In the intro, Does social media still sell books? [Self-Publishing with ALLi]; Trial by algorithm [The Bookseller]; Publishing’s AI Hypocrisy Problem [The New Publishing Standard]; ALLi AI survey for authors; Brave New Bookshelf Podcast, and Pics from signing at BookVault.

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Austin Kleon is the New York Times and international bestselling author of nonfiction books, including Steal Like an Artist, Show Your Work!, and Keep Going, as well as an artist, professional speaker, and poet. His latest book is Don't Call It Art: 10 Ways to Create Like a Kid Again.

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

Show Notes

• Why Austin wrote Don't Call It Art now, and what his kids taught him about creative joy
• Productive procrastination, silly rituals, and treating writing like Lego
• Comedy as a philosophical position, and giving yourself permission to be bad in private
• Sharing process in the algorithm era, and why your whole life is the process
• Bibliomancy, paper reference books, and what AI can't give you that a dictionary can
• Style, the Taco Bell distinctiveness rule, and how Austin's newsletter became his day job

You can find Austin at AustinKleon.com.

Transcript of the interview with Austin Kleon

Jo: Austin Kleon is the New York Times and international bestselling author of nonfiction books, including Steal Like an Artist, Show Your Work!, and Keep Going, as well as an artist, professional speaker, and poet. His latest book is Don't Call It Art: 10 Ways to Create Like a Kid Again. So welcome back to the show, Austin.

Austin: Thank you for having me back. It's nice to talk to you again.

Jo: You were on the show in March 2020, and at the time, your book was Keep Going, which was prescient considering the pandemic and politics. So I wondered, why this book, Don't Call It Art, now?

Was this something you see in the creative community or your own life that made you want to write this book?

Austin: Keep Going is a book about what happens when the world goes crazy around you and you're still trying to do your creative work. This is a book about what happens when inside has bottomed out.

Keep Going is a book about the world bottoming out, and you're worried that your own creative work is going to bottom out too. How do you keep pushing through and keep making stuff?

This book, to me, is about what happens when you bottom out inside—when you've lost that love and feeling for the thing that you wanted to do, and you're just not connecting with it in the way that you used to or the way that you want to.

How do you get back? How do you return to that sense of joy and wonder and fun that we have when we're starting out? And for me, it was being around my little kids that taught me how to tap into that.

My kids were natural—they didn't have any creative hangups. I would spend all day talking to people who had creative hangups, and then I'd get back in the house, and I'd just be around these beings who didn't have any of them.

It was really instructive. I felt like, if I could bottle the energy of my kids when they were about four years old and try to put it in a book, I think it could really help a lot of the people that I run into, and the people with the kinds of problems I hear from.

Jo: You mentioned bottoming out. How do people know when they've hit that point?

Austin: You just don't want to do it anymore. You're kind of like, “This just isn't giving me back what it used to.”

When we start with our creative work, that's the thing that juices us. We come away from it feeling full up. I think you hit a certain point where you start to feel drained after it. Or maybe you don't feel drained by the thing itself that you're doing—maybe it's all the stuff around it, which is more often the case.

For example, if you're a mid-career writer like me, who's been publishing books for 16 years now, I still really like writing. I still really like drawing. I still really like cutting and pasting and putting things together.

It's the admin around the work—the emails, the meetings, the running-a-business part of it—that's super draining for me, and that stuff can start to bleed over into the creative work.

So it's really important for me to make sure that I'm having some playtime, some R&D, some research and development time, to make sure it's not just all business. When you take the thing that you love and you turn it into the thing that you make a living from, you can really run into a lot of problems.

Jo: I'm at 20 years, so I know exactly what you're saying, and a lot of listeners are the same. We love writing books, but it's all the stuff that goes around it.

So for those of us who do this for money as well as passion, what are some practical ways to have more fun with our creativity?

Austin: Something I learned from my kids is that you really are your most creative when you're supposed to be doing something else. So one of the things I use a lot in the studio is productive procrastination. Whatever I'm supposed to be working on, I start another little project, and that's my little naughty fun time.

When I first come into the studio, I try to do something that I'm not supposed to be doing—something that I won't have much to show for. That could be making one of my blackout poems. That could be making a collage in my notebook. It could also be sitting here.

I have a bass in the studio now, so I can practise my bass guitar. Sometimes I'll do that for the first 15 minutes just to get in that headspace of, “Hey, what's it like to do something just for yourself? Just because you want to do it?”

The juice that you get from that little naughty “I'm going to do what I'm not supposed to be doing right now” thing, that carries into the rest of the day. It's like a nice start to things.

Jo: Do you think that play could be something different to what we make our money with?

For me, writing novels and stories is great fun in one way, but it's also what I then publish and make money on. So writing stories is more serious, I guess, than playing with Lego or something.

Austin: Right. So the trick is, how can you make writing your stories like playing with Lego? That's kind of been my whole career. I hate staring at Microsoft Word and that blinking cursor, taunting you like, “Come on, what have you got?”

A lot of my creative life has been about trying to make it more playful, trying to make it feel more like a game. That's how I came up with my blackout poems. I take an article from The New York Times and I black it out until it only has a few words left behind.

It sort of looks like if the CIA did haiku, for some people listening. That was one little exercise.

Then weirdly, that side thing that I thought was just play, just fun—that turned into my first book. So then it's, okay, what else can I mess around with and play with?

I do a lot of collage work in the studio, and I rarely actually use that for any of the books. Sometimes I use it for my newsletter to illustrate the newsletter. But it's always about trying to figure out, how can I make writing a game? How can I make it more playful?

There are different things that I do to make it feel more playful. One of them's really stupid. I really believe in silly rituals because I think silliness is really powerful. People talk about their daily rituals—Mason Currey has that great book, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work.

When I was reading that book, I realised it was really the silly stuff that I really liked. There was, I think it was Balzac counting out coffee beans or something before he got to write. Or Steinbeck sharpening 12 pencils or something goofy like that.

So one of the things I like to do before I write is that I have these cigarette pencils. They're pencils that look like cigarettes in the studio. I put one in my mouth before I start writing, and I pretend to be some old '40s writer on a typewriter.

I like doing goofy stuff in the studio because I think when you do goofy stuff—stuff that you'd be embarrassed if anyone else saw it—it gets you in that playful state.

Jo: It's interesting. In your book, you have a section that says, “Don't take things too seriously.” For many of us, we write memoir for example, and that is very close to us. It's like the deepest expression of what we want to say in the world. It feels very serious.

So how can we hold things more lightly and not take things so seriously?

Austin: For me, comedy is actually a philosophical position. What I mean by that is, I think a lot of people set out with a tragic model of creative work.

They think, “Oh, I have this special gift,” or, “I have this thing that I really need to do, and I need to put it out into the world, and I need to make the world look more like I want it to look.”

They have this idea that, “Through blood and sweat and tears, I'm going to see this thing through, and I'm going to push it into the world, and I'm going to have my way.”

I think there's another way of working where it's more like, “I'm just a normal person trying to play with my environment, and take my experiences and put them into something interesting. So I'm going to play and use my wits, and we're going to see what we come up with.” Those really are two modes of life.

The pandemic taught me that it was really when we were keeping our sense of humour, when we were having a laugh and keeping our egos in check around the house and just acknowledging how goofy we all were and how ridiculous the situation was, that seemed to be when we were really thriving.

Versus, “Well, we're in this tough situation. We've got to make it into what we want it to be.” That felt really bad. But when we cruised along and we were just improvisational, when we went at things with a kind of lightness, that worked.

There's a great Italo Calvino essay about lightness in Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Lightness is really underrated. Even when we're going about heavy work, having a sense of lightness and play with it just makes the work better.

That's a philosophical position of mine. I aspire to comedy. I aspire to a comic outlook on life. I'm just a creature with a body who's going to die, and I'm fundamentally ridiculous. Life is pretty absurd. You just make the best of it.

Jo: There's certainly some truth there. Staying on a similar theme, you have a chapter in the book on permission to be bad.

Many of the listeners also have your book Show Your Work, and it shaped many of us into sharing our work in progress. It feels quite dangerous now, in a world where judgment is much louder than it maybe was when you wrote Show Your Work.

So tell us a bit about permission to be bad versus should we keep some of this private?

Austin: Permission to be bad is about the making part of things. It's the private part. It's permission to be bad when you're in private, when you're actually doing the work.

Show Your Work is a book about what you do after you've done the work, or while you're doing the work. It was never about putting up a webcam and running a 24/7 feed. It was more like, hey, what are the ways that I can connect with the kind of audience I can build while I'm making the work itself?

So the way I see permission to be bad is, you really have to give yourself permission when you're not sharing, when you're off screen, to really be as bad as you want to be. It doesn't necessarily mean quality-wise.

I think it also means letting yourself write stuff that you would never say on social media. Letting yourself read stuff that you wouldn't admit you were reading on social media. Letting yourself listen to stuff. Letting yourself really be that unfiltered, unhinged, private person that you want to be.

