The Creative Penn Podcast For Writers

What are the most common reasons why writers don't finish their books —and how can you overcome them in order to finish yours this year? Roz Morris gives practical writing and mindset tips. In the intro, Spotify promo codes [FindawayVoices]; Rachael Herron's money episode [How Do You Write?]; Changes at Amazon [Kris Writes, BBC]; AI as a writing co-pilot [Stark Reflections]; Hindenburg Narrator for audiobook mastering; Pilgrimage audiobook chapters [Books and Travel]. Today's show is sponsored by Ingram Spark, which I use to print and distribute my print-on-demand books to 40,000 retailers including independent bookstores, schools and universities, libraries, and more. It's your content—do more with it through IngramSpark.com. Roz Morris is a best-selling author as a ghostwriter and an award-nominated author with her own literary novels. She writes writing craft books for authors under the Nail Your Novel brand, and is also an editor, speaker and writing coach. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. Show Notes The most common reasons that writers abandon books Creating a system for your creative process Finding the motivation to finish your book even when it gets tough The importance of research to help you keep going How to commit to finishing one project when you have multiple started Staying confident when you start doubting your book Knowing when to park a project You can find Roz at RozMorris.org Transcript of Interview with Roz Morris Joanna: Roz Morris is a best-selling author as a ghostwriter and an award nominated author with her own literary novels. She writes writing craft books for authors under the Nail Your Novel brand, and is also an editor, speaker and writing coach. Today, we're talking about why writers abandon books and how you can draft, fix and finish with confidence. And we'll have tips for both fiction and nonfiction authors. So welcome back to the show, Roz. Roz: Thank you, Joanna. It's so nice to be here again. Joanna: And this is your sixth time on the show which is amazing. It's probably been like a decade now since you've been coming on the show. Roz: Yes, it has. I was a listener from the early days, and when you contacted me and said, “do come on my show,” I thought, oh, that's brilliant because I've been listening for ages. Joanna: And over the years, we've become friends, and we've both written lots of books, and we've had a journey. But what's great is that you have so many books to help authors, and you're very wise, which is why I like talking to you. We're not going to get into your background because we've done it many times before. Let's get into the topic itself and start with a bit of an overview. What are the most common reasons that writers abandon books? Why doesn't every author just finish every book? Roz: Well, we always start on a blaze of enthusiasm and inspiration. You get terribly excited, can't wait to get to the keyboard, hammer loads of words down, and then we lose enthusiasm. And then what might happen is we grind on anyway. For most people, that's quite hard because they don't know how to do it and how to do it productively. Or we get interested in something else and start another book, and off we go again. Or we've run out of material, or we don't have enough time to actually do justice to the book and make enough regular appointments with ourselves to write it because it does take a while to write a whole book. Or we read something else and think, “oh, someone else has done it better, what's the point?” That's really why most books get abandoned. Joanna: And I wondered, because I did a survey on The Creative Penn Podcast last year, well, this year as we're recording this, last year as this goes out. And it was kind of stunning to me that this was one of the most common questions. So I did just want to ask you because you wrote this particular book about why writers abandoned books and how to sort it out. How did you know that not finishing was one of the most common issues? Roz: Maybe from talking to writers, meeting them, and they would say, “oh, well, how do you get to the end of a book?” So they'd all been able to start, and then it just failed them in some way. But I'd got quite a lot of books under my belt by that time as a ghostwriter because I used to do a lot of ghostwriting fiction. So I realized I developed a method for doing all the work necessary to go from that big bang of inspiration to start with and then finally end up with a book that was not only finished, but presentable. And I thought, I have obviously developed a system that gets me to the end and gets me through all the bad bits, because there are bad bits. And I thought, well I'll write a book about how I do that. And then it turned out that quite a lot of people found it helpful. Joanna: It is a very good book. And we're going to get into some of those things that you gave as an overview. But it's so interesting because you just mentioned there words like ‘system' and ‘method' and ‘process'. And I mean, I'm a discovery writer, but also you do take a long time to write your literary novels, in particular. And they do meander in a lot of ways and your process is very creative. How can you both have a system and a method and a process, but also be imaginative and lean into creativity? Roz: Well, I have the process to help me do worthwhile things with the more creative ideas that I have. So the process will be ways of getting the work done, ways of getting myself back on track if I've got distracted, ways of allowing myself to go down new creative avenues if I think, oh, this book needs a bit more of this kind of excitement, or I need to research something. The process gives me a kind of big framework that will allow me to control my creative urges and put them to good use. That probably sounds quite woolly. But I have ways in which I think, well, how am I going to use this? Where does it belong in the book? Does it belong in the book? Something I do is write lists of reasons to have something in the book or reasons not to have it in the book. So I think what my process does is it imposes discipline on the creativity aspect of it. So I'm very creative. I want to find the best way of using an idea. I want to find the most original way to use an idea. I want to find the deep meanings that I feel in are in an idea, which is why I take so long to write a book. Then what I also want to do is impose discipline on it so that the book is not just a sprawling mess of absolutely everything I've ever thought of. It's got purpose and a clear vision and themes and story. And my process allows me to pull everything together so that I can be creative and also create a coherent work that other people can enjoy. Joanna: So, let's get into one of the things. I mean, you mentioned starting with the blaze of enthusiasm, which then grinds to a halt. And this word ‘grinds', I think is really interesting. I feel like there's a bit of a myth that every moment of writing a book is just going to be amazing, and we're in flow, and it's like, wow, just all of this is amazing. But it feels like maybe some people lose enthusiasm, and they think that's the end of it. How does it feel when that first flush of romance is gone from a book? How do we approach that ‘grind'? Roz: That is so wise, what you've just said there. That other people think they're doing it wrong if they're not inspired all the time. But most of writing is work. It's like a diet is probably work as well. At first, you're thinking, I'm going to really get myself into the shape I want to, and I had this vision of what it will be like, and I will not be diverted from my course. And to begin with a book is like that. And then there will be bits that aren't as easy as you thought they were going to be. And very soon, that's when it's sort of like work. So what I do, is I have various ways to remind myself of the original burst of inspiration. So what I do now when I begin a book is I write myself notes that capture the particular things about the idea that gave me joy. And then I can look at them again later and think, “Oh, that is still giving me joy when I read it. How can I get back to that? Do I want to revise it?” But the joy is still there, you've captured it. It's really important to do that. Also, I build soundtracks that give me feelings that I want to put into the book. And quite a lot of those are pieces of music that just make me think my book could be this. And when I play them again, it starts that feeling again. And I also have other books that I collect, or movies that I collect, that are touchstones for the initial inspiration. So I think it's very important to keep things, you know, it's like mementos of the first moments of a romance. This is when it was a really good idea. So there's that. But then also, I think what you have to do some actual work, which may not sound very creative, but it will get you to the end. There comes a point where you can't just sit there making things up. You need to know where you're going. And most of us, I find, can hold a beginning in our heads and just write from that and blaze onwards. But after a while, we kind of run out of impetus. We're inventing stuff, and inventing stuff and inventing stuff. And then after a while, we realize it's not really going anywhere, is it? It's quite random. And unless you're very experienced, you won't then know what to do next. And that's usually the point where most writers think, oh, this isn't as easy as I thought it was gonna be. The inspiration has deserted me or I can't do this.  What a lot of writers don't realize, especially when they start out, is that a satisfying story has actually got a lot going on under the words. Under the moment by moment of each chapter, there's actually a pattern being built, and expectations being built for the reader, and seeds being planted, and things brought in that will be much more important later. And all that is really almost impossible to do unless you've planned it. So if you make a plan, you will then know how to make the best use of all the ideas you've had, whether to immediately write a scene where something amazing happens, or whether to keep it for much later because actually it belongs later in the book. And if you start thinking in terms of making a plan of how the whole book will go, you are much more likely to make the best use of your inspirations and get all the way to the end. Joanna: And as a discovery writer, I do find — like I write out of order anyway for both fiction and nonfiction. But there always comes a point where I just go, as you said, like, “I don't know what's happening here, and I don't know where this is going.” Like right now I have a short story, and the ending, I still don't know the ending. I've written an ending, but it's not the ending. So I'm on my third printout and reread and re-edit. And with my nonfiction, what I find is when I print things out and read them, and this normally happens to me in a full-length book at around, let's say, 30,000 words. I'll end up printing out what I have, and only by sort of printing it out, because that's how I edit, I kind of look at it from that higher level, that structural viewpoint, and then I can make a plan. And a plan can just be a few bullet points, like it doesn't have to be a spreadsheet, right? I mean, from reading your books, I know you're both unstructured and structured in your planning. But you can do this plan later on in the process. And it may be that for people who have blazed their first 20,000 words, or 40,000 words, that's when you can then take a look at it and make a plan. Now, I always want to be the person who plans, it just doesn't work for my creative process. So I do it a bit differently. There always comes a point where you have to figure out what the hell's happening with the book. Roz: Yes, absolutely. And the planning can come at whatever stage suits you. Most writers develop their own process. And everyone probably does the same elements, but probably at different points, depending on what suits them. I do give an example in Nail Your Novel, actually, of how I wrote 60,000 words having a really lovely time inventing stuff. And then I realized one day, I really really don't know what I'm doing with this. I don't know where it's going. So I thought, okay, the time is right to really think about everything. It might be that that's what you need to do. Or it might be that you're better if you know what the last line is going to be. The children's writer Alan Garner, does that. He always says, “a year of planning for every book.” And then he gets the last line and he knows exactly where he's going with everything. Everyone has their own method. You find what you need, but what you generally need to do is at some point to have a route map to follow because then you'll make the best use of your ideas, and you'll also spot if you've got ideas you haven't used well enough. A very, very common thing I find when I assess manuscripts is that there'll be threads that start and they don't have the consequences that they should have. And those consequences would make great story elements and would really spice things up and would get all the interest and complication that, at the moment, is missing from the book. So there's often a lot in the original inspiration and roughness that you can look at and then make much better use of. And the same goes for nonfiction as well. Because in a nonfiction book, you might find you've glossed over some aspects of your subjects. And you could actually make them into whole sections by themselves, and then the book would feel a lot more complete. It's the same kind of thing. It's seeing how to make the best out of the material you've got. Joanna: And also figuring out what else you need. So nonfiction, for example, it may be that you need to do — well, and fiction too — You might need to do some research. Sometimes I feel that new authors, in particular, think that everything has to come out of their head for a novel, or even for nonfiction. But like, right now, as we record this, I have a pile of another around 15 books behind me that are research for the next novel idea that I have. And I mean, I read tons. In fact, for my Pilgrimage book, I've probably read about 50 books over the last couple of years that kind of all go together. And I've picked bits up and used quotes from some, but just ideas that have popped into my head for others. What are your thoughts on when we might need to research in order to continue? Roz: That is such a good point. And I love the fact that you've raised the point of your pilgrimage book, which you are writing from your own experience. And you might think that all you would need is your own experience, but that's just not so. Every book that you write, you usually need to check facts, check any assertions you make, find out what other people have done. I found when I wrote my travel memoir, Not Quite Lost, I was having to go and look things up and check that I hadn't made any dumb assumptions. It would have been fine to make those assumptions in my diary when I was writing the actual incidents that go in the book, but when you put it in print, and it's going to be for an actual book for other people to read, you've usually got to do a lot of checking and additional research. And yes, so you need research in absolutely every kind of book you write, whether fiction or nonfiction. And something that I find particularly with fiction is, because we're often writing about things we haven't done or we don't have tons of experience of, we might think, “Oh, I don't really know what it's like to work in the circus in the 1930s. Does that mean I can't write the book?” Well, no, you just stop and go and do some research about it. Research stops are a totally legitimate part of the work of writing a book. And you can, depending on what works for you, you can either just stop there and then and go and do that research, and gather lots of stuff, and then bring it back to the book and decide where you're going to use it. Or, if not very much depends on those particular details, what you could do if you want to keep the flow, and you've got a good flow going, or you want to get a word count done every day, is you could just carry on writing and put placeholder words for those details you will then look up later, and then go and look them up. But research goes on all the time, really. Joanna: Absolutely. Well, let's pick another category. And one of the comments from the survey was from a listener called David who said, “I have at least three books on the go at the moment, or actually, make that five. And my problem is they're all totally different, and I just can't decide or find the inspiration on how to finish any of them.” And this comes under the category of the author who starts a project only to jump to another more exciting one, and then jumps on to another one after that, or in fact, might just change their mind about what the project is anyway. How does the author who's started lots of projects commit to one and finish it? Because of course, you can have 20 manuscripts on your drive, or sort of bits and bobs, but that's not the work, is it, in terms of getting things out into the world? Roz: Yes, but what a wonderful grasshopper imagination he has. Yes, you have got to decide to commit to something in order to be able to do enough preparation on it to then feel like you've got the serious chops to write it. What I would do, if I was David, is I would pick one of those projects to spend a month on. You've got to give something like this time, otherwise, you'll decide to just put it down when the going gets a bit tough. And all books do get tough at some stage, but keep in mind that when you've gone a bit further with it, they then become intensely rewarding because you have taken nothing, just something from your brain, and you have made a book out of it. And that's one of the things that really makes it very rewarding. So what I would do if I was David, is I'd pick one of those projects and just concentrate on that. And if it's a novel, decide whether you've got all the elements of the most interesting setting for the idea, the most interesting use of the idea, the kinds of characters you'd have, all those basic building blocks. Find out if there's any research you can do, and as soon as you start doing research that really does heap new ideas into your mind. You'll get absolutely loads of material. Then I would start to make a very rough plan of where the book could go because obviously what he's lacking is a route map for where to take it. And none of this has to destroy the creativity. I think this is a feeling that I've detected from talking to quite a lot of authors. They don't really want to spoil the spontaneity, because the spontaneity and the creativity is the joy. But if you do these other tasks, they are also creative. They are helping you gather material that you will then put into the book, and you won't just take a piece of research and put it in verbatim, you will make something out of it. You will decide my characters could do this, or this could create a really interesting plot situation, or a really interesting dilemma. Always look for dilemmas, by the way. Dilemmas are absolutely brilliant. They are drama. If your reader is wondering what your characters are going to do, and what they would do if they were in such a difficult situation, that is going to keep them gripped. So you can gather all this material, and then you'll find by doing that kind of work on the idea, you've got a lot more that you can have at your disposal to then start making a short synopsis, or some bullet points or a more detailed synopsis, and then you'll be able to write and keep writing. Joanna: And it's interesting, I think this idea of committing to a book, I mean, I have something similar in that I have folders in my drive where I have bigger book ideas under a structure. And then what I do is I number them and I move them up and down the hierarchy depending on which ones I'm being drawn to. And then by the time I'm ready to write, like this short story that I'm writing, it's a military photographer idea spun from a memoir that I read years ago, and I've been thinking about it since I've my laser eye surgery done. And this has kind of noodled around in my brain for years, so I guess it comes under that thing where I had an idea and now I'm like, okay, it's risen to the top of my tree, and now I'm actually going to write it. And that means to me, once I commit, I actually have to finish the project. And so it's like I have these other books that I'm kind of flirting with, and then once I'm actually committed, then I will finish that. Like this Pilgrimage book, maybe like your Not Quite Lost, this is years in the making. We can commit to a book that might take a long time, but once we commit, now we're going to finish it. Roz: Absolutely, yes. And you also find that it develops far more reality for you. Because you're taking it seriously, you're spending time with it, you are grappling with problems on it. All that makes it a bigger and more solid thing. And there are times when it will seem quite difficult. But what I've often found is that's usually some little reminder in my brain saying you haven't yet sorted out this problem. So you can then do some sort of self-diagnosis and think what exactly is bothering me about this, and then you go and solve the problem. For instance, I remember with my most recent novel Ever Rest, I was thinking, “I don't like this aspect of it. Okay, why don't I like that aspect?” Once you have diagnosed a problem, once you've asked yourself why enough times, you can then solve that. And the rest of the book is perfectly fine, it's just a particular part of it was sort of a bit blocked and holding you up. So that will keep you committed as well. As we've said, once you have quite a lot of work that you've done on the book, it's got a solidity of its own. And it's not just a little thing that you started as a bit of a craze and then drop. It's got quite a substantial mass in your computer, in your head, in the amount of time spent with it, in the things you think about when you go out for a walk, you'll find you're taking the book with you. So if you put the work in, it is rewarded. The book becomes big enough for you to write. Joanna: So what about those people, because I mean, and this often happens with people's first books, but can often happen later, which is they started a project, but because they have so little time to write, it's stretching on forever. We both know people who've spent sort of a decade writing a book — And there might come a point where maybe you can't remember why you started it in the first place. And you kind of think, “Ugh, I don't even know what I'm doing anymore.” And just the amount of time that's been allocated to this book sort of doesn't really allow it to finish. So how do people get over that? Roz: Well, you do have to decide you're going to commit regular time to it and enough regular spots that you will be able to keep it all in your head and know where you're going with it. Now, it might only be 20 minutes a day, or 20 minutes, five days a week or something. But what you need is some continuity, so that it becomes something you can pick up. And a lot of writing is done by thinking. It's when you're away from the computer that you start wondering about things and little details you can just dwell on for a while when you haven't got the pressure of the page in front of you. That's all really valuable time. So if you do manage to set aside only 20 minutes to do the actual writing, you'll find you are doing more, and so you will get far more out of just that 20 minutes. So try, if possible, to commit enough regular sessions that you can make progress. Another thing you can do is write yourself continuation notes. If you might have to put the book down for a few days, and you know you won't be firing on all cylinders when you get back, write yourself a couple of bullet points, maybe in the text, about what you're going to do next. That means when you then open the file again, you don't have a blank mind. You've still actually got some idea of what you're going to do next. And what you could do is, earlier I mentioned things like triggers that help you keep sight of your original inspiration, the thing that originally made you really excited, you could use those as well. Go back to those or put them in the text file. Joanna: I guess there's two things we're saying here. And one is, if you need to be gentle with yourself, and I know there are people who cannot commit daily, that just doesn't work for their brain, or perhaps there are kids, or illness or whatever it is. For those people, I think the continuation notes are brilliant. And for those who can take the tough love, I would say you just have to put it in your diary, you have to get up early or work late, or whatever it is, to get it done. Whichever way of motivation works for you, it is worth it to write your book. We're both telling you, the listener, that it is worth it to take whatever is in your head and put it into the world. Both of us feel there are just intrinsic benefits to finishing a book. You will be so proud of yourself, regardless if it's your first book or your 30th or 50th, or whatever book. You'll be like, yes, look what I've just done. This is amazing. So, I mean — It's either be gentle with yourself or tough love. Right, Roz? Roz: Yes, I think it is. There is toughness in everything you try to do, even if you started out doing it just because you felt like it. And I certainly found that when I was writing my ghost novels that there'd be times I'd think, oh, I really don't feel like it today. But I had a deadline and had to get it done. It's supposed to be creative work, but we still do have to make something out of nothing sometimes. And what I found was if I just sat down, I'd put some music on the headphones, and think, right, one CD, and I'll see how I feel. The days of CDs… Joanna: I was gonna say, you're aging yourself there! Roz: I would get into 10 minutes, and I'd be fine. So there are ways that you can overcome the kind of initial reluctance if you are just feeling a bit reluctant to start. There are ways of overcoming that too. But yes, there are also life circumstances that make it more difficult. And now, we have so many ways of recording our words, even if we can't type, you can just say it into a dictaphone. Again, if you've made a plan, it will be a lot easier for you to make useful words out of that time. So if you've got a plan, and you're thinking, right, I need this to happen, and this happened, and this to happen. You can speak it into a dictaphone and you'll get some text that's more useful than if you were just trying to randomly pick up for 20 minutes and didn't really know where you were going. Joanna: Absolutely. And again, nowadays, it's more like an app than a dictaphone. In fact, this transcript will be generated using otter.ai. And I use the Otter app now on my phone. And AI transcription is great in a lot of situations now, especially if it's just one voice. So that tip is really good. I mean, I remember when I was really sick with COVID, and I just literally was lying in bed a lot, and being able to speak and listen was a really good way of creating and also learning and thinking. In fact, I think we spoke about Not Quite Lost soon after that, and partly, your Not Quite Lost was part of my inspiration for my pilgrimage book. So I feel like there's lots of things that go into the making of a book, but we have to commit time. There's literally no way around it. You have to put in time. Roz: Yes, but it is a lot easier than it used to be when all you had was a computer to type on. Now there are — I'm not used to calling them apps yet. Because I do everything on a desktop, and I've only just acquired a phone that can do things like apps. It's all very new. Joanna: Oh, you're hilarious. Well, let that be encouraging to everyone listening. You do not have to be as techie as me to make a career of this. Oh, that's brilliant. Let's talk about confidence because this is another thing that you mentioned in the overview. It's like you're writing this book and then you realize that someone else has written a book like this, or, you know, Colleen Hoover's hit the top of the charts with a book just like your idea, or someone has written a nonfiction book that is similar to yours. How do we get past the point of wondering what's the point? Roz: That is such a good question. Someone will seem to have had your idea, but your idea is yours. It's not theirs. And you will do it differently. And the first thing you should do is to look very closely at all the other versions. And there'll be quite a lot more versions of what seem to be similar to your idea. Read them all, and they are part of your research. What you'll find is very soon you'll think, oh, I wouldn't have done that with it anyway. And that will make you more clear about what you do want to do. If you do find that somebody has done something very close, you probably should think of a way to make yours different, but it doesn't mean your idea is wasted. Some people say that there only a few stories in the world, maybe there are if you group them together. But there are so many author voices, and author souls, and styles and ways of examining the human condition or writing how-to books or writing a memoir. The personal touch is what will make yours different. If you do find there's something else that's quite like what you planned to do, bite the bullet, go and read it, and then sort of have a kind of dialogue with it. What is different about yours? How could you make yours even more different? What it might make me think is, well, their version is perhaps a little wider ranging or deeper than I was going to go. So what could I do with my idea to make it more mine? It is always going to happen, but you should use it as an opportunity. Joanna: It's interesting this question, because I was just reflecting as you were talking. I mean, your books on writing novels, for example, you've got lots of them and they're all amazing. And when I was thinking about, oh, do you know what, I really should write a book on writing a novel because people keep asking me for it, but there were so many. I mean, you've obviously written some of them, but there are so many books on writing novels. And I spent a lot of time going, there's no point in me writing one because I can just refer people to your books, for example, or to Stephen King, or James Patterson's masterclass or whatever. So my confidence around writing How to Write a Novel, my book, I had a draft for years, but I couldn't get it out there until I actually rewrote my first three novels, and I realized that I'd learned a lot and maybe I could share it now. So the confidence to write that particular book took time, but I didn't just sit there during those years not writing anything else. So what do you think about the sort of there are books that will take time, so maybe they just need to be put into the future, and in the meantime, we work on something else? How would you know when an idea is ready? Do you know what I mean? Roz: That's such a good question. Yes, some books will need to mature a bit more in order to be able to write them, quite simply. We need to get more experience to put our own personal spin on it. As you've explained there, maybe five years ago wouldn't have been the right time for you to release that book. But now, you've got quite a lot more of your own experience to add value to it. So yes, what you might do is finish a draft and think it's sort of alright, but it's not satisfying me yet. So you have to go a lot on gut feeling. And that's something that you learn as a writer. No one can teach you gut feeling. Gut feeling just sort of comes with experience with lots of reading, as well as writing. Writers should always read. Read loads and loads of stuff, get to know what else is out there, where your book fits, and then you have a better sense of whether you are contributing something useful to the books of that kind that readers of those kinds of books will appreciate. So yes, you might finish something to the best of your ability at the time, but you might still think it needs to settle a bit, or I need to settle a bit, and then come back to it. Joanna: And in the meantime, maybe write something simpler. Like I have quite a few of these books, like my Shadow book, which you know, I've been talking about for probably a decade. And then also like, I want to write something similar to Stephen King's The Stand, which is my favorite book. It is an epic, dark fantasy book, and like 1000, or 1500 pages or something. It's so big that it kind of scares me, that project scares me. But yet, I want to put something like that in my life at some point. So that would be another tip to people listening. Well, let's get into this question of quitting, because I feel like there's a difference between quitting a project because of some of the reasons we've talked about and not finishing it, and then parking a project because maybe you're not ready, or you want to tackle it when you've got more life experience or more writing experience. And there's this sort of, “you must finish what you start,” one of Heinlein's rules. But then this book Quit by Annie Duke that I've talked about on the show, and lots of people have, which is about walking away and really just leaving something behind. So I guess that's a continuum. How do you know when we should park something? How do we know when we should finish something? Roz: Parking is such a good word for this. I always believe in parking rather than giving up. That is because a lot of the writing mindset requires you to go through the grueling days and just get on with it. And there are always little problems you need to solve in the manuscript, where really bum on the seat is the only way. So giving up is quite hard for anyone to do. I do think you can find that you just need to put a book down for a little bit and go on to something else. And you usually find, if you're the kind of person who had an idea for one book, you'll have ideas for more. It's more that you had the writing urge, the creativity urge, the need to make other people see why something that strikes you, can also be very exciting to them, and the need to communicate all that. That's just a really basic thing that artistic people have. And that's why, if you start one kind of book, you'll probably start another kind of book. So you might have several that are done to the best of your ability at the time, but that you could revisit when you've got fresh insight, something else that you could add, something you could use to add what you think is missing. And it is gut feeling, again. If it seems it's not quite satisfying to you yet, that's an indication that you should park the book for a while. The feeling that something's not quite satisfying also walks you through revisions. We all have to revise our manuscripts, they don't come out perfect first time, even with all the planning in the world, because they're so big, there's so much complexity. And when we revise, some of its by a plan, and some of it's by the gut feeling that this could be better, this doesn't quite work or, oh, that does work. So listen to your gut a lot. Joanna: It's hard, though, because we're like, “Oh, you can park a book. But you have to finish some books. And you can't just keep parking everything.” It's funny, but, I don't know, you kind of get to know this through experience. And sometimes you have to force yourself onwards and you'll figure out how to finish a book, or sometimes you do need to park it. And it is hard to juggle, isn't it? But I guess, how do you measure? Because some of your books have taken years to write. So I guess — How do you know that this is the book you are going to finish this time? And why is it worth it for you to keep going, even after decades as an author? Roz: Oh, good question. Yes, my last novel took about seven years. And it came from a short story idea I wrote actually about 30 years ago now. So it took me a very long time to start envisioning it as a much bigger story. But I always had the feeling something was in there. As I keep saying, everything starts with a feeling, a feeling of, “I must write this.” And if the book is going to become a book in the end, it will always keep plunking at you. It's this idea that there is something in there that I really want to explore and express. That's with my kind of novels because they are quite literary, although they are really story based because I love a good story. I also want something bigger to shimmer through, and finding that is very rewarding to me. And creating characters who are complex and in unique difficulties really interests me. I certainly find that a novel kind of builds itself around me as the ideas for characters start to become quite real. So it develops its own momentum and becomes a thing I find very rewarding to build and problem solve. That's a very personal reason for wanting to write. It's the personal reward of creating something and doing it as well as you can. And I'll often find I might be reading something else or watching a movie, and I'll think, ah, that was a note I really wanted to put in the book, but I hadn't yet thought of it. After you've had a book with you for a while, it ambushes you all the time from unexpected directions, and that's very rewarding too. But that's the sort of real long haul book. While I was writing Ever Rest, I wrote Not Quite Lost, which was just from travel diaries, and that was a hoot to do that even though there was some hard work in that. As you would've found with your Pilgrimage book, you had to do certain bits of research, had to rewrite things so that they are intelligible to an audience who isn't you because you've written most of it in diaries. I also wrote some of my Nail Your Novel books as well. And they were all rewarding their own way. The Nail Your Novel books, I thought, right, I really want to communicate how you can do this, how you can solve this problem, how you can make your books much better, and in terms of the widest number of people can understand. So that's really rewarding as well. I think the reward really, underneath it all, is communication, isn't it? It's giving somebody either an escapist experience, or a mysterious or thrilling experience, or a useful experience or an inspiring experience that helps them go and do something they wanted to do. Joanna: Yes, basically, we just love doing this and we can't help ourselves. Roz: We can't help ourselves. Yes. Joanna: We can't stop. Roz: But both of us had to figure out to start with, how we were going to take that urge and get something out at the other end that would be satisfying to us. Joanna: Indeed. Tell us a bit more about your books for authors and how the others in the series might also help people. Roz: Well, the original book that started all this for me was called Nail Your Novel: Why Writers Abandon Books and How You Can Draft, Fix and Finish With Confidence. And it's a process book that you'll do for any kind of novel. It's also quite good for nonfiction as well, because it's about structuring your idea, filling gaps, finding ways to solve the problems, what kind of problems you'll get, how to keep sitting there writing every day, or every 20 minutes every other day, if that's what you can manage. And then also how to edit without getting lost, without getting stuck in endless rounds of editing, and editing and editing and never finishing it. And how to present it to the world when you have got a manuscript you're satisfied with. So that's all in that Nail Your Novel book. It's a process book, follow the steps, you'll get to the end of your book. I've also made a workbook version of that with a few extra tips and exercises to help you do that. And the other books in the series are one on characters and one on plot. And they were distilled from the work I've done with other authors, working on their manuscripts, figuring out the common misconceptions they have, how they can do what they want to do, what goes wrong. Lots of examples of how to, for instance, create a character who people will like but won't find saccharine, how to write dialogue, how to write plots that have all the rises and falls in the right place, what those right places are, how to keep a reader curious. All those are in my character's book, my plot book. Joanna: Brilliant, and they're all excellent. Also, as I've said, I really liked your Not Quite Lost. I think it's a quirky travel memoir. And also Ever Rest, I think I've read all your novels as Roz Morris. And Ever Rest is fantastic, so I definitely recommend that as well to people listening. Where can people find you and your books online? Roz: Easiest place is probably my website, which is RozMorris.org. Joanna: Brilliant. Well, thanks as ever for your time, Roz. That was great. Roz: Thank you.The post How To (Finally) Finish Your Book With Roz Morris first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How can you use paid advertising as part of your book marketing strategy? How can you reach more readers and sell more books in the year ahead? Mark Dawson provides strategies and tips in this interview. In the intro, publishing trends for 2023 [Written Word Media]; Apple AI narration; ChatGPT into Bing [The Verge]; Comments on Audible [Brandon Sanderson, Audiblegate]; TikTok ban and problems [Reuters, Rolling Stone]; my Pilgrimage Kickstarter. Today's show is sponsored by Draft2Digital, where you can get free ebook formatting, free distribution to multiple stores, and a host of other benefits. Get your free Author Marketing Guide at draft2digital.com/penn Mark Dawson is the award-winning USA Today best-selling author of the John Milton series and other thrillers, with over 6 million copies sold. He's also the co-founder of SelfPublishingFormula.com, with books, courses and events for indie authors who want to sell more 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 How advertising has changed in the past decade The difference between paid advertising and other forms of marketing Why building your mailing list can be your best free advertising option Is it worth it to advertise a standalone book? Different ways to monetize your brand to make ads profitable What is the biggest mistake indie authors make with advertising? The effect of Apple's privacy rules on Facebook ads Using AI to create more and sell more You can find Mark at MarkJDawson.com and SelfPublishingFormula.com. Image generated by Joanna Penn on Midjourney. Transcript of Interview with Mark Dawson Joanna: Mark Dawson is the award-winning USA Today best-selling author of the John Milton series and other thrillers, with over 6 million copies sold. He's also the co-founder of SelfPublishingFormula.com, with books, courses and events for indie authors who want to sell more books. Today, we're talking about how to use paid advertising as part of your book marketing. So welcome back to the show, Mark. Mark: Hi, Jo. Thanks for having me. Third time? Fourth time? Joanna: I reckon it might be the fifth time. Mark: Oh, my goodness. Joanna: I know. We've been doing this together for a while. And in fact, that does bring us to the first question because you recently tweeted a great thread, and you did a blog post and things, about your lessons learned from a decade of being an indie author. And I reckon I was there at the beginning, would that be right? We met quite soon after you got started. Mark: I would say we met two years after that, perhaps. So I thought my decade was next November, but Amazon contacted me in early November 2022, and said, “Your anniversary is coming up. Do you mind if we post something on our Facebook feed?” And I checked, and obviously they were right. I published 2012 was my first book. So it's weird. It's a good opportunity to look back and see how things have changed. And I've been full-time since 20 — oh, goodness, I don't know now — 16, something like that. So about six, seven years. And it's been the most fantastic second career, really. I have to pinch myself sometimes to think I can still do this and make a living out of it. Joanna: And I think that's what's exciting. And I often say to people, that a lot of this journey is learning from other people who have been doing this longer or doing it differently, or who are still here. I think that's the other thing, the more the years go by, the more we know people who've disappeared and fallen off the radar, who've stopped writing. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with people leaving the career, you know, we've come into this career, but things change — some things change, some things stay the same.  