Podcast appearances and mentions of joanna penn

Joanna Penn, host of the Creative Penn Podcast had me on to talk about:

On the Creative Self-Publishing stream of the Self-Publishing with ALLi Podcast, Orna Ross and Joanna Penn discuss creative confidence and the process of finding and sustaining an author voice. They talk about how life events, like grief or illness, can interrupt creativity, and how daily practices such as journaling or walking can help maintain a sense of continuity. The conversation also covers how recurring themes shape a writer's voice, how AI tools like voice cloning are changing audiobook production, and how authors can decide when and how to use these tools without losing their individual style. Sponsor This podcast is proudly sponsored by Bookvault. Sell high-quality, print-on-demand books directly to readers worldwide and earn maximum royalties selling directly. Automate fulfillment and create stunning special editions with BookvaultBespoke. Visit Bookvault.app today for an instant quote. About the Hosts 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 launched the Alliance of Independent Authors at the London Book Fair in 2012. Her work for ALLi has seen her named as one of The Bookseller's “100 top people in publishing”. She also publishes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction and is greatly excited by the democratizing, empowering potential of author-publishing. For more information about Orna, visit her website.

Join hosts J.D. Barker, Christine Daigle, Jena Brown, and Kevin Tumlinson as they discuss the week's entertainment news, including stories about Pizza Hut, folding e-readers, and The Great Gatsby. Then, stick around for a chat with Joanna Penn!I'm Jo Frances (J.F.) Penn, Award-nominated, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of thrillers, dark fantasy, and crime. My stories blend my love of travel with adventure at the edge of the supernatural. They all deal with the theme of good vs evil.I live in Bath, England with my husband and two British shorthair cats, Cashew and Noisette.When I'm not traveling for book research, I enjoy walking by the canal, and a nice gin and tonic.You can find me on Instagram @jfpennauthor and Facebook @jfpennauthor.I share my travels and interview other authors about the places that inspire them on my Books And Travel Podcast.I love reading, and my favorite authors include John Connolly, Jonathan Maberry, and Stephen King. I also read a lot of non-fiction for book research, which I share in the Author's Note at the back of my books/stories.If you want to hear about my latest book launches, or learn about special deals on my stories, or get behind the scenes research and photos — or if you'd like to be part of my Reader's Group, the Pennfriends, then click here to sign up for my email list.

In this newest episode of the En Factor, we are absolutely thrilled to be joined by Joanna Penn, a long time author, podcaster, and international professional speaker! Joanna joins us from the United Kingdom, where she has written a wide variety of genres over her career from nonfiction providing guidance and advice surrounding authoring and self-publishing, to fictional thrillers, dark fantasy, and memoirs under the name J.F. Penn. Since transitioning out of an IT consultant job to begin writing nearly twenty years ago, Joanna has been recognized by the New York Times and USA Today as a bestselling author for her work. Joanna also joins us from the podcasting realm as she is one of the early adopters of connecting with an audience with a podcast through The Creative Penn Podcast, with hundreds of episodes dating back to 2009.  Discussing the topics of authoring and the business surrounding being an author, Joanna is recognized as one of the top 1% of podcasters in the world, and has developed The Creative Penn into a successful business along with her own online community to connect with her audience even further. Joanna has also spoken at numerous events about the authoring space travelling to events all over the world, as well as virtual conferences and workshops. Having followed Joanna and her work for a long time, this episode was a very special one to record and one you will not want to miss a second of! Join us to learn more about Joanna's entrepreneurial journey, and how she chose herself to pursue her passion of authoring, as well as how she leveraged her knowledge and experience to create numerous valuable assets and build a successful business! Key Words - Women in Entrepreneurship, Author

Matty Dalrymple talks with Sarah Elisabeth Sawyer about TRAINING THE BRAIN FOR FICTION DICTATION, including the differences in approach for fiction versus nonfiction. Sarah describes the challenges authors face when transitioning to dictating fiction and offers practical advice for overcoming mental blocks. Sarah also highlights the flexibility of dictation, allowing authors to work in different environments and in shorter time blocks. And she discusses how dictation can improve other audio assets and can engage audiences in new ways.   Interview video at https://bit.ly/TIAPYTPlaylist  Show notes at https://www.theindyauthor.com/podcast.html    If you find the information in this video useful, please consider supporting The Indy Author! https://www.patreon.com/theindyauthor https://www.buymeacoffee.com/mattydalrymple   Sarah Elisabeth Sawyer is an author and writing instructor who takes authors struggling to master the tools and knowledge of their author journey and helps them become confident in writing their books. She has been featured on Joanna Penn's The Creative Penn podcast, Jane Friedman's blog, Writer's Digest magazine, and more. She's published 19 books, 11 of which she wrote solely by dictation. Sarah is also host of The Confident Fiction Author podcast which empowers authors to live their best creative lifestyle. Her Fictation Digital Course takes authors through the exact process of mastering dictation to write fiction.   Matty Dalrymple is the author of the Lizzy Ballard Thrillers, beginning with ROCK PAPER SCISSORS; the Ann Kinnear Suspense Novels, beginning with THE SENSE OF DEATH; and the Ann Kinnear Suspense Shorts. She is a member of International Thriller Writers and Sisters in Crime. Matty also writes, speaks, and consults on the writing craft and the publishing voyage, and shares what she's learned on THE INDY AUTHOR PODCAST. She has written books on the business of short fiction and podcasting for authors; her articles have appeared in "Writer's Digest" magazine and "Indie Author Magazine." She serves as the Campaigns Manager for the Alliance of Independent Authors.  

In this week's episode, we take a look at professional development for writers, and examine both the benefits and the pitfalls. We also take a look at my advertising results for March 2025. This week's coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Dragonskull: Curse of the Orcs, Book #4 in the Dragonskull series (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills), at my Payhip store: ORCCURSE50 The coupon code is valid through April 25, 2025. So if you need a new audiobook for spring, we've got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates   Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 246 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is April 4, 2025, and today we are looking at professional development for writers. Before we get to our main topic, we'll have Coupon of the Week, an update on my current writing and audiobook projects, Question of the Week, and then a look back at how my various ads performed for March 2025.   So let's start off with Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Dragonskull: Curse of the Orcs, Book Four in the Dragonskull series (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) at my Payhip store. That coupon code is ORCCURSE50. As always, you can find the coupon code and the links to my store in the show notes. This coupon code is valid through April 25th, 2025. So if you need a new audiobook for spring, we have got you covered.   Now for an update on my current writing projects. I'm very pleased to report that the rough draft of Shield of Battle is done, 102,800 words written in 22 days. That will be the second to last book in the Shield War series. If all goes well, I'm still hoping to have that out and edited and published before the end of the month. I'm now working on a currently untitled short story that newsletter subscribers will get for free in ebook form when Shield of Battle comes out. So this might be a great time to sign up for my new release newsletter. I am also 10,000 words into Ghost in the Corruption and that will be my main project after Shield of Battle is out.   Recording is still underway for Shield of Deception and Ghost in the Assembly. That is Brad Wills and Hollis McCarthy narrating, respectively. So I am looking forward to having those audiobooks out for you to listen to and then Shield the Battle and Ghost in the Corruption available for you to read, but I just have to get back to work on them.   00:01:48 Question of the Week   Now it's time for Question of the Week. Question of the Week is intended to inspire enjoyable discussions of interesting topics. This week's question, what games (if any) are you currently playing? No wrong answers, including “I don't play video games”. The inspiration for this question was that the fact that Nintendo was having this big Switch 2 announcement on April 2, which is amusing to me personally on a meta level because people have been speculating wildly about a Switch successor for years. Baseless Switch 2 rumors have been a clickfarm industry for years. Probably Nintendo had to have it on April 2 so no one would think it was a really elaborate April Fool's Day joke. Justin says: Online it would be World of Warcraft Classic. Otherwise, it is Conquest of the New World. Like me, my games are old and dated.   I can relate to Justin because I'm currently playing a game that was first made in 1994, but more on that later.   Sam says: Currently dancing between two games, my long-term love game, Final Fantasy 14 and Dragon Age: the Veilguard. The Veilguard was a massive disappointment for me, unfortunately, but it still has its reasonably okay points, but man, the developers dropped the ball in the worst way since Cyberpunk's disastrous release.   That's interesting because I've actually encountered a couple different people who have played Dragon Age: Veilguard and they either love it or hate it. There is just no in-between. So that does seem to be the kind of game where you either love the thing or you just hate it. Todd says: Enjoying No Man's Sky, waiting for Light No Fire. Continuing to grind World of Warcraft retail. Recently played the re-release of Half Life. Today, I also installed Lands of Lore, gotta love Patrick Stewart as King Richard!   I had forgotten that Patrick Stewart voiced King Richard back in the ‘90s in the Lands of Lore game. His most famous video game part (I think) is playing Emperor Uriel Septim in the Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.   JKM says: Monster Hunter Wilds and Star Citizen.   Jesse says: Been doing an on and off run on Enshrouded. The story hasn't hugely gripped me as yet, but the mechanics are fun if you like Breath of the Wilds-esque world exploration.   Michael says: I'm currently playing Star Traders: Frontiers, which is a 2D indie space trading/exploration/crew management game in a vaguely Dune-like setting. It has turn based squad combat in Darkest Dungeon style too. Originally a mobile game but mechanics are surprisingly deep. It's good fun.   Randy says: Wizardry Remaster. Ironic because I didn't play the original.   For myself, I am kind of alternating between three current games. I am playing the Master of Magic remake on the PC and I'm determined to finally beat a campaign at that. I am still playing Iratus: Lord of the Dead and drawing closer to the final level. And when I'm really tired and don't want to do anything else that requires a lot of brain power, I still fire up some Starfield and go really mess up the day of some procedurally generated space pirates.   So watch my website and Facebook for Question of the Week if you want to have your comment read on the show as well.   00:04:39 Ad Results for March 2025   Now let's look at how my ads for my books did in March 2025, which is interesting because I changed things up a fair bit for ads in March. The reason I did this is because the economy isn't great and not likely to improve for several years. I saw someone arguing that all the policy decisions in the Covid era will have a 15 year economic hangover into which we're only five years, and I think that argument might have some merit to it. So because of that, I thought it might be prudent to move some older series into Kindle Unlimited. So I did that with the Demonsouled books and with Cloak Games, though not with Cloak Mage, which will remain wide as new books come out. I might do it with Silent Order as well, but I haven't decided. My thinking is that as people are looking to economize, subscription services will probably offer better value than direct book sales.   So let's see how we did. For Facebook ads, I did Cloak Games/Cloak Mage and The Ghosts. For Games/Cloak Mage, I got $4.14 back for every $1 spent, with 10% of the profit coming from the audiobooks. For The Ghosts, I got back $8.73 for every dollar spent, with 6% of the profit coming from the audiobooks. Obviously the total for The Ghosts might be inflated because of Ghosts in the Assembly, which did well. Thanks, everyone! Without Ghosts in the Assembly, The Ghosts still would've done $3.68 for every dollar spent, with 15% for the profit coming from the audiobooks. So still pretty good.   For Amazon ads, I mostly focused on Half-Elven Thief. Remember that for an Amazon ad to be successful, it needs to get a sale or a complete Kindle Unlimited read for every six to eight clicks. So for Half-Elven Thief, I got back $3.41 for every $1 spent, with a sale or a complete KU read for every 0.84 clicks, which is a really good result. However, it was not all roses in Amazon ads because I gave up on advertising Stealth and Spells Online: Creation. I've realized I fundamentally misunderstood what readers in the LitRPG actually want. I'm still going to finish the series this summer with the final book. I am 75,000 words into it as of this recording, but I don't think I'm going to advertise the series anymore.   For Demonsouled, I did a combined Facebook/Amazon ads campaign and for a combined campaign like that, it's easiest just to track the return. So for Demonsouled, I got back $2.53 for every dollar spent on Facebook and Amazon ads. So that was pretty close to how it did in February.   I also did some BookBub ad campaigns for The Ghosts and Sevenfold Sword on Apple. For The Ghosts, we got back $9.24 for every dollar I spent and for Sevenfold Sword, I got back $6.76 back for every dollar spent. So those are some very good results.   Finally, I've begun experimenting with BookBub ads for Google Play. I tried out Sevenfold Sword first and for Sevenfold Sword on Google Play with BookBub ads, we got back $3.86 for every dollar. So that is a promising beginning and I might try more experiments with BookBub ads and Google Play in May. So a good month all in all. Thanks for reading, everyone. Hopefully I'll have more new books for you soon.   00:07:46 Main Topic: Professional Development   So our main topic this week will be part three of our series on writing adjacent activities, and that is professional development. As I mentioned on past episodes, I'm working on a new podcast series on what I call writing adjacent activities. What do I mean by this? I'm talking about the tasks that seem like they're a part of the writing process but really belong in a different category. These tasks are important, but they can also be a pitfall if you spend too much time on them or don't use that time correctly. In this series, we'll focus on a few of these tasks and how they can benefit or hinder your writing process, even though they seem like good uses of time and may in fact be beneficial in proper amounts.   In this episode, we'll talk about professional development for writers. Those working in education, healthcare, or the corporate world will be very familiar with this concept. For those who aren't familiar with professional development, let's explain what it is. What is professional development and what is it for writers specifically? Professional development generally means gaining skills or knowledge that can help someone stay current in their field and grow in their work. In some fields like teaching or healthcare, professional development is required and must be done regularly. Some examples of typical professional development tasks include learning a new programming language, attending conferences, and reading professional journals. Writers have many of these same opportunities. Ther are a slew of conferences, workshops, webinars, videos, courses, and books available for writers to hone their craft, pick up marketing skills, and learn the ever evolving technical skills needed to self-publish and have an online presence. Some of these options, especially conferences and retreats, can be very expensive and time consuming while others are free and quick to consume, such as blog posts or podcast episodes.   How can you benefit from professional development? There are five ways.   #1: You can learn information and techniques that can help you improve your writing. An example would be a workshop session presenting data on when readers typically give up when starting a new book, which can help you think about how your book is structured.   #2: You can learn about technology and software that can make your work more efficient or look more professional. An example of this would be tutorials on how to use formatting software to turn Word documents into a formatted ebook.   #3: In-person professional development can help you network with others in your field. For example, if one of your priorities is being added to group promotion, meeting other authors at a workshop or a conference could lead to more promising leads than just emailing people.   #4: You can keep up with the constant changes in the field and adjust your strategies and plans accordingly. For example, Amazon's policies for KDP change constantly, sometimes monthly, it feels like. Writing blogs and podcasts can often explain these changes in a practical way that's more efficient than trying to parse long legal documents yourself.   #5: Finally, and fifthly, some people find professional development motivational or it helps them to feel more excited about their work. An example is a phenomenon called the post conference high, when someone returns from a conference with a high level of excitement and a list of plans a mile long. It's easy to get bogged down in the day-to-day tasks of work and sometimes professional development can shake things up in a positive way.   So professional development can be a good thing, but there are ways it can hinder your writing process. So we'll look at four ways that professional development can get in the way of you actually sitting down and getting some writing done.   #1: One of the downsides of being a writer is that professional development must be self-funded or you must pursue your own scholarships or grants for it, which are pretty limited compared to professional development in other fields. It is quite easy to spend tens of thousands of dollars on it each year, so each opportunity must be carefully considered. It's important not to spend money without a clear plan for how to turn it into action and without researching less expensive (but still effective) options that might serve your purposes. It's also important to look carefully to see if you can find lower cost options before registering for something. For example, instead of going to a weeklong residential bootcamp to learn WordPress, you could find a community education class or a LinkedIn Learning class (which many libraries provide to their patrons). Do you need a full course offered by another author or are you only interested in one portion of it and can learn that information from a YouTube channel? There is a lot of nonsense on the Internet of course, but one of the advantages of living in the modern era is that there is an abundance of good free information. You just have to find it.   My podcast transcriptionist has something that she likes to call the Two Buck Chuck Principle. It is named after the store brand of wine from Trader Joe's. That's way back when it was $2 a bottle, hence the popular nickname for it. Many people refuse to stray from this cheapest available option at the store because they find it meets their alcohol related needs and refuse to buy more expensive bottles.   The point of this principle is that like those Trader Joe's shoppers, my podcast transcriptionist will search for the free and low cost option for something first and then see what is missing from them that a more expensive option offers before buying the more expensive option. For example, if you're just starting out as a writer, you may be tempted to pay $3,000 or $4,000 for consulting sessions about advertising strategies because you read a convincing testimonial. Realistically, if you only have one or two books with only a handful of reviews and you're not willing to throw thousands of additional dollars on a professional style ad campaign, this would be severe overkill.   Applying the Two Buck Chuck Principle to this person's ad spending, it would make more sense to learn the basics first through webinars and blog posts on the topic. Something like Brian Cohen's Five Day Amazon Ad Challenge would teach the basics of using the interface and some strategies that keep a rookie from overspending or straying from their target audience. Once a writer has a few years of sales and several books in the same series, then perhaps it might be wise to progress to something more advanced and expensive, like hiring a consultant.   For most professional development, if you're paying money, you're either paying for being in a physical location or you're paying for the time someone else took to assemble and present the knowledge for you (in the case of a conference or workshop, both). For the latter, you can usually apply this Two Buck Chuck Principle by taking the time to assemble the knowledge yourself or find others who have through blogs, podcasts, and lower cost books. Someone like Joanna Penn or David Gaughran provides a wealth of sensible advice through these types of much lower cost options.   #2: Professional development, like many other writing adjacent activities, can give you the illusion of progress. Knowing about something and actually doing it are very different things. You have to have a specific plan for how you will implement your professional development. The sooner you start after completing your professional development activity, the more likely you are to benefit from it. Even five minutes a day working on it helps keep the knowledge fresh and gives you the confidence to continue.   #3: The number of available options for professional development can be paralyzing and it can be easy to feel like you have to do it all. The fear of missing out is a very real phenomenon, but it's necessary to combat it by being intentional with your time. Start by making your goals for the next year and then seeing what professional development you need to further those goals. For example, if creating video content is not part of your goals for the year, then it doesn't make sense to watch webinars on creating Instagram Reels or TikTok videos, even if you feel like it might be useful or you have a fear of missing out on the information. Your professional development, your goals, and your output all need to be in harmony in order to progress as a writer.   I have talked before about how a certain degree of tunnel vision is necessary to write at the pace that I do. Because I want to publish frequently, I often ignore conference and workshop opportunities because travel actively hinders my main goal of getting down as many words as possible each day.   #4: Professional development can take up so much time that it keeps you from the priority of writers, which is actually writing. Like the other writing adjacent activities out there, they expand to the size you'll allow. Planning your professional development goals for the year when you've created your writing goals can help you be disciplined in choosing the activities that will serve you best and fit with the time you can give them.   For example, if your goal is to set up an author website in May, you can allocate a little block of time each day for that month to watching tutorials, reading instructions, checking out other author sites for inspiration, and testing out the software. You wouldn't want to attend a three week intensive writing retreat in May because that would likely derail your progress on your other goal.   So finally, what do I personally do for professional development? What has helped me? I think the biggest help I had in terms of writing advice was a book called Billion Dollar Outlines by David Farland. It's well worth reading and a good look at story structure and understanding story structure that I think would be very helpful if you're struggling to finish an outline and write a book. Most of my professional development since then has been aimed towards the goal of trying to sell as many books as possible. So I took the Self-Publishing Formula course on advertising for Facebook, which was very helpful. I read a couple of different books on Facebook advertising, which was helpful. What was really helpful was a course on Photoshop I took in 2020 and 2021 that really increased my Photoshop skills and gave me the ability to do my own covers, which is very helpful because you often have to book a cover designer out well in advance. So that was very useful. And beyond that, I keep an eye on the various writing podcasts and Facebook groups. I don't really participate in the Facebook groups because that can be a huge time sink. Arguing with random people over the internet is not a productive use of time, but it is a good way to keep an eye on news within the indie author space and what people are doing and what trends you can expect to see. So that's what I do.   In short, professional development, like so many other writing adjacent activities, is a good thing that can hinder your progress if it's not done with intentionality and clear goals. As I said earlier in the podcast, your professional development, your goals, and your output all need to be harmonized in order to progress as a writer.   So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to the Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. And a quick note of thanks to my podcast transcriptionist for helping me to pull together the research for this episode. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave your review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