Then when it comes to sharing, you put some time in between that input time, that making time, and the sharing time, and then you share what you think is going to be useful or helpful or interesting to other people.

Jo: I think you wrote that book before TikTok, and how fast people are moving.

Do you think people need to slow down a bit in what they share, maybe?

Austin: I don't know. I obviously had a lot more faith in social media back then. I use all the principles from Show Your Work in my newsletter.

Newsletters are very much the new kind of great thing. They're doing a lot of the work that social media used to do, in that you're still able to have this direct connection with the people that you're trying to reach.

The big problem with social media now is that it's all algorithmically tuned, where the people that are following you don't see the stuff that you're doing most of the time.

What you have to do now, if you want the people who are following you to see your stuff on social media, is you have to make stuff that the algorithm likes. That's a whole different thing.

As far as the Show Your Work principle—which is share your process as much as your product—that carries over to any platform. In my newsletter every Friday, I share a list of 10 things that were going on behind the scenes here.

It might have been what I was watching on TV, what I listened to, a new pen I was trying out, or something like that. The Friday newsletter is almost always process stuff.

When I talk about process, my definition is actually very broad. For a lot of people, it's drafting, editing, whatever. For me, the process is the whole life. The process is almost everything except the finished thing.

A writer's life is 24/7. My friends who have real jobs really are like, “What do you do all day?” And I'm like, “Well, what do you mean?” They're like, “Well, I see you out on your bike ride.”

I'm like, “Yes, when you see me out on a bike ride, I'm thinking through something half the time.” If I'm watching TV, I'm thinking, “Hey, would this be good in the newsletter?”

I'm never off. My whole life—everything is copy, as Nora Ephron said. That's part of the job. It's very hard to turn off. So I see the whole life as process, and the question becomes, what little bits and pieces of that life and that process can you share with people while you're making the things that you hope to sell them later?

Right now, I'm in a cycle where I'm selling this book, but all these people have showed up because I've shared my process every week for the past seven years since I put out a book.

Jo: It's funny you say that. I was at the dentist yesterday, and—

My dentist literally asked me, “So where do you get all your ideas?”

This is a common question for all of us, right? And it just becomes so hard to explain that to people who don't walk around in the world just constantly getting ideas.

Austin: I can't believe I'm going to tell this story. I was getting my vasectomy after my second kid, and I was talking to this doctor just before the operation.

He said, “So what do you do for a living?” I said, “I'm a writer.” He said, “Oh, that must be cool. You get to use your brain.” And I said, “That's everything that you want your doctor to say.” I was going to say, “Please use your brain,” before he's about to cut into you.

He said, “Oh, no, no. What I mean is, I know what I'm going to do every day for the next 10 years.” He knew exactly what his day was going to look like. He said, “You have to use your brain. You've got to figure out new stuff.” I was like, “Oh, that's really interesting.”

That's the trade-off, right? He's got the job security. He knows what he's going to do. Every writer has a moment where they have to talk to a normal person about what you do.

Jo: I was going to say, I'm married to one.

Austin: Now, my wife, on the other hand, grew up the daughter of a writer, so she knows exactly what it's like. Nothing ever phases her. She's totally used to it.

She's used to me staring off into space, completely checking out of a conversation. She's used to me using lines on her that I'm going to put in a piece later. She's used to the whole rigmarole. It's very handy. I've been very lucky in that sense.

Jo: Coming back to the book, you talk about your use of bibliomancy for inspiration.

Since we're talking about that, tell us about it. I think all the book people listening will be happy.

Austin: I'm a person who still keeps a dictionary nearby—a paper dictionary. I keep a big old American Heritage. It's just a big, thick book.

When I really don't have any ideas, I will turn at random to the dictionary, close my eyes, stick my finger down the page, open my eyes, and just see what I come up with. Sometimes just that act will give me an idea.

I also do that with books. I'll go around the studio, pick up a book, flip to a random page, and just see what it says there, or read an old piece of marginalia that I've left in a book. I believe deeply in the power of bibliomancy, and I think it's a case for paper books.

I'm one of those people that still really believes in reference books. I've started collecting more and more of them. I have an old, big dictionary that's always open on my desk, and I look up words.

I learned from John McPhee, the writer, that you should look up words that you think you know. That was the first time I'd ever heard anyone say that. So I look up words that I think I know.

Instead of reaching for a thesaurus when I need a different word, I actually just look up the definition of the word that I already have. That's another McPhee tip.

The other thing that happened that I thought was really interesting is, I got a Roget's for the first time—a thesaurus. I don't think most people know what an actual thesaurus is.

Most people think of a thesaurus as a synonym finder, and that's not actually what a thesaurus is at all. A thesaurus is more like an encyclopaedia, weirdly. You look up things based on big concepts, and then it gives you a bunch of words to look up later. It's a very strange thing. It's not what most people think it is.

I have a couple of editions of Roget's in here. I like the really old Roget's from the 1900s because they actually have opposing ideas facing each other on the page. Do you have an old-school Roget's? Have you ever looked through one?

Jo: I don't have one now, but I certainly grew up with them. I was literally just thinking, I wonder if there are ones for Americans and ones for British people, because so often we say different things and mean different things.

I always hear Americans say, “Oh, that's a doozy,” or something, and it means the complete opposite thing here.

Austin: Like if you say “fanny pack” over there. That means something very different than it means here, right? Chips or fries, that kind of stuff. So I wonder if there are different ones for different cultural references.

Jo: I don't know.

Austin: As people, with ChatGPT and all these LLMs and stuff, people are like, “Why would you ever pick up a paper reference book?” And I'm like, “I actually like the friction.”

I like having to move in space and go over to my dictionary. I like flipping the pages. I like having to scan a page for the word I'm looking for, because—

This marvellous thing happens when you're looking for the word, where you bump into all these other words.

If you're a word nerd, you get to start thinking about the root of the word—oh, why is this word next to this word? Well, it's because they share the same root. Then you're going down all these fun rabbit holes.

The thing that I'm trying to do as a writer and a creative person is, I'm trying to get to the thing that I didn't know I was looking for.

The thing that people misunderstand about AI, I think personally, is that it's a great tool if you know what you're looking for.

If you're like, “Find me this thing. I want exactly this. I want to see a picture of a dog wearing a king's costume,” or some crap like that, then it can spit that picture out for you. Or, “I want to know what happened on this day,” and whatever. It can do that.

But that's not actually what I'm doing most of the time when I'm writing or making something. I start with an idea, but what really happens—the magic of writing and the magic of making stuff in general—is when you discover something that you didn't even know you were headed for. That's the real magic for me.

Sometimes I have an idea and I want to articulate it for people, but more often than not, there's something that bothers me or something that I want to talk about, and I sit down and write, and I figure out what it is that I actually have to say and what I actually think.

Every writer really knows this, and that's why the dictionary, stuff like that, those are ways of training you to get in that discovery mode. “Well, let me—oh, I bumped into this. I went looking for this one thing and then I ran into this other thing.”

That's why I love the library. I don't know what system you use over there, but you look for one book in the Dewey Decimal System over here, and then, okay, here's all these other weird books next to it. Then you end up with three other books other than the one that you were looking for. That's the magic.

To me, that's the magic of creative work, discovering what you didn't know you were looking for.

That was particularly important for me when I was writing this book because we discovered that my wife has a condition called aphantasia. It's very rare in the population, about 2 to 3% of people. There's probably some people listening to this right now who are like, “What is this? Tell me.”

Jo: Aphantasia actually more common in the creative industries.

Austin: Yes. What it is, is that you don't see—when I say close your eyes and picture an apple, you don't actually see the apple in your head. You can think about an apple and the qualities of an apple, but you don't actually see it.

Some people, and it's a matter of degree—some people like me, I can close my eyes, I can tell you what the apple looks like, I can tell you what colour it is, I can tell you where the shading is. Someone like my wife doesn't see the apple. She can tell you what an apple is.

It's really interesting because she has a degree in architecture, which is known as a very visual field. But the thing you discover about aphantasia is, it doesn't keep people from becoming artists. In fact, it's the opposite.

Someone like Ed Catmull, who co-founded Pixar, writes about it in his book, and so many of the great animators at Pixar are actually aphantasics. The reason is that they learned that they had to draw in order to see things.

When you don't have a picture in your head of what you want something to look like, things appear in the drawing, and you find things that you couldn't even picture.

A lot of writers actually are aphantasics. John Green discovered recently that he has aphantasia. It turns out that it's a superpower for writers, because if you don't have a picture in your head, then you don't have to translate that picture into words. A lot of writers talk about thinking in radio, like they have a constant narrator.

My wife—she's probably going to kill me for talking about her this much—when she describes it to me, she's like, “Oh, it's like a radio in my head. I'm constantly hearing a voice, and it's a narrator.”

I was like, “Holy shit, that would be really helpful to me.” I don't have anything like that in my head. I read Mrs Dalloway for the first time, and I gave it to her and I said, “You've got to read this book. I think this must be what it's like in your head.” And she said, “Oh my God, it is.”

