The Creative Penn Podcast For Writers

Joanna Penn
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Writing Craft and Creative Business

  1. 2d ago

    Writing Cross-Genre, Selling Direct, And Serialising On SubStack With P.D. Alleva

    How can horror writing help readers — and writers — work through psychological trauma? Why does cross-genre fiction take longer to find an audience, but pay off in the long run? Is running a direct sales store actually worth the inventory, postage, and learning curve? And how can SubStack work for fiction authors? With psychotherapist and award-winning author P.D. Alleva. In the intro, thoughts on why in-person conferences are still worth it, even when they are a challenge for sensitive introverts! and tips for making the best of conferences [Self-Publishing Show]. Today's show is sponsored by Draft2Digital, self-publishing with support, where you can get free formatting, free distribution to multiple stores, and a host of other benefits. Just go to www.draft2digital.com to get started. This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn  P.D. Alleva is the award-winning author of horror, sci-fi, thrillers, and fantasy books. He's also a psychotherapist. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.  Show Notes Why horror puts the human condition on display better than any other genre Emotional trauma as the silent psychological killer most people overlook The pros and challenges of cross-genre writing and finding your audience Practical lessons from running a direct store, including integration and signed-copy fulfilment How a 3 a.m. writing routine keeps the writing separate from the marketing and admin Serialising fiction on Substack, multiple newsletters, and avoiding paid subscriber promotions Why Facebook groups, TikTok Lives, and the three-to-one rule are working right now You can find P.D. at PDAlleva.com or on Substack. Transcript of the interview with P.D. Alleva Jo: P.D. Alleva is the award-winning author of horror, sci-fi, thrillers, and fantasy books. He's also a psychotherapist. So welcome, Paul. PD: Thank you very much. Thank you for having me. This is a great opportunity. I love doing interviews, and I love talking to great people. Jo: Oh, good. Well, first up— Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and being an indie author. PD: So I've been writing since I was a kid, at least second grade and more than likely even before that. I've always had that creative itch. Getting into indie author publishing, I published my first book in 2011. At the time I was also operating my own business, which took up about 24 hours of my time every single day. Then I kind of got through that and sold that in 2016, and I'm like, you know what? The time has come. I'd always written books, poetry, short stories, but never really did anything with them because I just didn't have the time. So in 2017, that's when I really came out and said, all right, the time is now. Indie publishing was doing great. The one good thing I do love about Amazon is they allowed us to come out there and start showing our craft to people. So in 2017, I just started—let's do this. Let's write full time. Let's put books out there. Let's be creative. Let's really get those juices flowing. Plus, I was getting a little bit old, and I was like, now is definitely the time to do this. Since then I've been publishing consistently, and most of my books are horror books, but I dabble. I have a sci-fi series, and I'm starting to get into psychological thrillers too. I've got a new psychological thriller that'll be published in early 2027 called Girl on a Mission. For the most part, I'm definitely into the horror genre—books, short stories, all that good fun stuff. Jo: Right, so a couple of follow-ups. You said you're a bit old. Can you give us what decade you're in at least? PD: Well, I'm 51, so born in 1971. Jo: Oh, there you go. Same age as me. PD: All right, good. See that? So we're going head-to-head there. Jo: I don't think that's old at all. Also, you mentioned you sold your business in 2016. So what was your business before? Because I think business experience is so important. PD: Agreed 100%. So I'm a psychotherapist, and I had owned a treatment centre for mental health and addiction. That was started in 2011, and in 2016 is when it sold. Since then, my wife and I started a private practice. So I still, even to this day—well, about a year and a half ago is when I stopped. I specialise in trauma, PTSD, and addiction. Trauma mostly. Most of my caseload has always been trauma, PTSD, sexual abuse, psychological abuse, war-type trauma. I was doing that mostly individually since 2016 in private practice, and I'll still go into treatment centres and see patients there too, specifically for trauma. About a year and a half ago is when I started wanting to do writing 100% full time. I thought about becoming a professor, maybe going to college, but then I wasn't sure if I wanted to get into that full time, as far as a caseload and school and everything like that. So I decided to just do group therapy, group facilitation, and I've been doing that consistently since then. It may be 15 hours a week. I do love to give back, and to me, it's more what I teach. I specialise in neuro-linguistic programming, bilateral stimulation or EMDR, hypnotherapy, science of mind concepts, psychopharmacology, biological bases of behaviour—which is pretty much how your brain works—ancient wisdom, quantum physics. I do this in a drug addiction treatment centre mostly, also mental health. And of course, just living an addictive lifestyle is traumatic, too, in and of itself. So pretty much I'm teaching them. Behaviour modification is a big part of what I'm teaching during that time. You'll see that, too, if you read my books. There's two things you can figure out from my books. You can figure out how to murder people and get away with it, and two, you can figure out how to overcome trauma as well. The whole “murder people and get away with it” comes from my upbringing. I have a very sorted past, let's put it that way. My upbringing was very different than what most people grow up in. Jo: Oh, can you give us any more than that? Now everyone's like, “Oh.” PD: “What's going on with this guy, right?” So I grew up, let's say, quote unquote, “in an Italian New York family.” Jo: Okay. All right. PD: That might give people ideas, right? Jo: That's going to give people a lot of ideas. PD: If you've ever seen the movie Goodfellas, I kind of grew up in that atmosphere, and with even some of those people too. My family had connections to those people in that movie, which I find very funny. If you watch that movie with me, you get a very different perspective on what's going on in the movie. Jo: Wow. So you're an interesting guy with an interesting background, with a very interesting backstory job as well. Some people are like, “Well, of course he's writing horror because horror is just awful and full of slasher gore and all that.” I often have to say to people who don't read horror, “Look, it's not like that.” Maybe some of it is, sure. But most of it isn't. Could you talk about how reading and writing horror can also be psychologically healthy? How do these worlds intertwine for you? PD: Well, sure. It 100% can be healthy. Especially over the last few years, there's a trend going on out there right now where people are taking their trauma and putting it into a creative process through poems, short stories, and even novels. They're taking their trauma and giving it a face, like a monster, where people are overcoming that monster within the creative process. I always say that horror is the genre that puts on display, better than any other genre out there, the human condition. Why is that? When people are in a terrifying situation, you really see who they are. You get to the heart of the matter of who that person is by putting them in these horrific but undefinable situations where it's like, what are they going to come out as? That real true personality needs to come out, and that courage comes out. That's huge in horror, and I think horror gets such a bad name. Now, I know there's the extreme horror and the splatterpunk, and that has its kind of role too in what I'm saying, but that's where horror is getting its bad reputation out there with the over-the-top type of gore. For the most part, that's a small part of the horror genre. It's a subgenre for a reason. It has its readership, and that's fine. Nothing wrong with it. I read it all the time. I find a lot of joy in it, a lot of excitement. However, for the most part, any horror novel that is not completely with the gore and stuff like splatterpunk can be seen as a psychological thriller, and a lot of psychological thrillers can be seen as a horror novel. Look at books like The Silence of the Lambs, Red Dragon. That's horrific as well, but if you read the novel, it's in there. It just gets that bad rap right now, and it's not all gore. Most horror novels that I read today are psychological horror. It's tame on the gore, and the psychological aspect is there. I always see that psychological aspect—it's like psychological trauma. Most people, even in my industry, when people are out there and you mention trauma, PTSD, they're thinking about sexual abuse, physical abuse, or war-type trauma. The silent psychological one—I once wrote an article called “Emotional Trauma: The Silent Psychological Killer.” The one that's out there is the psychological trauma, the emotional trauma that is widespread. Most people go through that, and it could even be from parent to child, and most people don't understand that that's a traumatic experience. It's like a distortion of reali