On the Creative Self-Publishing stream of the Self-Publishing with ALLi Podcast, Orna Ross and Joanna Penn discuss their latest creative projects, insights from the London Book Fair, and the evolving role of AI in publishing. Orna shares her thoughts on how the fair is shifting away from being author-centric, while Joanna explores AI narration and its growing impact on audiobooks, including new developments from ElevenLabs and Amazon's Audible Virtual Voice. Sponsor This podcast is proudly sponsored by Bookvault. Sell high-quality, print-on-demand books directly to readers worldwide and earn maximum royalties selling directly. Automate fulfillment and create stunning special editions with BookvaultBespoke. Visit Bookvault.app today for an instant quote. About the Hosts 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 launched the Alliance of Independent Authors at the London Book Fair in 2012. Her work for ALLi has seen her named as one of The Bookseller's “100 top people in publishing”. She also publishes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction and is greatly excited by the democratizing, empowering potential of author-publishing. For more information about Orna, visit her website.    

Joanna Penn's back with us today to discuss her book, Writing the Shadow. Unusually for this prolific author – this book took years to write. In it, she explores the darker aspects of our psyche and how they can enrich our writing + business. In this fascinating conversation, Joanna shares her journey of embracing her shadow side, the importance of self-reflection + how confronting our inner darkness can lead to greater creativity + resilience. Look for more episode in this Your Business Needs a Book strand.   Books discussed in this episode: Writing the Shadow - Joanna Penn How to Write Nonfiction - Joanna Penn The Artist's Way - Julia Cameron Joanna's website: thecreativepenn.com Joanna's podcast: The Creative Penn Podcast ==== If you'd like my help with your Business go to www.lizscully.com/endlessClients ==== And don't forget to get your reading list of the 10 essential reads for every successful biz owner - these are the books Liz recommends almost on the daily to her strategy + Mastermind clients. This isn't your usual list of biz books, these answer the challenges you've actually got coming up right now. Helpful, quick to read and very timely. Click here lizscully.com/reading to get your book list

