It seemed the right thing. I wrote the piece first and then I kept thinking, “Well, this sounds like a good title.” Dave said it sounded like a good title. And then a friend of mine who does a lot of beta reading for me said, “Oh, that is the title, isn't it?” When several people tell you that's the title, you've got to take notice.

But how we find these things is more difficult, as you said. You just work and work at it, beating your head against the wall. I find they always come to me when I'm not looking. It really helps to do something like exercise, which will put you in a bit of a different mind state. Do you find this as well?

JOANNA: Yes, I often like a title earlier on that then changes as the book goes. I mean, we're both discovery writers really, although you do reverse outlines and other things. You have a chaotic discovery phase.

I feel like when I'm in that phase, it might be called something, and then I often find that's not what it ends up being, because the book has actually changed in the process.

ROZ: Yes, very much. That's part of how we realise what we should be writing. I do have working titles and then something might come along and say, “This seems actually like what you should call it and what you've been working towards, what you've been discovering about it.”

I think a good title has a real sense of emotional frisson as well. With memoir, it's easier because we can add a subtitle to explain what we mean. With fiction, it's more difficult. We've got to really hope that it all comes through those few words, and that's a bit harder.

JOANNA: Let's talk about your next book. On your website it says it might be a novel, it might be narrative nonfiction, and you have a working title of Four.

I wondered if you'd talk a bit more about this chaotic discovery writing phase when we just don't know what's coming.I feel like you and I have been doing this long enough—you longer than me—so maybe we're okay with it. But newer writers might find this stage really difficult. Where's the fun in it? Why is it so difficult? And how can people deal with it?

ROZ: You've summed that up really well. It's fun and it's difficult, and I still find it difficult even after all these years. I have to remind myself, looking back at where Ever Rest started, because that was a particularly difficult one. It took me seven years to work out what to do with it, and I wrote three other books in the meantime.

It just comes together in the end. What I find is that something takes root in my mind and it collects things. The title you just picked out there—the book with working title of Four—it's now two books. One possibly another memoir and one possibly fiction.

It's evolving all the time. I'm just collecting what seems to go with it for now and thinking, “That belongs with it somehow. I don't yet know how, but my intuition is that the two work well together.” There's a harmony there that I see.

In the very early stages, that's what I find something is. Then I might get a more concrete idea, say a piece of story or a character, and I'll have the feeling that they really fit together.

Once I've got something concrete like that, I can start doing more active research to pursue the idea. But in the beginning, they're all just little twinkles in the eye and you just have to let them develop.

If you want to get started on something because you feel you want to get started and you don't feel happy if you're not working on something, you could do a far more active kind of discovery. Writing lists. Lists are great for this.

I find lists of what you don't want it to be are just as helpful as what you do want it to be because that certainly narrows down a lot and helps you make good choices.

You've got a lot of choices to make at the beginning of a book. You've got to decide: What's it going to be about? What isn't it going to be about? What kind of characters am I interested in? What kind of situations am I interested in?

What doesn't interest me about this situation? Very important—saves you a lot of time. What does interest me?

If you can start by doing that kind of thing, you will find that you start gathering stuff that gets attracted to it. It's almost like the world starts giving it to you. This is discovery writing, but it's also chivvying it along a bit and getting going. It does work.

Joanna: I like the idea of listing what you don't want it to be. I think that's very useful because often writers, especially in the early stages—or even not, I still struggle with this—it's knowing what genre it might actually be.

With Bones of the Deep, which is my next thriller, it was originally going to be horror and I was writing it, and then I realised one of the big differences between horror and thriller is the ending and how character arcs are resolved and the way things are written.

I was just like, “Do you know what? I actually feel like this is more thriller than horror,” and that really shaped the direction. Even though so much of it was the same, it shaped a lot about the book.

It's always hard talking about this stuff without giving spoilers, but I think deciding, “Okay, this is not a horror,” actually helped me find my way back to thriller.

ROZ: Yes, I do know what you mean. That makes perfect sense to me, with no spoilers either. It's so interesting how a very broad-strokes picture like that can still be very helpful. Just trying to make something a bit different from the way you've been envisaging it can lead to massive breakthroughs.

“Oh no, it's not a thriller—I don't have to be aiming for that kind of effect.” Or try changing the tone a little bit and see if that just makes you happier with what you're making, more comfortable with it.

JOANNA: You mentioned the seven years that Ever Rest took. We should say the title is in two words—”Ever” and “Rest”—but it is also about Everest the mountain in many ways. That's why it's such a perfect title.

If that took seven years and you were doing all this other stuff and writing other books along the way, how do you keep your research under control? How do you do that? I still use Scrivener projects as my main research place.

How do you do your research and organisation?ROZ: A lot of scraps of paper. My desk is massive. It used to be a dining table with leaves in it. It's spread out to its fullest length, and it's got heaps of little pieces of paper. I know what's on them all, and there are different areas, different zones.

I'm very much a paper writer because I like the tangibility of it. I also like the creativity of taking a piece of paper and tearing it into an odd shape and writing a note on that. It seems as sort of profound and lucky as the idea. I really like that.

I do make text files and keep notes that way. Once something is starting to get to a phase where it's becoming serious, it will then be a folder with various files that discuss different aspects of it.

I do a lot of discussing with myself while writing, and I don't necessarily look at it all again. The writing of it clarifies something or allows me to put something aside and say, “No, that doesn't quite belong.”

Gradually I start to look at things, look at what I've gathered, and think, “How does this fit with this?” And it helps to look away as well. As I said with finding titles, sometimes the right thing is in your subconscious and it's waiting to just sail in if you look at it in a different way.

There's a lot to be said for working on several ideas, not looking at some of them for a while, then going back and thinking, “Oh, I know what to do with this now.”

JOANNA: Yes. My Writing the Shadow, I was talking about that when we met, and that definitely took about a decade.

ROZ: Yes.

JOANNA: I kept having to come back to that, and sometimes we're just not ready.

Even as experienced writers, we're not ready for a particular book. With Bones of the Deep, I did the trip that it's based on in 1999. Since I became a writer, I've thought I have to use that trip in some way, and I never found the right way to use it. I came at it a couple of times and it just never sat right with me.

Then something on this master's course I'm doing around human remains and indigenous cultures just suddenly all clicked. You can't really rush that, can you?

ROZ: You absolutely can't. It's something you develop a sense for, the more you do—whether something's ready or whether you should just let it think about itself for a while whilst you work on something else.

It really helps to have something else to work on because I panic a bit if I don't have something creative to do. I just have to create, I have to make things, particularly in writing. But I also like doing various little arty things as well. I need to always have something to be writing about or exploring in words.

Sometimes a book isn't ready for that intense pressure of being properly written. So it helps to have several things that I can play with and then pick one and go, “Okay, now I'm going to really perform this on the page.”

JOANNA: Do you find that nonfiction—because you have some craft books as well—do you find the nonfiction side is quite different? Can you almost just go and write a nonfiction book or work on someone else's project?

Does that use a different kind of creativity?ROZ: Yes, it does. Creativity where you're trying to explain something to creative people is totally different from creativity where you're trying to involve them in emotions and a journey and nuances of meaning. They're very different, but they're still fun.

So, yes, I am an editor as well, and that feeds my creativity in various unexpected ways. I'll see what someone has done and think, “Oh, that's very interesting that they did that.”

It can make me think in different ways—different shapes for stories, different kinds of characters to have. It really opens your eyes, working with other creative people.

JOANNA: I wanted to return to what you said at the beginning, that it is more difficult these days to get our work noticed. There's certainly a challenge in writing a travel memoir about home. What are you doing to market this book?

What have you learned about book marketing for memoir in particular that might help other people?ROZ: Partly I realised it was quite a natural progression for me because in my newsletter I always write a couple of little pieces. I think they're called “life writing.” Just little things that have happened to me. That's sort of like memoir, creative nonfiction, personal essays.

I was quite naturally writing that sort of thing to my newsletter readers, and I realised that was already good preparation for the kind of way that I would write in a memoir.

As for the actual campaign, I actually came up with an idea which quite surprised me because I didn't think I was good at that. I'm making a collage of the word “home” written in lots of different handwriting, on lots of different things, in lots of different languages.

I'm getting people to contribute these and send them to me, and I'm building them into a series of collages that's just got the word “home” everywhere. People have been contributing them by sending them by email or on Facebook Messenger, and I've been putting them up on my social platforms.

They look stunning. It's amazing. People are writing the word “home” on a post-it or sticking it to a picture of their radiator. Someone wrote it in snow on her car when we had snow.

Someone wrote it on a pottery shard she found in her drive when she bought the house. She thought it was mysterious. There are all these lovely stories that people are telling me as well.

I'm making them into little artworks and putting them up every day as the book comes to launch. It's so much fun, and it also has a deeper purpose because it shows how home is different for all of us and how it builds as uniquely as our handwriting. Our handwriting has a story. I should do a book about that!

JOANNA: That's a weird one. Handwriting always gets me, although it'd be interesting these days because so many people don't handwrite things anymore. You can probably tell the age of someone by how well-developed their handwriting is.

ROZ: Except mine has just withered. I can barely write for more than a few minutes.

JOANNA: Oh, I know what you mean. Your hand gets really tired.

ROZ: We used to write three-hour exams. How did we do that?

JOANNA: I really don't know.

JOANNA: Just coming back on that. You mentioned mainly you're doing your newsletter and connecting with your own community. You've done podcasts with me and with other people. But I feel like in the indie community, the whole “you must build your newsletter” thing is described as something quite frantic.

How have you built a newsletter in a sustainable manner?ROZ: I've built it by finding what suited me. To start with I thought, “What will I put in it? News, obviously.” But I wasn't doing that much that was newsworthy. Then I began to examine what news could actually be.

The turning point really happened when I wrote the first memoir, Not Quite Lost: Travels Without a Sense of Direction. I thought, “I have to explain to people why I'm writing a memoir,” because it seemed like a very audacious thing to do—”Read about me!” I thought I had to explain myself.

So I told the story of how I came to think about writing such an audacious book. I just found a natural way to tell stories about what I was doing creatively.

I thought, “I like this. I like writing a newsletter like this.” And it's not all me, me, me. It's “I'm discovering this and it makes me think this,” and it just seems to be generally about life, about little questions that we might all face.

From then, I found I really enjoyed writing a newsletter because I felt I had something to say. I couldn't put lists of where I was speaking, what I was teaching, what special offers I had, because that wasn't really how my creative life worked.

Once I found something I could sustainably write about every month, it really helped. Oh, it also helps to have a pet, by the way.

JOANNA: Yes, you have a horse!

ROZ: I've got a horse. People absolutely love hearing the stories about my ongoing relationship with this horse. Even if they're not horsey, they write to me and say, “We just love your horse.” It helps to have a human interest thing going on like that.

So that works for me. Everyone's got different things that will work for them. But for me, it builds just a sense of connection, human connection. I'm human, making things.

JOANNA: In terms of actually getting people signed up—has it literally just been over time? People have read your book, signed up from the link at the back?

Have you ever done any specific growth marketing around your newsletter?ROZ: I tried a little bit of growth marketing. I have a freebie version of one of my Nail Your Novel books and I put that on a promotion site. I got lots of newsletter signups, but they sort of dwindled away.

When I get unsubscribes, it's usually from that list, because it wasn't really what they came for. They just came for a free book of writing tips. While I do writing tips on my blog—I'm still doing those—it wasn't really what my newsletter was about.

What I found was that that wasn't going to get people who were going to be interested long-term in what I was writing about in my newsletter. Whatever you do, I found, has got to be true to what you are actually giving them.

JOANNA: Yes, I think that's really key. I make sure I email once every couple of weeks. And you welcome the unsubscribes. You have to welcome them because those people are not right for you and they're not interested in what you're doing.

At the end of the day, we're still trying to sell books. As much as you're enjoying the connection with your audience, you are still trying to sell Turn Right at the Rainbow and your other books, right?

ROZ: Absolutely, yes. And as you say, someone who decides, “No, not for me anymore,” and that's good. There are still people who you are right for.

JOANNA: Mm-hmm.

ROZ: I do market my newsletter in a very low-key way. I make a graphic every month for the newsletter, it's like a magazine cover. “What's in it?” And I put that around all my social media. I change my Facebook page header so it's got that on it, my Bluesky header.

People can see what it's like, what the vibe is, and they know where to find it if they're interested. I find that kind of low-key approach works quite well for what I'm offering. It's got to be true to what you offer.

JOANNA: Yes, and true for a long-term career, I think. When I first met you and your husband Dave, it was like, “Oh, here are some people who are in this writing business, have already been in it for a while.” And both of you are still here. I just feel like—

You have to do it in a sustainable way, whether it's writing or marketing or any of this. The only way to do it is to, as you said, live as a creative human and not make it all frantic and “must be now.”

ROZ: Yes. I mean, I do have to-do lists that are quite long for every week, but I've learned to pace myself. I've learned how often I can write a good blog post. I could churn out blog posts that were far more frequent, but they wouldn't be as good. They wouldn't be as properly thought through.

In the old days with blogs, you had an advantage if you were blogging very frequently, I think you got more noticed by Google because you were constantly putting up fresh content. But if that's not sustainable for you, it's not going to do you any good.

Now there's so much content around that it's probably fine to post once a month if that is what you're going to do and how you're going to present the best of yourself.

I see a lot on Substack—I've recently started Substack as well—I see people writing every other day. I think they're good, that's interesting, but I don't have time to read it. I would love to have the time, but I don't.

So there's actually no sin in only posting once a month—one newsletter a month, one blog post a month, one Substack a month. That's plenty. People will still find that enough if they get you.

JOANNA: Fantastic.

So where can people find you and your books and everything you do online?ROZ: My website is probably the easiest place, RozMorris.org.

JOANNA: Brilliant. Well, thank you so much for your time, Roz. As ever, that was great.

ROZ: Thank you, Jo.

The post Writing Emotion, Discovery Writing, And Slow Sustainable Book Marketing With Roz Morris first appeared on The Creative Penn.

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How do you build a creative life that spans music, writing, film, and spiritual practice? Alicia Jo Rabins talks about weaving multiple creative strands into a sustainable career and why the best advice for any creator might simply be: just make the thing.

In the intro, backlist promotion strategy [Written Word Media]; Successful author business [Novel Marketing Podcast]; Alliance of Independent Authors Indie Author Bookstore; Bones of the Deep – J.F. Penn

This podcast is sponsored by Kobo Writing Life, which helps authors self-publish and reach readers in global markets through the Kobo eco-system. You can also subscribe to the Kobo Writing Life podcast for interviews with successful indie authors.

This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn

Alicia Jo Rabins is an award-winning writer, musician, performer, as well as a Torah teacher and ritualist. She's the creator of Girls In Trouble, a feminist indie-folk song cycle about biblical women, and the award-winning film, A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff. Her latest book is a memoir, When We Are Born We Forget Everything.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights, and the full transcript is below.

Show Notes

• Building a sustainable multi-disciplinary creative career through teaching, performance, grants, and donations
• Trusting instinct in the early generative stages of creativity and separating generation from editing
• Adapting and reimagining religious and cultural source material through music, writing, and performance
• The challenges of transitioning from poetry to long-form prose memoir, including choosing a lens for your story
• Making an independent film on a shoestring budget without waiting for Hollywood's permission
• Finding your creative voice and building confidence by leaning into vulnerability and returning to the practice of making

You can find Alicia at AliciaJo.com.

Transcript of the interview with Alicia Jo RabinsJoanna: Alicia Jo Rabins is an award-winning writer, musician, performer, as well as a Torah teacher and ritualist. She's the creator of Girls In Trouble, a feminist indie-folk song cycle about biblical women, and the award-winning film, A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff. Her latest book is a memoir, When We Are Born We Forget Everything.

So welcome to the show, Alicia.

Alicia: Thank you so much. I'm delighted to be here.

Joanna: There is so much we could talk about. But first up—

Tell us a bit more about you and how you've woven so many strands of creativity into your life and career.Alicia: Yes, well, I am a maximalist. What happened in terms of my early life is that I started writing on my own, just extremely young.

I'm one of those people who always loved writing, always processed the world and managed my emotions and came to understand myself through writing. So from a very young age, I felt really committed to writing.

Then I had the good fortune that my mother saw a talk show about the Suzuki method of learning violin—when you start really young and learn by ear, which is modelled after language learning. It's so much less intellectual and much more instinctual, learning by copying.

She was like, that looks like a cool thing. I was three years old at the time and she found out that there was a little local branch of our music conservatory that had a Suzuki violin programme. So when I was three and a half, getting close to four, she took me down and I started playing an extremely tiny violin.

Joanna: Oh, cute!

Alicia: Yes, and because it was part of this conservatory that was downtown, and we were just starting at the suburban branch where we lived, there was this path that I was able to follow. As I got more and more interested in violin, I could continue basically up through the conservatory level during high school.

So I had a really fantastic music education without any pressure, without any expectations or professional goals. I just kept taking these classes and one thing led to another.

I grew up being very immersed in both creative writing and music, and I think just having the gift of those two parts of my brain trained and stimulated and delighted so young really changed my brain in some ways. I'll always see the world through this creative lens, which I think I'm also just set up to do personally.

Then the last step of my multi-practice career is that in college I got very interested in Jewish spirituality. I'm Jewish, but I didn't grow up very religious. I didn't grow up in a Jewish community really. So I knew some basics, but not a ton.

In college I started to study it and also informally learned from other people I met. I ended up going on a pretty intense spiritual quest, going to Jerusalem and immersing myself after college for two years in traditional Jewish study and practice.

So that became the third strand of the braid that had already been started with music and writing. Torah study, spiritual study, and teaching became the third, and they all interweave.

The last thing I'll say is that because I work in both words and music, and naturally performance because of music, it began to branch a little bit into plays, theatre, and film, just because that's where the intersection of words, performance, and music is.

So that's really what brought me into that, as opposed to any specific desire to work in film. It all happened very organically.

Joanna: I love this. This is so cool. We are going to circle back to a lot of this, but I have to ask you—

What about work for money at any point? How did this turn into more than just hobbies and lifestyle?Alicia: Yes, absolutely. Well, I'm very fortunate that I did not graduate college with loans because my parents were able to pay for college. That was a big privilege that I just want to name, because in the States that's often not the case. So that allowed me to need to support myself, but not also pay loans, which was a real gift.

What happened was I went straight from college to that school in Jerusalem, and there I was on loans and scholarship, so I didn't have to worry yet about supporting myself.

Then when I came back to the States, I actually found on Craigslist a job teaching remedial Hebrew. It was essentially teaching kids at a Jewish elementary school who either had learning differences or had just entered the school late and needed to be in a different Hebrew class than the other kids in their grade.

That was my first experience of really teaching, and I just absolutely fell in love with it. Although in the end, my passion is much more for teaching the text and rituals and the wrestling with the concepts, as opposed to teaching language.

So all these years, while doing performance and writing and all these things, I have been teaching Jewish studies. That has essentially supported me, I would say, between 50 and 70 per cent.

Then the rest has been paid gigs as a musician, whether as a front person leading a project or as what we call a sideman, playing in someone else's band. Sometimes doing theatre performances, sometimes teaching workshops.

That's how I've cobbled it together. I have not had a full-time job all these years and I have supported myself through both earned income and also grants and donations.

I've really tried to cultivate a little bit of a donor base, and I took some workshops early on about how to welcome donations. So I definitely try to always welcome that as well.

Joanna: That is so interesting that you took a workshop on how to welcome donations. Way back in, I think 2013, I said on this show, I just don't know if I can accept people giving to support the show. Then someone on the podcast challenged me and said, but people want to support creatives.

That's when I started Patreon in 2014. It was when The Art of Asking by Amanda Palmer came out and—

It was this realisation that people do want to support people. So I love that you said that.

Alicia: It's not easy. It's still not easy for me, and I have to grit my teeth every time I even put in my end-of-year newsletter. I just say, just a reminder that part of what makes this possible is your generous donations, and I'm so grateful to you. It's not easy.

I think some people enjoy fundraising. I certainly don't instinctively enjoy it, but I have learned to think of it exactly the way that you're saying. I mean, I love donating to support other people's projects. Sometimes it's the highlight of my day.

If I'm having a bad day and someone asks for help, either to feed a family or to complete a creative project, I just feel like, okay, at least I can give $36 or $25 and feel like I did something positive in the last hour, even if my project is going terribly and I'm in a fight with my kid or something.

So I have to keep in mind that it is actually a privilege to give as well as a privilege to receive.

Joanna: Absolutely. So let's get back into your various creative projects. The first thing I wanted to ask you, because you do have so many different formats and forms of your creativity—how do you know when an idea that comes to you should be a song, or something you want to do as a performance, or written, or a film?

Tell us a bit about your creative process.Because a lot of your projects are also longer-term.

Alicia: Yes. It's funny, I love planning and in some ways I'm an extreme planner. I really drive people in my family bonkers with planning, like family vacations a year in advance.

In terms of my creativity, I'm very planful towards goals, but in that early generative state, I am actually pure instinct.

I don't think I ever sit down and say, “I have this idea, which genre would it match with?” It's more like I sit on my bed and pick up my guitar, which is where I love to do songwriting, just sitting on my bed cross-legged, and I pick up my guitar and something starts coming out. Then I just work with that kernel.

So it's very nebulous at first, very innate, and I just follow that creative spirit. Often I don't even know what a project is, sometimes if it's a larger project, until a year or two in.

Once things emerge and take shape, then my planning brain and my strategy brain can jump on it and say, “Okay, we need three more songs to fill out the album, and we need to plan the fundraising and the scheduling.” Then I might take more of an outside-in approach. At the beginning it's just all instinct.

Joanna: So if you pick up your guitar, does that mean it always starts in music and then goes into writing? Or is that you only pick up a guitar if it's going to be musical?

Alicia: I think I'm responding to what's inside me. It's almost like a need, as opposed to, “I'm going to sit down and work.”

I mean, obviously I sit down and work a lot, but I think in that early stage of anything, it's more like my fingers are itching to play something, and so I sit down and pick up my guitar. Sometimes nothing comes out and sometimes the kernel of a song comes out.

Or I'm at a café, and I often like to write when I'm feeling a little bit discombobulated, just to go into the complexity of things or use challenging emotions as fuel. I really do use it as a—I don't know if therapeutic is the word, but I think it maybe is.

I write often, as I always have, as I said before, to understand what I'm thinking. Like Joan Didion said—to process difficult emotions, to let go of stuck places.

So I think I create almost more out of a sense of just what I need in the moment. Sometimes it's just for fun. Sometimes picking up a guitar, I just have a moment so I sit down and mess around. Sometimes it's to help me struggle with something.

It doesn't always start in music. That was a random example. I might sit down to write because I have an hour and I think, I haven't written in a while. Or I do have an informal daily writing thing where I'll try to generate one loose draft of something a day, even if it's only ten pages.

I mean, sorry, ten words.

Joanna: I was going to say!

Alicia: No, no. Ten words. I'm sorry. It's often poetry, so it feels like a lot when it's ten words.

I'll just sit down with no pressure, no goal, no intention to make anything specific. Just open the floodgates and see what comes out. That's where every single project of mine has started.

Joanna: Yes, I do love that. Obviously, I'm a discovery writer and intuitive, same as you. I think very much this idea of, especially when you said you feel discombobulated, that's when you write. I almost feel like I need that.

I'm not someone who writes every day. I don't do ten lines or whatever. It's that I'll feel that sense of pressure building up into “this is going to be something.” I will really only write or journal when that spills over into—

“I now need to write and figure out what this is.”Alicia: Yes. It's almost a form of hunger. It feels to me similar to when you eat a great meal and then you're good for a while. You're not really thinking of it, and then it builds up, like you said, and then there's a need—at least the first half of creativity. I really separate my generation and my editing.

So my generative practice is all openness, no critique, just this maybe therapeutic, maybe curious, wandering and seeing what happens. Then once I have a draft, my incisive editing mind is welcome back in, which has been shut out from that early process. So that's a really different experience.

Those early stages of creativity are almost out of need more than obligation.

Joanna: Well, just staying with that generative practice. Obviously you've mentioned your study of and practice of Jewish tradition and Jewish spirituality.

Steven Pressfield in his books has talked about his prayer to the muse, and I've got on my wall here—I don't talk about this very often, actually — I have a muse picture, a painting of what I think of as a muse spirit in some form.

So do you have any spiritual practices around your generative practice and that phase of coming up with ideas?Alicia: I love that question, and I wish I had a beautiful, intentional answer. My answer is no.

I think I experience creativity as its own spiritual practice itself. I do love individual prayer and meditation and things like that, but for me those are more to address my specifically spiritual health and happiness and connectedness.

I'm just a dive-in kind of person. As a musician, I have friends who have elaborate backstage rituals. I have to do certain things to take care of my voice, but even that, it's mostly vocal rest as opposed to actively doing things. There's a bit of an on/off switch for me.

Joanna: That's interesting. Well, I do want to ask you about one of your projects, this collaboration with a high school on a musical performance, I Was a Desert: Songs of the Matriarchs, and also your Girls in Trouble songs about women in the Torah.

On your website, I had a look at the school, the high school, and the musical performance. It was extraordinary. I was watching you in the school there and it's just such extraordinary work. It very much inspired me—not to do it myself, but it was just so wonderful.

I do urge people to go to your website and just watch a few minutes of it.

I'm inspired by elements of religion, Christian and Jewish, but I wondered if you've come up against any issues with adaptation—respecting your heritage but also reinventing it. How has this gone for you.

Any advice for people who want to incorporate aspects of religion they love but are worried about responses?Alicia: Well, I have to say, coming from the Jewish tradition, that is a core practice of Judaism—reinterpreting our texts and traditions, wrestling with them, arguing with them, reimagining them.

I don't know if you're familiar with Midrash, but just in case some of your listeners aren't sure I'll explain it.

There's essentially an ancient form of fanfic called Midrash, which was the ancient rabbis, and we still do it today, taking a biblical story that seems to have some kind of gap or inconsistency or question in it and writing a story to fill that gap or recast the story in an interestingly different light.

So we have this whole body of literature over thousands of years that are these alternate or added-on adventures, side quests of the biblical characters. What I'm doing from a Jewish perspective is very much in line with a traditional way of interacting with text.

I've certainly never gotten any pushback, especially as I work in progressive Jewish communities. I think if I were in an extremely fundamentalist community, there would be a lot of different issues around gender and things like that. The interpretive process, even in those communities, is part of how we show respect for the text.

When I was working with the high school—and I just want to call out the choir director, Ethan Chen, who has an incredible project where he brings in a different artist every two years to work with the choir, and they tend to have a different cultural focus each time.

He invited me specifically to integrate my songwriting about biblical women with his amazing high school choir. I was really worried at first because most of them are not Jewish—very few of them, if any. I wanted to respect their spiritual paths and their religious heritages and not impose mine on them.

So I spent a lot of time at the beginning saying, this project has religious source material, but essentially it is a creative reinterpretive project. I am not coming to you to bring the religious material to you.

I'm coming to take the shared Hebrew Bible myths and then reinterpret those myths through a lens of how they might reflect our own personal struggles, because that's always my approach to these ancient stories. I wanted to really make that clear to the students. It was such a joy to work with them.

Joanna: It's such an interesting project. Also, I find with musicians in general this idea of performance. You've written this thing—or this thing specifically with the school—and it doesn't exist again, right? You're not selling CDs of that, I presume. Whereas compared to a book, when we write a book, we can sell it forever.