    53 min

  2. Jun 8

    Don’t Call It Art: Rediscovering Creative Joy With Austin Kleon

    Have you ever lost the joy in your creative work — that sense of fun you had when you were starting out, before the admin and the algorithms drained it away? How do mid-career creatives get it back, and what can a four-year-old teach us about play? Austin Kleon talks about productive procrastination, silly rituals, the case for paper reference books in an AI world, and how his newsletter went from a marketing cost to the day job that keeps the lights on. In the intro, Does social media still sell books? [Self-Publishing with ALLi]; Trial by algorithm [The Bookseller]; Publishing’s AI Hypocrisy Problem [The New Publishing Standard]; ALLi AI survey for authors; Brave New Bookshelf Podcast, and Pics from signing at BookVault. Today's show is sponsored by ProWritingAid, writing and editing software that goes way beyond just grammar and typo checking. With its detailed reports on how to improve your writing and integration with writing software, ProWritingAid will help you improve your book before you send it to an editor, agent or publisher. Check it out for free or get 15% off the premium edition at www.ProWritingAid.com/joanna This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn  Austin Kleon is the New York Times and international bestselling author of nonfiction books, including Steal Like an Artist, Show Your Work!, and Keep Going, as well as an artist, professional speaker, and poet. His latest book is Don't Call It Art: 10 Ways to Create Like a Kid Again. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.  Show Notes Why Austin wrote Don't Call It Art now, and what his kids taught him about creative joy Productive procrastination, silly rituals, and treating writing like Lego Comedy as a philosophical position, and giving yourself permission to be bad in private Sharing process in the algorithm era, and why your whole life is the process Bibliomancy, paper reference books, and what AI can't give you that a dictionary can Style, the Taco Bell distinctiveness rule, and how Austin's newsletter became his day job You can find Austin at AustinKleon.com. Transcript of the interview with Austin Kleon Jo: Austin Kleon is the New York Times and international bestselling author of nonfiction books, including Steal Like an Artist, Show Your Work!, and Keep Going, as well as an artist, professional speaker, and poet. His latest book is Don't Call It Art: 10 Ways to Create Like a Kid Again. So welcome back to the show, Austin. Austin: Thank you for having me back. It's nice to talk to you again. Jo: You were on the show in March 2020, and at the time, your book was Keep Going, which was prescient considering the pandemic and politics. So I wondered, why this book, Don't Call It Art, now? Was this something you see in the creative community or your own life that made you want to write this book? Austin: Keep Going is a book about what happens when the world goes crazy around you and you're still trying to do your creative work. This is a book about what happens when inside has bottomed out. Keep Going is a book about the world bottoming out, and you're worried that your own creative work is going to bottom out too. How do you keep pushing through and keep making stuff? This book, to me, is about what happens when you bottom out inside—when you've lost that love and feeling for the thing that you wanted to do, and you're just not connecting with it in the way that you used to or the way that you want to. How do you get back? How do you return to that sense of joy and wonder and fun that we have when we're starting out? And for me, it was being around my little kids that taught me how to tap into that. My kids were natural—they didn't have any creative hangups. I would spend all day talking to people who had creative hangups, and then I'd get back in the house, and I'd just be around these beings who didn't have any of them. It was really instructive. I felt like, if I could bottle the energy of my kids when they were about four years old and try to put it in a book, I think it could really help a lot of the people that I run into, and the people with the kinds of problems I hear from. Jo: You mentioned bottoming out. How do people know when they've hit that point? Austin: You just don't want to do it anymore. You're kind of like, “This just isn't giving me back what it used to.” When we start with our creative work, that's the thing that juices us. We come away from it feeling full up. I think you hit a certain point where you start to feel drained after it. Or maybe you don't feel drained by the thing itself that you're doing—maybe it's all the stuff around it, which is more often the case. For example, if you're a mid-career writer like me, who's been publishing books for 16 years now, I still really like writing. I still really like drawing. I still really like cutting and pasting and putting things together. It's the admin around the work—the emails, the meetings, the running-a-business part of it—that's super draining for me, and that stuff can start to bleed over into the creative work. So it's really important for me to make sure that I'm having some playtime, some R&D, some research and development time, to make sure it's not just all business. When you take the thing that you love and you turn it into the thing that you make a living from, you can really run into a lot of problems. Jo: I'm at 20 years, so I know exactly what you're saying, and a lot of listeners are the same. We love writing books, but it's all the stuff that goes around it. So for those of us who do this for money as well as passion, what are some practical ways to have more fun with our creativity? Austin: Something I learned from my kids is that you really are your most creative when you're supposed to be doing something else. So one of the things I use a lot in the studio is productive procrastination. Whatever I'm supposed to be working on, I start another little project, and that's my little naughty fun time. When I first come into the studio, I try to do something that I'm not supposed to be doing—something that I won't have much to show for. That could be making one of my blackout poems. That could be making a collage in my notebook. It could also be sitting here. I have a bass in the studio now, so I can practise my bass guitar. Sometimes I'll do that for the first 15 minutes just to get in that headspace of, “Hey, what's it like to do something just for yourself? Just because you want to do it?” The juice that you get from that little naughty “I'm going to do what I'm not supposed to be doing right now” thing, that carries into the rest of the day. It's like a nice start to things. Jo: Do you think that play could be something different to what we make our money with? For me, writing novels and stories is great fun in one way, but it's also what I then publish and make money on. So writing stories is more serious, I guess, than playing with Lego or something. Austin: Right. So the trick is, how can you make writing your stories like playing with Lego? That's kind of been my whole career. I hate staring at Microsoft Word and that blinking cursor, taunting you like, “Come on, what have you got?” A lot of my creative life has been about trying to make it more playful, trying to make it feel more like a game. That's how I came up with my blackout poems. I take an article from The New York Times and I black it out until it only has a few words left behind. It sort of looks like if the CIA did haiku, for some people listening. That was one little exercise. Then weirdly, that side thing that I thought was just play, just fun—that turned into my first book. So then it's, okay, what else can I mess around with and play with? I do a lot of collage work in the studio, and I rarely actually use that for any of the books. Sometimes I use it for my newsletter to illustrate the newsletter. But it's always about trying to figure out, how can I make writing a game? How can I make it more playful? There are different things that I do to make it feel more playful. One of them's really stupid. I really believe in silly rituals because I think silliness is really powerful. People talk about their daily rituals—Mason Currey has that great book, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work. When I was reading that book, I realised it was really the silly stuff that I really liked. There was, I think it was Balzac counting out coffee beans or something before he got to write. Or Steinbeck sharpening 12 pencils or something goofy like that. So one of the things I like to do before I write is that I have these cigarette pencils. They're pencils that look like cigarettes in the studio. I put one in my mouth before I start writing, and I pretend to be some old '40s writer on a typewriter. I like doing goofy stuff in the studio because I think when you do goofy stuff—stuff that you'd be embarrassed if anyone else saw it—it gets you in that playful state. Jo: It's interesting. In your book, you have a section that says, “Don't take things too seriously.” For many of us, we write memoir for example, and that is very close to us. It's like the deepest expression of what we want to say in the world. It feels very serious. So how can we hold things more lightly and not take things so seriously? Austin: For me, comedy is actually a philosophical position. What I mean by that is, I think a lot of people set out with a tragic model of creative work. They think, “Oh, I have this special gift,” or, “I have this thing that I really need to do, and I need to put it out into the world, a