In this week's episode, we continue our discuss about how seeking prestige can be dangerous for writers, specifically in the form of traditional publishing and the New York Times Bestseller list. This coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Dragonskull: Shield of the Knight, Book #2 in the Dragonskull series (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills), at my Payhip store: DRAGONSHIELD50 The coupon code is valid through March 21, 2025. So if you need a new audiobook for spring, we've got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00   Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 241 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is February 28th, 2025. Today we are continuing our discussion of how to escape the trap of prestige for writers, specifically traditional publishing and The New York Times Bestseller List. Before we get to our main topic, we will do Coupon of the Week, an update on my current writing and audiobook projects, and then Question of the Week.   This week's coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Dragonskull: Shield of the Knight, Book Two in the Dragonskull series (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills), at my Payhip store. That coupon code is DRAGONSHIELD50. As always, I'll include the coupon code and the link to the store in the show notes. This coupon code is valid through March 21st, 2025. So if you need a new audiobook as we start to head into the spring months, we have got you covered. Now an update on my current writing projects. I'm pleased to report I am done with the rough draft of Ghost in the Assembly. I came in at 106,000 words, so it'll definitely be over a hundred thousand words when it's done. I'm about 20% of the way through the first round of edits, so I am confident in saying that if all goes well and nothing unexpected happens, I am on track to have it out in March. I am also 10,000 words into Shield of Battle, which will be the fifth of six books in the Shield War series and I'm hoping to have that out in April, if all goes well.   In audiobook news, recording for both Cloak of Dragonfire and Orc-Hoard is done. I'm just waiting for them to get through the processing on the various stores so they're available. There is also an audiobook edition of Half Elven Thief Omnibus One and Cloak Mage Omnibus Three that hopefully should be coming in March. More news with that to come.   00:01:55 Question of the Week   Now let's move on to Question of the Week. Question of the Week is intended to inspire interesting discussions of enjoyable topics. This week's question: what is your favorite subgenre of fantasy, high fantasy, epic fantasy, sword and sorcery, historical fantasy, urban fantasy, LitRPG, cultivation, or something else? No wrong answers, obviously.   Cindy says: Epic fantasy or those with a good history for that world. The Ghost Series are fantastic at this.   Thanks, Cindy.   Justin says: I enjoy all those sub-genres, if they are done well. In times past I would've said comic fantasy, but that is because Terry Pratchett at his best was just that good.   Mary says: High fantasy.   Surabhi says: I'd honestly read anything fantasy that's written well and has characters I'm attached to, given that it's not too gritty. Bonus points if there's humor! Also, I love your books so much and they're the perfect blend of fantasy, adventure, and characters. Your books were what really got me into Sword and Sorcery.   Thanks, Surabhi.     Matthew says: See, that's difficult. I love my sabers, both light and metal. I would say urban fantasy crosses the boundary the most. If it's a captivating story, it will be read.   John F says: I can't choose one- Lord of the Rings or LWW, The Inheritance Cycle, The Dresden Files, Caina, Ridmark, or Nadia. I think what draws me is great characters who grow. The setting/genre is just the device. That's why I keep coming back to your books. You create great characters.   Thanks, John F.   John K says: I think I'm partial to historical fantasy. I enjoy all genres, but when I think of my favorites, they tend to be derivations of historical settings. Think Guy Gavriel Kay or Miles Cameron. That said, I was weaned on Robert E. Howard, Fritz Lieber, Michael Moorcock, Karl Edward Wagner, Jack Vance, so a strong sword and sorcery second place.   Juana says: High fantasy. Belgariad, Tolkien, dragons, et cetera.   Jonathan says: Sword and sorcery in space! Prehistoric sword and sorcery, sword and sorcery always.   Quint: says Sword and sorcery!   Michael says: Sword and sorcery.   For myself, I think I would agree with our last couple of commenters and it would be sword and sorcery. My ideal fantasy novel has a barbarian hero wandering from corrupt city state to corrupt city state messing up the business of some evil wizards. I'm also very fond of what's called generic fantasy (if a fighter, a dwarf, an elf, and a wizard are going into a dungeon and fighting some orcs, I'm happy).   00:04:18 Main Topic of the Week: Escaping the Prestige Trap, Part 2   Now onto our main topic for the week, Escaping the Prestige Trap, Part 2, and we'll focus on traditional publishing and the New York Times Bestseller List this week. As we talked about last week, much of the idea of success, especially in the United States, is based on hitting certain milestones in a specific order. In the writing world, these measures of success have until fairly recently been getting an MFA, finding an agent, getting traditionally published, and hitting The New York Times Bestseller List. Last week we talked about the risks of an MFA and an agent. This week, we are going to talk about two more of those writing markers of prestige, getting traditionally published and having a book land on The New York Times Bestseller List. Why are they no longer as important? What should you devote your energy and focus to instead?   So let's start with looking at getting traditionally published. Most writers have dreamed of seeing their book for sale and traditional publishing for a long time has been the only route to this path. Until about 15 years ago, traditional publishing was the way that a majority of authors made their living. Now that big name authors like Hugh Howie, Andy Weir, and Colleen Hoover have had success starting as self-published authors (or in the case of authors Sarah J. Maas and Ali Hazelwood, fan fiction authors) and then are getting traditional publishing deals made for them for their self-published works. It's proof that self-publishing is no longer a sign that the author isn't good enough to be published traditionally. Previous to the rise of the Kindle, that was a common belief that if you were self-published, it was because you were not good enough to get traditionally published. That was sort of this pernicious belief that traditional publishing was a meritocracy, when in fact it tended to be based on who you knew. But that was all 15 years ago and now we are well into the age of self-publishing. Why do authors still want to be traditionally published when in my frank opinion, self-publishing is the better path? Well, I think there are three main reasons for that.   One of the main reasons is that the authors say they want to be traditionally published is to have someone else handle the marketing and the advertising. They don't realize how meager marketing budgets and staffing support are, especially for unknown authors. Many traditionally published authors are handling large portions of their own marketing and hiring publicists out of their own pocket because publishers are spending much less on marketing. The new reality is that traditional publishers aren't going to do much for you as a debut author unless you are already a public figure.   Even traditionally published authors are not exempt from having to do their own marketing now. James Patterson set up an entire company himself to handle his marketing. Though, to be fair to James Patterson, his background was in advertising before he came into publishing, so he wasn't exactly a neophyte in the field, but you see more and more traditionally published authors who you think would be successful just discontented with the system and starting to dabble in self-publishing or looking at alternative publishers like Aethon Books and different arrangements of publishing because the traditional system is just so bad for writers. The second main reason authors want to be traditionally published is that they want to avoid the financial burden of publishing. This is an outdated way of thinking. The barrier to publishing these days is not so much financial as it is knowledge. In fact, I published a book entirely using free open source software in 2017 just to prove that it could be done. It was Silent Order: Eclipse Hand, the fourth book in my science fiction series. I wrote it on Ubuntu using Libre Office and I edited it in Libre Office and I did the formatting on Ubuntu and I did the cover in the GIMP, which is a free and open source image editing program. This was all using free software and I didn't have to pay for the program. Obviously I had to pay for the computer I was using and the Internet connection, but in the modern era, having an internet connection is in many ways almost a requirement, so that's the cost you would be paying anyway.   The idea that you must spend tens of thousands of dollars in formatting, editing, cover, and marketing comes from scammy self-publishing services. Self-publishing, much like traditional publishing, has more than its fair share of scams or from people who aren't willing to take the time to learn these skills and just want to cut someone a check to solve the problem. There are many low cost and effective ways to learn these skills and resources designed specifically for authors. People like Joanna Penn have free videos online explaining how to do this, and as I've said, a lot of the software you can use to self-publish is either free or low cost, and you can get some very good programs like Atticus or Vellum or Jutoh for formatting eBooks for very low cost.   The third reason that writers want to be traditionally published is that many believe they will get paid more this way, which is, unless you are in the top 1% of traditionally published authors, very wrong. Every so often, there's a study bemoaning the fact that most publishers will only sell about $600 worth of any individual book, and that is true of a large percentage of traditionally published books. Traditional publishers typically pay a lump sum called advance, and then royalties based on sales. An average advance is about the same as two or three months of salary from an office job and so not a reflection of the amount of time it typically takes most authors to finish a book. Most books do not earn out their advance, which means the advance is likely to be the only money the author receives for the book. Even well-known traditionally published authors are not earning enough to support themselves as full-time authors. So as you can see, all three of these reasons are putting a lot of faith in traditional publishers, faith that seems increasingly unnecessary or downright misplaced. I think it is very healthy to get rid of the idea that good writing comes from traditional publishers and that the prestige of being traditionally published is the only way you'll be accepted as a writer or be able to earn a living as a full-time writer. I strongly recommend that people stop thinking that marketing is beneath you as an author or too difficult to learn. Whether you are indie or tradpub, you are producing a product that you want to sell, thus you are a businessperson. The idea that only indie authors have to sell their work is outdated. The sooner you accept this reality, the more options you will have. Self-publishing and indie publishing are admittedly more work. However, the benefits are significant. Here are five benefits of self-publishing versus traditional publishing.   The first advantage of self-publishing is you have complete creative control. You decide what the content of your book will be; you decide what the cover will be. If you don't want to make the covers yourself or you don't want to learn how to do that, you can very affordably hire someone to do it for you and they will make the cover exactly to your specifications. You also have more freedom to experiment with cross-genre books. As I've mentioned before, publishers really aren't a fan of cross genre books until they make a ton of money, like the new romantasy trend.   Traditional publishing is very trend driven and cautious. Back in the 2000s before I gave up on traditional publishing and discovered self-publishing, I would submit to agents a lot. Agents all had these guidelines for fantasy saying that they didn't want to see stories with elves and orcs and dwarves and other traditional fantasy creatures because they thought that was passe. Well, when I started self-publishing, I thought I'm going to write a traditional fantasy series with elves and orcs and dwarves and other traditional fantasy creatures just because I can and Frostborn has been my bestselling series of all time in the time I've been self-publishing, so you can see the advantages of having creative control.   The second advantage is you can control the marketing. Tradpub authors often sign a contract that they'll get their social media and website content approved by the publisher before posting. They may even be given boilerplate or pre-written things to post. In self-publishing, you have real time data to help you make decisions and adjust ads and overall strategy on the fly to maximize revenue. For example, if one of your books is selling strangely well on Google Play, it's time to adjust BookBub ads to focus on that platform instead of Amazon.   You can also easily change your cover, your blurb, and so forth after release. I've changed covers of some of my books many times trying to optimize them for increased sales and that is nearly impossible to do with traditional publishing. And in fact, Brandon Sanderson gave a recent interview where he talked about how the original cover of his Mistborn book was so unrelated to the content of the book that it almost sunk the book and hence his career.   You also have the ability to run ad campaigns as you see fit, not just an initial launch like tradpub does. For example, in February 2025, I've been heavily advertising my Demonsouled series even though I finished writing that series back in 2013, but I've been able to increase sales and derive a significant profit from those ads.   A third big advantage is that you get a far greater share of the profits. Most of the stores, if you price an ebook between $2.99 (prices are USD) and $9.99, you will get 70% of the sale price, which means if you sell an ebook for $4.99, you're probably going to get about $3.50 per sale (depending on currency fluctuations and so forth). That is vastly more than you would get from any publishing contract.   You also don't have to worry about the publisher trying to cheat you out of royalties. We talked about an agency stealing money last episode. Every platform you publish your book on, whether Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Google Play, Smashwords and Apple will give you a monthly spreadsheet of your sales and then you can look at it for yourself, see exactly how many books you sold and exactly how much money you're going to get. I have only very rarely seen traditional publishing royalty statements that are as clear and have as much data in them as a spreadsheet from Google Play or Amazon. A fourth advantage is you don't have to worry about publishers abandoning you mid-series. In traditional publishing, there is what's called the Publishing Death Spiral where let's say an author is contracted to write a series of five books. The author writes the first book and it sells well. Then the author publishes the second book and it doesn't sell quite as well, but the publisher is annoyed enough by the decrease in sales that they drop the writer entirely and don't finish the series. This happens quite a bit in the traditional publishing world, and you don't have to worry about that in indie publishing because you can just publish as often as you want. If you're not happy with the sales of the first few books in the series, you can change the covers, try ad campaigns, and other strategies.   Finally, you can publish as often as you want and when you want. In traditional publishing, there is often a rule of thumb that an author should only publish one book a year under their name. Considering that last year I published 10 books under my name, that seems somewhat ridiculous, but that's a function of the fact that traditional publishing has only so much capacity and the pieces of the machine involved there are slow and not very responsive. Whereas with self-publishing, you have much more freedom and everything involved with it is much more responsive. There's no artificial deadlines, so you can take as long as you want to prepare it and if the book is ready, you don't have to wait a year to put it out because it would mess up the publisher's schedule.   So what to do instead of chasing traditional publishing? Learn about self-publishing, especially about scams and bad deals related to it. Publish your own works by a platform such as KDP, Barnes and Noble Press, Kobo Writing Life, Apple Books, Google Play, Smashwords, and possibly your own Payhip and/or Shopify store.   Conquer your fear of marketing and advertising. Even traditionally published authors are shouldering more of this work and paying out of their own pocket to hire someone to do it, and if you are paying your own marketing costs, you might as well self-publish and keep a greater share of the profits. The second half of our main topic, another potential risk of prestige, is getting on The New York Times Bestseller List. I should note that I suppose someone could accuse me of sour grapes here saying, oh, Jonathan Moeller, you've never been on The New York Times Bestseller List. You must just be bitter about it. That is not true. I do not want to be on The New York Times Bestseller List. What I would like to be is a number one Amazon bestseller. Admittedly though, that's unlikely, but a number one Amazon bestseller would make a lot more money than a number one New York Times Bestseller List, though because of the way it works, if you are a number one Amazon bestseller, you might be a New York Times Bestseller, but you might not. Let's get into that now.   Many writers have the dream of seeing their name on the New York Times Bestseller List. One self-help guru wrote about “manifesting” this milestone for herself by writing out the words “My book is number one on The New York Times Bestseller List” every day until it happened. Such is the mystique of this milestone that many authors crave it as a necessity. However, this list has seen challenges to its prestige in recent years. The one thing that shocks most people when they dig into the topic is that the list is not an objective list based on the raw number of books sold. The list is “editorial content” and The New York Times can exclude, include, or rank the books on the list however they choose.   What it does not capture is perennial sellers or classics. For example, the Bible and the Quran are obviously some of the bestselling books of all time, but you won't see editions of the Bible or the Quran on the New York Times Bestseller List. Textbooks and classroom materials, I guarantee there are some textbooks that are standards in their field that would be on the bestseller list every year, but they're not because The New York Times doesn't track them. Ebooks available only from a single vendor such as Kindle Unlimited books, ebook sales from not reporting vendors such as Shopify or Payhip. Reference Works including test prep guides (because I guarantee when test season comes around the ACT and SAT prep guides or the GRE prep guides sell a lot of copies) and coloring books or puzzle books.  It would be quite a blow to the authors on the list to realize that if these excluded works were included on the list, they would in all likelihood be consistently below To Kill a Mockingbird, SAT prep books, citation manuals, Bibles/other religious works, and coloring books about The Eras Tour.   Publishers, political figures, religious groups, and anyone with enough money can buy their way into the rank by purchasing their books in enormous quantities. In fact, it's widely acknowledged in the United States that this is essentially a legal form of bribery and a bit of money laundering too, where a publisher will give a truly enormous advance to a public figure or politician that they like, and that advance will essentially be a payment to that public figure in the totally legal form of an enormous book advance that isn't going to pay out. Because this is happening with such frequency, The New York Times gave into the pressure to acknowledge titles suspected of this strategy with a special mark next to it on the list. However, these books remain on the list and can still be called a New York Times Bestseller.   Since the list is not an objective marker of sales and certainly not some guarantee of quality, why focus on making it there? I think trying to get your book on The New York Times Bestseller List would be an enormous waste of time, since the list is fundamentally an artificial construction that doesn't reflect sales reality very well.   So what can you do instead? Focus on raw sales numbers and revenue, not lists. Even Amazon's bestseller category lists have a certain amount of non-quantitative factors. In the indie author community, there's a saying called Bank not Rank, which means you should focus on how much revenue your books are actually generating instead of whatever sales rank they are on whatever platform. I think that's a wiser approach to focus your efforts.   You can use lists like those from Publishers Weekly instead if you're interested in what's selling or trends in the industry, although that too can be manipulated and these use only a fairly small subset of data that favors retail booksellers, but it's still more objective in measuring than The New York Times.   I suppose in the end, you should try and focus on ebook and writing activities that'll bring you actual revenue or satisfaction rather than chasing the hollow prestige of things like traditional publishing, agents, MFAs, and The New York Times Bestseller List.   So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all back episodes at https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

Learn why and how to share your end-of-life wisdom and stories by writing a non-fiction book. My guest Joanna Penn writes non-fiction for authors and is an award-winning, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of thrillers, dark fantasy, and memoir as J.F. Penn. She is also an award-winning podcaster, creative entrepreneur, and international… Continue reading Ep. 490 How to Write Non-Fiction About Death, Dying and Grief with Joanna Penn

Matty Dalrymple talks with Joanna Penn about THE EVOLVING AUTHOR AND SECOND EDITIONS, including the release of the second edition of Joanna's book, HOW TO WRITE NON-FICTION. Joanna discusses the changes in nonfiction writing, including the importance of storytelling, which led her to apply some of the personal elements and insights she has used in her memoir works into this new edition. We delve into the challenges and benefits of putting out a new edition versus updating the existing one, the evolving landscape of self-publishing, and the impact of new technologies on the writing business. Interview video at https://bit.ly/TIAPYTPlaylist Show notes at https://www.theindyauthor.com/podcast.html  If you find the information in this video useful, please consider supporting The Indy Author! https://www.patreon.com/theindyauthor https://www.buymeacoffee.com/mattydalrymple Joanna Penn writes non-fiction for authors and is an award-winning, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of thrillers, dark fantasy, and memoir as J.F. Penn. She's also an award-winning podcaster of The Creative Penn Podcast, a creative entrepreneur, and an international professional speaker. Matty Dalrymple is the author of the Lizzy Ballard Thrillers, beginning with ROCK PAPER SCISSORS; the Ann Kinnear Suspense Novels, beginning with THE SENSE OF DEATH; and the Ann Kinnear Suspense Shorts. She is a member of International Thriller Writers and Sisters in Crime. Matty also writes, speaks, and consults on the writing craft and the publishing voyage, and shares what she's learned on THE INDY AUTHOR PODCAST. She has written books on the business of short fiction and podcasting for authors; her articles have appeared in "Writer's Digest" magazine. She serves as the Campaigns Manager for the Alliance of Independent Authors.  

Now that we're done reflecting on 2024, it's time to look forward. We bring together some of our favorite all-stars of the publishing world, including Joanna Penn, Dale Roberts, and Mark Coker to give us their predictions for what authors can expect in 2025.//Draft2Digital is where you start your Indie Author Career//  Looking for your path to self-publishing success? Draft2Digital is the leading ebook publisher and distributor worldwide. We'll convert your manuscript, distribute it online, and support you the whole way—and we won't charge you a dime.  We take a small percentage of the royalties for each sale you make through us, so we only make money when you make money. That's the best kind of business plan.  • Get started now: https://draft2digital.com/• Learn the ins, the outs, and the all-arounds of indie publishing from the industry experts on the D2D Blog: https://Draft2Digital.com/blog  • Promote your books with our Universal Book Links from Books2Read: https://books2read.com  Make sure you bookmark https://D2DLive.com for links to live events, and to catch back episodes of the Self Publishing Insiders Podcast.