Since this is about advertising, I want to pick up one of the things you said in your long list, which I will link to in the show notes if people want to read the whole thing. “Advertising used to be a luxury. It isn't anymore – it's a necessity.” So I wonder if we could just take a step back and think about when do you think things changed? When did organic reach stop being effective on its own? Mark: I think it's a combination of things. I think it's kind of organic reach becoming less effective, and also, there's so much more noise you need to cut through now. By which I mean, other authors advertising or other choices for readers to get whatever they want to read next. You have to shout a little bit louder now to put your book in front of them. But on the organic reach — so I should I suppose we should probably say organic reaches effectively publicity that you don't have to pay for on social media. So back in the good old days, maybe eight or nine years ago, you could post something on your Facebook feed, and it would get through to a good number of your followers without you needing to spend anything to amplify it. And everyone knew that that couldn't last forever. Eventually, Facebook was going to monetize that and turn itself into one of the biggest advertising platforms in the world. And that happened, I don't know exactly when that would be, I'm going to say five, six, seven years ago, it became less and less easy to reach your followers without having to pay for the privilege.  It started off with boosting posts becoming a thing. So I remember spending $10 or $20 to amplify the message so that more readers would see what I was trying to tell them. But then they added different abilities and different mechanisms that enabled you to reach different segments of your potential readership, and the advertising platform was built. And things have just continued from there. I don't know what the percentage is now in terms of how many people would see your updates without you having to pay, but it will be low single digits, I'd have thought in terms of percentages. Joanna: But of course, it is not just social media or Facebook or wherever. It's also Amazon and the other stores online, in that back in the days of the so called “Gold Rush”, which never really was, you could upload your Kindle book, and they were so few books back then in 2008, 2009 when it all kicked off, you could upload a book with a terrible cover — and I wish I'd taken screen prints back when Kindle launched as to how many books were in the store. But organic reach back then was literally you'd upload a book and people would buy it. And that's also gone, hasn't it? Mark: Definitely. And I remember this just as I started publishing, so 10 or 11 years ago, the trend was either free books because the rankings were different then. So if you had a free download, that counted pretty much the same as a sale in terms of the algorithm. So you'd get loads and loads of visibility when you ran a free promotion for the three days that you had with Select. And then you had the 99 pence promotions backed up by sites like Pixel of Ink, FreeBooksy, BargainBooksy, BookBub came a little bit later, but it was a big entry into the market.  You could do really, really well with kind of priming the algorithm, and then it will continue to sell after the promotion had ended. But as you say, those days are gone now. I think there's something like 11 million books on the Kindle store now. And, you know, most of those probably won't be being promoted, so it's easy to rank above them, but you do have to do something now more proactively than just uploading and crossing your fingers, which kind of did work a little bit back in the day. Joanna: And I think this is why having a quick retrospective is good because things change all the time. I mean, I don't know when the last time we did an interview, but possibly it was before TikTok. I mean, 2022 was a year of TikTok taking Colleen Hoover into the stratosphere, and a whole load of other authors taking advantage of that. But things change every year. There are new platforms. I mean, when I first started out, it was MySpace. It's kind of crazy to think now. Things change, some things stay the same. So let's get into what's happening right now. So we're recording this at the beginning of 2023. What are the main paid advertising options for authors right now? And how is advertising different to other forms of marketing? Mark: Well, for the paid platforms, the two main ones are Facebook and Amazon. So those will be the primary levers that you can pull as an author to start generating sales or finding readers. Kind of the third major platform, but not as important as the first two, but still important, is BookBub. So BookBub has been around now for ages, they've got millions and millions of people on their lists. They also offer an advertising platform that you can use as well. So those would be the three main paid platforms, but then kind of bubbling up around those are lots of other opportunities to do the same thing. So TikTok is definitely a thing now. As you said, we saw Colleen Hoover go into the stratosphere last year, basically, because of her brilliant TikTok strategy. We've seen people like Lucy Score, who's a friend of the SPS podcast, recently one of her readers, a BookToker, put something together for one of her books, and it's shot straight back up to the top of the charts again. And Lucy is quite sure that the reason for that was because of TikTok. So there were things developing all the time. And who knows, maybe even Twitter will become a platform. I doubt it, given the way that Musk is running it at the moment, but it's not impossible that that could become a platform that has an effect. It never has been before in terms of selling books, but you know, things change. So it's definitely something worth keeping an eye on. Joanna: It's so interesting, isn't it — and again, we're recording this in January 2023. Twitter is still around, it's going through a lot of difficulties, and a lot of people have left. But it could become a completely different type of platform. Also, a lot of people have gone to LinkedIn. It's so funny as a nonfiction author in the self-help space, as I am, and you have I know some free stuff in nonfiction, but nonfiction authors, I mean, now looking at LinkedIn advertising again, which to me is kind of funny. So it's also when what goes around comes back around, in some cases. And even as new things emerge, like you mentioned TikTok, I mean, still, like you said, Facebook, still going, Amazon ads, still going. So I guess the message is: Try new things, but don't forget the old things. Mark: No, it's worth experimenting on all of the platforms that are available and finding the one that works for you, and also that you enjoy. I think it's important, if you can, to find a platform that you feel most comfortable on. I'm comfortable on Facebook and Amazon, not really confident on TikTok. I don't have a problem with doing videos and things, I just have a problem with finding the time to do them properly. For that reason, it will probably be something I don't really concentrate on because you can't do everything. But then if you look at new authors like Adam Beswick, who again is one of our SPS alumni, he just posted that he's had a six-figure year from nothing, effectively a standing start. He's a nurse in the UK, writing fantasy books. And he's gone from zero to six figures, and it's all based on TikTok, nothing else really. And that's amazing to see, and he's kind of comfortable on the platform. He's demonstrated that you don't have to write romance, which is one of the things we hear now and again, that TikTok only works for romance and genres of romance. Adam writes fantasy. James, my co-presenter at the SPS show, he writes military aviation, and he's made TikTok work for him. So I think the message is experiment, find out what you like and find out what works, and then do more of that. Joanna: Absolutely. How is paid advertising is different to other forms of marketing? Because just to be clear, you're on the show and lots of people are listening, and you didn't pay me to come on the show and neither of us take paid guests on our podcast because we want to offer value to our audience. And we get paid in other ways through affiliate income or sponsorship or other marketing. So, to me, podcasting is the basis, really, of content marketing for me as Joanna Penn, my nonfiction books. And then I guess email marketing would be another really big pillar. Some people are still using blogging or articles on other websites. So those types of things would be, I guess, earned marketing (as opposed to paid). Mark: I guess so. James and I do the podcast for SPS, and we enjoy doing it, it's fun, and we try and give value every week. But of course, we are running a business there, and it is really good marketing for us for people to know who we are, what we do, and the courses that we have available and things we can offer. So that's great. Amazon asked me just before Christmas, if I'd do an article, if I'd be interviewed for Business Insider. So I said yes, it was a little bit of time in terms of the interview and a few follow up questions. But that's something that will have introduced me, not really for readers, I think, but more for people who want to sell books and to be more effective in marketing their books. That will introduce me to an audience who might not otherwise have heard of me. And the only thing that I had to spend was my time, there was no money involved in that. It was set up by Amazon, I just had to answer some questions. And that can be really, really effective in terms of reaching lots of people at scale. So this chat now, I know you've got 1000s of listeners, we have 1000s of listeners, it is a really good way to do something that's quite enjoyable and also reach lots of people. Joanna: So listeners, don't discount the free things. I've had many guests on here, Dorie Clark was the most recent one, who sent me an email later saying, “Wow, your podcast audience really do buy books.” So, thanks for everyone who bought Dorie's book by listening to this show. So you can definitely shift books through other ways. But we are focusing on paid ads as part of this because it feels like, again, I know this having been podcasting since 2009 — It takes a long time to build up these audiences when you're building it slowly for free. It takes years. Whereas with paid ads, you can pay and get traffic. Yay! So it's either your time, or it's your money, or it's a combination of both. I think both of us really do a combination of both now, don't we? Mark: Yes, definitely. So I mean, in terms of kind of moving it to the author side of things in terms of actually writing and building an audience, a really good free way of doing that — and I'm gonna sound like a broken record because I say this all the time — but still one of the best ways is to build your mailing list. And to do that effectively, put something at the end of a book offering something else that will be of interest to the reader, get them to join your mailing list, and then you have them on a platform that you own and control. You're not at the whim of Zuckerberg, Musk, or Bezos or anybody. You can control that platform and then reach them when you've got something that you want to tell them about. So a new book or promotion, anything. And that doesn't cost you anything, that's a little bit of time in order to set that up, perhaps to write something that will be of interest. It doesn't have to be a novella, it could be anything at all, really. And then that will just work in the background and you will grow your mailing list on autopilot, which that's the goal, isn't it? That's the least effort, most results. That's worked for me for all of my career, and it's still the most effective platform that I have, ahead of the paid options. Joanna: Well, and again, to reemphasize, what's old is new again. I mean, email has never gone away. And people kept saying, “well, social media will kill email.” But it hasn't. And in fact, many people are saying social media might be dead in 2023, which I definitely don't believe. But people are cutting back on social media time, but still reading emails. So I agree with you. I mean, I've also built my business on email, and this podcast is the second thing I would definitely keep, along with the website. But yeah, that's really important. But let's get into a quick fire round. Some of the most asked questions that people are always emailing me and I'm sure they email you all the time. So quick fire round. Does paid advertising only work for certain types of books? Mark: No, definitely not. It works for everything, really. The good thing with advertising is there are no categories of products that someone will go, oh, advertising doesn't work for that. Not that I'm aware of anyway. It's ideally finding an audience that's interested in what you've got to sell, and then you're putting a message telling them about what you've got to sell in front of them. So it doesn't really matter what books you're writing, just got to make sure that there is an audience for those books on the platform that you're using. So Facebook is huge. Amazon is huge. Effectively, Amazon is like a search engine that's kind of a shop as well. Facebook has all kinds of people with all kinds of different interests available for you to reach. We get people saying, “Can you advertise kids books?” That's a fairly common one. And yes, definitely. I have a series of worth nearly six kids books, and I use Amazon and Facebook ads to build that audience. And that works quite well. Nonfiction definitely works. In some ways, it's easier because you're identifying a problem that the reader wants to have solved, and it's usually quite easy to find other people with the same problem or the same issue, and then you can put your ads in front of those people. So yes, I'm not aware of any book that wouldn't be able to be advertised effectively. Joanna: In fact, just on that, I'm pretty excited about my next book, which is Pilgrimage, and it is a solo walking book. And I'm excited because, in my other genres, it can be quite competitive to do paid ads. But I really think there is possibly nobody else who wants to advertise a book on pilgrimage! Mark: Yeah, you could do really well with that. Absolutely. Joanna: Exactly. Well, that's what I was thinking. I feel like it's a niche market that I don't feel like a load of authors are gonna rush into. Mark: No, no, I think unless, of course — Joanna: I start a trend. Mark: You start a trend, exactly. Then by this time next year, there'll be a huge subcategory on Amazon, and it'll be your fault. Joanna: Oh, fun! Is it worth advertising one book, or is it only worth doing for a series? Mark: It's easy to do for series, definitely, because you have what we call read through. So if someone buys the first book, and they like it, the next book they buy is probably going to be the second book. And that's definitely the case if it's a series with a recurring character, like my Milton books. But I would not dismiss advertising if you've only got one book. It is more difficult, but it's not impossible to turn a profit. And again, I look at James. James posted in the 20 Books to 50K Facebook group yesterday, actually, I think, as we record this, and kind of summed up his first 18 months or so of advertising his one book. And he turned a small profit. Now, he's not gonna better retire on that, but you got to remember what he's also done is built an audience, effectively at a cost zero basis. He wasn't actually paying for that because it was covered by the money that he was making. So it is possible to do. It is more difficult. I would recommend, definitely, if you've got one book and you're intending to write more then building an audience with lead generation ads, finding readers who would be interested in your books or your subsequent books. It's something that I would definitely do if I was starting out again. I would start to build that readership as quickly as possible, and build it as big as I could, because that then gives you an audience who's ready to buy the book when you're ready to release it. Joanna: And again, of course, coming back to Pilgrimage, as an example. If you have a nonfiction book, where you can have a higher price, for example, compared to let's say, a romance novel or thriller, where your prices, I guess, are more controlled by the rest of the market. So if you have a higher priced book, or you have other forms of income off the back end of it. So again, for nonfiction, that might be affiliate links, it might be a course, it might be your consulting. A lot of nonfiction authors — as long as you break even or even if it costs a little money — they're happy to do ads because it brings in more leads for their business. So I think it's really important to consider all the different types of books. And it doesn't need to be a $3.99 Kindle book. It could be something else. Mark: One thing I'd say for you, I mean, this is kind of consultation coming up now. I would be quite excited for that book because there's a lot you could do in terms of finding your audience. You could do things like maps, you could give away annotated maps of the routes that you've taken. And that could be the Camino, you can have a map about the Camino with a few notes. And then of course, as they get their email, the next thing they get is a link to the actual book itself. And they would probably be quite interested in that. And then in terms of kind of — I hate monetizing, but we might as well use that word — you could have the kit that you used, you could have it on your website, you've probably done this already, and then have affiliate links that would take people to Amazon, and you'd get a commission if they bought $100 pair of hiking boots. There are loads of things that you could do that I couldn't do as a fiction writer because it's a different story that you're telling, with different opportunities to reach readers and then to offer them things. Joanna: Absolutely. And I'm doing a whole load of special editions that are higher priced as well. And again, just to say to people, because I'm selling a lot direct now through my Shopify store, CreativePennBooks.com that I can make more money on print books. And doing ads to print books is not so common for mainstream fiction authors because the profit on Amazon, for example, isn't that high. Also audiobooks as well, for example, I'm looking at the Spotify platform to do ads for audiobooks now Spotify has audiobooks. So this is the thing, there are always different opportunities for different formats, different price points. So I want people to think beyond just Kindle on Amazon, right? It can be everything. Mark: Yeah, absolutely. Then you can take everything you just thought of in English, and then multiply it by all the languages that you might be able to sell it in. And so in German, big market now. I got an email from Bella Andre yesterday. I hadn't heard her for a little while. But Bella might be speaking at the conference in June. Bella is great, and she's been doing it for a long time. And I won't kind of spoil too much about what she might talk about, but she's absolutely crushing it in translation at the moment, and not just in German. So that's something that I haven't done. I've got German nailed with about 45 books in German now, but I haven't managed to figure out the Latin languages because I might be under the misapprehension that they hate Amazon. Maybe they don't because it looks like Bella might have cracked that one. So that can be something for me this year, is let's look again at the French and the Spanish and the Italian markets. Millions of readers who've never heard of me, but will probably like my books. Really exciting. Joanna: Yes, and those ad platforms often have very few people on. So, yeah, again, it feels like some people say, “Oh, it's too late to get into this.” Yeah. So what do you think about the “it's too late” people? Mark: Definitely not. We're on the same page on this. Amazon has a motto, “It's always day one.” I had lunch with someone and they took their laptop out, and there's a decal on the lid, saying “it's always day one.” And from their perspective, we are still at the beginning. You know, Amazon has been around for 20, 25 years now, but from their perspective, and in terms of the wider scope of history, they are still a baby company with huge amounts of growth that that they can still find. And that's definitely the case for us. I've been doing this for 10 years. You've been doing this for longer than that. And because we can kind of find ourselves in an echo chamber sometimes where we talk to each other, and we're like, “oh, I remember when he was around, or when she was doing this.” And it feels like ancient history, but it isn't. You know, most readers still read in print, which is great, because eventually they will move to digital, and then we'll be waiting for them. These are hundreds of thousands, millions and millions of readers who, as I say, have never heard of us before, and they're just waiting to be introduced to what we've got to sell them, and tell them, and things that they can enjoy. It's really exciting. Joanna: Yes, I think so too. And again, we wouldn't still be around if this was boring for us or we weren't still excited about it. So just another couple of things. Has Apple, with the new privacy rules, broken Facebook ads? Mark: No, definitely not. Everyone panicked about this. I was a little bit concerned until we realized exactly what had happened. And what's happened is Apple is much more concerned about privacy. They're definitely using that as a reason why you'd want to invest in an iPhone or an iPad because they will look after your data, or so they say. So what they've done is they've effectively prevented Facebook from using what we call cookies to track you across the internet. So what Facebook would do is you'd have a Facebook pixel on your web page, and you would then build an audience that you could serve ads to comprised of people who visited that webpage. Facebook would be told that this person, or these 100 people, all visited this website, you can now serve these people ads. Apple's made it difficult to do that if you're using Apple products to surf the internet. So it's definitely hobbled that particular aspect of Facebook and other marketing, Google offers that as well. But it hasn't really affected the Facebook platform itself. So Facebook, if you think of it as a walled garden with lots and lots of different ways to reach the people within the walled garden. So interests, look alike audiences, all kinds of different facilities to build the audiences you want to advertise to. What Apple's done has had no effect on that whatsoever. So it's affected kind of a slightly more sophisticated marketing, but it hasn't affected the simple and most effective advertising that's always worked. Joanna: So just as a practical example, if author Mark Dawson targets a Lee Child / Jack Reacher interest on Facebook, that's all within Facebook, so the whole Apple thing doesn't make any difference whatsoever. Yeah, that makes great sense. Thanks for explaining that. And then the other question that's happening a lot is Amazon ads are too expensive. New authors have no chance. So are Amazon ads just too expensive for most authors to use? Mark: No, they're not. So one thing I would say, a bit of advice there is, if people are starting to do Amazon ads for the first time, you'll see when you're setting your ads up, Amazon will give you a suggested bid. And that suggested bid has nothing to do with books. I don't know exactly how they come up with it, but it looks at other products, not just including books. So you know, things that cost $200 when you could afford to be at 150 per click, because there's a really big margin for you there. If we start following those suggested bids blindly, and I do see this all the time, authors will go in, there'll bid above the suggested bid because they think they have to in order to have their ads on the platform, it will be too expensive. Unless you've got a really deep series with lots of read-through and lots of profit, you can't bid 150 on a 2.99 book because the numbers just do not work. So don't look at that. Don't be afraid to bid beneath that. It is a question of testing, it is a competitive marketplace, and some clicks are going to be more expensive than other clicks depending on the authors and the advertisers that you're competing with. But it is something that can still work at lower bids, more competitive bids, where you are going to have to experiment and test quite a bit to make sure you get things right. Joanna: Absolutely. So if people are thinking now of trying ads or maybe trying again, because I mean and I know this, I mean you go in and you try. What's so funny is — well, you wouldn't remember this as it was before we met — I tried Facebook ads when they first came out, and I've still got a blog post on my site, and it was really, really early on when it was super basic, and I just didn't like it, so I stopped doing it. And then it was probably like, whatever, a year later, when you started doing things and just doing amazing. And I was like, right, I gotta try again. And this just happens to me every year. I'm like, right, I'm gonna try again with ads. So anyone listening, if you're like, oh, I'm just over it, and now I'm gonna try again, that's me, too. What is the biggest mistake that indie authors make with advertising that you could help them avoid this time around? Mark: It's not understanding the platform, I think is probably the main thing. You do need to learn how to do it properly. So you don't need to be a genius to do ads effectively, you don't need to be great at maths, or to really understand data. You need a kind of a surface level of understanding, so you can see what's working and what isn't. But what I wouldn't recommend is just going on to Facebook or Amazon and then just kind of closing your eyes and hoping for the best because that's probably going to be quite expensive and won't work. I tried that when I started out. I did that with Facebook ads, and I couldn't get them to work. And I'm just very grateful that I tried something else which did work and led to a fairly explosive growth in terms of the book sales because no one else was really doing it the way I was doing back in those days. So you need to learn, and you don't have to learn from me. There are a few people out there I would recommend now. From generalists that teach all kinds of people how to advertise to other authors who know what they're doing. But you do need to learn. The other thing I'd say is your product — and you know, I tried quite hard to be honest about this, but you also have to know when to stop being an artist and start being a business person. And you need to see your book, not as a labor of love, although of course it is. At the point that you're trying to sell it, it is effectively a widget that you're trying to sell, interest someone so that they might go and buy it and read it. So you need to be able to make that switch. And you need to make sure that your product is as professional as possible because you're going to be competing with traditional publishers who have great covers, great blurbs, well known authors. You're going to be competing with authors like me and the authors that we teach at SPF. So you want to make sure that your product is absolutely as perfect as it can be. So cover has got to be on point, your blurb certainly can't have any typos, it's got to effectively tell the reader what they're going to get. And then you want to make sure that you're targeting effectively, in terms of both relevant potential readers and in a way that's cost-effective. So not rushing, basically. Have a great product, don't rush, and learn how to do it. Joanna: Yes. And again, it's not too late, and it won't be too late next week or next month, either. Mark: Or next year. Joanna: Yeah, or next year. They'll just be something else. Although a lot of what we're talking about will probably still be around next year. I mean, that's what's funny. I mean, people always talk about the demise of this, that and the other, and there it is again, another year. Including us, we're still here! Regular listeners to the show know that I'm very interested in playing with sort of AI tools. So in 2022, the emergence of image generators, like Midjourney and DALL-E and Stable Diffusion, and text generators, like ChatGBT. And we've got coming in 2023 things like text-to-video. In fact, Meta/Facebook itself, has a generative AI text-to-video, which should be emerging at some point in 2023. What are your thoughts on how we can use AI to help us create more and also sell more? Mark: Well, I've told you this before, I usually say you're about five years earlier than everybody else. But you're almost always right in the end. And you're definitely right about AI. Obviously, I'm a longtime listener of your show, and one of the reasons is because you really do keep your finger on the pulse of what's coming up. I was in Florida last year for the NINC conference, and a writer, Elizabeth Ann West, who might listen showed me SudoWrite, and I wasn't convinced. I could see some potential, but I wasn't convinced. When I looked at ChatGPT late last year after you recommended it, I could immediately see. And I was just blown away. It was so impressive for what it could do. And, you know, people worry, authors are worried now about how AI is going to take our jobs. And I don't think that's a medium-term threat, with long-term, potentially, but I don't think we're near that yet.  What I can see it doing, and I've already tested it and it works really well, is generating ad copy. So you can give it some information about your book and tell it to write a punchy blurb, and it's done a pretty good job of that, certainly as a first attempt, which you can then polish. I did it with headlines for Facebook ads. I gave it an example and said ‘write me 10 more variations' based on this example. And it came up with some really, really good ones, like ones I would use without changing. So I can definitely see that, as you describe it, these are kind of tools in our tool belt that we should learn how to use because they will make us more effective as marketers, and also as authors with some of the things that it can do. So I'm not afraid of it, I'm quite excited that this is something that is going to really make things even more interesting over the next 12 months or 18 months. Joanna: I really feel like 2023 is going to be a very interesting year in terms of the possibilities that emerge, but also some of the legal stuff that is going to have to come in.Because at the moment, it's a free for all and there are no legal things at all about anything. Mark: Yeah — Whenever you get new technology, the law is usually very slow to catch up. And it's definitely very slow. I think copyright, generally, hasn't really been brought up to date to reflect the digital age. It's a fairly static law, there hasn't really evolved as much as it needs to. And there'll be interesting cases, I think, over the next couple of years that will bring a little bit more certainty, because at the moment, it is kind of like the wild west out there. Joanna: It is. But it feels to me like the Wild West when 2007, 2008, the early days of digital in general, which was just brilliant. And so many people took so long to catch up, and yet those of us who kind of got involved were able to build careers on this. So hence why I continue to be up on these things. And also you mentioned I'm always five years early. I first mentioned this in, I think it was November 2016. So given that it went mainstream in 2022, I'm about right. Mark: Now, the reason I said that was we were talking about German translations a while ago, and I think you were a little early. Joanna: I was too early. 2014. It was too early. Mark: But now, when did I do my first German translation? It was probably about 2018. And the translated market now is a really, really important part of my business. So yeah, you're kind of a Nostradamus. You're definitely right almost all the time, just that sometimes a little bit too soon. Joanna: But also Nostradamus was doom and gloom, and I am not. Mark: Oh, that's true. Very true. final question, looking into the year ahead — What is coming this year for you as Mark Dawson the author, and also for SPF? Mark: So for me, as an author, I'll probably do three novels, maybe four. I hope to do four. And then two or three short stories, I've got a new character, had a novella out just before Christmas that's done pretty well, so I'd like to do a couple more with him. And certainly more in German, and I'm going to look at Italy, French and Spanish for translation. So a busy year. That's about the level I'd expect to manage to hit. And then for SPF, the other thing I'd say is we have the live show in June, which I think is the 20th and 21st of June, and details are at selfpublishingformula.com/SPSlive. I'm starting to schedule that now. Bella Andre will be there, Elana Johnson is coming from the States, Dave Chesson is coming over. And this will be the third time that we've done it, and it's been great fun. And we've had Jo, you spoke for the last couple of times, and the most popular session both times to my chagrin, more popular than me. Joanna: I'm not going to speak this year, but I've got my ticket, so I will be there. And I'm really looking forward to that.  So you can win best talk this year! Mark: Oh, thanks. Thank you. That's great. I probably won't, though. It'll be somebody else. We had a lot of fun doing that. It's a lot of work, and it's quite stressful, but we always kind of finish the conference feeling that itt's been a really, really productive couple of days. So I'm looking forward to seeing authors there on the South Bank in London in June. Joanna: Fantastic. Where can people find you and your books online? Mark: Okay, so books, I'm at MarkJDawson.com. And for the author side of things, I'm at selfpublishingformula.com. Joanna: Brilliant. Thanks so much for your time, Mark. That was great. Mark: Thanks, Jo.The post How To Use Paid Advertising As Part Of Your Book Marketing With Mark Dawson first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Happy New Year 2023! I am more excited than ever this year about the books I want to write and publish. I've had a difficult few years (haven't we all?!) but now I'm ready to create at full throttle in 2023, aided by the incredible AI-powered tools emerging for writers. Here's an overview of my 2023 goals: J.F. Penn — Pilgrimage (and my first Kickstarter); Catacomb book, ARKANE 13, and some short stories Joanna Penn — The Shadow Book (and maybe another Kickstarter), The Creator Economy for Authors, and maybe The AI-Assisted Author Continue The Creative Penn Podcast Experiment with futurist technologies and share what I learn with you along the way More digital, more physical. Focus on optimizing my health, and do more in-person travel and events. Financial goals As ever, I am a full-time author-entrepreneur and this is my job, so I have a lot of goals. If your goals are simpler — like finishing your book, or publishing for the first time, or selling 1000 copies, then fantastic! You don’t have to have such extensive goals as me. Please share your goals in the comments so we can keep each other accountable. J.F. Penn — Kickstarter for Pilgrimage with a special signed hardback edition I have finished Pilgrimage and am currently narrating the audiobook as well as formatting the print edition. It's a very personal book, and so I want to do a special signed hardback edition that won't be available anywhere else. The best way to do that is to know how many people want to buy it, so I can order the books, have them shipped here, sign them, and then send them out myself. So I'm (finally) going to do a Kickstarter! Click here to sign up for the pre-launch list (no commitment to buy) You'll be notified of the campaign when it launches on 23 Jan, 2023. The Kickstarter will also have the ebook and audiobook (narrated by me), as well as the special edition hardback (signed and unsigned available), a special edition paperback edition (POD, not signed) and a Pilgrimage workbook, with guided prompts so you can plan your own pilgrimage. My plan is to sell direct through the Kickstarter, and then put the books in all formats (except for the special edition hardback) up on my store, www.CreativePennBooks.com and available everywhere wide a month later. character and setting Images for the Catacomb book, generated by joanna penn on midjourney J.F. Penn — Write and publish the ‘catacomb' book, ARKANE #13, and some short stories — and maybe other fiction The catacomb book is a stand-alone story I have had on my mind for a while, and I want to get it out of my head and onto the page. I'm not sure if it's a novel or a novella yet. At the end of Tomb of Relics, ARKANE #12, I left Morgan and Jake heading to Vienna for the next adventure, but until recently, I didn't know what they would find there. But now I know — and the plan is to go to Vienna sometime in 2023 — so I will be able to write the story. I've also got some short story ideas that I'd like to finish and publish. My goal is to do a short story anthology in 2024, so I can print a book, so I need more stories for that. I love writing short stories, but they take a lot more time than you expect! Joanna Penn — Write and publish The Creator Economy and The AI-Assisted Author I have courses on both topics, and since I think these are two of the biggest trends for authors, I'd like to expand them both into short non-fiction books. I already have drafts based on the course transcripts. The AI-Assisted Author will be a follow-up to my 2020 book, Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain and Virtual Worlds: The Impact of Converging Technologies on Authors and the Publishing Industry, much of which is now starting to happen. I am always early, lol! Joanna Penn — Write and publish ‘The Shadow Book' I've been talking about this for years and I have many thousands of words in a Scrivener project, but in 2023, I will overcome resistance and (finally) write this book. I'm also planning to launch it as a Kickstarter, and one of the reasons for doing the Pilgrimage Kickstarter is as practice for this one. I'm not sure yet whether this will go out under Joanna Penn or J.F. Penn, but the basic concept is about writing from your darker side, and about integrating your shadow into your creative work, rather than trying to bury it or sublimate it. I studied Jungian psychology as part of my degree in Theology, specializing in the psychology of religion, and I also have a Graduate Diploma in Psychology. Morgan Sierra in my ARKANE thriller series is a psychologist, and I have brought my interest into my fiction over the years. Now it's time to turn it into a book that you might be able to use for your creative process. book with ideas, Image created by joanna penn on midjourney I will continue to experiment with future technology and share what I learn with you Regular readers and listeners to the show know that I have been commentating on the AI space since Alpha Go beat Lee Sodol at the game of Go in 2016. In 2019, I posted 9 Ways That Artificial Intelligence (AI) Will Disrupt Authors And The Publishing Industry, and I'm planning to do an update of that later in the year. In 2020, I published my short book, Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, and Virtual Worlds: The Impact of Converging Technologies On Authors and the Publishing Industry. In 2021, I produced a course, The AI-Assisted Author. In 2022, generative AI went mainstream, and now many creatives are using Midjourney/Stable Diffusion/DALL-E 2 for images and ChatGPT (along with Sudowrite or Jasper based on GPT3) to write and rewrite text, ideate and outline stories and articles, write ad copy, and more. Some are expanding use of AI translation, and many more are using text-to-speech generation for audio, like Google Play Automated Narration or Deep Zen. In the last few weeks, Apple Books introduced AI narration as well. For years, I have quoted Kevin Kelly from The Inevitable: “This is not a race against the machines. If we race against them, we lose. This is a race with the machines. You’ll be paid in the future based on how well you work with robots … It is inevitable.