Part of the thing that I took away from that experience—this is a long-winded way of getting here—is that I take a lot of inspiration from people with this condition.

Most of the people I know in the arts or the creative fields, they set out with this grand vision, and then they start working on the thing and it's nothing like what they had in their head, and they get really depressed: “This isn't what I had in mind.”

Whereas if you set out without a picture in your head, and you just start manipulating things and you see what appears, that's more of the comic mode I was talking about earlier.

What would happen if we just sat down with our materials and we started playing and we saw what appeared on the page? What if we started typing and saw what appeared, and then we played with that?

That's the kind of joy. That's more like how kids operate. Kids are better at that. They're better at reacting to what's actually in front of them, instead of having these grandiose visions about what they're trying to achieve.

Jo: Just coming back on the longevity of a creative career. Your books are very distinctive. You have a very distinctive visual style, your handwriting and the way the books are done.

I wondered if another part of the ennui, perhaps, or the draining of the later career is that we get trapped into doing something that feels like it looks the same. Or we have a voice, and we're happy in that voice, but sometimes we want to do something completely different.

For authors, we have different names. I write under two different names, and that helps. But equally—

How do you define author voice, and do you ever feel like doing something completely different to your normal style?

Austin: Style, in a lot of ways, is self-plagiarism. Style is the repeated things that we notice in people's work. Hitchcock talked about this in films. Wes Anderson is someone like that—Wes Anderson has a style. I'm sure that he gets really sick of it too sometimes, but you also can't help it in some ways.

I thought a lot about this because people worry about style so much. A lot of the time, what we call style is what Adrian Tomine one time said: “Style is just the distance between what's in my head and what comes out of my hand.” I really like that definition.

With this book, I was trying to think, “Okay, if I do another book in this series, how can I push things a little bit?” And then I was reading this article about Taco Bell. You guys have Taco Bell over there, don't you? Do you have Taco Bell?

Jo: No.

Austin: So Taco Bell, for people who don't know, is this American Mexican chain, and they have tacos and burritos and stuff like that. They're well known for making these really insane… it's so American, this company. They make a taco with a Doritos as a shell. Doritos are crisps, I guess.

Jo: Yes, we have Doritos.

Austin: Okay. I spent time in England, I just don't remember if I ate Doritos when I was in England. Anyway, I was reading this article about Taco Bell. It was really funny. They have an innovation kitchen at Taco Bell, and they have a rule about new products.

The rule is called the distinctiveness rule, and the rule is: you can change the flavour or you can change the taste, or you can change the form, but you can't change both at the same time.

I got really obsessed with this concept because I thought, “Well, this could be kind of interesting.” If you're someone who's had success and you're known for something, this presents an interesting thing. You could do a complete break and do something completely new, or you could try the distinctiveness rule.

Okay, well, what if I play with this idea of taste versus form? What if I change the taste and keep the form?

So the idea for Don't Call It Art was, what if I do another one of these books, but the taste is more like if my kids made it? It had the texture of kids' art, it had lots of scribbles in it, it was loose and messy. That was kind of the idea.

The actual book ended up being more like the other books. It ended up looking like an Austin Kleon book, because I just can't help that.

The thing you said about having multiple names that you write under, that's kind of what I do with the newsletter. I think of the newsletter as very different from the books. The newsletter is this twice-weekly thing where I can be a little bit more of myself.

In the books, I'm this very helpful, happy version of myself. It's me, but it's me on my best day. I'm really helpful and interesting for you. The newsletter is still a highlight reel in a sense, but it's a little bit more of my weird everything-I'm-into. It's more of the unclipped version of me.

The newsletter becomes a place where I can do a lot of the weird stuff that's much different from the books. I have these little projects going all the time.

Sometimes I'll make a bunch of prints and put them online. Sometimes I'll make a bunch of zines on a topic I haven't covered in the book. Sometimes I'll do a mixtape.

As someone who's interested in a lot of different forms and genres and just different modes of output, having something like a newsletter has been really creatively fruitful for me.

It's kept me from getting too bottomed out with the books because the books do a certain thing for the reader, and as much as I'd love to do a book that was radically different, I also think I've been given a real gift with the form of my books, in that I kind of own the way that they feel and look.

There aren't a lot of books that look like those books and feel like those books, and so I like playing with that form. It would be hard to get rid of it now.

The pseudonym for me is kind of like the newsletter in a sense. The newsletter is a little bit more of where I get to be wild and wacky. Then the books are a little bit more of a chiselled thing.

Jo: The books are perfect examples of the form, as you say, but it's interesting about the newsletter. You mentioned at the beginning that we can be drained by the admin around the work.

For many people listening, a newsletter becomes admin. So how does the newsletter fit into your business? The books are traditionally published, they're very professional.

How do you have your independent side, and how does all of that work together in your business?

Austin: Thank you for asking that question. I run the whole show at the newsletter. The newsletter is just me, and then my wife edits it, and no one else is involved.

I don't have an assistant. I don't have a team. It is just me, and that's why I love it. I control everything. I pick who gets in there. I pick everything. I love that.

I grew up watching David Letterman over here, and Letterman had a nightly show, and I always thought that was killer. I thought, “Man, what a fun job. You have a show every night where you have a new guest, and you have all these wacky things going on.” It was like a variety show.

I always thought that would be really fun, so the newsletter is my version of that. I started the newsletter in 2013, and it was just a Friday newsletter. It quickly became a list of 10 things I thought were worth sharing.

I had a friend, Hugh MacLeod, who was like, “Hey, I have a newsletter. It's bigger than any conference you've ever gone to.” He was talking about South by Southwest here in Austin. He's like, “I have a newsletter now, and it's bigger than South by Southwest.”

Jo: Oh, I remember him.

Austin: He would say, “Every time I have a new print, I put it out, and there's a button, and then they buy it.” He was like, “You've got to get it. This newsletter thing is killer.” This was in 2011 or something.

Jo: Yes, I still have his books. Blogging in Your Underwear or something.

Austin: Totally. So Hugh's a whole different story, but I was just like, “Oh, I should really get a newsletter.” Letterman always had a top 10 list on his show. I just always thought a 10 list was really fun. And of course the books are lists of 10 too.

So it just worked to have a weekly list of 10. It felt good, and it felt like an infinitely repeatable format. What I'm looking for as a creative person is an infinitely repeatable format that can go on and on and on and be new every time. So the list of 10 is something that people know the form of.

It goes back to the Taco Bell thing. They know the form, but they're not sure what's going to go inside. They know it's going to be a burrito, but they don't know what's going to be in the burrito, and that's the exciting part.

The newsletter, business-wise, was always a marketing cost for about the first eight years of its existence. I paid MailChimp to send it out.

Then in about 2021, when I hadn't done a book for a while, my agent said, “You know, you should really think about doing a paid tier of your newsletter.” And this is to his credit, because he doesn't make anything off the newsletter. He said, “There's this thing called Substack now that makes that really easy.”

So we moved to Substack in 2021 in October, and I started doing a Tuesday edition of the newsletter that was just for paid people. That grew enough that it's gone from a marketing cost to something that's almost—it's not quite as much as I make on my books, but it's close. And to be candid, my books sell pretty well.

So suddenly the newsletter has become this really healthy income stream. The newsletter to me is actually the day job now. The newsletter is what really keeps the lights on.

It's also the perfect mix. It's the day job, it's the thing that keeps income coming in on a regular basis, but it's also the thing I like to do the most.

I'm not like a traditional writer who likes to just get lost in their book and take years and years and go away. I'm someone who loves to be doing a lot of different things. The newsletter is a perfect format for me. I'm talking myself into not quitting, actually. It's funny.

It's gone from this thing that was a marketing cost to now it's a significant part of our income. That journey—such a bad word, journey—that trip has been very interesting. It's been really cool. But I'm also just lucky. I've been really lucky, and I think part of my thing is, I'm always just trying not to squander my luck.

Jo: Well, the book is fantastic, and I know people are going to love it. And the newsletter, of course. So tell us—

Where can people find you and your books and newsletter online?

Austin: The easiest thing to do is to just go to AustinKleon.com, and that has links to everything—the books, the newsletter.

I do actually keep an old-school blog still. I'm one of the few people that still maintains their blog and keeps it up to date. I'm hedging my bets because I think in the end everything will come back to a self-hosted website. I think in the end everyone's going to just go back to their little websites, or at least I hope so.

Jo: Well, that was great, Austin. Thanks so much.

Austin: Oh, thank you.

The post Don’t Call It Art: Rediscovering Creative Joy With Austin Kleon first appeared on The Creative Penn.

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Jami Albright is the bestselling author of the Brides on the Run romances and the co-host of the Wish I'd Known Then Podcast. Today we're talking about her new novel, The Summer That Changed Us.

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

Show Notes

• How Jami started writing fiction at 47 and waited a year before publishing her first book
• Why she fictionalised her sister's terminal cancer story rather than writing a memoir
• The difference between writing as therapy and writing for the reader
• Reactivating an email newsletter after almost two years of silence
• Going wide with a standalone women's fiction novel after years in KU and rom-com
• Letting go of the frantic hustle of indie publishing and redefining what success looks like

You can find Jami at JamiAlbright.com.