    1h 10m

  3. Jun 1

    Writing Through Grief And Rebooting an Indie Author Business With Jami Albright

    How do you write when your heart is broken? How do you go back into the publishing business after years away, knowing it's a very different industry to the one you left? With Jami Albright. In the intro, InAudio is now distributing audiobooks to BookShop.org; The Feedback Loop that Makes Better Writers [Author Nation Podcast]; Bones of the Deep on Goodreads. This episode is sponsored by Publisher Rocket, which will help you get your book in front of more Amazon readers so you can spend less time marketing and more time writing. I use Publisher Rocket for researching book titles, categories, and keywords — for new books and for updating my backlist. Check it out at www.PublisherRocket.com This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn  Jami Albright is the bestselling author of the Brides on the Run romances and the co-host of the Wish I'd Known Then Podcast. Today we're talking about her new novel, The Summer That Changed Us. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.  Show Notes How Jami started writing fiction at 47 and waited a year before publishing her first book Why she fictionalised her sister's terminal cancer story rather than writing a memoir The difference between writing as therapy and writing for the reader Reactivating an email newsletter after almost two years of silence Going wide with a standalone women's fiction novel after years in KU and rom-com Letting go of the frantic hustle of indie publishing and redefining what success looks like You can find Jami at JamiAlbright.com. Transcript of the interview with Jami Albright Jo: Jami Albright is the bestselling author of the Brides on the Run romances and the co-host of the Wish I'd Known Then Podcast. Today we're talking about her new novel, The Summer That Changed Us. So, welcome to the show, Jami. Jami: Thank you, Joanna. I've made it. This is my first time on The Creative Penn, so I can retire tomorrow. Jo: And we were saying before the show, I really thought you had been on the show before, because over the years we've connected a lot. We met over a decade ago, didn't we? At the Smarter Artist Summit. I was like, “I'm sure you've been on the show,” and you haven't. So, yes, welcome. Jami: Thank you. You've been on our show, though. We did an interview with you a few years ago. Jo: Yes. Well, anyway, for anyone who doesn't follow your show— Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and publishing. Jami: Okay. So I am the co-host of the Wish I'd Known Then Podcast for Writers. Sara Rosett and I have been doing that podcast since January 2020. Little did we know what was coming, and it really saved me, just mentally, being able to talk to people every week. I never wrote a word of fiction until I was 47. I'd never really written anything. I have really bad grammar. I tell a lot of stories, and I would make up stories, but I'd never write them down because of the grammar thing. But my reading buddy had her birthday coming up in about three months, and I thought, “You know what? I'm going to write Jennifer a book for her birthday. She doesn't care if I have bad grammar.” I just thought it would be on brand. It was so hard. I wrote myself into a corner very fast. When I told her, she said, “Well, now you have to.” So I got Writing a Romance Novel for Dummies, I read that, and I started writing what is now Running from a Rock Star. But then my computer crashed and I lost it, and I was like, “Well, I'm not a writer.” So that was fine. Then I turned 50, and I told my family, “I think the only thing I regret is not finishing that book.” Of course they were like, “Well, you need to just do it again.” I was like, “No, I had 30,000 words.” A few weeks later my daughter came in and said, “Mom, I found this flash drive in my car. I think it has your book on it.” And it was 20,000 of the 30,000 words. So I was like, “Well, it's now or never.” So I joined Romance Writers of America and got involved in a critique group, and they absolutely kicked my butt for a good six months. I think every week they were surprised I came back, because it was so brutal. I knew I didn't know anything, and they taught me to write. Six months after I joined that first critique group, I won my first contest with the first 10 pages of that book. Then I just continued on. Three years later, I published Rock Star. I was going to publish it two years later, but I went to the Smarter Artist Summit, where I met you. I was advised by Julia Cant and Sean Platt and some other people to wait—preferably to have more books written. I had the second book written when the first one came out, but it still needed to be edited. So I waited a year, learned this business, and sold plasma to pay for my edits because I was poor. It was the best decision I ever made. Going to that conference, first of all, was the best $500 I've ever spent, and waiting that year really helped me learn this business. When I published the book, I had an email list of 1,200 people before the book ever came out. None of those things would have been set up had I published right after the Smarter Artist Summit, which is what I'd thought I would do, in the summer. So waiting gave me time to get everything set up so that when I published that book, it really took off from day one. I had 1,200 people on that newsletter list who wanted that book, because I had done a preview promo. Instead of putting out the whole book, I think I put out four chapters, and then people signed up. I don't know that that works anymore. Jo: I was going to say that. We should say to people, what was that, around 2016? Jami: 2017. Things have changed. Jo: Yes, things have changed, and I think this is so important. I had a question about this, and what they were implying was things that, like you said, we learned a decade ago. Things have changed. We'll come back to how you're doing it now, but just in terms of finishing off how you got started—those books did really well, didn't they? You had a couple of years there. How many books did you do? How did that go? Because you did have real success. Jami: Yes. From 2017 until really the beginning of 2021, if you look at my sales graph and my income, it just increased, increased, increased. 2019 was my very best year, but 2020 was only slightly lower as far as book sales and income. I only put out a book a year after the second book. The second book came out about six months after the first one, and after that it was about every nine months to a year that I put a book out. Everyone said you can't make money doing that, but I did. I think those books are very tropey. They're very hooky. That helped. I also think the timing of those books was really good. Rom-com was really coming up, and my rom-com is pretty wacky, but it's also really emotional too. If I get any critiques about them it's usually that “this book was way more emotional than I expected, and I was looking for something a little lighter.” They're just really wacky. They're rom-coms. Wacky circumstances. Small town, so there's all these small-town people. I just think it was a good time to release those. Those were good years. I miss those years. Jo: It's a good lesson, because it's not always up and to the right, is it? We're going to come back and revisit that. So then the pandemic hit, and on a more personal level, over the last few years, you've had a deeply difficult time that has led to The Summer That Changed Us, your latest book. So talk a bit about what's happened, why this book, and also why fictionalise it rather than write a memoir? I had that question. Jami: Okay. So 2021, my income was dropping, but it was still okay. I was still making more than enough that—thank God I don't have to make all the money in our household—but there was a level that I wanted to. At the end of 2021, my sister, who was the fourth of five sisters, had lived with cancer—non-smoker's lung cancer—for 10 years. She had the kind that, if you had a certain mutation, there were medications that worked amazingly well. Until they didn't, and then they put you on another class of that medication. So for 10 years, that's what she did. She missed work maybe three times in 10 years. People who met her never knew she had cancer unless they knew us. She just never acted like she had cancer. We would have to say, “Remember, you have cancer.” At the end of 2021, they ran out of that class of drugs. There were some being tested, but none had been approved. When she was diagnosed, she was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer. You don't survive very long having stage four lung cancer with no medication. So I saw the writing on the wall pretty much at the end of 2021, but of course I was very hopeful that they could do something. By May of 2022, it was clear things were not going well. In July of 2022, she got a six-to-twelve-week diagnosis. She just went in one day thinking she was about to get radiation, not knowing anything, and they were like, “No, we can't do radiation, and you should get your affairs in order because you have six to twelve weeks to live.” Jo: Oh. Jami: People who've been through it know this feeling. It's like being hit by a wrecking ball. It just knocks everything off your axis. Your whole world implodes into this one moment, this person that you love. I live four hours away from my family. They all still live in the same small town. I was in Dallas at my daughter's at the time, and they live about 30 miles outside of Dallas. So I went to my mom's, and I stayed there. I was t