“ It feels like 2008 all over again, like the early days of digital when we didn't really know what we were doing, but it was a hell of a lot of fun, and those who embraced the changes built a career on that technology. I intend to work with the robots (AI tools), and 2023 will bring many more advances. These technologies will transform our industry in the next decade — not just ours, of course, but every industry. In fact, the more important AI applications are outside of our industry. I am more excited about AI helping to solve climate change, finding treatments and even cures for diseases, and in reforming education to make it accessible for all, and much more. There are so many opportunities, but as ever with technology, there are also dangers, problems, ethical questions, and much more. It's important that authors and creatives are involved in discussions around copyright, intellectual property, and future business models, rather than trying to ban these tools or avoid them completely. We need our voices to be heard so we can be part of creating the future. Colorful exploding typewriter, created by Joanna Penn on Midjourney I've previously worked with the Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi) on submissions for the World Intellectual Property Organization, as well as the UK government on AI and copyright, and I helped with the Ethical AI use guidelines. I will continue to work with ALLi on these aspects and become more active in the AI for Good movement. In terms of using the tools in my creative process, this year, I will: Use ChatGPT and (hopefully) GPT-4 and other generative text tools to help iterate ideas for my books, to write the sales descriptions and ad copy, as well as expand on my words (like an extended thesaurus). Use Midjourney, DALL-E and other generative image tools for character and setting ideas, as well as elements of my book covers and marketing Mint special NFT editions of my books/stories on blockchain platforms Create more AI-narrated audiobooks Use text-to-video to get back into video marketing, which I put aside a few years back because the overhead of making video was too great, but that has changed with emerging text-to-video tools Use Otter.ai (AI speech-to-text) for the podcast transcription, and also to help me dictate my first drafts more quickly No doubt there will be other things I don't even know about yet, but I hope to jump in as things emerge. One of the wonderful things about owning and controlling your own intellectual property assets is the ability to take advantage of new things as they arrive without asking permission from anyone. Continue podcasting at The Creative Penn Podcast The Creative Penn Podcast is part of my body of creative work, and I reach more people every week through the podcast than I do with my books. It is creative work, it is an important income stream, it is my community, and it is marketing. I'm committing to another year of The Creative Penn Podcast, and to my patrons with my monthly Q&A. Many of the topics I have covered as ‘futurist' have now moved into the mainstream conversation, so I will start covering those as part of the normal Monday shows instead of inbetweenisodes. If you find the podcast useful, please consider supporting the show (and you'll get my extra monthly Q&A episode) at www.Patreon.com/thecreativepenn or you can buy me a coffee (or 3) at BuyMeACoffee.com/thecreativepenn Financial goals While my multi-six-figure business revenue has remained approximately the same for the last couple of years, book sales have become a greater part of it again because of selling direct. In 2023, I have a few overarching goals: Double my book sales revenue — which means writing and publishing more books as well as increasing my ad spend and growing my email list. Grow the percentage of book sales revenue made from direct sales — through my Shopify store and Kickstarter, which will mean releasing direct first, and direct only for some products. Increase foreign rights and subsidiary licensing revenue. I'm working with DropCap, a rights licensing agency in 2023, which will hopefully result in some licensing revenue. I'll share more on the podcast once I have something to show for it! Creative world map, made by joanna penn on midjourney Travel, speaking, health, and other things I'll be speaking at Superstars of Writing in February, so I'll be in Colorado Springs, and I'm planning to visit Washington DC as well, since I've never been and I've always wanted to visit the Smithsonian. I'll be at London Book Fair, and also potentially 20Books Seville in Spain in April. We're heading back to New Zealand to visit family, and (hopefully) stopping somewhere on the way for a little holiday. I'm also planning to visit Vienna, and hopefully, have at least another trip in the second half of the year. Health-wise, I'll keep lifting weights, eating IF, and I have an ultra-marathon walk booked for the summer. Plus, I'd like to do another walking holiday, if Jonathan will join me for it. Onwards into 2023, Creatives! What are your creative and business plans for 2023? Please leave a comment if you’d like to share, or if you have a question, and let’s keep each other accountable for another year. You can also tweet me @thecreativepenn or Contact me here. The post My 2023 Creative and Business Goals With Joanna Penn first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Another year ends, and once more, it's time to reflect on our creative goals. I hope you will take the time to review your goals, and leave a comment below about how the year went. Did you achieve everything you wanted to? You can read my 2022 goals here and I reflect on what I achieved below. Books for authors — Joanna Penn Fiction as J.F. Penn — thrillers, dark fantasy, crime, horror, short stories Shift to the Creator Economy and focus on selling direct Embrace multi-passionate creativity — and optimize for curiosity — as we move into The Creative Future. Generative AI, NFTs, and more The Creative Penn website and podcast Book-binding: Limited hand-bound edition of A Thousand Fiendish Angels I achieved a lifetime goal of walking the Camino de Santiago — and finished my Pilgrimage book The end of my Books and Travel Podcast Travel and speaking, health and personal things Header image generated by Joanna Penn on Midjourney. Books for authors — Joanna Penn I've had a draft of How to Write a Novel in my Work In Progress drive for over five years, but this year, I overcame resistance and finally finished it. I was worried that I didn't have anything to add to the millions of other books on writing craft, but it turned out to be useful for some people, especially those who write out of order and are discovery writers. I launched the book direct on my Shopify store, CreativePennBooks.com and sold it exclusively direct for a month before publishing it wide. It's now available on all platforms, in all formats, including the audiobook narrated by me. Click here to buy it direct from me. Click here to buy it from other stores. Fiction as J.F. Penn — thrillers, dark fantasy, crime, horror, short stories In the first quarter of 2022, I re-edited my first novel, Stone of Fire, and the subsequent two novels, Crypt of Bone, and Ark of Blood. Click here for my lessons learned from re-editing. Was it worth it? Yes, creatively, because I am much happier about advertising the early books in the series now. Financially, I can't see any impact, but it was still personally worth it, especially as it helped me see how far my writing has come since that first novel in 2009 and the lessons helped me to finish How to Write a Novel. I also wrote and published two short stories. Blood, Sweat, and Flame, a dark little story set in a glassblowing hot shop, inspired by the Netflix series, Blown Away. Soldiers of God, an ARKANE short story, featuring a popular secondary character, Martin Klein, my AI geek/ ‘Q' character in the ARKANE universe. It's based around a document found in the Vatican Secret Archives that leads to a crypt hidden under Paris which holds a dark secret. I've also written another short story which is currently with my editor, working title, Demons in the Smoke, but even though the work was in 2022, I will include that in 2023. A shift to the Creator Economy and a focus on selling direct In 2022, I purposed shifted into the Creator Economy model. This is essentially a mindset shift, as well as a behavioral change. Instead of chasing algorithms and focusing primarily on building business for the big tech companies, it's about nurturing a direct relationship with readers and selling direct as much as possible. This means that the author takes a bigger slice of the revenue upfront, as well as controlling the customer data and the customer relationship, plus we get paid faster than going through other distribution platforms. I've been selling direct since 2008 when I started online, but it's always been an afterthought for book sales. I offered it, but I didn't focus on it. I also only offered digital formats. In 2022, I prioritized selling direct in print as well as ebook and audio, and made sure to release direct first and direct only for new books. In July 2022, I launched www.CreativePennBooks.com, my Minimum Viable Shopify store and you can read all the details here, where I outline all the reasons it's a good idea for your income, your customer data, and your mental health! I launched How to Write a Novel for a month direct only with all formats, before putting the book wide on all the stores in all formats. Plus, I have kept the How to Write a Novel Workbook as direct only exclusive to my store. This will be my model going forward — release direct first for at least a month before putting the book/s wide and keep some products as direct only. I spoke at London Book Fair and at SPS Live on the topic of the Creator Economy, and produced a course on this in mid-2022: The Creator Economy for Authors. Embrace multi-passionate creativity — and optimize for curiosity — as we move into The Creative Future. At the beginning of the year, I decided to optimize for curiosity, rather than trying to rein in my eclectic, multi-passionate interests. This allowed me to play in the technological and futurist spaces that I find so invigorating, and I have shared much of this experimentation with you in the extra podcast episodes during 2022. Generative AI I've been talking about creative AI since 2016, and personally, I have been using GPT-3 through Sudowrite for at least 18 months, mainly as an expanded thesaurus for sensory description. [Sudowrite Tutorial here]. I've previously written a book on AI for authors and publishing, I've worked on submissions for the UK government and the WIPO on AI and copyright, and I've helped the Alliance of Independent Authors formulate their Ethical Guidelines for AI Usage. So creative uses of AI are not a surprise to me. created by joanna penn on midjourney, prompt “all different kinds of pens lined up in a row, all different colors, joyful creative” But this year generative AI went mainstream with the release of Midjourney, DALL-E 2, and Stable Diffusion for image generation in the northern hemisphere summer, and the release of ChatGPT in early December 2022 for text generation. I'm now using generative AI as part of my creative and book marketing process. I've written and rewritten book sales descriptions and ad copy with ChatGPT and started to play with it as an outlining and research tool; I've used Sudowrite to help with multi-sensory description (like a thesaurus on steroids); I've used Midjourney to create header images for this blog, to create a custom ornamental break for my next book, and to create social media images related to my stories. I've done a number of interviews on AI including co-writing fiction; AI art for book covers and marketing, and collaborative writing with OpenAI's Andrew Mayne. Blockchain / NFTs I minted and sold my first NFT special editions on OpenSea using AI-generated art before it went mainstream. I've also done a number of presentations and interviews on NFTs including an overview of how authors can use NFTs and blockchain; blockchain for copyright and intellectual property; financial and tax implications of NFTs; legal and contractual aspects of NFTs and DAOs; Plus, a crossover with AI and NFTs in a discussion with J. Thorn about how he is using generative AI for his NFT music and books. AI for voice Google Play auto-narrated audiobooks have helped thousands of authors create AI-narrated audiobooks for free, and have now rolled out the program to more countries, and enabled multiple narrator voices. I interviewed Ryan Dingler from Google Play Books about auto-narration, and produced an update about other aspects of AI for voice. Apple has just started with AI narration as well, so this trend will only continue in 2023. I am an audiobook narrator so I narrate most of my own books these days, but I also have AI-narrated audiobooks distributed to almost every platform except Audible. As ever, I remain a techno-optimist, and while there are always problems with technology, I believe on balance it's a force for good and I want to continue to be part of the positive side. Much more on the creative future here. The Creative Penn website and podcast I published 67 episodes of The Creative Penn podcast in 2022, and I'm so pleased that the show still resonates after more than 13 years. I did a survey in the autumn and asked why people keep listening. The main reasons were: my positive spin on the author life, my focus on the future for authors and publishing which no other show covers, and the fact I have been around so long, giving me a longer-term perspective. The survey results helped me re-commit to the show, and also to plan episodes that will help authors at different stages of the journey. Thanks to corporate sponsors Kobo Writing Life, Ingram Spark, Draft2Digital, ProWritingAid, FindawayVoices, WrittenWordMedia, and Kindlepreneur. Thanks also to my patrons, who specifically support the inbetweenisodes and help me keep going when I feel like giving up. You can support the show (and get my extra monthly Q&A episode) at www.Patreon.com/thecreativepenn or you can buy me a coffee (or 3) at BuyMeACoffee.com/thecreativepenn In terms of stats, The Creative Penn Podcast is in the top 1% of podcasts with over 10,000 downloads in the first 7 days of publishing, and 15K-25K downloads per episode. [Comparisons at The Podcast Host] Stats from 17 Dec 2022 [Blubrry] — Over 7.9 million podcast downloads across 228 countries (60% USA, 12% UK, 5% Australia, 5% Canada, 18% Rest of the World). 123,685 listens in the last 30 days. 86% impactful plays (where people listen to at least 75% of the episode). Book-binding: I created a limited hand-bound edition of A Thousand Fiendish Angels One of my over-arching mantras these days is ‘more physical, more digital.‘ As I delve deeper into the online world and experiment more with AI, blockchain and other online things, I also need to focus more on physical products as well as in-person physical experiences. In 2022, I decided to learn more about bookbinding and, with the help of a local bookbinder, I took a print-on-demand edition of A Thousand Fiendish Angels, stripped off the cover, and made it into a leather-bound original with special aged paper, end-papers, and more. The story is based around a book of human skin, so it was an appropriate project! I really enjoyed the process, but it was also time-consuming and expensive, so I won't be making it part of my regular publishing experience. I'm keeping the edition for my personal library. Click here to see the project in detail: From print-on-demand to leather-bound original Joanna Penn, camino de santiago, sept 2022 I achieved a lifetime goal of walking the Camino de Santiago — and finished my Pilgrimage book In September 2022, I walked the Camino de Santiago Portuguese coastal route, around 300km from Porto, Portugal to Santiago de Compostela, Spain. I have been thinking about doing the Camino pilgrimage for over twenty years, and when I was sick with Covid last year, I made a promise to myself to finally do it. Because you never know when it will be too late to achieve a goal. Click here for a day-by-day overview of the route with photos Click here for A Pilgrim in the Path of History: my personal podcast episode with lessons learned I have walked two other pilgrimages over the last few years, The Pilgrims' Way and also the St Cuthbert's Way, and between the three long walks, I've learned a lot about myself. They helped me during the difficult pandemic times and improved my mental health during a time of change in my life. I thought I would write a book after the Pilgrims' Way, but it turned out that I needed the other pilgrimages in order to find meaning (and a worthwhile book) from my experiences. If you're interested in pilgrimage or solo walking in general, or if you like travel memoir as a genre, or if you'd just like to know more personal things about me (!!), then Pilgrimage: Lessons Learned From Solo Walking Three Ancient Ways will be out in early 2023. I'm doing a Kickstarter for a special hardback edition launching 23 January, which will also include the ebook, audiobook, and print-on-demand paperback as pledge levels. I will then sell it direct, and also on all the usual stores. Click here to read more about the book Click here to register for the Kickstarter pre-launch The end of my Books and Travel Podcast I have been thinking about this for a while, but reading Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away by Annie Duke helped me make this decision. (Thanks to J. Thorn for the recommendation). I have loved doing my Books and Travel Podcast for the last three years, but I need to make room for other things. The show does not have a viable business model for the amount of time (and money) it takes, and it's too much work and therefore not sustainable as a passion project. I started Books and Travel in May 2019 when I envisioned a travel-related business around it with different books and products, and perhaps even guided tours and creative holidays. It was a very different travel world back then! The pandemic hit less than a year later and changed travel as an experience, and as a business. I also discovered how much of the travel writing industry is either freelance writing, or writing for hire/commissioned writing. It's very different to other genres and the business model is not so clear — or profitable. The Books and Travel Podcast has given me precious moments of escape, especially in the depths of the pandemic. I have loved the many conversations over the last few years, but I need time for other things. The backlist will remain and the episodes are evergreen so you can still listen/read the transcripts. I have lots of solo episodes about my travels as well as interviews with travel writers and novelists who are inspired by a sense of place. I've also been thinking a lot about my strengths and what I bring to a podcast that no one else can. I am not remarkable at travel podcasting, and — after my Pilgrimage book — I don't have any plans for more travel books, although of course, my fiction as J.F. Penn will still be inspired by my travels. This is also evident in the downloads. Books and Travel gets around 1000—1500 downloads per episode, and it has remained stable for the last year. The Creative Penn Podcast gets at least 20,000 downloads per episode. Yes, 20 times the downloads of Books and Travel. It's clear where my energy should go! I will do a final solo episode when Pilgrimage is available, and may add to the feed over time, but not as a regular show. The podcast remains live so you can listen to 90 episodes of the backlist, and the website, BooksAndTravel.page will remain with all its diverse content, so I have the opportunity to go back to it later if I want to. Was Books and Travel a waste of time? Not at all. I follow my curiosity and I consider Books and Travel to be a project that I needed at the time, and is now finished (at least for now). I have also changed since starting the podcast. We bought a house and settled down; we have adopted cats, and the pandemic helped me feel part of a community in Bath. Before the pandemic, I always wanted to leave, to go somewhere else, but now, I am happy to stay home and put down roots. We all change. Life moves on. We do not have to keep doing the same thing over and over. I recommend Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away by Annie Duke if you are struggling to let go of aspects of your life. (Thanks to J. Thorn for the recommendation.) Have a listen to my recent episode with Orna Ross on quitting/pivoting for more in-depth discussion. Travel and speaking, health and personal things Travel-wise, we started 2022 in New Zealand visiting family, but I left soon after the new year because the Covid restrictions were so severe. As the year progressed, the pandemic became less of a worry and more part of the risks of everyday life. I attended the Creator Economy Expo conference (business trip) in Arizona in April, and then we had a beach holiday in Rhodes (Greek Islands) in May, then I walked my Camino from Porto in Portugal to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. I'm happy to be out and about in the world again! I spoke at London Book Fair on The Creator Economy, as well as Self Publishing Show Live on the same topic. I spoke online about NFTs several times, and I was on a panel at NFT.London. I ran a full-day in-person event here in Bath with Orna Ross, as well as running online sessions on business planning. Joanna Penn speaking at SPS Live, June 2022 Health-wise, it's been a transformative year. I stopped sleeping properly in November 2019 and blamed my subsequent insomnia on the pandemic. But it only got worse and by April 2022 (after turning 47), I reached the end of what I could manage. I went on HRT (hormone replacement therapy) and within 48 hours, I slept through the night. It was a miracle! HRT has dramatically improved my mental health and happiness, and if you are a woman of perimenopausal age (usually around 45-54 although that can, of course, vary), or if you love someone this age, then I recommend reading Menopausing: The Positive Roadmap to Your Second Spring by Davina McCall and Dr. Naomi Potter. I know HRT is not for everyone, and I don't want to hear any political opinions on women's health or natural remedies vs pharmaceuticals! This menopausal age bracket is the highest risk for suicide amongst women, and I certainly felt the edge of the abyss during my many sleepless nights, so I just wanted to share my experience in the hope it might help someone out there who is suffering as I was. On other health things, I continue to lift weights twice a week (PB deadlift, 80kgs for 2 sets of 3) and also to eat with an intermittent fasting lifestyle. I've also walked a LOT of kilometers in 2022, both in training for the Camino, and the walk itself. On happiness things, we adopted two British Shorthair cats, Cashew and Noisette. Cashew is my writing buddy and curls up beside my desk, and Noisette loves her warm space next to Jonathan. You can always find them on my Facebook and Instagram @jfpennauthor. Financial Goals The Creative Penn Limited made almost exactly the same amount of money in 2022 as it did in 2021, which I'm pleased about. It's a healthy multi-six-figure revenue, which is great for a mature creative business with only 1 employee (me!). I grew my direct book sales which means a greater percentage of profit for a lower number of book sales. Although my affiliate income has dropped (since I don't do so many tutorials or webinars anymore), I made up the difference through the podcast and live event sales. Interestingly, I spent a lot less on book marketing in 2022. This might be because I focused on email marketing to sell direct, but I intend to increase this again next year and see if I can grow my book sales further. I like a Christmas gin & Tonic! Thank you so much for being part of my community in the last year — for buying my books in all formats, for being a patron of the show, for clicking my affiliate links, for leaving positive reviews on the books and the podcast, and for recommending them to others. I wouldn’t have this career without you, so thank you so much and I hope you’ll join me for the year ahead. How did your creative goals go in 2022? Please leave a comment and let me know. I'll be back with my 2023 goals on 1 January, 2023.  The post Review Of My 2022 Creative Business Goals first appeared on The Creative Penn.

“If you just keep writing/querying/marketing/etc you will eventually be successful. Just don't give up.” We've all heard a variation of this, but what if it isn't true? When is quitting worthwhile? Joanna Penn and Orna Ross discuss Quit: The Power of Knowing When To Walk Away by Annie Duke and give examples of what they have quit around writing, book marketing, and more. In the intro, book recommendations, and Pilgrimage Kickstarter pre-launch page. Get 33% off my ebooks, audiobooks and courses for the rest of 2022. Use coupon 2022 at checkout at CreativePennBooks.com (ebooks and audio, not print), and/or TheCreativePenn.com/learn for courses. Valid until the end of 2022. This episode is supported by my patrons at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn. If you support the show, you get the extra Q&A episode for patrons only. Joanna Penn and Orna Ross Joanna Penn writes nonfiction for authors and is an award-nominated, New York Times and USA Today bestselling thriller author as J.F.Penn. She’s also an award-winning podcaster, creative entrepreneur, and international professional speaker. Orna Ross is a novelist, poet, and non-fiction author. She's also the founder of the Alliance of Independent Authors, a professional speaker and creative coach. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.  Show Notes Why we need to reframe quitting — and why it's so hard to do Getting over sunk cost fallacy Why Orna quit a whole series of non-fiction books Why I quit my Books and Travel Podcast Other things you might want to quit: social media platforms, blogging, an author name, a book series, writing a book that's taking forever, marketing a book that isn't selling, a business model, a day job, being a full-time author, a city or even a country How quitting makes room for you to create something new You can find Orna Ross at www.OrnaRoss.com and listen to the Ask ALLi Podcast on your favorite podcast app. This episode originally went out on the Ask ALLi Podcast, 2 Dec 2022. Shareable image generated by Joanna Penn on Midjourney. Transcript of the discussion Joanna Penn: Hello everyone, and welcome to the Alliance of Independent Authors Advanced Self-Publishing Salon with me, Joanna Penn, and Orna Ross. Hi Orna. Orna Ross: Hi Joanna, and hello everyone. Joanna Penn: Hello. Yes, we are back. It is almost the end of 2022, which is crazy, and today our topic is, when to quit and what to quit, and all the things we've been quitting. I'm going to put this into context. So, basically, my friend J Thorn, who many people will know, author/podcaster extraordinaire, J Thorn recommended this book to me. So, it's called Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away by Annie Duke, and J recommended it to me. I recommended it to you. I've recommended it to Sacha Black, who's also talked about it on her podcast now. It's going around at the moment, this book, and what is so brilliant about it, and what we want to do is reframe it as the book reframed it, which is, quitting doesn't need to have this negative context. What we want is it to have a more positive context, and letting go of things, and we're at that time of year when it's like, yeah, we need to let something go for a good reason. So, when I recommended it to you, Orna, why did you say, yes, that sounds like a good idea. Why is quitting necessary? Orna Ross: Well, I was thinking of it as letting go because that's my vernacular, but I periodically do this anyway, as a clear out. No matter how careful you are, how intentional you are, you accumulate dead wood and also you change, you shift, or things change, tools change, the climate changes, readers change in what they want, and so you can get stuck. So, it's good to do a bit of an inventory and have a look and see what's going on. So, just at the moment that I was doing all that, we were chatting, and you said, oh, great book, Quit. And then we said, okay, that's got to be the theme for our next podcast. Joanna Penn: Yeah, well, this is it. I feel like so often we idolize grit and perseverance, and they have all these positive connotations. You'll often hear, for example, in the author industry, oh, all you need to do is stick it out. Eventually people fall away, and ‘if you keep going, you'll make it.' If you keep submitting to agents, you'll eventually get an agent, or if you keep writing more books, you'll eventually be successful, whatever that means, and we have all this stuff that basically says, you must keep going, whatever happens. And that is considered a good thing. Whereas, the word ‘quitting' can imply negativity, and Annie Duke, who's the author, she played professional poker and she basically talked about that professionals quit more often; the most successful poker players quit more often, and we are not playing poker, but it's a game of skill and I think that's really interesting in terms of quitting more often. Also, what I think's really important is we're not necessarily talking about quitting bad things like quitting smoking, although, great, or whatever else. It's more about quitting some of the good things, because we don't necessarily pile bad things into our life, we pile good things into our life, but then we can't achieve the main goal. Orna Ross: Yeah, absolutely, and that is the point, particularly in creative industries, passion-based businesses, we love all the things we do and we'd love to do more, and it just keeps on expanding as well. All the lovely, shiny things you can do. It's just over a decade and a half ago that none of these opportunities existed, and now with every passing year there are more and more so it can be really tempting. And we're not talking here about shiny object syndrome so much as things that have become embedded, and they may be fun and they may also be financially rewarding to some degree, but you have to check them for opportunity cost. Might you be better off doing something else with your time and resources? It's not just about what you're doing, but you might be better off quitting something that's doing okay for you because something else might serve us better. The other thing I think is that not quitting and just doing the same thing can become a bit compulsive sometimes, or we do it by rote. So, we talk about creative writing and creative publishing and the core of that is keeping things fresh and staying engaged, what we were talking about there at the beginning, the variety of switching out of non-fiction into fiction works for us in some way, but sometimes it's just about letting things go so that something new can come in. Joanna Penn: You mentioned there the opportunity costs, but there are also financial costs, time costs, which kind of come into that opportunity cost. But also, one really big thing that she talks about is sunk cost, and this feeling like, look, I've put this much into whatever it is, and we are going to go into some more examples in a minute, but you know, I've put all these years in, all this money, all this effort, and it may be if I just keep going a bit longer, it might be worth it eventually. So, let's start on some of the examples. You mentioned it before, that your creative non-fiction books, you put years into these. What did you quit and how did you get over that sunk cost fallacy? Orna Ross: Yeah, so I've always been really interested in the process of creativity and I wanted to do a series about the creative process, not so much about writing and publishing, but creative living and how you can apply the process that we apply to our writing and to our publishing into everything, because I really firmly believe that this is a way to approach life, except that we're all conditioned into a different way of approaching life. So, I did a long series, I commissioned all the covers, I put the covers out there, which I used to do as a way to make myself do things — I didn't after this one! So, I kept going for a long time between, I think, 2013 and 2016 I was working on it on and off as I was doing all sorts of other things and kept going back to it, kept going back to it, and then one day you said to me, maybe it's time to realize it's not going to happen, because it just wasn't coming together for me. Joanna Penn: It was your birthday, that's what it was. It was the year before a big birthday, and you said, I want to finish on this particular day, and you hadn't, and that's when I said to you, how much longer are you going to do it? Orna Ross: Yeah, and I went home with my tail between my legs, and realized, you know what, this is best; quit. So, what I did was, I put the core of it, the nuggets of it, into one book, and I was satisfied with that. And I still every so often find myself drifting back over and thinking that I'd love to do that again, and I realized it became and could be, still could be, but I won't let it, be a sort of a procrastination thing, an easier thing to do in a way than some of the other things that I want to do more. So, that was the biggest thing I think, that I ever quit, because I am somebody who sticks it out. My fiction takes a very long time to put together and even writing a short poem, I can take a long time over that, and I am somebody who prides myself on my grit and my resilience and my bounce back and all of that, and what I found very interesting about the Duke book was the examples she gave of people who were at the height of their game and then were watching things falling apart. Muhammad Ali being the very well-known example, but lots of business examples as well of people who, the evidence was clear and in front of them, this is not working, but there's this mental and emotional attachment to something that you've invested lots of blood and sweat and tears into, and just letting it go becomes the hardest thing to do. But of course, when you do let go — and when I let that series go — it was such a sense of lightness. I really felt like a great burden had been lifted off me and I was free to do other things. I got much more serious about poetry publishing, which was much more fun and much better integrated with the busy schedule that I had in those years. Joanna Penn: Well, I guess before we get into all the other details, I'll just do the big one that I came to after reading the book, which was to quit my Books and Travel Podcast. Orna Ross: No, you didn't tell me! Oh, wow. Joanna Penn: Oh, didn't I? I thought I told you? Yeah. So, basically, and it was almost like that book gives permission to let something go that you've been feeling for a while. So I started my Books and Travel podcast and the website back in early 2019, obviously before the pandemic. I thought I was going to write, and move into more travel genres — and I still love my Books and Travel podcast, I may still do an occasional episode, or a solo show or something, and I'll keep the website. That's all going to be there. But doing a new episode every couple of weeks, you know how much work a podcast is, and then it would suck me in with all the awesome show notes and I would find all the right photos, and I was doing all that because I really enjoyed it. But it was probably taking like a day and a half a week for something that ultimately has not brought me any income and has actually cost me money, costs me hosting, costs me time, all of that. Also I've discovered a lot about the traditional publishing industry around travel books. It's a very different genre. It's a lot of writing for hire, a lot of commissioned work. So, I learned about the genre, and I also just decided not to follow a business model that I'd set up for that website. It just wasn't going to work. So, I decided to give it up and the moment I decided, I felt so much better. Again, it's like, you know when this is the right decision, when you just feel like, oh yeah, thank goodness for that. And it's freed up my time and now I feel like I can, I finished my Pilgrimage book; it's almost released me from a whole load of stuff, and all the stuff I thought I was going to do with it, I've now just let that go. As I said, it's still going to sit there and it's all kind of evergreen because it's travel stuff, but yeah. So, I didn't know I hadn't told you that. Orna Ross: No, that one escaped me. I've been very head down, I have to say. Interesting. Yeah. So, wow. Why Orna quit blogging I'm still suffering from the latest let go that I've done though, I've found it really hard, which is my personal blog. So, that was the big one that came out of the book for me. I hadn't even been thinking about it. I just blog because I blog, if you know what I mean. It was a way of me getting thoughts together. I've used it in all sorts of different ways over the years, it's grown with me. I have been blogging since 2008, year in, year out, and just always did, and then, I just thought, you know what, I'm going to let go of the blog. So, I did, but I still find it hard, and I have things that I want to express in a certain way, and I'm not quite sure how to do that as yet, but I know it's the right decision. But I'm still feeling this sort of habit energy of having it there and it feels like a bit of a hole in all my nice things. But I know it's the right thing to do because I really have to focus my energy. Fiction writing is very different, and that's what I've realized, how much energy it takes. By not doing it for a while, on my coming back to it I realized that I just didn't have enough time, enough energy, enough creative energy. Joanna Penn: Yeah, I feel like both of us, well, in fact, you hear this from everyone, whether you are a rapid release person or more like us, everybody does seem to need to sink into the fiction and you have to allocate a specific amount of time. With nonfiction, I can be like, oh, I've got an hour, I'll write some stuff and bash out some words, but I can't do that with fiction. I need more time to sink into it like you do, but let's get into some of the questions we've got for the listeners. So, we'll stay with writing and books, first of all because I feel like this is what we're talking about right now. You've talked about quitting writing those creative books, we've talked about quitting blogging. So, when do you quit writing a book you've been working on? So, you've really talked about that, although you were already writing those. We hear from indies, and not just indies, people who've been writing the same book for more than a decade, or people who've just been working and working on the same book. Maybe one could write something else, or can we get blocked by that old idea? Orna Ross: Yeah, definitely, and I think the main thing to say about these questions is there is no right answer. It's just going to resonate with you if you feel that actually maybe it's time to let that go. I mean, there are two, especially at the beginning, you can keep working away at something that you would be better off doing something maybe a little bit less ambitious, getting it through, particularly if you are keen to be a successful indie author and to publish regularly. The whole experience of putting a book out, actually getting through the publishing thing, so if it's something that has taken years and is going to take years, like my first book, maybe it might be do something easier first and do one or two easier projects and then come back to the great magnum opus rather than feeling that has to be your first time out. Joanna Penn: So, some of the other possibilities around quitting, when to quit a series. So, if your read-through is dropping and dropping over time, and maybe you've put loads of marketing money in it and it's just not taking off, should you write something new? Also, even quitting an entire genre. I've recently interviewed Dan Padavona, who's a great example. He just wasn't making the money he wanted for the amount of books that he was writing, and he switched genres from horror into thriller and just found that immediately things started to take off. I think this is something that, I'm actually considering this around genres is that I have some ideas that don't fit into my normal genres, and it may be that I might find it easier to write some of these ideas in other genres than the ones that I've been writing for, sort of, over a decade now. So, that's interesting too. Orna Ross: Very interesting, and I think it's easy enough to know you should quit if money is falling, but actually, if money is still fine and you're selling reasonably well, but you know that creatively you're in a rut and you know you're bored or worse; you can really have quite negative feelings where you turn your writing into the worst sort of day job and you have to whip yourself in and all of that. That too is time to quit. If you're not balancing both the commercial and the creative, then that is a sign that something needs to change, for sure. Maybe not all out quitting the full thing, the full series or the full genre, but something needs to go. So, it's not just about commercial reasons, which can make it easier to make that judgment. Joanna Penn: Yeah, and then a couple more in the writing bit is when to quit an author name. This is a big one, and especially, I almost feel for me that both my author names are my actual name, which means emotionally, like J.F. Penn for my fiction, I have written all over the shop and I am really thinking not to leave, not to quit J.F. Penn, but maybe a bit like Books and Travel, park it and write a new genre under another name to almost start again, or do something in secret. This is a problem when we do everything in public, like we do, but you have, I mean, Orna Ross is not your actual name, it is a pen name for the first instance, but you also did add an initial for your non-fiction, didn't you? So, what are your thoughts on quitting author names? Orna Ross: Yeah, it's that thing of freshening it up, isn't it? And like you say, it's the beginner's mind, you give yourself permission in a way that, if there's a whole lot of baggage attached to the name, both your own internal emotional baggage, and then what readers expect, that just by changing your name, you can really lighten your load. So, I think there are definitely times to think about doing that. When I was a journalist, I had about six names. Joanna Penn: That's funny because Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch talk about this, between them they have like 50 names or something that they've written under. Traditional publishing does this all the time, right? Orna Ross: All the time. You meet people and you realize they're writing steamy erotica under one name, and domestic tips under another, because we are all many things, we contain multitudes. So yeah, there is absolutely no problem with that, and parking things for a while. But also, I think one of the biggest reasons here to let go is if something is completed, then let it go completely. We do tend to keep a door open, and sometimes that makes sense. And again, there is no right answer here or no right way to do things, but it is worth saying that sometimes keeping a door open, creative energy can leak out that door. And doing the hard thing of quitting while you're ahead is a really great thing to do. You see it all the time with TV shows and other creative projects that, it just goes from bad to worse and people are so attached, and they just can't let go. So, it's definitely worth asking you yourself these questions at the end of the year as we're beginning to look at another year. A publishing model is the other thing. Is it time to quit (or pivot) your business model and publishing model? So, if you've been KU from the start, is it time to go wide with some books or vice versa, if you're always wide, is there something that should go into to KU? We would say that it is definitely time for people to think about quitting some things in order to put them onto your own website. So, for example, I'm quitting Patreon at the moment, taking my reader members over onto my website because I think I can, well, one reason is because Patron doesn't allow you to put things up and, and put up the amount that it costs, and I initially went in at a very low level and it's years ago. Joanna Penn: Me too. Orna Ross: Yeah, and it's years ago and you can't make that change. Also, I just feel I'd be able to serve the, something about the communication being more direct, I think, will suit my readers. I'm not going to move my author patrons. So, yeah that's another example of just thinking about different ways of doing things, because of course, letting one thing go means taking on something else, or not necessarily taking in a new thing, but it does mean you're going to do something differently. So yeah, you finish one chapter, you open another. Joanna Penn: And just on that, so the direct sales model, software is another thing. You and I have been doing this long enough now. We've seen so many different software and new software comes along all the time, and it, again, this is not shiny object syndrome, this is look at the software and does it actually suit what you need better than another type of software. So, for example I moved from, Payhip is wonderful if you just want to do some direct eBook sales or whatever, but moving to Shopify for me was about being able to do print-on-demand, being able to do a lot, merchandise, a lot more functionality with Shopify. Also, they're getting into crypto and NFTs, and all of these things. So, I've got this kind of futureproofing, I've been using Payhip, before that I was using various WordPress plugins and email software. Someone asked me the other day, I use ConvertKit, but it's the third service I've used. Hosting platforms, I think I've used four hosting platforms. So again, the service you use as part of your business model, you can move this stuff. And again, it takes a bit of energy to move from one system to another. But Patreon, I'm also thinking about how I can achieve what I want to achieve with that, or whether I have to find something else. So, this is part of it too, isn't it? Quitting can be pivoting or moving and changing, not just giving it up entirely. Orna Ross: Exactly, and advice too, where you're getting your advice, where's it coming from? Are you listening to the same people saying the same things for many years? There's so many new podcasts now. When's the last time you actually went out and looked to see what is newest? Same with technology and tools. Things are really changing, and changing very rapidly, but are you doing things the same old just because that's the way you’ve always done it? There may well be a tool that would really lighten your low that you're not even thinking about. So I would say at least once a year, well worth doing an inventory of what you're using and just looking to see whether it's been upgraded. Joanna Penn: Or even just looking at your monthly subscriptions, because often we sign up for things, we go, oh, it's $5 a month, whatever, and then you realize that you haven't looked at this stuff. Or you've done a yearly, this happened to me recently, a yearly subscription renewed for something that I didn't use anymore, but because it was on annual, I didn't notice it was there. It was a social media plugin thing for my website, and I was like, oh, that's really annoying. Then, of course, they wouldn't refund me, and I was like, well, now I only do monthly, but that's another example. You just have to look at things and move on. But let's talk about marketing as well, because you have quit something that kind of comes under marketing and or communication. What else have you quit? Why Orna has quit Twitter and Jo is sticking with it Orna Ross: Twitter. Goodbye. Really sad about this because again, I started my blog on Twitter at the same time, because they fed into each other. Joanna Penn: We met on Twitter, Orna. Orna Ross: We met on Twitter. I met so many great people on Twitter, absolutely. I think it is the best social network because it's got the thinkers and the writers in abundance there and all of that, but I just can't cope with the drama, the Musk factor. So, @indieauthoralli is still there, but just me personally, everything about the way he does business is the opposite to the way I do business, and I've just quit it. So, quit it, deactivated the account. It gets a month, I think, and then it's gone for good. So, yeah, I'm not going back. Joanna Penn: Well, this is an interesting question. So, I'm on the opposite side. I will go down with that ship. I'm all in on Twitter. It's really my only network, like everything else is peripheral, not important to me, but I'm in Twitter every day and especially the AI Twitter, crypto Twitter, I'm in a lot of communities that aren't really elsewhere. So, I get a lot out of it, and so I'm staying but I did consider what would happen if it implodes or if it's blocked on Apple devices, blah, blah, blah, and I don't think I would go anywhere else. I think if it came down to it, it would be a case of quitting and not replacing it. I've seen a lot of people go to Mastodon, go to Hive, go to other networks. Do we need to replace things? I guess that's the bigger question. If you quit something, do you have to replace it? Orna Ross: Well, I'm not. Everybody says, oh, are you going to Mastodon? No, I'm not. One of the things about letting it go, it was partly that, you know what I've already said, it was also about, again, time and focus. So again, I loved spending time there and for lots of different reasons, but again, it's about letting go of something you like, letting go of something that