Transcript of the interview with Jami Albright

Jo: Jami Albright is the bestselling author of the Brides on the Run romances and the co-host of the Wish I'd Known Then Podcast. Today we're talking about her new novel, The Summer That Changed Us. So, welcome to the show, Jami.

Jami: Thank you, Joanna. I've made it. This is my first time on The Creative Penn, so I can retire tomorrow.

Jo: And we were saying before the show, I really thought you had been on the show before, because over the years we've connected a lot. We met over a decade ago, didn't we? At the Smarter Artist Summit. I was like, “I'm sure you've been on the show,” and you haven't. So, yes, welcome.

Jami: Thank you. You've been on our show, though. We did an interview with you a few years ago.

Jo: Yes. Well, anyway, for anyone who doesn't follow your show—

Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and publishing.

Jami: Okay. So I am the co-host of the Wish I'd Known Then Podcast for Writers. Sara Rosett and I have been doing that podcast since January 2020. Little did we know what was coming, and it really saved me, just mentally, being able to talk to people every week.

I never wrote a word of fiction until I was 47. I'd never really written anything. I have really bad grammar. I tell a lot of stories, and I would make up stories, but I'd never write them down because of the grammar thing.

But my reading buddy had her birthday coming up in about three months, and I thought, “You know what? I'm going to write Jennifer a book for her birthday. She doesn't care if I have bad grammar.” I just thought it would be on brand. It was so hard. I wrote myself into a corner very fast.

When I told her, she said, “Well, now you have to.” So I got Writing a Romance Novel for Dummies, I read that, and I started writing what is now Running from a Rock Star. But then my computer crashed and I lost it, and I was like, “Well, I'm not a writer.” So that was fine.

Then I turned 50, and I told my family, “I think the only thing I regret is not finishing that book.” Of course they were like, “Well, you need to just do it again.” I was like, “No, I had 30,000 words.”

A few weeks later my daughter came in and said, “Mom, I found this flash drive in my car. I think it has your book on it.” And it was 20,000 of the 30,000 words. So I was like, “Well, it's now or never.”

So I joined Romance Writers of America and got involved in a critique group, and they absolutely kicked my butt for a good six months. I think every week they were surprised I came back, because it was so brutal. I knew I didn't know anything, and they taught me to write.

Six months after I joined that first critique group, I won my first contest with the first 10 pages of that book. Then I just continued on. Three years later, I published Rock Star.

I was going to publish it two years later, but I went to the Smarter Artist Summit, where I met you. I was advised by Julia Cant and Sean Platt and some other people to wait—preferably to have more books written. I had the second book written when the first one came out, but it still needed to be edited.

So I waited a year, learned this business, and sold plasma to pay for my edits because I was poor. It was the best decision I ever made. Going to that conference, first of all, was the best $500 I've ever spent, and waiting that year really helped me learn this business.

When I published the book, I had an email list of 1,200 people before the book ever came out. None of those things would have been set up had I published right after the Smarter Artist Summit, which is what I'd thought I would do, in the summer.

So waiting gave me time to get everything set up so that when I published that book, it really took off from day one.

I had 1,200 people on that newsletter list who wanted that book, because I had done a preview promo. Instead of putting out the whole book, I think I put out four chapters, and then people signed up. I don't know that that works anymore.

Jo: I was going to say that. We should say to people, what was that, around 2016?

Jami: 2017. Things have changed.

Jo: Yes, things have changed, and I think this is so important. I had a question about this, and what they were implying was things that, like you said, we learned a decade ago. Things have changed.

We'll come back to how you're doing it now, but just in terms of finishing off how you got started—those books did really well, didn't they? You had a couple of years there.

How many books did you do? How did that go?

Because you did have real success.

Jami: Yes. From 2017 until really the beginning of 2021, if you look at my sales graph and my income, it just increased, increased, increased. 2019 was my very best year, but 2020 was only slightly lower as far as book sales and income.

I only put out a book a year after the second book. The second book came out about six months after the first one, and after that it was about every nine months to a year that I put a book out. Everyone said you can't make money doing that, but I did.

I think those books are very tropey. They're very hooky. That helped. I also think the timing of those books was really good. Rom-com was really coming up, and my rom-com is pretty wacky, but it's also really emotional too.

If I get any critiques about them it's usually that “this book was way more emotional than I expected, and I was looking for something a little lighter.”

They're just really wacky. They're rom-coms. Wacky circumstances. Small town, so there's all these small-town people. I just think it was a good time to release those. Those were good years. I miss those years.

Jo: It's a good lesson, because it's not always up and to the right, is it? We're going to come back and revisit that.

So then the pandemic hit, and on a more personal level, over the last few years, you've had a deeply difficult time that has led to The Summer That Changed Us, your latest book.

So talk a bit about what's happened, why this book, and also why fictionalise it rather than write a memoir?

I had that question.

Jami: Okay. So 2021, my income was dropping, but it was still okay. I was still making more than enough that—thank God I don't have to make all the money in our household—but there was a level that I wanted to.

At the end of 2021, my sister, who was the fourth of five sisters, had lived with cancer—non-smoker's lung cancer—for 10 years. She had the kind that, if you had a certain mutation, there were medications that worked amazingly well. Until they didn't, and then they put you on another class of that medication.

So for 10 years, that's what she did. She missed work maybe three times in 10 years. People who met her never knew she had cancer unless they knew us. She just never acted like she had cancer. We would have to say, “Remember, you have cancer.”

At the end of 2021, they ran out of that class of drugs. There were some being tested, but none had been approved. When she was diagnosed, she was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer. You don't survive very long having stage four lung cancer with no medication.

So I saw the writing on the wall pretty much at the end of 2021, but of course I was very hopeful that they could do something. By May of 2022, it was clear things were not going well. In July of 2022, she got a six-to-twelve-week diagnosis.

She just went in one day thinking she was about to get radiation, not knowing anything, and they were like, “No, we can't do radiation, and you should get your affairs in order because you have six to twelve weeks to live.”

Jo: Oh.

Jami: People who've been through it know this feeling. It's like being hit by a wrecking ball. It just knocks everything off your axis. Your whole world implodes into this one moment, this person that you love.

I live four hours away from my family. They all still live in the same small town. I was in Dallas at my daughter's at the time, and they live about 30 miles outside of Dallas. So I went to my mom's, and I stayed there.

I was there for almost six months, if you count the time I was back and forth, because she was not doing great but she was still okay. She had always rallied and come back.

But once she got the diagnosis, I stayed. She would go home, but she would come back to my mom's during the day, because her husband worked. She was a teacher, so she was off during the summer. I was just there, and we all just took care of her.

When she decided to go on hospice, she wanted to be at my mom's. She didn't want to be at home—they lived out in the country. She wanted to be at my mom's, so we set her up in the living room.

We're redneck country people. We bring our crazy people in, our sick people, just out for everybody to see. She was just in the middle of the living room in her hospital bed, and the world just revolved around that hospital bed.

Once that happened, once I knew at the end of 2021 that things were not going to go well—I really did not believe she would die. But she died a month after she went on hospice in October of 2022.

That whole year, I was useless. I could not write. I couldn't think of anything to write. I write funny. How do you write funny when your heart's broken? I couldn't do it.

After she died, I knew it would take a while. I knew it would maybe even be a year. But as the weeks turned into months and the months turned into years, I haven't written—except for her obituary—I've not written a word since she died until I started writing this book a year ago. I started it on April 19th.

Jo: I mean, the stories of grief—there seems to be no way of escaping whatever it ends up being. You didn't choose your response. Your deep grief was just there, and you couldn't write. I feel like sometimes people just try and force it. It sounds like that's what you needed, and you have done that.

So what then gave you the impetus to finally write—and to choose fiction?

Jami: I didn't write memoir. I did think about doing a memoir, but I don't read memoir, and I don't know how to write it.

I was already behind the eight ball, trying to write a book at all because it had been forever. I don't need to learn how to write something completely different. Plus, it just felt too close to write the memoir.

I had been in Mexico City with my daughter, who has an event planning company, and we were there scouting locations for one of her events. Janet Margot lives in Mexico City, so I reached out, and we had dinner.

We were talking, and she had had two big losses about the same time that my sister passed away. So we were talking about how difficult it is afterwards, just getting your head back into a space of being creative at all.

She said, “You really should write this book. You should tell this story. It hits everything: middle-aged women dealing with middle-age things. You've got your parents that you were dealing with, and then your sister. You should write this story.”

I said, “No, thank you. I lived it. I don't want to write it.” But it just wouldn't go away. I couldn't figure out how I would tell it. Whose point of view? I couldn't do it from the dying sister's point of view because I didn't think I could be authentic.