On the Creative Self-Publishing stream of the Self-Publishing with ALLi Podcast, Orna Ross and Joanna Penn discuss creative challenges, including patience, mindset, and balancing creative freedom with traditional publishing ambitions. Joanna shares her experience submitting her novel Blood Vintage to traditional publishers, while Orna reflects on how family obligations disrupted her plans and required a flexible approach to creativity. Sponsor This podcast is proudly sponsored by Bookvault. Sell high-quality, print-on-demand books directly to readers worldwide and earn maximum royalties selling directly. Automate fulfillment and create stunning special editions with BookvaultBespoke. Visit Bookvault.app today for an instant quote. About the Hosts 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 launched the Alliance of Independent Authors at the London Book Fair in 2012. Her work for ALLi has seen her named as one of The Bookseller's “100 top people in publishing”. She also publishes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction and is greatly excited by the democratizing, empowering potential of author-publishing. For more information about Orna, visit her website.

Send us a textAuthor and ESE CEO Eric Simmons discusses the importance of getting your books into libraries, the steps to take in this pursuit, and tips on bettering your chances of getting sales in this special extended episode to kick off the new year!▬Get in contact with Eric and start your library journey today:Library Contacts “Database"Library Consulting ServicesCheck out the other resources recommended by Eric:Get Your Book Into Libraries Now – Eric's YouTube interview with April Cox.How To Get Your Self-Published Book Into Libraries – His podcast interview with Joanna Penn.“How To Get Your Book Into Libraries” – For several years, this article was the top Google search result on the subject out of 2 billion “hits.” “Get Your Book Into Libraries” Library Marketing Services

Happy New Year 2025! I love January and the opportunity to start afresh. I know it's arbitrary in some ways, but I measure my life by what I create, and I also measure it in years. At the beginning of each year, I publish an article (and podcast episode) here, which helps keep me accountable. If you'd […] The post My 2025 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 can take the time to review your goals and you're welcome to leave a comment below about how the year went. Did you achieve everything you wanted to? Let me know in the comments. It's always interesting looking […] The post Review Of My 2024 Creative And Business Goals With Joanna Penn first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Today's guest is Joanna Penn, prolific author + expert in the world of writing + publishing. We're discussing her book on writing non-fiction, part of a wide array of books she's created to help aspiring authors do well.  We discussed practical strategies on, amongst other things, how to find your unique voice + connect with your audience. Joanna's clear anyone can produce effective writing with the right approach. This episode is also part of the December Daily, where - you guessed it - the show is, gasp, daily for the whole month. Extra Episodes Mentioned Audio for Authors - An episode featuring Joanna Penn and Katherine Goldman, discussing the legal aspects of audio for authors.Writer 's Block - An upcoming episode in the December Daily Sessions series that will address overcoming writer's block. Make sure to check these out for more insights and tips on writing and publishing! Joanna's books discussed in this episode: How to Write Nonfiction: Turn Your Knowledge into Words  Audio for Authors - Joanna Penn Career Change - Joanna Penn Writing the Shadow - Joanna Penn Pilgrimage - Joanna Penn Other book mentioned in this episode: Atomic Habits - James Clear Joanna's website: thecreativepenn.com Joanna's podcast: The Creative Penn Podcast ==== If you'd like my help with your Business go to www.lizscully.com/endlessClients ==== And don't forget to get your reading list of the 10 essential reads for every successful biz owner - these are the books Liz recommends almost on the daily to her strategy + Mastermind clients. This isn't your usual list of biz books, these answer the challenges you've actually got coming up right now. Helpful, quick to read and very timely. Click here lizscully.com/reading to get your book list

It's one of my favorite times of year, National Novel Writing Month (also called NaNoWriMo), and to celebrate and honor all my writing friends, I thought we could delve into what it takes to be a Healthy Writer, from one of the most prolific authors I know, Joanna Penn. We'll discuss stress in our dream job, realizing and getting in tune with our cycles, loneliness, and lessons from yoga and running. If you would like to learn more about Healthy Writer, or check out other books by Joanna Penn, visit her site at https://www.thecreativepenn.com/books/

Want to learn how facing your inner shadows can lead to a more authentic and fulfilling life? In this enlightening episode of The Quiet And Strong Podcast, host David Hall is joined by author Joanna Penn to explore the richness that lies within the darker aspects of our personality.Join us as we navigate Carl Jung's concept of the "shadow" and uncover how these unconscious traits, often repressed by societal norms, can be a goldmine for creativity. Joanna shares her personal journey of embracing her introversion, moving from a high-stress corporate career to becoming a successful and intuitive writer. She discusses using triggers and shadow exploration to enrich both personal and professional life, offering actionable insights.This episode is packed with wisdom and practical advice that will resonate deeply with introverts aiming to harness their unique strengths. Whether you're a writer, creator, or someone striving for personal mastery, understanding and embracing your shadow can elevate your work and personal life. Be inspired by Joanna Penn's journey and learn how to turn your own darkness into gold.Tune in for a captivating discussion that promises not just self-improvement, but a profound appreciation for the introverted experience — and be strong.Episode Link: QuietandStrong.com/199 (https://quietandstrong.com/199)---Joanna Penn writes non-fiction for authors and is an award-winning, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of thrillers, dark fantasy, and memoir as J.F. Penn. She's also an award-winning podcaster, creative entrepreneur, and international professional speaker. She lives in Bath, England.Connect with Joanna: Website: TheCreativePenn.com Get Joanna's New Book: Writing the Shadow More from Joanna: Non-fiction books | Fiction Books Socials: Twitter | Instagram | Facebook | Youtube- - -Contact the Host of the Quiet and Strong Podcast:David Hall Author, Speaker, Educator, Podcaster quietandstrong.comGobio.link/quietandstrongdavid [at] quietandstrong.com Take the FREE Personality Assessment: Typefinder Personality Assessment Follow David on your favorite social platform: Twitter | Facebook | Instagram | LinkedIn | Youtube Get David's book:Minding Your Time: Time Management, Productivity, and Success, Especially for Introverts You may also like:Quiet & Strong Merchandise

Author, podcaster, and creative entrepreneur Joanna Penn is a best-selling and award-winning writer of horror, thrillers, dark fantasy and travel memoirs. She's also taken up going on pilgrimages.Music: © Barney & Izzi Hardy Support the show

In a departure from the usual format, in this episode Orna Ross and Joanna Penn hand their podcast notes over to Google's NotebookLM to see what this new AI tool makes of their topic: "5 Myths that Hold Indie Authors Back — And How to Break Free." Joanna shares key developments in AI conversation tools, and as AI continues to shape the industry, Orna asks: What does it mean to stay true to your creative self in an AI-powered publishing industry? Find more author advice, tips, and tools at our self-publishing advice center. And, if you haven't already, we invite you to join our organization and become a self-publishing ally. Now, go write and publish! About the Hosts 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 launched the Alliance of Independent Authors at the London Book Fair in 2012. Her work for ALLi has seen her named as one of The Bookseller's “100 top people in publishing”. She also publishes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction and is greatly excited by the democratizing, empowering potential of author-publishing. For more information about Orna, visit her website.

In this solo episode, I talk about my lessons learned from 13 years as a full-time author entrepreneur. You can read/listen to previous updates at TheCreativePenn.com/timeline. Joanna Penn writes non-fiction for authors and is an award-winning, New York Times and USA Today bestselling thriller, dark fantasy, horror, crime, and memoir author as J.F. Penn. She's also an […] The post Lessons Learned from 13 Years as an Author Entrepreneur first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Join us for an exploration of the future of audio creation with our guest – independent author, audiobook narrator, and creative economy expert, Joanna Penn. Joanna shares her insights on selling audiobooks directly through Shopify, using YouTube for distribution, and maintaining direct fan engagement with her extensive email lists. We also go down the Importance of Intellectual Property Rights, rabbit hole. Listen in.   JFPennBooks.com CreativePennBooks.com The Music Tectonics podcast goes beneath the surface of the music industry to explore how technology is changing the way business gets done. Visit musictectonics.com to find shownotes and a transcript for this episode, and find us on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. Let us know what you think!

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In this episode of Intermittent Fasting Stories, Gin talks to Cheryl Beckerich from Indianapolis, IN.Are you ready to take your intermittent fasting lifestyle to the next level? There's nothing better than community to help with that. In the Delay, Don't Deny community we all embrace the clean fast, and there's just the right support for you as you live your intermittent fasting lifestyle. You can connect directly with Gin in the Ask Gin group, and she will answer all of your questions personally. If you're new to intermittent fasting or recommitting to the IF lifestyle, join the 28-Day FAST Start group. After your fast start, join us for support in The 1st Year group. Need tips for long term maintenance? We have a place for that! There are many more useful spaces beyond these, and you can interact in as many as you like. Visit ginstephens.com/community to join us. An annual membership costs just over a dollar a week when you do the math. If you aren't ready to fully commit for a year, join for a month and you can cancel at any time. If you know you'll want to stay forever, we also have a lifetime membership option available. IF is free. You don't need to join our community to fast. But if you're looking for support from a community of like-minded IFers, we are here for you at ginstephens.com/community. Cheryl loves to knit, she writes knitting patterns, and she works as marketing and communications manager for a church. She recounts how a podcast by Joanna Penn led her to explore intermittent fasting after hearing Gin as a guest. Despite her religious familiarity with fasting, its connection with weight loss was a novel concept for her.Cheryl lost around 20 pounds over the first six months of her intermittent fasting journey, typically fasting between 18 and 20 hours a day. She enjoys traditional foods without guilt and stays active. Her body has settled into a healthy weight range for her height, and she doesn't have to think about what she does from day to day—the lifestyle feels natural, and it's simply what she does. In her final advice to newcomers to intermittent fasting, Cheryl stresses the importance of easing in and maintaining a clean fast by avoiding any consumables that mimic the taste of food, like gum or diet beverages. Her parting words encourage beginners to stick with it and trust the process, highlighting the significance of perseverance for long-term success and overall wellbeing.Get Gin's books at: http://www.ginstephens.com/get-the-books.html, including her latest bestseller 28-Day Fast Start Day-By-Day, the Ultimate Guide to Starting (or Restarting) Your Intermittent Fasting Lifestyle so it Sticks, New York Times Bestseller, Fast. Feast. Repeat., and Cleanish, available wherever you buy books! Delay, Don't Deny is available on Amazon. Join Gin's community! Go to: ginstephens.com/communityDo you enjoy Intermittent Fasting Stories? You'll probably also like Gin's other podcast with cohost Sheri Bullock: Fast. Feast. Repeat. Intermittent Fasting for Life. Find it wherever you listen to podcasts. Share your intermittent fasting stories with Gin: gin@intermittentfastingstories.comVisit Gin's website at: ginstephens.com Check out Gin's Favorite Things at http://www.ginstephens.com/gins-favorite-things.htmlSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Drawing insights from their own recent Kickstarters, Orna Ross and Joanna Penn explore both fiction and nonfiction crowdfunding and discuss their upcoming campaigns, with a particular focus on reader participation, making a profit, and getting paid. Whether you're a seasoned author or just starting out, this episode will provide you with actionable tips and inspiration to launch your own successful crowdfunding campaign. Find more author advice, tips, and tools at our self-publishing advice center. And, if you haven't already, we invite you to join our organization and become a self-publishing ally. Now, go write and publish! About the Hosts 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 launched the Alliance of Independent Authors at the London Book Fair in 2012. Her work for ALLi has seen her named as one of The Bookseller's “100 top people in publishing”. She also publishes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction and is greatly excited by the democratizing, empowering potential of author-publishing. For more information about Orna, visit her website.

