Balancing Creativity With Building A Business, And Author Nation With Joe Solari

How can you balance creativity with business in order to have a profitable, long-term author career? What were the successes and challenges of the Author Nation conference? Joe Solari shares his perspective.

In the intro, the money episode [Ink In Your Veins]; WISE for multi-currency banking; creative planning tips for 2025 [Self~Publishing Advice]; Surprising Trends Authors Can’t Ignore in 2025 [Novel Marketing Podcast]. Plus, an update on Death Valley, A Thriller, and reflections on seeing live theatre vs online & stream/subscription models.

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 

Joe Solari helps authors build great businesses through books, courses, and podcasting, as well as strategy and operations consulting. He's also the managing director of Author Nation, the biggest conference for indie authors in the world.

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

• Maintaining sustainable balance between writing and marketing
• Creating an author business that fulfills you
• Utilizing your time effectively in 2025
• Navigating social media and business goals
• Learning to say no and focusing on what you really want
• Author Nation 2024 Highlights
• The logisitics of running an author conference
• Catering to different experience levels at an author conference

You can find Joe at JoeSolari.com and AuthorNation.live.

Transcript of Interview with Joe Solari

Joanna: Joe Solari helps authors build great businesses through books, courses, and podcasting, as well as strategy and operations consulting. He's also the managing director of Author Nation, the biggest conference for indie authors in the world. So welcome back to the show, Joe.

Joe: Thanks for having me on again. I really enjoy the time we get to spend together. It seems like we talk more on the show than we do at events that we meet each other at.

Joanna: Absolutely. Well, we're often both very busy. You've been on the show a couple of times before—and I'll link to those in the show notes—so we're just going to jump in today.

Now, as we head into 2025, authors are assessing their priorities for the year. Now, in your experience helping authors build profitable businesses—

How can we balance writing and marketing so that both are sustainable?

Joe: That's such an awesome question. I think a lot of folks that are used to hearing me on your podcast or other podcasts are going to think that I'm going to go right into talking about profitability or budgeting, but I'm going to actually get a little different approach for you on this whole thing.

Let me give you some context first, and that is—

Where do you have your best ideas?

Joanna: Personally, a lot of my ideas come from traveling and places, in particular. So I have to go and visit things and input in order to have ideas.

Joe: Yes, and that doesn't surprise me. I've asked the question of a lot of creatives, and what I've discovered in asking that question is there tends to be two different things that come up. Like, it's when I do something like go on walks. Or a lot of times it's things like driving or a shower.

Why that is, there's science behind this, and it's you have two distinct networks in your brain that you need to use for creativity.

One is the default mode network. That's what your body goes into when you daydream. It's when you were sitting in class and getting bored by your teacher, and it would make you go off and think into your imaginary world. That's a natural place for you to go.

The other system is your executive functioning system, which is what helps you focus and get words out and hit deadlines.

They're two distinct systems that sometimes will overlap, like in a venn diagram. When that happens, that's your flow state where you feel like the ideas are coming and you're getting them down on paper.

The interesting thing about that is that it’s completely counter to what you're told to do as an entrepreneur and hustle culture. You're just supposed to produce. You're supposed to produce words. You're supposed to sit in a chair. You're supposed to produce.

So what you do is, when you are only focused on that one side, the executive function side, you detach yourself and you distance yourself from your creative well.

So my answer to your question is that — I suggest that authors start to build into their process in 2025 more time to tap into that default mode network and spend time thinking about how they can spend some real quality time and —

Protect that creative space, because that's where all your good ideas come from.

When you feel like you're being blocked, it's because you're disconnecting yourself from that default mode network. So it's sound business advice, in the sense of there's this process that's core to your business that we need to get more efficient and think about how we can improve its performance.

Joanna: I really like that, and I feel like this is something I've always done is that I separate my time into creative time and business and marketing time. I find like I can't do both in the same time period.

When I had a day job, first thing in the morning—you know, I'm a morning person—so I'd write before going to work. Then in the evening, I could do business and marketing. This podcast was started after my work, back in the day.

So perhaps that fits into what you're saying is that you have to schedule different types of time, some for input and creativity and thinking and not doing much sometimes. Then other time for business and marketing.

I feel like maybe authors sometimes try to do everything all at once, and maybe that's why it doesn't work.

Joe: Absolutely, you're really getting into the core of this.

There are different systems, and they have to be honored in different ways, and you need them both. We're on The Creative Penn show, come on, we have got to talk about creativity. It's like, we forget that's the source of the product.

We get very focused on, oh, it's a business. You have this product you have to put out. You have these customers you need to serve. All that stuff, it has to be done, but what you asked was —

How do we make this sustainable process between the marketing and the writing?

What I'm getting at is there's some things that we can do to make that process easier. What it means is understanding that this isn't up and to the right like a business chart of sales. It's an undulating cycle.

Let me give you another context for this. If we look at creativity as a profession, you have this natural talent as a creator. We've identified that you've got this active imagination, and you love to spend time in the story world, and it's fulfilling to you. That's no different than if we noticed some natural athletic talent.

So what would we do around that if we saw that you were a really good tennis player? Well, we would work on your endurance and your speed. We would work on racket skills. We would work on all these different things to supplement that natural talent.

One of the big things we would also do for an athlete is we would have a recovery cycle.

We wouldn't just say after you finished winning Wimbledon to go play the French Open. We'd put you in an ice bath, we'd stretch you out, we'd go into some kind of a process that would get you to be ready for the next time you play.

I think that goes, again, back to that first question of yours, what could you do to make 2025 better? It's like, how do you build a recovery process?

How do you give yourself that space to let the well refill?

There's a lot of things right now in the world that are really, really detrimental to you refilling the well. We're talking about this really powerful default mode network and that time where you just need to be bored to let it kick in.

What do we do? Well, we get on social media, and we doom scroll, and we do a bunch of stuff to fill in that time that really deteriorates. It does two things, right.

You lose that time that you need, and it deteriorates your capacity because you're doing really horrible things to your neuro-chemical system with these dopamine hits from scrolling.

I've been doing this research, and it's kind of scary to see what could potentially happen with this. It's destroying all this creative capacity out there that we need to have new