I was afraid to tell it from multiple POVs because the book has a lot of characters in it. My family is gigantic—my immediate family, my sisters, husbands, nieces and nephews, my kids, my mom and dad—there are 35 of us. Almost all of those are in and out of my mom's house all the time. So I knew I couldn't do multiple point of view.

One day, I was driving home to my mom's house, and it just hit me. The whole story laid out in front of me, and that's what I did. The first draft was pretty much just a retelling of what happened to us. I added some fictional elements, but I just wanted to get the story out. It was hard.

I started Adderall on April 19th of 2025—I know that, because that's the day I started this book. I do call this the book that Adderall wrote, because I could sit and focus for three or four hours, which I'd never really been able to do.

I would come to Starbucks and I would sit and write this book, and I would cry sitting in Starbucks, like a crazy person. People would walk by and slide a napkin onto the table and just keep walking, because I'm sitting there crying like crazy.

I was so superstitious, and things were working so well, that I was afraid not to come and write at Starbucks. Staying at home, I think, would have been really hard. I would maybe have sunk into a depression had I done this at home. So I just wrote the whole book at Starbucks.

After I wrote the first draft, I went back in and made it more fictional. But a lot of the book—especially her stuff—is a lot of what happened. She was just crazy. I tell a story in the book that, this is the absolute truth, this happened.

She was in college, and she had convinced my younger sister to go to a honky-tonk club because they were having a Miss Honky-Tonk contest. Before she could get up on stage to compete as Miss Honky-Tonk, she got in a fight with some girl, and the girl hit her in the head with a bottle and split her head open. She was bleeding.

My youngest sister was like, “We've got to go to the ER.” And she just refused, because there was a $300 cash prize for winning, and she needed it to make rent. So she borrowed a towel from the bartender, wrapped it around her head, competed with that bloody towel on her head, and won that stupid contest.

That story in and of itself was my sister. Everything about her is in that story. So a lot of the stories in there happened to her in one way or another. What happens to June in the book happened to my sister.

Jo: This is interesting, because the same thing memoir writers face is something perhaps you face: how much of the writing is therapy and how much is for the reader?

You said you sat there crying. Absolutely, writing for therapy is very important—but when you come to edit, there might be things that your therapy side of you is like, “That's so important to me.”

How do you kill your darlings when you're editing your sister's life?

Jami: That was hard. I had to take out a lot of what was in the first draft, mostly the stories. Once she came home on hospice, it was just a steady stream of people coming in, and everybody had a story about her.

What I found in editing was that Hope, the main character, was mostly a spectator in those scenes instead of being actively part of them. So I had to take those out, because they didn't serve the purpose of the book.

I committed early on to: while I wanted to tell the story, I did not want it to be self-indulgent. I did not want it to be a therapy session that I sold to people as a story. Because of that, I think that really helped. I really did think about that as I was revising.

I sent it to a developmental editor, and I don't know how great she was, but she gave me some really good advice about a couple of things.

One was, “There's just not enough conflict in this book. You say that Hope and the father have this really contentious relationship, yet we don't see it. There's a little bit of it here and there, but you're not really digging into that.”

It's hard, because while the rest of the world doesn't know, my family knows that this is a lot of our story. I just had to let that go and not worry about what my family thought.

They had all given me permission. I'd sort of said, “I want to do this. Are you guys okay with that?” I talked to her husband, and everybody was okay with me doing it. But I couldn't worry about what they were going to think.

I would repeat to myself: if they want to tell this story, they can write their own book. I'm writing what I saw and telling a fictionalised story that will hopefully honour her, but also help other people feel like they're being seen, and also be entertaining. If you're going to write a book, it needs to be somewhat entertaining.

Jo: I don't think you can help yourself. You're funny.

Jami: Yes. The book is really funny. I tell people that and they're like, “Hmm, really?” And I'm like, “It is really funny.” But it's also really sad.

Jo: Well, I think that's the truth—to defend myself. There is a lot of humour in grief. There is death and dying, and it's a human condition.

Jami: It is a human condition, yep.

Jo: There's comedy in all of the human condition. That's just the way it is, right?

I heard you mention on an interview, I can't remember where it was, that you feel very connected to this book, and you're worried that people judging it or giving it a bad review might feel like an insult to your sister.

How are you dealing with these kinds of fears about how to separate ourselves from our books?

Jami: I've been in therapy—like, literal therapy—for that, because I felt like that would be hard. So far, I've only gotten a few reviews back. They've all been good reviews. I haven't had anyone say they hate it.

I just have had to separate myself. It's not personal. Reviews are never personal. People not liking your book is never personal.

That's just a mindset. I've had to change my mind about that. Knowing that's a pitfall I could fall into, I really keep it top of mind. My family knows that's an issue, so they know they have to pull me out of that hole if I drop in. So that's really how I've handled it so far. We'll see.

Jo: Maybe it's time as well. You're almost back to the “book is your baby” situation. As the years pass, the book almost becomes separate, doesn't it? How you feel about your first bride book is probably like, “It's not even me anymore.”

Jami: Right. I learned early that your book isn't really your baby. Once you publish it, it's your product. So that has never been very hard for me. I still hate bad reviews, and I take them personally like everybody else does, if I let myself.

But ultimately, this is a book that I'm putting out for entertainment. Yes, it's very personal. Yes, it means a lot to me. But if people don't like it, it isn't because they don't like my dead sister. They just don't like my writing.

Jo: It's tough, but it's good to talk about, because this is something many people feel. My memoir Pilgrimage—it's not the same at all—but I was just so scared of judgment. The fear of judgment. What people would think of me. That's kind of different, but—

It's this question of how it'll land.

The reality is, not many people read these books anyway.

Jami: Well, I have worried about how it would land, but mostly I worry about how it would land with the people I love. My mom read it last week. I was there while she was reading it. That was no fun. She laughed, but it was devastating to her.

She's like, “It's great, and I hate it.” Because it is so raw and real to her still—well, to all of us. That's where I worry, how it's going to land with them. But again, I've had to let that go. I had to let it go during the writing, because if I worried about that, then I would not have told an honest story.

That was another thing—I didn't want it to be self-indulgent, and I wanted it to be honest. As honest as I could make it, even to the point of making people uncomfortable.

There's a line. Once you cross it, there's no getting you back after that. So I walked that line really carefully, because I did want it to be honest about how I felt, how other people I know who've been through something like this feel.

Also, just relationships. Because when you're in a big family like my sisters and I—we adore each other, but we can also go toe-to-toe real fast. It can get ugly, because we know each other really well. We're also a little bit redneck, so we don't pull any punches.

Your sisters are always the most honest people in your life. I wanted that to be true in this book too—both sides of that story.

Jo: Let's circle back to the business stuff and some of the things we talked about, because obviously this has been a really difficult time. There was no way to deal with it in any other way, but your business has changed. You had these great few years, good sales, and then you had other priorities.

So how are you rebooting the business? Lots of people end up taking a few years out for whatever reason.

How are you rebooting the business to try and sell some books?

Jami: To be honest, I have the remnants of a business. I have tried over the last four years to run some ads to get the Bride's books going, but here's something that's very interesting, and if somebody can tell me why this happened, I would love to hear it.

These books that have sold so many books—I mean, so many books—I could not give them away. It didn't matter what I did. I changed covers, I changed blurbs, I put them on sale, I took them off sale, I ran ads. Ads wouldn't really move the needle.

I know that at a certain point, when you haven't published and your books get pushed down in the algorithm, that is an uphill battle. But it was almost like, one day they just fell off, and once they started falling, I could not get them back. I just couldn't.

So that I didn't make myself crazy—because also during this time, I was just trying to keep my head above water—when I would deal with my books or go into my dashboard, I would feel horrible. I was already feeling horrible, so I didn't need to feel more horrible. So I just sort of let them go after a certain point.

I've now started running some Facebook ads. I have one Facebook ad that's working really well, knock on wood, right now for my first Bride's book. The problem is, this book and my Bride's books are different. The voice and the tone are the same, but they're really different in a lot of ways. They're the same in a lot of ways.

This book doesn't have any sex; the other books don't have anybody dying. But some of the things are really similar. So I may have some crossover.

For whatever reason, this ad is working. My book one is ranked better than it's been ranked in forever—really good. I'm not spending a ton of money to do it. So I don't know what changed. I don't know if I'll ever know.

I've revised my newsletter, and that's worked well. I still have around a 35 to 40% open rate on a newsletter that I didn't send out for almost two years. I was sending it out, but then I kind of stopped, and then I started again.

Jo: I was going to ask you about that, because I often get people emailing me. They're like, “I have a really old newsletter from several years ago. I haven't emailed them for years.”

So what did you say in that first email? Like, “Hey, I'm back”?

Jami: I mean, I'm just like, “Remember me?” It really was kind of like that. Just, “I'm back. You guys know life has happened. I'm sure you understand. If you're still here, thank you so much. I have been writing. I have this book that I think some of you will really love.”

That's really how it was. From the first email, even that first email had a higher open rate. I think it was close to 45%. I had not sent out a newsletter in two years literally.

Jo: People were like, “What happened?”