you enjoy. But if you're just going to replace it and do the same thing somewhere else, then unless you've got a really good set of reasons for doing that, and I can't find good reasons for me to go to Mastodon, for example, I don't like it anyway. It doesn't feel right. Twitter felt right the moment I landed there, it always felt right, and I used to use it more for reading than for actually tweeting. But all the information is available in lots of different ways. There are a thousand ways to get your information and you have to be really careful. So, yeah, I'm not sorry. It's gone and I'm not replacing it. Joanna Penn: Yeah, but I think the overall message for people listening is, if you quit something, that doesn't mean you just have to jump into replacing it exactly the same thing. It's more like just take advantage of having that open space to, like you wanted to quit some things to make more room for fiction. Well, this is something else that gives you more space. But let's talk about some other forms of marketing. So, I could say that my Books and Travel podcast, essentially is marketing. I will launch my pilgrimage book in February 2023, and I'll do a special episode, that kind of thing, but it was marketing for books I never wrote, and there is a danger of building up a marketing engine when you don't have a product, I know a lot of people make that mistake. But let's talk about also quitting advertising, spending money on a series or a book that does not work. So, let's say you've changed the covers, you've rewritten the blurb, you've changed the metadata, and you still are not managing to make money with those books. What should you quit in that situation? Orna Ross: Well, move on to another book is an option, and again, there is no definite right answer. It might be time to stop doing a particular form of promotion and change into something quite different. To get more creative about your promotion might be one option, or it might just be a matter of stopping, just giving it up and moving on to market another book or another series. I think also part of quitting can be testing something new. So, you might feel, okay, I'll give that up and I'll go over here and I'll do this, but I think that the more I go on in this business, the more I realize that testing is the way to go, and testing things on the small scale before you run off and do things on the big scale. One of the things that I liked very much in the Duke book was this idea of kill criteria. So, you set a date and a state, were the two components of the kill criteria. So, if I'm not in such and such a state, in other words, if I haven't achieved a certain thing by such and such a date, then I will quit on that date. Of course, sometimes it is about keeping going and sometimes it won't let you go, and you want to quit, and you can't. But I think this idea, I really like this kill criteria idea, and the idea of the value of it. What is its projected value? Whatever you're doing, in marketing, I think though this is particularly relevant for, what is the projected outcome of the marketing that you're doing? We can get very confused with marketing, because marketing really is all that base stuff. Ads and other promotional things are different, and so in terms of looking at promotions, what is the expected value that you want on the far side? It can be too easy to just say, oh, well I sold more books and more people know about me, and so on. It's about that return on investment, and it's not just financial. It can also be about wellbeing. It can be about your health, it can be about your happiness. It can be all sorts of things. But doing a bit of advanced planning and thinking around it and that idea of kill criteria. So, if I don't reach such and such a state by such and such a date, I quit that, and I maybe think about something. Joanna Penn: Yeah, and I do think this energy, I mean we talk a lot about energy and the feeling of, I'm really glad I just did that will tell you whether or not that's a good idea, and that book really gives you permission. Sometimes we need to be given permission. That's why we wanted to do this episode because we know some of you listening need permission to quit some of these things because actually it's not true, just because you continue doing something for month in, month out, year in, year out doesn't mean it will be a success, unfortunately, that's actually the truth, right? Orna Ross: Absolutely, and you do need resilience in this business. You need it to absorb when it isn't successful the first time and there is such a thing as if at first you don't succeed, try again. There is such a thing as third time lucky. All of these things do happen and we're not for a second saying that they don't, and we're not for a second saying, if you haven't had success, give it up and go away, necessarily. But we are saying, if you feel you should quit something, you have permission. Give yourself that permission, and you can always come back to something in a different way if in time you find that it doesn't work out. But we get so much advice about, write more books, for example. When there is no marketing structure in place, often, just writing another book is not actually a strategy that is likely to deliver. And again, she talks in the book about the monkey and the pedestal, or something like that, and how we- Joanna Penn: That bit confused me. Orna Ross: Oh, I thought that was really good. So, you know, how you can spend a lot of time and building a pedestal for something that, I guess the Books and Travel would be an example of that. So, you spend a lot of time on the architecture, putting it all together and so on, without having tested, does this- Joanna Penn: There was no product. Orna Ross: Yeah. Does the monkey do the trick? So, test the monkey bit first before you put all the effort into the other part, and if it doesn't work, quit that and find, is there another way to get at the same thing that might deliver more value in a while. Joanna Penn: But that comes back to what you said near the beginning, which was about, is it procrastination? Is it because it's easier? It is easier for me to build another podcast and a website because I know exactly how to do that. It's easier for me to record interviews than it is for me to sit down and write travel books in a genre or memoir, which is really hard it turns out, and I resisted, it was easier to resist doing that. So, yeah, I guess, like you said, we're not saying you have to quit, but it's an option for you. But in the last few minutes —  Let's talk about some of the bigger questions, quitting your job to go full-time as an author entrepreneur, or vice versa, quitting being an author full-time to go back to a job. And I wanted to bring up the latter because I know quite a few authors who are struggling financially and felt guilty about going back to a job, and I'm like, don't feel guilty, everyone has to feed their family and pay the bills and whatever go. You are allowed to quit, whatever, but it's the self-definition thing, right? You're like, I'm a full-time author, but then I need to go, as Michaelbrent Collings shared on my show, he went to deliver pizzas because he couldn't pay the bills. I quit my job back in 2011, and I had five years of building up a business on the side, and my quit criteria was, if I can't make this work within six months, I will go back and get a job, and I still feel that way. If this business went completely south, I would go back and get a job. There's nothing wrong with that. So, what are your thoughts on the career thing of either direction? Orna Ross: Yeah, I think, I suppose you've spoken very eloquently there about quitting to get a job to supplement, or to quit completely and say, you know what, I've been defining myself as a writer, but why? I can be all sorts of other things. It's one short life. You don't have to be a writer; you don't have to be a publishing writer. You can quit in that way. But the other part is very often seeing authors of talent who are doing well, who hold on to the day job far too long and don't do that brave thing of quitting and throwing yourself out there in a way too. So, I wouldn't advise anyone to do that straight up. I wouldn't advise anyone to do that until they are seeing return on investment, until they are fully publishing, you know, have mastered at least six of the seven stages, which is the whole production thing and the whole marketing and promotion thing, and you're making good sales, but time is becoming a real problem for you, and you're just not able to, and you have a good reason to think that you could actually make a lot more money if you take the leap, then take that leap. Do quit the day job. I love to see people quitting the day job. I remember encouraging you to leave the day job and stay with what you were doing. Joanna Penn: Well, and you also helped me not go back to my day job in the early difficult phase, when you were like, no, you will do better. Ironically, you will do better if you just keep going, and that was true in my circumstance. How we've both quit cities and even countries for creative reasons Again, just before we finish, even bigger things that both you and I have done, which I feel also about energy, is we've changed cities and both of us have changed cities in the last few years. So, I moved from London to Bath, and you moved to the coast, a coastal town from London. Also, we've both moved countries. I moved from the UK to New Zealand, and then Australia, and then back to the UK, and you moved from Ireland to the UK and moving back to the UK from down under, liberated me from a whole load of stuff and enabled me to be a writer. But equally, I had to leave the UK to almost become an indie author because it's such a staid environment, or it used to be back in the day, that I almost had to leave to escape. So, quitting can be an even bigger thing. So, what energy did you moving, what did that give you? Orna Ross: Oh no, absolutely. I moved three times to the UK back again, and then for the final time back in 2008, and at that time it was absolutely essential to me to leave just for creative sort of, all four in the family came across to London for creative reasons, to freshen things up, to give ourselves opportunities that we wouldn't have had in Ireland and so on. And the recent move down to St. Leonard's was very much about moving into a more creative environment. London is super creative, obviously, and super interesting as a city, but I personally am more nurtured by things like the sea and the woods and all of that. London's still on my doorstep and I commute there all the time, but to actually live, this has been a great creative boost for me, and I think that's the end of my moving, but if I felt my creative juices needed it again and it suited, obviously spouse and family and everything, I wouldn't rule it out. I don't think so at this stage, but you never know. The point being, if you are thinking of quitting a country, a relationship, or any of those big things because you know in your heart and soul that creatively you need it, then quit. Do quit. Joanna Penn: Do whatever it is. So, I hope we've given you lots of examples from tiny things to really big things that we've both quit over the years, but moved into new things. This is about new opportunities, refreshment, as you've said several times, and the wonderful things that can happen when you make space for it. So, we are out of time, but we will be back in December. We're going to record just before the New Year, talking about how can indie authors prepare for the opportunities coming in 2023, because once you've made some space, we are going to fill it with some ideas of things. Joanna Penn: Fantastic. Right, well, it just remains to say happy writing, Orna Ross: And happy publishing. Joanna Penn: We'll see you next time. Bye.The post What Do You Need To Quit? With Joanna Penn And Orna Ross first appeared on The Creative Penn.

What has changed in the publishing industry over the last few years? What can authors learn from the DOJ vs PRH court case? How can mid-list authors thrive in uncertain times? Jane Friedman talks about these things and more. In the intro, USA Today list is on indefinite hiatus [US News]; Paid for bestseller list; Recommended books; My scallop shell custom ornamental break; A Midwinter Sacrifice; The Author’s Mindset Podcast; What do you do if your book isn’t selling? [Rachael Herron]; My Pilgrimage Kickstarter pre-launch page; History Quill Writer's Conference; Get 33% off my ebooks, audiobooks and courses for the rest of 2022. Use coupon 2022 at checkout at CreativePennBooks.com (ebooks and audio, not print), and/or TheCreativePenn.com/learn for courses. Valid until the end of 2022. 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.  Jane Friedman is the author of The Business of Being a Writer, as well as other nonfiction books. She's also an award-winning publishing commentator, writer, editor, professional speaker and teacher. 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 the pandemic and increasing online sales have changed traditional publishing Thoughts on the DOJ vs PRH legal case (lots more at Publishers Weekly) Why backlist sales are so important The struggles of the mid-list author Key book publishing paths (updated) How acquisitions affect authors Why marketing is important however you choose to publish Tips for using a paid newsletter as part of your author business What to watch out for in the coming year You can find Jane at JaneFriedman.com Image generated by Joanna Penn on Midjourney. Transcript of Interview with Jane Friedman Joanna: Jane Friedman is the author of The Business of Being a Writer, as well as other nonfiction books. She's also an award-winning publishing commentator, writer, editor, professional speaker, and teacher. So welcome back to the show, Jane. Jane: Thank you. I'm so delighted to be back. Joanna: So you were last on the show in 2018. Seems like a different world. For those who don't know you — Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and publishing. Jane: Well, it's been a lifelong endeavor. I was a creative writing major in college, and I went straight into a publishing job right out of college. It was a midsize commercial publisher. I stayed for about 12 years. And then I had a brief detour into teaching at university level where I was teaching writing. And then I went back into publishing, and now I'm full-time freelance. So I write a newsletter, I host classes, and I go to publishing conferences. So it's all been kind of one long, unbroken focus on writing and publishing. Joanna: And we're going to come back to The Hot Sheet in a minute. But I wanted to talk to you, I mean, you do just fantastic commentary on the publishing industry. And you've seen so many different things. But I wanted your reflections, I guess, on the last couple of years. How has the pandemic and increasing online sales changed the more traditional publishing industry? Because I feel like indies, like myself, we were already doing everything online. But I feel like the pandemic has really shifted traditional. So what are your thoughts on that? Jane: Yes, I mean, first of all, the pandemic was great for traditional publishing, generally. I mean, there are supply chain issues, of course, which are still affecting everyone. But print book sales were up 9% in 2021, and for a mature industry that is astonishing. And they're still doing pretty well in 2022. Comparatively, I think they're down maybe 5% versus last year, which is still great. It's above where we were in 2019. Something interesting that happened too, is that Bookshop.org and independent bookstores are in a better position — Bookshop being the online retailer that competes against Amazon. They're very flexible, they're more focused on the things that only they can do well, and they're benefiting from people who want to consume more conscientiously. I think the Bookshop founder said ‘virtuous shopping', a virtuous alternative to Amazon is what he was hoping for. And they have, they've succeeded. There's now a UK version of Bookshop. I think there might be one in Spain. So, yeah, I think the pandemic really helped the launch of that because they were established in January 2020, having no idea what was about to happen. The other thing that was very positive, for novelists in particular, is that adult fiction sales came back after many years of decline. So at first, it was believed this was driven by comfort reads. But now I would say it's probably more TikTok driven. Sales are also more backlist oriented. Part of that is the shift to online sales, but TikTok is also, again, driving some of that. And I think the other piece of good news for maybe all, well, I think it's good news for all authors, is that The Big 5 aren't actually selling as much combined as everyone else. So I do see that it's a very diverse market. And I know we'll talk about some concerns about the market a little later. But I think generally, books have done really well the past few years, no matter where you're sitting in the industry. Joanna: So you mentioned The Big 5 there, and one of the things I really wanted to talk to you about is what's shocked the publishing industry, or a lot of authors anyway. In September 2022 — The US Department of Justice took Penguin Random House to court over the potential acquisition of Simon and Schuster. And the proceedings of the trial brought to light a lot of surprising things, or perhaps only surprising to authors and people who didn't know much about the industry. So I wanted to hear what were some of the things that stood out for you because you did a ton of commentary around this. Jane: Yes, so the things that shocked the average person and even a lot of authors, frankly, that have been in the industry a while, the big CEOs of these enormous companies saying they don't know what will sell. You know, portraying the industry as just a lot of random bets. People have casually said that for many, many years that it's a ‘throw it against the wall and see what sticks' sort of industry. But I guess there was this assumption that if you put a big CEO on the stand, and you ask them questions under oath, that they would show more business acumen than they did. So I think that was very shocking to people and discouraging. Like, they were denying they had any responsibility over what books would do well.  I think the other reality that was thrown into stark relief, is that most books aren't getting a lot of marketing investment. Unless there are already clear indicators after the book releases that it's going to do well, then the publisher will funnel more support toward it. But unless the book is getting one of these really big advances, there is just a lot of waiting and seeing, rather than proactive marketing and promotion. The other thing that came out is that — and again, if you study the industry closely like I do, this was not a surprise, but I think for the general public, it was shocking — that most books don't earn out their advances. And publishers knowingly pay more to get the books they want, knowing the advance won't earn out, rather than negotiate on anything else. They don't want to give up their eBook rights, their audiobook rights, they don't want to really mess around with the royalty rates. They are really just paying a lot more upfront to run their business. And obviously, only The Big 5 are able to play that sort of game, the smaller publishers can't. And that's part of what the trial was about. So what we saw is that it's a really small percentage of winners that drive profitability for The Big 5. And sometimes they know what those are going to be, or they're paying larger advances thinking that they know what the winners will be, but more often than not, it's the surprises. It’s the things that they maybe paid a more modest advance, and then it just shocked everyone how well it performed. And it was portrayed is almost out of your hands. It was the Penguin Random House CEO who made the most, I think, quote-worthy comments, where he was just like, “Publishing is random. That's why we're called Random House.” And I mean, he's said that line a lot at industry conferences, but again, to say it on the stand under oath, I think was just surprising for folks. Joanna: Yeah, I didn't know that. I hadn't heard that before. And I guess we had assumed that the name didn't mean that word, like we didn't think that. Maybe it was, I didn't know, someone's name or something. To hear that coming from the CEO, it's discouraging in a way if you want to get a traditional publishing deal. But to me, I actually felt like, you know what, if the CEO with all the power and all the money thinks that it's random, then as independent authors where we're just one person on their own, then that's actually encouraging. Because it explains why — like, I've got 35 books now, and most of my income comes from a handful of them. And, obviously, every single one I thought was going to sell, but it's only a few. So I mean, what encouragement can we take from this? What encouragement can independent authors take from this? Jane: I think exactly what you said, that it is, in fact, a pretty level playing field, especially considering you can be distributed in all the same places online as a Big 5. You can't necessarily tell the difference between a Big 5 title and a self-published title when you're shopping online. I saw a good number of small presses, independent presses who were watching the coverage saying, “Wow, The Big 5 have the same problems that I have. They don't have any secret sauce. They have more money, that's what they do have. But they don't necessarily have any better instincts.” So I think this is the encouragement that any small publisher or author can take, that there is some equity in the playing field. And the fact that Penguin Random House, it was revealed when those two big companies, Penguin and Random House, when they merged, I think this was around 2012, the trial showed that over the last 10 years, they've lost market share, rather than gain it. So the merger did nothing to help them in the market. And part of their motivation for acquiring Simon and Schuster was, in fact, to make sure that they retain the market share by buying a big list.  So I'm sure your listeners have seen this happen over the last 10 years, there's a lot of acquisitions happening and a lot of purchasing of backlists happening because — A bigger and bigger percentage of sales are backlist sales. So I think this also speaks to the indie author experience, which is that as you build up a fuller list, once you get beyond the first title, the third title, the fifth title, that's kind of the engine that often runs a stable business, then you just keep adding more books onto that. That's the model. Joanna: Yes. And I think when Michael Anderle and Craig Martelle started 20BooksTo50K, for some people that's scary. Like 20 books is a lot of books for a lot of people. But that model, I think it kind of holds true, actually. Jane: It really does. Joanna: And I think it still holds true. But the other one, just from The Hot Sheet, on August the 31st, 2022, so your newsletter was about how many books sell. “Out of the 58,000 trade titles published per year, half of those titles sell fewer than one dozen books.” So again, people listening, I think a lot of indie authors think, “Oh, my goodness, I only sold 50 books this month,” or whatever. But again, that might be better than a ton of traditionally published authors. Jane: Yes. That particular statistic got shared all over social media and it raised people's hackles. Like some people thought, it can't be true, that must be a distortion. And I was just so tickled when someone from NPD BookScan, which is the US business that tracks book sales, mainly print, but they also look at eBook sales and audio as well. So they actually confirmed, okay, so it might not be quite as bad as that figure that was cited at the trial, they couldn't figure out where that number came from. But when they crunched the numbers, they saw that it was about, I want to say 25% of titles don't sell more than a dozen copies. So like it was big enough that you could feel like what was cited at the trial was like, okay, yes. There are a lot of books that just don't perform. Joanna: And as you say, if the publishing house doesn't put money into marketing, or effort, which costs money because everyone has their time as well, then it doesn't go anywhere. And that's, again, the same truth for an indie author. You can put your book up online and no one's going to buy it. Everyone has to do marketing. And I feel like — we've been bashing on about this for a long time, haven't we, Jane?! Why is it that some people still don't believe it? I mean, it's kind of crazy.  I also want to ask you about this, so traditionally published editors and people who work for a company, they don't get paid based on the success of a book, right? So an agent will, as in they'll get a percentage of the advance, but even then, their future money is not based on the success of that book. And certainly, if you earn a salary from a publishing house, your salary is not dependent on the success of a book. And so, is that part of the problem, in a way? As long as you acquire books and publish books, the sales side is almost completely separate? Whereas for an indie author, like myself, I have to make sure my books sell, otherwise, I can't pay my mortgage or whatever. Jane: Right. Yes, so agents are entirely driven by the advance. I'm not going to say they don't care about the royalties, but they know the statistics that we discussed, that most books don't earn out the advance. So they're very focused on that. And they don't play any role in the marketing and promotion and publicity of books. And so that leaves you with the editors and the people inside the house. They're looking at so many different titles at once, and they're trying to make an entire season of books pass muster on a profitability level. And they know that it's probably going to be one or two titles that bring everything home. So as long as they can do that, they're not likely to lose their job. But certainly editors and others, I'm sure there are people who have been laid off or fired or otherwise sidelined because they're not known for picking at least a few decent winners in a year. But it's true that I think it would probably be considered crass or not entirely appropriate to measure an editor's merit on sales alone. Joanna: It's that brilliant discussion on “quality” in inverted commas, which we've been having for a very long time, where some books might be considered quality but don't sell very much, and vice versa. But let's get back to that court case, because as we record this, we've just had the news that Paramount, who owns Simon and Schuster, won't support the appeal. So Penguin Random House were going to take this judgment to appeal. So now it's unlikely to go ahead. Now, of course, we can only discuss hypotheticals. We do not know. But given other publishers have expressed interest, as well as KKR, which is an investment firm which own things like medical devices and stuff like that. So what are your thoughts? Is it better if a publishing house buys Simon & Schuster, another publishing house? Or is it better if a different kind of company does it? And how could this affect authors? Because I believe you've been through this, haven't you, when you worked for Writer's Digest? Jane: Yes. So I worked for a publisher called F&W Publications, which owned Writer's Digest. And they changed hands at least three times while I worked for them, always going to a different private equity or financial buyer, like a KKR, as you mentioned. And there are pros and cons, both ways. I mean, I personally having been through the private equity nightmare, I kind of think the grass is greener on the other side. I feel like I would rather be purchased by a publisher. Now, it's possible that that could still happen for Simon and Schuster because there are other Big 5 companies that are interested in buying it. And the judge, in her ruling, explicitly stated, “I can envision another publisher buying Simon and Schuster,” as almost as if to encourage HarperCollins or Hachette to come in and make their offer. I am not entirely sure if they did make an offer. I think HarperCollins definitely did, but it wasn't as rich as the Penguin Random House offer. Simon and Schuster is doing really well right now. So there's still an attractive acquisition, but I guess there's the problem of interest rates are higher so it might be more highly leveraged at this point. Back to the pros and cons. If another publisher absorbs Simon and Schuster, you're going to have the so-called redundancies. So there will likely be some sort of layoffs, imprints may merge or reconfigure, and generally agents and authors don't like that. If private equity were to step in, then what you get is cost-cutting, typically. They're trying to squeeze, squeeze, squeeze more profit. If it's not a publisher who's buying, what I would be looking for is, does this appear to be a long-term investment? Or are they looking to turn it around in a few years and squeeze that profit out in those few years? So, to me, it doesn't look great either way. I mean, certainly if Penguin Random House had won, there would have been layoffs of one kind or another. There would have been imprint reconfigurations. But there were people who were, let's say less critical of consolidation, I think did feel that Penguin Random House might make the best home for Simon and Schuster, just because there is the sense that they have better marketing and promotion, better systems, that would bring some discipline to Simon and Schuster, that maybe it doesn't have right now. Whether those problems get resolved under a private equity sort of buyer, who knows? So, we'll see. Joanna: So for people listening, if authors are with a Simon and Schuster imprint, or I mean, to be honest, any company can be bought or sold. And a lot of the current publishing contracts, the IP will stay with the company, like they don't have an automatic reversion clause that says, “Once this is sold, you can have it back.” Because of course, the valuation of the intellectual property is what makes the company so valuable. You can understand that from the publishing company perspective. For an author who might be part of that imprint, what are the things that might happen, regardless of who buys them? Jane: There could be some orphaned books, there could be authors who lose their editors. And so then you end up in this really horrible situation. I mean, it's bad enough when you have a publisher who's not investing a lot in marketing and promotion, but usually, at least you have your editor who's your champion inside the house, advocating on some level for attention. But if your editor leaves, you're just really up the creek, and you may not have interest in your next book if that editor departs. So it could be really bad news for those who lose either their editor or the imprint that they're publishing under. Usually, it's a small percentage, it just depends on how much change is enacted by the new owner. Joanna: And I would suggest that authors in that situation would talk to their agents. Also have a look at your contract, like what does your contract actually say about a situation like this? Because I know some people in Writer's Digest, who have been published there, who got their rights back or were given a choice. Of course, some authors just would prefer to have a publisher, but others wanted to go indie. So there might be some choices at that point. So take control, I think would probably be a tip. But — You also had a great focus piece in The Hot Sheet on the challenges of the mid-list author. So apart from the upheaval in the industry, what are some of those other challenges and your recommendations for authors? Jane: Well, earlier I mentioned an effect of the pandemic is increasing backlist sales, although this was a trend that was happening over the last 10 years, and the pandemic just sped it up. So this is where every new author or every new title is just competing against this growing catalogue of existing titles. Older titles are more discoverable than ever. I think The Big 5 publishers, in particular, seem to be struggling with launching new authors, and then also maintaining enthusiasm, excitement and media coverage for their midlist authors who, you know, their next book may not necessarily be what we would call like breakout material, but it's still another really good solid book. It's really hard now, with fewer media outlets where books are reliably reviewed or covered. It's just really hard to get any sort of attention. And usually, the outlets that are left, they focus on books that are going to get the biggest conversation going, like the Mike Pence memoir that's recently come out. The other thing is that publishers can't pay for placement in physical bookstores anymore, not at Barnes and Noble anyway, which is still the biggest chain in the US. So where do they have to run to? They have fewer newspapers, magazines, traditional media outlets, they can't pay to have their key titles on display across the country. They have recently been stymied by changes in Facebook ads, it's become a little more difficult. Joanna: Haven't we all? Jane: Yes. And Amazon obviously holds a lot of the cards in terms of visibility, and publishers don't have the same data or insights or direct-to-consumer power as Amazon. Now that said, some of them are really getting better at the direct-to-reader, building email lists, doing better on social, some are getting active on TikTok. But if a midlist author hasn't been doing their own direct-to-reader marketing, like having a decent website, building an email list, engaging with readers somewhere online, finding ways to spread the word without the publishers help, they're in a very vulnerable position.  I find that some of the authors who just get caught where their publishers basically dropped them, they end up with Amazon publishing. Not self-publishing, but going to one of those imprints because Amazon can reach the readers and boost them in a way that they haven't been boosted before. So the other thing is that publishers, and I can say this having worked for one and seeing this firsthand, they are very perverse at how they fill in budget gaps. You know, rather than trying to sell more of what they have, or focusing on what succeeding, they'll just publish more books, new books, in the hopes of finding something that sticks. It's really, you know, quite lazy when you think of it, but it's the easiest solution to just put another title in the season. So that obviously hurts midlist authors as well. Joanna: I've got to take that criticism for independent authors too, though, which is a lot of the time, we would much rather just write another book than try and figure out how to sell the book that isn't selling very well. And I'll put myself in that camp just as much as anyone else. But it's interesting, I mean, you've had a wonderful chart on your website, Key Book Publishing Paths, I'll link to it in the show notes. Oh my goodness, has that changed?! I mean, your writing is getting smaller and smaller because there are so many paths to publication now. And we might have come across as a little negative, I want to say, in this discussion so far, but can you just outline some of the choices? Because I feel like choices are incredible for creatives these days, those who want to look at their choices. So is that traditional publishing old school model — I mean, obviously, it's not dead — But what are the choices that authors have? And who do they suit, I guess? Jane: One thing that's been fascinating to me is some of the opportunities that agents can offer authors. Now, obviously, this assumes that you've been able to secure an agent, and you don't have to have one to access these opportunities, but there are a lot of work for hire opportunities in TV, film, entertainment, novelizations of movies and TV shows, video games. And I think most writers aren't even aware these opportunities exist because they are a little bit under the radar, and you would have to like kind of already be in that community to know about it.  Then I also find that agents are helping authors with negotiating app-driven adaptations of their work. So for instance, Wattpad Webtoon just launched a new app called Yonder, which serializes backlist titles from publishers, or you could do a new, original exclusive for Yonder, as you might for Kindle Vella. And I've always been very fascinated by the rise of these online literature apps, whether it's Wattpad, Webtoon, Tapas, Radish, now Yonder, because I see young people in a very diverse global audience engaging with those apps. And they're very sticky, so people tend to be very loyal, and they're reading maybe 30 minutes a day through these apps. So I see authors, you know, it helps if you have an agent because some of these contracts are a bit funny. So it helps to have an agent's eye on them. But authors too, and indie authors as well, have been working with these apps, I think, in very unique and innovative ways. The other thing that's not on that Key Book Publishing Paths chart, but probably should be, is just the rise of audio storytelling, audio first storytelling. So when you look at how Spotify, Storytel, Audible, and there are other companies, they're all really fiercely competing for the audio listener. And we're also seeing some blurring of the lines between podcast-based storytelling and then audiobooks. So there have also been a lot of opportunities in that sector, whether you have an agent or not, to sell your fiction. There's also this increased interest from, this is really from authors who are dropped by their traditional publishers, there's increased interest in hybrids and what they do. But it's just a varied — I have to throw up the red flag. It's a very mixed situation because so many different companies might call themselves a hybrid, but they're not really giving you the benefits of a hybrid in the sense that you can get that traditional publishing experience with distribution into bookstores and libraries. But I do see a lot of traditional authors deciding, look, rather than struggle further with traditional publishing, I'm just going to work with this other company and pay for what I need. Joanna: Or authors who do a sort of combination of everything. I mean, Colleen Hoover has to be the biggest example, given that she started out self-publishing, and, in fact, I think she still does some books as an indie. She's got, I think, three different publishers as well, now. Obviously, she's surfing TikTok, and has sold more books than the Bible, I think, this this year, which is just kind of crazy. [NY Times.] And she's a classic example of someone who's just using multiple ways to market and multiple ways to reach people, using traditional publishing to reach more readers. A bit like James Patterson, basically ‘my own imprint' and ‘my own business.' So is this literally what authors have to have now? Is there room for the author who does not want to do any marketing? Is that path still possible in traditional? Jane: Oh boy, it's really hard. I mean, I think that there are a handful of authors who have been very astute early on in, let's say, developing a Patreon, and they're able to get a small circle of supporters there to help fund their ongoing work. I'm thinking right now of Monica Byrne, who's a literary author who probably, you know, for most people in her position, there's no hope of making a living on book sales alone. So she knows she has to fill in the gaps with something else and she does it through Patreon. So is she actively marketing and promoting that? Maybe not, but she has these really key windows of opportunity, like when a book releases or if she gets a really good critical review, to really make sure that people know, “Look, my work depends on you supporting it. Now is the time to join my Patreon.” So even if you're not doing active marketing and promoting, you need to be thinking business model in terms of who, how, where are you going to get the support that you need. Brandon Sanderson is another one in that same circle as Colleen Hoover, where he now is credited with the most successful Kickstarter in history. $42 million he raised for, I think it was three books. Joanna: Four books. Jane: Four books that he wrote, I have to assume over the pandemic, that he did not give to his publisher, Tor. Now, fascinating, Tor is going to release those books in a print edition hardcover. They're not doing the eBook or the audio because I presume Sanderson will not grant them those rights. So I'm like all for this, but he's also something of — I don't want to necessarily say an outlier — but not just any author can go and have a $40 million Kickstarter. So he worked toward that over many years. Joanna: For sure. But what's interesting is Kickstarter, Patreon, a lot of people earning a couple of $1,000 for a release. And given the numbers we quoted earlier about what you can get potentially, with a book, I think the model might work. This year I did my first sell direct first. I sold direct only for a month, and then only after I'd done all my direct sales, then I put the book up on Amazon, Kobo, Apple, print, all of that. And next year, I'm going to double that. I'm going to do a Kickstarter, followed by a direct month on my Shopify store, and again, only then put it up everywhere else. So essentially taking the biggest bite of the cherry, where I pay the lowest percentage to other people, before then releasing it. And like, that's the model Sanderson did there. But still putting it everywhere, just putting it everywhere much later on. [This is the Creator Economy model, see my course for more details.] So, I mean, I just want to ask you about that too, though, because what really annoys me about some of these traditional media studies is that they don't see any of this stuff. They are comparing traditional book sales on, say, Amazon, with independent authors. But they don't see things like KU Borrows, they don't see direct sales, or Kickstarter, or Patreon, or subscription models. They don't see this. So is it that they don't see it? Or are they deliberately ignoring this other market? Jane: I think so much of it is, well, anecdotal, and not tracked by the industry sources they're paying attention to, whether that's AAP or NPD BookScan, or whatever. And I think there's recognition that the creator economy, if one accepts that term, that this is very active, that authors are using it, that it's affecting every single industry, not just books. I think they recognize that, but I'm not quite sure how much they understand especially when you just look at digital sales, how much of the pie has migrated over to independent authors. It was very recently that the head of Kobo, Michael Tamblyn, talked about how independent authors represent a whole other Penguin Random House for that company in terms of sales. [You can watch the entire conversation from Frankfurt Book Fair 2022 here.] And, to me, no surprise, because I've been observing this segment of the industry for so long. But again, when you state that out in public to the average person, their mind is blown. And it seems like we shouldn't be having that same conversation anymore. It is a little frustrating to keep having that conversation. Joanna: It's been over a decade we've been talking about this! Jane: It is a curious thing. And certainly I do think there are publishers who are very strong, like in romance, or in other genre fiction areas. I think they know and understand, but no one wants to talk about self-publishing eating their lunch. So it's, you know — I can understand. Joanna: I predict we're going to see studies saying that traditional publishing is taking back market share in these areas. But what's actually happening is those sales have gone direct, or they're on subscription models, or they're just not measurable. But let's come back to business models. You are a nonfiction author. And it's really important for nonfiction authors, and very more lucrative, in fact, to have these multiple streams of income. And one of your revenue streams is The Hot Sheet, which is a fantastic paid newsletter for authors and publishers, which I subscribe to, and I highly recommend to people listening that you subscribe to The Hot Sheet. It's great. So I wanted to ask you, as this is something I'm considering, I mean, I've had an email list since 2008. When I got started was when I started my newsletter. But it's not been paid, and I have considered doing a paid newsletter. What are your tips for those writers who might want to add a paid newsletter to their business? And also, why didn't you use Substack? Jane: Well, that's the easy question to answer. Substack wasn't around when I launched Hot Sheet. Now, if I were starting today, it would make a ton of sense to go there first. Now that I have my own system set up, it makes no sense to switch and give up 10% of