It doesn't exist as a performance generally for an author of a memoir or a novel. It carries on existing.

So how does that feel, the performance idea versus the longer-lasting thing? I mean, I guess the video's there, but the performance itself happened.

Alicia: I do know what you mean. Absolutely. We did, for that reason, record it professionally. We had the sound person record it and mix it, so it is available to stream. I'm not selling CDs, but it's out there on all the streaming services, if people want to listen. I do also have the scores, so if a choir wanted to sing it.

The main point that you're making is so true. I think there's actually something very sacred about live performance—that we're all in the moment together and then the moment is over.

I love the artefacts of the writing life. I love writing books. I love buying and reading books and having them around, and there's piles of them everywhere in this room I'm standing in.

I feel like being on stage, or even teaching, is a very spiritual practice for me, because it's in some ways the most in-the-moment I ever am. The only thing that matters is what's happening right then in that room.

It's fleeting as it goes. I'm working with the energy in the room while we're there. It's different every time because I'm different, the atmosphere is different, the people are different. There's no way to plan it. The kind of micro precision that we all try to bring to our editing—you can't do that.

You can practice all you want and you should, but in the moment, who knows? A string breaks or there's loud sound coming from the other room. It is just one of those things.

I love being reminded over and over again of the truth that we really don't control what happens. The best that we can do is ride it, surf it, be in it, appreciate it, and then let it go.

Joanna: I think maybe I get a glimpse of that when I speak professionally, but I'm far more in control in that situation than I guess you were with—I don't know how many—was it a hundred kids in that choir? It looked pretty big.

Alicia: It was amazing. It was 130 kids. Yes.

Joanna: 130 kids! I mean, it was magic listening to it. And yes, of course, showing my age there with buying a CD, aren't I?

Alicia: Well, I do still sell some CDs of Girls in Trouble on tour, because I have a bunch of them and people still buy them. I'm always so grateful because it was an easier life for touring musicians when we could just bring CDs. Now we have to be very creative about our merch.

Joanna: Yes, that's a good point because people are like, “Oh yes, I'll scan your QR code and stream it,” but you might not get the money for that for ages, and it might just be five cents or whatever.

Alicia: Streaming is terrible for live musicians. I mean, I don't know if you know the site Bandcamp, but it's essentially self-publishing for musicians.

Bandcamp is a great way around that, and a lot of independent musicians use it because that's a place you can upload your music and people can pay $8 for an album. They can stream it on there if they want, or they can download it and have it. But, yes, it's hard out there for touring musicians.

Joanna: Yes, for sure. Well, let's come to the book then. Your memoir, When We Are Born We Forget Everything.

Tell us about some of the challenges of a book as opposed to these other types of performances.Alicia: Well, I come out of poetry, so that was my first love. That's what I majored in in college. That's what my MFA is in.

Poetry is famously short, and I'm not one of those long-form poets. I have been trained for many years to think in terms of a one-page arc, if at all. Arc isn't even really a word that we use in poetry.

So to write a full-length prose book was really an incredible education. Writing it basically took ten years from writing to publication, so probably seven years of writing and editing. I felt like there was an MFA-equivalent process in the number of classes I took, books I read, and work that went into it.

So that was one of my main joys and challenges, really learning on the job to write long-form prose coming out of poetry.

How to keep the engine going, how to think about ending one chapter in a way that leaves you with some torque or momentum so that you want to go into the next chapter. How many characters is too many? Who gets names and who doesn't?

Some of these things that are probably pretty basic for fiction writers were all very new to me. That was a big part of my process.

Then, of course, poets don't usually have agents. So once it was done, I began to query agents. It was the normal sort of 39 rejections and then one agent who really understood what I was trying to do. She's incredible, and she was able to sell the book.

The longevity of just working on something for that long—I have a lot of joy in that longevity—but it does sometimes feel like, is this ever going to happen, or am I on a fool's errand?

Joanna: I guess, again, the difference with performance is you have a date for the performance and it's done then. I suppose once you get a contract, then for sure it has to be done. But memoir in particular, you do have to set boundaries, because of course your life continues, doesn't it?

So what were the challenges in curating what went into the book? Because many people listening know memoir is very challenging in terms of how personal it can be.

Alicia: Yes, and one thing I think is so fascinating about memoir is choosing which lens to put on your story, on your own story.

I heard early on that the difference between autobiography and memoir is that autobiography tries to give a really comprehensive view of a life, and memoir is choosing one lens and telling the story of a life through that lens, which is such a beautiful creative concept.

I knew early on that I wanted this to be primarily a spiritual memoir, and also somewhat of an artistic memoir, because my creativity and my spirituality are so intertwined.

It started off being spiritual, and also about my musical life, and also about my writing life. In the end, I edited out the part about my writing life, because writing about writing was just too navel-gazing.

So there's nothing in there about me coming of age as a writer, which used to be in there, but that whole thing got taken out. Now it's spiritual and musical.

For me, it really helped to start with those focuses, because I knew there may be things that were hugely important in my life, absolutely foundational, that were not really going to be either mentioned or gone deeply into in the book.

For example, my husband teases me a lot about how few pages and words he gets. He's very important in my life, but I actually met him when I was 29, and this book really mainly takes place in the years leading up to that.

There's a little bit of winding down in the first few years of my thirties, but this is not a book about my life with him. He is mentioned in it. That story is in there.

Having those kinds of limitations around the canvas—there's a quote, I forget if it was Miranda July, but somebody said something like, basically when you put a limitation on your project, that's when it starts to be a work of art.

Whatever it is, if you say, “I'm taking this canvas and I'm using these colours,” that's when it really begins, that initial limitation. That was very helpful.

Joanna: It's also the beauty of memoir, because of course you can write different memoirs at different times. You can write something about your writing life. You can write something else about your marriage and your family later on. That doesn't all have to be in one book.

I think that's actually something I found interesting. And I would also say in my memoir, Pilgrimage, my husband is barely mentioned either.

Alicia: Does he tease you too?

Joanna: No, I think he's grateful. He is grateful for the privacy.

Alicia: That's why I keep saying, you should be grateful!

Joanna: Yes. You really should. Like, maybe stop talking now.

Alicia: Yes, exactly. I know. Marriage, memoir—those words should strike fear into his heart.

Joanna: They definitely should. But let's just come back. When I look at your career—

You just seem such an independent creative, and so I wondered why you decided to work with a traditional publisher instead of being an independent.How are you finding it as someone who's not in charge of everything?

Alicia: It's a great question. The origin story for this memoir is that I was actually reading poetry at a writing conference called Bread Loaf in the States. This was 16 years ago or something.

I was giving a poetry reading and afterwards an agent, not my agent, came up to me and said, you know, you have a voice. You should try writing nonfiction because you could probably sell it.

Back to your question about how I support myself, I am always really hustling to make a living. It's not like I have some separate well-paying job and the writing has no pressure on it. So my ears kind of perked up.

I thought, wait, getting paid for writing? Because poetry is literally not in the world. It's just not a concept for poets. That's not why we write and it's not a possibility.

So a little light turned on in my brain. I thought, wow, that could be a really interesting element to add to my income stream, and it would be flexible and it would be meaningful.

For a few years I thought, what nonfiction could I write? And I came up with the idea of writing a book about biblical women from a more scholarly perspective, because I teach that material and I've studied it.

I went to speak to another agent and she said, well, you could do that, but if you actually want to sell a book, it's going to have to be more of a trade book. So if you don't want an academic press, which wouldn't pay very much, you would have to have some kind of memoir-like stories in there to just sweeten it so it doesn't feel academic.

So then I began writing a little bit of spiritual memoir. I thought, okay, well, I'll write about a few moments. Then once I started writing, I couldn't stop. The floodgates really opened. That's how it ended up being a spiritual memoir with interwoven stories of biblical women. It became a hybrid in that sense.

I knew from the beginning that this project—for all my saying earlier that I never plan anything and only work on instinct, I was thinking as I said that, that cannot be true.

This time, I actually thought, what if, instead of coming from this pure, heart-focused place of poetry, I began writing with the intention of potentially selling a book? The way my fiction writer friends talked about selling their books.

So that was always in my mind. I knew I would continue writing poetry, continue publishing with small presses, continue putting my own music out there independently, but this was a bit of an experiment. What if I try to interface with the publishing world, in part for financial sustainability?

And because I had a full draft before I queried, I never felt like anyone was telling me what to write. I can't imagine personally selling a book on proposal, because I do need that full capacity to just swerve, change directions, be responsive to what the project is teaching me.

I can't imagine promising that I'll write something, because I never know what I'll write. But writing at least a very solid draft first, I'm always delighted to get notes and make polish and rewrite and make things better. I took care of that freedom in the first seven years of writing and then I interfaced with the agent and publisher.

Joanna: I was going to say, given that it's taken you seven to ten years to do this and I can't imagine that you're suddenly a multimillionaire from this book. It probably hasn't fulfilled the hourly rate that perhaps you were thinking of in terms of being paid for your work.

I think some people think that everyone's going to end up with the massive book deal that pays for the rest of their life.

I guess this book does just fit into the rest of your portfolio career.Alicia: Yes. One of the benefits of these long arcs that I like to work on is, one of them—and probably the primary one—is that the project gets to unfold on its own time. I don't think I could have rushed it if I wanted. The other is that it never really stopped me from doing any of my other work.

Joanna: Mm-hmm.

Alicia: So it's not like, oh, I gave up months of my life and all I got was this advance or something. It's like, I was living my life and then when I had a little bit of writing time—and I will say, it impacted my poetry. I haven't written as much poetry because I was working on this.

So it wasn't like I just added it on top of everything I was already doing, but it was a pleasure to just switch to prose for a while. It was just woven into my life.

I appreciated having this side project where no one was waiting for it. There were no deadlines, there was no stress around it, because I always have performances to promote and due dates for all kinds of work. It was just this really lovely arena of slow growth and play.

When I wanted a reader, I could do a swap with a writer friend, but no one was ever waiting for it on deadline. So there's actually a lot of pleasure in that.

Then I will say, I think I've made more from selling this than my poetry. Probably close to ten times more than I've ever made from any of my poetry.

So on a poetry scale, it's certainly not going to pay for my life, but it actually does make a true financial difference in a way that much of my other work is a little more bit by bit by bit. It's actually a different scale.

Joanna: Well, that's really good. I'm glad to hear that. I also want to ask you, because you've done so many things, and—

I'm fascinated by your independent film, A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff.I have only watched the trailer. You are in it, you wrote it, directed it, and it's also obviously got other people in, and it's fascinating. It's about this particular point in history.

I've written quite a lot of screenplay adaptations of my novels, and I've had some various amounts of interest, but the whole film industry to me is just a complete nightmare, far bigger nightmare than the book industry. So I wonder if you could maybe talk about this, because it just seems like you made a film, which is so cool.

Alicia: Oh yes, thank you.

Joanna: And it won awards, yes, we should say.

Alicia: Did we win awards? Yes. It really, for an extremely low-budget indie film, went far further than my team and I could ever have imagined.

I will say I never intended to make a film. Like most of the best things in my life, it really happened by accident.

When I was living in New York— I lived there for many years—the 2008 financial collapse happened and I happened to have an arts grant that gave a bunch of artists workspace, studio space, in essentially an abandoned building in the financial district.

It was an empty floor of a building. The floor had been left by the previous tenant, and there's a nonprofit that takes unused real estate in the financial district and lets artists work in it for a while.

So I was on Wall Street, which was very rare for me, but for this year I was working on Wall Street. Even though I was working on poems, the financial collapse happened around me, and I did get inspired by that to create a one-woman show, which was more of a theatre show.

That was already a huge leap for me because I had no real theatre experience, but it was experimental and growing out of my poetry practice and my music. It was a musical one-woman show about the financial collapse from a spiritual perspective, apparently.

So I performed that. I documented it, and then a friend who lives in Portland, Oregon, where I now live, said, “I'm a theatre producer, I'd like to produce it here.” So then I rewrote it and did a run here in Portland of that show.

Essentially, I started to tour it a little bit, but I got tired of it. It was too much work and it never really paid very much, and I thought, this is impacting my life negatively. I just want to do a really good documentation of the show.

So I wanted to hire a theatre documentarian to just document the show so that it didn't disappear, like you were saying before about live performance. But one of the people I talked to actually ended up being an artistic filmmaker, as opposed to a documentarian.

She watched the archival footage, just a single camera of the show, and said, “I don't think you should do this again and film it with three cameras. I think you should make it into a feature film. And in fact, I think maybe I should direct it, because there's all this music in it and I also direct music videos.” We had this kind of mind meld.

Joanna: Mm.

Alicia: I never intended to make a film, but she is a visionary director and I had this piece of IP essentially, and all the music and the writing.

We adapted it together. We did it here in Portland. We did all the fundraising ourselves. We did not interface with Hollywood really. I think that would be, I just can't imagine.

I love Hollywood, but I'm not really connected, and I can't imagine waiting for someone to give us permission or a green light to make this. It was experimental and indie, so we just really did it on the cheap.

We had an amazing producer who helped us figure out how to do it with the budget that we had. We worked really hard fundraising, crowdfunding, asking for donations, having parties to raise money, and then we just did it and put it out there.

I think my main advice—and I hear this a lot on screenwriting podcasts—is just make the thing.

Make something, as opposed to trying to get permission to make something. Because unless you're already in that system, it's going to be really hard to get permission to make it.

Once you make something, that leads to something else, which leads to something else. So even if it's a very short thing, or even if it's filmed on your phone, just actually make the thing. That turned out to be the right thing for us.

Joanna: Yes, I mean, I feel like that is what underpins us as independent creatives in general. As an independent author, I feel the same way. I'm never asking permission to put a book in the world. No, thank you.

Alicia: Exactly. We have a vision and we do it. It's harder in some ways, but that liberation of being able to really fully create our vision without having to compromise it or wait for permission, I think it's such a beautiful thing.

Joanna: Well, we're almost out of time, but I do want to ask you about creative confidence.

Alicia: Hmm.

Joanna: I feel I'm getting a lot of sense about this at the moment, with all the AI stuff that's happening. When you've been creating a long time, like you and I have, we know our voice and we can lean into our voice. We are creatively confident. We'll fail a lot, but we'll just push on and try things and see what happens.

Newer creators are struggling with this kind of confidence. How do I know what is my voice? How do I know what I like? How do I lean into this?

So give us some thoughts about how to find your voice and how to find that creative confidence if you don't feel you have it.Alicia: I love that. One thing I will say is that I always think whatever is arising is powerful material to create from. So if a lack of confidence is arising, that's a really powerful feeling to directly explore and not just try to ignore.

Although sometimes one has to just ignore those feelings. But to actually explore that feeling, because AI can't have that, right? AI can't really feel a crisis of confidence, and humans can.

So that's a gift that we have, those kinds of sensitivities. I think to go really deep into whatever is arising, including the sense that we don't have the right to be creating, or we're not good enough, or whatever it is.

Then I always do come back to a quote. I think it might have been John Berryman, but I'm forgetting which poet said it. A younger poet said, “How will I ever know if I'm any good?” And this famous poet said something like—I'm paraphrasing—”You'll never know if you're any good. If you have to know, don't write.”

That has been really liberating to me, actually. It sounds a little harsh, but it's been really liberating to just let go of a sense of “good enough.” There is no good enough. The great writers never know if they're good enough.

Coming back to this idea of just making without permission—the practice of doing the thing is being a writer. Caring and trying to improve our craft, that's the best that we can have.

There's never going to be a moment where we're like, yes, I've nailed this. I am truly a hundred per cent a writer and I have found my voice. Everything's always changing anyway.

I would say, either go into those feelings or let those feelings be there. Give them a little tea. Tell them, okay, you're welcome to be here, but you don't get to drive the boat. And then return to the practice of making.

Joanna: Absolutely. Great.

So where can people find you and your books and everything you do online?Alicia: Everything is on my website, which is AliciaJo.com, and also on Instagram at @ohaliciajo. I'd love to say hello to anyone who's interested in similar topics.

Joanna: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Alicia. That was great.

Alicia: Thank you. I love your podcast. I'm so grateful for all that you've given the writing world, Jo.

The post Creative Confidence, Portfolio Careers, And Making Without Permission with Alicia Jo Rabins first appeared on The Creative Penn.

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How can trauma become a catalyst for creative transformation? What lessons can indie authors learn from the music industry's turbulent journey through technological disruption? With Jack Williamson.

In the intro, Why recipes for publishing success don’t work and what to do instead [Self-Publishing with ALLi Podcast]; Why your book isn’t selling: metadata [Novel Marketing Podcast]; Creating a successful author business [Fantasy Writers Toolshed Podcast]; Bones of the Deep – J.F. Penn.

Today's show is sponsored by ProWritingAid, writing and editing software that goes way beyond just grammar and typo checking. With its detailed reports on how to improve your writing and integration with writing software, ProWritingAid will help you improve your book before you send it to an editor, agent or publisher. Check it out for free or get 15% off the premium edition at www.ProWritingAid.com/joanna

This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn

Jack Williamson is a psychotherapist, coach, and bestselling author who spent nearly two decades as a music industry executive. He's the founder of Music & You, his latest nonfiction book is Maybe You're The Problem, and he also writes romance under A.B. Jackson.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.

Show Notes

• Finding post-traumatic growth and meaning after bereavement, and using tragedy as a catalyst for creative transformation
• Why your superpower can also be your Achilles heel, and how indie authors can overcome shiny object syndrome
• Three key lessons from the music industry: embracing change, thinking creatively about marketing, and managing pressure for better creativity
• The A, B, C technique for PR interviews and why marketing is storytelling through different mediums
• How to deal with judgment and shame around AI in the author community by understanding where people sit on the opinion-belief-conviction continuum
• Three AI developments coming from music to publishing: training clauses in contracts, one-click genre adaptation, and licensed AI-generated video adaptations

You can find Jack at JackWilliamson.co.uk and his fiction work at ABJackson.com.

Transcript of the interview with Jack WilliamsonJo: Jack Williamson is a psychotherapist, coach, and bestselling author who spent nearly two decades as a music industry executive. He's the founder of Music & You, his latest nonfiction book is Maybe You're The Problem, and he also writes romance under A.B. Jackson. Welcome to the show.

Jack: Thank you so much for having me, Jo. It's a real honour to be on your podcast after listening all of these years.

Jo: I'm excited to talk to you. We have a lot to get into, but first up—

Tell us a bit more about you and why get into writing books after years of working in music.Jack: I began my career at the turn of the millennium, basically, and I worked for George Michael and Mariah Carey's publicist, which I'm sure you can imagine was quite the introduction to the corporate world.

From there I went on to do domestic and international marketing for a load of massive artists at Universal, so the equivalent of the top five publishers in the publishing world that we all work in.

Then from there I had a bit of a challenge. In December 2015, I lost my brother, unfortunately to suicide. For any listener or any person that's gone through a traumatic event, it can really make you reassess everything, make you question life, make you question your purpose.

When I went through that, I was thinking, well, what do I want to do? What do I want out of life? So I went on this journey for practically the next ten years.

I retrained to be a psychotherapist. I created a bucket list—a list of all the things that I thought maybe my brother would've wanted to do but didn't do. One of the things was scatter his ashes at the Seven Wonders of the world.

Then one of the items on my bucket list was to write a book. The pandemic hit. It was a challenge for all of us, as you've spoken about so much on this wonderful podcast.

I thought, well, why not? Why not write this book that I've wanted to write? I didn't know when I was going to do it because I was always so busy, and then the pandemic happened and so I wrote a book.

From there, listening to your wonderful podcast, I've learned so much and been to so many conferences and learned along the way. So now I've written five books and released three.

Jo: That's fantastic. I mean, regular listeners to the show know that I talk about death and grief and all of this kind of thing, and it's interesting that you took your brother's ashes to the Seven Wonders of the world.

Death can obviously be a very bad, negative thing for those left behind, but it seems like you were able to reframe your brother's experience and turn that into something more positive for your life rather than spiralling into something bad.

So if people listening are feeling like something happens, whether it's that or other things—

How can we reframe these seemingly life-ending situations in a more positive way?Jack: It is very hard and there's no one way to do it. I think as you always say, I never want to tell people what to do or what to think. I want to show them how to think and how they can approach things differently or from a different perspective.

I can only speak from my journey, but we call it in therapeutic language, post-traumatic growth. It is, how do you define it so it doesn't define you? Because often when you have a bereavement of a loved one, a family member, it can be very traumatic, but how can you take meaning and find meaning in it?

There's a beautiful book called Man's Search for Meaning, and the name of the author escapes me right now, but he says—

Jo: Viktor Frankl.

Jack: Yes. Everyone quotes it as one of their favourite books, and one of my favourite lines is, “Man can take everything away from you, apart from the ability to choose one thought over the other.”

I think it's so true because we can make that choice to choose what to think. So in those moments when we are feeling bad, when we're feeling down, we want to honour our feelings, but we don't necessarily want to become them.

We want to process that, work through, get the support system that we need. But again, try to find meaning, try to find purpose, try to understand what is going on, and then pay it forward.

Irrespective of your belief system, we all yearn for purpose. We all yearn for being connected to something bigger than ourselves. If we can find that through bereavement maybe, or through a traumatic incident, then hopefully we can come through the other side and have that post-traumatic growth.

Jo: I love that phrase, post-traumatic growth. That's so good. Obviously people think about post-traumatic anything as like PTSD—people immediately think a sort of stress disorder, like it's something that makes things even worse. I like that you reframed it in that way.

Obviously I think the other thing is you took specific action. You didn't just think about it. You travelled, you retrained, you wrote books. So I think also it's not just thinking. In fact, thinking about things can sometimes make it worse if you think for too long, whereas taking an action I think can be very strong as well.

Jack: Ultimately we are human beings as opposed to human doings, but actually being a human doing from time to time can be really helpful. Actually taking steps forward, doing things differently, using it as a platform to move forward and to do things that maybe you didn't before.

When you are confronted with death, it can actually make you question your own mortality and actually question, am I just coasting along? Am I stuck in a rut? Could I be doing something differently?

One of the things that bereavement, does is it holds a mirror up to ourselves and it makes us question, well, what do we want from our life? Are we here to procreate? Are we here to make a difference?

Some of us can't procreate, or some of us choose not to procreate, but we can all make a difference. And it's, how do we do that? Where do we do that? When do we do that?

Jo: That's interesting. I was thinking today about service and gratitude. I'm doing this Master's and I was reading some theology stuff today, and service and gratitude, I think if you are within a religious tradition, are a normal part of that kind of religious life.

Whether it's service to God and gratitude to God, or service and gratitude to others. I was thinking that these two things, service and gratitude, can actually really help reframe things as well.

Who can we serve? As authors, we're serving our readers and our community. What can we be grateful about? That's often our readers and our community as well.

So I don't know, that helped me today—thinking about how we can reframe things, especially in the world we're in now where there's a lot of anger and grief and all kinds of things.

Jack: That's what we've got to look at. We are here to serve. Again, that can take different shapes, different forms. Some of us work in the service industry.

I provide a service as a psychotherapist, you serve your listeners with knowledge and information that you gather and dispense through the research you do or the guests you have on. We serve readers of the different genres that we write in. It's what ways can we serve, how can we serve?

Again, I think we all, if we can and when we can, should pay it forward. Someone said this to me once in the music industry: be careful who you meet on the way up and how you treat them on the way up, because invariably you'll meet them on the way down.

So if you can pay forward that kindness, if you can be kind, considerate, and treat people how you want to be treated, that is going to pay dividends in the long run. It may not come off straight away, but invariably it will come back to you in some way, shape, or form in a different way.

Jo: I've often talked about social karma and karma in the Hindu sense—the things that you do come back to you in some other form. Possibly in another life, which I don't believe.

In terms of, I guess, you didn't know what was going to happen to your brother, and so you make the most of the life that we have at the moment because things change and you just don't know how things are going to change.

You talk about this in your book, Maybe You're The Problem, which is quite a confronting title.

So just talk about your book, Maybe You're The Problem, and why you wrote that.Put it into context with the author community and why that might be useful.

Jack: Thank you for flagging my book. I intentionally crossed out “maybe” on the merchandise I did as well, because in essence, we are our own problem. We can get in the way, and it's what happened to us when we grew up wasn't our fault, but what we do with it is our responsibility.

We may have grown up in a certain period or a climate. We didn't necessarily choose to do that, but what we do with that as a result is up to us.

So we can stay in our victimhood and we can blame our parents, or we can blame the generation we are in, or we can blame the city, the location—however, that is relinquishing your power. That is staying in a victim mindset rather than a survivor or a thriver mindset.

So it's about how can we look at the different areas in our life. Whether that is conflict, whether that is imposter syndrome, whether that is the generation we're born into.

We try to understand how that has shaped us and how we may be getting in our own way to stop us from growing, to stop us from expanding, and to see where our blind spots are, our limitations are, and how that may impact us.

There's so much going on in the moment in the world, whether that is in the digital realm, whether that is in the geo-climate that we're in at the moment. Again, that's going to bring up a lot for us.

How can we find solutions to those problems for us so that we continue to move forward rather than be restricted and hindered by them?

Jo: Alright. Well let's get into some more specifics. You have been in the author community now for a while. You go to conferences and you are in the podcast community and all this kind of thing.

What specific issues have you seen in the author community?Maybe around some of the things you've mentioned, or other things? How might we be able to deal with those?

Jack: With authors, I think it is such a wonderful and unique industry that I have an honour and privilege of being a part of now. One of the main things I've learned is just how creative people are.

Coming from a creative industry like the music industry, there is a lot of neurodivergence in the creative industries and in the author community. Whether that is autism, whether that is ADHD—that is a real asset to have as a superpower, but it can be an Achilles heel.

So it's understanding—and I know that there is an overexposure of people labelling themselves as ADHD—but on the flip side to that, it's how can we look at what's going on for us?

For ADHD, for example, there's a thing called shiny object syndrome. You've talked about this in the past, Joanna, where it's like a new thing comes along, be it TikTok, be it Substack, be it bespoke books, be it Shopify, et cetera.

We can rush and quickly be like, “oh, let me do this, let me do that,” before we actually take the time to realise, is this right for me? Does this fit my author business? Does this fit where I'm at in my author journey?

I think sometimes as authors, we need to not cave in to that shiny object syndrome and take a step back and think to ourselves, how does this serve me? How does this serve my career? How does this work for me if I'm looking at this as a career?

If you're looking at it as a hobby, obviously it's a different lens to look through, but that's something that I would often make sure that we look at.

One of the other things that really comes up is that in order for any of us to address our fears and anxieties, we need to make sure that we feel psychologically safe and to put ourselves in spaces and places where we feel seen, heard, and understood, which can help address some of the issues that I've just mentioned.

Being in that emotionally regulated state when we are with someone we know and trust—so taking someone to a conference, taking someone to a space or a place where you feel that you can be seen, heard, and understood—can help us and allow us to embrace things that we perceive to be scary.

That may be finding an author group, finding an online space where you can actually air and share your thoughts, your feelings, where you don't feel that you are being judged.

Often it can be quite a judgmental space and place in the online world. So it's just finding your tribe and finding places where you can actually lean into that. So there'd be two things.

Jo: I like the idea of the superpower and the Achilles heel because I also feel this when we are writing fiction. Our characters have strengths, but your fatal flaw is often related to your strength.