    1 hr

  4. May 25

    Accessibility And AI: How New Tools Are Opening Doors For Indie Authors With Jeff Adams

    How is AI transforming accessibility for indie authors — and why should you care even if you consider yourself able-bodied? What happens when the tools designed to help people with disabilities end up making everyone's creative business better? Jeff Adams, accessibility expert and romance author, explores how AI is opening doors that were previously closed. In the intro, Spotify Audiobook Innovations; The Economics of Convention Life [The Indy Author]; Friction in your Author Business [Self-Publishing with ALLi]. Today's show is sponsored by Draft2Digital, self-publishing with support, where you can get free formatting, free distribution to multiple stores, and a host of other benefits. Just go to www.draft2digital.com to get started. This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn  Jeff Adams is the author of YA thrillers and gay romance, and the co-author of Content for Everyone, a practical guide for creative entrepreneurs to produce accessible and usable web content. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.  Show Notes How ending a long-running podcast made space for more writing — and how to know when it's time to let go of a good thing What accessibility really means for indie authors and why your digital content might be excluding part of your audience How AI agents like Claude Cowork are removing physical and cognitive barriers for authors with disabilities, chronic pain, or limited energy The culture of shame around AI use in the writing community and why blanket anti-AI statements can be ableist Practical tools including NotebookLM, ElevenReader, and ChatGPT for marketing copy, metadata management, and multimodal research Exciting futures in personalised reading, real-time translation, and AI browser agents that could change how everyone interacts online You can find Jeff at JeffAdamsWrites.com. Jeff also now has a SubStack at contentforeveryone.substack.com Transcript of the interview with Jeff Adams Jo: Jeff Adams is the author of YA thrillers and gay romance, and the co-author of Content for Everyone, a practical guide for creative entrepreneurs to produce accessible and usable web content. Welcome back to the show, Jeff. Jeff: Thanks so much, Jo. It's good to be back. Jo: It is. You were last on the show in March 2023, so over three years ago now. Give us a bit of an update on your writing and publishing business and what it looks like at the moment. Jeff: Sure. I think the biggest thing that happened is that my husband Will, who is also a writer, we ended the Big Gay Fiction Podcast at the end of 2024, after 470-something episodes. It was basically time to do that. So we both focused on writing from that point. In 2025 we had some of our biggest successes in getting writing out into the world. I refound my groove—my difficulty in writing went away finally. We talked a little bit about that back in 2023 too. Will started a new pen name and started producing again, and it was really good to be able to move in that direction. Jo: Was this the hockey romance that really hit at the right time? Jeff: You know, I wish I could have capitalised more on Heated Rivalry when it came out, but I did get hockey books out, and I think I did get to ride that wave a little bit there too. Jo: Yes, and if people don't know about that, that was a super popular streaming series. Was that based on a book? Jeff: It was, yes. Rachel Reid was the author of that book and that series that then Jacob Tierney optioned and made into what fairly turned into a global phenomenon at the end of 2025. Jo: Yes, absolutely. Although I particularly liked Red, White and Royal Blue. That was the one I liked. Not so much into hockey. But anyway, I just wanted to ask you about the Big Gay Fiction Podcast. As you say, you did hundreds of episodes over many years. You and I met over podcasting. You've had lots of connections with people. You ended it, and I know you struggled with ending it, but it sounds like it went really well for you. So maybe you could talk a bit about— How do you know when it's time to end something—a good thing rather than something bad? Does that make more space for writing, essentially? Jeff: It absolutely did make more space for writing for both of us, in particular for me because I have a day job. I balance everything on the creative side with the day job. Will and I had been talking about it for over a year. It just was like, it's really time. After nine years, getting to that 470 mark, we thought about trying to get to 10 years and we thought about, if not 10, then getting to 500 and ending on a milestone. As we looked at everything in our creative business, it was like, this is fun, we enjoy it, but we're not getting as much out of it as we might be if we were actually also writing books, which we also really want to do. It became a time thing and what was the best use of the time. We absolutely miss it occasionally. The whole Heated Rivalry thing, I would've loved to have had episodes to talk about that on, but in the long run, it was worth it. Jo: I mean, one of the things with a podcast, particularly around fiction, was that it was a marketing angle for your fiction. This show is a marketing angle mainly for my nonfiction. So what did you replace the podcast with, in terms of book marketing? Jeff: It was really stepped-up email marketing. I'd always had a list. Will started a list, of course, as he started his new pen name. So it was really turning on that, focusing on that, getting some email marketing with a Bargain Booksy and a Fussy Librarian and a BookBub occasionally to do that work. To be honest, even though we covered things in our genre that if you like what we're talking about, you should like our books, there was never as much of a connection there as you'd want there to be. Even from that book marketing angle, these other things that we can do, it's also a better spend of the money to get those types of promos than it was to continue running the show. Jo: Yes, that is interesting. I mean, obviously I think about podcasting a lot since I have this one, and I put Books and Travel on a hiatus and that was meant to help my fiction and definitely didn't help my fiction sales. But I want to bring it back again because I love doing it. Do you have this hankering sometimes? Do you think you'd ever do the podcast again? Because you are also quite into all the technical stuff and all that. Jeff: It's possible. I've toyed with the idea of doing a short accessibility podcast geared towards creatives, tilting to the same audience that Content for Everyone does. Then I come back and look at the time—is my time better served writing new fiction or perhaps starting a Substack, which I also toy with the idea of, for accessibility stuff? So it bounces around in my head to do another show, but I haven't really decided to jump on that yet. Jo: Yes, and I think that waiting is really good. As you say, you quit a big thing and you don't have to rush to fill it again. I love that you guys are writing more books. So I wanted us to talk about that up front because I know people who listen to this show—I encourage people to start podcasts if you want to, but equally it can take a lot of time. So that's fantastic. Now, you mentioned accessibility, and I feel like the word can be quite difficult for people. So let's just start with a definition. What is accessibility? Why do you care and why should we care? Jeff: So accessibility is really about making sure that whatever the thing is, whether it's something out in the physical world or in the online world, that everybody has access to it. Access to the information, access to getting into a building or being able to cross the street appropriately, whatever that is—that the accessibility of the thing is high. So that regardless of who is approaching it, they can interact with whatever the thing is. If we put that into the digital world, it's about making sure that text on a screen can be perceived by anybody, whether they're trying to read it visually or if they're trying to read it through a screen reader or through a braille monitor. Whatever that is, they need to be able to interact with it, get the information they need, do all the functions of whatever it is on the screen. Check out on Amazon, check out at their favourite e-commerce place, be able to get the products in their cart, check out, et cetera. For creatives, it's about the things that we do: the websites that we build for ourselves, the e-commerce platforms that we use, our email marketing, our social media posts. Making all of that as accessible as we can so that we're not perhaps missing a part of our audience or our prospective audience from being able to engage with our work and in turn, hopefully, buy our books and enjoy our books and become a fan. This became important to me because of my day job. I hadn't really considered this—like, I think most people don't—until I started working at UsableNet. It's going to be 15 years I've been at that company come this autumn, and I really started to see the impacts because UsableNet is all about accessibility on the digital front. I really started to learn, being a project manager for them, what all of that meant and how it impacted people who couldn't buy something online, couldn't book a hotel room, couldn't book an airline ticket. It just really became something I got passionate about. I ended up writing the book because I realised that nobody talks to creatives about this. Nobody tells the independent author what they should do to help make t