my proceeds because my costs are super low. So there is a point at which if you get really successful on Substack, you will probably want to move over to your own turf. But I think Substack is very attractive when you're starting out because they have a built-in recommendation system, and they're trying to build this community around the people who write there, and so you can really benefit from the cross-promotional opportunities. That aside, before you even think about going there, whether it's on Substack or something else, you have to think about what you already do for free that can act as lead generation to that newsletter. And Joanna, you've got so many things, like I don't think this will be an issue for you. But you have to get people aware of what you do, and then you kind of level them up into paying over time. So there might be a free version of the newsletter, that's like the dead easy option, and it's what most people do. It's not terribly imaginative or creative, but it can work. If you have a blog, or a podcast, or you have social media activity, you need something that indicates the value you provide. And then if people are really motivated to get more of it, hopefully, they will pay for the newsletter. Okay, but here's the trap that I think people fall into. Sometimes the paid newsletter is just more of the same. People are so pressed for time, they don't necessarily want more, sometimes they actually want less. So you have to consider what holds value for the person who would pay. Sometimes it's actually as simple as they just want to support you. Other times they want the ability to interact and comment. And this is where Substack is very useful because you can restrict commenting or other features just to people who pay. So you have to have, first, a real understanding of who it is you're trying to attract and what's going to be motivating for them. I think where this gets really challenging for fiction authors. I've seen some people try to serialize in newsletter format or in email format. I don't know that it really works that well. Despite, what is it, Dracula, that's been so popular on Substack. Despite that, I think if you're just an unknown person without a classic, I think it can be tough. And I would probably be looking more at apps where people go to read stories, whether that's Vella, or Yonder, or Wattpad, or whatever. For nonfiction, folks, I mean, the only limit is really your imagination. And I've seen people use all sorts of strategies, whether it's you have to pay to interact, or you have to pay to be able to ask a question and have it addressed. You have to pay if you want access to the monthly roundtable or whatever. So you do have to think about it. I would encourage not just more, but different. Joanna: Well, it's interesting, I mean, your Hot Sheet, it's so much work. You do it every two weeks. I can't imagine you doing it any more often than that because you put a lot of work into it. And I guess that is the question. It's money for time, which is if you stopped doing that, we'd stop paying, basically. So it is really dependent on you, as a curator, as a creative, because you do a lot of longer articles. And I know how much information you consume. I mean, I do the same. We both do look at similar things. But your in-depth information, I always read the whole of your email, I mean, because it's so good. And that's what holds me back, and the question for most authors is, would I be better off writing? As Kristine Kathryn Rusch says, and what she means is, would I be better off writing another book? What do you think in terms of that money-for-time equation? And what type of personality does a paid newsletter suit? Because it's a very different way of writing, isn't it? Jane: It is. My particular newsletter, The Hot Sheet, is very transactional in the way that you expressed. Like, if I stopped doing it, people will stop paying. They're not paying it just out of good feelings for me, they're expecting a benefit. Now, I have seen some paid newsletters and some paid efforts that are, in fact, more about support. I want to support what this person's mission is or what they're attempting to do in the community. And in those cases, people will be very forgiving. But I modeled The Hot Sheet on, I'm on a schedule, I promise to deliver something every two weeks, and it's going to be meaningful and worth your time. And I don't expect you to pay me if I don't deliver. Now, the good thing about The Hot Sheet is that it's scalable. So the more people I get, then obviously the more profitable it is. It doesn't take me any more time to write for 2000 than 200, so that's the good news. But I have seen a lot of instances of burnout because the newsletter ends up being this thing on top of everything else. Maybe it's because it's the new shiny and you're thinking, oh, well, you're influenced by trends and influencers who are talking about this. I mean, I pursued it before it was quite so sexy or trendy, and I really like the churn of it. Like, the worst thing for me is actually writing a book because requires this really long-term focus and effort. And I don't like going back over things again and again and again. So The Hot Sheet really suits me as a writer because it's so compressed. It's very deadline oriented. And once I'm done, it's on to the next thing. So maybe that can help some writers think about, if you do want a transactional newsletter, do you like that high churn? And if not, maybe think instead about a Patreon or something where it might be a little bit more about community support, and you're not locked into some sort of delivery schedule. Joanna: Thank you. That's actually really helped me. I've really been debating whether to do something on the AI side for creativity because that's something I like and because I have so much more information than I can share on this podcast that I pick up every weekend. Because it changes so fast, I thought, well, maybe that would suit more of a newsletter model. But some of the things you've said there really got me thinking, and I know people listening will think that's really useful. But I do want to talk about the future because you and I do share an interest in it. And in fact, we've known each other more than a decade, right? We met on Twitter, probably 2009, or something like that. So we've seen things come true, I guess. The rise of self-publishing, the rise of podcasting, I mean, we've seen a lot of things happen that we have commentated on and often picked up in advance. So I am definitely more techno-optimist than you, being quite bullish on things where you're more skeptical. And I think that's a personality difference, let alone anything else. What do you see coming in the next few years — a decade is probably too far — but what do you think are interesting trends? Jane: Well, artificial intelligence is just getting more amazing by the second. I mean, just in the last year, the strides made in AI-generated text, AI-generated art, AI-narration, like it has all just skyrocketed. Especially on the narration, I don't think I would have expected the voices to become as good as fast as they have. And I think we're going to see many more publishers, especially the smaller ones, academic ones, using synthetic voices to get into the audio market in a bigger way. And I think it's going to hugely benefit self-publishing authors, as well, who can't afford the production of a professional narrator. [More on your options for AI-narration here.] I don't think the professional narrators will be out of work whatsoever, they have plenty of work from traditional publishers. This is going to help get those smaller titles that don't justify the investment broaden their reach by getting into audio. The AI writing thing, I was probably more of a skeptic a few years ago. But seeing, again, just the development and the sophistication that's occurring, it's interesting. Again, I don't think writers are threatened. I think that we still care, as readers, about a person who's written this story. I mean, I could maybe be very provincial in this view, but I don't know that we want to read stories by AI. I guess we'll see.  I can see AI helping with brainstorming and doing things that are on the more tedious side that we might not want to do ourselves, helping when we're stuck. So that's also a really interesting way to think about what AI might do to the future of writing and publishing. What else? Well, I should pause there and see if there's a direction you want to go with that I haven't mentioned. Joanna: Yes, and obviously I've been talking about AI for a while. But even I am surprised by how far some of this is going. And again, as we record this, there are rumors of GPT-4, which is the next iteration of a generative text model, which will be, I think, will be very, very interesting. And again, like you, I don't believe that an AI, is going to 100% write a novel. I don't even know if it will ever be like that, certainly not in our lifetime. I think what's interesting is the percentage. If you have 100% human on one end and 100% AI on the other end, where will the slider go? How much is AI generated? And how much is human-directed? That is the tension. And I don't think traditional publishers, again, have thought about this and what that means. I mean, I've been advocating for a sort of data licensing model, where authors with works in copyright will get paid for licensing their books to these large models. And that might be what happens after some of the lawsuits that are going to be coming through. I mean, I don't think AI development will stop. What I would like to see is this kind of recompense for creators for training the models. I think that's a super interesting area, and perhaps the most important in terms of tools, because you know, you and I are recording this over Zoom, which didn't exist when we first met. There's so much technology that has enabled the business models of today. That is what I see for the next decade, is all these new tools, all these new places, all these new ways to connect, all the new ways to create. I see in a decade's time that things will be as different in 2032, as you and I here in 2022, things were so different a decade ago. It will be that much change. Jane: Yes. Hearing you talk about this, there are a few other things that I'm keeping an eye on. So one of them is, you mentioned, traditional publishers may not really be paying much attention. I really wonder what happens when like someone feeds the entirety of some famous authors backlist into an AI and they start generating new stories by that author, what are the courts going to say about that? I'm very curious to see what happens. Like if you pile all of Stephen King into an AI, can it generate a feasible Stephen King story out of it? I've also noticed Google is getting smarter about filtering out anything that's AI generated or like ranking it lower. So I've had questions about if I think AI will destroy the blogging community or just short-form writing of any kind. And I don't think so, at least not yet. Especially for blogs, I think this also applies to podcasts, we're reading or we're consuming to get someone's particular lens on the world, their perspective or attitude or voice. And so far, I'm not entirely — well, I haven't seen GPT-4 yet, but I haven't seen AI create that lens or voice that can be very compelling for people. And then the last thing, on the audio side, I am very curious to see how long Audible can hold out against AI-narrated books, which they currently don't allow. So when they start allowing them, I think that's going to be a huge deal. Joanna: Just to come back on that. The Stephen King load up all his books and then generate one — My thinking is that traditional publishers own the biggest data set. So you and I can both think of an imprint, a particular romance imprint, that has had contracts — we don't need to mention any names — but contracts where authors pretty much wrote to a specific market, and it was very prescribed. And in any kind of dataset, that kind of data would be very valuable. So I almost see the traditional publishers themselves, if they grasp this, could utilize their backlist and these tools to generate books. And I mean, how different is that than the ghostwriters writing in the names of dead authors, which we see all the time? So that would be one thing. The other thing on that Google finding AI-generated work, that annoys me so much because Google have their own AI-generating tools. And so it really kind of annoys me that they're doing that. But also, again, it's about this, if you just generate an article, and I've been using Lex. Have you seen Lex.Page? [Update: We recorded this before the release of ChatGPT which is far superior, so if you want to check anything out, check out ChatGPT!] Jane: I don't think I have. Joanna: It's really good. It's super, super good. And I just put in ‘seven tips for new authors' or something like that, and it wrote a whole article, but I could with just one click. And I was like, okay, that's actually pretty good. But I would need to change it, I would add my own voice to it. So again, it's about first draft writing, it's not a finished product. And I don't see how Google could tell if I then changed bits and bobs. It's like you upload a new edition of a book, and it has to be like 20% different or something to warrant being a new addition. So again, all of these things, I think are not 100% this or 100% that. They're all kind of on the way. Then coming back on Audible, I think they have a very strong narrator community right now. But again, as you say, at some point, it will tip over, and then I think they will have a tool, like Google auto narration, there'll be some kind of ACX audio tool, and as you say, it will kind of takeoff everywhere. And that's what Spotify are going to introduce as well, I believe. That is a rumor, but that's what I've heard. So again, is it just a case, for authors listening, is it just a case of if you have the rights to your IP, take advantage of the tools in order to just keep surfing this wave of change? Jane: Yes, absolutely. You might instinctively resist, I think it's in our nature to resist change. Just try and be open to what the tools can enable you to do. Joanna: So this is going out at the end of 2022. And as we look forward into 2023, I'm interested, Jane, after you've been doing this just as long as me, we've both been in this industry for so long — What are you up to in 2023? What have you got going on? Jane: Well, conferences are starting to come back, I think cautiously. And so I do expect to be getting around a little bit more. I'll be at Digital Book World in January, which is returning to New York City for the first time in quite a while. And Digital Book World, I have like, a really long history with because it was actually my publishing company that I worked for that started it while I was still there. So it's been kind of interesting to watch it evolve over the years. I like going to that conference, especially in January, because it helps me understand what's happening on the edges of media and publishing. The guy who organizes it, Bradley Metrock, does not follow a traditional publishing sort of program, he is really reaching into every corner of technology. So I think it helps keep your perspective fresh to not always be going to the book-focused conferences. But what else do I have going on? I mean, I'm going to continue what I've always been doing, which is offering classes and doing the newsletter. I am, as far as news items, I am looking to see who the next buyer is, or that steps up, for Simon and Schuster. It'll be interesting to see what happens with TikTok because it's been so important to lifting traditional publishing sales. And I mean, you and I have both been around long enough to see how things come and go. Will the TikTok effect lessen? Will there be — I don't know, sometimes things go sour when everyone sees what's working, and then everyone jumps on. Things get overcrowded or the system gets manipulated in some way. So I'm just really curious to see if the positive vibes stick around with TikTok. And of course, in the US, every time I bring it up, someone says, “Well, it's owned by China, how can you even suggest using it?” So there are also these privacy and concerns that come into play. And people actually still expect the US government might push it to be sold off, or I don't really understand the legal ramifications of that. But here we are. Joanna: Yes. Well as ever, I mean, what's so funny like with your blog, and your newsletter now and this podcast, we keep doing this because stuff keeps happening. It never stops. Like the moment I think, “oh, things are getting a bit stagnant,” then things kind of change again. That's what keeps us interested. So tell people where can they find you and The Hot Sheet and everything you do online. Jane: The best place to go is JaneFriedman.com. That links to everything that I do, the newsletters, the classes, the conferences and so on. Joanna: Brilliant. Thanks so much for your time, Jane. That was great. Jane: Thank you.The post Changes In Publishing With Jane Friedman first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Why might a first-time author choose to independently publish? Barnaby Jameson talks about his experience with his first historical novel, and why valuing intellectual property is critical for authors to understand. Plus tips for self-publishing and marketing. In the intro, Draft2Digital distributing to Smashwords store [D2D], expansion of Google Play Books auto-narration into more countries, and multiple voices per audio production, with more detail in episode 642; 3 surveys on author income [ASA; CREATe UK; Written Word Media] and why you need to choose your path. Get 33% off my ebooks, audiobooks and courses for the rest of 2022. Use coupon 2022 at checkout at CreativePennBooks.com (ebooks and audio, not print), and/or TheCreativePenn.com/learn for courses. Valid until the end of 2022. Today's show is sponsored by Ingram Spark, which I use to print and distribute my print-on-demand books to 40,000 retailers including independent bookstores, schools and universities, libraries, and more. It's your content—do more with it through IngramSpark.com. Use promo code PENN at checkout for 1 free book upload, print, ebook, or both, if uploaded at the same time—until December 31, 2022. Barnaby Jameson is an English barrister specializing in terrorism and counterterrorism. His first novel is Codename: Madeleine, a historical espionage thriller. 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 Research for writing historical fiction The challenges of switching to fiction as a non-fiction expert — especially with writing dialogue Deciding to use a pen name vs your own name The benefits of self-publishing — and the importance of valuing your intellectual property Becoming the CEO of your own creative endeavor Publishing services for self-published authors — and why Barnaby recommends White Fox as a premium publishing partner. [More in my episode with White Fox here.] Different platforms and methods for marketing your book You can find Barnaby Jameson at BarnabyJameson.com Shareable image generated by Joanna Penn with Midjourney. If you need help self-publishing, check out my free ebook, Successful Self-Publishing, also available in print and ebook. Transcript of Interview with Barnaby Jameson Joanna: Barnaby Jameson is an English barrister specializing in terrorism and counterterrorism. His first novel is Codename: Madeleine, a historical espionage thriller. So welcome to the show, Barnaby. Barnaby: Thank you, Joanna. It's a great pleasure to be here. Joanna: Oh, I'm excited to talk about this. So first up, you are a busy guy. You're a barrister with important cases. So what got you interested in writing fiction? And why write a historical novel? Barnaby: Yes, I am quite a busy guy. My life is one of extremes. And so sometimes I'm probably the busiest man in the kingdom if I'm in the heat of a major terrorist case. But then I do, because I'm now a King's Counsel, get breaks between cases. And so I can then find myself between cases having a little bit of time, maybe to go to Greece where I like to write, to have a bit of time to myself to do some writing. So it's kind of, in my life, it's feast or famine. Barnaby Jameson, in his barrister's wig. Photo used with permission from barnaby jameson Joanna: And why a historical novel? Because I guess most people would say, “oh, well, why don't you just write a terrorism thriller?” Because that's what you know all about. Why historical? Barnaby: Yes, that's an entirely fair question. And maybe the terrorist blockbusters will come, but I think I'd have to hang up my wig first because I can't write them while I'm currently in practice. In answer to your question, I've always been interested in history. I read history, rather haphazardly at Cambridge, but it's probably the only subject that I showed any degree of interest in as a student. I've got a particular interest in World War Two because I come from a post-war generation, but it's clearly a seismic event that I think we're still coming to terms with. And of course, it's moving now from living memory into the history books. I've got a personal connection because my grandfather on my mother's side was an airman serving in Ethiopia in World War Two and also an intelligence officer, moonlighting for something called the Special Operations Executive. And my book is inspired by an agent of the SOE. Joanna: Interesting. So apart from that personal connection, how have you done your research? Because readers of historical fiction can be very finicky about what is exact. Barnaby: You're absolutely right. And when my book was edited, every single historical assertion or description was challenged at every stage. And you're right, historical fiction writers (and readers) do not suffer fools gladly. I read effectively the official history of the Special Operations Executive, written by an ex-serving SEO soldier during the war called M.R.D. Foot, who's since died. And then I read a series of biographies of the various characters in the book whose stories I have fictionalized, but they are based 90% on real people. Joanna: So your writing process — obviously as a barrister, you do a lot of writing as part of your job — but writing fiction is quite different. What did you learn about this different type of writing? How did you have to change your process? Barnaby: One of the strange things about criminal work, which is the work that I do, is that it's probably more like fiction writing than any other part of the law. For the simple reason that in a criminal case, there is an opening speech by the prosecution and then there are closing speeches from both sides. A case is a little bit like a story. It's about an event that took place sometime in the past, and is recreated in court, and the prosecution has to persuade the jury that what happened in a certain way. And the defense obviously have a job to try and dismantle that narrative. As somebody that mainly prosecutes in quite big terrorist cases, it is more like writing a short novella. And so some of my opening speeches have been up to 25,000 – 30,000 words. And in the neo-Nazi cases I've been prosecuting recently, there's a throwback to Nazi history. And I'm obviously writing about the Nazi period in my book. And so actually, in my case, the writing in my work is actually more enmeshed with my fiction writing than perhaps would be the case if I was any other type of barrister. Joanna: I guess that's, as you say, that's the story angle. But you're essentially, I guess, performing a monologue at that point. Whereas in a novel, I think one of the hardest things for new writers is dialogue. So it's conversations between characters that seem real because often they're not in whole sentences and that kind of thing. So were there challenges in the actual writing of fiction that you particularly noticed? Barnaby: Yes, and dialogue is one that you rightly alight on. And again, in a curious way, I think my work has actually helped with dialogue because sometimes I have to look at lengthy interviews between the suspect and the police, which is sometimes just pages and pages of dialogue, it's questions and answers. And then in court, when I'm asking questions of a witness or a defendant, that is a type of dialogue. And so I think one's ear for dialogue, even with all sorts of different individuals, expert witnesses, defendants, becomes quite sharp. But I think there is a bigger question in what you ask or what I interpret as something that I found difficult, which is finding your voice, basically, as a novelist as opposed to a prosecutor. And I didn't find that at all easy. Just for me, it just came with an awful lot of practice rereading and rewriting what I had written. And eventually, I think I found my voice, but I suspect my readers will judge that for themselves. Joanna: Also, I think it will emerge over time. I mean, when you were beginning your legal career, you might have had 10% of the voice you have now. And I feel like as you develop, if you carry on with fiction writing, which I know you are, then that will be something that also emerges. Voice is like a strength. Any kind of strength comes from practice and confidence that you build up. You can't help but build up over time, right? There's no way someone in year one of a legal career is as confident and good as someone in year 20, for example. Barnaby: One would hope that that would be the case, Joanna. No, you're absolutely right about that. It comes with confidence, practice, and also, I think it comes down to the old-fashioned idea that unless you've done something I think it's for 10,000 hours, you're not really going to master it. So I think it does take, as we all know, an enormous commitment. But when you find your feet and find your voice, it's wonderful, as you know. Joanna: This is a really interesting discussion because I know a lot of very smart people like yourself, who are experts at writing essentially nonfiction, and they really struggle with almost the difficulty of switching into fiction because the skills are so different. And there's almost this blow to the ego as you realize there's so much you have to learn, even though you thought that you were an expert in some of these things. And I mean — How have you dealt with essentially becoming a beginner again? Whereas in your career, you're at the top of your career, now you're kind of going to the bottom of a fiction ladder, which is super hard. Barnaby: It's really difficult. And I think that the process of writing is humbling. The process of writing and then showing it to other people, as in readers, is doubly or triply humbling. And I had to slightly hold my breath over the summer because I published, as you know, under my own name, see how my writing was going to go down. I have to say, it's been, to some extent, quite a nerve-wracking process. But when I started to get the response that I've had from readers and bloggers and critics, I was able to let out a small sigh of relief. But it's very difficult going, as you say, like snakes and ladders, right the way down to the bottom rung. But I have found that on the sort of other side of the mountain, having now got my book out and published, it's really heartening and wonderful to see people actually enjoying my work, even though I am a rookie novelist, as you say. Joanna: And as you said, you published it under your own name. So this is your name, and I mean, that is an interesting decision because, of course, if people Google you, you come up in different circumstances, I guess. So why did you make the decision to publish under your own name? Barnaby: I took that decision because I was comfortable with what I was writing not, in a sense, interfering with my work. You mentioned a moment ago writing a terrorist thriller. I think if I was writing a thriller that was intimately connected with some of the cases that I've done, then I think I would have had to have published under a different name. And I probably would have had to have, as I said, hung up my wig.  I think that the writing I've done is sufficiently disassociated from my day-to-day job. But having said that, I have borrowed certain things from my work, as in one of the characters in the book is based on the barrister Francis Suttill, who was an SOE agent who was sent to Paris and ran one of the biggest SOE-backed resistance networks. He was a barrister who was half French and half English. And there are various scenes to do with Francis Suttill where he's having dinner at Lincoln's Inn or he's at court at the Old Bailey, where I'm actually able to use my experience as a barrister to make that authentic. And I think something would be lost, frankly, if I published under the name of Joe Bloggs. Joanna: Fair enough, it's a difficult decision. Okay, so let's get into the publishing side because you have a lot of connections in traditional media. You absolutely could have got a traditional publishing deal. So why did you decide to self-publish Codename: Madeleine? Barnaby: Thank you. I did have various publishing deals or offers that were made to me. And I was in the extremely fortunate position of having a choice. I had offers that were made to me through the traditional route, both through an agent and also through simply personal approach from me. So I was looking at the various offers that I had, obviously very grateful for them. And there are enormous upsides of publishing traditionally, as you know, but there are also some quite significant downsides. The first obviously, is that your rights go for a fairly small amount of money, given the amount of work that's gone into a book, but that's a common problem. But for me, there were two other factors which I had to take into account. The first was timing. Had I gone down the traditional route, the offers that I had meant that the book would not have come out until probably autumn 2024. And just in terms of my work, I had a juncture this year. This was kind of the now or never moment for me. And so the timing was something that really pushed my consideration. And the other thing was this, I'm lucky enough to have a friend of mine called Olivia Williams, who's a great actor. She's just been playing Camilla in the crown. And she basically volunteered herself wisely, or unwisely, to become the narrator. And it was just talking to various people, that I realized that having the book read by somebody of Olivia's stature, was potentially quite valuable IP. So to that extent — I became actually quite cautious about handing over the rights for a paltry sum and actually hanging on to what was potentially some valuable IP. And so that really is what tipped me into the independent route at this stage. Joanna: Because of course, traditional publishing contracts now include eBooks, audiobooks and print. I mean, most of them are not letting audiobooks go separately, or eBooks go separately, right? Barnaby: You put your finger on it, Joanna. And I was worried, deeply concerned about ceding my sort of queen on the chessboard. And of course, once you've got an A list actor who has done one book, then there's a good chance that somebody else of her stature will read book two. I'm not going to give the name of the potential reader of book two, but it's somebody that we all would have heard of. Joanna: I love how you've leveraged your contacts in such a great way to go the independent route. And I think that's brilliant. But just coming back to what you said about valuable IP, so valuable intellectual property. And I mean, obviously you're a lawyer, you understand these contracts and the value of these things, but many authors don't. So how would you advise new authors listening, people who have never been offered any money for their writing, and in fact, you hadn't been offered money, I guess, for your fiction before this. How can writers look ahead to the future value of their intellectual property when they're completely unproven? Barnaby: It's a very difficult question. And obviously, as a rookie writer, if you submit your work to an agent, an agent likes it and takes it to a publisher, 90% of you is going to be so thrilled that you're going to be published, that that is going to be the main driver of your emotion. The fact is that somebody is going to pay you, maybe I don't know, a small number of thousands of pounds for the rights and will then publish your book. But of course, the contracts, as you've rightly observed, are stacked in favor of the publisher and against the author. I mean, that's just the way of the world. And I think what's changed now with the independent route, is that people in my position, who are fortunate in having the choice of either traditional or independent, are able to stand back and say, “Well, yes, I'd love to be published. And I'm so glad you, the traditional publisher, feel this is publishable. But I'm actually going to go about this in a different way.” And I picked up from your book on book marketing, How To Market a Book, one of the avenues open to you as an indie author if you decide to write more than one book and you write a series, is that you do have the possibility, if it works out, of becoming as it were, the next Joanna Penn. That is to say, the CEO of their own creative endeavor. I think for me, certainly, that is very exciting. And I've got more books in the pipeline and I will review the position perhaps after book two or three and decide whether it's best to stay independent, or whether it's best to hire some of the publications off for traditional printing. So I'm just going to sort of watch and see. But I think for somebody going into the profession, they have to ask themselves some hard questions. Are they going into it purely for the love of the writing, and sod the money? Or are they thinking, “I'm going into this because I'm doing it for the writing, but I'm also thinking about a commercial career here”? And if it's the latter, then I think that there's a strong argument for being quite reluctant to cede all of your IP to a traditional publisher for a sum. Joanna: I love that. I love ‘CEO of your creative endeavor.' I think that's wonderful. And certainly, I guess, that's the route I've chosen. And so I know you wanted the book to be the best it could be and you were absolutely concerned with quality. And your book could stand next to a traditionally published book anywhere. What publishing services did you use? Any lessons learned or tips for authors who are just starting out self-publishing? Barnaby: Yes, I think the first thing to say is to underscore what you just said, which is that I think an independently published book should be able to sit on a bookshelf at the same standard of, or better, than a traditionally published book. I mean, that was the test that I set for myself. And the way that I went about it was, first of all, I had it edited within an inch of its life. I went to the Ink Academy in London, which is a wonderful service. It does creative writing courses, but it also has on its books some very good editors. And somebody called Marina Kemp, who heads up the Ink Academy, she took a look at some samples of chapters and she said, “Right, I know just the editor who I think is going to enjoy this book, and you'll enjoy working with him.” I will always be thankful to Marina because she put me together with a guy called Phil Connor. And he edited my book and he edited it just so unbelievably well. And a piece of writing he produced at the end, which was a sort of critique of the book, was almost publishable in its own right. It was so perceptive and brilliant. And he's one of the people at the beginning of my book, along with you, to whom a dedication is made, at least as mentioned. And so it went to him, and it then went through all the other editing processes. And at that stage, I got in touch with somebody called John Bond, who I think you know. Joanna: Yes, he's been on the show a couple of times. From White Fox. Listen to JOhn Bond from white fox in this episode, click the image for more info. Barnaby: He's the CEO of White Fox, which produces, I think, very high-end independently published books. I mean, they are absolutely beautiful books. My experience of White Fox is that they have extremely exacting criteria, perhaps even more exacting than some publishers that I've come across. One has to go through a quality threshold in order to publish through White Fox, because as John said to me, I'm putting my name, along with yours as it were, on the spine of the book. It's White Fox publishing Barnaby Jameson.  That turned out to be a bit of a marriage made in heaven. There are other barristers who publish through White Fox. One is Bob Marshall-Andrews KC and the other is somebody called Nigel Lithman KC, who's a judge who's just written a book about being a judge. And so there was already a relationship between barristers and judges and White Fox. And I found the team at White Fox extremely careful, with great attention to detail. And the book went out, as you know, for any number of different edits after the first edit. But then going back to what you said about publishing under my own name. I also sent it to members of my profession, in particular Imran Mahmood, who's written You Don't Know Me, which has become a Netflix series, just to make sure that he was content along with all the other editors that this was the right thing to do under my own name. And so it had input from any number of different individuals, as well as writers who are friends who also read the manuscript very generously. Joanna: So it's a real collaborative process. And as you said, I think you were more rigorous than — I mean, a traditional publishing house will be rigorous, but they also have a ton of other authors to work with, and they have a process and you go in the queue. But what you did is you worked with, like you said, so many different editors and so many different people to help you. I think you did an incredible job there. So did White Fox do your eBook and your print book? Barnaby: Yes, basically, they did everything. And they helped me sort out the audiobook as well. I mean, there you've got that sort of tie in with the studio, but they were deeply involved in getting the studio and everything else organized. I mean, Olivia herself was a great help with that. But as you say, it was basically one big collaboration involving a lot of extremely generous people with their time and as people to help me with the print, the eBook and the audiobook. Joanna: So was there anything that surprised you or that you were like, “oh, my goodness, I just did not realize that” or — Was there anything that you learned that was unexpected or surprising in self-publishing? Barnaby: I think having read How to Market a Book, I had a reasonable grip on the importance of marketing. But I have to say, in the last few months, I have really felt how much attention really needs to go into pushing your book forward, pushing it into the limelight at every opportunity. I'm particularly lucky because I'm a barrister, but there are other barrister writers within the profession who have put their shoulder to the wheel and have helped me. And so I've had a review from The Secret Barrister, who I think you would have come across.  Joanna: He's famous in the UK. Barnaby: Exactly. He's tweeted about my book. Somebody called Rob Rinder, otherwise known as Judge Rinder, he's a barrister. He's also did a bit for the back of my book, he put a bit on the blurb. And Imran Mahmood, who I mentioned a moment ago, they've really helped me with the marketing of the book. I found Twitter, I know it's going through some throws at the moment, but I found Twitter to be a very benign and effective forum, actually, for putting my book out into the world. On the plus side, the one thing that I think has surprised me to my delight, are some of the book bloggers, many of them habituate the Twittersphere. The people that did my publicity, Midas, they sent me on, I think what they call it, a blog tour. And so apart from getting reviews from established authors, like Giles Foden, I also had the book go on a blog tour. It was when the reviews started coming in from the bloggers that I really was quite overwhelmed. I was completely blown away that they obviously really felt very deeply about the book. It was really the emotion and passion of the bloggers I found absolutely extraordinary. And of course, one blogger will quite often pass the book on to another blogger. And so some other people have sort of come on the bandwagon. And that has produced a little bit of a head of steam. And just today, a blogger gave away two copies of my book as part of a competition that he was running. And I was only too happy to help him out. Joanna: You've done some great things. I mean, calling in favors and using relationships, that's just a core piece of the initial stage of marketing. You mentioned social media there, you've mentioned book blogging and a PR team that you use. Now I know people listening are like, you know, “but Barnaby, earlier you mentioned about the importance of valuable IP.” How is your profit and loss looking? You don't have to give us numbers. But it seems like for a book one, this is an investment, and this is not necessarily a profit-making venture as yet. Barnaby: Yes, that's a fair comment. I mean, looking at the numbers, I haven't yet recouped the outlay. But I'm not a million miles away. And I think a lot of that actually is driven by the sales of the audiobook more than anything else, you know, from a profit point of view, is the main revenue driver. And so it is an investment.  I think for any rookie writers out there, obviously, I wouldn't advise against selling the farm to go down the route that I've done. I've obviously put some investment into this. But I'm quietly confident, I would say, that in time, I will find myself moving from the red into the black. And there was just one other comment that I was going to make, if I may, lest I forget, which is just going back to social media and Twitter, but it taps into marketing generally. The one thing that I found in the last few weeks that people have really responded to very well are our little short films which I've put onto my Twitter feed. And I've got a talented young filmmaker called Gabriel da Costa who's just put together a two-minute film which is of the prologue of my book being read, and you can hear Olivia Williams's voice. And I've also got my technical guru and mentor, which is my 12-year-old boy, who's also done some compilation films of Olivia Williams, which again, you can see on my Twitter feed. There seems to be something about this sort of two-minute film that people can't quite resist watching. And at the moment, I've now set up a TikTok account, although it's a fairly young TikTok account. And again, I think if authors have got any expertise in this area of putting together short films or they know whiz kids who can, that to me, I would say, has been a very valuable part of the marketing. And just looking on Twitter today, more than 200 views of the short film that's only been up for a few days, which is quite a lot for Twitter. Joanna: It's so great to hear about all the different things you're doing. And of course, you said, you're almost in the black. But you're also planning a series. So tell us about the series? What will you do differently next time? How are you going to build on what you've started? Barnaby: Well, thank you. The series is called The Resistance Series. And part of that was actually going to this very good editor, Phil, and talking to various people. And at the beginning, my book one was giant. And then I'd realized I'd really written two or even three books. And so it's been spread out into a series of potentially six or eight books. And so with each book, what I'm doing is taking one particular SOE agent as the protagonist. You may meet them briefly in book one and then they become the protagonist of book two. You may then meet the protagonist of book two briefly, and then they become the protagonist of book three. Each title will have the word “codename” in the title. And book two, which is being written at the moment, is called Codename: God-Given. I think in terms of doing things differently, I'm going to have a winter launch next year as opposed to a summer launch, only because I just think it'll just be a little bit different. I think I will really up my game in terms of short films. And so what I would like to do is to have a short film going out on my Twitter feed, maybe every week when the book first comes out. Or what I'm thinking of doing at the moment is taking one character from the book and then making a short film about them. And then week two, you get an introduction to another character. And as I said, there's something about the 90-second film that people sort of can't resist. And so I think, really, it's just trying to build on some of the small successes that I've had this year, building my relationship with very passionate book bloggers, and then building my followers on social media. You know, I haven't at the moment got a mass following because I didn't really start this until I started to take my books out. But I would hope that my following, like yours, will grow as I grow as a writer. I'd like to beef up my website and rejig it so that potential readers can sign up. And I've got a bit of work to do with my web designer. But I think in answer to your question, it's really building on the foundations that I've laid this year. Joanna: So have you got an email list? Have you been building an email list from that book one? Barnaby: The answer is, I have to slap myself on the wrist here, Joanna. That's one part of my website that I've actually got to organize. And so what I will have, as of next week, is a system whereby if you sign up onto the reading list, you basically get a copy of your own of the prologue. But I've just got to organize that with my web designer. So that's one thing that I'm a little bit behind on. And so I hope that by next year, I will have a reading list that's been built from now, effectively. [Note from Joanna: I use ConvertKit for my email list. It's really easy to use and set up.] Joanna: Well, I can actually hear some people are quite relieved that you haven't done everything perfectly! Because I mean, sometimes people feel like there's so much to do, and there is so much to do even if you're working with outsourced services. But still, you have to manage everything, right, with your job and your family and all of this. So the fact that you managed to not do everything is completely normal. Barnaby: Thank you, thank you for saying that, Joanna. And by no means have I done everything perfect. And as you rightly observed, I mean, you're learning all the time. I didn't know what Amazon KDP was at the very beginning. I didn't know anything. And in a sense, it's a relief to know how little I did know. Had I at the time realized how little I knew, who knows what I would have done?  