Jack: Yes.

Jo: For example, I know I am independent. One of the reasons I'm an independent author is because I'm super independent. But one of my greatest fears is being dependent.

So I do lots of things to avoid being dependent on other people, which can lead me to almost damage myself by not asking for help or by trying to make sure that I control everything so I never have to ask anyone else to do something.

I'm coming to terms with this as I get older. I feel like this is something we start to hit—I mean, as a woman after menopause—is this feeling of I might have to be dependent on people when I'm older.

It's so interesting thinking about this and thinking—

My independence is my strength. How can it also be my weakness? So what do you think about that? You're going to psychotherapist me now.

Jack: I definitely won't, but it's interesting. Just talking about that, we all have wounds and we all have the shadow, as you've even written about in one of your books. And it's how that can come from a childhood wound where it's like we seek help and it's not given to us.

So we create a belief system where I have to do everything myself because no one will help me. Or we may have rejection sensitivity, so we reject ourselves before others can reject us.

So it's actually about trying, where we can, to honour our truths, honour that we may want to be independent, for example, but then realising that success leaves clues.

I always say that if you are independent—and I definitely align a hundred percent with you, Joanna—I've had to work really hard myself in personal therapy and in business and life to realise that no human is an island and we can't all do this on our own.

Yes, it's amazing with the AI agents now that can help us in a business capacity, but having those relationships that we can tap into—like you mentioned all of the people that you tap into—it's so important to have those.

I always say that it's important to have three mentors: one person that's ahead of you (for me, that would be Katie Cross because she's someone that I find is an amazing author and we speak at least once a month); people that are at the same level as you that you can go on the journey together with (and I have an author group for that); and then someone that is perceived to be behind you or in a younger generation than you, because you can learn as much from them as they can learn from you.

If you can actually tap into those people whilst honouring your independence, then it feels like you can still go on your own journey, but you can tap in and tap out as and when needed.

Sacha Black will give you amazing insights, other people like Honor will give you amazing insights, but you can also provide that for them.

So there's that safety of being able to do it on your own. But on the flip side, you still have those people that you can tap into as and when necessary as a sounding board, as information on how they were successful, and go from there.

Jo: No, I like that. If you're new to the show, Sacha Black and Honor Raconteur have been on the show and they are indeed some of my best friends. So I appreciate that.

I really like the idea of the three mentor idea. I just want to add to that because I do think people misunderstand the word mentor sometimes. You mentioned you speak to Katie Cross, but I've found that a lot of the mentors that I've had who are ahead of me have often been books.

We mentioned the Viktor Frankl book, and if people don't know, he was Jewish and in the concentration camps and survived that. So it's a real survivor story. But to me, books have been mostly my mentors in terms of people who are ahead of me.

We don't always need to speak to or be friends with our mentors. I think that's important too, right? Because I just get emails a lot that say, “Will you be my mentor?” And I don't think that's the point.

Jack: Oh, I a hundred percent agree with you. If you don't have access to those mentors—like Oprah Winfrey is one of the people that I perceive as a mentor—I listen to podcasts, I read her books, I watch interviews.

There is a way to absorb and acquire that information, and it doesn't have to be a direct relationship with them. It is someone that you can gain the knowledge and wisdom that they've imparted in whatever form you may consume it.

Which is why I think it is important to have those three levels: that one that is above you that may be out of reach in terms of a human connection, but you can still access; then the people at the same level as you that you can have those relationships and grow with; and again, that one behind that you can help pave the way for them, but also learn from them as well.

So a hundred percent agree that that mentor that you are looking for that may be ahead of you doesn't necessarily need to be someone that is in a real-world relationship.

Jo: So let's just circle back to your music industry experience. You mentioned being on the sort of marketing team for some really big names in music, and I mean, it's kind of a sexy job really. It just sounds pretty cool, but of course the music industry has just as many challenges as publishing.

What did you learn from working in the music industry that you think might be particularly useful for authors?Jack: The perception of reality was definitely a lot different. It does look sexy and glamorous, but the reality is similar to going to conferences. It's pretty much flight, hotel, and dark rooms with terrible air conditioning that you spend a lot of time in. So sorry to burst the illusion. But I mean, it does have its moments as well.

There is so much I've learned over the years and there's probably three things that stand out the most.

The first one was I entered the industry right at the height of the music industry. In 2000, 2001. That was when Napster really exploded and it decimated the music industry. It wiped half the value in the space of four years.

Then the music industry was trying to shut it down, throwing legal, throwing everything at it, but it was like whack-a-mole. As soon as one went down such as Napster, ten others popped up like Kazaa.

So you saw that the old guard wasn't willing to embrace change. They weren't willing to adapt. They assumed that people wanted the formats of CDs, vinyls, cassettes, and they were wrong.

Yes, people wanted music, but they actually wanted the music. They didn't care about the format, they just wanted the access.

So that was one of the really interesting things that I learned, because I was like, you have to embrace change. You can't ignore it. You can't push it away, push it aside, because it's coming whether you like it or not.

I think thankfully the music industry has learned as AI's coming, because now you have to embrace it. There's a lot of legal issues that have been going on at the moment with rights, which you've covered about the Anthropic case and so on. It's such a challenge, and I just think that's the first one.

The second one I learned was back in 2018. There was an artist I worked on called Freya Ridings. At that time I was working at an independent record label rather than one of the big three major record labels. She had great songs and we were up against one of the biggest periods of the year and trying to make noise.

At the time, Love Island was the biggest TV show on, and everyone wanted to be on it in terms of getting their music synced in the scenes. We were just like, we are never going to compete. So we thought, we need to be clever here. We need to think differently.

What we did is we found out what island the show was being recorded on, and we geo-targeted our ads just to that island because we knew the sync team were going to be on there. So we just went hard as nails, advertised relentlessly, and we knew that the sync people would then see the adverts.

As a result of that, Freya got the sync. It became the biggest song that season on Love Island, back when it was popular. As a result of that, we built from there. We were like, right, we can't compete with the majors. We have to think differently. We need to do things differently. We need to be creative.

It wasn't an easy pathway. That year there were only two other songs that were independent that reached the top 10. So we ended up becoming a third and the biggest song that year.

The reason I'm saying that is we can't compete with the major publishers. But the beauty of the independent author community is because we have smaller budgets—most of us, not all of us, but most of us—we have to think differently. We have to make our bang for our buck go a lot further. So it's actually—

How can we stay creative? How can we think differently? What can we do differently? So that would be the second thing.

Then the third main lesson that I learned, and this is more on the creative side, is that pressure can often work against you, both in a business sense, but especially creativity.

I've seen so many artists over the years have imposed deadlines on them to hand in their albums, and it's impacted the quality of their output. Once it's handed in, the stress and the pressure is off, and then you realise that actually those artists end up creating the best material that they have, and then they rush to put it on.

Whether that's Mariah Carey's “We Belong Together,” Adele with her song “Hello,” Taylor Swift did the same with “Shake It Off”—they're just three examples.

The reason is that pressure keeps us in our beta brainwave state, which is our rational, logical mind. For those of us that are authors that are writing fiction, or even if we are creating stories in our nonfiction work to deliver a point, we need to be in that creative mindset.

So we need to be in the alpha and the gamma brain state. Because our body works on 90-minute cycles known as our ultradian rhythm, we need to make sure that we honour our cycle and work with that. If we go past that, our creativity and our productivity is going to go down between 60% and 40% respectively.

So as authors, it's important—one, to apply the right amount of pressure; two, to work in breaks; and three, to know what kind of perspective we're looking at. Do we need to be rational and logical, or do we need to be creative? And then adjust the sails accordingly.

Jo: That's all fantastic. I want to come back on the marketing thing first—around what you did with the strategic marketing there and the targeted ads to that island. That's just genius.

I feel like a lot of us, myself included, we struggle to think creatively about marketing because it's not our natural state. Of course, you've done a lot of marketing, so maybe it comes more naturally to you. I think half the time we don't even use the word creative around marketing, when you're not a marketeer.

What are some ways that we can break through our blocks around marketing and try to be more creative around that?Jack: I would challenge a lot of authors on that presumption, because as authors we're in essence storytellers, and to tell a story is creative.

There's a great quote: “One death is a tragedy. A thousand deaths is a statistic.”

If you can create a story, a compelling narrative about a death in the news, it's going to pull at the heartstrings of people. It's going to really resonate and get with them. Whereas if you are just quoting statistics, most people switch off because they become desensitised to it.

So I think because we can tell stories, and that's the essence of what we do, it's how can we tell our story through the medium of social media? How can we tell a story through our creative ads that we then put out onto Facebook or TikTok or whatever platform that we're putting them out—BookBub, et cetera?

How can we create a narrative that garners the attention? If we are looking at local media or traditional media, how can we do that? How can we get people to buy in to what we're selling?

So it's about having different angles. For me with my new romance book, Stolen Moments, one of the stories I had that really has helped me get some coverage and PR is we recorded the songs next door to the Rolling Stones.

Now that was very fortunate timing, very fortunate. But everyone's like, “Oh my God, you recorded next door to the Rolling Stones?” So it's like, well, how can you bring in these creative nuggets that help you to find a story?

Again, marketing is in essence telling a story, albeit through different mediums and forms. So it's just how can you package that into a marketable product depending on the platform in which you're putting it out on.

Jo: I think that's actually hilarious, by the way, because what you hit on there, as someone with a background in marketing, your story about “we recorded an album for the book next door to the Rolling Stones”—it's got nothing to do with the romance.

Jack: Oh, the romance is that the pop star in the book writes and records songs.

Jo: Yes, I realised that. But the fact is—

For doing things like PR, it's the story behind the story. They don't care that you've written a romance.

Jack: Yes.

Jo: They're far more interested in you, the author, and other things. So I think what you just described there was a kind of PR hook that most of us don't even think about.

Jack: I'm sure a lot of authors already know this, so it's a good reminder, and if you don't, it's great. It's called the A, B, C technique.

When you get asked a question, you Answer the question. So that's A. You Build a bridge, and then you go to C, which is Covering one of your points.

So whenever you get asked a question, have a list of things you want to get across in an interview. Then just make sure that you find that bridge between whatever the question is to cover off one of your points, and that's how you can do it.

Because yes, you may be selling a story, like I said, about writing the songs, but then you can bridge it into actually covering and promoting whatever it is you're promoting. So I think that's always quite helpful to remember.

Jo: Well, that's a good tip for things like coming on podcasts as well.

I've had people on who don't do what you just mentioned and will just try and shoehorn things in in a more deliberate fashion, whereas other people, as you have just done with your romance there, bring it in while answering a question that actually helps other people.

So I think that's the kind of thing we need to think about in marketing.

Okay, so then let's come back to the embracing change, and as you mentioned, the AI stuff that's going on. I feel like there's so many “stories” around AI right now. There's a lot of stories being told on both sides—on the positive side, on the negative side—that people believe and buy into and may or may not be true.

There's obviously a lot of anger. There's, I think, grief—a big thing that people might not even realise that they have.

Can you talk about how authors might deal with what's coming up around the technological change around AI, and any of your personal thoughts as well?Jack: I was thinking about this a lot recently. I mean, I guess everyone is in their own ways and forms. One of the things that came up for me is we have genre expectations and we have generation expectations.

When we look at genres, you will have different expectations from different genres. For romance, they want a happily ever after or a happy for now. For cosy mysteries, they expect the crime to be solved. So we as authors make sure we endeavour to meet those expectations.

The challenge is that if we are looking at AI, we are all in our own generations. We might be in slightly different generations, but there are going to be different generation expectations from the Alpha generation that's coming up and the Beta generation that's just about to start this year or next year because they're going to come into the world where they don't know any different to AI.

So they will have a different expectation than us. It will just be normal that there will be AI agents. It will just be normal that there are AI narrators. It will be normalised that AI will assist authors or assist everyone in doing their jobs.

So again, it is a grieving period because we can long for what was, we can yearn for things that worked for us that no longer work for us—whether it's Facebook groups, whether it's the Kindle Rush.

We can mourn the loss of that, but that's not coming back. I mean, sometimes there may be a resurgence, but essentially, we've got to embrace the change.

We've got to understand that it's coming and it's going to bring up a lot of different emotions because you may have been beholden to one thing and you may be like, yes, I've now got my TikTok lives, and then all of a sudden TikTok goes away.

I know Adam, when he was talking about it, he'll just find another platform. But there'll be a lot of people that are beholden to it and then they're like, what do I do now?

So again, it's never survival of the fittest—it's survival of the most adaptable.I always use this metaphor where there are three people on three different boats. A storm comes. And the first, the optimist, is like, “Oh, it'll pass,” and does nothing. The pessimist complains about the storm and does nothing. But the realist will adjust the sails and use the storm to find its way to the other side, to get through.

It's not going to be easy, but they're actually taking change and making change to get to where they need to go, rather than just expecting or complaining.

I get it. We are not, and I hate the expression, “we're all in the same boat.” I call bleep on that. I'm not going to swear. We're not all in the same boat. We're all in the same storm, but different people are going through different things.

For some, they can adjust and adapt really quickly like a speedboat. For others, they may be like Jack and Rose in the Titanic on that terrible prop where they're clinging to dear life and trying to get through the storm.

So it's about how do I navigate this upcoming storm? What can I do within my control to get through the storm? For some it may be easier because they have the resources, or for some of us that love learning, it's easy to embrace change.

For others that have a fear mindset and it's like, “Oh, something new, it's scary, I don't want to embrace it”—you are going to take longer. So you may not be the speedboat, but at some point we are going to have to embrace that change. Otherwise we're going to get left behind. So you need to look at that.

Jo: The storm metaphor is interesting, and being in different boats. I feel I do struggle. I struggle with people who suddenly seem to be discovering the storm. I've been talking about AI now since 2016. That's a decade.

Jack: Yes.

Jo: Even ChatGPT has been around more than three years, and people come to me now and they're talking about stories that they've seen in the media that are just old now. Things have moved on so much.

I feel like maybe I was on my boat and I looked through my telescope and I saw the storm. I've been talking about the storm and I've had my own moments of being in the middle of the storm. Now I definitely do struggle with people who just seem to have arrived without any knowledge of it before.

I oscillate between being an optimist and a realist. I think I'm somewhere between the two, probably. But I think what is driving me a little crazy in the author community right now is judgment and shame. There are people who are judging other people, and there's shame felt by AI-curious or AI-positive people.

So I want to help the people who feel shame in some way for trying new technology, but they still feel attacked. Then those people judge other authors for their choices to use technology.

So how do you think we can deal with judgment and shame in the community?Which is a form of conflict, I guess.

Jack: Of course. I think with that, there's another great PR quote: “If it bleeds, it leads.”

Especially in this digital age, there's a lot of clickbait. So the more polarising, the more emotion-evoking the headline, the more likely you are to engage with that content—whether that is reading it or whether that's posting or retweeting, or whatever format you are consuming it on.

So unfortunately, media has now become so much more polarising. It's dividing us rather than uniting us. So people are going to have stronger positions.

There's so much even within this to look at. One is, you have to work out where people are on the continuum. Do they have an opinion on AI? Do they have a belief? Or do they have a conviction?

Now you're not going to move someone that has a conviction about something, so it's not worth even engaging with them because they're immovable.

Like they say, you shouldn't talk about sports, politics, and religion. There are certain subjects that may not be worth talking about, especially if they have a conviction. Because they may not even be able to agree to disagree. They may not be willing or able to hear you.

So first and foremost, it's about understanding, well, where are those people sitting on the continuum of AI? Are they curious? Do they have an opinion, but they're open to hearing other opinions? Do they have a belief that could be changed or evolved if they find more information?

That's where I think it is. It's not necessarily our jobs—even though you do an amazing job of it, Joanna—but a lot of people are undereducated on these issues or these new technologies.

So in some cases it's just a case of a lack of education or them being undereducated. Hopefully in time they will become more and more educated. But again, it's how long is a piece of string? Will people catch up? Will they stay behind? Are they fearful?

I guess because of social media, because of the media, as they say, if you can evoke fear in people, you can control them. You can control their perspectives. You can control their minds. So that's where we see it—a lot of people are operating from a fear mindset. So then that's when they project their vitriol in certain cases.

If people want to believe a certain thing, that's their choice. I'm not here to tell people what to think. Like I said earlier, it's more about how to think. But I would just encourage people to find people that align with you.

Do a sense test, like a litmus test, to find where they sit on the continuum and engage with those people that are open and have opinions or beliefs. But shy away or just avoid people that have convictions that maybe are the polar opposite of yours.

Jo: It's funny, isn't it? We seem to be in a phase of history when I feel like you should be able to disagree with people and still be friends.

Although, as you mentioned, there's certain members of my family where we just stay on topics of TV shows and movies or music, or what books are you reading? Like, we don't go anywhere near politics.

So I do think that might be a rule also with the AI stuff. As you said, find a community, and there are plenty of AI-positive spaces now for people who do want to talk about this kind of stuff.

I also think that, I don't know whether this is a tipping point this year, but certainly—

I know people who are in bigger corporates where the message is now, “You need to embrace this stuff. It is now part of your job to learn how to use these AI tools.”So if that starts coming into people's day jobs, and also people who have, I don't know, kids at school or people at university who are embracing this more—I mean, maybe it is a generational thing.

Jack: Yes. Look, there were so many people that were resistant to working from home, or corporations that were, and then the pandemic forced it. Now everyone's embraced it in some way, shape, or form. I mean, there are people that don't, but the majority of people—when something's forced on you, you have to adapt.

So again, if those things are implemented in corporations, then you're going to see it. I'm seeing so many amazing new things in AI that have been implemented in the music industry that we'll see in the publishing industry coming down the road.

That will scare a lot of people, but again, we have to embrace those things because they're coming and there's going to be an expectation—especially from the younger generations—that these things are available.

So again, it's not first past the post, but if you can be ahead of the wave or at least on the wave, then you are going to reap the rewards. If you are behind the wave, you're going to get left behind.

So that's my opinion. I'm not trying to encourage anyone to see from my lens, but at the same time, I do think that we need to be thinking differently. We need to always embrace change where we can, as we can, at the pace that we can.

Jo: You mentioned there AI things coming down the road in the music industry. And now everyone's going, wait, what is coming? So tell us—

What do you see ahead that you think might also shift into the author world?Jack: There are three things that I've seen. Two that have been implemented and one that's been talked about and worked on at the moment.

The first, and this will be quite scary for people, is that major record labels—so think the major publishers on our side—they're all now putting clauses in their contracts that require the artists that sign with them to allow their works to be trained by their own AI models.

So that is something that is now actually happening in record labels. I wouldn't be surprised, although I don't have insight into it, if Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, et cetera, are potentially doing the same with authors that sign to them. So that's going to become more standardised. So that is on the major side.

But then on the creative side, there are two things that really excite me. The music AI platforms that we're hearing about, the stories that we've seen in the press, and it's the fact that with a click of a button, you can recreate a song into a different genre.

I find it so fascinating because if you think about that—turning a pop song into a country song or a rap song into a dance song—the possibilities that we have as authors with our books, if we wish to do so, are amazing.

I just think, for example, with your ARKANE series, Joanna, imagine clicking a button and just with one click you can take Morgan Sierra and turn her into a romantic lead in a romance book.

Jo: See, it's so funny because I personally just can't imagine that because it's not something I would write. But I guess one example in the romance genre itself is I know plenty of romance authors who write a clean and a spicy version of the same story, right? It is already happening in that way. It's just not a one-click.

Jack: Well, I think you can also look at it another way. I think one of the most famous examples is Twilight. With Twilight and Stephenie Meyer, if she had the foresight—and I'm not saying she didn't, just to clarify—but fan fiction is such a massive sub-genre of works. And obviously from Twilight came 50 Shades of Gray.

Imagine if she had the licensing rights like the NFTs, where she could have made money off of every sale. So that you could then, through works that you create and give licence, earn a percentage of every release, every sale, every consumption unit of your works.

There are just so many possibilities where you can create, adapt, have spinoffs that can then build out your world. Obviously, there may need to be an approval process in there for continuity and quality control because you want to make sure you're doing that, but I think that has such massive potential in publishing if we wish to do so.

Or like I said, change characters. Like Robert Langdon's character in Dan Brown's books—no longer being the kind of thriller, but maybe being a killer instead. There's so many possibilities. It's just, again, how to think, not what to think—how to think differently and how we can use that. So that's the second of three.

Jo: Oh, before you move on, you did mention NFTs and I've actually been reading about this again. So I'm usually five years early. That's the general rule. I started talking about NFTs in mid-2021, and obviously there was a crypto crash, it goes up and down, blah, blah, blah.

But forget the crypto side—on the blockchain side, digital originality, and exactly what you said about saying like, where did this originate? This is now coming back in the AI world. It could be that I really was five years early.

So amusingly—and I'm going to link to it in the notes because I did a “Why NFTs Are Exciting for Authors” solo episode, I think in 2022—it may be that the resurgence will happen in the next year, and all those people who said I was completely wrong, that this may be coming back.

Digital originality I think is what we're talking about there.But so, okay, so what was the other thing?

Jack: So the third one is the one that I'm most excited about, but I think will be the most scary for people.

Obviously consumption changes and formats change. Like I said, in music I've seen it all the time—whether it's vinyl to cassettes, to CDs, to downloads, to streaming.

Again, there's different consumption of the same format, and we see that with books as well, obviously—hardbacks, paperbacks, eBooks, audiobooks.

Now with the rise of AI, AI narration has made audiobooks so much more accessible for people. I know that there are issues with certain people not wanting to do it, or certain platforms not allowing AI narration to be uploaded unless it's their own.

The next step is what I'm most excited about. What I'm seeing now in the music industry is people licensing their image to then recreate that as music videos because music videos are so expensive.

One of my friends just shot a music video for two million pounds. I don't think many authors would ever wish to spend that.

If you can license your image and use AI to create a three-minute music video that looks epic and just as real as humanly possible, imagine if those artists—or if we go a step further, those actors—license their image to then be used to adapt our books into a TV series or a film.

So that then we are in a position where that is another format of consumption alongside an audiobook, a paperback, an eBook, hardcover, special edition, and so on and so forth. It potentially has the opportunity to open us up to a whole new world.

Because yes, there are adaptations of books that we're seeing at the moment, but for those of us that are trying to get our content into different formats, this can be a new pathway.

I'm going to make a prediction here myself, Joanna.

Jo: Mm-hmm.

Jack: I would say in the next five to ten years, there will be a platform akin to a Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney Plus, Apple Plus, where you can license the rights to an image of an actor or an actress.

Then with the technology—and you may need people to help you adapt your book into a TV series or a film—that can then be consumed. I just think the possibilities are endless.

I mean, again, I think of your character and I'm like, oh, what would it be if Angelina Jolie licensed her image and you could have her play the lead character in your ARKANE series? I mean, again, the possibilities potentially are endless here.

Jo: Well, and on that, if people think this won't happen—1776, I don't know if you've seen this, it's just being teased at the moment. Darren Aronofsky has made an American revolutionary story all with AI. So this is being talked about at the moment. It's on YouTube at the moment.

The AI video is just extraordinary already, so I totally agree with you. I think things are going to be quite weird for a while, and it will take a while to get used to.

You mentioned coming into the music industry in 2000, 2001—I started my work before the internet, and then the internet came along and lots of things changed. I mean, anyone who's older than 40, 45-ish can remember what work was like without the internet.

Now we are moving into a time where it'll be like, what was it like before AI? And I think we'll look back and go like, why the hell did we do that kind of thing? So it is a changing world, but yes, exciting times, right?

I think the other thing that's happening right now, even to me, is that things are moving so fast. You can almost feel like a kind of whiplash with how much is changing.

How do we deal with the fast pace of change while still trying to anchor ourselves in our writing practice and not going crazy?Jack: Again, it's that everything everywhere all at once—you can get lost and discombobulated.

I always say be the tortoise, not the hare—because you don't want to fly and die. You want pace and grace. Everyone will have a different pace. For some marathon runners, they can run a five-minute mile, some can run an eight-minute mile, some can run a twelve-minute mile. It's about finding the pace that works for you.

Every one of us have different commitments. Every one of us have different ways we view the industry—some as a hobby, some as a business. So it's about honouring your needs, your commitment.

Some of us, as you've had people on the podcast, some people are carers. They have to care. Some people are parents. Some people don't have those commitments and so can devote more time and then actually learn more, change more as a result.

So again, it's about finding your groove, finding your rhythm, honouring that, and again, showing up consistently. Because motivation may get you started, but it's habit and discipline that sees you through.

Keep that discipline, keep that pace and grace. Be consistent in what you can do. And know where you're at. Don't compare and despair, because again, if you look at someone else, they may be ahead of you, but the race is only with yourself in the end.

So you've got to just focus on where you are at and am I in a better place than I was yesterday? Am I working on my business as well as in my business? How am I doing that? When am I doing that? And what am I doing that for?

If you can be asking yourself those questions and making sure you're staying true to yourself and not burning out, making sure that you are honouring your other commitments, then I think you are going at the pace that feels right for you.

Jo: Brilliant.

Jo: Where can people find you and your books and everything you do online?Jack: Thank you so much for having me on, Joanna, today. You can find me on JackWilliamson.co.uk for all my nonfiction books and therapy work. Then for my fiction work, it is ABJackson.com, or ABJacksonAuthor on Instagram and TikTok.

Jo: Well, thanks so much for your time, Jack. That was great.

Jack: Thank you so much.

The post Post-Traumatic Growth, Creative Marketing, And Dealing With Change with Jack Williamson first appeared on The Creative Penn.

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How do you stay audacious in a world that's noisier and more saturated than ever? How might the idea of creative rhythm change the way you write? Lara Bianca Pilcher gives her tips from a multi-passionate creative career.

In the intro, becoming a better writer by being a better reader [The Indy Author];
How indie authors can market literary fiction [Self-Publishing with ALLi];
Viktor Wynd’s Museum of Curiosities; Seneca’s On the Shortness of Life; All Men are Mortal – Simone de Beauvoir; Surface Detail — Iain M. Banks; Bones of the Deep – J.F. Penn.

This episode is sponsored by Publisher Rocket, which will help you get your book in front of more Amazon readers so you can spend less time marketing and more time writing. I use Publisher Rocket for researching book titles, categories, and keywords — for new books and for updating my backlist. Check it out at www.PublisherRocket.com

This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn

Lara Bianca Pilcher is the author of Audacious Artistry: Reclaim Your Creative Identity and Thrive in a Saturated World. She's also a performing artist and actor, life and creativity coach, and the host of the Healthy Wealthy Wise Artist podcast.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.

Show Notes

• Why self-doubt is a normal biological response — and how audacity means showing up anyway
• The difference between creative rhythm and rigid discipline, and why it matters for writers
• How to navigate a saturated world with intentional presence on social media
• Practical strategies for building a platform as a nonfiction author, including batch content creation
• The concept of a “parallel career” and why designing your life around your art beats waiting for a big break
• Getting your creative rhythm back after crisis or burnout through small, gentle steps

You can find Lara at LaraBiancaPilcher.com.

Transcript of the interview with Lara Bianca PilcherLara Bianca Pilcher is the author of Audacious Artistry: Reclaim Your Creative Identity and Thrive in a Saturated World. She's also a performing artist and actor, life and creativity coach, and the host of the Healthy Wealthy Wise Artist podcast. Welcome, Lara.

Lara: Thank you for having me, Jo.