In this week's episode, I look at six ways indie authors can effectively work with audiobook narrators to produce great audiobooks. TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Update Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 208 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is July the 5th, 2024, and today we're discussing six tips for working with audiobook narrators. Before we do that, we'll have an update on my current writing projects and Question of the Week. For my current writing projects, I'm very pleased to say that Shield of Darkness is finally done and published. By the time this episode goes live on Monday, the book should be live at all the ebook stores and you pick it up at your ebook store of choice. It took a bit longer to write this one because I was obliged to take quite a bit of time off during the writing process, but I'm pleased to report it is finally done. My next project will be the third Rivah book, Half-Orc Paladin and I am 35,000 words into that one. I think the final book will end up being around 80,000 words, give or take. I'm also about 18,000 words into Ghost in the Tombs. Not sure when I would do that one. Possibly after Half-Orc Paladin. I might do another book after Half-Orc Paladin first, but we will see. In audiobook news, nothing has changed from what it was last week. Both Stealth and Spells Online: Leveling and Wizard-Thief are currently underway for production, which would ironically tie into my main topic of this week about working with audiobook narrators. 00:01:14 Question of the Week Now it's time for Question of the Week, which is designed to inspire interesting discussion of enjoyable topics. This week's topic: your home Internet goes out, which means you can't use the Internet until your Internet service provider gets around to fixing it. What do you do instead? The inspiration for this question was that I wanted to play Starfield, but the Xbox Network services were down and I didn't feel like going through the settings to get the offline mode to work on my Xbox. So I wrote the blog post for Question of the Week instead. We had an interesting range of responses this week. Our first response is from Justin who says: if the Internet is down, I have many things to do. During leisure and recovery time, I can read, play games, and watch movies just fine without the Internet. Most of my computer games are old and do not require connection in order to function. World of Warcraft is the only exception to that, and I keep that around as much to chat with friends and family who play it. If I need to use the Internet (banking, ordering, directions, etcetera), my phone can act as a hotspot and as long as there's phone service, I have slow connectivity. Adrian says: I am lucky enough to live on an island where all the Internet is via fiber network and we have a minimum connection of 500 megabits per second and only have failures once a year at most and our phone network is about to change to 5G. Adrian is quite lucky here, I have to admit, because 500 megabits is very fast. Jonathan D. says: mostly I listen to my son complaining that he cannot watch YouTube videos and then tell him that when I was his age, we only had four TV channels. After that, I would wonder when I became more like my parents. I do have plenty of books, board games, DVDs, and offline computer games if it's a long-term outage. Joaquim says: this would be my day. Over the years we've amassed nearly five terabyte worth of movies and TV shows from tape video recorder, DVD video recorder, and online video recorder. Also, we have a lot of DVDs. My family would rather stream, even if we have it offline already. For music, we have a lot of CDs and MP3s. We would have an outage if a Caterpillar would cut the cable during driveway refurbishing. The last time this happened before smartphones were available, I used a Mini WLAN router as backup. Now I just bought a 5G smartphone, which can act as hotspot for up to 10 devices and has USB tethering for my router. I tested both modes and the speed was quite good. Surabhi says: my data was over for the day, so I read one of your books. I often have these days. I usually catch up on more homework or read some books. Have you watched Oppenheimer yet? I sadly missed the opportunity to watch it in theaters, but I streamed it recently and it was honestly well worth the hype. I read the screenplay before the movie for some reason and it added the experience for some reason. Nolan's screenplays always make for a nice experience. In fact, I did watch Oppenheimer in the theater back in July or August, when Dragonskull: Crown of the Gods was done, and I published it and finished the Dragonskull series. That was how I celebrated. I took a half day off and went to the theater to watch Oppenheimer and because it was like a three hour movie, you kind of have to take a half day off work to go watch Oppenheimer. I thought it was quite good and one of my favorite movies of 2023. Our next comment is from William, who says: this is also a good reminder to buy physical copies of games you really like. On a side note, I have had very few Internet outages that lasted very long since I switched to fiber, and nowadays you always have your phone for backup Internet anyway, so work can continue. Power outages, on the other hand, present more of a challenge, especially in winter. Becca says: do some gardening or read. Michael says: yeah, as others have said, I just tether to my phone instead if I wanted to use the Internet. If my phone signal is also gone, I just assume a global apocalypse and go hide in bed. Probably a sensible reaction to the situation. Mike says: well, I have books downloaded on my iPad and hundreds of other paper books to read and go outside and see the world. Braq says: I hope on my adventure motorcycle (Triumph Tiger 1200), then I find the nearest back road and a cold clear water stream and I fly fish till the sun goes down. Adeline says: hotspot off the phone, if I need to be online. It's happened before. It'll happen again. If I don't need to be online, I really just read one of your books on my phone, either on the sofa or wander out to the nearest park if the weather is good and read it there. Todd says: there's plenty to do without the Internet. I grew up in the ‘80s. Pet my dogs, read a book, play cards or dominos or another board game, make some tasty food. Work on a hobby. Go for a walk or bike ride. Maaike says: if the Internet goes down, I'll be drawing, painting, reading, or kayaking. Or maybe practicing martial arts or going for a run. Plenty of stuff left to do. Jenny says: my phone becomes a mobile hotspot. Juana says: read. Jesse says: guitar, paperbacks, and the occasional card game or tabletop game. I realized that for me, the question breaks down in two ways: if the Internet goes down while I'm working, or if the Internet goes down while I want to relax. If the Internet goes down while I'm working, it's not necessarily a huge deal. If I'm writing or editing, everything is downloaded locally anyway, so I would just keep on writing and editing until the Internet came back up. If the Internet goes down while I'm uploading an ebook or an audiobook or setting up ads or changing my website, that is in fact super annoying. However, I usually work on multiple books at a time. Right now, I'm finishing up the publishing process for Shield of Darkness, and I'm also writing Half-Orc Paladin and Ghost in the Tombs. So if I'm working on an online task, and the Internet goes out, then I'll switch to one of the books I'm currently working on and make progress with that. If the Internet goes down while I want to relax, I'll read a paper book (I still have lots of those) or watch a DVD. When Oppenheimer came out on Blu-ray (to tie it back to Oppenheimer), Christopher Nolan rather famously said that you should get it on Blu-ray so no evil streaming service could take it away. Obviously, Mr. Nolan had a financial motive for that statement, but he wasn't wrong. So if there is a movie I really like, I will attempt to get it on DVD or Blu-ray. 00:06:14 Main Topic of the Week: Working with Narrators on Audiobooks Now on to our main Topic of the Week: six tips for working with narrators on audiobooks. I decided to do this as a topic because at this point, I have had quite a lot of experience at this. I did my first self-funded audiobook back in 2018, so over half a decade now. You occasionally hear horror stories of indie authors and narrators that don't get along well or the entire thing falls apart and it turns into this mutual cycle of bitter recriminations and so forth. So with that in mind, I thought I would share six tips for how to have a good relationship with your narrator if you are an indie author who is producing audiobooks and how to work well with a narrator and hopefully have a good professional relationship. Tip #1: As with so many things, manage your expectations and understand what the narrator actually does. An audiobook narrator is a skilled professional, and it's not the same thing as reading a book aloud or having AI do it. A narrator has to perform the story and bring it alive (or if you're doing a nonfiction book, read it in a crisp and professional manner) and bring nuance and help to punctuate the story's emotional beats, which is, as with so many things in life, a lot harder than it looks from the outside. Be wary of doing it yourself or having a friend or relative do it if they don't have experience and don't know what they're doing. Joanna Penn, who is sort of an indie author guru, rather famously does a lot of her nonfiction audiobooks herself. However, I should point out that's not for everyone, and she took a bunch of classes and has practiced really hard to do it. She works hard to pull it off. If it's not something you have a passion in doing yourself and you're not willing to put in the work to become good enough to do it, then it is really better if you hire a narrator. For myself, I would not ever even remotely think of narrating my own audiobooks. If you're listening to this podcast, if you have a regular practice of listening to this podcast, I think we can all agree that nobody wants to pay $15 or spend an Audible credit to listen to me talk and attempt to narrate an audiobook for ten straight hours. Part of the reason for this is that the audiobook community is very savvy and has very high expectations for quality and narration. If the narrator isn't good, if there are technical problems with recording, the reviews will let you know and your audiobook won't sell. The flip side of that is a good narrator isn't cheap. Many audiobook narrators belong to the SAG-AFTRA/The Screen Actors Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA has rules for everything. Audiobook narration is no different. If you are a member of SAG-AFTRA and you're an audiobook narrator, you are expected to charge between $200 and $400 per finished hour of audiobook narration. Now this might seem very high if you don't know about the work that goes into it. Like, oh, I'd like to get paid, you know, $350 an hour for work, but quite a lot of work goes into it. There's a lot of preparation for each individual hour. And then based on the way that ACX and Findaway are set up, the audiobook narrator is responsible for producing finished, mastered, and leveled files that will pass the quality standards of both ACX and Findaway and all the individual audiobook stores. This can be very hard if you don't know what you're doing, and many narrators will hire someone to, you know, master and level and edit their audiobook files. If they put the time in to learn the skills, they'll do it themselves. That still is quite time consuming because you've got to sit there and edit the files and get out any weird spaces and make sure everything sounds good and so forth. All that said, ACX does offer a program called royalty share, where instead of paying the narrator upfront, you and the narrator split the royalties of the audiobook for the next seven years. The plus of this is you can get the audiobook off the ground for very little cost to yourself if you're an indie author. The downside of this, from the narrator's point of view, is that it's a lot of work that they're basically doing on spec and if the audiobook doesn't sell any copies, and many audiobooks do not sell very many copies, then the audiobook narrator is out of luck. Additionally, a great deal of the very skilled narrators will not do royalty share. They will only work for payment on completion, and if they do royalty share, they will only do it as part of another deal where they're getting paid per finished hour anyway. Because of that, a lot of beginning narrators and narrators who just started out do royalty share. I'm not going to say that you can't find a good narrator doing royalty share because there are good talented narrators starting out doing royalty share. However, it is harder to find a good narrator who is doing royalty share and a lot of the very experienced narrators will have switched to doing payment per finished hour instead of attempting to do a royalty share. If you want a professionally done audiobook, odds are you are going to be paying between $200 and $400 per finished hour. If you are paying more than that (and you really shouldn't be), that means you have hired a celebrity narrator, you know, someone who would be recognizable from a movie or a TV show or whatever, and they're doing your audiobook. If you have a celebrity narrator, you are probably beyond the level of needing to listen to me for advice. So that is our first tip: make sure you understand what the narrator does. Make sure you have a good way of paying for your audiobook and make sure you know the difference between royalty share and payment per finished hour. #2: Our second tip is to do your homework before holding auditions. Typically the way both ACX and Findaway work is you put up the posting for your book, and then you say this is what I'm looking for and then narrators have the chance to audition. Findaway used to have a more guided process for that, but I'm not sure they do that anymore. And for the last couple of times I've looked for a new narrator, I've done it off ACX. I recommend the first thing you do before you write out your posting for your audiobook is to research narrators in your genre. Some narrators specialize in certain genres, but it's not unusual for narrators to work in several genres at once. And now the reason for this is because narrators (and I've had actual narrators actually tell me this is that) find it very helpful. The more specific you can be in your posting for your audiobook auditions, the more helpful they find it. So that to that end, it's a good idea to find short samples of narrators and books that fit the desired tone of your book. The Audible website is very useful for this, because if you've spent any time browsing the Audible website, you can play a sample of any audiobook that's up there, and you'll get a little three to five minute sample of the audiobook and the narrator that you can listen to. I find a good practice to be is when you're putting together an audiobook is to include a list of the kind of narrators and narrator styles you want. The last time I did a posting for a new audiobook, I said I am looking for something a bit similar to the way Michael Kramer narrated Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson and the way that Jonathan Davis narrated the Revenge of the Sith novelization by Matthew Stover. Narrators do find that kind of thing very helpful, because that helps them dial in on what you are looking for. It's also a good idea for you as the author in producing this audiobook to know what you are looking for, because some narrators try to have a different voice for characters. Probably one of the more famous examples is Marc Thompson, who does a lot of the Star Wars novels. If you listen to them, like if you listen to his narration of Heir to the Empire by Timothy Zahn, he does a pretty good impression of Luke Skywalker. He does a pretty good impression of Han Solo and Lando Calrissian and all the other classic Star Wars characters and he tries to give distinctive voices to all the other characters in the book. When you're auditioning narrators, you also have to post a short excerpt of your book in order to give the narrator something to audition with. I found that it's best to keep this under 1,000 words or so. Auditions should not really be more than 5 minutes, I think. Remember, the narrators are doing this on spec. They don't get paid for auditioning and it's good to be respectful of everyone's time and not waste anyone's time. What I usually do is I pick for those 1,000 words (though sometimes it goes up to about 1,500 words) is pick three different scenes from the book. What I try to do is pick a dialogue heavy scene. I try to pick an action scene and then maybe a more emotionally heavy scene to see how the narrator handles each one of these different tones. That would give the narrator something to work with and show off their chops and then they know what I'm looking for, an audiobook that sounds like, you know, these other sample audiobooks I've mentioned. Here is about 1,000 words of the book for you to try it with and give it a try and we will see what happens. It's good to be very clear with what you want when you audition audiobook narrators. I think this is important. Not everyone does this, but I think they should. It's very good to have a specific deadline and a specific deadline by when you're going to make a decision. The last couple of times I've auditioned new narrators, I've said usually something along the lines of, the posting is live now, it's going to be open for a week (which will be the 12th) and I will listen to every audition I get before the 12th. By the time I close the auditions on the 12th, I will make a decision and make an offer by the 14th or 15th. That way no one's kept in suspense and is waiting forever. They know if they haven't heard from you by the, you know 14th or the 15th or the 16th, that they're not going to get the audiobook. I used to reply to every audition I got, but unfortunately that was just not possible. The last time I auditioned a new narrator, we got nearly 100 auditions, and it did take a lot of time to sort through them all, and I'm afraid there just wasn't time to respond to everybody. That said, I think it's also important when you put up the audiobook posting and say this is what I'm looking for, it's also important to be as open as possible during that process, so if narrators have questions for you, you can answer them. I've had narrators during this process email me and say, does this book have like explicit adult scenes or explicit scenes of, you know, violence or cruelty against animals or women or children, or anything of that nature? It's important to be open and you don't want anyone to narrate who's uncomfortable with that. I think being as open as possible during the audition process and answering any questions from narrators is important, but I definitely didn't have time to respond to nearly 100 different auditions, and you may not as well. #3: So we go on to Tip #3 now: actually choosing a narrator from the auditions. If you get a lot of auditions, it may take some time to sort through them all. Like I said before, the last time I held open auditions for a narrator got nearly 100 auditions for the book, and sorting through them would take some time. There are easy ways to eliminate, you know, potential auditions quite quickly, like if you specified an American accent and you got a British accent or if you specified a female narrator and you get auditions from male narrators and that kind of thing. Usually, I've found you can narrow it down to about maybe 10 or 12 of the best ones for the for the book, and then at that point you look a little more closely at them. What I usually do is look at how much they charge and how many Audible credits they have (by that mean how many audiobooks they've done). The more audiobooks a narrator has done, the more likely they're able to be reliable and that you can expect confidently that they'll be able to finish the work. It's less of a gamble to hire a narrator who's done 150 audiobooks as opposed to one who has done 3. This isn't to say that you can have a good result with someone who has done 3, but there is a different track record and potentially a different level of expectation there. Also, and this is just Due Diligence 101, it might be a good idea to Google the narrators and look over the search results. Make sure that, for example, they haven't been convicted of serious crimes or are wanted in a different state or expressed strong opinions that you yourself are not comfortable with. Like I said earlier in this episode, you want the narrator to be comfortable working with you and you want to be comfortable working with the narrator. If the narrator is expressing very strong opinions on social media that you happen to find personally distasteful for whatever reason, it might be best to choose someone else. Once you have narrowed it down and found a narrator who has the style you're looking for and the kind of track record in terms of completed credits that you're looking for, that is the time to make an offer. The offer will also include a deadline for when you want the audiobook done by. I've found it's best to be a little flexible in that deadline, if possible. Maybe extend it out two or three months into the future. That way if you've chosen a narrator who can't do it right away but it has time in that time space, they can do it. It might also be a good idea to go back and forth a bit and pin down the schedule exactly. Once you have chosen the narrator and you've extended an offer and once the narrator has accepted it, this is the point in the process where you do need to get them the book. They obviously need the manuscript of the book if they're going to read it, and I've also found it's best to send a spreadsheet with all the major character names and locations and a pronunciation guide. If you're just doing thrillers or mystery or contemporary romance, you probably don't need a pronunciation guide. You do need a guide for the characters and how they sound. For example, Julia is a middle-aged woman with a raspy voice and a thick Midwestern accent. I write science fiction and fantasy, and I frequently have names like Xothalaxiar, Agrimnalazur, and Seziravorna. Obviously the narrator is going to want a pronunciation guide, so what I usually do is I also read aloud the names in each in the location spreadsheet and the character spreadsheet and send that along to the narrator. #4: Let's move on to our fourth tip, which is understand that narrators all work differently. I've had some narrators who will send me the chapters over right away when they're done, and so then we tend to listen to the chapters in clumps of three to four the time until the book is done. I've had other narrators who wait until the entire book is done and send that all over at once, and then we listen to it. It's important to respect someone else's workflow in a way that you are hiring an expert and there's no point in hiring an expert if you don't listen to the expert's advice. Some narrators may have questions or want suggestions, while others may not have as many. It's always a good idea to answer these questions promptly so that there aren't delays in recording. Again, that's part of maintaining a good professional relationship with someone where if they have questions, you're available to address them promptly and as quickly as is reasonably possible. #5: Now on to our fifth tip: how to be a good collaborator. First, don't micromanage and don't ask for updates before the agreed upon deadlines. When you set up the book through ACX or Findaway, there's a default contract in there, and there's supposed to be a 15 minute sample by the first date and the finished book by the 2nd date. And if it's still not up to the deadline, that's not the time to send pestering emails. If you haven't gotten the book by the deadline, that's the time when you ask if anything is everything's going okay, if there's any questions, and so forth. Don't micromanage before that. Don't micromanage at all, and don't pester the narrator before the initially agreed upon deadlines. Additionally, don't be too picky. The time to be picky is in the audition process. Once you have gotten through the audition process and made your offer, you have hopefully selected the narrator you think will work best with what you want, and that is when you let the narrator get on with it and don't be overly critical. I've heard horror stories where the authors would reject the book because like the Welsh accent wasn't Snowdonia enough. It's before you choose a narrator during the audition process, that's when you're picky. Treat the narrator like a fellow professional and trust their judgment. Be willing to accept their suggestions. If you listen this podcast quite a bit, you know, my vocal performance skills are not necessarily the best, so if someone who has more experience with vocal performance than I do is going to make suggestion, I'm going to seriously consider it. Once you have received the finished audiobook, ideally you are supposed to have listened to it within seven business days, and by then you can either approve it or ask for changes, and ideally you want to do this as quickly as possible because the narrator doesn't get paid ‘til you finish and until the narrator's paid, you can't post the audiobook and sell it. You should only ask for corrections and changes if you have a very good reason for doing so, like there's something actually wrong, like a sentence was dropped, or a paragraph is missing, or the chapters are in the wrong order and that kind of stuff, you know, the usual kind of glitches and small problems that prop up in any major projects like this. Sometimes the software just derps and a sentence drops out, that kind of thing. You should not ask for changes that are not for good reasons, and by this I mean if you don't like a character's accent or you don't like the pronunciation of something. You should have addressed all of this before, when you sent over the pronunciations and when you sent over the character list and any other information. This kind of information needs to be shared before and the proofing process is not the place to address it. It should have been done before. Be quick when responding to questions, if possible. If you do find things that need to be fixed, like a missing word or a character has the wrong name, that kind of thing, the best way to send that to your narrator is to give a timestamp of where precisely where it is in the chapter. And then probably the sentence before and the sentence after that. That will let them quickly zoom in on any errors in the recording and fix it promptly. So be precise as you can with the requested changes. Give the chapter numbers and time stamps, and probably the sentence before and after that sentence. #6: Our sixth and final tip: once the audiobook is done, be sure to acknowledge the narrator's work. I believe the requirements for ACX or Findaway is that the narrator's name has to be on the audiobook cover, but I occasionally hear stories where the narrator isn't credited, which strikes me as absurd because the narrative put a lot of hard work into this audiobook. It might cost you a lot of money, but it was still a lot of hard work. The narrator should be credited for that. Be sure to make sure that you have read by or narrated by, and then the narrator's name on the cover for the audiobook. Also when you mentioned it on your social media and your website and your blog posts and so forth, you want to say this is the audiobook of whatever as narrated by the narrator. Because the audio narrator, in my very strongly held opinion, does deserve very strongly to be credited for the work on the audiobook. So that is it for this week. Those are my six tips for working with audiobook narrators. I hope you found them helpful. I suppose this episode by its nature is a rather limited episode because of the large mass of indie authors out there, only a small subset of subset of us are currently doing our own audiobooks. If someone is thinking about doing their own audiobooks and wondering about how to approach it, I hope this podcast episode was helpful. Thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. I remind you can listen to all the back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com. A quick note of thanks to my transcriptionist for helping me to organize my thoughts for this episode. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