I think if you're willing, as you say, to learn and just to go out into the world, I found that the response has been positive. Because I think people respect the fact, and admire the fact, that you're putting yourself out there, your book is an expression of your soul in the pages of a book. And I think if you've got the courage to do that, people respond. I mean, you know this as an established author, and when they respond very viscerally, it makes everything worthwhile. Joanna: You work in a very traditional industry. You've mentioned your wig and a lot of people are listening outside of the UK. I'll have to get a picture of you and put it on the show notes with all your gear on. But I mean, it's a very traditional industry and people respect tradition. So what's been the response? You mentioned there that you have had a lot of great responses and friends helping — But have people looked down on you at all for self-publishing? Do you feel like the so-called “stigma” is just not there anymore? Barnaby: I don't think it's really occurred to people, if that's the honest answer. I mean, I think that unless somebody really knows about books. If a reader is somebody, you know, from the publishing world, the first thing they'll do is really turn to the first page and see who the publisher is. But I think most readers, if they see a well-produced book, and some blurb on the back and some reviews, I don't think that they actually are really that concerned about which route you took it to market.  I think probably that's what's changed within the publishing industry. And I think that the traditional publishers, to some extent, should be looking over their shoulders. Because people like me coming along, they don't have two years to wait around for their book to go through the system. And so we're in a sense, jumping the queue. And I think it's, in a way, quite healthy for the traditional publishing industry to realize that there is another way open for authors like me. And I think competition is good. Joanna: Absolutely. And then final question. You mentioned earlier being the CEO of your own creative endeavor and going into the profession. So where are you going to be in 10 years' time? Is this the way you're going? Are you going to hang up your wig and become a full-time writer? Is that in the future? Barnaby: Well, I think the truthful answer is I'm not quite sure yet. What I would say, is that as a counterterrorist prosecutor, of living a life of such extremes, that it's not really something you can do forever. And most of my colleagues have moved on into the judicial space or some other space because it's really not a sustainable life, although it's a very rewarding one. But in 10 years' time, I think if things go to plan and I've got six or eight books out by that stage, and I have a miniature creative empire, I think I'd be very happy with that. And I take an enormous feather out of your cap and a leaf out of your book. And if I could emulate even a tiny amount of what you've done in this space, I think I'd be very, very happy and rewarded. Joanna: You're very sweet. Where can people find you and Codename: Madeleine and everything you do online? Barnaby: Okay, probably the first port of call is going to be BarnabyJameson.com. It sometimes comes out as BarnabyJamesonWriter.com. That will give you a pointer exactly where to go. There's a button you can click for Amazon and other outlets as well. But the main internet outlets are Amazon.com and Apple. Joanna: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Barnaby. That was great. Barnaby: Thank you, Joanna. It's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you for having me.The post Choosing Your Route To Publication With Barnaby Jameson first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How can authors use generative AI as a co-writing tool? How can creatives approach AI possibilities with curiosity rather than fear? Charlene Putney talks about writing with LAIKA. In the intro, ChatGPT, thoughts on the GitHub Co-Pilot case [WIRED]; and why digital abundance is an opportunity for curious creatives, not a threat. I also mention my book, Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, and Virtual Worlds: The Impact of Converging Technologies on Authors and the Publishing Industry, and you can find more interviews and resources on my Future of Creativity page. This podcast is sponsored by Written Word Media, which makes book marketing a breeze by offering quick, easy and effective ways for authors to promote their books. You can also subscribe to the Written Word Media email newsletter for book marketing tips. Charlene Putney is an award-winning writer, professional speaker and university lecturer. She's also the co-creator of LAIKA, an AI-powered creativity tool. 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 people with arts backgrounds need to get more involved in AI AI-powered creativity tools for writers Using your own backlist to train an AI brain Tips for approaching AI tools as an author Copyright, bias, and plagiarism Data licensing and how fine-tuning models might benefit creatives The importance of personal branding, author voice, and connection with readers in a future of digital abundance You can find Charlene Putney at AlphaChar.com and on Twitter @alphachar. You can try LAIKA at WriteWithLAIKA.com Header image by Joanna Penn on Midjourney. Transcript of Interview with Charlene Putney Joanna: Charlene Putney is an award-winning writer, professional speaker and university lecturer. She's also the co-creator of LAIKA, an AI-powered creativity tool. So welcome to the show, Charlene. Charlene: Thanks so much, Joanna. It's really great to be here. Thanks for inviting me. Joanna: Oh, I'm excited to talk to you about this. So first up – Tell us a bit more about your background at the intersection of creativity and technology. Charlene: Sure, so I am quite old now. I'm 42, so I've been around doing a lot of things for a long time. I started out my “career” – I'm doing inverted commas here – studying ancient Near Eastern languages in university. And then after that, I wasn't quite sure what to do next, but then they had openings for people to work in Google in Dublin, where I'm from. And I applied there, and I worked there for the next almost five years. And then from there, I went and worked in Facebook. And weirdly, my ancient Near Eastern languages helped me out a lot because I was able to use those to work on product teams with right to left languages. So I worked in tech there for about almost 10 years. Then I really wanted to do something a bit more creative with my time. And I had been doing a lot of experimental writing classes and I was writing a little sci-fi novel myself. And so I basically left Facebook to just devote myself for a few months to writing. After those few months had gone and I realized that I still needed to earn money and pay the rent, I started trying to figure out how I could actually use my writing to do that. And that's how I got into writing for video games. So after a few small projects in and around Dublin, I ended up working for Larian Studios on much bigger games, big role-playing games, like Divinity: Original Sin 2 and Baldur's Gate 3. And from there, I started speaking at different games events all around the world, and one of them was here in Copenhagen, where I live now. And there I met Martin Pichlmair, who's my partner on LAIKA and my partner in life. And together, we've basically been just making wild experiments with writing ever since. So that's where I am. Joanna: That's awesome. And just to say, I'm older than you. So I'm 47. Charlene: Oh nice. I never meet people older than me. Joanna: But also my degree is in theology, and so I did ancient Greek, and studied Israel before the exile, and some ancient Near Eastern stuff and I started out doing Arabic. So I kind of feel like we have quite a lot in common in our background, but not computer science, right? And I think this is so important. Let me then ask you that question, essentially you've got an arts background – How does your arts background help you in this technological world full of people who do computer science? Charlene: That's a really good question. So in my undergrad, I also did philosophy. And I think that part of what has helped me a lot, like in all of the tech world and also in the games industry, and now also coming into the AI industry where I've been for the last year or so, is this feeling of, it's okay to stop and slow down and think about things before rushing into solutions. I've kind of always been the person in the room who's going, okay, wait a minute, let's just think about this other part first before we implement something. And I'm sure you can see now, especially with the ongoing downfall of Twitter that we're all witnessing every day, that is something that is not super common in the tech world. So I feel like that's one of the things that arts has helped me to bring into my career. Joanna: Yes, well, we're recording this in the middle of November 2022. So by the time people listen to this, we don't know what might have happened with Twitter. But it's interesting, just staying on the creativity side, so I feel pretty enmeshed in the AI space as well. And I often feel like there aren't enough – when I say creative, I mean, obviously coding is very creative. So there are lots of coding creative people in the room, but there aren't so many, let's say ‘artists'. So you mentioned writing a science fiction novel, and I feel like the visual art at the moment is obviously really interesting with AI. But this sense of ‘are we missing artists and arts people in this tech space'? And how can arts people get involved when they feel like the AI space is just too techie? Charlene: Yeah, I think that's a really nice point, Joanna. So actually, like when we started making LAIKA, it was kind of coming from that place of, my partner is a programmer, like he has a computer science degree. And so when we would make our experiments, he would set up all these notebooks for me in Jupiter and Collaboratory, and he would write code programs for me to mess around with and then I'd be able to work with them because I don't have a coding background. What we really wanted to do was make this accessible to normal people who don't want to fiddle around with knobs and buttons and find their way through that. And that's one of the things I've really found very strange about so much of the tools out there, is that like even for example, Midjourney, which is my favorite of the image generation tools and I use it all the time for illustrating my yoga workshops, illustrating pieces from LAIKA, is that like it’s in this Discord server, and you also need to understand how to make the prompts. And all of the things about it just requires so much personal investigation and knowledge about how to do things. Like even just being on the Discord server, I tried to keep my dad interested because he's really into lots of different types of tech, and then the Discord thing, he just couldn't get into the Discord part. So there is that, I think there is just a barrier of entry to regular people like me, still at the moment, even with these excellent tools. So yeah, I hope that that becomes more accessible. And I'm sure it will because every tool, when it comes out at first, the early adopters need to jump through a few hoops and then people make it more accessible for the next ones who come along. Joanna: I totally agree with you. And I mean, what's so funny is I had gone on to Discord for various blockchain things, and I just hated it. And I was like, I'm not even going to use Discord, I'm just not going to go there. And then with Midjourney, I was like, well, I need to have a look at Midjourney. And now I'm in it every single day. Charlene: Yeah, same. Joanna: I will get over this problem with myself and Discord in order to use the tool. But I mean, it is a really interesting time. But let's talk about LAIKA –   Can you explain what is LAIKA, and why did you decide to create it? Charlene: Sure. So it's basically an AI-powered creativity tool for writers. It's specifically for like serious writers, we would say. So like professional writers, really serious hobbyist writers, people who have a chunk of writing already behind them basically, like who already have their own voice and their own way of writing. The way it came about was actually over the pandemic, myself and my partner would be sitting around the table together because we both be at home from work, working from home. And so we had a lot more time together to talk about our experiments and think about what we want to do next. And we made tons of experiments using GPT-2, using Google Colaboratory. And then we started thinking, “wouldn't it be so nice to show other writers how to do this?” So we started setting up these events online, like over Zoom, where we would show people, over a two and a half to three hour session, very, very step by step on how to upload their texts, how to train an artificial intelligence on their own writing, how to use these notebooks, and then how to decipher the results and pull them into something else. And so we got a great result from those and you could just see the magic in their eyes, the sparkle. But it was still spending three hours on a Wednesday evening trying to learn this stuff and then trying to hold the way that the code notebook works in your brain before you try and work on it again. So basically, we were just like, well, maybe we could make this very, very accessible. Like maybe we can take this and put it into a very friendly, intuitive and accessible format. And so that's what we basically did. So when you come to work with LAIKA now, you can train a brain, which is basically like fine-tuning an artificial intelligence using your own writing. So as I said, it's for writers who have a body of work. So you can basically come in, give us somewhere over 10,000 words of your own writing, we will fine tune your own personal GPT-2 model on that – we host our own GPT-2 on our own server – and then that'll always be there for you. And it will basically bounce back suggestions and ideas and thoughts to you, in your own voice using your own concepts. So that's what the idea is. That's where we've been going with so far. Joanna: It's so interesting. Obviously, I've tried loads of these different tools. And in fact, I did work with someone to train a GPT-2 model on my writing before I'd discovered yours. So I think this is a really interesting thing. But what I actually found by doing that is that I was kind of bored by my own brain. So what I did, like you mentioned this is an AI-powered creativity tool, and what I have kind of come to is that I initially thought I wanted more of my writing, but actually, I love the creative copilot or almost the sort of madness that having a GPT-3 or whatever brings because it's the fact that it's not my mind that is more interesting than being my mind. So talk about the different brains in LAIKA you can use other than your own work. Charlene: Sure. So yeah, that's also a really nice point. Because indeed, sometimes our own voice is not as inspiring as that of others. At the moment, we've uploaded a bunch of different brains into LAIKA, which are all based on works that I've taken from Project Gutenberg. So they're all in the public domain. So we have like, for example, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, we have Kafka, Dostoyevsky, Jane Austen, and you can basically use all of these. But our best one is Marcus Aurelius by far, he is just so good. No matter what you do with Marcus, he gives you a great answer. So I'm kind of obsessed with that. I will use my own brain, but then I will always find out what Marcus has to say about the same thing and sometimes take that instead because he's my favorite writing partner now. So yes, we found that we do a lot of live events at the moment. So like, we were just at the Royal Danish Academy the other night, and we were at the AdventureX conference in London last weekend. And when we're at these events, we basically do a live demo, where we use lots of different brains to kind of create a story or create a thing. Like for AdventureX, we made The Five Rules of Writing with LAIKA, which you can see on our ‘Write with LAIKA' Twitter account. But basically, there's so much joy in the audience, so much joy in the moment of like bouncing between different brains, and like starting one sentence with the mind of Robespierre and then finishing it up with H.P. Lovecraft. It's wild. And actually, another thing we've been doing is making combination brains. So myself and my partner are actually writing a little book at the moment together with a brain that we've made as a combination of Jane Austen, H.P. Lovecraft and a lot of really crappy free cryptocurrency eBooks. And we're making this like cosmic horror marriage plot about demons on the blockchain. And I think it's gonna be great. Joanna: That sounds awesome. I'm definitely interested in that. I often have demons in stuff I write. So there's a few things to come back on there. So you talked there about joy — we're both giggling away here — you've talked about magic, and sparkle and wild. And these are all words that make this sound amazing. And having used many of these models, I spend a lot of time being amazed and finding it super brilliant, but most writers are just scared and rejecting this out of hand. I've had, I'm sure you have too, but quite a lot of personal attacks and comments and emails that say, “Why are you talking about this? This is going to destroy writers,” and all of this. So what do you say to people who are scared about it? How should people approach these tools? Charlene: So yeah, another great question, Joanna. And the funny thing is, I don't get much vitriol, actually, at the moment. Fingers crossed, it doesn't start. Joanna: You might now, coming on the show! Charlene: But I suppose, I find that if a writer spends any amount of time writing with artificial intelligence, it's very, very clear, very, very quickly how much the human soul and creativity and spark is needed to kind of corral thoughts together and pull the pieces into a beautiful tapestry that the world will see as good writing. That without you, the writer, pulling something into it and taking it together, it isn't anything. And it never is. And I don't think it ever will be. I mean, maybe I'll be wrong, maybe there'll be amazing AI poets in 50 or 100 years. I feel like as soon as you start working with it, you start to see it's a paintbrush. It's a tool. It's like when we moved from writing with a pen to writing with a typewriter. It's like when you move from writing with a typewriter to writing in Google Docs. And now here, we have this thing to bounce off. So I suppose my experience is that like, I used to work in a very big writers room, there was seven of us. We all worked in the same Google Docs, we wrote over each other, we added comments to each other, we struck out each other's lines and put in new ones. And it was just this constant like hive mind way of working.  Then when I left the writers room, when I moved here to Copenhagen and was back writing by myself again, I was completely confronted with that fear of the blank page. Honestly, I hadn't really ever experienced that before to the same degree, because I completely missed having somebody to bounce off. And for me, that's what AI writing tools are, all of them. It's like, they're not replacing me, they're not replacing anything, what they are just doing is giving me something to bounce off. So I can be like, “Oh, yes, more like this,” or “Oh, no, I don't like that at all.” But even that's giving me a new direction to go in. So it's kinda like all those tricks that the old experimental writers used to work with, like cut-up technique, like the Dice Man method, all those things that the Surrealists used to try to pull out stuff from the unconscious. That's what we're getting. Joanna: It's almost like you prompt the AI with something, and it returns something back, and then that prompts your mind to come up with something else, and then you come up with a new thing and then re-prompt it. It's this iterative process. But to me, the writer, the artist, is the creative director.  Let's get into how writers make a living right now. We make money from licensing copyright, that's how we make money. So there are two things to address here. First of all, the issue of creating these models in the first place. So obviously these tools have been trained. I mean, you said you trained LAIKA on out of copyright works, but GPT-2 itself, and GPT-3, and Midjourney and all these have been trained on works available on the internet. And I just don't think we can say they are all out of copyright. I just can't see it for text, as well as images. How do we address the issue of the training data for models, given that the original creators are not being recompensed? Charlene: Hmm, okay. Yeah, that's a really juicy and spicy question. So I suppose another part of that is that the bigger the models get, the more of the content they're going to be taking from the world. So as far as we know, when we were working with GPT-2, we only work with GPT-2 at the moment because we want to be able to host our own models ourselves, so that we can give our users their own brains and have it in their own space. But with GPT-2 is that it was like trained on lots and lots and lots and lots of scraped internet data from around 2017, and a load of old books, I think called ‘The Pile'. And a lot, a lot of the content comes from things like Reddit posts, social media, anything that's out there and that's publicly available. So when it's being recombined in that way, that content, like the content of GPT-2 itself, doesn't really give you anything special. So if you try to write something with it, like you can't maybe write something really amazing with it. There's nothing that you're going to create out of it that somebody will be able to say, “oh, that's using my content,” or “that's doing something that was mine.” Whereas when you fine tune the work, then it is like honing. So I like to think of it like GPT-2 is basically the grammar. It knows where the words go, it knows how a sentence is constructed, it knows what the shape of the sentence or a phrase should be. And then we're filtering that through a particular writer's voice. And like we're very, very interested in following the law, and not in any way interested in being any kind of proto case for the new laws that are definitely going to be coming in the next few years around AI and copyright. So we are very strongly saying people should only use either your own content or content that you know to be in the public domain. And if anyone uploads content that is in copyright, I will take it down. So we have that and like, yeah, from our perspective, the GPT-2 is open source and we're just using it as a base grammar. However, you are kind of inching me into one of my – what's the opposite of a pet peeve? Joanna: Favorite topic? Charlene: Favorite topic, yeah, which is this compensation for the writers. Because one of the things we're really hoping to do in our next few months, like as we get ourselves with a brand, we've started doing this thing called shared brains. So you could basically, Joanna, take your brain, and upload it and share it with other people for them to use. What we want to do, is allow this to be a kind of a thing where IP holders can license out their brains. So let's, for example, say my dad's favorite author is Robert Ludlum, who has been dead for many years and yet still keeps writing books with the aid of ghost writers and additional writers. And how wonderful would it be if the estate of Robert Ludlum was to give us all of his content and then licensed that to us so that people who want to write just like Robert Ludlum would be able to pay a small fee that would go almost completely to the IP holder in order to access that, or that you or any other writer who has fans, who has people who want to write like them, can license their brains for a fee. Joanna: I love that you say that because two years ago, I wrote a book on AI and how it will impact publishing and authors and talked about this. I basically said, what I want is to collectively license blocks of IP. So if I said, for example, indie thriller authors. So indie authors control all of their rights. So this would be very hard with the publishing companies, probably, because they're quite resistant. But there's quite a lot of indie authors who would join together and create like, let's say, an action/adventure/thriller brain that would have the work of quite a lot of my friends. And why I put it with Blockchain is the ability to do micro payments and split that. Now obviously, it wouldn't need to be blockchain, but it was kind of thinking about how to do that without having to do other contracts and things like that. But with the idea there, the fact that we've both come up with this idea, gives me more hope because I just haven't seen a way to do that. But what you're talking about is exactly that thing. Essentially, it's data licensing, right? Charlene: Exactly. Like I say, it's something we actually hope to do in the next three months as we just get into the next phase of our project. Because we are currently in the process of turning ourselves into a commercial enterprise, but until last week, we were a research project as part of the IT University of Copenhagen working with research funding. So we are now out loose in the world, able to start monetizing and working with actual commercialization. And this is one of our main avenues that we're really keen on. Joanna: Well, yes, because the problem I found, even just with training my brain on LAIKA, is that I don't have enough words to give it enough breadth. So it's almost like even a writer like Stephen King or Robert Ludlum does not have the breadth of work or the number of words that would really give it a good spin in the direction of that. But a whole load of authors together would really make that possible. The other thing is also writing in different genres. So as J.F. Penn, for example, I write in action adventure, I write in crime, I have some horror, I have some other things. So it's almost like there are ways of splitting people's IP into these different models. I think that idea has definitely got legs. Charlene: I think we should chat about this again in a month when we're more set up and maybe we can contact you to get it rolling. Joanna: Yeah, absolutely. But then being devil's advocate, I know I'm a techno-optimist, you clearly are too, right. And so we're just thrilled about all this stuff, we're just giddy with excitement. But we both use Midjourney, and I'm sure you've tried Midjourney Version 4 which they brought out in the last couple of weeks. In fact, in the last week, I think, as we record this. Have you tried version four? Charlene: Yes, I have. Joanna: So I found with the same prompt on Version 3 on Midjourney, and Version 4, it was a step change. Like the ability of the AI to understand my prompt was just incredible. And so I feel like that is very interesting, given that you're using GPT-2. GPT-3, I did find a step change from GPT-2, and now we're hearing rumors of GPT-4, which should be coming in the next few months. So given that, I mean, I want LAIKA and other tools to be as good as they can be, so I want it to be better and better. But again, then we come back to the issue of the training data. I mean, even you and I both using Midjourney, and the training data is very clearly in copyright. So I don't know, it's really hard. What I don't want to do is legislate these tools out of existence. Because you can't, they'll just go to an area where they can flourish. But how do we resolve this? I mean, obviously, we can't come up with a decision. But it's difficult, right? Charlene: It is difficult. And as a person who's trying to set up a business, I'm very keen on us never breaking the law. And as a writer, I'm very keen on figuring out how we can compensate writers and how we can make sure that people are able to get something out of their work. But as a kind of humanoid on this tiny rock hurtling through space and time with only a certain amount of years to live, I just have this absolute feeling of ‘let's go, let's go, let's go. Let's keep rolling, bigger, better, faster, stronger.'  I keep coming back to this feeling about the kind of work that is being replaced by AI or the kind of things that are going away. It kind of makes me feel something about the people who put on horseshoes in the early 1900s complaining about the car. There's a giant world out there that we can explore and we, as the early adopters, can perhaps exploit and be part of and figure out new ways of making new kinds of money, or new ways of making a living. But trying to just say, “this future way of doing things isn't good for our industry, so let's not let cars happen. Us horseshoe makers need to make a living,” just doesn't feel right to me. It just feels like we need to throw ourselves into the new ways and finding out what those new ways can be. Joanna: Absolutely. So we talked about the input there, the training data and the potential for licensing in the future. Let's talk about the output, because people who haven't used these tools worry about plagiarism. So how does LAIKA and these other tools, how do they avoid plagiarism? Why is it not plagiarism? Charlene: Well, I mean, it's just not plagiarism. Basically. So I'll just talk about LAIKA since that's the thing that I know. But every time you use LAIKA, you can put in a prompt. So for example, let's say we put in a prompt of “deep down, I always knew.” Every single time you use that prompt, with any brain, you're going to get a different result. Actually three different results because we give three different inferences each time. There is really no way other than the kind of, you know, ‘how many monkeys on a typewriter it would take to come up with Shakespeare eventually,' there isn't really going to be a situation where you and me come up with the same thing. And so there isn't really a way in which we can be plagiarizing either each other, or anybody else. Except perhaps for like the plagiarism of the spirit of the dead who we use as our brains that we're working with. Even still, you're never going to get like a perfect sentence that's taken from something that already exists. Every time you use a prompt, you're shifting and shaping and moving the message into a new direction that it couldn't have been in without your human touch coming in and shaping it that way. And so at this point in time, like so what we say with LAIKA is like, whatever you make with LAIKA, it belongs to you. Because as we currently understand copyright law, you as the human being who is creating the imagination to put in the prompt, are the only human being who can hold the copyright. Only human beings can hold copyright. [As we record this in late 2022.] So we don't expect or need anybody to even say that they use LAIKA when they use it, and that's not really part of what we're interested in. So you don't have to credit LAIKA when you're working because you are still the artist. Again, it comes back to that idea of being a brush, a paintbrush, like a tool. Joanna: Yeah, except it's a super smart paintbrush. Charlene: Super smart paintbrush. Like every little filament of the paintbrush has its own paintbrush. Joanna: Exactly. It will get even more powerful, and this is what I find so interesting. And I love using these tools and people listening will know about my enthusiasm too. But you said there's no need for labeling, you believe people hold the copyright as the human. And obviously, as we record this in November 2022, the law isn't that clear on these generative tools. There are some things, I think it's OpenAI for the GitHub copilot is going to court about copyrighted code. There are some cases, and obviously, we're going to see some cases. Again, I think this is about jurisdiction, because like you're in Copenhagen, a lot of people listening will be in the USA. And a lot of this stuff is international, right? Let's talk about publishing, because you might not care about the output of LAIKA, that you think that belongs to the author and they don't need to label it. But how do you think readers feel about it? Or do they not care because they don't care if it's a ghostwriter? I mean, what I've been doing because of this time we live in, I have been adding a statement of AI usage at the end of my fiction – I haven't used it for nonfiction yet at all – but saying where I use AI tools. I have also said I use Sudowrite, I use ProWritingAid, I use Facebook advertising, I use Amazon. So I've actually included all my AI usage because people put this in one box, and I didn't think they should. So what do you think about labeling finished work in that way? Charlene: I mean, I think if it makes you happy, it's fine, if that makes sense. It's kind of like a content warning or a trigger warning or something like that. I suppose there might be people who aren't interested in consuming anything that has even a whiff of AI about it. But I suppose like, I grew up with no television, so in a way, it's weird that I'm so into tech and future things because I spent my entire childhood just reading constantly. I'm a voracious reader. And if I read something and it's good, then I'm happy. And if I read something and it's bad, I put it down. It's not really of any particular interest to me if the thing that I'm reading is written by like a man, or a woman, or a Danish person, or an American, or a completely human that has nothing else going on, or human with the help of an AI. That's kind of beside the point to me when it comes to reading something that's setting my mind on fire. Joanna: I think partly, it's like if you sign a publishing contract, that it will say something like, “I warrant that this is my own work.” And if you submit, say, a short story to a competition, it will have a similar warrant of, “this is my own work.” And I feel like at the moment, this has not been ruled one way or the other. So for example, I am independently published, that doesn't matter, but I do enter competitions. And when I write my stories for competitions, I do not use AI for that because I feel like then I can agree to that warrant. And I feel like if I enter a competition, and I win it, and then they find I used LAIKA or whatever, I think at the moment, the industry will consider that cheating. So what do you think? So you said you and your partner are publishing this book with demons on the blockchain. So would you submit that to a traditional publisher? How do you feel about the legal side of publishing and these warranties of your own work? How will that work? Charlene: I mean, sure, we'd be happy to submit it to a traditional publisher if they'll have us. And we'll be happy to say that it's our work. And of course, we'll mention LAIKA because that's the thing we're trying to promote all the time. But I suppose there's this thing where, at least for me, it doesn't feel like cheating because it's actually really hard work to make the content into something that's shaped around a human thought. So when we have all of our users, after they've been with us for a few weeks, we send them a questionnaire and we ask them a bunch of questions. And one of the questions is how much you agree with these statements. And one of them is, “LAIKA saves me time.” And literally nobody thinks LAIKA saves them time, because it doesn't. But then 100% of people say, “LAIKA is fun.” And like 95% say, “LAIKA makes me feel creative.” And that's kind of where the space is, I think. It's that you're in this playground, you're sketching, you're making something, but you have to pull it together. If you imagine like a bunch of puppies running around in a room, like trying to corral them into the playpen is kind of what it feels like some of the times when you're trying to write with LAIKA. You're the one who has to keep track of where the characters are, what's happening, what's going on in the plot, where things are going to go, what's the amazing theme or message or thing you're trying to get through. And what LAIKA is giving you is some snappy phrases, some interesting suggestions and some rabbit holes that you might jump down. And then you jump down those rabbit holes, and oh my God, you've just spent half an hour writing a poem, instead of continuing with the plot that you're supposed to be on. So in my stance, and I'm pretty sure my partner's stance as well, and in fact, the stance of our kind of copyright policy that we have at the moment, is that whatever you make with this is yours because you actually made it. You really made it. You squeezed the blood from the stone and got something beautiful out of it. Joanna: Yeah, I mean, again, when I first started getting into this, it was 2016 when AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol at the game of Go. That's when I started getting into creativity in AI because they said that move, one of the moves, was creative, and it's changed the way the game of Go is played. And that's when I started to get into this. So that's six years ago since we're speaking now in 2022. And I think some of my questions are probably still related to how things were a few years ago. And we're early adopters on this, many of my audience have not even tried a text generative tool. So I feel like some of the questions that you and I might take for granted are things that the traditional publishing industry hasn't even started considering yet. Like, I really don't think that they understand it.  One of the things I am postulating is, if you think about who has the most training data, it is a traditional publisher. So if a particular imprint who has been specializing in science fiction, or romance or whatever, for the last 100 years, or let's say even 20 years, and they've got all that content, they could train a brain and they could then pay creatives to do it. But as you say, that's not possible right now because it's still quite a lot of work to use the tools. But where do you think it's gonna go? Because I feel like things are moving very, very fast. Charlene: Yeah, things are moving super-fast. I mean, I do think it's gonna go into that space. I mean, I hope that we're going to be able to be part of the start of that side of the monetization of things. But I definitely think it's going to go that way. I think some of the interesting conundrums that are gonna come out there is like when the publisher owns the work, they might start making brains like artificial intelligence brains, based on the work, and the writer might not be interested in that at all or might not want that to happen, but might not have much of a say. There could be all kinds of situations where these things are happening. Or where people are using it on the sly. Or for example, I mean, obviously, we are people who care very much about sticking to the law and only using public domain works or works that you've written yourself, but like there's nothing stopping anybody from going and ripping the eBooks of the top 50 science fiction bestsellers and going and making a Google Collaboratory notebook and training GPT-2 on that, and then writing with it. There is nothing stopping them except for time, and patience and energy. But there is a lot of capability out there for bad actors and good actors. And I think where we're really going to see things happen over the next few years is once the laws start getting crystallized around particular cases. God forbid that we are part of any of those. Joanna: This is why I want creatives, artists, writers to be involved in this discussion so that we can impact the law. And as part of the Alliance of Independent Authors, I've been part of submissions to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), the UK Government, about this kind of thing and how AI should impact copyright. Let's fast forward a decade, and I think all of this stuff will be much, much easier. So we're in a world of digital abundance where, like I now can create a Midjourney image, every time I want an image, I just go on Midjourney and create it, right. I don't need to buy stock images anymore. It's possible that creating fiction or books will be the same. Therefore, I think that it's about building your personal brand, and building your relationship with your readers, and making sure your voice is strong and writing what you love to write, whether or not it's with an AI tool. The future will be about creation, but also curation, and about building a brand where people still want to buy your books however you use AI tools. What do you think? Clearly digital abundance is the future, right? Charlene: Yeah, absolutely. And I definitely think that personal branding thing is key. And I think we've already seen that happen over the last few years with publishing. Like even just with Twitter, the amount of literary Twitter over the last 10 years has just been huge. And how much it's necessary as a writer to be out there, and to have a website and to be talking all the time with people. It's part of the job now. And I think it's just gonna keep being how it is. I suppose, I personally just don't really see – I suppose it's maybe the kind of writing that I like, or the kinds of things that I enjoy, like I really like very experimental and very weird fiction. And I suppose that although it might seem like AI is best placed to make more of that and to make it to the way I like it, I just don't really believe that it's going to feel like that because a lot of the works that I really love feel like a conversation between me and the writer, like feel like they've touched something in me that's also in them, this resonance between souls. So I'm just not sure that I believe that AI will ever replace the kind of writing that I like, but maybe it can replace some kinds of writing. Joanna: Such interesting times. If people want to try LAIKA, where can they find it? Charlene: So you can just go to www.writewithLAIKA.com, and there's a big button on the front of the page. And it's LAIKA,  L-A-I-K-A, like the space dog. And it's basically the big button on the front page to sign up for the beta and I just add in a bunch of people every day. So usually you're spending maybe three or four days on the waitlist and then come in. But if you write in your comment, if you write something like, “I literally cannot wait,” I'll see it and let you in quicker. Joanna: That's fantastic. And where can people find you and everything you do online? Charlene: So I'm Charlene Putney and you can find me at alphachar on Twitter and I'm www.alphachar.com. Always happy to get emails and I usually respond to them on Fridays. I'm a bit of an email Luddite in that way. Joanna: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Charlene. That was great. Charlene: Thanks so much, Joanna. And happy writing to everyone out there.The post Co-writing Fiction With Generative AI With Charlene Putney first appeared on The Creative Penn.