Jo: It's exciting to talk to you today. First up—

Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing.Lara: I'm going to call myself a greedy creative, because I started as a dancer, singer, and actress in musical theatre, which ultimately led me to London, the West End, and I was pursuing that in highly competitive performance circles. A lot of my future works come from that kind of place.

But when I moved to America—which I did after my season in London and a little stint back in Australia, then to Atlanta, Georgia—I had a visa problem where I couldn't work legally, and it went on for about six months.

Because I feel this urge to create, as so many of your listeners probably relate to, I was not okay with that. So that's actually where I started writing, in the quietness, with the limits and the restrictions. I've got two children and a husband, and they would go off to school and work and I'd be home thinking, ha.

In that quietness, I just began to write. I love thinking of creativity as a mansion with many rooms, and you get to pick your rooms. I decided, okay, well the dance, acting, singing door is shut right now—I'm going to go into the writing room. So I did.

Jo: I have had a few physical creatives on the show. Obviously one of your big rooms in your mansion is a physical room where you are actually performing and moving your body. I feel like this is something that those of us whose biggest area of creativity is writing really struggle with—the physical side.

How do you think that physical practice of creativity has helped you in writing, which can be quite constrictive in that way?Lara: It's so good that you asked this because I feel what it trained me to do is ignore noise and show up. I don't like the word discipline—most of us get a bit uncomfortable with it, it's not a nice word.

What being a dancer did was teach me the practice of what I like to call a rhythm, a creative rhythm, rather than a discipline, because rhythm ebbs and flows and works more with who we are as creatives, with the way creativity works in our body.

That taught me: go to the barre over and over again—at the ballet barre, I'm talking about, not the pub. Go there over and over again. Warm up, do the work, show up when you don't feel like it. thaT naturally pivoted over to writing, so they're incredibly linked in the way that creativity works in our body.

Jo: Do you find that you need to do physical practice still in order to get your creativity moving? I'm not a dancer. I do like to shake it around a bit, I guess. But I mainly walk. If I need to get my creativity going, I will walk.

If people are stuck, do you think doing something physical is a good idea?Lara: It is, because the way that our body and our nervous system works—without going into too much boring science, although some people probably find it fascinating—is that when we shake off that lethargic feeling and we get blood flowing in our body, we naturally feel more awake.

Often when you're walking or you're doing something like dance, your brain is not thinking about all of the big problems.

You might be listening to music, taking in inspiration, taking in sunshine, taking in nature, getting those endorphins going, and that naturally leads to the brain being able to psychologically show up more as a creative.

However, there are days, if I'm honest, where I wake up and the last thing I want to do is move. I want to be in a little blanket in the corner of the room with a hot cocoa or a coffee and just keep to myself. Those aren't always the most creative days, but sometimes I need that in my creative rhythm, and that's okay too.

Jo: I agree. I don't like the word discipline, but as a dancer you certainly would've had to do that. I can't imagine how competitive it must be. I guess this is another thing about a career in dance or the physical arts.

Does it age out? Is it really an ageist industry? Whereas I feel like with writing, it isn't so much about what your body can do anymore.

Lara: That is true. There is a very real marketplace, a very real industry, and I'm careful because there's two sides to this coin. There is the fact that as we get older, our body has trouble keeping up at that level. There's more injuries, that sort of thing.

There are some fit women performing in their sixties and seventies on Broadway that have been doing it for years, and they are fine. They'll probably say it's harder for some of them.

Also, absolutely, I think there does feel in the professional sense like there can be a cap. A lot of casting in acting and in that world feels like there's fewer and fewer roles, particularly for women as we get older, but people are in that space all the time.

There's a Broadway dancer I know who is 57, who's still trying to make it on Broadway and really open about that, and I think that's beautiful. So I'm careful with putting limits, because I think there are always outliers that step outside and go, “Hey, I'm not listening to that.”

I think there's an audience for every age if you want there to be and you make the effort. But at the same time, yes, there is a reality in the industry. Totally.

Jo: Obviously this show is not for dancers. I think it was more framing it as we are lucky in the writing industry, especially in the independent author community, because you can be any age. You can be writing on your deathbed. Most people don't have a clue what authors look like.

Lara: I love that, actually. It's probably one of the reasons I maybe subconsciously went into writing, because I'm like, I want to still create and I'm getting older. It's fun.

Jo: That's freeing.

Lara: So freeing. It's a wonderful room in the mansion to stay in until the day I die, if I must put it that way.

Jo: I also loved you mentioning that Broadway dancer. A lot of listeners write fiction—I write fiction as well as nonfiction—and it immediately makes me want to write her story. The story of a 57-year-old still trying to make it on Broadway.

There's just so much in that story, and I feel like that's the other thing we can do: writing about the communities we come from, especially at different ages.

Let's get into your book, Audacious Artistry. I want to start on this word audacity. You say audacity is the courage to take bold, intentional risks, even in the face of uncertainty. I read it and I was like, I love the sentiment, but I also know most authors are just full of self-doubt.

Bold and audacious. These are difficult words. So what can you say to authors around those big words?Lara: Well, first of all, that self-doubt—a lot of us don't even know what it is in our body. We just feel it and go, ugh, and we read it as a lack of confidence. It's not that. It's actually natural. We all get it. What it is, is our body's natural ability to perceive threat and keep us safe.

So we're like, oh, I don't know the outcome. Oh, I don't know if I'm going to get signed. Oh, I don't know if my work's going to matter. And we read that as self-doubt—”I don't have what it takes” and those sorts of things.

That's where I say no. The reframe, as a coach, I would say, is that it's normal. Self-doubt is normal. Everyone has it. But audacity is saying, I have it, but I'm going to show up in the world anyway. There is this thing of believing, even in the doubt, that I have something to say.

I like to think of it as a metaphor of a massive feasting table at Christmas, and there's heaps of different dishes. We get to bring a dish to the table rather than think we're going to bring the whole table. The audacity to say, “Hey, I have something to say and I'm going to put my dish on the table.”

Jo: I feel like the “I have something to say” can also be really difficult for people, because, for example, you mentioned you have kids. Many people are like, I want to share this thing that happened to me with my kids, or a secret I learned, or a tip I think will help people. But there's so many people who've already done that before.

When we feel like we have something to say but other people have said it before, how do you address that?Lara: I think everything I say, someone has already said, and I'm okay with that. But they haven't said it like me. They haven't said it in my exact way. They haven't written the sentence exactly the way—that's probably too narrow a point of view in terms of the sentence—maybe the story or the chapter.

They haven't written it exactly like me, with my perspective, my point of view, my life experience, my lived experience. It matters.

People have very short memories. You think of the last thing you watched on Netflix and most of us can't remember what happened. We'll watch the season again.

So I think it's okay to be saying the same things as others, but recognise that the way you say it, your point of view, your stories, your metaphors, your incredible way of putting a sentence togethes, it still matters in that noise.

Jo: I think you also talk in the book about rediscovering the joy of creation, as in you are doing it for you. One of the themes that I emphasise is the transformation that happens within you when you write a book. Forget all the people who might read it or not read it.

Even just what transforms in you when you write is important enough to make it worthwhile.Lara: It really, really is. For me, talking about rediscovering the joy of creation is important because I've lost it at times in my career, both as a performing artist and as an author, in a different kind of way.

When we get so caught up in the industry and the noise and the trends, it's easy to just feel overwhelmed. Overwhelm is made up of a lot of emotions like fear and sadness and grief and all sorts of things. A lot of us don't realise that that's what overwhelm is.

When we start to go, “Hey, I'm losing my voice in all this noise because comparison is taking over and I'm feeling all that self-doubt,” it can feel just crazy. So for me, rediscovering the joy of creation is vital to survival as an author, as an artist.

A classic example, if you don't mind me sharing my author story really quickly, is that when I first wrote the first version of my book, I was writing very much for me, not realising it. This is hindsight. My first version was a little more self-indulgent. I like to think of it like an arrowhead. I was trying to say too much.

The concept was good enough that I got picked up by a literary agent and worked with an editor through that for an entire year. At the end of that time, they dropped me. I felt like, through that time, I learned a lot. It was wonderful.

Their reason for dropping me was saying, “I don't think we have enough of a unique point of view to really sell this.” That was hard. I lay on my bed, stared at the ceiling, felt grief. The reality is it's so competitive. What happened for me in that year is that I was trying to please.

If you're a new author, this is really important. You are so desperately trying to please the editor, trying to do all the right things, that you can easily lose your joy and your unique point of view because you are trying to show up for what you think they all need and want.

What cut through the noise for me is I got off that bed after my three hours of grief—it was probably longer, to be fair—but I booked myself a writing coach. I went back to the drawing board.

I threw a lot of the book away. I took some good concepts out that I already knew were good from the editor, then I rewrote the entire thing. It's completely different to the first version.

That's the book that got a traditional publishing deal. That book was my unique point of view. That book was my belief, from that grief, that I still have something to say. Instead of trusting what the literary agent and the editor were giving me in those red marks all over that first version, I was like, this is what I want to say.

That became the arrowhead that's cut into the industry, rather than the semi-trailer truck that I was trying to bulldoze in with no clear point of view. So rediscovering the joy of creation is very much about coming back to you. Why do I write? What do I want to say?

That unique point of view will cut through the noise a lot of the time. I don't want to speak in absolutes, but a lot of the time it will cut through the noise better than you trying to please the industry.

Jo: I can't remember who said it, but somebody talked about how you've got your stone, and your stone is rough and it has random colours and all this. Then you start polishing the stone, which you have to do to a point. But if you keep polishing the stone, it looks like every other stone. What's the point?

That fits with what you were saying about trying to please everyone, you end up pleasing no one. I also think the reality of what you just said about the book is a lot of people's experience with writing in general.

Certainly for me, I don't write in order. I chuck out a lot. I'm a discovery writer. People think you sit down and start A and finish Z, and that's it.

It's kind of messy, isn't it? Was that the same in your physical creative life?Lara: Yes. Everything's a mess. In the book I actually talk about learning to embrace the cringe, because we all want to show up perfect. Just as you shared, we think, because we read perfect and look at perfect or near-perfect work—that's debatable all the time—we want to arrive there, and I guess that's natural.

But what we don't often see on social media or other places is the mess. I love the behind the scenes of films. I want to see the messy creative process.

The reality is we have to learn to embrace the messy cringe because that's completely normal. My first version was so messy, and it's about being able to refine it and recognise that that is normal. So yes, embrace it. That's my quote for the day. Embrace the cringe, show up messy. It's all right.

Jo: You mentioned the social media, and the subtitle of the book mentions a “saturated world.” The other problem is there are millions of books out there now. AI is generating more content than humans do, and it is extremely hard to break through.

How are we to deal with this saturated world? When do we join in and when do we step away?Lara: I think it's really important not to have black and white thinking about it, because trust me, every day I meet an artist that will say, “I hate that I have to show up online.” To be honest with you, there's a big part of me that does also.

But the saturation of the world is something that I recognise, and for me, it's like I'm in the world but not of it. That saturation can cause so much overwhelm and nervous system threat and comparison.

What I've personally decided to do is have intentional showing up. That looks like checking in intentionally with a design, not a randomness, and then checking out.

When push comes to shove, at the end of the day, I really believe that what sells books is people's trust in us as a person.

They might go through an airport and not know us at all and pick up the book because it's a bestseller and they just trust the reputation, but so much of what I'm finding as an artist is that personal relationship, that personal trust.

Whether that's through people knowing you via your podcast or people meeting you in a room. Especially in nonfiction, I think that's really big.

Intentional presence from a place where we've regulated ourselves, being aware that it's saturated, but my job's not to be focused on the saturation. My job is to find my unique voice and say I have something to bring.

Be intentional with that. Shoot your arrow, and then step out of the noise, because it's just overwhelming if you choose to live there and scroll without any intentionality at all.

Jo: So how do people do that intentionality in a practical way around, first of all, choosing a platform, and then secondly, how they create content and share content and engage?

What are some actual practical tips for intentionality?Lara: I can only speak from my experience, but I'm going to be honest, every single application I sent asked for my platform stats. Every single one.

Platform stats as in how many followers, how many people listening to your podcast, how many people are reading your blog. That came up in every single literary agent application.

So I would be a fool today to say you've got to ignore that, because that's just the brass tacks, unless you're already like a famous footballer or something. Raising and building a platform of my own audience has been a part of why I was able to get a publishing deal.

In doing that, I've learned a lot of hard lessons. Embrace the cringe with marketing and social media as well, because it's its own beast.

Algorithms are not what I worry about. They're not going to do the creativity for you. What social media's great at is saying, “Hey, I'm here”—it's awareness. It's not where I sell stuff. It's where I say, I'm here, this is what I'm doing, and people become aware of me and I can build that relationship.

People do sell through social media, but it's more about awareness statistically. I am on a lot of platforms, but not all of them work for every author or every style of book.

I've done a lot of training. I've really had to upskill in this space and get good at it. I've put myself through courses because I feel like, yes, we can ignore it if we want to, but for me it's an intentional opting in because the data shows that it's been a big part of being able to get published.

That's overwhelming to hear for some people. They don't want to hear that. But that's kind of the world that we are in, isn't it?

Jo: I think the main point is that you can't do everything and you shouldn't even try to do everything. The best thing to do is pick a couple of things, or pick one thing, and focus on that.

For example, I barely ever do video, so I definitely don't do TikTok. I don't do any kind of video stuff. But I have this podcast. Audio is my happy place, and as you said, long-form audio builds trust. That is one way you can sell, but it's also very slow—very, very slow to build an audio platform.

Then I guess my main social media would be Instagram, but I don't engage a lot there.

So do you have one or two main things that you do, and any thoughts on using those for book marketing?Lara: I do a lot of cross-posting. I am on Instagram and I do a lot of creation there, and I'm super intentional about this. I actually do 30 days at a time, and then it's like my intentional opt-in.

I'll create over about two days, edit and plan. It's really, really planned—shoot everything, edit everything, put it all together, and then upload everything. That will be 30 days' worth.

Then I back myself right out of there, because I don't want to stay in that space. I want to be in the creative space, but I do put those two days a month aside to do that on Instagram.

Then I tweak things for YouTube and what works on LinkedIn, which is completely different to Instagram. As I'm designing my content, I have in mind that this one will go over here and this one can go on here, because different platforms push different things.

I am on Threads, but Threads is not statistically where you sell books, it's just awareness. Pinterest I don't think has been very good for my type of work, to be honest. For others it might. It's a search engine, it's where people go to get a recipe.

I don't necessarily feel like that's the best place, this is just my point of view. For someone else it might be brilliant if you're doing a cookbook or something like that.

I am on a lot of platforms. My podcast, however, I feel is where I'm having the most success, and also my blog. Those things as a writer are very fulfilling. I've pushed growing a platform really hard, and I am on probably almost every platform except for TikTok, but I'm very intentional with each one.

Jo: I guess the other thing is the business model. The fiction business model is very, very different to nonfiction. You've got a book, but your higher-cost and higher-value offerings are things that a certain number of people come through to you and pay you more money than the price of a book.

Could talk about how the book leads into different parts of your business?Because some people are like, “Am I going to make a living wage from book sales of a nonfiction book?” And usually people have multiple streams of income.

Lara: I think it's smart to have multiple streams of income. A lot of people, as you would know, would say that a book is a funnel. For those who haven't heard of it, a way that people come into your bigger offerings. They don't have to be, but very much I do see it that way.

It's also credibility. When you have a published book, there's a sense of credibility.

I do have other things. I have courses, I have coaching, I have a lot of things that I call my parallel career that chug alongside my artist work and actually help stabilise that freelance income. Having a book is brilliant for that. I think it's a wonderful way to get out there in the world.

No matter what's happening in all the online stuff, when you're on an aeroplane, so often someone still wants to read a book. When you're on the beach, they don't want to be there with a laptop. If you're on the sand, you want to be reading a beautiful paper book. The smell of it, the visceral experience of it.

Books aren't going anywhere, to me. I still feel like there are always going to be people that want to pick it up and dig in and learn so much of your entire life experience quickly.

Jo: We all love books here.

I think it's important, as you do talk about career design and you mentioned there the parallel career—I get a lot of questions from people. They may just be writing their first book and they want to get to the point of making money so they could leave their day job or whatever. But it takes time, doesn't it?

So how can we be more strategic about this sort of career design?Lara: For me, this has been a big one because lived experience here is that I know artists in many different areas, whether they're Broadway performers or music artists. Some of them are on almost everything I watch on TV. I'm like, oh, they're that guy again. I know that actor is on almost everything.

I'll apply this over to writers. The reality is that these high-end performers that I see all the time showing up, even on Broadway in lead roles, all have another thing that they do, because they can still have, even at the highest level, six months between a contract.

Applying that over to writing is the same thing, in that books and the money from them will ebb and flow. What so often artists are taught—and authors fit into this—is that we ultimately want art to make us money.

So often that becomes “may my art rescue me from this horrible life that I'm living,” and we don't design the life around the art. We hope, hope, hope that our art will provide.

I think it's a beautiful hope and a valid one. Some people do get that. I'm all for hoping our art will be our main source of income. But the reality is for the majority of people, they have something else.

What I see over and over again is these audacious dreams, which are wonderful, and everything pointing towards them in terms of work. But then I'll see the actor in Hollywood that has a café job and I'm like, how long are you going to just work at that café job?

They're like, “Well, I'm goint to get a big break and then everything's going to change.” I think we can think the same way. My big break will come, I'll get the publishing deal, and then everything will change.

The reframe in our thinking is: what if we looked at this differently? Instead of side hustle, fallback career, instead of “my day job,” we say parallel career. How do I design a life that supports my art? And if I get to live off my art, wonderful.

For me, that's looked like teaching and directing musical theatre. It's looked like being able to coach other artists. It's looked like writing and being able to pivot my creativity in the seasons where I've needed to.

All of that is still creativity and energising, and all of it feeds the great big passion I have to show up in the world as an artist. None of it is actually pulling me away or draining me. I mean, you have bad days, of course, but it's not draining my art.

When we are in this way of thinking—one day, one day, one day—we are not designing intentionally.

What does it look like to maybe upskill and train in something that would be more energising for my parallel career that will chug alongside us as an artist? We all hope our art can totally 100% provide for us, which is the dream and a wonderful dream, and one that I still have.

Jo: It's hard, isn't it? Because I also think that, personally, I need a lot of input in order to create. I call myself more of a binge writer. I just finished the edits on my next novel and I worked really hard on that.

Now I won't be writing fiction for, I don't know, maybe six months or something, because now I need to input for the next one.

I have friends who will write 10,000 words a day because they don't need that. They have something internal, or they're just writing a different kind of book that doesn't need that.

Your book is a result of years of experience, and you can't write another book like that every year. You just can't, because you don't have enough new stuff to put in a book like that every single year.

I feel like that's the other thing.

People don't anticipate the input time and the time it takes for the ideas to come together. It is not just the production of the book.Lara: That's completely true. It goes back to this metaphor that creativity in the body is not a machine, it's a rhythm. I like to say rhythm over consistency, which allows us to say, “Hey, I'm going to be all in.”

I was all in on writing. I went into a vortex for days on end, weeks on end, months and probably years on end. But even within that, there were ebbs and flows of input versus “I can't go near it today.”

Recognising that that's actually normal is fine. There are those people that are outliers, and they will be out of that box. A lot of people will push that as the only way. “I am going to write every morning at 10am regardless.” That can work for some people, and that's wonderful.

For those of us who don't like that—and I'm one of those people, that's not me as an artist—I accept the rhythm of creativity and that sometimes I need to do something completely different to feed my soul.

I'm a big believer that a lot of creative block is because we need an adventure. We need to go out and see some art. To do good art, you've got to see good art, read good art, get outside, do something else for the input so that we have the inspiration to get out of the block.

I know a screenwriter who was writing a really hard scene of a daughter's death—her mum's death. It's not easy to just write that in your living room when you've never gone through it.

So she took herself out—I mean, it sounds morbid, but as a writer you'll understand the visceral nature of this—and sat at somebody's tombstone that day and just let that inform her mind and her heart.

She was able to write a really powerful scene because she got out of the house and allowed herself to do something different.

All that to say that creativity, the natural process, is an in-and-out thing. It ebbs and flows as a rhythm. People are different, and that's fine. But it is a rhythm in the way it works scientifically in the body.

Jo: On graveyards—we love graveyards around here.

Lara: I was like, sorry everyone, this isn't very nice.

Jo: Oh, no. People are well used to it on this show.

Let's come back to rhythm. When you are in a good rhythm, or when your body's warmed up and you are in the flow and everything's great, that feels good. But what if some people listening have found their rhythm is broken in some way, or it's come to a stop?

That can be a real problem, getting moving again if you stop for too long.

What are some ways we can get that rhythm back into something that feels right again?Lara: First of all, for people going through that, it's because our body actually will prioritise survival when we're going through crisis or too much stress. Creativity in the brain will go, well, that's not in that survival nature.

When we are going through change—like me moving countries—it would disconnect us a lot from not only ourselves and our sense of identity, but creativity ultimately reconnects you back into life.

I feel like to be at our optimum creative self, once we get through the crisis and the stress, is to gently nudge ourselves back in by little micro things. Whether it's “I'm just going to have the rhythm of writing one sentence a day.” As we do that, those little baby steps build momentum and allow us to come back in.

Creativity is a life force. It's not about production, it's actually how we get to any unique contribution we're going to bring to the world. As we start to nudge ourselves back in, there's healing in that and there's joy in that.

Then momentum comes. I know momentum comes from those little steps, rather than the overwhelming “I've got to write a novel this week” mindset. It's not going to happen, most of the time, when we are nudging our way back in. Little baby steps, kindness with ourselves.

Staying connected to yourself through change or through crisis is one of the kindest things we can offer ourselves, and allowing ourselves to come into that rhythm—like that musical song of coming back in with maybe one line of the song instead of the entire masterpiece, which hopefully it will be one day.

Jo: I was also thinking of the dancing world again, and one thing that is very different with writers is that so much of what we do is alone. In a lot of the performance art space, there's a lot more collaboration and groups of people creating things together.

Is that something you've kept hold of, this kind of collaborative energy?

How do you think we can bring that collaborative energy more into writing?Lara: Writing is very much alone. Obviously some people, depending on the project, will write in groups, but generally speaking, it's alone.

For me, what that looks like is going out. I do this, and I know for some writers this is like, I don't want to go and talk to people. There are a lot of introverts in writing, as you are aware.

I do go to creative mixers. I do get out there. I'm planning right now my book launch with a local bookstore, one in Australia and one here in America.

Those things are scary, but I know that it matters to say I'm not in this alone. I want to bring my friends in. I want to have others part of this journey. I want to say, hey, I did this. And of course, I want to sell books. That's important too.

It's so easy to hide, because it's scary to get out there and be with others. Yet I know that after a creative mixer or a meetup with all different artists, no matter their discipline, I feel very energised by that. Writers will come, dancers will come, filmmakers will come. It's that creative force that really energises my work.

Of course, you can always meet with other writers. There's one person I know that runs this thing where all they do is they all get on Zoom together and they all write. Their audio's off, but they're just writing. It's just the feeling of, we're all writing but we're doing it together.

It's a discipline for them, but because there's a room of creatives all on Zoom, they're like, I'm here, I've showed up, there's others. There's a sense of accountability. I think that's beautiful. I personally don't want to work that way, but some people do, and I think that's gorgeous too.

Jo: Whatever sustains you. I think one of the important things is to realise you are not alone. I get really confused when people say this now.

They're like, “Writing's such a lonely life, how do you manage?” I'm like, it is so not lonely.Lara: Yes.

Jo: I'm sure you do too. Especially as a podcaster, a lot of people want to have conversations. We are having a conversation today, so that fulfils my conversation quota for the day.

Lara: Exactly. Real human connection. It matters.

Jo: Exactly. So maybe there's a tip for people. I'm an introvert, so this actually does fulfil it. It's still one-on-one, it's still you and me one-on-one, which is good for introverts. But it's going out to a lot more people at some point who will listen in to our conversation.

There are some ways to do this. It's really interesting hearing your thoughts.

Tell people where they can find you and your books and your podcast online.Lara: The book is called Audacious Artistry: Reclaim Your Creative Identity and Thrive in a Saturated World, and it's everywhere. The easiest thing to do would be to visit my website, LaraBiancaPilcher.com/book, and you'll find all the links there.

My podcast is called Healthy Wealthy Wise Artist, and it's on all the podcast platforms. I do short coaching for artists on a lot of the things we've been talking about today.

Jo: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Lara. That was great.

Lara: Thank you.

The post Audacious Artistry: Reclaiming Your Creative Identity And Thriving In A Saturated World With Lara Bianca Pilcher first appeared on The Creative Penn.

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How do you juggle multiple book projects, a university teaching role, Kickstarter campaigns, and rock albums—all without burning out? What does it take to build a writing career that spans decades, through industry upheavals and personal setbacks? Kevin J. Anderson shares hard-won lessons from his 40+ year career writing over 190 books.

In the intro, Draft2Digital partners with Bookshop.org for ebooks; Spotify announces PageMatch and print partnership with Bookshop.org; Eleven Audiobooks; Indie author non-fiction books Kickstarter; Bones of the Deep – J.F. Penn

This podcast is sponsored by Kobo Writing Life, which helps authors self-publish and reach readers in global markets through the Kobo eco-system. You can also subscribe to the Kobo Writing Life podcast for interviews with successful indie authors.

This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn

Kevin J. Anderson is the multi-award-winning and internationally bestselling author of over 190 books across different genres, with over 24 million copies in print across 34 languages. He's also the director of publishing at Western Colorado University, as well as a publisher at WordFire Press, an editor and rock album lyricist, and he's co-written Dune books and worked on the recent Dune movies and TV show.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights, and the full transcript is below.

Show Notes

• Managing multiple projects at different stages to maximise productivity without burning out
• Building financial buffers and multiple income streams for a sustainable long-term career
• Adapting when life disrupts your creative process, from illness to injury
• Lessons learned from transitioning between traditional publishing, indie, and Kickstarter
• Why realistic expectations and continuously reinventing yourself are essential for longevity
• The hands-on publishing master's program at Western Colorado University

You can find Kevin at WordFire.com and buy his books direct at WordFireShop.com.

Transcript of Interview with Kevin J. AndersonJo: Kevin J. Anderson is the multi award-winning and internationally bestselling author of over 190 books across different genres, with over 24 million copies in print across 34 languages.

He's also the Director of Publishing at Western Colorado University, as well as a publisher at WordFire Press, an editor, a rock album lyricist, and he's co-written Dune books and worked on the recent Dune movies and TV show.

Welcome back to the show, Kevin.

Kevin: Well, thanks, Joanna. I always love being on the show.

Jo: And we're probably on like 200 books and like 50 million copies in print. I mean, how hard is it to keep up with all that?

Kevin: Well, it was one of those where we actually did have to do a list because my wife was like, we really should know the exact number. And I said, well, who can keep track because that one went out of print and that's an omnibus. So does it count as something else?

Well, she counted them. But that was a while ago and I didn't keep track, so…

Jo: Right.

Kevin: I'm busy and I like to write. That's how I've had a long-term career. It's because I don't hate what I'm doing. I've got the best job in the world. I love it.

Jo: So that is where I wanted to start. You've been on the show multiple times. People can go back and have a listen to some of the other things we've talked about. I did want to talk to you today about managing multiple priorities.