Jami: They're like, “Oh, she didn't die. That was her sister, not her.” But I've just been really fortunate. They've been really encouraging. Every time I send one out, I get really encouraging emails back. So I've sent out about the book.

The majority of my readers are KU readers because my books are in KU. But this book is going wide. One of the things I'm doing because I have been a little concerned about… Janet Margot does a lot of Amazon ads stuff and she knows a lot about Amazon.

We've talked a lot about whether I should use my real name, my pen name, or come up with another name. Should I worry about my readers buying the book and messing up my Also Boughts?

All of those things, because my readers are romance readers. Some of them read women's fiction, but for the most part, they're romance readers.

I've decided to stick with Jami Albright and not worry about it. There are just things you can't control, so I've had to hold everything with a really open hand with this book.

I am offering the book on my website. I'm selling it at $7.99—I chose a high price point, because I just feel like, to sit with the other books that I want it to sit with, I need that price point.

So I'm offering it on my website, starting at the end of this week, for $5. If they're KU readers and they don't buy books, but they want the book, they can get it for $5 on my website, which I think is reasonable.

Jo: Mm. Absolutely.

Jami: If that's too much for them, I understand and I get it. Time, things are hard right now, and if they can't do that, it's going to be in libraries, so they can request it at their library. But right now that's the plan.

Hopefully that helps with the Also Boughts a little bit too. Even though, again, I just can't worry about those things. As a gift to my readers, I want to do this for them as well—give them a discount.

Jo: And obviously this is a standalone, right? This is not—

Jami: Yes, it is.

Jo: Again, a bit like memoir, all the book marketing we talk about in fiction is “write a series.” It's much easier. So it is difficult to market a standalone in general. And this is something that happened, so it is a standalone situation.

So do you feel like you're back in terms of writing? Have you got plans for more books, or is this a business for you going forward?

Do you feel like you want to re-enter this whole world?

Jami: I do. I have an idea for a book similar to this one—not in the same kind of genre, I mean, of women's fiction, kind of midlife fiction stuff. I have an idea.

I had nothing for months and months and months, and a couple of months ago, this idea kind of came to me. I was like, “Oh, that's not bad.” So I'm mulling it over—I do a lot of mulling—and that's the next book I think I will write.

I don't know that I'll write rom-coms again. Not because I don't love them. I do, and I love my rom-coms. But I'm just different. You do not go through something like this and come out on the other side the same.

I don't know that I could carry an entire rom-com through without it being even more emotional than mine are now. So for right now, I'm going to write another one of these kinds of books where it's got a lot of emotion, family dynamic, tension and dynamics.

Jo: That's great. I do feel like once you've written the book that was waiting—your sister's book—then more things arrive, and it's great to hear that that is arriving for you.

And of course, we change. One of the nice things about writing for the long term and building more of a name brand is that you change, and your readers either follow you or they don't, but it's your life.

So I think that's a good reason to have one pen name. I obviously have two, but my fiction pen name I've written all kinds of genres under.

Why else would we keep doing this? I don't want to write the same book over and over again.

Jami: Right. Believe me, I've had to eat a lot of crow over the last four years, and it's tasty with ketchup.

I have decided that a lot of the stuff I said is true: about you write in one genre, you give the people exactly what they want, and you give it to them over and over again. I believe all of that. I still believe those things. It's just that I don't know that I'm capable of doing that right now.

Also, I'm older. I am about doing the things that bring me joy and are not a drudgery. I want to say this, because I miss the success. I miss who I thought I was during that time. I miss the recognition. I'll freely admit it.

I miss being the person doing the thing that everybody said couldn't be done. “You can't make money with one book a year.” Well, watch me. And I did. I miss that.

What I don't miss, and I've had to be really, really honest with myself, which has been difficult—I don't miss the anxiety that came with that. There was a lot of franticness. I think that if you are in a lot of groups, you see that franticness.

I've had to step back, like I've had to step back, and then go back into these groups, you hear authors and see authors, and there's just this frantic sense that we're losing everything, and we have to hold on so tight to everything.

I was like that. I checked my ads constantly. I checked my dashboard constantly. My mom used to say, “This should be fun.” I'm like, “Mom, it's a business. It's not fun.” But I recognise that I loved that so much that I held onto it so tight. I don't want to go back to that. I don't have the energy for that.

Since this all happened, I've gained four more grandchildren than I had. I have six grandchildren now. I want to spend time with them. I want to spend time with my adult children. I want to spend time with my mom and dad.

So I can't be frantic about my sales—are they going up, are they dropping?—and give emotionally to the people I love in my life.

If the last four years have taught me anything, it is that the one thing you can never get back is time. You can never get it back, and that is so important to me right now.

With this book—and one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you when we were talking about when I would do it—I wanted to do it before it came out, because I've already won.

Writing this book, writing a book that honours the bravest person I've ever known and doing the second-hardest thing that I've ever had to do, is the win. That's the win. Whatever happens with this book afterwards is just what happens with this book afterwards.

It doesn't change who I am, and you told me that when we were in Vegas two years ago. That conversation really changed a lot for me, because you said, “You are a successful author.”

I was still trying to come up with a plan to be a successful author again, and you were like, “You are a successful author. You've had success. That makes you a successful author. You don't have to chase that.”

That changed so much of my thinking. If I could leave listeners with anything, it is that we need to recognise the things we can't control and just deal with the things we can control.

That's kind of how my sister lived. She could not control her cancer, but she could control how she responded to it and how she went forward.

I think a lot of times, when bad things happen, we want to make sense of them. We want a reason for them. And a lot of times there's just no reason. There's no reason my sister died. There's no reason she left two kids and a husband devastated and a family that just has a giant hole in it. There's no reason for that.

What defines us is not figuring out why that happened. It's what we do with that going forward. I think that's important for me to remember when I start getting caught up in all the franticness of this business.

Jo: Yes. Or not, as the case may be. You can just let the book be what it is. And I do feel like these deeper books, they're more slow burn. You wrote books that ran, ran like the bride. Now we're not running like the bride.

Jami: I'm tired. I don't run unless a wild animal's chasing me.

Jo: Exactly. Look, we're out of time, but just tell people, if they haven't listened, a bit about your podcast, Wish I'd Known Then with Sara Rosett.

Tell people what they can find over on that podcast and why you're still doing it.

You've been doing it throughout the whole time. While not writing, you've still been podcasting.

Jami: It absolutely saved my life. It's kept me in this business. While I haven't been publishing, I still know what's going on. I know about direct sales, I know about what's happening behind the scenes, with Facebook ads. I've kept in touch with those things because of our podcast.

It's an interview podcast like yours, but we talk to people about what they wish they'd known about indie publishing. Most people have some certain thing that they've been working on or doing, and we talk to them a little bit about that too.

We ask the same questions every week to every guest, and it's so interesting how different the answers are, and yet how similar they are.

I think that helps when you're going through it and you're like, “God, I must be the only one feeling this way.” But you tune into a podcast, and you hear week after week, “Oh, no, there are other people feeling the same way I'm feeling, or struggling with the same things I'm struggling with.”

Hopefully we give people things to shoot for and to aspire to. We have some amazing guests. They've all been really gracious and really honest. I don't know if it's the questions, or just because Sara and I are our style, but they're really honest with us when they answer the questions.

Jo: It's a great show. I recommend it a lot.

Jami: Thank you.

Jo: Where can people find you and your books online?

Jami: You can find me at JamiAlbright.com—that's J-A-M-I-Albright.com. I'm on all the socials as Jami Albright Author. My books are on Amazon right now, but this book is actually now on all the retailers. So that's where you can find me.

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

Jami: It was an honour. Thank you so much.

The post Writing Through Grief And Rebooting an Indie Author Business With Jami Albright first appeared on The Creative Penn.

In the intro, Spotify Audiobook Innovations; The Economics of Convention Life [The Indy Author]; Friction in your Author Business [Self-Publishing with ALLi].

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

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

Jeff Adams is the author of YA thrillers and gay romance, and the co-author of Content for Everyone, a practical guide for creative entrepreneurs to produce accessible and usable web content.

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

Show Notes

• How ending a long-running podcast made space for more writing — and how to know when it's time to let go of a good thing
• What accessibility really means for indie authors and why your digital content might be excluding part of your audience
• How AI agents like Claude Cowork are removing physical and cognitive barriers for authors with disabilities, chronic pain, or limited energy
• The culture of shame around AI use in the writing community and why blanket anti-AI statements can be ableist
• Practical tools including NotebookLM, ElevenReader, and ChatGPT for marketing copy, metadata management, and multimodal research
• Exciting futures in personalised reading, real-time translation, and AI browser agents that could change how everyone interacts online

You can find Jeff at JeffAdamsWrites.com. Jeff also now has a SubStack at
contentforeveryone.substack.com

Transcript of the interview with Jeff Adams

Jo: Jeff Adams is the author of YA thrillers and gay romance, and the co-author of Content for Everyone, a practical guide for creative entrepreneurs to produce accessible and usable web content. Welcome back to the show, Jeff.