    1h 3m

  5. May 18

    SuperCreativity And KeyNote Speaking With A Non-Fiction Book With James Taylor

    How can you supercharge your creativity in an age when AI is reshaping everything — including how we write, edit, and market our books? What does it look like to use AI as a genuine creative partner rather than a shortcut? And could professional speaking become an income stream that complements your writing career? With James Taylor. In the intro, Audible's new royalty model; New royalty model details [ACX; Kindlepreneur]; Public Speaking for Authors, Creatives and other Introverts; Why Indie Authors Should Ignore the Market’s Mood and Focus on their Mission [Self-Publishing with ALLi]; Lichfield Cathedral; This podcast is sponsored by Kobo Writing Life, which helps authors self-publish and reach readers in global markets through the Kobo eco-system. You can also subscribe to the Kobo Writing Life podcast for interviews with successful indie authors. This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn  James Taylor is a nonfiction author, professional speaker, podcaster, and entrepreneur who helps people unlock their creative potential. He hosts the SuperCreativity Podcast and his latest book is SuperCreativity: Augmenting Human Creativity in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.  Show Notes How to define creativity and why it's becoming the most valuable skill in the age of AI The five stages of the creative process — and the stage most people skip Three types of creative purpose: play, self-expression, and legacy How James used multiple AI tools alongside human collaborators to write, edit, and market SuperCreativity Bulk book sales, industry-specific editions, and revenue models for nonfiction author-speakers Practical tips for authors who want to break into professional keynote speaking You can find James at JamesTaylor.me. Transcript of the interview with James Taylor Jo: James Taylor is a nonfiction author, professional speaker, podcaster, and entrepreneur who helps people unlock their creative potential. He hosts the SuperCreativity Podcast and his latest book is SuperCreativity: Augmenting Human Creativity in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. Welcome to the show, James. James: Well, thank you for having me as a guest. I'm looking forward to this conversation today. Jo: It's going to be really good. First up— Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and publishing. James: Well, today I'm a professional keynote speaker, so I deliver about fifty to a hundred keynotes per year in twenty-five-plus countries. Primarily I speak on creativity, innovation, and artificial intelligence. Go back into my deepest, darkest history—I actually used to manage rock stars. That was my old job. I used to be in the music industry for many, many years. I worked with members of The Rolling Stones, and for our listeners in the UK, I managed bands like Deacon Blue. Then I went to the dark side. In 2010, I moved to California to work in Silicon Valley, to work in the world of tech. That got me involved in artificial intelligence. Right about 2017, I was speaking at an event in San Francisco and someone came up to me and said, “You realise you could probably speak for a living, you could do this for a living.” So I thought, well, how does that work? And he told me. Then I embarked on the career that I have today, which is primarily as a speaker, with writing now coming a bit more to the fore. Jo: Wow, I remember Deacon Blue. James: Yes. Jo: “Dignity.” That's crazy. Very, very cool backstory there, but we'll come back to the career side of things. Let's get into super creativity, because my listeners are certainly creatives. Most of the listeners will have a book either on the way or they might even have lots of books. So we all do want to be super creative. How do you define creativity, and why is it important to keep focusing on this even if we do identify that way? James: For me, creativity is about bringing new ideas to the mind. Innovation is about bringing new ideas to the world, but without creativity, there is no innovation. So creativity is really the engine of innovation. Whether that is designing new products, new services, or creating new works of art and new books. The reason that creativity is becoming more important is because of what we're seeing right now in terms of artificial intelligence. AI is going to replace a lot of the non-creative tasks that we currently do in our jobs. If you look at things like the World Economic Forum, there was recently a study with a thousand global business leaders, and work from companies like LinkedIn—they all highlight that creativity is going to be one of the foremost important soft skills for this new future. So creativity, strangely, will actually become more important, not less important, as we go ahead. That's the creativity side. Probably for many of the listeners here, they'll consider themselves to be creative. That is not the norm. As I mentioned, I speak in about twenty-five countries a year, and if I ask the audiences—primarily corporate audiences—to put their hands up if they consider themselves to be creative, only between ten to forty per cent of the audience will raise their hands. So part of my job is to show them why they are more creative than they think they are and why we're all born with this creative potential. Then moving into the super creativity side, it's really to show them how they can augment that creativity by collaborating more deeply with other people or machines—things like artificial intelligence. So SuperCreativity, the book that I've written and the speeches I give on it, is really about how we can augment our individual creativity by collaborating more deeply with other people or artificial intelligence. For me, that's been the thing I've been fascinated by for the past few years, and probably for many of our listeners who are now using AI in their writing, their researching, and their marketing of their books, they're probably getting into this space as well. I really wanted to dive into that—both the collaboration with other people and with machines and AI. Jo: In terms of the super creativity then, do you have any practices or ideas? Before we get into collaboration, many of us authors work alone—and of course we can come back to the AI stuff in a minute—but in terms of super creativity, are there ways that we can even supercharge what we do already? Then, of course there are people listening who might not feel creative. So give us a few tips on how we can potentially change our mindset or become even more creative. James: In the book I talk about what I call the eight Ps of super creativity, which are purpose, personality, practice, people, process, place, product, and persuasion. Persuasion is really the marketing piece at the end. Probably the one that could be most useful to many listeners today is the practice piece—the practice or the process side of things. For many of us, what that usually consists of is just having some type of daily creative practice. Different people do it in different ways. Many of your listeners will know the works of people like Julia Cameron—the morning pages style of having some type of daily practice. Other people do it in slightly different ways. The process bit is really interesting. I talk about this creative process that we all have, and I talk about these five stages of the creative process. The first stage, let's say if we're writing a book, is really that preparation stage. That is usually the stage where we are trying to absorb as much information as possible about the thing that we're going to be writing about. The topic, if it's nonfiction, or going to the places, visiting the scenes that we're going to set certain things within for the book. So that preparation stage is really about absorbing as much information as possible from the outside. It's not going to look very creative. We're just absorbing at that stage. Now the mistake that a lot of people tend to make is they immediately try to jump from that preparation stage to looking to generate ideas. But what all the studies show us is we should spend a little bit of time in what we call the incubation stage. This is where it's often very useful if we've done some research, that we put things to one side for a little while, maybe a few weeks, move on to another project, think about something completely different. Your brain will continue to work in the background. Your unconscious brain will work on that content you've been absorbing. Then what often happens as a result of that is we come to this third stage, which is that insight stage—that aha moment. That happens for various different reasons and you can seed that in slightly different ways so you're more likely to get inspiration in your day-to-day work. Then as we know—as you are a writer of many, many books—many people think, “Well, that's it. I've done it. The idea for that book or that chapter has come to me.” That is really just the first five per cent of the process. The next stage is where we look at all the different ideas we have and decide which ones we want to pursue, which ones are going to make the grade. This is what we call the evaluation stage. Once we've done that, we move to that final stage, which is the elaboration stage. If it's a startup, this is when you're building your minimum viable product. As a writer, this is where you're actually doing the work, putting those words out onto the page. It's a very iterative process, so it's not necessarily linear. You'll go back and forth.