You are a director of publishing at Western Colorado University. I am currently doing a full-time master's degree as well as writing a novel, doing this podcast, my Patreon, all the admin of running a business, and I feel like I'm busy.

Then I look at what you do and I'm like, this is crazy. People listening are also busy. We're all busy, right. But I feel like it can't just be writing and one job—you do so much.

So how do you manage your time, juggle priorities, your calendar, and all that?Kevin: I do it brilliantly. Is that the answer you want? I do it brilliantly.

It is all different things. If I were just working on one project at a time, like, okay, I'm going to start a new novel today and I've got nothing else on my plate. Well, that would take me however long to do the research and the plot.

I'm a full-on plotter outliner, so it would take me all the while to do—say it's a medieval fantasy set during the Crusades. Well, then I'd have to spend months reading about the Crusades and researching them and maybe doing some travel.

Then get to the point where I know the characters enough that I can outline the book and then I start writing the book, and then I start editing the book, which is a part that I hate. I love doing the writing, I hate doing the editing. Then you edit a whole bunch.

To me, there are parts of that that are like going to the dentist—I don't like it—and other parts of it are fun.

So by having numerous different projects at different stages, all of which require different skill sets or different levels of intensity—

I can be constantly switching from one thing to another and basically be working at a hundred percent capacity on everything all the time. And I love doing this. So I'll be maybe writing a presentation, which is what I was doing before we got on this call this morning, because I'm giving a new keynote presentation at Superstars, which is in a couple of weeks.

That's another thing that was on our list—I helped run Superstars. I founded that 15 years ago and it's been going on. So I'll be giving that talk.

Then we just started classes for my publishing grad students last week. So I'm running those classes, which meant I had to write all of the classes before they started, and I did that.

I've got a Kickstarter that will launch in about a month. I'm getting the cover art for that new book and I've got to write up the Kickstarter campaign. And I have to write the book. I like to have the book at least drafted before I run a Kickstarter for it. So I'm working on that.

A Kickstarter pre-launch page should be up a month before the Kickstarter launches, and the Kickstarter has to launch in early March, so that means early February I have to get the pre-launch page up. So there's all these dominoes. One thing has to go before the next thing can go.

During the semester break between fall semester—we had about a month off—I had a book for Blackstone Publishing and Weird Tales Presents that I had to write, and I had plotted it and I thought if I don't get this written during the break, I'm going to get distracted and I won't finish it.

So I just buckled down and I wrote the 80,000-word book during the month of break. This is like Little House on the Prairie with dinosaurs. It's an Amish community that wants to go to simpler times. So they go back to the Pleistocene era where they're setting up farms and the brontosaurus gets into the cornfield all the time.

Jo: That sounds like a lot of fun.

Kevin: That's fun. So with the grad students that I have every week, we do all kinds of lectures.

Just to reassure people, I am not at all an academic. I could not stand my English classes where you had to write papers analysing this and that. My grad program is all hands-on, pragmatic. You actually learn how to be a publisher when you go through it.

You learn how to design covers, you learn how to lay things out, you learn how to edit, you learn how to do fonts.

One of the things that I do among the lectures every week or every other week, I just give them something that I call the real world updates. Like, okay, this is the stuff that I, Kevin, am working on in my real world career because the academic career isn't like the real world.

So I just go listing about, oh, I designed these covers this week, and I wrote the draft of this dinosaur homestead book, and then I did two comic scripts, and then I had to edit two comic scripts.

We just released my third rock album that's based on my fantasy trilogy. And I have to write a keynote speech for Superstars. And I was on Joanna Penn's podcast. And here's what I'm doing.

Sometimes it's a little scary because I read it and I go, holy crap, I did a lot of stuff this week.

Jo: So I manage everything on Google Calendar. Do you have systems for managing all this? Because you also have external publishers, you have actual dates when things actually have to happen. Do you manage that yourself or does Rebecca, your wife and business partner, do that?

How do you manage your calendar?Kevin: Well, Rebecca does most of the business stuff, like right now we have to do a bunch of taxes stuff because it's the new year and things. She does that and I do the social interaction and the creating and the writing and stuff.

My assistant Marie Whittaker, she's a big project management person and she's got all these apps on how to do project managing and all these sorts of things. She tried to teach me how to use these apps, but it takes so much time and organisation to fill the damn things out.

So it's all in my head. I just sort of know what I have to do. I just put it together and work on it and just sort of know this thing happens next and this thing happens next.

I guess one of the ways is when I was in college, I put myself through the university by being a waiter and a bartender.

As a waiter and a bartender, you have to juggle a million different things at once. This guy wants a beer and that lady wants a martini, and that person needs to pay, and this person's dinner is up on the hot shelf so you've got to deliver it before it gets cold.

It's like I learned how to do millions of things and keep them all organised, and that's the way it worked. And I've kept that as a skill all the way through and it has done me good, I think.

Jo: I think that there is a difference between people's brains, right? So I'm pretty chaotic in terms of my creative process. I'm not a plotter like you. I'm pretty chaotic, basically. But I come across—

Kevin: I've met you. Yes.

Jo: I know. But I'm also extremely organised and I plan everything. That's part of, I think, being an introvert and part of dealing with the anxiety of the world is having a plan or a schedule.

So I think the first thing to say to people listening is they don't have to be like you, and they don't have to be like me. It's kind of a personal thing. I guess one thing that goes beyond both of us is, earlier you said you basically work at a hundred percent capacity.

So let's say there's somebody listening and they're like, well, I'm at a hundred percent capacity too, and it might be kids, it might be a day job, as well as writing and all that. And then something happens, right? You mentioned the real world. I seem to remember that you broke your leg or something.

Kevin: Yes.

Jo: And the world comes crashing down through all your plans, whether they're written or in your head.

So how do you deal with a buffer of something happening, or you're sick, or Rebecca's sick, or the cat needs to go to the vet? Real life—how do you deal with that?

Kevin: Well, that really does cause problems. We had, in fact, just recently—so I'm always working at, well, let's be realistic, like 95% of Kevin capacity.

Well, my wife, who does some of the stuff here around the house and she does the business things, she just went through 15 days of the worst crippling migraine string that she's had in 30 years.

So she was curled up in a foetal position on the bed for 15 days and she couldn't do any of her normal things. I mean, even unloading the dishwasher and stuff like that.

So if I'm at 95% capacity and suddenly I have to pick up an extra 50%, that causes real problems. So I drink lots of coffee, and I get less sleep, and you try to bring in some help.

I mean, we have Rebecca's assistant and the assistant has a 20-year-old daughter who came in to help us do some of the dishes and laundry and housework stuff.

You mentioned before, it was a year ago. I always go out hiking and mountain climbing and that's where I write. I dictate. I have a digital recorder that I go off of, and that's how I'm so productive.

I go out, I walk in the forest and I come home with 5,000 words done in a couple of hours, and I always do that. That's how I write.

Well, I was out on a mountain and I fell off the mountain and I broke my ankle and had to limp a mile back to my car. So that sort of put a damper on me hiking.

I had a book that I had to write and I couldn't go walking while I was dictating it. It has been a very long time since I had to sit at a keyboard and create chapters that way.

Jo: Mm-hmm.

Kevin: And my brain doesn't really work like that. It works in an audio—I speak this stuff instead.

So I ended up training myself because I had a big boot on my foot. I would sit on the back porch and I would look out at the mountains here in Colorado and I would put my foot up on another chair and I'd sit in the lawn chair and I'd kind of close my eyes and I would dictate my chapters that way.

It was not as effective, but it was plan B. So that's how I got it done.I did want to mention something. When I'm telling the students this every week—this is what I did and here's the million different things—one of the students just yesterday made a comment that she summarised what I'm doing and it kind of crystallised things for me.

She said that to get so much done requires, and I'm quoting now, “a balance of planning, sprinting, and being flexible, while also making incremental forward progress to keep everything moving together.”

So there's short-term projects like fires and emergencies that have to be done. You've got to keep moving forward on the novel, which is a long-term project, but that short story is due in a week. So I've got to spend some time doing that one.

Like I said, this Kickstarter's coming up, so I have to put in the order for the cover art, because the cover art needs to be done so I can put it on the pre-launch page for the Kickstarter.

It is a balance of the long-term projects and the short-term projects. And I'm a workaholic, I guess, and you are too.

Jo: Yes.

Kevin: You totally are. Yes.

Jo: I get that you're a workaholic, but as you said before, you enjoy it too. So you enjoy doing all these things. It's just sometimes life just gets in the way, as you said.

One of the other things that I think is interesting—so sometimes physical stuff gets in the way, but in your many decades now of the successful author business, there's also the business side.

You've had massive success with some of your books, and I'm sure that some of them have just kind of shrivelled into nothing. There have been good years and bad years.

So how do we, as people who want a long-term career, think about making sure we have a buffer in the business for bad years and then making the most of good years?Kevin: Well, that's one thing—to realise that if you're having a great year, you might not always have a great year. That's kind of like the rockstar mentality—I've got a big hit now, so I'm always going to have a big hit. So I buy mansions and jets, and then of course the next album flops.

So when you do have a good year, you plan for the long term. You set money aside. You build up plan B and you do other things.

I have long been a big advocate for making sure that you have multiple income streams. You don't just write romantic epic fantasies and that's all you do. That might be what makes your money now, but the reading taste could change next year. They might want something entirely different.

So while one thing is really riding high, make sure that you're planting a bunch of other stuff, because that might be the thing that goes really, really well the next year.

I made my big stuff back in the early nineties—that was when I started writing for Star Wars and X-Files, and that's when I had my New York Times bestselling run. I had 11 New York Times bestsellers in one year, and I was selling like millions of copies.

Now, to be honest, when you have a Star Wars bestseller, George Lucas keeps almost all of that. You don't keep that much of it. But little bits add up when you're selling millions of copies. So it opened a lot of doors for me.

So I kept writing my own books and I built up my own fans who liked the Star Wars books and they read some of my other things. If you were a bestselling trad author, you could keep writing the same kind of book and they would keep throwing big advances at you. It was great.

And then that whole world changed and they stopped paying those big advances, and paperback, mass market paperback books just kind of went away.

A lot of people probably remember that there was a time for almost every movie that came out, every big movie that came out, you could go into the store and buy a paperback book of it—whether it was an Avengers movie or a Star Trek movie or whatever, there was a paperback book.

I did a bunch of those and that was really good work. They would pay me like $15,000 to take the script and turn it into a book, and it was done in three weeks. They don't do that anymore.

I remember I was on a panel at some point, like, what would you tell your younger self? What advice would you give your younger self?

I remember when I was in the nineties, I was turning down all kinds of stuff because I had too many book projects and I was never going to quit writing. I was a bestselling author, so I had it made.

Well, never, ever assume you have it made because the world changes under you. They might not like what you're doing or publishing goes in a completely different direction.

So I always try to keep my radar up and look at new things coming up.I still write some novels for trad publishers. This dinosaur homestead one is for Blackstone and Weird Tales. They're a trad publisher. I still publish all kinds of stuff as an indie for WordFire Press. I'm reissuing a bunch of my trad books that I got the rights back and now they're getting brand new life as I run Kickstarters.

One of my favourite series is “Dan Shamble, Zombie P.I.” It's like the Addams Family meets The Naked Gun. It's very funny. It's a private detective who solves crimes with monsters and mummies and werewolves and things.

I sold the first one to a trad publisher, and actually, they bought three. I said, okay, these are fast, they're fun, they're like 65,000 words. You laugh all the way through it, and you want the next one right away. So let's get these out like every six months, which is like lightning speed for trad publishing.

They just didn't think that was a good idea. They brought them out a year and a half apart. It was impossible to build up momentum that way.

They wanted to drop the series after the third book, and I just begged them—please give it one more chance. So they bought one more book for half as much money and they brought it out again a year and a half later.

And also, it was a trad paperback at $15. And the ebook was—Joanna, can you guess what their ebook was priced at?

Jo: $15.

Kevin: $15. And they said, gee, your ebook sales are disappointing. I said, well, no, duh. I mean, I am jumping around—I'm going like, but you should have brought these out six months apart. You should have had the ebook, like the first one at $4.

Jo: But you're still working with traditional publishers, Kevin?Kevin: I'm still working with them on some, and I'm a hybrid. There are some projects that I feel are better served as trad books, like the big Dune books and stuff. I want those all over the place and they can cash in on the movie momentum and stuff.

But I got the rights back to the Dan Shamble stuff. The fans kept wanting me to do more, and so I published a couple of story collections and they did fine. But I was making way more money writing Dune books and things.

Then they wanted a new novel. So I went, oh, okay. I did a new novel, which I just published at WordFire. But again, it did okay, but it wasn't great. I thought, well, I better just focus on writing these big ticket things. But I really liked writing Dan Shamble.

Somebody suggested, well, if the fans want it so much, why don't you run a Kickstarter? I had never run a Kickstarter before, and I kind of had this wrong attitude. I thought Kickstarters were for, “I'm a starving author, please give me money.” And that's not it at all. It's like, hey, if you're a fan, why don't you join the VIP club and you get the books faster than anybody else?

So I ran a Kickstarter for my first Dan Shamble book, and it made three times what the trad publisher was paying me. And I went, oh, I kind of like this model. So I have since done like four other Dan Shamble novels through Kickstarters, made way more money that way.

And we just sold—we can't give any details yet—but we have just sold it. It will be a TV show. There's a European studio that is developing it as a TV show, and I'm writing the pilot and I will be the executive producer.

Jo: Fantastic.

Kevin: So I kept that zombie detective alive because I loved it so much.

Jo: And it's going to be all over the place years later, I guess.

Just in terms of—given I've been in this now, I guess 2008 really was when I got into indie—and over the time I've been doing this, I've seen people rise and then disappear. A lot of people have disappeared. There are reasons, burnout or maybe they were just done.

Kevin: Yes.

Jo: But in terms of the people that you've seen, the characteristics, I guess, of people who don't make it versus people who do make it for years. And we are not saying that everyone should be a writer for decades at all. Some people do just have maybe one or two books.

What do you think are the characteristics of those people who do make it long-term?Kevin: Well, I think it's realistic expectations.

Like, again, this was trad, but my first book I sold for $4,000, and I thought, well, that's just $4,000, but we're going to sell book club rights, and we're goingn to sell foreign rights, and it's going to be optioned for movies. And the $4,000 will be like, that's just the start.

I was planning out all this extra money coming from it, and it didn't even earn its $4,000 advance back and nothing else happened with it.

Well, it has since, because I've since reissued it myself, pushed it and I made more money that way. But it's a slow burn.

You build your career. You start building your fan base and then your next one will sell maybe better than the first one did. Then you keep writing it, and then you make connections, and then you get more readers and you learn how to expand your stuff better. You've got to prepare for the long haul.

I would suggest that if you publish your very first book on KU, don't quit your day job the next day. Not everybody can or should be a full-time writer.

We here in America need to have something that pays our health insurance. That is one of the big reasons why I am running this graduate program at Western Colorado University—because as a university professor, I get wonderful healthcare.

I'm teaching something that I love, and I'm frankly doing a very good job at it because our graduates—something like 60% of them are now working as writers or publishers or working in the publishing world.

So that's another thing. I guess what I do when I'm working on it is I kind of always say yes to the stuff that's coming in. If an opportunity comes—hey, would you like a graphic novel on this?—and I go, yes, I'd love to do that. Could you write a short story for this anthology? Sure, I'd love to do that.

I always say yes, and I get overloaded sometimes. But I learned my lesson. It was quite a few years ago where I was really busy.

I had all kinds of book deadlines and I was turning down books that they were offering me. Again, this was trad—book contracts that had big advances on them. And anthology editors were asking me.

I was really busy and everybody was nagging me—Kevin, you work too hard. And my wife Rebecca was saying, Kevin, you work too hard.

So I thought, I had it made. I had all these bestsellers, everything was going on. So I thought, alright, I've got a lot of books under contract. I'll just take a sabbatical. I'll say no for a year. I'll just catch up. I'll finish all these things that I've got. I'll just take a breather and finish things.

So for that year, anybody who asked me—hey, do you want to do this book project?—well, I'd love to, but I'm just saying no. And would you do this short story for an anthology? Well, I'd love to, but not right now. Thanks. And I just kind of put them off.

So I had a year where I could catch up and catch my breath and finish the stuff.

And after that, I went, okay, I am back in the game again. Let's start taking these book offers. And nothing. Just crickets. And I went, well, okay. Well, you were always asking before—where are all these book deals that you kept offering me? Oh, we gave them to somebody else.

Jo: This is really difficult though, because on the one hand—well, first of all, it's difficult because I wanted to take a bit of a break. So I'm doing this full-time master's and you are also teaching people in a master's program, right.

So I have had to say no to a lot of things in order to do this course. And I imagine the people on your course would have to do the same thing. There's a lot of rewards, but they're different rewards and it kind of represents almost a midlife pivot for many of us.

So how do we balance that then—the stepping away with what might lead us into something new? I mean, obviously this is a big deal. I presume most of the people on your course, they're older like me. People have to give stuff up to do this kind of thing.

So how do we manage saying yes and saying no?Kevin: Well, I hate to say this, but you just have to drink more coffee and work harder for that time. Yes, you can say no to some things. My thing was I kind of shut the door and I just said, I'm just going to take a break and I'm going to relax.

I could have pushed my capacity and taken some things so that I wasn't completely off the game board.

One of the things I talk about is to avoid burnout. If you want a long-term career, and if you're working at 120% of your capacity, then you're going to burn out.

I actually want to mention something. Johnny B. Truant just has a new book out called The Artisan Author. I think you've had him on the show, have you?

Jo: Yes, absolutely.

Kevin: He says a whole bunch of the stuff in there that I've been saying for a long time. He's analysing these rapid release authors that are a book every three weeks. And they're writing every three weeks, every four weeks, and that's their business model.

I'm just like, you can't do that for any length of time. I mean, I'm a prolific writer. I can't write that fast. That's a recipe for burnout, I think.

I love everything that I'm doing, and even with this graduate program that I'm teaching, I love teaching it. I mean, I'm talking about subjects that I love, because I love publishing. I love writing. I love cover design. I love marketing. I love setting up your newsletters.

I mean, this isn't like taking an engineering course for me. This is something that I really, really love doing. And quite honestly, it comes across with the students. They're all fired up too because they see how much I love doing it and they love doing it.

One of the projects that they do—we get a grant from Draft2Digital every year for $5,000 so that we do an anthology, an original anthology that we pay professional rates for. So they put out their call for submissions.

This year it was Into the Deep Dark Woods. And we commissioned a couple stories for it, but otherwise it was open to submissions. And because we're paying professional rates, they get a lot of submissions. I have 12 students in the program right now. They got 998 stories in that they had to read.

Jo: Wow.

Kevin: They were broken up into teams so they could go through it, but that's just overwhelming. They had to read, whatever that turns out to be, 50 stories a week that come in.

Then they write the rejections, and then they argue over which ones they're going to accept, and then they send the contracts, and then they edit them. And they really love it.

I guess that's the most important thing about a career—you've got to have an attitude that you love what you're doing. If you don't love this, please find a more stable career, because this is not something you would recommend for the faint of heart.

Jo: Yes, indeed. I guess one of the other considerations, even if we love it, the industry can shift. Obviously you mentioned the nineties there—things were very different in the nineties in many, many ways. Especially, let's say, pre-internet times, and when trad pub was really the only way forward.

But you mentioned the rapid release, the sort of book every month. Let's say we are now entering a time where AI is bringing positives and negatives in the same way that the internet brought positives and negatives. We're not going to talk about using it, but what is definitely happening is a change.

Industry-wise—for example, people can do a book a day if they want to generate books. That is now possible. There are translations, you know. Our KDP dashboard in America, you have a button now to translate everything into Spanish if you want. You can do another button that makes it an audiobook.

So we are definitely entering a time of challenge, but if you look back over your career, there have been many times of challenge.

So is this time different? Or do you face the same challenges every time things shift?Kevin: It's always different. I've always had to take a breath and step back and then reinvent myself and come back as something else.

One of the things with a long-term career is you can't have a long-term career being the hot new thing. You can start out that way—like, this is the brand new author and he gets a big boost as the best first novel or something like that—but that doesn't work for 20 years.

I mean, you've got to do something else. If you're the sexy young actress, well, you don't have a 50-year career as the sexy young actress.

One of the ones I'm loving right now is Linda Hamilton, who was the sexy young actress in Terminator, and then a little more mature in the TV show Beauty and the Beast, where she was this huge star.

Then she's just come back now. I think she's in her mid-fifties. She's in Stranger Things and she was in Resident Alien and she's now this tough military lady who's getting parts all over the place. She's reinvented herself.

So I like to say that for my career, I've crashed and burned and resurrected myself. You might as well call me the Doctor because I've just come back in so many different ways.

You can't teach an old dog new tricks, but—

If you want to stay around, no matter how old of a dog you are, you've got to learn new tricks.And you've got to keep learning, and you've got to keep trying new things.

I started doing indie publishing probably around the time you did—2009, something like that. I was in one of these great positions where I was a trad author and I had a dozen books that I wrote that were all out of print.

I got the rights back to them because back then they let books go out of print and they gave the rights back without a fight. So I suddenly found myself with like 12 titles that I could just put up. I went, oh, okay, let's try this.

I was kind of blown away that that first novel that they paid me $4,000 for that never even earned it back—well, I just put it up on Kindle and within one year I made more than $4,000. I went, I like this, I've got to figure this out.

That's how I launched WordFire Press. Then I learned how to do everything. I mean, back in those days, you could do a pretty clunky job and people would still buy it. Then I learned how to do it better.

Jo: That time is gone.

Kevin: Yes. I learned how to do it better, and then I learned how to market it. Then I learned how to do print on demand books. Then I learned how to do box sets and different kinds of marketing.

I dove headfirst into my newsletter to build my fan base because I had all the Star Wars stuff and X-Files stuff and later it was the Dune stuff. I had this huge fan base, but I wanted that fan base to read the Kevin Anderson books, the Dan Shamble books and everything.

The only way to get that is if you give them a personal touch to say, hey buddy, if you liked that one, try this one. And the way to do that is you have to have access to them.

So I started doing social media stuff before most people were doing social media stuff. I killed it on MySpace. I can tell you that.

I had a newsletter that we literally printed on paper and we stuck mailing labels on. It went out to 1,200 people that we put in the mailbox.

Jo: Now you're doing that again with Kickstarter, I guess. But I guess for people listening, what are you learning now?

How are you reinventing yourself now in this new phase we are entering?Kevin: Well, I guess the new thing that I'm doing now is expanding my Kickstarters into more.

So last year, the biggest Kickstarter that I've ever had, I ran last year. It was this epic fantasy trilogy that I had trad published and I got the rights back.

They had only published it in trade paperback. So, yes, I reissued the books in nice new hardcovers, but I also upped the game to do these fancy bespoke editions with leather embossed covers and end papers and tipped in ribbons and slip cases and all kinds of stuff and building that.

I did three rock albums as companions to it, and just building that kind of fan base that will support that.

Then I started a Patreon last year, which isn't as big as yours. I wish my Patreon would get bigger, but I'm pushing it and I'm still working on that.

So it's trying new things. Because if I had really devoted myself and continued to keep my MySpace page up to date, I would be wasting my time. You have to figure out new things.

Part of me is disappointed because I really liked in the nineties where they just kept throwing book contracts at me with big advances. And I wrote the book and sent it in and they did all the work. But that went away and I didn't want to go away. So I had to learn how to do it different.

After a good extended career, one of the things you do is you pay it forward. I mentor a lot of writers and that evolved into me creating this master's program in publishing.

I can gush about it because to my knowledge, it is the only master's degree that really focuses on indie publishing and new model publishing instead of just teaching you how to get a job as an assistant editor in Manhattan for one of the Big Five publishers.

Jo: It's certainly a lot more practical than my master's in death.

Kevin: Well, that's an acquired taste, I think.

When they hired me to do this—and as I said earlier, I'm not an academic—and I said if I'm going to teach this, it's a one year program. They get done with it in one year. It's all online except for one week in person in the summer.

They're going to learn how to do things. They're not going to get esoteric, analysing this poem for something. When they graduate from this program, they walk out with this anthology that they edited, that their name is on.

The other project that they do is they reissue a really fancy, fine edition of some classic work, whether it's H.G. Wells or Jules Verne or something. They choose a book that they want to bring back and they do it all from start to finish.

They come out of it—rather than just theoretical learning—they know how to do things.

Surprise, I've been around in the business a long time, so I know everybody who works in the business. So the heads of publishing houses and the head of Draft2Digital or Audible—and we've got Blackstone Audio coming on in a couple weeks. We've got the head of Kickstarter coming on as guest speakers.

I have all kinds of guest speakers. Joanna, I think you're coming on—

Jo: I'm coming on as well, I think.

Kevin: You're coming on as a guest speaker. It's just like they really get plugged in. I'm in my seventh cohort now and I just love doing it. The students love it and we've got a pretty high success rate.

So there's your plug. We are open for applications now. It starts in July. And my own website is WordFire.com, and there's a section on there on the graduate program if anybody wants to take a look at it.

Again, not everybody needs to have a master's degree to be an indie publisher, but there is something to be said for having all of this stuff put into an organised fashion so that you learn how to do all the things.

It also gives you a resource and a support system so that they come out of it knowing a whole lot of people.

Jo: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Kevin. That was great.

Kevin: Thanks. It's a great show.

The post Managing Multiple Projects And The Art of the Long-Term Author Career with Kevin J. Anderson first appeared on The Creative Penn.

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How can indie authors raise their game through academic-style rigour? How might AI tools fit into a thoughtful research process without replacing the joy of discovery? Melissa Addey explores the intersection of scholarly discipline, creative writing, and the practical realities of building an author career.

In the intro, mystery and thriller tropes [Wish I'd Known Then]; The differences between trad and indie in 2026 [Productive Indie Fiction Writer]; Five phases of an author business [Becca Syme]; Bones of the Deep – J.F. Penn;

Today's show is sponsored by Bookfunnel, the essential tool for your author business. Whether it’s delivering your reader magnet, sending out advanced copies of your book, handing out ebooks at a conference, or fulfilling your digital sales to readers, BookFunnel does it all. Check it out at bookfunnel.com/thecreativepenn

This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn

Melissa Addey is an award-winning historical fiction author with a PhD in creative writing from the University of Surrey. She was the Leverhulme Trust Writer in Residence at the British Library, and now works as campaigns lead for the Alliance of Independent Authors.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.

Show Notes

• Making the leap from a corporate career to full-time writing with a young family
• Why Melissa pursued a PhD in creative writing and how it fuelled her author business
• What indie authors can learn from academic rigour when researching historical fiction
• The problems with academic publishing—pricing, accessibility, and creative restrictions
• Organising research notes, avoiding accidental plagiarism, and knowing when to stop researching
• Using AI tools effectively as part of the research process without losing your unique voice

You can find Melissa at MelissaAddey.com.

Transcript of the interview with Melissa AddeyJOANNA: Melissa Addey is an award-winning historical fiction author with a PhD in creative writing from the University of Surrey. She was the Leverhulme Trust Writer in Residence at the British Library, and now works as campaigns lead for the Alliance of Independent Authors. Welcome back to the show, Melissa.

MELISSA: Hello. Thank you for having me.

JOANNA: It's great to have you back. You were on almost a decade ago, in December 2016, talking about merchandising for authors. That is really a long time ago.

So tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and self-publishing.MELISSA: I had a regular job in business and I was writing on the side. I did a couple of writing courses, and then I started trying to get published, and that took seven years of jumping through hoops. There didn't seem to be much progress.

At some point, I very nearly had a small publisher, but we clashed over the cover because there was a really quite hideous suggestion that was not going to work. I think by that point I was really tired of jumping through hoops, really trying to play the game traditional publishing-wise.

I just went, you know what? I've had enough now. I've done everything that was asked of me and it's still not working. I'll just go my own way.

I think at the time that would've been 2015-ish. Suddenly, self-publishing was around more. I could see people and hear people talking about it, and I thought, okay, let's read everything there is to know about this.

I had a little baby at the time and I would literally print off stuff during the day to read—probably loads of your stuff—and read it at two o'clock in the morning breastfeeding babies. Then I'd go, okay, I think I understand that bit now, I'll understand the next bit, and so on.

So I got into self-publishing and I really, really enjoyed it. I've been doing it ever since. I'm now up to 20 books in the last 10 or 11 years. As you say, I did the creative writing PhD along the way, working with ALLi and doing workshops for others—mixing and matching lots of different things. I really enjoy it.

JOANNA: You mentioned you had a job before in business.

Are you full-time in all these roles that you're doing now, or do you still have that job?MELISSA: No, I'm full-time now. I only do writing-related things. I left that in 2015, so I took a jump. I was on maternity leave and I started applying for jobs to go back to, and I suddenly felt like, oh, I really don't want to. I want to do the writing.

I thought, I've got about one year's worth of savings. I could try and do the jump. I remember saying to my husband, “Do you think it would be possible if I tried to do the jump? Would that be okay?”

There was this very long pause while he thought about it. But the longer the pause went on, the more I was thinking, ooh, he didn't say no, that is out of the question, financially we can't do that. I thought, ooh, it's going to work. So I did the jump.

JOANNA: That's great. I did something similar and took a massive pay cut and downsized and everything back in the day. Having a supportive partner is so important.

The other thing I did—and I wonder if you did too—I said to Jonathan, my husband, if within a year this is not going in a positive direction, then I'll get another job.

How long did you think you would leave it before you just gave up? And how did that go? Because that beginning is so difficult, especially with a new baby.

MELISSA: I thought, well, I'm at home anyway, so I do have more time than if I was in a full-time job. The baby sleeps sometimes—if you're lucky—so there are little gaps where you could really get into it.

I had a year of savings/maternity pay going on, so I thought I've got a year. And the funny thing that happened was within a few months, I went back to my husband and I was like, I don't understand.

I said, all these doors are opening—they weren't massive, but they were doors opening. I said, but I've wanted to be a writer for a long time and none of these doors have opened before.

He said, “Well, it's because you really committed. It's because you jumped. And when you jump, sometimes the universe is on board and goes, yes, all right then, and opens some doors for you.”

It really felt like that. Even little things—like Mslexia (a writing magazine) gave me a little slot to do an online writer-in-residence thing. Just little doors opened that felt like you were getting a nod, like, yes, come on then, try.

Then the PhD was part of that. I applied to do that and it came with a studentship, which meant I had three years of funding coming in. That was one of the biggest creative gifts that's ever been given to me—three years of knowing you've got enough money coming in that you can just try and make it work.

By the time that finished, the royalties had taken over from the studentship. That was such a gift.

JOANNA: A couple of things there. I've got to ask about that funding. You're saying it was a gift, but that money didn't just magically appear.

You worked really hard to get that funding, I presume.MELISSA: I did, yes. You do have to do the work for it, just to be clear.

My sister had done a PhD in an entirely different subject. She said, “You should do a PhD in creative writing.” I said, “That'd be ridiculous. Nobody is going to fund that. Who's going to fund that?” She said, “Oh, they might. Try.”

So I tried, and the deadline was something stupid like two weeks away. I tried and I got shortlisted, but I didn't get it. I thought, ah, but I got shortlisted with only two weeks to try. I'll try again next year then.

So then I tried again the next year and that's when I got it. It does take work. You have to put in quite a lot of effort to make your case. But it's a very joyful thing if you get one.

JOANNA: So let's go to the bigger question: why do a PhD in creative writing?

Let's be clear to everyone—you don't need even a bachelor's degree to be a successful author. Stephen King is a great example of someone who isn't particularly educated in terms of degrees. He talks about writing his first book while working at a laundry. You can be very successful with no formal education.

So why did you want to do a PhD? What drew you to academic research?MELISSA: Absolutely. I would briefly say, I often meet people who feel they must do a qualification before they're allowed to write. I say, do it if you'd like to, but you don't have to. You could just practise the writing. I fully agree with that.

It was a combination of things. I do actually like studying. I do actually enjoy the research—that's why I do historical research. I like that kind of work. So that's one element.

Another element was the funding. I thought, if I get that funding, I've got three years to build up a back catalogue of books, to build up the writing. It will give me more time. So that was a very practical financial issue.

Also, children. My children were very little. I had a three-year-old and a baby, and everybody went, “Are you insane? Doing a PhD with a three-year-old and a baby?” But the thing about three-year-olds and babies is they're quite intellectually boring.

Emotionally, very engaging—on a number of levels, good, bad, whatever—but they're not very intellectually stimulating. You're at home all day with two small children who think that hide and seek is the highlight of intellectual difficulty because they've hidden behind the curtains and they're shuffling and giggling.

I felt I needed something else. I needed something for me that would be interesting.

I've always enjoyed passing on knowledge. I've always enjoyed teaching people, workshops, in whatever field I was in. I thought, if I want to do that for writing at some point, it will sound more important if I've done a PhD.

Not that you need that to explain how to do writing to someone if you do a lot of writing. But there were all these different elements that came together.

JOANNA: So to summarise: you enjoy the research, it's an intellectual challenge, you've got the funding, and there is something around authority. In terms of a PhD—and just for listeners, I'm doing a master's at the moment in death, religion, and culture.

MELISSA: Your topic sounds fascinating.

JOANNA: It is interesting because, same as you, I enjoy research. Both of us love research as part of our fiction process and our nonfiction.

I'm also enjoying the intellectual challenge, and I've also considered this idea of authority in an age of AI when it is increasingly easy to generate books—let's just say it, it's easy to generate books.

So I was like, well, how do I look at this in a more authoritative way? I wanted to talk to you because even just a few months back into it—and I haven't done an academic qualification for like two decades—it struck me that the academic rigour is so different.

What lessons can indie authors learn from this kind of academic rigour? What do you think of in terms of the rigour and what can we learn?

MELISSA: I think there are a number of things. First of all, really making sure that you are going to the quality sources for things—the original sources, the high-quality versions of things.

Not secondhand, but going back to those primary sources. Not “somebody said that somebody said something.” Well, let's go back to the original. Have a look at that, because you get a lot from that.

I think you immerse yourself more deeply. Someone can tell you, “This is how they spoke in the 1800s.” If you go and read something that was written in the 1800s, you get a better sense of that than just reading a dictionary of slang that's been collated for you by somebody else. So I think that immerses you more deeply.

Really sticking with that till you've found interesting things that spark creativity in you. I've seen people say, “I used to do all the historical research. Nowadays I just fact-check. I write what I want to write and I fact-check.”

I think, well, that's okay, but you won't find the weird little things. I tend to call it “the footnotes of history.” You won't find the weird little things that really make something come alive, that really make a time and a place come alive.

I've got a scene in one of my Regency romances—which actually I think are less full of historical emphasis than some of my other work—where a man gives a woman a gift. It's supposed to be a romantic gift and maybe slightly sensual.

He could have given her a fan and I could have fact-checked and gone, “Are there fans? Yes, there are fans. Do they have pretty romantic poems on them? Yes, they do. Okay, that'll do.”

Actually, if you go round and do more research than that, you discover they had things like ribbons that held up your stockings, on which they wrote quite smutty things in embroidery. That's a much more sexy and interesting gift to give in that scene. But you don't find that unless you go doing a bit of research.

If I just fact-check, I'm not going to find that because it would never have occurred to me to fact-check it in the first place.

JOANNA: I totally agree with you. One of the wonderful things about research—and I also like going to places—is you might be somewhere and see something that gives you an idea you never, ever would have found in a book or any other way.

I used to call it “the serendipity of the stacks” in the physical library. You go looking for a particular book and then you're in that part of the shelf and you find several other books that you never would have looked for. I think it's encouraging people, as you're saying, but I also think you have to love it.

MELISSA: Yes. I think some people find it a bit of a grind, or they're frightened by it and they think, “Have I done enough?”

JOANNA: Mm-hmm.

MELISSA: I get asked that a lot when I talk about writing historical fiction. People go, “But when do I stop? How do I know it's enough? How do I know there wasn't another book that would have been the book? Everyone will go, ‘Oh, how did you not read such-and-such?'”

I always say there are two ways of finding out when you can stop. One is when you get to the bibliographies, you look through and you go, “Yep, read that, read that, read that. Nah, I know that one's not really what I wanted.” You're familiar with those bibliographies in a way that at the beginning you're not.

At the beginning, every single bibliography, you haven't read any of it. So that's quite a good way of knowing when to stop.

The other way is: can you write ordinary, everyday life? I don't start writing a book till I can write everyday life in that historical era without notes. I will obviously have notes if I'm doing a wedding or a funeral or a really specific battle or something.

Everyday life, I need to be able to just write that out of my own head. You need to be confident enough to do that.

JOANNA: One of the other problems I've heard from academics—people who've really come out of academia and want to write something more pop, even if it's pop nonfiction or fiction—they're also really struggling. It is a different game, isn't it?

For people who might be immersed in academia, how can they release themselves into doing something like self-publishing?Because there's still a lot of stigma within academia.

MELISSA: You're going to get me on the academic publishing rant now. I think academic publishing is horrendous. Academics are very badly treated. I know quite a lot of academics and they have to do all the work. Nobody's helping them with indexing or anything like that.

The publisher will say things like, “Well, could you just cut 10,000 words out of that?” Just because of size. Out of somebody's argument that they're making over a whole work. No consideration for that.

The royalties are basically zilch. I've seen people's royalty statements come in, and the way they price the books is insane. They'll price a book at 70 pounds. I actually want that book for my research and I'm hesitating because I can't be buying all of them at that price. That's ridiculous.

I've got people who are friends or family who bring out a book, and I'm like, well, I would gladly buy your book and read it. It's priced crazy. It's priced only for institutions.

I think actually, if academia was written a little more clearly and open to the lay person—which if you are good at your work, you should be able to do—and priced a bit more in line with other books, that would maybe open up people to reading more academia.

You wouldn't have to make it “pop” as you say. I quite like pop nonfiction. But I don't think there would have to be such a gulf between those two. I think you could make academic work more readable generally.

I read someone's thesis recently and they'd made a point at the beginning of saying—I can't remember who it was—that so-and-so academic's point of view was that it should be readable and they should be writing accordingly.

I thought, wow, I really admired her for doing that. Next time I'm doing something like that, I should be putting that at the front as well. But the fact that she had to explain that at the beginning…

It wasn't like words of one syllable throughout the whole thing. I thought it was a very quality piece of writing, but it was perfectly readable to someone who didn't know about the topic.

JOANNA: I might have to get that name from you because I've got an essay on the Philosophy of Death. And as you can imagine, there's a heck of a lot of big words.

MELISSA: I know. I've done a PhD, but I still used to tense up a little bit thinking they're going to pounce on me. They're going to say that I didn't talk academic enough, I didn't sound fancy enough. That's not what it should be about, really.

In a way, you are locking people out of knowledge, and given that most academics are paid for by public funds, that knowledge really ought to be a little more publicly accessible.

JOANNA: I agree on the book price. I'm also buying books for my course that aren't in the library. Some of them might be 70 pounds for the ebook, let alone the print book. What that means is that I end up looking for secondhand books, when of course the money doesn't go to the author or the publisher.

The other thing that happens is it encourages piracy. There are people who openly talk about using pirate sites for academic works because it's just too expensive. If I'm buying 20 books for my home library, I can't be spending that kind of money. Why is it so bad?

Why is it not being reinvented, especially as we have done with indie authors for the wider genres? Has this at all moved into academia?MELISSA: I think within academia there's a fear because there's the peer reviews and it must be proven to be absolutely correct and agreed upon by everybody. I get that. You don't want some complete rubbish in there.

I do think there's space to come up with a different system where you could say, “So-and-so is professor of whatever at such-and-such a university. I imagine what they have to say might be interesting and well-researched.” You could have some sort of kite mark. You could have something that then allows for self-publishing to take over a bit.

I do just think their system is really, really poor. They get really reined in on what they're allowed to write about.

Alison Baverstock, who is a professor now at Kingston University and does stuff about publishing and master's programmes, started writing about self-publishing because she thought it was really interesting. This was way back.

JOANNA: I remember. I did one of those surveys.

MELISSA: She got told in no uncertain terms, “Do not write about this. You will ruin your career.” She stuck with it. She was right to stick with it. But she was told by senior academics, “Do not write about self-publishing. You're just embarrassing yourself. It's just vanity press.”

They weren't even being allowed to write about really quite interesting phenomena that were happening. Just from a historical point of view, that was a really interesting rise of self-publishing, and she was being told not to write about it.

JOANNA: It's funny, that delay as well. I'm looking to maybe do my thesis on how AI is impacting death and the death industry. And yet it's such a fast-moving thing.

MELISSA: Yes.

JOANNA: Sometimes it can take a year, two years or more to get a paper through the process.

MELISSA: Oh, yes. It moves really, really fast. Like you say, by the time it comes out, people are going, “Huh? That's really old.” And you'll be going, “No, it's literally two years.” But yes, very, very slow.

JOANNA: Let's come back to how we can help other people who might not want to be doing academic-level stuff.

One of the things I've found is organising notes, sources, references. How do you manage that? Any tips for people? They might not need to do footnotes for their historical novel, but they might want to organise their research. What are your thoughts?

MELISSA: I used to do great big enormous box files and print vast quantities of stuff. Each box file would be labelled according to servant life, or food, or seasons, or whatever.

I've tried various different things. I'm moving more and more now towards a combination of books on the shelf, which I do like, and papers and other materials that are stored on my computer.

They'll be classified according to different parts of daily life, essentially. Because when you write historical fiction, you have to basically build the whole world again for that era. You have to have everything that happens in daily life, everything that happens on special events, all of those things.

So I'll have it organised by those sorts of topics. I'll read it and go through it until I'm comfortable with daily life. Then special things—I'll have special notes on that that can talk me through how you run a funeral or a wedding or whatever, because that's quite complicated to just remember in your head.

MELISSA: I always do historical notes at the end. They really matter to me. When I read historical fiction, I really like to read that from the author.

I'll say, “Right, these things are true”—especially things that I think people will go, “She made that up. That is not true.” I'll go, “No, no, these are true.” These other things I've fudged a little, or I've moved the timeline a bit to make the story work better.

I try to be fairly clear about what I did to make it into a story, but also what is accurate, because I want people to get excited about that timeline.

Occasionally if there's been a book that was really important, I'll mention it in there because I don't want to have a proper bibliography, but I do want to highlight certain books. If you got excited by this novel, you could go off and read that book and it would take you into the nonfiction side of it.

JOANNA: I'm similar with my author's notes. I've just done the author's note for Bones of the Deep, which has some merfolk in it, and I've got a book on Merpeople. It's awesome. It's just a brilliant book. I'm like, this has to go in.

You could question whether that is really nonfiction or something else. But I think that's really important.

Just to be more practical: when you're actually writing, what tools do you use? I use Scrivener and I keep all my research there. I'm using EndNote for academic stuff.

MELISSA: I've always just stuck to Word. I did get Scrivener and played with it for a while, but I felt like I've already got a way of doing it, so I'll just carry on with that. So I mostly just do Word.

I have a lot of notes, so I'll have notepads that have got my notes on specific things, and they'll have page numbers that go back to specific books in case I need to go and double-check that again.

You mentioned citations, and that's fascinating to me. Do you know the story about Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner? It won the Pulitzer. It's a novel, but he used 10% of that novel—and it's a fairly slim novel—10% of it is actually letters written by somebody else, written by a woman before his time.

He includes those and works with them in the story. He mentioned her very briefly, like, “Oh, and thanks to the relatives of so-and-so.” Very brief. He got accused of plagiarism for using that much of it by another part of her family who hadn't agreed to it.

I've always thought it's because he didn't give enough credence to her. He didn't give her enough importance. If he'd said, “This was the woman who wrote this stuff. It's fascinating. I loved it. I wanted to creatively respond and engage with it”—I think that wouldn't have happened at all.

That's why I think it's quite important when there are really big, important elements that you're using to acknowledge those.

JOANNA: That's part of the academic rigour too—

You can barely have a few of your own thoughts without referring to somebody else's work and crediting them. What's so interesting to me in the research process is, okay, I think this, but in order to say it, I'm going to have to go find someone else who thought this first and wrote a paper on it.

MELISSA: I think you would love a PhD. When you've done a master's, go and do a PhD as well. Because it was the first time in academia that I genuinely felt I was allowed my own thoughts and to invent stuff of my own.

I could go, “Oh no, I've invented this theory and it's this.” I didn't have to constantly go, “As somebody else said, as somebody else said.” I was like, no, no. This is me. I said this thing.

I wasn't allowed to in my master's, and I found it annoying. I remember thinking, but I'm trying to have original thoughts here. I'm trying to bring something new to it.

In a PhD, you're allowed to do that because you're supposed to be contributing to knowledge. You're supposed to be bringing a new thing into the world. That was a glorious thing to finally be allowed to do.

JOANNA: I must say I couldn't help myself with that. I've definitely put my own opinion. But a part of why I mention it is the academic rigour—it's actually quite good practice to see who else has had these thoughts before.

Speed is one of the biggest issues in the indie author community. Some of the stuff you were talking about—finding original sources, going to primary sources, the top-quality stuff, finding the weird little things—all of that takes more time than, for example, just running a deep research report on Gemini or Claude or ChatGPT.

You can do both. You can use that as a starting point, which I definitely do. But then the point is to go back and read the original stuff. On this timeframe—

Why do you think research is worth doing? It's important for academic reasons, but personal growth as well.MELISSA: Yes, I think there's a joy to be had in the research. When I go and stand in a location, by that point I'm not measuring things and taking photos—I've done all of that online. I'm literally standing there feeling what it is to be there.

What does it smell like? What does it feel like? Does it feel very enclosed or very open? Is it a peaceful place or a horrible place?

That sensory research becomes very important. All of the book research before that should lead you into the sensory research, which is then also a joy to do. There's great pleasure in it.

As you say, it slows things down. What I tend to say to people if they want to speed things up again is: write in a series. Because once you've done all of that research and you just write one book and then walk away, that's a lot. That really slows you down.

If you then go, “Okay, well now I'm going to write four books, five books, six books, still in that place and time”—obviously each book will need a little more research, but it won't need that level of starting-from-scratch research. That can help in terms of speeding it back up again.

Recently I wrote some Regency romances to see what that was like. I'd done all my basic research, and then I thought, right, now I want to write a historical novel which could have been Victorian or could have been Regency. It had an openness to it.

I thought, well, I've just done all the research for Regency, so I'll stick with that era. Why go and do a whole other piece of research when I've only written three books in it so far? I'll just take that era and work with that.

So there are places to make up the time again a bit. But I do think there's a joy in it as well.

JOANNA: I just want to come back to the plagiarism thing. I discovered that you can plagiarise yourself in academia, which is quite interesting.

For example, my books How to Write a Novel and How to Write Nonfiction—they're aimed at different audiences. They have lots of chapters that are different, but there's a chapter on dictation. I thought, why would I need to write the same chapter again? I'm just going to put the same chapter in. It's the same process.

Then I only recently learned that you can plagiarise yourself. I did not credit myself for that original chapter.MELISSA: How dare you not credit yourself!

JOANNA: But can you talk a bit about that? Where are the lines here? I'm never going to credit myself. I think that's frankly ridiculous.

MELISSA: No, that's silly. I mean, it depends what you're doing. In your case, that completely makes sense. It would be really peculiar of you to sit down and write a whole new chapter desperately trying not to copy what you'd said in a chapter about exactly the same topic. That doesn't make any sense.

JOANNA: I guess more in the wider sense. Earlier you mentioned you keep notes and you put page numbers by them. I think the point is with research, a lot of people worry about accidental plagiarism. You write a load of notes on a book and then it just goes into your brain. Perhaps you didn't quote people properly.

It's definitely more of an issue in nonfiction. You have to keep really careful notes. Sometimes I'm copying out a quote and I'll just naturally maybe rewrite that quote because the way they've put it didn't make sense, or I use a contraction or something. It's just the care in note-taking and then citing people.

MELISSA: Yes. When I talk to people about nonfiction, I always say, you're basically joining a conversation. I mean, you are in fiction as well, but not as obviously.

I say, well, why don't you read the conversation first? Find out what the conversation is in your area at the moment, and then what is it that you're bringing that's different?

The most likely reason for you to end up writing something similar to someone else is that you haven't understood what the conversation was, and you need to be bringing your own thing to it.

Then even if you're talking about the same topic, you might talk about it in a different way, and that takes you away from plagiarism because you're bringing your own view to it and your own direction to it.

JOANNA: It's an interesting one. I think it's just the care. Taking more care is what I would like people to do.

So let's talk about AI because AI tools can be incredible. I do deep research reports with Gemini and Claude and ChatGPT as a sort of “give me an overview and tell me some good places to start.”

The university I'm with has a very hard line, which is: AI can be used as part of a research process, but not for writing.

What are your thoughts on AI usage and tools? How can people balance that?MELISSA: Well, I'm very much a newbie compared to you. I follow you—the only person that describes how to use it with any sense at all, step by step.

I'm very new to it, but I'm going to go back to the olden days. Sometimes I say to people, when I'm talking about how I do historical research, I start with Wikipedia. They look horrified.

I'm like, no. That's where you have to get the overview from. I want an overview of how you dress in ancient Rome. I need a quick snapshot of that. Then I can go off and figure out the details of that more accurately and with more detail.

I think AI is probably extremely good for that—getting the big picture of something and going, okay, this is what the field's looking like at the moment. These are the areas I'm going to need to burrow down into.

It's doing that work for you quickly so that you're then in a position to pick up from that point. It gets you off to a quicker start and perhaps points you in the direction of the right people to start with.

I'm trying to write a PhD proposal at the moment because I'm an idiot and want to do a second one. With that, I really did think, actually, AI should write this. Because the original concept is mine. I know nothing about it—why would I know anything about it? I haven't started researching it.

This is where AI should go, “Well, in this field, there are these people. They've done these things.” Then you could quickly check that nobody's covered your thing. It would actually speed up all of that bit, which I think would be perfectly reasonable because you don't know anything about it yet. You're not an expert.

You have the original idea, and then after that, then you should go off and do your own research and the in-depth quality of it.

I think for a lot of things that waste authors' time—if you're applying for a grant or a writer-in-residence or things like that—it's a lot of time wasting filling in long, boring forms. “Could you make an artist statement and a something and a blah?”

You're like, yes, yes, I could spend all day at my desk doing that. There's a moment where you start thinking, could you not just allow the AI to do this or much of it?

JOANNA: Yes. Or at least, in that case, I'd say one of the very useful things is doing deep searches. As you were mentioning earlier about getting the funding—if I was to consider a PhD, which the thought has crossed my mind—I would use AI tools to do searches for potential sources of funding and that kind of research.

In fact, I found this course at Winchester because I asked ChatGPT. It knows a lot about me because I chat with it all the time. I was talking about hitting 50 and these are the things I'm really interested in and what courses might interest me. Then it found it for me. That was quite amazing in itself.

I'd encourage people to consider using it for part of the research process.But then all the papers it cites or whatever—then you have to go download those, go read them, do that work yourself.

MELISSA: Yes, because that's when you bring your viewpoint to something. You and I could read the exact same paper and choose very different parts of it to write about and think about, because we're coming at it from different points of view and different journeys that we're trying to explore.

That's where you need the individual to come in. It wouldn't be good enough to just have a generic overview from AI that we both try and slot into our work, because we would want something different from it.

JOANNA: I kind of laugh when people say, “Oh, I can tell when it's AI.” I'm like, you might be able to tell when it's AI writing if nobody has taken that personal spin, but that's not the way we use it. If you're using it that way, that's not how those of us who are independent thinkers are using it.

We're strong enough in our thoughts that we're using it as a tool. You're a confident person—intellectually and creatively confident—but I feel like some people maybe don't have that.

Some people are not strong enough to resist what an AI might suggest. Any thoughts on that?MELISSA: Yes. When I first tried using AI with very little guidance from anyone, it just felt easy but very wooden and not very related to me. Then I've done webinars with you, and that was really useful—to watch somebody actually live doing the batting back and forth.

That became a lot more interesting because I really like bouncing ideas and messing around with things and brainstorming, essentially, but with somebody else involved that's batting stuff back to you.

“What does that look like?” “No, I didn't mean that at all.” “How about what does this look like?” “Oh no, no, not like that.” “Oh yes, a bit like that, but a bit more like whatever.”

I remember doing that and talking to someone about it, going, “Oh, that's really quite an interesting use of it.” And they said, “Why don't you use a person?”

I said, “Well, because who am I going to call at 8:30 in the morning on a Thursday and go, ‘Look, I want to spend two hours batting back and forth ideas, but I don't want you to talk about your stuff at all. Just my stuff. And you have to only think about my stuff for two hours. And you have to be very well versed in my stuff as well. Could you just do that?'” Who's going to do that for you?

JOANNA: I totally agree with you. Before Christmas, I was doing a paper. It was an art history thing. We had to pick a piece of art or writing and talk about Christian ideas of hell and how it emerged. I was writing this essay and going back and forth with Claude at the time.

My husband came in and saw the fresco I was writing about. He said, “No one's going to talk to you about this. Nobody.”

MELISSA: Yes, exactly.

JOANNA: Nobody cares.

MELISSA: Exactly. Nobody cares as much as you. And they're not prepared to do that at 8:30 on a Thursday morning. They've got other stuff to do.

JOANNA: It's great to hear because I feel like we're now at the point where these tools are genuinely super useful for independent work. I hope that more people might try that.

JOANNA: Okay, we're almost out of time.

Where can people find you and your books online? Also, tell us a bit about the types of books you have.MELISSA: I mostly write historical fiction. As I say, I've wandered my way through history—I'm a travelling minstrel. I've done ancient Rome, medieval Morocco, 18th century China, and I'm into Regency England now. So that's a bit closer to home for once.

I'm at MelissaAddey.com and you can go and have a bit of a browse and download a free novel if you want. Try me out.

JOANNA: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Melissa.

MELISSA: That was great. Thank you. It was fun.

The post Research Like An Academic, Write Like an Indie With Melissa Addey first appeared on The Creative Penn.

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Could live selling be the next big opportunity for indie authors? Adam Beswick shares how organic marketing, live streaming, and direct sales are transforming his author career—and how other writers can do the same.

In the intro, book marketing principles [Self-Publishing with ALLi]; Interview with
Tobi Lutke, the CEO and co-founder of Shopify [David Senra]; The Writer's Mind Survey; Bones of the Deep – J.F. Penn; Alliance of Independent Authors Indie Author Lab.