In this week's episode, we take a look at seven attitude shifts for writers that will make them happier and more productive. TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 207 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is June 28th, 2024 and today we are discussing seven important attitude shifts for writers. Before we get into all that, we'll have an update on my current writing projects and then we'll do Question of the Week and then we'll move over to our main topic. For current writing projects, I am still in the first phase of editing for Shield of Darkness. I'm on chapter 20 of what I think is going to end up being either 27 or 28. A couple of my chapters were quite long, so I need to keep splitting them in half as I edit to not have, like 9,000 word chapters. So things are going pretty well with that and I am hoping if all goes well that the book will be out the second week of July, probably after the 4th of July holiday, because releasing new books on the 4th of July is not a great idea. So hopefully before too much longer, we will have that book out. I'm also 31,000 words into Half-Orc Paladin and that will be my next book once Shield of Darkness is done and that will hopefully be out in very early August. I'm also 14,000 words into Ghost in the Tombs. I'm not sure when that's going to come out. I'm very much hoping to have it out before October, but we'll see how things go in the next couple of months. In audiobook news, recording for Wizard Thief and Stealth and Spells Online: Leveling is underway. I believe both narrators started on recording this week. Spells Online: Leveling will be narrated by C.J. McAllister and Wizard Thief will be narrated by Leanne Woodward and they both did the previous books in the respective series. So if you want a sample, you can listen to the audiobook of Half-Elven Thief and Stealth and Spells Online: Creation. 00:01:50 Question of the Week (note: This section contains spoilers for multiple movies, including Casablanca and Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan) Now let's move on to Question of the Week. It's time for a Question of the Week, which is designed to inspire interesting discussion of enjoyable topics. This week's topic: what is your favorite ending to a movie? No wrong answers, obviously. The inspiration for this was that I've been editing Shield of Darkness, so I've been thinking a lot about what makes a satisfying ending and what does not. Obviously, I want to have a satisfying ending. We had some good comments with this one. Our first comment is from Justin, who says: I'll go with an oldie, Casablanca. Rick saves Ilsa, the woman he loves, and puts her on the plane to Lisbon with her husband. He puts morals above love and tells her that she would regret staying with him. Then he and Renault head off to join the Resistance. “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship” Archetypes so powerful that you've used them. I'd argue that the Gray Knight's ending with Ridmark, leaving Calliande and go with Kharlacht is a variation on this. That is interesting because I meant that was not at all in my head when I wrote the ending of Frostborn: The Gray Knight, and I don't think I've ever consciously written anything that I would say had been influenced by Casablanca, though of course I have seen it and it is a great movie, which again shows it's a very interesting that people's interpretation of a particular piece of artwork can often have no connection to what the artist intended when he or she created the artwork, but both views are often valid. Our next come is from Michael, who says: probably the ending to The Illusionist, which is very satisfying or more infamously, Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, which often reminds me of a story writing tip you have given in podcasts about good endings not necessarily needing to be a happy one. Our next comment is from Brandy, who says: the end of Serenity, where Summer Glau is checking everyone and stimming. Then her brother is badly hurt and you see that mental click and all the worry that she's going to hurt the one she cares about shifts to a feral “I will make this stop” and it's both feral and beautiful. When they break in, she's got this look like, yeah, test me. But she's perfectly willing to continue laying waste. It's just moving. Honestly having thought about it, go watch Hellsing Ultimate Abridged on YouTube. It's like a quarterly watch at my house, along a lot of true crime right now because my partner is trying to find an appropriately gruesome way to get rid of a character. I have to admit I've never actually seen Serenity or Hellsing myself, so maybe I'll put that on the to watch list. Our next comment is from John who says: Casablanca. Walking off at the end saying “this is beginning of a beautiful friendship.” Becca says V for Vendetta for me, I think. The ending scenes link key scenes, people, and phrases from earlier, then shows everyone from earlier, even those who died, and how they are linked to the change (with the voiceover). Our next comment is from Jenny, who says: no loose ends, no open to interpretation BS. Our next comment is from David who says: Son of Godzilla. When he goes back to his son in the snow-powerful. Scott says: The Mist. What a twist! Juana says: The Wrath of Khan. Fred says: Alien: Covenant. I think it's interesting that a couple of different people both said that Casablanca and Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan have very satisfying endings (I'm going to assume you've seen both those movies, so for next minute, actually next two minutes, if you haven't seen those movies, skip ahead If you want to avoid spoilers) because neither one of those movies has what would traditionally be called a happy ending. At the end of Casablanca, Rick doesn't get the girl, and at the end of Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan, Spock dies, saving the Enterprise. Of course, there's a level of happiness to the ending because Spock dies, but he dies saving the entire Enterprise crew from being destroyed by the Genesis device. And in Casablanca, Rick doesn't get the girl, but she goes off with her husband and escapes. The Nazis continue fighting, and Rick and Renault, the police inspector join forces to be in the Resistance to the Nazis in Casablanca, which in a sense is also a happy ending. So I think that reinforces yet again, that if you are writing something, you need to have an ending that emotionally satisfactorily resolves the conflicts in the of the story that were raised in the story itself. It doesn't have to be a happy ending, but does need to be a satisfying ending. And I think I think it's very fair to say that both Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan and Casablanca have satisfying endings. Also, as Jenny said, you probably want to avoid loose ends and open to interpretation endings, because they really do seem to irritate people. 00:05:44 Main Topic: Seven Important Attitude Shifts for Writers Now on to our main topic this week: seven important attitude shifts for writers. I decided to talk about this today because actually this I'm recording this on June the 28th and yesterday was the first presidential debate of the 2024 campaign season and without, you know, going into too much detail on that, you see a lot of reactions from people that are very gloom and doom and the country is doomed and the civilization is going to fall and so forth, which overlooks the fact that none of us know what is going to happen tomorrow and might be good or bad or maybe a little bit of both. That got me to thinking about how much of life is essentially mindset. Very often, regardless of one's circumstances, happiness and contentment can be a choice, even in very extreme and extenuating circumstances, and it can be a choice that you reject if you're doing quite well. Like in the book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible, the writer of the book talks about how a grievous evil he has seen under the sun is that there's a man with riches and palaces and food, and yet he's unable to enjoy any of them or derive any happiness for them, because he was not making the choice to, you know, appreciate the good things he had. He did not, in essence, have the mindset to appreciate the good things he had in his life. I've noticed this is very common for writers, probably because writing is such an intellectual activity that takes place significantly inside of one's own head, even before you start putting down words on the page. It's very easy to be your own worst enemy as a writer and develop beliefs that limit your ability to be effective or successful. I remember a long time ago when I was in college, I knew a couple of different people who said they didn't want to try very hard at things because one of them said the world was so evil that she thought the world was going to come to an end by before she was 30 and another one said that due to climate change and pollution, the world was going to come to an end before she was 30 as well. Well, I was the same age as them and I have not been 30 years old for a significant span of time. They were both wrong. The world has continued on for good and bad, for the significant span of time since we all would have been 30 years old. That is a good example of a mindset being self-defeating and not being in accordance with reality and essentially limiting what you can do because after all, if the world is going to end when you are 30 years old, there's no point in trying in your 20s and then suddenly you are hitting the mid-40s and upper 50s and like, hey, the world didn't end 20 years ago. So with that in mind, here are seven self-destructive attitudes I think both new and more advanced writers should train themselves out of. #1: the first destructive attitude: I should just sign up for one of those publishing services for writers because I don't have the time to figure all this stuff out. That is both a bad attitude and a very bad idea in general, because many of these services are predatory and don't offer very much for the large amount of money they're charging. It's better to pay in time than money when it comes to self-publishing. There are a lot of free resources online to help you learn to self-publish. Good ones include David Gaughran's newsletter that he gives that away for free. He has several free e-books on self-publishing. Bryan Cohen has what he calls his quarterly 5 Day Amazon Ads Profit Challenge. That is a very good way to start learning the intricacies of Amazon ads. Joanna Penn has a wide variety of free YouTube videos on the process of getting started with self-publishing and I think she has a free ebook on the topic as well. So there are all these free resources that you can use to just commit the time to learning the beginnings of self-publishing and not fork over thousands of dollars to do something. I mean granted in life, there are areas where it is probably better to hire experts. For example, I recently had to have a large tree taken down near my house because it was diseased and the bark was falling off. It was rotten and I was worried that it was going to fall on the house. Theoretically, I could have broken out my electric chainsaw and done it myself, but that would have been a very bad idea. It was better to hire experts who know what they're doing to do it safely to bring the tree down. However, self-publishing is not a giant tree that might fall on your house. It is relatively easy to learn the basics and to do so without paying money and you avoid predatory self-publishing companies as you do because you have to be licensed to run a tree removal company, at least in this state. You do not have to be licensed to buy a website and call yourself a self-publishing expert. So for all those reasons, I think this attitude is a destructive and harmful one, and it would be better for you to learn at least the fundamentals of self-publishing before you pay anyone for it. #2: Our second destructive attitude is: I should focus on building sales and a following for my first book before I bother starting the next one. I think this is a self-destructive attitude because it's what I call the decorating the bathroom before you've done dug the foundation of the house problem. If you want to have a writing career, or if you want to be a writer, actually doing writing needs to be the foundation of that. But writers tend to procrastinate and channel themselves into sort of writing adjacent activities, like working about their work on their website, or trying to build social media followers or building their newsletter or the other kind of things that can be important and useful for selling books but are nonetheless less important than actually writing the next book. I say that's like worrying about how your bathroom will be decorated before you've even dug the foundation of your house. You should really dig the foundation of the house, build that house, and then worry how the bathroom is going to be decorated before you start worrying about that. It's also very rare for a writer of any genre to have massive success on a first book. Everyone thinks about these debut novelists who released their first books and were big hits. However, if you look at the overall population of writers, these people are vanishingly rare in terms of percentages, like lottery winners. They just got lucky and found an agent who believed in the book, who passed it on to an editor who believed in the book, and the publisher believed in the book and decided to put a big marketing push behind it. That was enough to turn the book into a hit. This can happen to you, but it's about as likely as going to the gas station, buying a lottery ticket, and becoming a billionaire. It's probably not going to happen, and you're better off putting in the work yourself. So with all that in mind, if you're worried about the sales of your first book rather than getting your energies too diverted on the various writing adjacent tasks like newsletters and social media and websites and so forth, perhaps writing the next book might be a better use of your time. #3: The third self-destructive attitude we're going to talk about is “Ads and marketing aren't for me.  My book should stand on its own merits.” I recently heard of someone who attended a training session about ads where one of the other attendees refused to do any ads for their book but were frustrated that their sales had stalled. The person in question simply did not see the causal connection between these two events. It's a very cruel and very real fact that plenty of great books are never read because people never find them. It's important not to view ads as something dirty or shifty or uncouth. If you feel that way, you're probably doing them wrong. Ads are just a simple way to connect people with books that they're excited to read. It's as simple as that. You want to use ads as a tool where you will find the right reader for your specific book. It is intimidating to learn how ads work. I'd say Facebook is the most complicated and Amazon is the least complicated, but that's just matters of degree because they're both pretty complicated. There are free programs like Bryan Cohen's Author Ad Challenge for learning how Amazon ads work for writers, and this includes forums for asking questions and getting more help. As with just learning the basics of self-publishing, there are a lot of free resources and good resources out there that you can use to give yourself at least a basic competency with ads. That would be very helpful for your writing career. #4: Our 4th self-destructive attitude: It's a waste to spend money on ads. This can be true, with the caveat it's a waste to spend money on ads if you don't know what you're doing. It is very easy to aimlessly spend large amounts of money on Facebook and Bookbub ads. While it's much harder to aimlessly spend money on Amazon ads, you can do it. Taking the time to learn how these ads work and then starting out slowly and gradually building up the budgets is crucial to not wasting money. Amazon, Facebook, and BookBub's daily limits make it easy to budget how much you are spending on ads. Another reason people often think it's a waste to spend money on ads is because their targeting is way too broad. Like you hear about people saying Facebook ads don't work, and then you dig into their story a bit more and it turns out they set their category to “books” and that's it. They're just targeting everyone who liked books. That is indeed a waste of money, because with advertising in general and book marketing in particular, the more specific you can get your targeting down, the better you will do. This is most easily demonstrated in romance, where it's common for romance readers describe books as like, you know, a slow burn, enemies to lovers, sweet romance with a happily ever after ending. Which is like four different story tropes, but that's very commonly how romance authors talk about books. So if you wrote a book like that, you can dial down the advertising enough to target people who are just interested in that kind of book through comp authors or interests, then your ads have a much higher chance of being successful, so bear that in mind. It's only a waste to spend money on ads if you don't know what you're doing, and if your targeting isn't right. #5: The 5th destructive attitude is: if that my book wasn't successful right away, I'm a failure as a writer. No one ever does anything right the first time and you should beat yourself up over it. Additionally, many books do well after a re-edit, title change, or cover change. It's possible your book just needs one of those. I mean, I've written 150 novels and I still have that kind of thing.  I originally called my LitRPG series Sevenfold Sword Online, but that confused people with because they thought it was attached to the Sevenfold Sword series. Earlier this year I retitled it to Stealth and Spells Online, and it's done quite a bit better since that title change. The reality is that most first books don't sell well. It doesn't mean that you should give up. The solution is to keep writing. Keep reading books in your genre and keep learning what readers want to read. It's important to keep experimenting and keep trying new things. I'm currently reading a history of the Dune series as a franchise. Based on Frank Herbert's earlier career, you would not predict that he would have written one of the classics of sci-fi literature. In fact, what he was originally writing about that turned into Dune was a nonfiction article about how the state of Oregon was trying to control the sand dunes in the eastern part of the state and keep them from overrunning other lands. That was what Dune originally was, a nonfiction article about sand dune management and then he wasn't able to sell that article. He rewrote it into a fictional short story and it gradually turned into Dune. There's a joke that every overnight success takes 10 to 20 years to prepare, and it definitely seems to have been true in Frank Herbert's case. If you keep on writing, perhaps that will be true of you as well. #6: Self-destructive attitude number six: it's not worth self-publishing because people won't respect my book unless it's traditionally published. I always love this one because the prestige of being traditionally published is great. But do you know what prestige doesn't do? Pay bills! Would you rather have the prestige or the money and full control of your works? Like earlier this episode, I mentioned that I had to pay some people to bring a tree down in my yard. Can you imagine walking up to a bunch of guys and with chainsaws and telling them, hey, I'm going to pay with the prestige of being traditionally published, but not actual money? That would not work out very well. I have in fact been traditionally published a very long time ago and let me tell you, the money of self-publishing is so much better than the prestige of being traditionally published. Full control of your work and money, in my opinion, is much better than prestige. Additionally, if you do get the prestige of traditional publishing, you are paying for it quite a bit. Traditional publishing has been providing their authors with increasingly less editing, marketing, and creative control and are prone to giving you increasingly restrictive contracts in return. Royalties may take a very long time to arrive and more realistically, never arrive at all as many books don't pay out past their initial advance. Traditionally published authors are taking on an increasing amount of the workload of marketing and find that their books are often filled with typos because less attention and staffing are being provided to the editorial departments. Prestige is really the main thing that traditional publishing is still offering, and there's also the problem that that many people in traditional publishing are unethical. I mean obviously self-publishing has its fair share of scammers as well, but remember, traditional publishing is supposed to have prestige. Prestige doesn't keep out the scammers. Recently there was a meltdown on Twitter where a literary agent posted that she just read a great book and she liked the idea but she didn't like the author and so she thought about giving the idea of the book to another one of her authors to write for her. I suspect she was saying that jokingly, but it didn't come across that way and so all of literary Twitter fell upon her head. She followed the predictable course of deleting all her social media accounts and then getting fired from the agency from which she worked. If you talk to experienced traditional published writers off the record, very often they will admit that literary agents are often very sketchy people. So if you are self-published, one of the big advantages is that you don't have to deal with that. #7: The seventh and final most self-destructive attitude: I need to quit my day job to be a real writer. The answer to that is no, you don't. Just a few examples of authors who kept their day jobs: Franz Kafka worked in an insurance company, Anthony Trollope was a postal clerk who wrote for 2 hours in the morning every day before he went to work, and Toni Morrison was an editor. I don't think anyone in their right mind would claim that Franz Kafka, Anthony Trollope, and Toni Morrison were not real writers. Real writers usually still have a full-time job. The reality is that very few writers earn an income on their own larger than a salary and work benefits would be or if they do, they're not able to sustain that level of income over the span of their career. In an Author's Guild survey from a few years ago, even full-time authors were reporting a median yearly income of $20,300. There's nothing wrong with not being a full-time writer and nothing wrong with just doing writing as a side hustle that you enjoy. Now you might think this is hypocritical. Jonathan Moeller, you yourself are a full-time writer and have been for the last eight years. For my part, I didn't actually want to become a full-time writer at first. I found that I was obliged to do so because I needed to move for family reasons. It did work out in my case. And to be fair to myself, I have definitely hustled doing that. I mean, in the last eight years I've written like 80 new novels and at least half a dozen complete series in that time. Most days I am writing from about 7:30 in the morning to 5:00 in the afternoon with breaks for lunch and exercise and so forth. Then there's all the business stuff on the side and then audiobooks as well. So you can be a full time writer, but it is definitely a lot of work, which is what I've been doing for the last eight years. By no means should you consider yourself not to be a real writer if you also have a full-time job. If I had not been obliged to move for family circumstances, I probably would have kept my full-time job until my employer ran out of money (which would have been a real possibility a few years ago). So there we are, seven self-destructive attitudes that I think writers would do well to remove from their minds. So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A quick note of thanks to my transcriptionist for helping me to research and pull together a list for this episode. A reminder that you that you can listen to all the back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