Jeff: Thanks so much, Jo. It's good to be back.

Jo: It is. You were last on the show in March 2023, so over three years ago now.

Give us a bit of an update on your writing and publishing business and what it looks like at the moment.

Jeff: Sure. I think the biggest thing that happened is that my husband Will, who is also a writer, we ended the Big Gay Fiction Podcast at the end of 2024, after 470-something episodes. It was basically time to do that. So we both focused on writing from that point.

In 2025 we had some of our biggest successes in getting writing out into the world. I refound my groove—my difficulty in writing went away finally. We talked a little bit about that back in 2023 too.

Will started a new pen name and started producing again, and it was really good to be able to move in that direction.

Jo: Was this the hockey romance that really hit at the right time?

Jeff: You know, I wish I could have capitalised more on Heated Rivalry when it came out, but I did get hockey books out, and I think I did get to ride that wave a little bit there too.

Jo: Yes, and if people don't know about that, that was a super popular streaming series. Was that based on a book?

Jeff: It was, yes. Rachel Reid was the author of that book and that series that then Jacob Tierney optioned and made into what fairly turned into a global phenomenon at the end of 2025.

Jo: Yes, absolutely. Although I particularly liked Red, White and Royal Blue. That was the one I liked. Not so much into hockey.

But anyway, I just wanted to ask you about the Big Gay Fiction Podcast. As you say, you did hundreds of episodes over many years. You and I met over podcasting. You've had lots of connections with people. You ended it, and I know you struggled with ending it, but it sounds like it went really well for you. So maybe you could talk a bit about—

How do you know when it's time to end something—a good thing rather than something bad?

Does that make more space for writing, essentially?

Jeff: It absolutely did make more space for writing for both of us, in particular for me because I have a day job. I balance everything on the creative side with the day job.

Will and I had been talking about it for over a year. It just was like, it's really time. After nine years, getting to that 470 mark, we thought about trying to get to 10 years and we thought about, if not 10, then getting to 500 and ending on a milestone.

As we looked at everything in our creative business, it was like, this is fun, we enjoy it, but we're not getting as much out of it as we might be if we were actually also writing books, which we also really want to do.

It became a time thing and what was the best use of the time. We absolutely miss it occasionally. The whole Heated Rivalry thing, I would've loved to have had episodes to talk about that on, but in the long run, it was worth it.

Jo: I mean, one of the things with a podcast, particularly around fiction, was that it was a marketing angle for your fiction. This show is a marketing angle mainly for my nonfiction.

So what did you replace the podcast with, in terms of book marketing?

Jeff: It was really stepped-up email marketing. I'd always had a list. Will started a list, of course, as he started his new pen name. So it was really turning on that, focusing on that, getting some email marketing with a Bargain Booksy and a Fussy Librarian and a BookBub occasionally to do that work.

To be honest, even though we covered things in our genre that if you like what we're talking about, you should like our books, there was never as much of a connection there as you'd want there to be.

Even from that book marketing angle, these other things that we can do, it's also a better spend of the money to get those types of promos than it was to continue running the show.

Jo: Yes, that is interesting. I mean, obviously I think about podcasting a lot since I have this one, and I put Books and Travel on a hiatus and that was meant to help my fiction and definitely didn't help my fiction sales. But I want to bring it back again because I love doing it.

Do you have this hankering sometimes? Do you think you'd ever do the podcast again?

Because you are also quite into all the technical stuff and all that.

Jeff: It's possible. I've toyed with the idea of doing a short accessibility podcast geared towards creatives, tilting to the same audience that Content for Everyone does.

Then I come back and look at the time—is my time better served writing new fiction or perhaps starting a Substack, which I also toy with the idea of, for accessibility stuff?

So it bounces around in my head to do another show, but I haven't really decided to jump on that yet.

Jo: Yes, and I think that waiting is really good. As you say, you quit a big thing and you don't have to rush to fill it again.

I love that you guys are writing more books. So I wanted us to talk about that up front because I know people who listen to this show—I encourage people to start podcasts if you want to, but equally it can take a lot of time. So that's fantastic.

Now, you mentioned accessibility, and I feel like the word can be quite difficult for people. So let's just start with a definition.

What is accessibility? Why do you care and why should we care?

Jeff: So accessibility is really about making sure that whatever the thing is, whether it's something out in the physical world or in the online world, that everybody has access to it.

Access to the information, access to getting into a building or being able to cross the street appropriately, whatever that is—that the accessibility of the thing is high. So that regardless of who is approaching it, they can interact with whatever the thing is.

If we put that into the digital world, it's about making sure that text on a screen can be perceived by anybody, whether they're trying to read it visually or if they're trying to read it through a screen reader or through a braille monitor.

Whatever that is, they need to be able to interact with it, get the information they need, do all the functions of whatever it is on the screen. Check out on Amazon, check out at their favourite e-commerce place, be able to get the products in their cart, check out, et cetera.

For creatives, it's about the things that we do: the websites that we build for ourselves, the e-commerce platforms that we use, our email marketing, our social media posts.

Making all of that as accessible as we can so that we're not perhaps missing a part of our audience or our prospective audience from being able to engage with our work and in turn, hopefully, buy our books and enjoy our books and become a fan.

This became important to me because of my day job. I hadn't really considered this—like, I think most people don't—until I started working at UsableNet. It's going to be 15 years I've been at that company come this autumn, and I really started to see the impacts because UsableNet is all about accessibility on the digital front.

I really started to learn, being a project manager for them, what all of that meant and how it impacted people who couldn't buy something online, couldn't book a hotel room, couldn't book an airline ticket. It just really became something I got passionate about.

I ended up writing the book because I realised that nobody talks to creatives about this. Nobody tells the independent author what they should do to help make their digital stuff accessible so that they don't miss people.

I never expected my day job to interact with my creative side so much, but this certainly has over the last few years.

Jo: I mean, has it got better? Like we said, you were on here three years ago. We did talk about some of the things around EPUB formats and taking off DRM and what we need to do on our websites—labelling images, for example, and that kind of thing.

Do you think accessibility has gotten better?

Jeff: I think the awareness of it has improved, both within the creative community and in the broader web ecosphere, that the awareness is better.

There's so much knowledge that needs to go into creating something that is accessible. Sometimes there's so much that you have to think about with colours and alt tags on images and all the little bits and pieces, if it doesn't really come to muscle memory, it's easy for it to fall off.

There's a survey that's done by WebAIM every year about the top one million homepages out in the universe, and they surveyed those for just the things that an automated scan can detect, which is a small portion of overall accessibility, and the number of errors across that top million actually ticked up this year.

Even though there's all these laws around the world—people get sued all the time in the US—the number of errors ticked up for the first time in a few years.

So I think the awareness is up, but I think being able to take action on it and make the time to take action on it isn't where it needs to be.

Jo: So last time you gave us all those tips. I'll refer people back to that and also to your book Content for Everyone, which has got loads of great stuff in.

I wanted to talk to you for this show because I was sitting watching Claude Cowork—now I use Claude Code a lot more—but updating 140 titles on IngramSpark, where me clicking things and there's like 15 clicks per record on IngramSpark updates for pricing, is an absolute nightmare.

I was watching the AI do the work and I realised this isn't just saving me time, it's actually saving my wrist and my arm from repetitive strain injury. That's when I thought about this accessibility thing.

As you mentioned, for example being physically accessible into a building, say someone's in a wheelchair, they can't necessarily get into a building if there's no ramp.

I was thinking that for many years, being an indie author, being a writer online, there's also been these physical barriers because there's a lot of plumbing and clicking for us. So I wondered, starting with an attitude around a shift in who this is opening up to—

How is AI starting to help people with these accessibility issues?

Jeff: Yes, there's so much opportunity around this. We should note, just to timestamp this, that we're talking on 14th April 2026, because who knows what will change, even in an hour from now.

I think Cowork was one of the first things that we saw, and that's only been out since the very top of this year. Being able to do actual agentic tasks. Other things have sort of gotten there, but Cowork really opened it up.

You mentioned the repetitive stress that you would've had clicking all of those forms on IngramSpark across 140 books. But there's that type of stress, chronic pain, cognitive drain for somebody who may have some cognitive disability and trying to work through that form.

The cognitive energy just might drain out and maybe knock them out for several days after trying to get through that, or the tasks take them multiple days to do. Someone who has lower vision, someone who's trying to work through that form with a screen reader—all of that draws energy, draws focus.

Now we've got something where, with plain language, we could say something like: here's all my pricing information, I've logged into IngramSpark, go update these books. Obviously the prompt's going to be a little more than that, but in broad terms, that's what we're going to tell it.

Jo: Hmm.

Jeff: And being able to have it go through and do the thing. If it gets stuck, have it come back and say, “Hey, I've got trouble with this. Please help me.”

That can just free up so much of the drains that people can have—the things that can take them out of doing the part of the work that they need to do for an author business.

They can go write the book through whatever process you're going to use to do that, rather than getting caught up in something like having to update all those books on IngramSpark.