Today's show is sponsored by ProWritingAid, writing and editing software that goes way beyond just grammar and typo checking. With its detailed reports on how to improve your writing and integration with writing software, ProWritingAid will help you improve your book before you send it to an editor, agent or publisher. Check it out for free or get 15% off the premium edition at www.ProWritingAid.com/joanna

This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn

Adam Beswick is a bestselling fantasy author and an expert in TikTok marketing for authors, as well as a former NHS mental health nurse. Adam went full-time as an indie author in 2023 and now runs AP Beswick Publications.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.

Show Notes

• How Adam scaled from garden office to warehouse, with his wife leaving her engineering career to join the business
• Why organic marketing (free video content) beats paid ads for testing what resonates with readers
• The power of live selling: earning £3,500 in one Christmas live stream through TikTok shop
• Mystery book bags: a gamified approach to selling that keeps customers coming back
• Building an email list of actual buyers through direct sales versus relying on platform algorithms
• Why human connection matters more than ever in the age of AI-generated content

You can find Adam at APBeswickPublications.com and on TikTok as @a.p_beswick_publications.

Transcript of interview with Adam BeswickJo: Adam Beswick is a bestselling fantasy author and an expert in TikTok marketing for authors, as well as a former NHS mental health nurse. Adam went full-time as an indie author in 2023 and now runs AP Beswick Publications. Welcome back to the show, Adam.

Adam: Hi there, and thank you for having me back.

Jo: Oh, I'm super excited to talk to you today. Now, you were last on the show in May 2024, so just under two years, and you had gone full-time as an author the year before that. So just tell us—

What's changed for you in the last couple of years? What does your author business look like now?Adam: That is terrifying to hear that it was that long ago, because it genuinely feels like it was a couple of months ago. Things have certainly been turbocharged since we last spoke.

Last time we spoke I had a big focus on going into direct sales, and I think if I recall correctly, we were just about to release a book by Alexis Brooke, which was the first book in a series that we had worked with another author on, which was the first time we were doing that.

Since then, we now have six authors on our books, with a range of full agreements or print-only deals. With that focus of direct selling, we have expanded our TikTok shop.

In 2024, I stepped back from TikTok shop just because of constraints around my own time. We took TikTok shop seriously again in 2025 and scaled up to a six-figure revenue stream throughout 2025, effectively starting from scratch.

That means we have had to go from having an office pod in the garden, to my wife now has left her career as a structural engineer to join the business because there was too much for me to manage.

We went from this small office space, to now we have the biggest office space in our office block because we organise our own print runs and do all our distribution worldwide from what we call “AP HQ.”

Jo: And you don't print books, but you have a warehouse.

Adam: Yes, we have a warehouse. We work with different printers to order books in. We print quite large scale—well, large scale to me—volumes of books. Then we have them ordered to here, and then we will sign them all and distribute everything from here.

Jo: Sarah, your wife, being a structural engineer—it seems like she would be a real help in organising a business of warehousing and all of that.

Has that been great [working with your wife]? Because I worked with my husband for a while and we decided to stop doing that.

Adam: Well, we're still married, so I'm taking that as a win! And funnily enough, we don't actually fall out so much at work. When we do, it's more about me being quite chaotic with how I work, but also I can at times be quite inflexible about how I want things to be done.

But what Sarah's fantastic at is the organisation, the analytics. She runs all the logistical side of things. When we moved into the bigger office space, she insisted on us having different offices. She's literally shoved me on the other side of the building.

So I'm out the way—I can just come in and write, come and do my bit to sign the books, and then she can just get on with organising the orders and getting those packed and sent out to readers.

She manages all the tracking, the customs—all the stuff that would really bog me down. I wouldn't say she necessarily enjoys it when she's getting some cranky emails from people whose books might have gone missing or have been held up at customs, but she's really good at that side.

She's really helped bring systems in place to make sure the fulfilment side is as smooth as possible.

Jo: I think this is so important, and I want everyone to hear you on this. Because at heart, you are the creative, you are a writer, and sure you are building this business, but I feel like one of the biggest mistakes that creative-first authors make is not getting somebody else to help them.

It doesn't have to be a spouse, right? It can also be another professional person. Sacha Black's got various people working for her.

I think you just can't do it alone, right?Adam: Absolutely not. I would have drowned long before now. When Sarah joined the team, I was at a position where I'd said to her, “Look, I need to look at bringing someone in because I'm drowning.”

It was only then she took a look at where her career was, and she'd done everything she wanted to do. She was a senior engineer. She'd completed all the big projects. I mean, this is a woman who's designed football stands across the UK and some of the biggest barn conversions and school conversions and things like that.

She'd done everything professionally that she'd wanted to and was perhaps losing that passion that she once had.

So she said she was interested, and we said, “Look, why don't you come and spend a bit of time working with me within the business, see whether it works for you, see if we can find an area that works for you—not you working for the business, the business working for you—that we maintain that work-life balance.”

And then if it didn't work, we were in a position where we could set her up to start working for herself as an engineer again, but under her own terms.

Then we just went from strength to strength. We made it through the first year. I think we made it through the first year without any arguments, and she's now been full-time in the business for two years.

Jo: I think that's great. Really good to hear that. Because when I met you, probably in Seville I think it was, I was like, “You are going to hit some difficulty,” because I could see that if you were going to scale as fast as you were aiming to—

There are problems of scale, right? There's a reason why lots of us don't want a bloomin' warehouse.Adam: Yes, absolutely. I think it's twofold. I am an author at heart—that's my passion—but I'm also a businessman and a creative from a marketing point of view. I always see writing as the passion. The business side and the creating of content—that's the work. So I never see writing as work.

When I was a nurse, I was the nurse that was always put on the wards where no one else wanted to work because that's where I thrived. I thrive in the chaos.

Put me with people who had really challenging behaviour or were really unwell and needed that really intense support, displayed quite often problematic behaviours, and I would thrive in those environments because I'd always like to prove that you can get the best out of anyone.

I very much work in that manner now. The more chaotic, the more pressure-charged the situation is, the better I thrive in that. If I was just sat writing a book and that was it, I'd probably get less done because I'd get bored and I wouldn't feel like I was challenging myself.

As you said, the flip side of that is that risk of burnout is very, very real, and I have come very, very close. But as a former mental health nurse, I am very good at spotting my own signs of when I'm not taking good care of myself. And if I don't, Sarah sure as hell does.

Jo: I think that's great. Really good to hear. Okay, so you talked there about creating the content as work, and—

You have driven your success, I would say, almost entirely with TikTok. Would that be right?Adam: Well, no, I'd come back and touch on that just to say it isn't just TikTok. I would say definitely organic marketing, but not just TikTok.

I'm always quick to pivot if something isn't working or if there's a dip in sales. I'm always looking at how we can—not necessarily keep growing—but it's about sustaining what you've built so that we can carry on doing this.

If the business stops earning money, I can't keep doing what I love doing, and me and my wife can't keep supporting our family with a stable income, which is what we have now.

I would say TikTok is what started it all, but I did the same as having all my books on Amazon, which is why I switched to doing wide and direct sales: I didn't want all my eggs in one basket.

I was always exploring what platforms I can use to best utilise organic marketing, to the point where my author TikTok channel is probably my third lowest avenue for directing traffic to my store at the moment.

I have a separate channel for my TikTok shop, which generates great traffic, but that's a separate thing because I treat my TikTok shop as a separate audience. That only goes out to a UK audience, whereas my main TikTok channel goes out to a worldwide audience.

Jo: Okay. So we are going to get into TikTok, and I do want to talk about that, but you said TikTok Shop UK and—

Then you mentioned organic marketing. What do you mean by that?Adam: When I say organic marketing, I mean marketing your books in a way that is not a detriment to your bank balance.

To break that down further: you can be paying for, say for example, you set up a Facebook ad and you are paying five pounds a day just for a testing phase for an ad that potentially isn't going to work.

You potentially have to run 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 ads at five pounds a day to find one ad that works, that will make your book profitable. There's a lot of testing, a lot of money that goes into that.

With organic marketing, it's using video marketing or slideshows or carousels on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook—wherever you want to put it—to find the content that does resonate with your readers, that generates sales, and it doesn't cost you anything.

I can create a video on TikTok, put it out there, and it reaches three, four hundred people. That hasn't cost me any money at all. Those three, four hundred people have seen my content. That's not TikTok's job for that to generate sales. That's my job to convert those views into sales.

If it doesn't, I just need to look at the content and say, “Well, that hasn't hit my audience, or if it has, it hasn't resonated. What do I need to do with my content to make it resonate and then transition into sales?”

Once you find something that works, it's just a case of rinse and repeat. Keep tweaking it, keep changing or using variants of that content that's working to generate sales.

If you manage to do that consistently, you've already got content that you know works. So when you've built up consistent sales and you are perhaps earning a few thousand pounds a month—it could be five figures a month—you've then got a pool of money that you've generated.

You can use that then to invest into paid ads, using the content you've already created organically and tested organically for what your audience is going to interact with.

Jo: Okay. I think because I'm old school from the old days, we would've called that content marketing. But I feel like the difference of what you are doing and what TikTok—I think the type of behaviour TikTok has driven is the actual sales, the conversion into sales.

So for example, this interview, right? My podcast is content marketing. It puts our words out in the world and some people find us, and some people buy stuff from us. So it's content marketing, but it's not the way you are analysing content that actually drives sales.

Based on that content, there's no way of tracking any sales that come from this interview. We are just never going to know.

I think that's the big difference between what you are doing with content versus what I and many other, I guess, older creators have done, which is—

We put stuff out there for free, hope that some people might find us, and some of those people might buy. It's quite different.

Adam: I would still argue that it is organic marketing, because you've got a podcast that people don't have to pay to listen to, that they get enjoyment from, and the byproduct of that is you generate some income passively through that.

If you think of your podcast as one product and your video content is the same—these social media platforms—you don't just post your podcast on one platform.

You will utilise as many platforms as you can, unless you have a brand agreement where a platform is paying you to solely use their platform because you or yourself are the driver for the audience there.

I would say a podcast is a form of organic marketing. I could start a podcast about video marketing. I could start a podcast about reading. The idea being you build up an audience and then when you drop in those releases, that audience then goes and buys that product.

For example, if you've got a self-help book coming out, if you drop that into your podcast, chances are you're going to get a lot more sales from your audience that are here to listen to you as the inspirational storyteller that you are from a business point of view than what you would if you announced that you had a new crime novel coming out or a horror story you've written.

Your audience within here is generally an author audience who are looking to refine their craft—whether that be the writing or the selling of the books or living the dream of being a full-time author. I think it's more a terminology thing.

Jo: Well, let's talk about why I wanted to talk to you. A friend of ours told me that you are doing really well with live sales. This was just before Christmas, I think. And I was like, “Live sales? What does that even mean?”

Then I saw that Kim Kardashian was doing live sales on TikTok and did this “Kim's Must Have” thing, and Snoop Dogg was there, and it was this massive event where they were selling.

I was like, “Oh, it's like TV sales—the TV sales channel where you show things and then people buy immediately.”

And I was like, “Wait, is Adam like the Kim Kardashian of the indie author?”

So tell us about this live sale thing.Adam: Well, I've not got that far to say that I have the Kim Kardashian status! What it is, is that I'm passionate about learning, but also sharing what's working for me so that other authors can succeed—without what I'm sharing being stuck behind a paywall.

It is a big gripe of mine that you get all these courses and all these things you can do and everything has to be behind a paywall. If I've got the time, I'll just share.

Hence why we were in Vegas doing the presentations for Indie Author Nation, which I think had you been in my talk, Jo, you would've heard me talking about the live selling.

Jo: Oh, I missed it. I'll have to get the replay.

Adam: I only covered a short section of it, but what I actually said within that talk is, for me, live selling is going to be the next big thing. If you are not live selling your books at the moment, and you are not paying attention to it, start paying attention to it.

I started paying attention about six months ago, and I have seen constant growth to a point where I've had to post less content because doing one live stream a week was making more money than me posting content and burning myself out every single day for the TikTok shop.

I did a live stream at the beginning of Christmas, for example. A bit of prep work went into it. We had a whole Christmas set, and within that one live stream we generated three and a half thousand pounds of organic book sales.

Jo: Wow.

Adam: Obviously that isn't something that happened overnight. That took me doing a regular Friday stream from September all the way through to December to build up to that moment.

In fact, I think that was Black Friday, sorry, where we did that. But what I looked at was, “Right, I haven't got the bandwidth because of all the plates I was spinning to go live five days a week. However, I can commit to a Friday morning.”

I can commit to a Friday morning because that is the day when Sarah isn't in the office, and it's my day to pack the orders. So I've already got the orders to pack, so I thought I'll go live whilst I'm packing the orders and just hang out and chat.

I slowly started to find that on average I was earning between three to four hundred pounds doing that, packing orders that I already had to pack. I've just found a way to monetise it and engage with a new audience whilst doing that.

The thing that's key is it is a new audience. You have people who like to consume their content through short-form content or long-form content. Then you have people who like to consume content with human interaction on a live, and it's a completely different ballgame.

What TikTok is enabling us to do—on other platforms I am looking at other platforms for live selling—you can engage with an audience, but because on TikTok you can upload your products, people can buy the products direct whilst you are live on that platform.

For that, you will pay a small fee to TikTok, which is absolutely worth it. That's part of the reason we've been able to scale to having a six-figure business within TikTok shop itself as one revenue stream.

Jo: Okay. So a few things. You mentioned there the integration with TikTok shop. As I've said many times, I'm not on TikTok—I am on Instagram—and on Instagram you can incorporate your Meta catalogue to Shopify.

Do you think the same principle applies to Instagram or YouTube as well?I think YouTube has an integration with Shopify. Do you think the same thing would work that way?

Adam: I think it's possible. Yes, absolutely. As long as people can click and buy that product from whatever content they are watching—but usually what it will have to do is redirect them to your store, and you've still got all the conversion metrics that have to kick in.

They have to be happy with the shipping, they have to be happy with the product description and stuff like that. With TikTok shop, it's very much a one-stop shop. People click on the product, they can still be watching the video, click to buy something, and not leave the stream.

Jo: So the stream's on, and then let's say you are packing one of your books—

Does that product link just pop up and then people can buy that book as you are packing it?Adam: So we've got lots and lots of products on our store now. I always have a product link that has all our products listed, and I always keep all of the bundles towards the top because they generate more income than a single book sale.

What will happen is I can showcase a book, I'll tap the screen to show what product it is that I'm packing, and then I'll just talk about it. If people want it, they just click that product link and they can buy it straight away.

What people get a lot of enjoyment from—which I never expected in a million years—is watching people pack their order there and then. As an author, we're not just selling a generic product. We're selling a book that we have written, that we have put our heart and soul into. People love that.

It's a way of letting them into a bit of you, giving them a bit of information, talking to them, showing them how human you are.

If you're on that live stream being an absolute arse and not very nice, people aren't going to buy your books. But if you're being welcoming, you're chatting, you're talking to everyone, you're interacting, you're showcasing books they probably will.

What we do is if someone orders on the live stream, we throw some extra stuff in, so they don't just get the books, they'll get some art prints included, they'll get some bookmarks thrown in, and we've got merch that we'll throw in as a little thank you.

Now it's all stuff that is low cost to us, because actually we're acquiring a customer in that moment. I've got people who come onto every single Friday live stream that I do now.

They have bought every single product in our catalogue and they are harassing me for when the next release is out because they want more, before they even know what that is. They want it because it's being produced by us—because of our brand.

With the lives, what I found is the branding has become really important. We're at a stage where we're being asked—because I'm quite well known for wearing beanie hats on live streams or video content—people are like, “When are you going to release some beanie hats?”

Now and again, Sarah will drop some AP branded merch. It'll be beer coasters with the AP logo on, or a tote bag with the AP logo on. It's not stuff that we sell at this stage—we give them away.

The more money people spend, the more stuff we put in. And people are like, “No, no, you need to add these to the store because we want to buy them.”

The brand itself is growing, not just the book sales. It's becoming better known. We've got Pacificon in April, and there's so many people on that live stream that have bought tickets to meet us in person at this conference in April, which is amazing. There's so much going on.

With TikTok shop, it only works in the country where you are based, so it only goes out to a UK audience, which is why I keep it separate from my main channel. That means we're tapping into a completely new audience, because up until last year, I'd always targeted America—that's where my biggest readership was.

Jo: Wow. There's so much to this. Okay. First of all, most people are not going to have their own warehouse. Most people are not going to be packing live.

So for authors who are selling on, let's just say Amazon, can live sales still work for them? Could they still go live at a regular time every week and talk about a book and see if that drives sales, even if it's at Amazon?

Adam: Yes, absolutely. I would test that because ultimately you're creating a brand, you're putting yourself out there, and you're consistently showing up.

You can have people that have never heard of you just stumble across your live and think, “What are they doing there?” They're a bit curious, so they might ask some questions, they might not. They might see some other interactions. There's a million and one things you can do on that live to generate conversation.

I've done it where I've had 150 books to sign, so I've just lined up the books, stood in front of the camera, switched the camera on while I'm signing the books, and just chatted away to people without any product links.

People will come back and be like, “Oh, I've just been to your store and bought through your series,” and stuff like that. So absolutely that can work. The key is putting in the work and setting it up.

I started out by getting five copies of one book, signing them, and selling them on TikTok shop. I sold them in a day, and then that built up to effectively what we have now. That got my eyes open for direct selling.

When I was working with BookVault and they were integrated with my store, orders came to me, but then they went to BookVault—they printed and distributed.

Then we got to a point scaling-wise where we thought, “If we want to take this to the next level, we need to take on distribution ourselves,” because the profit lines are better, the margins are bigger.

That's why we started doing it ourselves, but only once we'd had a proven track record of sales spanning 18 months to two years and had the confidence.

It was actually with myself and Sacha that we set up at the same time and egged each other on. I think I was just a tiny bit ahead of her with setting up a warehouse. And then as you've seen, Sacha's gone from strength to strength.

It doesn't come without its trigger warnings in the sense of it isn't an easy thing to do. I think you have to have a certain skill set for live selling. You have to have a certain mindset for the physicality that comes with it.

When we've had a delivery of two and a half thousand books and we've got to bring them up to the first floor where the office is—I don't have a massive team of people. It's myself and Sarah, and every now and again we get my dad in to help us because he's retired now. We'll give him a bottle of wine as a thank you.

Jo: You need to give him some more wine, I think!

Adam: Yes! But you've gotta be able to roll your sleeves up and do the work.

I think if you've got the work ethic and that drive to succeed, then absolutely anyone can do it. There's nothing special about my books in that sense.

I've got a group called Novel Gains where I've actually started a monthly challenge yesterday, and we've got nearly two and a half thousand people in the group now.

The group has never been more active because it's really energised and charged. People have seen the success stories, and people are going on lives who never thought it would work for them.

Lee Mountford put a post up yesterday on the first day of this challenge just to say, “Look, a year ago I was where you were when Adam did the last challenge. I thought I can't do organic marketing, I can't get myself on camera.”

Organic marketing and live selling is now equating to 50% of his income.Jo: And he doesn't have a warehouse.

Adam: Well, he scaled up to it now, so he's got two lockups because he scaled up.

He started off small, then he thought, “Right, I'm going to go for it.” He ordered a print run of a few of his books—I think 300 copies of three books. Bundled them up, sold them out within a few months.

Then he's just scaled from there because he's seen by creating the content, by doing the lives, that it's just creating a revenue stream that he wasn't tapping into.

Last January when we did the challenge, he was really engaged throughout the process. He was really analytical with the results he was getting. But he didn't stop after 30 days when that challenge finished. He went away behind the scenes for the next 11 months and has continued to grow. He is absolutely thriving now.

Him and his wife—a husband and wife team—his wife is also an author, and they've now added her spicy books to their TikTok shop. They're just selling straight away because he's built up the audience. He's built up that connection.

Jo: I think that's great. And I love hearing this because I built my business on what I've called content marketing—you're calling it organic marketing. So I think it's really good to know that it's still possible; it's just a different kind.

Now I just wanna get some specifics. One—

Where can people find your Novel Gains stuff?Adam: So Novel Gains is an online community on Facebook. As I said, there's no website, there's no fancy website, there's no paid course or anything. It is just people holding themselves accountable and listening to my ramblings every now and again when I try and share pills of wisdom to try and motivate and inspire.

I also ask other successful authors to drop their story about organic marketing on there, to again get people fired up and show what can be achieved.

Jo: Okay. That's on Facebook.

So then let's talk about the setup. I think a lot of the time I get concerned about video because I think everything has to be on my phone.

How are you setting this up technically so you can get filmed and also see comments and all of this kind of stuff?Adam: Just with my phone.

Jo: It is just on your phone?

Adam: Yes. I don't use any fancy camera tricks or anything. I literally just settle my phone and hit record when I'm doing it.

Jo: But you set it up on a tripod or something?

Adam: Yes. So I'll have a tripod. I don't do any fancy lighting or anything like that because I want the content to seem as real as possible.

I'll set up the camera at an angle that shows whatever task I'm doing. For example, if I'm packing orders, I can see the screen so I can see the comments as they're coming up. It's close enough to me to interact.

At Christmas, we did have a bit of a setup—it did look like a QVC channel, I'm not going to lie! I was at the back. There was a table in front of me with products on. We had mystery book bags. We had a Christmas tree. We had a big banner behind me.

The camera was on the other side of the room, but I just had my laptop next to me that was logged into TikTok, so I was watching the live stream so I could see any comments coming up.

Jo: Yes, that's the thing. So you can have a different screen with the comments. Because that's what I'm concerned about—it might just be the eyesight thing, but I'm like, I just can't literally do everything on the phone.

Adam: TikTok has a studio—TikTok Studio—that you can download, and you can get all your data and analytics in there for your live streams.

At the moment, I'll just tap the screen to add a new product or pin a new product. You can do all that from your computer on this studio where you can say, “Right, I'm showcasing this product now,” click on it and it'll come up onto the live stream. You just have to link the two together.

Jo: I'm really thinking about this. Partly this is great because my other concern with TikTok and all these video channels is how much can be done by AI now. TikTok has its own AI generation stuff.

A lot of it's amazing. I'm not saying it's bad quality, I'm saying it's amazing quality, but—

What AI can't do is the live stuff. You just can't—I mean, I imagine you can fake it, but you can't fake it.

Adam: Well, you'd be surprised. I've seen live streams where it's like an avatar on the screen and there is someone talking and then the avatar moving in live as that person's talking.

Jo: Right?

Adam: I've seen that where it's animals, I've seen it where it's like a 3D person. There's a really popular stream at the minute that is just a cartoon cat on the stream. Whenever you send a gift, it starts singing whoever sent it—it gets a name—and that's a system that someone has somehow set up.

I have no idea how they've set it up, but they're literally not doing it. That can run 24 hours a day. There's always hundreds and hundreds of people on it sending gifts to hear this cat sing with an AI voice their name.

Yes, AI will work and it will work for different things. But I think with us and with our books, people want that human connection more than ever because of AI. Use that to your advantage.

Jo: Okay. So the other thing I like about this idea is you are doing these live sales and then you are looking at the amount you've sold. But are you making changes to it? Or are you only tweaking the content on your prerecorded stuff?

Your live is so natural. How are you going to change it up, I guess?Adam: I am always testing what is working, what's not working. For example, I'm a big nerd at heart and I collect Pokémon cards. Now that I'm older, I can afford some of the more rare stuff, and me and my daughter have a lot of enjoyment collecting Pokémon cards together.

We follow channels, we watch stuff on YouTube, and I was looking at what streamers do with Pokémon cards and how they sell like mystery products on an app or whatnot.

I was like, “How can I apply this to books?” And I came up with the idea of doing mystery book bags. People pay 20 pounds, they get some goodies—some carefully curated goodies, as we say, that “Mrs. B” has put together.

On stream, I never give the audience Sarah's name. It's always “Mrs. B.” So Mrs. B has built up her own brand within the stream—they go feral when she comes on camera to say hi!

Then there's some goodies in there. That could be some tote socks, a tote bag, cup holders, page holders, metal pins, things like that. Then inside that, I'll pull out a thing that will say what book they're getting from our product catalogue.

What I make clear is that could be anything from our product catalogue. So that could be a single book, it could be six books, it could be a three-book bundle. There's all sorts that people can get. It could be a deluxe special edition.

People love that, and they tend to buy it because there's so much choice and they might be struggling with, “Right, I don't know what to get.” So they think, “You know what? I'll buy one of them mystery book bags.”

I only do them when I'm live. I've done streams where the camera's on me. I've done top-down streams where you can only see my hands and these mystery book bags. Every time someone orders one, I'm just opening it live and showcasing what product they get from the stream.

People love it to the point where every stream I do, they're like, “When are you doing the next mystery book bags? When are you doing the next ones?”

Jo: So if we were on live now and I click to buy, you see the order with my name and you just write “Jo” on it, and then you put it in a pile?Adam: So you print labels there and then, which I'll do. Exactly. If I'm live packing them—I'm not going to lie—when I'm set up properly, I don't have time to pack them because the orders are coming in that thick and fast.

All I do is have a Post-it note next to me, and I'll write down their username, then I'll stick that onto their order. I'll collect everything, showcase what they're getting, the extra goodies that they're getting with their order, and then I'll stick the Post-it on and put that to one side.

To put that into context as something that works through testing different things: we started off doing 60 book bags—30 of them were spicy book bags, 30 were general fantasy which had my books and a couple of our authors that haven't got spice in their books—and the aim was to sell them within a month.

We sold them within one stream. 60 book bags at 20 pounds a pop. What that also generated is people then buying other products while we're doing it. It also meant that I'd do it all on a Friday, and we'd come in on a Monday and start the week with 40, 50, 60 orders to pack regardless of what's coming from the Shopify store.

The level of orders is honestly obscene, but we've continuously learned how best to manage this. We learned that actually, if you showcase the orders, stick a Post-it on, when we print the shipping labels, it takes us five minutes to just put all the shipping labels with everyone's orders.

Then we can just fire through packing everything up because everything's already bundled together. It literally just needs putting in a box.

Jo: Okay. So there's so much we could talk about, but hopefully people will look into this more. So I went to go watch a video—I thought, “Oh, well, I'll just go watch Adam do this. I'm sure there's a recording”—and then I couldn't find one. So tell me about that.

Does [the live recording] just disappear or what?Adam: Yes, it does. It's live for a reason. You can download it afterwards if you want, and then you've got content to repurpose.

In fact, you're giving me an idea. I've done a live today—I could download that clip that's an hour and 20 minutes long. Some of it, I'm just rambling, but some of it's got some content that I could absolutely use because I'm engaging with people.

I've showcased books throughout it because I've been packing orders. I had an hour window before this podcast and I had a handful of orders to pack. So I just jumped on a live and I made like 250 pounds while doing a job that I would already be having to do.

I could download that video, put it in OpusClip, and that will then generate short-form content for me of the meaningful interaction through that, based on the parameters that I give it. So that's absolutely something you could do. In fact, I'm probably going to do it now that you've given me the idea.

Jo: Because even if it was on another channel, like you could put that one on YouTube.

Adam: Yes. Wherever you want. It doesn't have a watermark on it.

Jo: And what did you say? OpusClip?

Adam: OpusClip, yes. If you do long-form content of any kind, you can put that in and then it'll pull out meaningful content. Loads of like 20, 30 short-form content video clips that you can use. It's a brilliant piece of software if you use it the right way.