Welcome back to Alchemy for Authors! In this week's episode I interview award-winning podcaster, creative entrepreneur, and bestselling author, Joanna Penn, about her wonderful new book, Writing the Shadow: Turn Your Inner Darkness into Words. Joanna gives advice on how to recognize your Shadow Self and how we can use it to not only become better writers, but also better people. We discuss why AI is no competition for you showing up and being vulnerable on the page, what it's like to be an intuitive discovery writer, and why there's nothing wrong with binge writing. We also discuss the role of synchronicity in writing a book, and why planning your author career is often about lifestyle design. If you're ready to delve into the dark, confront your shadows, and are willing to use your vulnerability to really connect with your readers, then it's time to let your dark horse run. Grab a drink, find a comfy chair, sit back and enjoy the show! Visit Joanna's Creative Penn website here: https://www.thecreativepenn.com/ Listen to The Creative Penn podcast here or on your favourite podcast app. Visit Joanna's J. F. Penn website here: https://jfpenn.com/ Grab your copy of Writing the Shadow: Turn Your Inner Darkness into Words here: https://creativepennbooks.com/ Support Joanna's Spear of Destiny Kickstarter here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/thecreativepenn/spear-of-destiny-an-action-adventure-thriller-novel Follow Joanna on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/TheCreativePenn Follow Joanna on Instagram at: https://www.instagram.com/jfpennauthor/ Other resources mentioned in this episode: Tim Ferris – The 4 Hour Workweek Becca Symes – Dear Writer, Are You Intuitive? Listen to Episode 20: Intuition and Success for Authors with Becca Syme here. Join Lee Savino and Renee Rose's Money Magic Membership here and enjoy the first month for FREE: https://www.moneymagicmembership.com/a/2147619110/FFtoFakC and use the coupon code JO on checkout. (Please note: I am a member and an affiliate myself and I may receive a small commission if you decide to stay on past the month trial. This commission helps support the show.) If you enjoyed this episode please subscribe, rate and review. You can also support the show by buying me a coffee at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/jobuer. Your support helps me keep this podcast going and is greatly appreciated. If you have a question you would like answered on the show, or a topic suggestion for a future episode, leave a voice message here: https://www.speakpipe.com/AlchemyForAuthors Follow me on Instagram: @alchemyforauthors and @jobuerauthor. Join my Alchemy for Authors newsletter and download your FREE copy of Manifestation for Authors here.  If you enjoy Gothic Suspense, you can join my reader's newsletter and download a FREE copy of my short story collection, Between the Shadows, here. You can find all my books at https://jobuer.com or visit https://Books2Read.com/JoBuer for links to your favourite store. Visit my website for the full transcript of this episode: https://jobuer.com/alchemy-for-authors/

What does independence mean for authors in terms of creative and publishing choices? Why is interdependence so important, and how can we be stronger together? Orna Ross and Joanna Penn discuss their ideas. Find more author advice, tips, and tools at our self-publishing advice center. And, if you haven't already, we invite you to join our organization and become a self-publishing ally. Now, go write and publish! About the Hosts 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 launched the Alliance of Independent Authors at the London Book Fair in 2012. Her work for ALLi has seen her named as one of The Bookseller's “100 top people in publishing”. She also publishes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction and is greatly excited by the democratizing, empowering potential of author-publishing. For more information about Orna, visit her website.  

Joanna Penn on what it's like to be stuck, and how to get yourself out. Rachael's Kickstarter, Unstuck: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rachaelherron/unstuck-an-audacious-hunt-for-home-and-happinessJoanna Penn is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of thrillers writing under the name J.F. Penn. She also writes inspirational non-fiction for authors and is an award-winning creative entrepreneur and international professional speaker. Find her here: https://www.thecreativepenn.com/resources-new/Ink In Your Veins: How Writers Actually Write (and how you can, too)Writing doesn't have to be so hard. With internationally bestselling author Rachael Herron, learn how to embrace ease, reject perfectionism, and finally create your perfect writing process. (Formerly known as How Do You Write) Come for inspiration, stay for lots more.✏️ Can I email you some writing help? http://rachaelherron.com/write

Episode Show Notes In this episode we cover:  The structure of a good pitch Finding the right podcasts to pitch to What authors should be prepared to speak about Benefits of a podcast tour when launching a book Interview tips and tricks Find out more about Michelle: MichelleGlogovac.com Facebook Instagram Twitter Rebel of the Week is: Delilah  If you'd like to be a Rebel of the week please do send in your story, it can be any kind of rebellion. You can email your rebel story to rebelauthorpodcast@gmail.com 3 new patrons this week, welcome and thank you to Joanna Penn, Jennifer Shelby, and Sheena Ager. A big thank you to my existing patrons. If you'd like to support the show, and get early access to all the episodes as well as bonus content you can from as little as $2 a month by visiting: www.patreon.com/sachablack  This Show is Sponsored by ProWritingAid Rebel Discount link Twitter, Facebook, Instagram

There are many options for book marketing, so how do you choose the right ones for you? I give my thoughts on the different polarities on the marketing scale to help you figure out what might work for your book, your stage on the author journey, and your lifestyle. In the intro, Storybundle for writers; […] The post Different Ways To Market Your Book With Joanna Penn first appeared on The Creative Penn.