    1h 7m

  6. May 11

    Verb Your Enthusiasm: Transform Your Writing With Stronger Verbs With Sarah Kaufman

    How can upgrading your verbs transform flat writing into vivid, page-turning prose? Why do so many writing problems turn out to be verb problems — and how can you fix yours? Sarah Kaufman explores the art of the verb and shares practical tips for making your writing stronger, clearer, and more alive. In the intro, writing as a caregiver and grief [Stark Reflections; The Creative Penn episode]; Beyond Bookshops — Bulk Sales, Gifting and Alternative Distribution [Self-Publishing Advice]; list of money books; London walk along SouthBank; Bones of the Deep: AI-Assisted Artisan Author webinars. Today's show is sponsored by ProWritingAid, writing and editing software that goes way beyond just grammar and typo checking. With its detailed reports on how to improve your writing and integration with writing software, ProWritingAid will help you improve your book before you send it to an editor, agent or publisher. Check it out for free or get 15% off the premium edition at www.ProWritingAid.com/joanna This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn  Sarah Kaufman is a Pulitzer Prize–winning critic, an award-winning author, and a writing teacher. Her latest book is Verb Your Enthusiasm: How to Master the Art of the Verb and Transform Your Writing. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.  Show Notes Why verbs are the most versatile and underrated tool in a writer's toolkit How to replace flat, explanatory sentences with vivid, action-driven prose The power of physical and metaphorical verbs to show emotion instead of telling it When passive voice works, and when it's hiding something Balancing beautiful language with the demands of storytelling and deadlines How to broaden your writing expertise into a sustainable portfolio career You can find Sarah at SarahLKaufman.com. Transcript of the interview with Sarah Kaufman Jo: Sarah Kaufman is a Pulitzer Prize–winning critic, an award-winning author, and a writing teacher. Her latest book is Verb Your Enthusiasm: How to Master the Art of the Verb and Transform Your Writing. Welcome to the show, Sarah. Sarah: Thank you so much. I'm delighted to be with you. Jo: This is such a great topic, but first up— Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing. Sarah: I got into writing in a backwards way, I guess. The romantic, wonderful thing about writing is the freedom that it gives you, right? That's what we all think about—this freedom to address the world. Then the practical, wonderful thing about writing is developing a focal point, which I had to do in order to write in the first place. I'll explain a little bit about that. I became a dance critic, which is what I did at the Washington Post for 27 years, to have something to write about. That was necessary because, though I've always known that I wanted to be a writer ever since earliest childhood, I just didn't really find things to write about when it came time to actually try to make a living at it. As I was approaching leaving college as an English major, I was getting very anxious about what I was actually going to do, and I didn't have this burning desire to write about any certain thing. I happened to be working as a full-time secretary at a ballet school because I had been a ballet nerd all through my youth. I knew quite a bit about doing ballet, about the steps and about the lingo, so I was a suitable candidate to work at a ballet school. I was learning so much from the teachers there—who had all been professional dancers—about the aesthetics of ballet and how you shape the steps into art and into a performance. I was getting more and more interested in dance. One day the director took me out to lunch and she said, “You should write about dance.” I had seriously never considered that before, but she knew that I was an English major, that I wanted to write. She said, “Look, you know so much,” and she really encouraged me. So I said, “Well, okay, I'll give it a go,” because I had been reading dance criticism. I just started picking it apart and seeing how critics put their reviews together, called up a local paper, took on some freelance assignments, and did a lot of freelancing for years and eventually landed at the Washington Post. So the point I want to make is that I had that thing to write about. Now I had a focal point, and my books grew out of that. The first book I wrote is The Art of Grace: On Moving Well Through Life. That was an exploration of aspects of grace stemming from physical grace, which I knew about from dancers, and looking at connections there with social grace and spiritual grace. Then this verbs book likewise grew out of my work as a dance writer because my goal in writing about dance was to capture the experience of it. I didn't want to be a scholarly type of critic, though I do love that kind of criticism and I read it and learn so much from it, but I knew that was not going to be my style. I wanted more to primarily recreate the experience for the reader, as well as then coming in with analysis of it. I was just so fascinated by the look and the feel of what I was seeing on the stage. I wanted to be able to share that with the reader. So I had to lean on verbs to capture the action, and people occasionally would say, “Oh, you're so good with verbs, Sarah,” which I thought was kind of interesting. It's like, oh, so this is a strength I had developed. I didn't really realise it. Then that, coupled with my teaching experience, is what led me to think I have some things to talk about regarding verbs. I'd like to share with the world because, as a teacher, I often see that writing issues my students have are actually verb issues. They get into a corner with a lot of explanation or clauses on top of clauses, and they get lost. Where is the point that you want to make here? What is the meaning? What is it you want me to take away from your work? Well, if we pare that back and look at the verbs and try to get some direction in the sentences, that often brings clarity. Suddenly the student will say, “I was thinking more about adjectives and nouns. I didn't realise that verbs were really something to focus on.” I thought that would be an interesting challenge to bring that out. Jo: It's so fascinating. I love how your career has emerged and that you've leaned into different things. It has a kind of dance to it itself. We're going to come back to your career, but let's start with that, because you mentioned that with many of your students you are reading their work and you think, “Oh, we can fix this with some verbs.” Let's get into that because you talk about weeding and this verb-first editing process. Most of the listeners will have some kind of writing already—either they've got a lot of books or they've got a draft in progress. This is the kind of thing we struggle with: how do we make our work stronger? Talk about why you are so obsessed with verbs some tips for making our work stronger. Sarah: Yes, I am obsessed with verbs. I will cop to that. They're so interesting and I felt like they were a little underrated as a writing tool. Verbs, as we learned in school, drive your sentence forward. They're the engine. Really, I feel like they are the secret soul of language, because they're so versatile, they're so essential. First of all, they hold it all together. They're the only part of speech that in itself is a full sentence. You can have a full sentence that's a verb. “Watch.” “Look.” “Continue.” You could go on and on. That is a full grammatical sentence. You can't do that with any other part of speech. They're so essential. The word “verb” itself comes from the Latin verbum, which means “a word.” So verbs became that name for all words. Our literary ancestors understood this—that they're really the beginning and the end as far as words go. They can add to your work when you start thinking about verbs in this way, and you start thinking about how can I elevate my writing—well, verbs are very efficient and very evocative. They can add not only clarity to your work, but a kind of elegance. They can say so much in such a little amount of space. For example, say you have something like this: “The cook was facing the dinner rush, and so she decided to put together something quick and easy so no one would know how nervous and unprepared she was.” In that sentence, I'm doing a lot of explaining and describing. I'm just explaining to you the situation, but I haven't really brought it to life much. A better way to do it might be something like this—and you can see it comes a little bit more active: “The dinner rush pressed upon her. To hide her nerves, she whisked eggs and milk into omelettes, shredded parsley with her bare hands and flung it all onto plates like Jackson Pollock splashing his canvas.” I show you what her nerves and the pressure resulted in. I show that manifesting. Or you could even shorten it and just say: “Dinner rush loomed. She whisked and whipped, chopped and dripped and masked her nerves with glistening omelettes.” There are stylistic differences there, but it's just to give an example of how you can take something that, on the face of it, sure, it makes sense—it's perfectly fine as a sentence—but it just lies there. It's flat. Maybe it's not very exciting. It doesn't really move the story forward. You can bring it to life by showing us. You show us with the action. Jo: You haven't really specifically said what a verb is in that sentence you just had around “whisked” and all of those things. Those sentences were actually quite d