Jo: Okay. Well I want you to repurpose that because I want to watch you in action, but I'm not going to turn up for your live—although now I'm like, “Oh, I really must.”

So does that also mean—you said it's UK only because the TikTok shop is linked to the UK—

So people in America can't even see it?Adam: So sometimes they do pop in, but again, that's why I have a separate channel for my main author account.

When I go live on that, anyone from around the world can come in. But if I've got shoppable links in, chances are the algorithm is just going to put that out to a UK audience because that's where TikTok will then make money.

If I want to hit my US audience, I'll jump on Instagram because that's where I've got my biggest following. So I'll jump on Instagram and go live over there at a time that I know will be appropriate for Americans.

Jo: Okay. We could talk forever, but I do have just a question about TikTok itself. All of these platforms seem to follow a way of things where at the beginning it's much easier to get reach. It is truly organic. It's really amazing.

Then they start putting on various brakes—like Facebook added groups, and then you couldn't reach people in your groups. And then you had to pay to play.

Then in the US of course, we've got a sale that has been signed. Who knows what will happen there.

What are your thoughts on how TikTok has changed? What might go on this year, and how are you preparing?Adam: So, I think as a businessman and an author who wants to reach readers, I use the platforms for what I can get out of them without having to spend a stupid amount of money. If those platforms stop working for me, I'll stop using them and find one that does.

With organic reach on TikTok, I think you'll always have a level of that. Is it harder now? Yes. Does that mean it's not achievable? Absolutely not.

If your content isn't reaching people, or you're not getting the engagement that you want, or you find fulfilling, you need to look at yourself and the content you are putting out. You are in control of that.

There's elements of this takeover in America—again, I've got zero control over that, so I'm not going to lose any sleep over it. I'll focus on areas that are making a difference.

As I said, TikTok isn't the biggest earner for my business. My author channel's been absolutely dead for a good six months or so. But that means I get stagnant with the content I'm creating. So the challenge I'm doing at the minute, I'm taking part to create fresh content every day to recharge myself.

I've got Instagram and Facebook that generate high volumes of traffic every single day. And usually if they stop, TikTok starts to work.

Any algorithm changes—things will change when it changes hands in America—but primarily it still wants to make money. It's a business.

If anything, it might make it harder for us to reach America because it will want to focus on reaching an American audience for the people that are buying TikTok shop. But they want it because they want the TikTok shop because of the amount of money that it is generating.

It's gone from a small amount of people making money to large volumes of businesses across the entire USA—like over here now—that are reaching an audience that previously you had to have deep pockets to reach, to get your business set up.

Now you've got all these businesses popping up that are starting from scratch because they're reaching people. They've got a product that's marketable, that people want to enjoy. They want to be part of that growth.

I think that will still happen. It might just be a few of the parameters change, like Facebook does all the time.

Jo: Things will always change. That is key.

We should also say by selling direct, you've built presumably a very big email list of buyers as well.Adam: Yes. I've actually got a trophy that Shopify sent me because we hit 10,000 sales—10,000 customers. I think we're nearing 16,000 sales on there now.

We've got all that customer data. We don't get that on TikTok. We haven't got the customer data.

Jo: Ah, that's interesting. Okay.

How do you not though? Oh, because—did they ship it?

Adam: So if you link it with your Shopify and you do all your shipping direct, the customer data has to come to your Shopify, otherwise you can't ship.

When TikTok ship it for you—so I print the shipping labels, but they organise the couriers—all the customer data's blotted out. It's like redacted, so you don't see it.

Jo: Ah, see that is in itself a cheeky move.

Adam: Yes. But if it's linked to your Shopify, you get all that data and your Shopify is your store. So your Shopify will keep that data. They kept affecting how I extracted the shipping labels and stuff like that, and just kept making life really difficult. So I've just switched it back.

I think Sarah has found an app that works really well for correlating the two.

Jo: Yes, but this is a really big deal. We carp on about it all the time, but—

If you sell direct and you do get the customer data, you are building an email list of actual buyers as opposed to freebie seekers.Which a lot of people have.

Adam: Absolutely, and that's the same for you. If you send poor products out or your customer has a poor experience, they're not going to come back and order from you again.

If your customer has a really good experience and opens the products and sees all this extra care that's gone in and all the books are signed, then they've not had to pay extra.

There was a Kickstarter—I'm not going to name which author it was—but it was an author whose book I was quite excited to back. They had these special editions they'd done, but you had to buy a special edition for an extra 30 quid if you wanted it signed.

I was like, “Absolutely not.” If these people are putting their hands in their pockets for these deluxe special editions, and if you're a big name author, it's certainly not them that have anything to do with it. They just have other companies do it all for them.

Whereas with us, you are creating everything. Our way of saying thank you to everyone is by signing the book.

Jo: I love that you're still so enthusiastic about it and that it seems to be going really well. So we're almost out of time, but just quickly—

Tell people a bit more about the books that they can find in your stores and where people can find them.Adam: Yes. So we publish predominantly fantasy, and we have moved into the spicy fantasy world. We have a few series there.

You can check out APBeswickPublications.com where you will see our full product catalogue and all of my books.

On TikTok shop, we are under a.p_beswick_publications. That's the best place to see where I go live—short-form content. I'll post spicy books on there, but on lives, I showcase everything.

I also have fantasy.books.uk, where that's where you'll see the videos or product links for the non-spicy fantasy books.

Jo: And what time do you go live in the UK?

Adam: So I go live 8:00 AM every Friday morning.

Jo: Wow. Okay. I might even have to check that out. This has been so great, Adam. Thanks so much for your time.

Adam: Well, thank you for having me.

The post Selling Books Live On Social Media With Adam Beswick first appeared on The Creative Penn.

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What if the most transformative thing you can do for your writing craft and author business is to face what you fear? How can you can find gold in your Shadow in the year ahead? In this episode, I share chapters from Writing the Shadow: Turn Your Inner Darkness Into Words.

In the intro, curated book boxes from Bridgerton's Julia Quinn; Google's agentic shopping, and powering Apple's Siri; ChatGPT Ads; and Claude CoWork.

Balancing Certainty and Uncertainty [MoonShots with Tony Robbins]; and three trends for authors with me and Orna Ross [Self-Publishing with ALLi Podcast]; plus, Bones of the Deep, Business for Authors, and Indie Author Lab.

This show is supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn

Joanna Penn writes non-fiction for authors and is an award-winning, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of thrillers, dark fantasy, and memoir as J.F. Penn. She’s also an award-winning podcaster, creative entrepreneur, and international professional speaker.

• What is the Shadow?
• The ‘creative wound' and the Shadow in writing
• The Shadow in traditional publishing
• The Shadow in self-publishing or being an indie author
• The Shadow in work
• The Shadow in money

You can find Writing the Shadow in all formats on all stores, as well as special edition, workbook and bundles at www.TheCreativePenn.com/shadowbook

Writing the Shadow: Turn Your Inner Darkness Into WordsThe following chapters are excerpted from Writing the Shadow: Turn Your Inner Darkness Into Words by Joanna Penn.

Introduction. What is the Shadow?

“How can I be substantial if I do not cast a shadow? I must have a dark side also if I am to be whole.” —C.G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul

We all have a Shadow side and it is the work of a lifetime to recognise what lies within and spin that base material into gold.

Think of it as a seedling in a little pot that you’re given when you’re young. It’s a bit misshapen and weird, not something you would display in your living room, so you place it in a dark corner of the basement.

You don’t look at it for years. You almost forget about it.

Then one day you notice tendrils of something wild poking up through the floorboards. They’re ugly and don’t fit with your Scandi-minimalist interior design. You chop the tendrils away and pour weedkiller on what’s left, trying to hide the fact that they were ever there.

But the creeping stems keep coming.

At some point, you know you have to go down there and face the wild thing your seedling has become.

When you eventually pluck up enough courage to go down into the basement, you discover that the plant has wound its roots deep into the foundations of your home. Its vines weave in and out of the cracks in the walls, and it has beautiful flowers and strange fruit.

It holds your world together.

Perhaps you don’t need to destroy the wild tendrils. Perhaps you can let them wind up into the light and allow their rich beauty to weave through your home. It will change the look you have so carefully cultivated, but maybe that’s just what the place needs.

The Shadow in psychologyCarl Gustav Jung was a Swiss psychologist and the founder of analytical psychology. He described the Shadow as an unconscious aspect of the human personality, those parts of us that don’t match up to what is expected of us by family and society, or to our own ideals.

The Shadow is not necessarily evil or illegal or immoral, although of course it can be. It’s also not necessarily caused by trauma, abuse, or any other severely damaging event, although again, it can be.

It depends on the individual.

What is in your Shadow is based on your life and your experiences, as well as your culture and society, so it will be different for everyone.

Psychologist Connie Zweig, in The Inner Work of Age, explains,

“The Shadow is that part of us that lies beneath or behind the light of awareness. It contains our rejected, unacceptable traits and feelings. It contains our hidden gifts and talents that have remained unexpressed or unlived. As Jung put it, the essence of the Shadow is pure gold.”

To further illustrate the concept, Robert Bly, in A Little Book on the Human Shadow,uses the following metaphor:

“When we are young, we carry behind us an invisible bag, into which we stuff any feelings, thoughts, or behaviours that bring disapproval or loss of love—anger, tears, neediness, laziness. By the time we go to school, our bags are already a mile long.

In high school, our peer groups pressure us to stuff the bags with even more—individuality, sexuality, spontaneity, different opinions. We spend our life until we’re twenty deciding which parts of ourselves to put into the bag and we spend the rest of our lives trying to get them out again.”

As authors, we can use what’s in the ‘bag’ to enrich our writing — but only if we can access it. My intention with this book is to help you venture into your Shadow and bring some of what’s hidden into the light and into your words.

I’ll reveal aspects of my Shadow in these pages but ultimately, this book is about you. Your Shadow is unique. There may be elements we share, but much will be different.

Each chapter has questions for you to consider that may help you explore at least the edges of your Shadow, but it’s not easy. As Jung said,

“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular.”

But take heart, Creative. You don’t need courage when things are easy. You need it when you know what you face will be difficult, but you do it anyway.

We are authors. We know how to do hard things.

We turn ideas into books. We manifest thoughts into ink on paper.

We change lives with our writing. First, our own, then other people’s. It’s worth the effort to delve into Shadow, so I hope you will join me on the journey.

The creative wound and the Shadow in writing

“Whatever pain you can’t get rid of, make it your creative offering.” —Susan Cain, Bittersweet

The more we long for something, the more extreme our desire, the more likely it is to have a Shadow side. For those of us who love books, the author life may well be a long-held dream and thus, it is filled with Shadow.

Books have long been objects of desire, power, and authority. They hold a mythic status in our lives. We escaped into stories as children; we studied books at school and college; we read them now for escape and entertainment, education and inspiration. We collect beautiful books to put on our shelves. We go to them for solace and answers to the deepest questions of life.

Writers are similarly held in high esteem. They shape culture, win literary prizes, give important speeches, and are quoted in the mainstream media. Their books are on the shelves in libraries and bookstores. Writers are revered, held up as rare, talented creatures made separate from us by their brilliance and insight.

For bibliophile children, books were everything and to write one was a cherished dream. To become an author? Well, that would mean we might be someone special, someone worthy.

Perhaps when you were young, you thought the dream of being a writer was possible — then you told someone about it.

That’s probably when you heard the first criticism of such a ridiculous idea, the first laughter, the first dismissal. So you abandoned the dream, pushed the idea of being a writer into the Shadow, and got on with your life.

Or if it wasn’t then, it came later, when you actually put pen to paper and someone — a parent, teacher, partner, or friend, perhaps even a literary agent or publisher, someone whose opinion you valued — told you it was worthless.

Here are some things you might have heard:

• Writing is a hobby. Get a real job.
• You’re not good enough. You don’t have any writing talent.
• You don’t have enough education. You don’t know what you’re doing.
• Your writing is derivative / unoriginal / boring / useless / doesn’t make sense.
• The genre you write in is dead / worthless / unacceptable / morally wrong / frivolous / useless.
• Who do you think you are? No one would want to read what you write.
• You can’t even use proper grammar, so how could you write a whole book?
• You’re wasting your time. You’ll never make it as a writer.
• You shouldn’t write those things (or even think about those things). Why don’t you write something nice?
• Insert other derogatory comment here!

Mark Pierce describes the effect of this experience in his book The Creative Wound, which “occurs when an event, or someone’s actions or words, pierce you, causing a kind of rift in your soul. A comment—even offhand and unintentional—is enough to cause one.”

He goes on to say that such words can inflict “damage to the core of who we are as creators. It is an attack on our artistic identity, resulting in us believing that whatever we make is somehow tainted or invalid, because shame has convinced us there is something intrinsically tainted or invalid about ourselves.”

As adults, we might brush off such wounds, belittling them as unimportant in the grand scheme of things. We might even find ourselves saying the same words to other people. After all, it’s easier to criticise than to create.

But if you picture your younger self, bright eyed as you lose yourself in your favourite book, perhaps you might catch a glimpse of what you longed for before your dreams were dashed on the rocks of other people’s reality.

As Mark Pierce goes on to say,

“A Creative Wound has the power to delay our pursuits—sometimes for years—and it can even derail our lives completely… Anything that makes us feel ashamed of ourselves or our work can render us incapable of the self-expression we yearn for.”

This is certainly what happened to me, and it took decades to unwind.

Your creative wounds will differ to mine but perhaps my experience will help you explore your own. To be clear, your Shadow may not reside in elements of horror as mine do, but hopefully you can use my example to consider where your creative wounds might lie.

“You shouldn’t write things like that.”It happened at secondary school around 1986 or 1987, so I would have been around eleven or twelve years old. English was one of my favourite subjects and the room we had our lessons in looked out onto a vibrant garden. I loved going to that class because it was all about books, and they were always my favourite things.

One day, we were asked to write a story. I can’t remember the specifics of what the teacher asked us to write, but I fictionalised a recurring nightmare.

I stood in a dark room.

On one side, my mum and my brother, Rod, were tied up next to a cauldron of boiling oil, ready to be thrown in. On the other side, my dad and my little sister, Lucy, were threatened with decapitation by men with machetes.

I had to choose who would die.

I always woke up, my heart pounding, before I had to choose.

Looking back now, it clearly represented an internal conflict about having to pick sides between the two halves of my family. Not an unexpected issue from a child of divorce.

Perhaps these days, I might have been sent to the school counsellor, but it was the eighties and I don’t think we even had such a thing. Even so, the meaning of the story isn’t the point. It was the reaction to it that left scars.

“You shouldn’t write things like that,” my teacher said, and I still remember her look of disappointment, even disgust.

Certainly judgment.

She said my writing was too dark. It wasn’t a proper story. It wasn’t appropriate for the class.

As if horrible things never happened in stories — or in life.

As if literature could not include dark tales.

As if the only acceptable writing was the kind she approved of. We were taught The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie that year, which says a lot about the type of writing considered appropriate.

Or perhaps the issue stemmed from the school motto, “So hateth she derknesse,” from Chaucer’s The Legend of Good Women: “For fear of night, so she hates the darkness.”

I had won a scholarship to a private girls’ school, and their mission was to turn us all into proper young ladies. Horror was never on the curriculum.

Perhaps if my teacher had encouraged me to write my darkness back then, my nightmares would have dissolved on the page.

Perhaps if we had studied Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or H.P. Lovecraft stories, or Bram Stoker’s Dracula, I could have embraced the darker side of literature earlier in my life.

My need to push darker thoughts into my Shadow was compounded by my (wonderful) mum’s best intentions. We were brought up on the principles of The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale and she tried to shield me and my brother from anything harmful or horrible. We weren’t allowed to watch TV much, and even the British school drama Grange Hill was deemed inappropriate.

So much of what I’ve achieved is because my mum instilled in me a “can do” attitude that anything is possible. I’m so grateful to her for that. (I love you, Mum!)

But all that happy positivity, my desire to please her, to be a good girl, to make my teachers proud, and to be acceptable to society, meant that I pushed my darker thoughts into Shadow.

They were inappropriate. They were taboo. They must be repressed, kept secret, and I must be outwardly happy and positive at all times.

You cannot hold back the darkness

“The night is dark and full of terrors.” —George R.R. Martin, A Storm of Swords

It turned out that horror was on the curriculum, much of it in the form of educational films we watched during lessons.

In English Literature, we watched Romeo drink poison and Juliet stab herself in Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet.

In Religious Studies, we watched Jesus beaten, tortured, and crucified in The Greatest Story Ever Told, and learned of the variety of gruesome ways that Christian saints were martyred.

In Classical Civilisation, we watched gladiators slaughter each other in Spartacus.

In Sex Education at the peak of the AIDS crisis in the mid-’80s, we were told of the many ways we could get infected and die.

In History, we studied the Holocaust with images of skeletal bodies thrown into mass graves, medical experiments on humans, and grainy videos of marching soldiers giving the Nazi salute.

One of my first overseas school field trips was to the World War I battlegrounds of Flanders Fields in Belgium, where we studied the inhuman conditions of the trenches, walked through mass graves, and read war poetry by candlelight. As John McCrae wrote:

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields.

Did the teachers not realise how deeply a sensitive teenager might feel the darkness of that place? Or have I always been unusual in that places of blood echo deep inside me?

And the horrors kept coming.

We lived in Bristol, England back then and I learned at school how the city had been part of the slave trade, its wealth built on the backs of people stolen from their homes, sold, and worked to death in the colonies. I had been at school for a year in Malawi, Africa and imagined the Black people I knew drowning, being beaten, and dying on those ships.

In my teenage years, the news was filled with ethnic cleansing, mass rape, and massacres during the Balkan wars, and images of bodies hacked apart during the Rwandan genocide. Evil committed by humans against other humans was not a historical aberration.

I’m lucky and I certainly acknowledge my privilege. Nothing terrible or horrifying has happened to me — but bad things certainly happen to others.

I wasn’t bullied or abused. I wasn’t raped or beaten or tortured.

But you don’t have to go through things to be afraid of them, and for your imagination to conjure the possibility of them.

My mum doesn’t read my fiction now as it gives her nightmares (Sorry, Mum!). I know she worries that somehow she’s responsible for my darkness, but I’ve had a safe and (mostly) happy life, for which I’m truly grateful.

But the world is not an entirely safe and happy place, and for a sensitive child with a vivid imagination, the world is dark and scary.

It can be brutal and violent, and bad things happen, even to good people.

No parent can shield their child from the reality of the world. They can only help them do their best to live in it, develop resilience, and find ways to deal with whatever comes.

Story has always been a way that humans have used to learn how to live and deal with difficult times. The best authors, the ones that readers adore and can’t get enough of, write their darkness into story to channel their experience, and help others who fear the same.

In an interview on writing the Shadow on The Creative Penn Podcast, Michaelbrent Collings shared how he incorporated a personally devastating experience into his writing:

“My wife and I lost a child years back, and that became the root of one of my most terrifying books, Apparition. It’s not terrifying because it’s the greatest book of all time, but just the concept that there’s this thing out there… like a demon, and it consumes the blood and fear of the children, and then it withdraws and consumes the madness of the parents… I wrote that in large measure as a way of working through what I was experiencing.”

I’ve learned much from Michaelbrent. I’ve read many of his (excellent) books and he’s been on my podcast multiple times talking about his depression and mental health issues, as well as difficulties in his author career. Writing darkness is not in Michaelbrent’s Shadow and only he can say what lies there for him. But from his example, and from that of other authors, I too learned how to write my Shadow into my books.

Twenty-three years after that English lesson, in November 2009, I did NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, and wrote five thousand words of what eventually became Stone of Fire, my first novel.

In the initial chapter, I burned a nun alive on the ghats of Varanasi on the banks of the Ganges River. I had watched the bodies burn by night on pyres from a boat bobbing in the current a few years before, and the image was still crystal clear in my mind. The only way to deal with how it made me feel about death was to write about it — and since then, I’ve never stopped writing.

Returning to the nightmare from my school days, I’ve never had to choose between the two halves of my family, but the threat of losing them remains a theme in my fiction. In my ARKANE thriller series, Morgan Sierra will do anything to save her sister and her niece. Their safety drives her to continue to fight against evil.

Our deepest fears emerge in our writing, and that’s the safest place for them. I wish I’d been taught how to turn my nightmares into words back at school, but at least now I’ve learned to write my Shadow onto the page. I wish the same for you.

The Shadow in traditional publishingIf becoming an author is your dream, then publishing a book is deeply entwined with that. But as Mark Pierce says in The Creative Wound,

“We feel pain the most where it matters the most… Desire highlights whatever we consider to be truly significant.”

There is a lot of desire around publishing for those of us who love books!

It can give you:

• Validation that your writing is good enough
• Status and credibility
• Acceptance by an industry held in esteem
• The potential of financial reward and critical acclaim
• Support from a team of professionals who know how to make fantastic books
• A sense of belonging to an elite community
• Pride in achieving a long-held goal, resulting in a confidence boost and self-esteem

Although not guaranteed, traditional publishing can give you all these things and more, but as with everything, there is a potential Shadow side.

Denying it risks the potential of being disillusioned, disappointed, and even damaged. But remember, forewarned is forearmed, as the saying goes. Preparation can help you avoid potential issues and help you feel less alone if you encounter them.

The myth of success… and the reality of experienceThere is a pervasive myth of success in the traditional publishing industry, perpetuated by media reporting on brand name and breakout authors, those few outliers whose experience is almost impossible to replicate.

Because of such examples, many new traditionally published authors think that their first book will hit the top of the bestseller charts or win an award, as well as make them a million dollars — or at least a big chunk of cash. They will be able to leave their job, write in a beautiful house overlooking the ocean, and swan around the world attending conferences, while writing more bestselling books. It will be a charmed life.

But that is not the reality.

Perhaps it never was.

Even so, the life of a traditionally published author represents a mythic career with the truth hidden behind a veil of obscurity.

In April 2023, The Bookseller in the UK reported that

“more than half of authors (54%) responding to a survey on their experiences of publishing their debut book have said the process negatively affected their mental health. Though views were mixed, just 22%… described a positive experience overall… Among the majority who said they had a negative experience of debut publication, anxiety, stress, depression and ‘lowered’ self-esteem were cited, with lack of support, guidance or clear and professional communication from their publisher among the factors that contributed.”

Many authors who have negative experiences around publishing will push them into the Shadow with denial or self-blame, preferring to keep the dream alive. They won’t talk about things in public as this may negatively affect their careers, but private discussions are often held in the corners of writing conferences or social media groups online.

Some of the issues are as follows:

Repeated rejection by agents and publishers may lead to the author thinking they are not good enough as a writer, which can lead to feeling unworthy as a person. If an author gets a deal, the amount of advance and the name and status of the publisher compared to others create a hierarchy that impacts self-esteem.

A deal for a book may be much lower than an author might have been expecting, with low or no advance, and the resulting experience with the publisher beneath expectations.

The launch process may be disappointing, and the book may appear without fanfare, with few sales and no bestseller chart position.

In The Bookseller report, one author described her launch day as

“a total wasteland… You have expectations about what publication day will be like, but in reality, nothing really happens.”

The book may receive negative reviews by critics or readers or more publicly on social media, which can make an author feel attacked.

The book might not sell as well as expected, and the author may feel like it’s their fault. Commercial success can sometimes feel tied to self-worth and an author can’t help but compare their sales to others, with resulting embarrassment or shame.

The communication from the publisher may be less than expected. One author in The Bookseller report said,

“I was shocked by the lack of clarity and shared information and the cynicism that underlies the superficial charm of this industry.”

There is often more of a focus on debut authors in publishing houses, so those who have been writing and publishing in the midlist for years can feel ignored and undervalued.

In The Bookseller report, 48 percent of authors reported “their publisher supported them for less than a year,” with one saying,

“I got no support and felt like a commodity, like the team had moved on completely to the next book.”

If an author is not successful enough, the next deal may be lower than the last, less effort is made with marketing, and they may be let go.

In The Bookseller report, “six authors—debut and otherwise—cited being dropped by their publisher, some with no explanation.”

Even if everything goes well and an author is considered successful by others, they may experience imposter syndrome, feeling like a fraud when speaking at conferences or doing book signings.

And the list goes on …

All these things can lead to feelings of shame, inadequacy, and embarrassment; loss of status in the eyes of peers; and a sense of failure if a publishing career is not successful enough.

The author feels like it’s their fault, like they weren’t good enough — although, of course, the reality is that the conditions were not right at the time. A failure of a book is not a failure of the person, but it can certainly feel like it!

When you acknowledge the Shadow, it loses its powerDespite all the potential negatives of traditional publishing, if you know what could happen, you can mitigate them. You can prepare yourself for various scenarios and protect yourself from potential fall-out.

It’s clear from The Bookseller report that too many authors have unrealistic expectations of the industry.

But publishers are businesses, not charities.

It’s not their job to make you feel good as an author. It’s their job to sell books and pay you. The best thing they can do is to continue to be a viable business so they can keep putting books on the shelves and keep paying authors, staff, and company shareholders.

When you license your creative work to a publisher, you’re giving up control of your intellectual property in exchange for money and status.

Bring your fears and issues out of the Shadow, acknowledge them, and deal with them early, so they do not get pushed down and re-emerge later in blame and bitterness.

Educate yourself on the business of publishing. Be clear on what you want to achieve with any deal. Empower yourself as an author, take responsibility for your career, and you will have a much better experience.

The Shadow in self-publishing or being an indie authorSelf-publishing, or being an independent (indie) author, can be a fantastic, pro-active choice for getting your book into the world. Holding your first book in your hand and saying “I made this” is pretty exciting, and even after more than forty books, I still get excited about seeing ideas in my head turn into a physical product in the world.

Self-publishing can give an author:

• Creative control over what to write, editorial and cover design choices, when and how often to publish, and how to market
• Empowerment over your author career and the ability to make choices that impact success without asking for permission
• Ownership and control of intellectual property assets, resulting in increased opportunity around licensing and new markets
• Independence and the potential for recurring income for the long term
• Autonomy and flexibility around timelines, publishing options, and the ability to easily pivot into new genres and business models
• Validation based on positive reader reviews and money earned
• Personal growth and learning through the acquisition of new skills, resulting in a boost in confidence and self-esteem
• A sense of belonging to an active and vibrant community of indie authors around the world

Being an indie author can give you all this and more, but once again, there is a Shadow side and preparation can help you navigate potential issues.

The myth of success… and the reality of experienceAs with traditional publishing, the indie author world has perpetuated a myth of success in the example of the breakout indie author like E.L. James with Fifty Shades of Grey, Hugh Howey with Wool, or Andy Weir with The Martian.

The emphasis on financial success is also fuelled online by authors who share screenshots showing six-figure months or seven-figure years, without sharing marketing costs and other outgoings, or the amount of time spent on the business.

Yes, these can inspire some, but it can also make others feel inadequate and potentially lead to bad choices about how to publish and market based on comparison.

The indie author world is full of just as much ego and a desire for status and money as traditional publishing.

This is not a surprise!

Most authors, regardless of publishing choices, are a mix of massive ego and chronic self-doubt. We are human, so the same issues will re-occur. A different publishing method doesn’t cure all ills.

Some of the issues are as follows:

You learn everything you need to know about writing and editing, only to find that you need to learn a whole new set of skills in order to self-publish and market your book. This can take a lot of time and effort you did not expect, and things change all the time so you have to keep learning.