If you're not making the money you expected from your books, how can you pivot genres in order to write what you enjoy AND make a living? How can you change your mindset to one of creative abundance and productivity? Dan Padavona talks about these topics and more. In the intro, publishing year in review [Kris Rusch]; how you can use ChatGPT with examples; Collaborative writing with AI [Andrew Mayne]; Open AI usage guidelines; Ethical AI usage for authors [ALLi]. Get 33% off my ebooks, audiobooks and courses for the rest of 2022. Use coupon 2022 at checkout at CreativePennBooks.com (ebooks and audio, not print), and/or TheCreativePenn.com/learn for courses. Valid until end of 2022. Today's podcast sponsor is Findaway Voices, which gives you access to the world's largest network of audiobook sellers and everything you need to create and sell professional audiobooks. Take back your freedom. Choose your price, choose how you sell, choose how you distribute audio. Check it out at FindawayVoices.com. Dan Padavona is the best-selling and award-nominated author of thrillers and mysteries, including the Wolf Lake Thrillers and Logan and Scarlett Serial Killer thrillers. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.  Show Notes How — and why — to pivot genres Combining what you want to write and what sellsCreating a new audience when pivoting genresAre Facebook ads and AMS ads still worth it?Financial factors that influence the decision to become a full-time writerRevitalizing a series with Facebook adsThe importance of a positive mindset and how to stay motivated for the long term You can find Dan at DanPadavona.com Dan has now started The Author's Mindset series. Image generated by Joanna Penn on Midjourney. Transcript of Interview with Dan Padavona Joanna: Dan Padavona is the best-selling and award-nominated author of thrillers and mysteries, including the Wolf Lake Thrillers and Logan and Scarlett Serial Killer thrillers. So welcome to the show, Dan. Dan: Thank you so much, Joanna. It's a pleasure to be here. Joanna: Oh, I'm excited to talk to you. But before we get into it – Tell us a little bit more about you and how you got into writing and self-publishing. Dan: Writing came to me very late in life. I did some writing as a child. I wrote a few short stories during high school, which ended up getting published in the school newspaper. It interested me back then, but I didn't really follow through on it.  Now, I do have a communications degree, which is somewhat angling towards that direction. But I ended up going into atmospheric sciences and meteorology eventually. And I think I became a writer because I love reading. It was probably late 2013, early 2014, I read a fictional book, which absolutely blew me away, and I just knew right then and there, I needed to create something like this. Not that I could ever create something quite that brilliant, but I got into writing and I read everything that I could on the subject of writing. I began as a horror author in 2014, switched to thrillers in 2018, and that's pretty much where things took off for me. Joanna:  So we'll circle back on that. But you said you came to writing late in life. I didn't think you were that old, actually. Can you give us a sense of what time of your life you started? Dan: I still get proofed if I buy wine, but I am actually 54 now. I started writing in 2014, so that would have made me 46 at the time. Joanna: Okay. And then, like you said, things took off in 2018, so you were 50. And I think that's really great because so many people are like, “oh, I have missed the chance to become a writer.” And my mum wrote her first book at 72, so there's no need to think that. For people listening, it's never too late. So you were in meteorology. That's like a weatherman? Dan: That's right. I did that since 1994. I retired in September of 2021, so there was 27 years of that. I loved the job and I loved the people, but the shift work was killing me. It had really for 27 years, and that's what made my decision for me to make a move. Otherwise, I think I would still be doing it. I was just so blessed by writing and the way my career took off, that I was making many times my income that I was working at my day job. So it was kind of like, well, I could do this for four hours a day and make a lot, or I could do that for eight or nine hours a day and make a little. So you know, easy choice. Joanna: Oh, it is. And we're gonna dig into all of that. But you said you started out writing horror, and I think that's where I must have first seen you. Did you co-write something with J Thorn? Dan: I did. Yeah. Joanna: Like everyone has, clearly. I have. Dan: That's right. He's like the Kevin Bacon of writing. Joanna: He is. Dan: There may be eight degrees of separation when it comes to J Thorn. And he's been a good friend ever since too. He pretty much is to everybody in the industry. Joanna: Oh, absolutely. You started out writing horror, so why did you decide to pivot into mysteries and thrillers? Like I love reading horror and I write a little bit of horror, and mysteries and thrillers is a much more mainstream niche. But kind of talk us through why you decided to make that change. Dan: There's two different reasons, I think. The first was financially, I just wasn't making money at writing horror. And I felt that the genre itself had very voracious fans who read it, but there aren't that many of them. And they're shrinking too, which I just find mind boggling because I grew up loving horror. And when I was a kid, you couldn't swing a cat without hitting a Friday the 13th or Halloween movie, and that's what dominated Hollywood. These days, horror just seems to be kind of taking a backburner, and I'm not sure why that is. But it wasn't purely for financial reasons, though. I hit a point too in my life where I think I'd become a more positive person. And I was writing some really dark horror, and putting myself in those places day after day was one of the reasons why I procrastinated about writing. I just couldn't bring myself to do it every day, and I needed to change. Now, that doesn't change what I read. I still read plenty of horror. I'm a huge Jack Ketchum fan. I love Stephen King. Dean Koontz, obviously. He was probably more thriller than horror anyway. I still love those types of books, but writing them, to me, eventually became a little bit suffocating. Joanna: Craft-wise, you said there that the horror readership is shrinking. I wonder if it's because what people used to call horror is now moved into all kinds of other genres. So for example, it used to be anything with a vampire in it was horror. And now you could say it's urban fantasy, or dark fantasy. So I almost feel like horror, just the word, used to cover so much. Now there are so many granular subgenres that are not in horror, but yet, they really are what horror used to be. Dan: Yeah, I think that that is an excellent point, and it has become a lot more fragmented. Vampires, you brought up vampires, that's probably the ultimate example. The first book I ever wrote was a book called Storberry, which was horribly titled and probably was the reason nobody ever found it. But it was essentially a love letter to Stephen King's Salem's Lot. I wanted to return to the old school vampire horror that I found just absolutely wonderful growing up with, and it was haunting, and get it away from Twilight and all those other directions that vampire movies and TV shows were heading in. There's nothing wrong with Twilight or Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But I just felt that there was no Salem's Lot anymore. There were no frightening vampires. And that's why I wanted to head in that direction. Joanna: I think that's interesting. I mean, many people listening will be like, “oh, I don't write horror,” but they're actually writing some kind of it. But like post-apocalyptic, we both know Zach Bohannon as well, that's kind of horror, but post-apoc is its own thing. There's so many subgenres. Then it's interesting, so you said you're a positive person and writing all that dark stuff was difficult, but you've got serial killer thrillers, and they're some of your bestsellers. And it's so funny, because I love reading horror, but I struggle reading serial killers, I find them more disturbing than reading horror. So how did you identify serial killers as a genre? And how on earth is it not as dark as your other stuff? Dan: That's probably going to be a multifaceted answer to that one. So to start with, serial killers I think are more frightening for most people, because — well, alright, I'm not gonna say the vampires don't exist. Some people do believe that they exist, I don't. But serial killers most definitely exist. And one could be living next door to you. That's a very frightening prospect. As far as how did I happen upon them, I love Thomas Harris, I love all the Hannibal books and movies. With me, it's not just the horror, which is part of that, but it's also the hunt. It's also the mystery that surrounds it. So when I was trying to decide, well, what am I going to write, in 2017-2018 — I was actually really close to just stopping writing at all because writing is so difficult. It takes up all your time and all your mental energy. And if you're not seeing any results from that, as far as great reviews, money, whatever, then it's hard to summon the strength to do it every day. So I wanted to try something else – And I kind of looked at writing and success as like separate Venn diagrams. So in one circle you would have a list of things that you love to either read or write. And for me, that was fantasy, horror, some psychological thriller-type stuff. And then you had the stuff which actually sells in the other circle. The overlap to me, and I don't know why I hadn't thought of it before, but was obviously dark thrillers and sometimes serial killer thrillers. And that, to me, just seemed like, oh, this is perfect. These books are very popular. So then I went about reading what was out there, what was being published by indies and selling very well, just to see if I can I write in this genre and would I enjoy it. And the first two series which I read, I mean, I just like devoured them. I was enjoying them so much. And I was like, yeah, I can do this. And not only can I do this, I would love to do this. So yeah, I jumped on that immediately.  And to probably wrap it all up with a bow, I also incorporate into my stories the positivity that I talked about too. So like the Wolf Lake Thrillers, on the surface they are very dark mysteries, often with serial killers in the background. Right now I'm writing one about a serial kidnapper who kills, and it's very dark from that standpoint. But below the surface, every Wolf Lake Thriller is actually about overcoming adversity, the powers of love and friendship and understanding each other. And these themes like pervade that entire series, and it just makes writing these characters such a joy. If you love Dean Koontz, Dean Koontz has such a great knack for ending every single book making you feel so good and so positive about the future and optimistic. And that's something which I really wanted to do too. And even in my Logan and Scarlett Thrillers, which are also very dark serial killer thrillers, they often end on a very positive note. Not every time, but certainly with the Wolf Lake Thrillers they do. Joanna: You mentioned Dean Koontz there. I love his Jane Hawk series, if you've read that. Dan: Mmhm. Joanna: I love that. And it's so funny, I do find his work a bit hit or miss with me, as in sometimes I love the books, and sometimes I couldn't care less, really. And it's so interesting, but he's so prolific, it doesn't really matter. But I want to stay on the craft elements, because Blake Crouch did this too. Did you take some inspiration from Blake Crouch? In that he was known in the horror genre, and then I believe he was like, I'm going to write thrillers and I'm going to make this a success. Dan: Yeah. Joanna: And I wonder if the element is the supernatural. And this is something I think about a lot because all my fiction is supernatural in some way. Here in the UK, the crime genre is huge, and I wrote some crime books but I just couldn't help putting some supernatural in, and then it suddenly falls off the edge of what is acceptable to the mass market in that genre. So given that you wrote horror and vampires and stuff, have you got any supernatural in what you write now? And is that something you deliberately left out? Dan: There isn't, just because most of them are like police procedurals and whatnot. There are some people who are definitely making it work, like LT Ryan incorporates a lot of supernatural into his books. And they're pretty much either psychological or serial killer thrillers that kind of fall somewhere in there. He's made it work. For me, I've tried to stick to the ‘yeah, that could happen' elements of the stories, and for whatever reason, it's resonated very well with my readers, and I don't want to mess that up. There are times where I feel very limited because supernatural is not a part of what I write, and I would love to be able to incorporate it. In fact, I hinted at it in the book that I'm writing right now, where it ends up just being a tease. There isn't actually any ghost in the story, but for a while there you are really wondering if there are. So yeah, it's something I would love to incorporate, if I could find a way to do it properly. And it may just be something where I would do a separate series and see what the reaction is. Joanna: You mentioned your readers there. So how's it going? You're using the same name, right? You went from publishing horror to suddenly publishing the serial killers and thrillers and things. So how did that go? Like, have you had feedback saying, “hey, Dan, why aren't you writing this other type of book anymore?” Have your audience crossed over? Or do you think you've found an entirely new audience? Dan: I found an entirely new audience. I'll tell you a little bit about how that went down. First of all, if I had it to do over again and I could go back, I would create a pen name for my thriller titles, just to better separate things. I do think that there is some confusion within the Amazon algorithm as to what exactly does he write here. But I think now that I sell so many more thrillers than I do horror, that it probably isn't much of a problem anymore. Back in 2018, again, when I made the shift, I started writing these books called the Scarlett Bell Thrillers. I released the first book for 99 cents, and I had this great plan which was lined out. I was going to hold the first three books until they were all ready, and then I was going to rapid-release them once every two to three weeks, I think it was. It just seemed like a foolproof plan. It was working really great for the people on like the 20Books forums, and when I tried this, it completely fell flat. I sent it out to my list, and I got no sales. And I remember thinking to myself, “well, I just sent these thrillers out to like 300 or 400 people who love horror, so why would they buy the book?” So obviously I confused them and I wasn't doing myself any favors. So I started to try to find another way into locating readers. I had never had success with Facebook ads in the past, but I decided I'll give it a shot. I quickly discovered that by getting read-through through the three books in my series, I was getting enough money and enough orders off my clicks that I was actually turning a small profit on these Facebook ads. So then I started to think, well, there's more books coming in this series. I'm only up to three, and there's going to be ten, so this really has potential. So I just kept writing and I kept those ads running, I knew that the ads eventually would probably start to fail, and they did. Facebook ads after usually two to four months, they start to get a little bit wonky, and you got to create something new. In that amount of time, I was able to attract enough people to my Facebook page and attract enough people to sign up to my mailing list. And I started an absolutely new mailing list too. I switched to Mailerlite and just made a clean break with the new signups. And I quickly had a list which was larger than my horror list, and it had only taken me a couple months to do it. And these people were not just like on a list, they were buying the books. So that was a big change, too. I think it became like a snowball at that point. Every new series I released brought more and more new readers into my world. It greatly grew my Facebook following, my Instagram and Twitter, but especially the email list, and that's where the rubber really hits the road, I think, in writing. Joanna: I think it's so interesting. So you've done some great blog posts, I'm gonna link to them in the show notes. And one of your blog posts says: “Between 2019 and 2022, I grew my earnings from breakeven to over $350,000.” That is amazing. I guess that's when you decided to leave your job. So how did you make that decision? Because obviously, there are up years and there are down years when things are difficult. So how did you make that decision? Because I know some authors want to do that, some authors don't. So yeah, how did you make that? Dan: Well, that was a really tough choice. But fortunately, the earnings grew so quickly that it became an easy choice at the very end. I had often joked with my wife, if my writing ever earned us enough money that it replaced my income at work, I would leave — haha. And neither of us ever thought that that would happen. And then things really took off. And by late 2020, early 2021, I had replaced my income. But at that point, I felt as you did, as you just elucidated, that there are ups and downs and you can fail. So I felt at that point that just replacing my income, while that was a wonderful blessing, was not a safety net for me. I needed to make twice my income, and then we would really think about it. And so I talked to my wife about it, and then, again, we said, “if I ever made 2x my income — haha.”  Then that happened several months later. And that's where we both decided, yeah, I think it's time. Because I was really burning the candle at both ends. I'm working nine hours a day, there's another 45 minutes, probably, in my day of commuting. And then I've got to get in an hour and a half of writing in my free time, and then there's editing. It was just getting crazy. I was keeping up with it, but I felt there was no reason to have to keep up with that anymore. And by the time that I put in my notice of leaving, my income had then grown to three times what I was making at work. So it became such an easy decision. And actually at the end, I was like, “boy, I wish I had taken a date which was earlier than this.” Joanna: It's good to be cautious. Let's talk about marketing. So you've mentioned Facebook ads, and that you got into that. Tell us about what kind of marketing you're doing now, because Facebook ads have changed a lot in the last couple of years. I mean, even since you left in 2021, this is only a year later, but we've had the Apple privacy changes. Some people are saying ads don't work anymore. Amazon ads have got more expensive. So how are you running marketing at the moment? Dan: Ads have definitely gotten more expensive. I believe that it's less to do with Apple, and it's more to do with authors simply realizing that there's money to be made here, and everybody's kind of piling in. It's just a supply and demand thing, it's driving up clicks. So it's a lot more difficult to make a return on investment these days than it was two years ago when I was making a killing on these investments. So Facebook ads, to me, I can't make, for instance, mailing list signups through Facebook Ads work financially for me anymore. I find that doing multi-author promos is far more cost efficient, and at least it keeps me in the black. So I've gotten away from those altogether. Every once in a while, I'll turn them on for a little bit just to see if I can build my list again at a profit, but I really can't. So that that's already gone away for me. Writing in a long series and having all that extra read-through is such an advantage. It allows me to have a lot more wiggle room on cost per click. So the idea being that if you have one book that you're selling for $4.99, even if you're making a 70% commission on that, the odds that you're going to turn a profit on that with an AMS ad or Facebook ad are pretty much slim and none. However, if you have nine more books backing that up in the series and your read-through is pretty good, you're actually making a lot more than 70% of $4.99, you're making 70% of all those sales. Plus, if you're part of Kindle Unlimited, you're making that on page-reads as well, and selling some paperbacks. So, to me, it became a lot more easy to break away from the pack. And there are some words which I can — phrases, anyway — that I can bid on in AMS for ridiculous amounts, like $2 to $4 per click. And I'm not actually paying that much per click, I usually end up paying about like $0.75 to a $1.25 per click, but I'm dominating the top position, and I'm always getting those clicks whenever I want them. And I can afford to do so because I know that every time I get a click or a buy, I'm going to make so much more money than I would if it was just one book. I'm selling an entire series. So that's really important too. I do agree it's getting more and more difficult to make money that way. And I think you always need to think outside the box. As you coined the term ‘author entrepreneurs', we need to think not like every other author in the genre and we need to take a larger view of things and just think like marketers. So I read a lot of books on marketing, period. And there's always a trick that is out there which other authors aren't doing. So as long as you keep standing on the shoulders of giants, you're only going to get as tall as they allow you to get. But if you are innovating and you're borrowing techniques which work in other industries, for instance, attracting people to your website. Most people have websites which are just there to show their ‘about author' page and have some buy links. If you can actually attract people who are looking for your types of books to your website, then you completely bypass the need for ads. You don't have to pay for anything, it's just work. You need to do some due diligence and writing articles and whatnot. But if you're a writer, that should be pretty easy to switch to. Joanna: Obviously, I've built this business — for the nonfiction side — on content marketing. And I pretty much have never advertised The Creative Penn, and certainly not the podcast. So I've built a business on that, but it takes a lot longer for sure. And it was funny as you were talking there, I read a lot of business books and marketing books, too, and I was just thinking like, “where's the blue water right now?” And as we record this, Elon Musk recently bought Twitter, and a whole load of people are leaving Twitter and going on to this thing called Mastodon. Now, I haven't looked at this, but I was just thinking, I bet you there's some marketing possibilities on Mastodon, whatever the hell, or it might just go the way of the dinosaurs, which is what I thought as soon as I heard the name. But it's interesting, isn't it? I mean, I also have seen people pouring back into LinkedIn. Which I mean, it's not really a fiction platform. But it's not always the same thing, isn't it, as you said. I did want to ask you, you have another great blog post about revitalizing a series with Facebook ads. And I think this is so important. When is it worth spending money on an old series? Or when should we just write another series? And I guess a sub-question is: would you ever use these tactics back on your horror books? Or have you just left them behind? Dan: So it wouldn't work on the horror books anymore, for basically the same reasons that it didn't didn't work on my horror books three to five years ago, and that is that I was writing stand alones. I just cannot come up with a way to sell those stand alones at a profit. I couldn't find a way to do it back then because cost per click had gone up by so much. Now that the cost per clicks are dwarfing what they were just a few years ago, there's just absolutely no chance. Now I do run some AMS ads, like evergreen ads, that target the usual, the Dean Koontz's, the Jack Ketchum's, the Stephen King's. And yeah sure, I'll get maybe a sale here, a sale there, but it's not enough to move the needle. And I just kind of do it because I know that they'll make money over time, even if it's just a few bucks a month. There's no reason not to do them, but they're not worth spending time or mental energy on. If I had written series back then, I probably could have pulled it off. The only thing which comes close is my Dark Vanishing series, which is post-apocalyptic. And I have had some success running Facebook ads for those and making that work. I'm a little bit less successful, for whatever reason, with AMS ads. I think because with AMS ads, it's so much more granular, and I haven't zeroed in on exactly who I should be targeting. But I've tried for about three or four years to zero in on who that should be, and I still haven't found it yet. Joanna: And then, let's just take AMS ads. Do you target traditionally published authors? Like I don't know, someone like Karin Slaughter, for example, I believe has some serial killer books. Do you target traditionally published authors or only indies? Dan: Oh, sure. I've targeted not only through AMS, but Facebook ads, I've targeted Karen Slaughter in the past. And I've also targeted Lisa Gardner, who I seem to do better with for whatever reason. That seems to be a better match, at least in my readers' opinions. Dean Koontz was a great target for me through Facebook ads for about four months until the ads started to dry up. Ads are really weird in that it is based on the audience size that that writer has. And for whatever reason, according to Facebook anyway, Dean Koontz only has like 200,000 people reading him, which is about what they say for Lisa Gardner too. Whereas some other writers who are much smaller than him may have millions. And so I don't really get it. I don't understand what the algorithm is considering a Dean Koontz reader. But either way, it's not nearly tapping all the readers which he has. So that's why I think Facebook ads for Dean Koontz worked well for me for a few months, and then I just dried up the supply, I couldn't use it anymore. AMS ads to Dean Koontz are very up and down for me. They don't work so well in the US, but for whatever reason, they work great in the UK and they weren't great in Australia. So I don't quite understand that. But I just follow the numbers. If it works, it works, and if it doesn't, I turn it off. Joanna: And the other question – You mentioned that you work four hours a day now. You said that, right? I mean, is that just your writing, or is that the writing and the marketing? Dan: It's the writing and the whole business itself. So actually, I probably do a lot more than four hours, in terms of getting myself prepared for writing. But I say it's about four hours in terms of like there's an hour and a half of writing, there's another 45 minutes or so of editing and reading over my manuscript. By the way, that's a Dean Koontz trick as well. I read that trick in an interview that he wrote, where he likes to rework his prose on the same day that he writes, so that when he's done at the end of the day, that chapter is done, it's ready for his editor. Now, I don't send it to my editor, but there's a power in finishing the day knowing that up until that point in my book, my book is done. I don't need to deal with it again. So you know, people slog through second, third, fourth drafts after the fact. I never do. It's just done. So that's another 45 minutes. Well, I'll just get in my daily routine. Now this starts to get a little bit above the fold here, but I think it's really important. You know, everybody asks me about advertising and if that's the secret to my success. Is it rapid release, because I'm releasing a book every few months, and I'm about to release them even more frequently. And the answers are kind of and kind of, but there's a lot more that I do. So much of this is mindset, Joanna. It really is. I mean, anybody can change their mindset with a snap of the finger if they really want to. It's a lot of just forming better habits and finding what works with you. I came from a broken home. My father left our family when I was four years old, and that probably is one of my earliest memories is my father sitting me down at the kitchen table and saying, “I'm moving in with grandma and grandpa.” And after that, my father became a rather famous person in performing arts, and I almost never saw him again after that. It was a very frustrating life growing up. My mother had her own demons. We lived with a man who became physically abusive to us. And those were things which I ended up dealing with growing up my entire life. And I bottled them up and I hid them from people and I didn't tell anybody about what my issues were, and it just exploded on me. Finally, when I got into college, I basically had — I wouldn't call it quite a mental breakdown — but all of a sudden I had all this social anxiety. I couldn't go out without feeling sick to my stomach. I was just hiding from people in general. And I needed therapy. And once I started getting therapy, I started to get better. But once I moved out of my mother's house, and I started to do things on my own, and I'm not saying my mother was toxic, I was just saying that I needed to start doing things for myself in building that confidence. And that's probably the first time in my life where I felt this super energy kind of pulsing through me. I wouldn't tap it for years and years later, but it was the first sign that I could break out of this on my own. It was just a matter of changing my mindset. So I meet writers all the time, who tell me, “I can't. I just can't keep up with the writing because I have a job.” And then I have to explain to them that I did this from 2014 to 2021, writing an hour or more per day while holding up a full time job. “Well, yeah, but I have kids.” Well, so did I. “Well, yeah, but I wanted to go to the gym.” Well, yes, so did I, and I did all these things too. You can fit it into your life if you really want to, if it really means that much to you. So now my life is a lot more high energy because of the way that I treat my body, by feeding it proper nutrition, by exercising every day, or almost every day, and some of that exercise is pretty strenuous. So I'm always feeding my mind, I'm making it ready to write. And also, because writing is so difficult, every author knows how facing that blank page every day can be so challenging. So you have to have this positive mindset, you have to have high energy. There are all sorts of tips which the self-help industry, the self-development gurus, will espouse. Things like manifesting, all that different stuff. And you know what, it all works, but it all works for different reasons, depending on what you believe. Some people believe that manifesting works because they believe in a higher power, they believe in God, and they think that they're talking to God and God is helping them. Other people are spiritual in the sense that they think the universe is giving it to them. Other people look at it as this is the subconscious mind that you're feeding positive thoughts to. So here's something which a lot of people don't realize – Your subconscious mind doesn't know the difference between a truth statement and a lie. Whatever you tell your subconscious mind, if you tell it enough times, it will believe it. So if you tell yourself over and over again that you are a great writer and that you're going to make X amount of money from it, you can become that, or at least your subconscious mind will certainly believe it. Now, where does it go from there? So okay, so you've planted the thoughts in your subconscious mind. Let's say that you want to buy a bungalow house, how does it end up actually manifesting to the point where you can buy a bungalow house? Well, once you have decided you want to buy a bungalow house, every time you go out and drive around, you're going to recognize bungalows which are off to the side of the road until you finally see one which is for sale. Or you're going to be checking online or somebody's going to be talking about, “hey, I just saw this great bungalow go up for sale.” And immediately you're going to be like, “oh, yeah, yeah.” So what you're actually doing is you're priming your subconscious to look for these opportunities. And so that's what I'm doing every day is I'm trying to prime my mind to look for opportunities to write well, to find new ways to promote myself, to make a larger profit or a larger revenue stream. And how do I set my energy to high every day? What I do is probably going to be different than what you would do or anybody who's listening will do. But you need to find the things that put you in a positive mindset. For me, I wake up in the morning, and before I do anything, I open up a book, which is something which is really positive. And so it's not a Jack Ketchum book, I'll read that a little bit later in the day. It's probably something like a self development book, maybe some Tony Robbins, or some Brendon Burchard, or somebody like that. And I'll just read it for about five to seven minutes. So, all right, now I've got a better mindset. So I'll take care of tasks before I do anything, before I write, before I get on with my day. Then I will sit down and I will spend at least five to 10 minutes on goal planning. So what are my long-term goals? What am I trying to do to get to a point where I want to be in 12 months from now? So right now I'm working on some goals which are financials, some goals which are writing-based, and some goals which are just for me, personally, and who I want to be as a person. But then I also learned about these monthly goals, and this was a Brendon Burchard trick, where you can't always be looking long-term. How about giving yourself some near-term victories, so that you have something to charge yourself up with every single day. So that is where we came up with the concept of monthly goals. So now I have this monthly revenue goal which I'm trying to hit in KDP. And I'm hoping that I will get there, but more than hoping, I'm coming up with a plan. And whether I do or don't, I'm really focused on it. But here's where it works, and where thinking about it kind of manifests the reality. So here I am trying to come up with this monthly revenue goal and I'm trying to figure out, well, I don't have a release again until the beginning of December. So it's not going to come from a release. Don't I already have enough ads running out there? What am I going to do? So just for the heck of it, I'm going through my ads this morning, and I look far less commonly at my Australian ads and my Canadian ads than I do my American ones because it makes so much money in America. And I'm looking at my Australian AMS dashboard, and I'm seeing that, my goodness, I'm making money hand over fist over there. Every target which I put up just seems to work. My ACOS is so low, and my CPC is just so low compared to the amount of books which I'm selling over there. So now all of a sudden, it just hits me that if I just spend a day and come up with more keywords and more targets in that country, I'm going to suddenly sell a lot more books there. And this may be the path, or at least is going to get me a lot closer to the goal which I'm trying to set for me this month. So always keep these things in mind. Whatever it is that you want to do, write it down, even if you write it down digitally like in a Google Doc. Write it down, look at it frequently, brainstorm ways to come up with the answer, and you'll find a lot of times it just it just happens. It just comes to you. Joanna: Wow, great talk there. Great pep talk for everyone. I love that. And I know you've got stuff on your blog about mindset as well. But it's interesting because you had a good mindset back when you wrote horror. But what you then did was take action on ‘this isn't working', which is what I admire very much about you and people who make this pivot. I think it's a strong move because it's difficult to let go of some of those old series. I mean, I feel this very much, but I have multiple streams of income in other ways. But I am often thinking about this, like, maybe I should write something else. But you do have to do the research, and as you say, the mindset. So just returning to the four hours a day, I don't think people are believing you because you're basically saying that you do 90 minutes writing, 45 minutes editing, like you mentioned some mindset stuff you do in the preparing. So realistically, you're saying you really only spend an hour a day on marketing? Dan: I mean, there's marketing and there's also like just coming up with very simple things, like making sure that I have a social media post every single day, something that will at least either make my Facebook and Instagram readers laugh, or I'm trying to promote a book or something. And I have like a ratio in the back of my mind that I always keep too, that I try to entertain my followers a lot more than I sell to them. But every month though, at least once, hitting them saying, “hey, sign up for my mailing list,” or “hey, I've got this new book coming up.” So yeah, that's part of the planning. But yeah, I'll do a lot more with marketing — marketing and goal setting kind of, for me anyway, goes hand in hand. So like, I'll be working on goal setting, and then I'll be like, oh, yeah, that idea about Australia, I'm gonna go work on that. And so now, instead of like spending 15 minutes on marketing and just kind of tweaking the CPCs on my bids, now I'm like coming up with all these new ideas, and I'm into it all day. But yeah, it ends up being about four hours. Once I've done marketing, and social media, writing and editing. And also there is another 15 or 20 minutes which is added into that as well, which is planning. I'm always planning story beats for my next book, so that as soon as I finish this book, the story beats are set to go for the next book, and I don't have to lose a day. I don't have to lose a week coming up with a new story. Boom, I can just go again. So a lot of that is efficiency too. I'm planning my day to make sure that I'm always writing every day. I'm always coming up with a new book. And my goal is to release a new book every four to five weeks in the year 2023. And right now, at least on my writing anyway, I'm on pace to do that. But I need to do it for another seven, eight months to bring it to fruition. Again, it's part of my work day, in always thinking of new ways to get ahead and stay ahead, and planning for the inevitable setbacks. There's always going to be a setback, so I try to stay ahead of the game. Joanna: Fantastic. Oh, you've shared so much. And I mean, obviously people listening, some of them might be interested in your fiction, but I think a lot more of them are interested in more of your tips. And you do have some blog posts, but you also share quite a lot in the 20BooksTo50K group. Is that right? Dan: Yeah, I do. Not as much as I used to, just because I've found social media to be just such a time suck, and it can be kind of soul-draining at times. To be honest with you, the worst place on Earth, I think, is Twitter. There's just so many hateful things that get said on Twitter. But for me, it's the best place on earth, because it's the one that you can aggregate. If you just follow the people, or you just create lists out of the people that you want to read. So for instance, you know, I have a list of writers and entrepreneurs who I absolutely adore, and I treasure their opinions. You know, you're one of them. I have you on a list and other people on that list, and that's what I see when I bring up a third party app like TweetDeck, I just see that feed. And then I have a feed of people who are our motivational types like Eric Thomas, and Tony Robbins, and Brendon Burchard and people like that. So I always have this positivity heading at me. And if anybody were too — nobody on that list would — but if anybody on that list were to say something hateful, then I would just take them off the list. So all that bullying or racism or sexism that you hear about going on on Twitter, I never see it. And it's wonderful. But on Facebook, I do see it. I see it a lot. And I just find it to be very soul-draining. And it makes me want to like fight back and say, “no, no, don't say this.” But you know, that's a waste of my time because you can't change anybody's opinion on social media anyway. But I just don't want to see it. So with Facebook, I'm almost never in my public profile anymore. I'm almost always in my author profile, and just like talking to my readers and making sure that they know what's coming up and just keeping them entertained. Otherwise, I'm hardly ever on Facebook at all. Same thing with Instagram, I'll show up and I'll make a post, and then I'll talk to the readers who I have on Instagram and respond to them. But otherwise, I'm not like scrolling through Instagram and seeing what other people are doing because I always run into something which is hateful, eventually, if I keep scrolling or just something which is just going to waste my time. And if you want to be serious about any business endeavor, and certainly in writing, you have to say no to things. And it doesn't have to be social media for you, but it is for me. Joanna: Absolutely. So where can people find you and your books online? Dan: So I recommend that people go to my website at DanPadavona.com. You'll not only find my books, but you will also find some advice for reader articles, which I'm almost always adding to. And I'm throwing around the idea, you know, I'd really love to do a podcast to help other writers and just something quick that I can put out like once every week or two and just kind of help people with little tips like I shared here today. And so be looking for that too. I'll make an announcement when I have a launch date in sight. [Dan has now started The Author's Mindset series.] Joanna: Fantastic. Well, yeah, definitely let me know because I'm interested for sure. So thanks so much for your time, Dan. That was great. Dan: Wonderful, Joanna. Thank you very much.The post Pivoting Genres And Mindset Tips For Success With Dan Padavona first appeared on The Creative Penn.