    1h 3m

  7. May 8

    AI, Creativity, And The Future of Publishing with Nadim Sadek

    Is AI really the end of creativity, or the biggest emancipation of creative energy we've ever seen? How can authors thrive in a time of super abundance, when anyone can make anything? What happens when publishers become technology providers, and agents start shopping for books on our behalf? With Nadim Sadek. In the intro, my AI-Assisted Artisan Author webinars. This show is supported by my Patrons. Join my Community and get articles, discounts, and extra audio and video tutorials on writing craft, author business, and AI tools, at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn  Nadim Sadek is a serial entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of Shimmr AI, an AI-powered book marketing company, as well as the bestselling author of children's books and non-fiction books, including Quiver, don't Quake: How Creativity Can Embrace AI. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.  Show Notes Using AI as a research partner, editor, and constructive critic when writing a book The ratio of dreaming to execution Why publishers still draw red lines at AI-written words, and why that may change Inside Shimmr's three-engine advertising system: Strategizer, Generator, and Deployer Multimodal interactivity, agentic purchasing, and the idea of the Panthropic You can find Nadim on LinkedIn or at NadimSadek.com. Transcript of Interview with Nadim Sadek Jo: Nadim Sadek is a serial entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of Shimmr AI, an AI-powered book marketing company, as well as the bestselling author of children's books and non-fiction books, including Quiver, don't Quake: How Creativity Can Embrace AI. So welcome to the show, Nadim. Nadim: It is lovely to be here. I feel very privileged to be invited onto this. Thank you. Jo: Oh, I'm excited to talk to you today, and we're really talking about AI. I wanted to start with the fact that you do seem to have a sort of relentless optimism. How do you remain so optimistic about AI when the publishing industry that we both work in seems so overwhelmingly negative? Lift our eyes to the horizon—what is the bigger picture? Nadim: Oh my goodness. That is a big one. I think my optimism is quite confined actually in the area of publishing. If you were to ask me to speak about AI more broadly—which you're not, but I'm going to give you a little bit of it—I've got lots of concerns. That includes the advent of autonomous weapons and economic singularity, where the wealth from AI as an industry is going into just a few hands, and energy usage, and cultural homogenisation, I suppose, and the potential for brain rot. There's a whole pile of stuff which is really not very good about AI, and all the normal things about fraud and theft and so on. However, if you recognise that and then you say what's going on in publishing, then the obvious thing that you first have to deal with is what did happen with copyright. Is it appropriate to say that things have been stolen and taken without permission and so on? It is. It's going through the American courts at one pace. I saw that Penguin Random House have started a case against OpenAI in Germany, where there will be a much faster legal conclusion—a judge's conclusion, I think. This will begin to put parameters on how copyrighted materials can be used, and possibly also some retrospective judgment about what has happened to this point and what can be done about it. So it's good that you've asked questions so early in our conversation, because I think —  It's important to contextualise my optimism. It is whilst noting with regret the behaviour of the AI industry—the models themselves—in not dealing with copyright in the most generous or appropriate fashion. I think we should also recognise that copyright probably wasn't designed for machine learning in the way that it is. Probably the industry wasn't terribly well prepared to note, negotiate with, and navigate the very fast-moving technological culture of AI companies. So I think lots of mistakes have been made on both sides. When you put all that to one side, what's left for me is an amazing emancipation of creative energy and also a huge efficiency being brought to the publishing industry. We can talk about both those things further, but for me that is what's going on. The efficiency of bookmaking and publishing generally—the whole workflow of getting a book out of somebody's head and into a reader's hands—I think is immensely streamlined and improved by AI. Actually, if you talk about it carefully, which I'm sure we will do, the ability of creators to share and let others experience their creative endeavours becomes so much better, so much fuller, so much richer. So that's why I'm excited about it. Jo: Well, let's get into those two things then. You mentioned the emancipation of creative energy, and you've worked with various AI tools as part of your creative and business processes. You've said that AI can be a creative companion. So specifically when it comes to Quiver, don't Quake, for example— How are you using the various tools in such an emancipated way? Nadim: Well, just to put a bit of a broader context on it, we're an AI-native company at Shimmr, and separately I wear a hat as an author. You mentioned the AI books and the children's books. I'm also writing a book about the psychology of motorcycling. So it's a very odd authorial footprint, but it means that I kind of tramp around the place and learn different things. What I've noticed, even within Shimmr, is that the whole team has been using AI tools very differently. Lots of people are very bright in the company. They're all brighter than me, and I salute them and love them. But they've all used AI to become more creative in their own ways. For example, our Chief Commercial Officer is very numerate and logical, and not loquacious. She prefers to say things straight and simply. She has become an unbelievably creative financial modeller and analyst because she uses AI in lots of different ways. So she has flourished and grown so much, and is creative in a way that she never could be before—not only around numeracy and financial matters, but in thinking through new concepts for sales and marketing and for our commercial development. I've just noticed all around me this going on. When it comes to me, I prefer to express myself through writing. I talk a bit as well, as you can tell, but my favourite means of communication is just writing. When I was writing Quiver, don't Quake, I would use AI in a number of different fashions. One would be for research. One of the chapters is about the psychology of creativity. I'm a psychologist, so I tend to come at things from a psychological perspective. What is the psychology of creativity? Well, here comes a million-word answer from an AI—this person said this, this person said that. Then I kind of focused my research in particular areas and assembled them by drawing from the outputs of several AIs about what has been said about AI, what the science says about it, what sociology says about it, what particular creatives that we're all aware of say about it, whether they're in the advertising industry or musicians or artists or whatever. So that was a very rich way of researching things. I would often put a chapter in—this is a slightly different use—a manuscript that I'd written and say, “Read this as if you're somebody just coming across my book, and tell me where the reader might struggle between one paragraph and another, or where there's a logical fallout, or where the concept isn't really very fully excavated and developed.” It would occasionally prompt me to say, “You could probably do with a line that brings the reader from this point to that point.” And usually I listened to that and then wrote something new. In another use case, I eventually gave it the whole book and said, “I think I've done an okay job here and I quite like the flow and I'm sort of satisfied enough, but before I send it to the publisher and say, ‘there you go,' what do you think? Are there any ways in which this book could become a better and more interesting read?” It came back fairly promptly and said, “Well, what you haven't really done is considered what all the naysayers would say. You've done your dark moments of militarism and all that stuff, but what about some of the other stuff closer to publishing or creativity?” So off I went on a new round of research, and did some myself and used the AI for other bits. The funny thing, really the ironic thing here, is that the book is much better, and most people salute the book for the eighth to ninth chapter that talks about the constructive critics. I assemble them all and articulate all their arguments and say how hideous AI is and how terrible it is for the world and all of us. And then I try to repudiate some of them, not in a defensive way, but just to say, actually, yes, that's one perspective and here's another one. That chapter, ironically, about how AI is terrible was prompted by AI. It said, “You should really have a go at me.” And so I did. So that was another use case. Then finally—perhaps I'll say this—I have a friend who is, I think, the Editor-in-Chief of Penguin in India. I got to know her at a book fair or something. We started chatting, and I told her about my kids' books. I said, “I could really do with an editor on these ten books that are due to be published.” She very generously, amiably, and very constructively gave me feedback on each individual book and then on the whole set. I was really happy with it. I said to her, “That was a delight.” She said, “You'd be much better off working with Edi