SPECIAL GUEST STAR! Joanna Penn joins Sacha Black and Rachael for a friends' chat about publishing, Kickstarter fun, and how to find community while maintaining boundaries. Ink In Your Veins: How Writers Actually Write (and how you can, too)Writing doesn't have to be so hard. With internationally bestselling author Rachael Herron, learn how to embrace ease, reject perfectionism, and finally create your perfect writing process. (Formerly known as How Do You Write) Come for inspiration, stay for lots more.✏️ Can I email you some writing help? http://rachaelherron.com/write

Boy, do I have a treat for you guys! Along with my celebrity co-host Jodi Burnett,  my extra special guest on the show today is none other than Award-Winning, Bestselling Author, Entrepreneur, and Award-Winning Podcaster Joanna Penn!!!!Joanna Penn writes non-fiction for authors and is an award-nominated, New York Times and USA Today bestselling thriller, dark fantasy, crime, and horror author as J.F. Penn. She's also an award-winning podcaster as the host of the Creative Penn Podcast that, according to Listen Notes, is in the top 0.5% of three million of all global podcasts. She is also a creative entrepreneur and a highly sought after international professional speaker.In today's episode we discuss:·      Trigger warnings and the implications of using them.·      Her newest book, “Writing The Shadow: Turn Your Inner Darkness into Words.”·      The moment in time Joanna Penn quit her day job and took the plunge into being a full-time author entrepreneur. ·      Lessons learned from Joanna's business accomplishments and missteps. ·      Keeping up with and benefiting from artificial intelligence and other fast-paced technology. ·      Keeping her business as fresh and fun as when she first started.·      Giving away the farm. When is it appropriate and effective?·      The impact and value of podcasting. Setting realistic goals and expectations.·      Joanna's favorite book she has written.Please visit Joanna Penn's website to learn more about her and her books!Please visit Jodi Burnett at her website to learn more about her and her books.Check out Field Training (Brew City Blues Book 1)!!Enjoy the Cops and Writers book series.Please visit the Cops and Writers website. Only for Cops and Writers Podcast listeners! Get 50% off the audiobook version of the F.B.I. K-9 thriller, Avenging Adam by Jodi Burnett. Use code, https://jodi-burnett.com/copsandwriters/Support the show

How can you create more beautiful print books — and make more money with your products by selling direct? Alex Smith explains how BookVault can help with various options as well as helpful resources. In the intro, audiobooks and AI [Frankfurt Bookmesse]; Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, and Virtual Worlds by Joanna Penn; Google's woke AI Gemini […] The post How To Create Beautiful Print Books And Sell Direct With Alex Smith From Bookvault first appeared on The Creative Penn.

In the spotlight is Joanna Penn, who teaches how to write, publish and market your book — and make a living with your writing. She is an award-nominated, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author more than 35 books published and almost 1 million sold across 169 countries in five languages. She is also a podcaster, international speaker, and entrepreneur. But it hasn't always been this way for Joanna Penn. She was an IT consultant for 13 years for large corporations in Europe and Asia. Though well employed, she was determined to become a full-time novelist — and accomplished that feat in September 2011. In February 2011, she published her first thriller novel “Pentecost,” later republished as “Stone of Fire.” There are now 11 books in the ARKANE action-adventure thriller series, described by readers as “Dan Brown meets Lara Croft.” We discuss: >> Why she writes fiction under the name J.F. Penn >> Why she writes nonfiction under Joanna Penn >> The use of generative AI >> Selling books through an author's Shopify store >> The Creative Penn podcast >> Traveling for research >> Her theological studies >> Etc. Learn more about Joanna Penn here: https://www.thecreativepenn.com Novelist Spotlight is produced and hosted by Mike Consol, author of “Lolita Firestone: A Supernatural Novel,” “Family Recipes: A Novel About Italian Culture, Catholic Guilt and the Culinary Crime of the Century” and “Hardwood: A Novel About College Basketball and Other Games Young Men Play.” Buy them on any major bookselling site. Write to Mike Consol at novelistspotlight@gmail.com. We hope you will subscribe and share the link with any family, friends or colleagues who might benefit from this program. 

What's hiding in your shadow self, and how can you use it to improve your writing?Today's conversation with Joanna Penn is a brilliant look at what it takes to unearth the raw essence of author creativity. Joanna Penn writes non-fiction 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. www.TheCreativePenn.com In this interview, we talk about her book "Writing the Shadow" while reflecting on our own personal strides in writing and business - from transitioning from the corporate world to the arts, tackling email conundrums, and developing a growth mindset.Follow Us! Joanna PennWebsite: http://www.thecreativepenn.com Podcast: The Creative PennBooks: https://creativepennbooks.comInstagram: @jfpennauthor The Author Wheel:Website: www.AuthorWheel.comFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/AuthorWheelGreta Boris:Website: www.GretaBoris.comFacebook: @GretaBorisAuthorInstagram: @GretaBorisMegan Haskell:Website: www.MeganHaskell.comFacebook & Instagram: @MeganHaskellAuthorTikTok: @AuthorMeganHaskellClarify | Simplify | Implement Newsletterhttps://meganhaskellauthor.substack.com/The Writing Romance Mastery SummitThere's still time to register and learn from some of the best authors and coaches in the writing industry. The summit takes place from February 19, 2024 through February 23, 2024, and we promise it'll be a top-notch event. We're proud to be included in this year's lineup of guests, talking about how to decide if you should self-publish or get an agent. By clicking this link, we may earn a commission from your purchase, at no additional cost to you. Support the showFREE Mini Email CourseHave you ever struggled to explain to others exactly what you write? Or wondered which of the many fiction ideas running through your brain you should tackle? If so, The Author Wheel's new mini-course might be your solution. 7 Days to Clarity: Uncover Your Author Purpose will help you uncover your core writing motivations, avoid shiny-thing syndrome, and create clear marketing language. Each daily email will lead you step by step in defining your author brand, crafting a mission statement, and distilling that statement into a pithy tagline. And, best of all, it's free. Click here to learn more!

As we move into another year, Orna Ross and Joanna Penn discuss how they plan for the year ahead and some of the most important trends for indie authors, including the continued rise of direct sales, the impact of generative AI, and more. Find more author advice, tips, and tools at our self-publishing advice center. And, if you haven't already, we invite you to join our organization and become a self-publishing ally. Now, go write and publish! About the Hosts 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 launched the Alliance of Independent Authors at the London Book Fair in 2012. Her work for ALLi has seen her named as one of The Bookseller's “100 top people in publishing”. She also publishes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction and is greatly excited by the democratizing, empowering potential of author-publishing. For more information about Orna, visit her website.

Happy New Year 2024! I love January and the opportunity to start afresh. I know it's arbitrary in some ways, but I measure my life by what I create, and I measure it in years. At the end of each year, I make a photobook, and I publish an article here, which helps keep me […] The post My 2024 Creative And Business Goals With Joanna Penn [Updated] 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 you're welcome to leave a comment below about how the year went. Did you achieve everything you wanted to? Let me know in the comments. In the intro, 2023 […] The post Review Of My 2023 Creative And Business Goals With Joanna Penn first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Mega-bestselling author Joanna Penn, whose 40 books span several genres, has now written a memoir after making three separate solo pilgrimage walks. The walks and this new book, Pilgrimage: Lessons Learned from Solo Walking Three Ancient Ways, allowed her to define for herself her personal definition of being a seeker. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the bookThe Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life. Read it, and begin your own journey to writing what you know. To learn more, join The Memoir Project free newsletter list and keep up to date on all our free webinars and instructive posts and online classes, as well as our talented, available memoir editors and memoir coaches, podcast guests and more.

In this episode, I reflect on 15 years of TheCreative Penn, and outline how I will reposition myself for the next 15 years of being an author entrepreneur. In the intro, We used to do that [Seth Godin]; Penguin Random House has acquired Hay House [Publishing Perspectives]; Business for Authors; Your Author Business Plan; OpenAI […] The post The 15-Year Author Business Pivot With Joanna Penn first appeared on The Creative Penn.

So it's December 1st, and NaNoWriMo is over. And everywhere around you, fellow author friends are posting on social media that they made it, they did it. They wrote 50,000 words in a single month. You're happy for them, of course. But you didn't quite make it to that 50,000 word goal yourself. So what do you do? Do you hang your head in shame and despair? I say: NO. I might be one of those "the page is half full" kind of writers, but if you're in the same boat as me, as an author who didn't complete the 30-day 50K word challenge, let me take over the paddle for a while and share a different spin.   Prior to the main content of this solo episode, Mark shares a brief personal update (explaining why there's another solo episode) and a word from this episode's sponsor. There are plenty of books and tips on writing faster, learning more marketing tactics and strategies, trying to maximize your ranking, hitting the top of the charts, judging the algorithms, and hacking different ad platforms. But not enough guides to help you take the pressure off your art and enjoy the creative journey. Return to the love that brought you to writing in the first place. Check out The Relaxed Author in audio, print, or eBook format.   Links of Interest: EP 212 - A Conversation with Joanna Penn on Co-Authoring The Relaxed Author Mark's YouTube Channel Buy Mark a Coffee Patreon for Stark Reflections Best Book Ever Podcast Lovers Moon Podcast The Relaxed Author Buy eBook Direct Buy Audiobook Direct Publishing Pitfalls for Authors An Author's Guide to Working with Libraries & Bookstores Wide for the Win Mark's Canadian Werewolf Books This Time Around (Short Story) A Canadian Werewolf in New York Stowe Away (Novella) Fear and Longing in Los Angeles Fright Nights, Big City Lover's Moon Hex and the City The Canadian Mounted: A Trivia Guide to Planes, Trains and Automobiles Yippee Ki-Yay Motherf*cker: A Trivia Guide to Die Hard   The introductory, end, and bumper music for this podcast (“Laser Groove”) was composed and produced by Kevin MacLeod of www.incompetech.com and is Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

Today's show is a special bonus episode of me being interviewed on the Creative Penn Podcast with the most excellent host, Joanna Penn! Joanna and I talk about writing realistic police stories, starting a second career as an author, networking, and the dangers of writing about real-life trauma. Please enjoy my chat with Joanna Penn.In today's episode, we discuss:·      Becoming a writer after a significant first career·      Dos and don'ts of finding a mentor·      Being of service and volunteering with purpose·      Knowing when an author relationship clicks·      Writing entertainment vs. writing for therapy·      Managing different energies in an author conferenceCheck out Joanna's website!Check out Field Training (Brew City Blues Book 1)!!Enjoy the Cops and Writers book series.Please visit the Cops and Writers website.  Do you enjoy gritty, action-packed real-life police dramas to get your fill of blood, heartache, and cop humor, and maybe even a little romance?I have partnered up with Michael Anderle and we have released a new crime fiction series called “Brew City Blues.” If you're a fan of Hill Street Blues, Southland, or Bosch you're going to love Brew City Blues! Brew City Blues is now live! https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0BLR7FX27Support the show

How can you let your creative dark horse run? What is the Shadow — and why explore your Shadow side? This episode features excerpted chapters from the audiobook of Writing the Shadow: Turn Your Inner Darkness Into Words, written and narrated by Joanna Penn, available on Kickstarter until 25 October 2023: www.TheCreativePenn.com/shadowbook (link will redirect […] The post Let Your Dark Horse Run. Writing The Shadow With Joanna Penn first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Self-publishing veteran Joanna Penn talks about her new non-fiction book “Writing the Shadow” and where her writing career will go from here.

A really exciting episode today! Joanna Penn and I talk about her NEW writing book about The Shadow, something she's a veritable expert in. This is for you if you want to go deep with your writing (and yourself). Joanna Penn writes non-fiction 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. Writing the Shadow is her next non-fiction for authors. Find it at http://TheCreativePenn.com/shadowbookHow Do You Write Podcast: Explore the processes of working writers with bestselling author Rachael Herron. Want tips on how to write the book you long to finish? Here you'll gain insight from other writers on how to get in the chair, tricks to stay in it, and inspiration to get your own words flowing. ✏️ Can I email you some writing help? http://rachaelherron.com/write

"Most authors sell most of their books on Amazon, and while Amazon has helped indie authors become publishers, they take a large bite of your profits.But there is a way to earn more money on each book sale and connect with your readers via email. You can sell direct from your website.If you've listened to Novel Marketing for a long time, you know I haven't been a fan of authors selling direct from their websites because it was expensive, required technical sophistication, and tended to be a time-suck.But in the last decade, the cost of selling directly online has decreased. Selling direct now makes sense for many authors, and in this week's episode, we talk about it with Joanna Penn.Joanna tells us:how buyer behavior has changedwhich web store tools work best for certain authorshow all book formats can be easily delivered to readershow to create beautiful editionsWith the explosion of AI and a slew of paperbacks and ebooks for sale online, this episode will teach you how to make your book stand out and earn more money per sale at the same time."Click here to read the blog version.

Four years ago, in July 2019, I put out a podcast episode that went through the 9 disruptions I saw coming for authors and publishing in the next decade. It turns out that most are happening faster than even I expected. In this episode, Nick Thacker and I discuss some of the main points. In […] The post 9 Ways That Artificial Intelligence (AI) Will Disrupt Authors And The Publishing Industry. An Update With Joanna Penn And Nick Thacker first appeared on The Creative Penn.