What is genre, and how can transcending it improve your fiction? How can you effectively write cross genre? John Truby gives an overview of the Anatomy of Genres. In the intro, the PRH acquisition of S&S is over [The Guardian]; Amazon Advertising Everywhere [Vox]; Spotify expands audiobooks to more markets [TechCrunch]; Plus, 20BooksVegas recordings; Machines Behaving Badly: The Morality of AI by Toby Walsh; A16Z podcast with Neal Stephenson; Jane McGonigal on Moonshots and Mindsets; Join me for this Webinar on Amazon data and trends for 2023 – 1 Dec. Plus, my mermaid images on Midjourney @jfpennauthor. Today's show is sponsored by Draft2Digital, where you can get free ebook formatting, free distribution to multiple stores, and a host of other benefits. Get your free Author Marketing Guide at draft2digital.com/penn John Truby is the founder and director of Truby's Writers Studio, and teaches story principles and techniques through books, courses and audio programs, as well as speaking and story consulting. He's also the author of The Anatomy of Story. And today we're talking about his new book, The Anatomy of Genres. 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 John became an expert on storyDefining genre — and examples from science fictionGenre vs. Amazon SubcategoriesHow to transcend genre How to successfully write cross-genre storiesTips for editing and rewriting The importance of advanced theme and complex plotThe future of storytelling as an immersive experience You can find John at Truby.com Header image by Joanna Penn on Midjourney. Transcript of Interview with John Truby Joanna: John Truby is the founder and director of Truby's Writers Studio, and teaches story principles and techniques through books, courses and audio programs, as well as speaking and story consulting. He's also the author of The Anatomy of Story. And today we're talking about his new book, The Anatomy of Genres. So welcome to the show, John. John: Well, thank you so much, Joanna. I can't tell you what a thrill it is for me to be here on this podcast with you. This is one of the top podcasts in the world, and I couldn't be happier to be here with you. Joanna: Thanks so much. Before we get into the meat of the book, tell us a bit more about you and how you came to be so enmeshed in the world of story. John: It's interesting. When I first started writing stories, there were no books I could find about how to do that, if you can imagine that. It was that long ago. So I had to be self-taught. And what I did was I read as many great novels and saw as many great films as I could over about a three-year period. And I broke them all down to see what works and what doesn't work. I found that about 90% of what works came from the deep story structure under the surface. So I came up with a theory of story that was based on the organic development of the hero as they move through the plot. I then translated that into specific practical techniques. I began writing my own work and helping other writers fix their work. This led to a lot of story consulting jobs, and I started getting a reputation for being really good at story. Now, as you probably know, Hollywood is a small town. So that reputation got around very fast. And based on the techniques I was using, I decided to teach a course called The Anatomy of Story, which is also the name of my first book. By now, over 50,000 writers have taken my story courses. And those students have sold over $15 billion worth of books, films and television. The book, The Anatomy of Story, has sold over 200,000 copies worldwide in nine different languages. Now, if I may, just to give you some background on how this new book came about, a lot of times when I talk to writers about what I do, they say, oh, I know all about story. And they say, I use three-act structure or hero's journey or Save the Cat. And they think, that's all I need. Well, here's the problem. These books are great for beginners, but they have very few practical story techniques and certainly nothing that can tell you how to write a great story at the professional level. Because remember, we're talking about being in the top 1% of writers. So when I wrote The Anatomy of Story, my goal was to include all the professional story techniques a writer would need in order to write a best-selling novel. But the one subject it does not cover, which is now crucial to writing a best seller, is how to write to different genres that make up 99% of popular story today. That's why for the last five years, I've been writing The Anatomy of Genres. And now that book, I'm happy to say, is finally here. And I really believe it's going to change how writers tell their stories going forward. Joanna: Indeed. I think I saw you speak–I don't think I've told you this–I saw you speak at London Screenwriters Festival, a number of years ago now, and I came to one of your workshops. With this book, The Anatomy of Genres, I feel like we're in the vanguard, because you're going to be talking about this for a long time. And I'm like, yes, we're getting it first! And as I mentioned, before we started recording, I got the copy you gave me to review, but I've bought it in hardback because it's such a great textbook. I know a lot of people listening will probably already have The Anatomy of Story, but I think this book is quite different. And I almost think it's more practical because it's in genres, and most of the people listening write in genres. And in fact, we know that we want to write best-selling books in genres. Before we get into it further, let's start with a definition. How do you define genre? Is it just a subcategory on Amazon? John: Well, it's a good question. The answer to that is no. In the beginning of the book, I say that there are three rules for success and story today in every medium. And if you don't know these rules and don't play by them, you have no chance to succeed. Rule number one is the storytelling business buys and sells genres. That's their business. Now, genres are types of stories, but they're a lot more than that. I call them the all stars of the story world. And they've achieved huge popular success over hundreds, and in some cases, thousands of years, in the particular case of myth. Writers who want to succeed professionally have to write the stories that the business — in other words, the publishers and the readers — want to buy. That means the storytelling game is won by mastering the story structure of genres.  That means first of all, mastering the 15 to 20 story beats that are unique to each form. These beats must be in your story, I can't emphasize that enough. Those 15 to 20 story beats must be in your story if you're to tell that genre story properly. But the bottom line is genres are plot systems. They are extremely popular and writing them is how you win. Joanna: Just on the subcategories on Amazon. So for independent authors, like myself, when we publish, we have to put a book in several subcategories, between two and 10 subcategories. So do genres and Amazon subcategories overlap in some way? Because all our books do go into these things. John: Absolutely. Absolutely. Some of the categories on Amazon are the major genres I talked about, but many of them are subgenres of the major genres. And I go into that in the book for each of the genres. I tell what is the main genre and then what are the most popular subgenres of that form. Strictly speaking in Amazon, because they're basing it on the marketing of these books, they want to break down the subgenres into his fine a distinction as possible. The real trick in terms of writing the story is to know what your main genre is and what the main subgenre might be. Then when it comes to marketing it, that's knowing what that book is going to work best on Amazon. Joanna: Okay, great. So you cover loads of genres in the book. That's why it's a great handbook, but we can't go into them all in this. So I thought we'd take science fiction as an example because it's not a genre I write or really read much of. So I thought this would be super interesting. As an example, what are some of the key elements of the science fiction genre that can help authors listening to write a better book? John: I'm really glad you're asking me about science fiction because it's one of the most complex and ambitious of all genres. The chapter on science fiction is full of techniques for writing a really good one. So let me just give your listeners some overview of how science fiction really works. Science fiction shows social and universal evolution. So it's usually an epic, and that's why science fiction is sometimes referred to as social philosophy in fiction form. The key question the genre asks– and every genre asks a key question which defines basically the theme– in science fiction it's, how do you create a better world. But to write great science fiction, we first have to get past the big misconception that a lot of science fiction writers have, which is science fiction is not about predicting the future. It's about looking at the present world through different eyes, and then focusing on the choices we have to make now to avoid the world that will come if we don't change. So a lot of the techniques for writing great science fiction focus on how you set up the story world, especially the society and the technology of the story. Now, the single biggest reason that many science fiction stories fail right off the bat, is that the writer creates this bizarre, unrecognizable, futuristic world. And what that does is it alienates the reader by making them an intellectual observer, not an emotional participant. In other words, they're draining all the emotion out of the story, and that is a huge mistake. So the first technique is to create a recognizable future world. So the reader can see that it's different from my world, but it's still my world that we're commenting on. Another technique: give the hero a severe weakness, and especially a moral flaw. In science fiction, often the hero's weaknesses turn on what it means to be human. And we see this in films like Blade Runner, 2001 and Ex Machina. Another technique: the world that you create isn't just the future in time, it should be a new evolutionary stage. In other words, the society is a new vision of how the individual connects to the society. So for example, in The Matrix, society has moved to a new stage where machines rule and create this fake human world to keep people enslaved. Now to transcend science fiction, which I talk about in every genre, this is the key to setting yourself apart from the crowd, to set yourself apart from everybody else who is writing in that form, you can't just do a big adventure story. No, you have to focus on how to make a new world. And you can see right there how ambitious the science fiction form is because that's massive. You have to give a new vision of how the world works and how it can grow. This means at some point in the story, the hero must have a cosmic revelation. One last point on science fiction: transcending this form almost always involves combining it with myth or horror. And in the book, in the section of each chapter where I talk about how to transcend, often you transcend by connecting with another form, by creating some kind of hybrid. And in science fiction, some examples of science fiction plus myth are The Foundation Trilogy, Star Wars, 2001, Interstellar, The Stars My Destination and Arrival. Combining science fiction with horror, the greatest examples are Frankenstein, Ex Machina, and Westworld. Joanna: And Alien. Surely, Alien. John: Alien is primarily a horror story. It's a horror story in space. But yes, it is a combination of horror and science fiction. And I mentioned Alien quite a bit in the horror chapter. Joanna: It's so interesting. And you talked there about transcending the genre, which I think is really interesting. But I did want to circle back to what you mentioned earlier about story beats. So some people might not know what story beats are. You've mentioned they're the sort of bigger things that you have to tackle within a science fiction book or in a particular genre.  How do the story beats fit into these bigger aspects? Like you mentioned a moral flaw for the hero, but how does that work with the story beats that are expected within a genre? Just give us a couple of examples within science fiction. John: Absolutely. It's a great question because it is so important to distinguish story beats, plot beats, from tropes. This is a mistake I see writers making all the time. They think writing in their particular genre is all about, “I grab a few tropes from this form and I put them together and I have a good story.” Absolutely not. People use the term story beat all the time. What a story beat is, is it's a plot event with major structural importance. And the reason that genres work the way they do, and the reason why you have to know your genre and transcend your genre to be successful, is that a genre is first and foremost a plot system. It is a sequence of plot beats, story beats, that connect together and allow you to build a story from beginning through middle to the end. So if you're not working with all of the plot beats of that genre, as I mentioned, each genre has 15 to 20 plot beats that are already predetermined, and so if you don't hit them, then you're going to have readers of that genre, be very unhappy with you. For example, I sometimes give the example in a love story, in a romance, if you fail to have the first dance, your romance readers are going to be really unhappy with you. So you have to hit these beats. And this gets into the third rule from when I was mentioning about the three major rules that you have to follow. The third rule is you have to transcend those beats. In other words, you can't just hit the plot beats. That's necessary, but not sufficient in any way. You have to transcend them. And transcending means two things. One, you twist the beats, you do them in a different way, or you do them in a different order than they're normally seen. And the other way that you transcend, is you express the deeper life philosophy that each genre has because genres are not only plot systems. That's what most writers understand, they understand that these are different kinds of plots. What they don't understand is that genres are also theme systems. Theme is what brings the reader back again, and again. It's the theme that the reader loves. Because readers who love romance novels, for example, they know what those beats are. They may not put a name to them, but they know what those beats are. So you're not going to surprise them with the plot. What you're going to do is reaffirm the values that that theme, that life philosophy, and that genre expresses. Because that's the life philosophy that they want to live their life by, and that they try to live their life by. Joanna: And I know that some people, myself included, we can sometimes feel like we do not want to be hemmed in, and it feels like that. It's like, well, you're saying these are sort of predetermined story things we have to hit, story beats or whatever, and we have to hit those in order to be successful. And yet we come up with these stories, and maybe they don't quite fit. To be fair, I have not written like a blockbuster novel or a movie, so that could be the reason why! How do we keep these things in place as a structure, but also use our originality so that we don't feel like we're hemmed in? John: It's exactly what I was just saying in terms of transcending. Because if you just hit those beats, you're doing what everybody else is doing, and that is generic writing. I mean, to use the word genre, generic writing is the worst thing you can do. So you absolutely don't want to be hemmed in by it.  At the same time, you have to hit those beats, otherwise, it's not that genre. And so what do you do? You have to find a way to be creative with the beats that you have. And that's why I said, it is absolutely essential that you take a genre story that is more or less familiar to your readers, but you do it in such a way that they've never seen before. You do it either by flipping what happens in the beat or you do it by changing the order. And changing the order of beats is a huge thing. It's really, really powerful because in the back of the readers mind, they not only know the beats, they know how those beats are going to build, they know how they're going to sequence. So if you play with that sequence, you totally short-circuit their expectations. And they love it. That's what they want you to do because what you're basically doing is you're letting them have their cake and eat it too. You let them have the beats that they love so much, but you also do it in such a way they've never seen before. So I liken it to the analogy, “you still got the structure, but you've added new skin on top.” Joanna: Exactly. And it's so interesting, isn't it? Because when you break it down, you think, “oh, yeah, like 20 beats. Yeah, I can write that.” And then it's the bit on top of that that becomes difficult.  I wanted to ask you, so from the book, you say, “mixing genres is tougher than it looks.” And as I read that I was like, yeah, I have to ask you about that, because I write cross-genre, I read cross-genre, and I write that way, and that's what I want. But it does seem much easier to sell clear-genre stories. “Mixing genres is tougher than it looks.” How can we successfully write cross-genre? John: Well, it is tricky. And if you don't know how to write it, you're going to get story chaos. And a lot of writers when they try to mix genres, this is rule number two, that the most successful stories in every medium are a mix of two to four genres. So when writers tried to do that, they don't know what they're doing, and so they end up with story chaos. They have too many heroes, too many opponents, too many desire lines, too many story spines, and so on and so forth. So the solution is to choose a primary genre because that gives you your main hero, your main opponent, it gives you a single desire line, it gives you the primary plot beats, and it gives you the main thing. Then what you do is you add the beats from the other genres, but only when they work with the main genres. So if they contradict a beat from the main genre — and one reason that genres are different from each other is their story beats sometimes are in direct opposition to each other. So when that occurs, you don't include the beat from the genre that you're adding because you always want to keep the plot beats of the main genre first. Another benefit of choosing a primary genre is marketing because it lets the readers identify your main category of fiction. And as you point out, that's easier to sell. So notice what you're doing. You're mixing multiple genres when you write the story, but you're selling just one. Joanna: That's such a challenge. So interesting that you mentioned story chaos. I love that. I think that's a great phrase. And I often talk about my process as ‘wrangling the chaos' in terms of the initial story. You mentioned a few things there, like simplifying with a protagonist and an opponent and stuff. If we find ourselves in story chaos, like we've “lost the plot” as the adage goes, how can we get ourselves out of it? So I'm thinking of people listening, maybe they've got like 100,000 words, or 70,000 words or something, and they're looking at it going, this is story chaos. How would you, as a story consultant, how would you fix that? What do you advise people to do? John: Well, first of all, Joanna, I see this all the time. And it comes from typically, that when they first start writing, they didn't do the kind of prep work upfront that was necessary to give them a single spine. And that's really what you're looking for. I mean, there are all of the techniques that I could mention in terms of fixing that story, but it all comes down to the spine. The spine is the desire line of the hero. What does the hero want? You want that to be very specific. When I talk about rewriting, in The Anatomy of Story class and book, I talked about the fact that there's a dirty little secret that most writers don't want to talk about, which is that typically, the second draft is worse than the first. And it's very depressing for people. And they think, I might as well give up right now.  One of the reasons for that is they don't know how to rewrite. And it's a specific set of skills, just as character is a set of skills, plot is a set of skills, and you have to learn how to do it. And the first rule of rewriting is don't do what most writers do, which is they go to the first scene and they start reading through it and rewriting that scene. No, no! It's the last thing you do. The first thing you do is you fix the structure of the story. And you do that by looking at the two endpoints of the story: the beginning and the end. 90% of the problems that are in your story are found in the first few pages, in the setup to the story. And what do I mean by the setup to the story? Those are the pages where you set up the first major structure step of the story, which is the hero's weakness. That's what you're really solving for, their internal flaw, followed immediately by the desire line. What do they want in this story? You want it to be as specific as possible. Then you go to the endpoint of your story to the self-revelation. What is it that the character learns about themselves at the end of the story that fixes the weakness that they started off with? Once you get those three things correct, and you focus and make sure that those are right, those two endpoints on the spine, then everything else will fall into place. You will see exactly what is not working and why. Joanna: Yes, and it's not grammar and typos, which is what for some reason people obsess over. John: Yep. Joanna: So it's so interesting. I've written like pages of notes, and I read the book, and I've got it coming in print as well. This is great. I did want to come back to theme. You did mention theme before. But again, in the book, you say, “The crucial strategy in writing today is advanced theme expressed through complex plot. Genres are the vehicle for doing that. This isn't one way to succeed, it's the only way.” Which is pretty strong. So you mention kind of theme, but this talks about advanced theme. What is advanced theme and how can we use that? Just give us a couple of examples. John: Sure. Let me just give people the background on this because theme is probably the most misunderstood element of great story. So advanced theme is what each genre is really about. Now, most writers are afraid of theme. They think it's the old classic Goldwyn line, which is, “if you want to send a message, send it Western Union.” So they don't want to preach to the audience which is good. So what do they do? They avoid theme altogether. That is a big mistake because it prevents them from telling a great story. So what is theme? Theme is the author's view of how to live successfully in the world. And when it's done through the genre beats of the story, not preaching in the dialogue, it has tremendous power. And that's why in each chapter of the book, the first half explains those specialized genre beats of the form, in other words, the plot sequence. And the second half explains the deeper theme or the philosophy of life that the genre expresses. Now, each life philosophy contains a massive amount of wisdom that that genre can impart to the reader. But first, you the writer, you have to know what that life philosophy is. And fact is, no one has ever done a book like this in story. And that's why I think this book is going to totally change how writers work in every medium. Because the second half of each chapter, and as you know, this is very dense and very detailed stuff, but the entire second half of each chapter is about how do you express the theme of that genre under the surface through the structure instead of preaching to the audience. Joanna: It's interesting that you say not preaching to the audience. And of course, that implies like a long monologue about something. But in some of the story structure books, there's a thing where the theme is stated at a particular point, like the hero will say something where they are stating the theme. Should theme be spelled out somewhere, or is it all done through action and subtext and plot? John: I personally believe that 80% to 90% of the theme should be expressed through the structure. Because as soon as you put the theme into dialogue in someone's mouth, the audience, the reader, these are people who have seen thousands of stories, as soon as you do that, they back out. They say, “I don't want to hear that.” Right? They want to be lured in.  So that's why it's so important to do most of it through the story structure, through those plot beats. However, that being said, one of the marks of great writing is to have some theme expressed in dialogue. But it's only when you have it on a foundation of expressing the theme through the structure. Because what are we saying? It's the old thing of you are what you do. Actions speak louder than words. If you want the audience to really get a sense of what this story is really about, and it's about how to live, you want to lure them in through an exciting plot. And then once you got them there, then you can add some thematic lines to the dialogue. Joanna: It's so funny, because I mean, I've been writing fiction now for over a decade (as J.F. Penn.) And I feel like at the beginning when you write your first novel, you think you can learn everything. And then you get to a point when you realize you can never learn everything. There's always more to learn, and it's interesting. So The Anatomy of Story, many people use as a blueprint. And now The Anatomy of Genres, I'm sure many people will do that, too. But you've taught tens of thousands of students, and not all of them are successful. What sets apart the successful storytellers from the failed ones, of the people who've used your methods? Because to me, it's like, I can take your books, but if I follow them exactly, I'm still not going to be in the top 1%. What sets the most successful storytellers apart? How can we be that top 1% of storytellers? John: Yes, again, great question. In my opinion, the reason most writers don't get to that bestseller status is because they don't know the story techniques that best-selling authors use. And they often think they know, as I mentioned, they read these books that I mentioned right at the beginning, but those are not professional techniques. That's the big distinction.  In my experience, the biggest difference, and this belief has been heightened incredibly in the last 10 years because of trends in storytelling in every medium in the last 10 to 15 years. The biggest difference between the top 1% of professional writers and everybody else is the ability to create complex plot. And what separates the top  0.1% of professional writers from everyone else is the ability to also express advanced theme. Again, that's why I wrote the book because it tells writers exactly how to express advanced themes through complex plot. Both of these elements, theme and plot, are misunderstood. And in the case of plot, highly underestimated. Most writers, when they think about telling their story, they know the importance of character and character change, and the importance of tight dialogue and so on. When it comes to plot, they think, “well, I'll just figure that out as I go.” And that is the worst thing you can do. Because plot has more techniques to being able to write a complex or a great plot than all other stories skills combined. And most writers simply don't know what those techniques are. Joanna: Can you just address literary fiction as well? Because I can hear people listening who are like, “yeah, but I write literary fiction. I don't write science fiction or horror, or whatever.” What about literary fiction? How does this relate to that? Because it's not known as plot heavy, really. John: Exactly. And that is the biggest challenge you have when you write literary fiction. Now, what some writers of literary fiction do is they have a very anti-plot idea. And this, by the way, is about 150 years old. We went through a major emphasis on plot with writers like Dickens and Dumas. And then from then on, there was a slow but steady decline in terms of the importance that writers put on plot. We had this idea of anti-plot, that we would purposely try to have as little plot as possible. Now, there are some advantages to that, but there are very severe disadvantages to it as well. And I believe that one of the best techniques for a writer of literary fiction is put some plot in there, get some plot in there. Now, it's difficult to do in literary fiction. Why? Because of the story structure. The story structure in literary fiction, and why literary fiction is not included in this book, is because technically speaking, it's not a genre. It is a level, it is a quality of story. But if you were to look at stories that we normally think of as literary fiction, they are typically personal dramas. Typically we have a main character, and typically the opposition is within the family, or it's with characters who act like a family. And drama is a very large category of stories, but the problem with writing them is that drama does not have these landmarks, these guideposts. It does not have a predetermined hero or predetermined opponent and so on and so forth. Now, writers of literary fiction say, “that's why I write it because I don't want to have those kinds of prefab things.” And that's great, but the problem is coming up with a plot that will engage the reader enough to get across those larger elements of theme and character that you want to express. Joanna: I think you're right there. I mean, I read a lot of horror, and horror is often a standalone story. And a lot of the books I read are literary horror, like they really are incredible quality writing in a story that technically fits in horror. And of course, there's plenty of examples of that. So I agree with you there. I think that's brilliant. John: Joanna, you bring up a great point right there, which is the main technique — you know, I go through in each chapter how exactly how you transcend that particular genre — but the main technique overall for transcending any genre is to combine the plot beats of the genre with drama techniques. And so what you just described, like high-level horror, that's probably somebody who took the horror form and added drama elements, literary fiction elements, and kicked it up to a higher level. That combination is probably the best combination for telling a story that is both a popular and critical success. Joanna: Hmm, which is a rare thing indeed. So, we're almost out of time. You end the book with a glimpse into the future of storytelling and talk about an immersive experience where the story comes to life, potentially in virtual reality or in other ways. And you say the audience will interact with the story at every degree. And in a way that's exciting, and in a way that's kind of scary. How can we create in a way that might enable this kind of adaptation? John: Well, we're definitely moving toward a complete interconnection between life and story, in my opinion. And I believe that's a good thing because the more story informs our lives, the more we can make a life we want to live. And I believe story is the key to doing that. So we're moving toward what I call in the book, “a complete storyfication.” I made up a word there, storyfication of the world. Now, to your question, the way writers allow the reader to interact with the story at every degree is to create a story structure and a story world where all the genres exist simultaneously, or as many genres as work for that particular story idea. And that allows the story to move in a number of different directions, which the audience reader cannot predict. It allows them to identify with characters depending on which genre that main character represents. And by the way, we're seeing this not just in theme parks, and VR and so on, which you know, that's all about going as immersive as possible. But you're even seeing this in film, novels and television, and especially television, which is one of the things I talked about in the book, is we have lived through two major revolutions in story in our lives. The first is the revolution of television becoming an art form, to the degree that it is now far surpassed film as the place where the best stories are told. The other major revolution that we're seeing that I talk about in the myth story, is the emergence of the female myth, which has been gone from our culture for 3000 years. It's coming back strong and it's coming back fast. The point is, that when you set up stories that have various genres as part of the main storyline, and in TV especially you're going to see this because of the serial story structure that they use, which of course is based on Dickens, then you're going to be able to do these multi-line stories, with multiple main characters, each representing a different genre and telling a different type of story, which the reader will then be able to hook into in various ways. Joanna: As you were talking now, I was thinking of Game of Thrones, the TV show. I tried the books, I read a couple of them, and I think the TV show was fantastic. And like you said, it actually has all the genres. I mean, on one level, it's fantasy, but the romance is very strong, obviously it's thriller, it's horror. It's got everything. I don't know about science fiction. But, you're right, these big things that hit. I mean, Harry Potter is another great example where we can see ourselves in the different characters and there's elements of all these different stories. I mean, George R.R. Martin, in particular, has had a very long career, and a lot of it was a failure. And then he created this world that has become so evocative, and obviously has made him very, very rich. Is this something we can learn over a career? Or is it something that just sometimes happens by luck and timing? For JK Rowling, it was her first series. Do you think it is luck? How much does luck play in this compared to preparation? John: There is zero luck involved in that. Now, obviously, you can't control whether something you write will be popular. And of course, she's famous for having the Harry Potter stories turned down by everybody initially. As was Star Wars, for example. These stories are legendary. But in terms of when you look at what they're doing and you break down what they've done structurally and in terms of genres, that is totally figured out from the beginning. And it's just they're really brilliant at mixing genres. I talked in the first chapter of the book how Star Wars started this whole thing in every medium, this mixed-genre world that we live in. There are four major genres in Star Wars, and what the studios and publishers realized when Star Wars came out was that we're living in a multi-genre story world now. And if you want to hit a worldwide audience, that's what you do. Harry Potter has four major genres in it. And there is no question in my mind that JK Rowling put those together with foresight, knowing exactly how she wanted to do that in the story world that she created. Game of Thrones is exactly the same way. You can't get that kind of multi-thread storylines, with multiple heroes and over 150 major characters, unless you've got that thing really figured out ahead of time, both in terms of not just the plot and the characters, but in terms of how you're going to weave those genres. So I absolutely believe that people can learn it, and that's why I wrote this book. Joanna: And it is an excellent book, as I've said. I'm getting it in hard copy when it comes out. I definitely will be using it. So tell people where they can find you and your books and courses online. John: Great. For the book, just go to anatomyofgenres.com. That's one word, anatomyofgenres.com. And for courses in stories and software, just go to truby.com. And whatever your genre is, whatever your story preference might be, we've got courses and software to help you do that. Joanna: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, John. That was great. John: Joanna, thank you. It's been a real pleasure to be here with you. ˙The post Writing Tips: The Anatomy Of Genres With John Truby first appeared on The Creative Penn.