    48 min

  8. May 4

    Self-Publishing in German: How to Translate, Distribute, and Market Your Books with Skye MacKinnon

    How is the German market different to English speaking markets, and why might it be worth looking into translation? What are the best ways to translate, self-publish and market your books in German? With Skye MacKinnon. In the intro, thoughts on feeling empty after a book, and the benefits of SubStack for authors [Stark Reflections; Wish I'd Known Then]; AI-Assisted Artisan Author webinars 16 and 23 May. This episode is sponsored by Publisher Rocket, which will help you get your book in front of more Amazon readers so you can spend less time marketing and more time writing. I use Publisher Rocket for researching book titles, categories, and keywords — for new books and for updating my backlist. Check it out at www.PublisherRocket.com This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn  Skye MacKinnon is the award-winning, USA Today bestselling author of over 70 books across romance and children's books under multiple pen names, most of which are also available in German, which is her bestselling market. Her latest book for authors is Self-Publishing in German: How to Translate, Publish and Market Your Books. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.  Show Notes Why the German-speaking market is much bigger than just Germany, and which genres sell best there Title protection laws, the Impressum, and translator copyright How to find and vet human translators, and what a quality translation actually costs The current state of AI translation for fiction, and why quality assurance passes are essential Distribution decisions: the Tolino Alliance, Skoobe, libraries, and why IngramSpark doesn't work in Germany Marketing in German: BookDeals, LovelyBooks, ads, BookTok, and why pre-orders matter even more You can find Skye SkyeMacKinnon.com and her children's books at IslaWynter.com. Transcript of the interview with Skye MacKinnon Jo: Skye MacKinnon is the award-winning, USA Today bestselling author of over 70 books across romance and children's books under multiple pen names, most of which are also available in German, which is her bestselling market. Her latest book for authors is Self-Publishing in German: How to Translate, Publish and Market Your Books. Welcome, Skye. Skye: Hi. Thank you so much for having me. Jo: This is such an interesting topic. But first up— Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and publishing. Skye: I've always loved writing, but I was always told, “Well, you can't be an author. Get a proper job.” So I became a journalist and did that for a few years, but there was always that love of creative writing. At some point when I was getting more active on social media, I was following some other indie authors and realised they're just like me. They're not special people. I had always pictured authors as these mythical beings high up above the rest of us. That gave me the courage to put out my own book. I self-published from the start, never even looked into trad publishing, and that was in 2017. I was really lucky because my first series totally hit it off. I was able to quit my job a year later and I have been a full-time author ever since. I started with romance and then, by accident, got into children's books. Which has been great fun. I don't even have children myself, but it's just that palette cleanser in between. Writing about cute animals and unicorns and just bringing some fun into everything. Nowadays I have about five or six pen names, depending on how you count, across genres, although most of it is romance, and that's my bread and butter really. Jo: Yes, I'm certainly one of those people who wish I could write romance. It always just seems to be the most profitable market in any language, I guess. Let's get into the book. It's a fantastic book. I've been through it myself. It's really packed full of everything you need, so we can't cover everything. Let's start by considering the German language in general. Why is German a good language market to consider expanding into? And for anyone who might not realise, why is it more than Germany? Skye: Well, Germans love to read, and depending on the statistic that you look at, they're generally seen as the third largest book market in the world after English and Mandarin Chinese. So it's a huge market, even though you think of Germany as a small little country in Europe. As you said, it's much more than Germany. Yes, you've got about 83 million people in Germany, but then you've also got Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, parts of Belgium, Luxembourg, and even Italy. So if you look at the whole footprint on the map, it is much bigger than just the one country. A lot of young people there still read and go to bookshops. There's a huge bookshop culture. You will find, if you go to a high street there, way more bookshops than you do here in the UK, for example. There's demand for quality and for really gorgeous books. They have been way ahead of the curve when it comes to special editions and sprayed edges, and they also like translations. I found one statistic where about two thirds of all newly released titles in German are actual translations. Readers are used to translations, but until a few years ago it was all trad-published translations. So this transition is coming now. It's coming very, very fast, especially with AI. They generally are very open to translations as long as the quality is there. Jo: So what about specific genres then? Obviously we mentioned romance there, and romance is not just one genre anymore. Whatever they're writing— How can somebody tell if it's worth expanding into German? How do we do this? It takes time and effort and money, potentially. Skye: It can take a lot of money, so it is worth doing research. There's one easy way, which is just looking at your current sales and looking at how many books you're selling in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland at the moment in English. That can give you an indication of which of your books might be already quite popular there. Sometimes it's quite surprising. A lot of my books sell very differently in German than they do in English. I've got one series that did okay in English, and I almost didn't translate it. The German version is, I think, my second bestselling series in German and has completely surprised me. So sometimes it's worth just experimenting a bit. Otherwise, obviously as you said, romance is doing really well. There are a few surprises though. I had a chat with Draft2Digital and they gave me lots of information from their statistics, and they said about 40% of all the western title sales on Draft2Digital are actually in Germany, which is just a huge percentage. Jo: In English? Skye: Across languages. Jo: Mm-hmm. Skye: Germans, to be fair, they love their westerns. My dad in Germany, he has been watching westerns for I don't know how many decades. It is one of those things that is just really popular there. Another thing is anything that is set in other countries and really has the location as almost like a character. There's lots of Cornwall, Scotland, different islands, but also mountains and cities. So if your book is set in, even in New York City, if it has a clear setting—if it's not just that it could be any city—then that's a good one to think about translating. In general, most genres can do well. There's a few where you have to be a bit careful. Second World War books, for example. If you have a book that portrays every single German as a Nazi and as evil, it might not do as well in Germany. So some common sense when it comes to historical books. Otherwise, just look at German retailers, look at what is selling there—and not just Amazon. Places like Thalia, which is part of the Tolino Alliance, and they have about 40% of the market. So it's really important to look at them too, and not just at Amazon. Jo: We'll come back to the distribution in a minute. There are some important differences between the German market and the US/UK market. Obviously we're talking about a different language, but of course there are a few things that are different that some people might not think about. So give us a few of those things that people definitely need to think about. Skye: Okay, so even before you start publishing, you need to be aware that title protection is a thing in Germany. Your book can't have the same title as an already published book. That is a law that is basically there to avoid readers being confused. So if you had five books with the same title, readers might not realise which book is by which author. You have to do your research and check if anyone else is using your title. There are some exceptions—if it's a completely different category, so if there's a children's book with that title but you write spicy romance, then the chance that the reader gets confused is much lower. Quite often you can then contact either the author or the publisher and ask, “Can I get written permission to use that title?” I did that for one of my series and it was totally fine. Just be sure to get it in writing, because if your book suddenly becomes a huge bestseller, they might reconsider. So title protection is an important one. You need to research that before you publish. One thing that people sometimes get confused about is reusing their English title. That's totally fine because it's your own title. So if your English title hasn't been used and you want to keep that same title, that works. It's just about other people's books where you can't use those titles. Another important legal bit is the Impressum. It's the copyrigh

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