Jo: You mentioned writing the book there. I have this real sense of being an able-bodied indie author in terms of my computer use and my ability to write a whole book, a 70,000-word thriller that I write regularly.

We're all special in some way, but I do have a reasonably normal brain where I can do this work without too much strain. It's hard work, but I can do it.

I meet people who are now using AI to help them write, to help them organise their work—maybe someone has dyslexia or ADHD or cognitive issues or pain—there's just so many things that I take for granted that don't affect me.

I hear from people who, at this point in time in the community, are almost shamed for using AI to write.

So I wanted to bring this up to discuss it under the terms of accessibility. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Jeff: I have real difficulty with people who will say anything in the broad range of, “I don't need to use this thing, and therefore you should not either.” Which is adjacent to indie anti-AI speak that there is out there.

Certainly we're living right now at probably the highest point that it's ever been, where more and more there's a sentiment towards not using AI for whatever the reason is.

I totally respect that people can have concerns about the environment and about energy use and water use, et cetera. Not to mention all the other things that are on the more difficult side of AI.

To shame someone who may not be able to put their story out there without the use of that AI, whichever one they're using, or to shame them because they're using AI to run part of their business—updating IngramSpark, doing other things like that—I think it can come down to there being some ableism there.

Ther is some privilege behind that too, where they're just like, “I don't need this, and you shouldn't have it either.”

I want to give people just a sliver of an idea of what this can mean for someone who is disabled and what AI can unlock for them. There is a person on LinkedIn that I follow whose name is Hannah Desmond. She's an ADHD coach and a former software developer, and very recently she posted this on LinkedIn.

This is a paraphrase of what she said, but: having something that can meet you where you are and help you bridge that gap is what I think I have found so helpful about using AI.

Here's what I keep coming back to. Without that support, I wasn't more motivated or more capable. I was just stuck. That's the bit that gets lost.

We've been taught that struggling is how you know you're doing it properly. So when something reduces the struggle, it can feel wrong—even when it's the thing that actually makes the work possible. Because there's a difference between avoiding thinking and being able to think at all. I think that rounds it up.

She's talking about her time as a software developer, but you can apply that to any realm of AI when we're thinking about trying to shame someone for why they may be using it.

We may not know that they have a disability because we don't always share that part of ourselves. So I really feel strongly about that and how we are in this culture of shame.

Jo: Yes. It drives me up the wall, actually. But I will also say: you don't have to have a disability or accessibility issues in order to use AI in whatever way you personally decide is okay—talking to the listeners now.

I think Orna Ross from the Alliance of Independent Authors says it well, which is you should have your own AI policy. So you personally decide where your lines are, how it helps you, what you want to keep for you, and what you want help with.

I was also thinking in terms of accessibility around money. Again, for many of us, professional cover design, professional editing, professional human-level translation, these are things that are pretty pricey for many people. So again, this makes it more accessible.

One of the reasons we got into the indie way and being indie authors was to try and remove the barriers to entry to people who have been excluded from the environment of publishing.

So, yes, it is really hard to talk about this, and yet that's why I wanted to talk about it, because—

There's so many variables for each individual and there's no situation that's the same, really, is there?

Jeff: No, not at all. The things that I may need to do my work in the most efficient way possible is different from the way that you're going to work, is different than the way my husband's going to work, is different than every other person and the way that they're going to work.

Which is why any kind of blanket statement about “I don't need something and therefore you shouldn't need it either” can just be so problematic, because we have no idea what someone else is going through.

Either it's a permanent part of their lives or maybe it's something that is happening temporarily with them where they might need to leverage other tools.

Jo: Yes. Talking about that temporary, I think I really got the first sense of this when I had COVID the first time, which was really bad. I remember I was so sick, the only thing I could do was listen to an audiobook. I couldn't think, I couldn't read. It was really probably months of not having my brain back.

Then the other thing that's happened as I age, as women age, is menopause kicks in and the brain fog is a real thing. I've heard from other people too who've said having Claude or whoever, an AI tool, to help with the brain fog is so important because otherwise I just wouldn't be able to gather my thoughts. Again, as you said—

Even if we don't need these things now, it's quite likely we're going to need them at some point, given ageing, given the potential for injury and disease.

I mean, we don't escape this alive, do we?

Jeff: Yes, that's a great point because unless we're extremely lucky as individuals, we're all likely to have some sort of a disability in our lives at some point.

I know for me, as I age and my eyes get more and more tired after being in front of a screen all day for work, and then whatever creative stuff I do in the afternoon on a book—when it comes near bedtime and I do want to read, I probably want to do that with an audiobook, much more audio, especially for any long reading project.

That can also be like, if I have a long document or a long article to read, I am likely to give it to ElevenReader, let it load itself up, and then listen to it, because I take the information in better than trying to follow words across a screen.

Jo: Yes. Jonathan, my husband, now also listens to a lot of academic papers on ElevenReader. Most of us will know it as where we publish some audiobooks from ElevenLabs, or you can also publish other things there. So it is super useful to think about what we can do with ElevenReader.

Another thing that I found really useful recently is NotebookLM. On NotebookLM, there is a free tier. You can put various things in there and then create a custom audio.

So this is something I've been doing as part of research. You can put in, say, 10 YouTube videos or some PDFs or your book or whatever, and then you can create a custom audio. Then I'll go for a walk and I'll listen to the custom audio, and then I'll go back and look at the detail of what it was.

It gives me the framework of whatever I'm thinking about on a broader level, and then I can come back to the details. So again, it's this multimodal approach that can help us manage our energy, I guess.

Jeff: And it's all about the managing of the energy, I think, too. That is a great way to think about the accessibility of it all.

You mentioned a great use there for NotebookLM. That could also be putting your book in there and having it help you build a world bible or something like that. Or building marketing materials off of that.

There's a lot of things now that NotebookLM can do in terms of helping you create FAQs maybe for a newsletter or for your website, and building video stuff off of the material that it has.

So there's a lot of options there, and ever-growing options that can be useful for someone to manage any number of the things that they may need in their creative business.

Jo: Yes. In fact, talking about Claude, there are a lot of Claude plugins now, skills and integrations. Shopify just released a Claude plugin and many of us now have Shopify stores.

I have a lot of products with a lot of different variations and the metadata. There's so much metadata. And again, I'm just so pleased now that I can work with Cowork and get it to actually update directly into Shopify.

In fact, coming back, you mentioned updating alt tags earlier. That's something again that AI could help you update—the back list of your alt tags on a website. I've now got my Cowork doing EPUBs so I could finally update all my EPUBs with back matter and all of this kind of thing.

So I feel like perhaps we could go beyond accessibility to talk about amplification.

All the things that we didn't do because it was too tiring and we just couldn't be bothered, or it would just be way too much work, that now it's opened up as a possibility because of these tools.

Jeff: Absolutely. I mean, you look at a backlist as large as yours and the things that you're now able to do. I didn't know that Claude had a Shopify plugin. So the abilities that we have now to maybe do things in the business that we hadn't before.

One of the things I've been working with Claude on is rewriting my website and creating a more proper website for Will.

I'm really making sure that it is not only SEO prepared but also GEO prepared, with all the metadata and all the backend code schema that it needs so that LLMs can find me, can understand what I do, can understand the books, branch out to the other areas that it needs to.

Doing that through WordPress would've been so much more difficult, even with Claude, that to be able to rewrite the site in a way that is going to let me manage it better so that I will do it on a more consistent basis.

Whatever that thing is, we're now able to do these things. That could be updating keywords in Amazon or making sure we're aligned across all of the sales platforms that we might be on and things like that, that Claude can do and do well.

Jo: Yes, I think marketing is just the killer app really for people, isn't it? I think most authors do not enjoy marketing. I find Claude better for creative work, for strategic work, for doing work through Cowork or Code, but—

ChatGPT with marketing copy is very, very good.

So I've actually been using that as we record this. I've got a Kickstarter launching next week, so I've been getting it to do ad copy and social media copy and all that kind of thing.

This is stuff when you have to produce—give me 20 taglines, give me 20 hooks, give me another 20 and another 20. I mean, we just cannot do it as humans, right?

Jeff: Yes, I have found GPT wildly helpful. I mentioned trying to get Bargain Booksy and Fussy Librarian promos.

Jo: Mm.

Jeff: And you have to give it the marketing hook, and it can't just be the blurb that's on Amazon—it's got to be something fresh, and they each have slightly different requirements.

Having GPT—here's the blurb, give me a dozen different options—and then I may take pieces of all of them and create one of my own. But it reworks that much faster than my brain was ever going to try to find the right thing I want to give to Bargain Booksy.

Jo: Yes, you are right. Or it says write this in 300 characters or less.

Jeff: Yes.

Jo: I do exactly the same. That kind of transformative work can be really good.

In fact, there was somebody I know who has been rampantly anti-AI for years and then said, “Would this help me? I have to do a synopsis for an agent, so I've got this 100,000-word book and it needs to be a 10-page synopsis. How would I do that with AI?”

So I was encouraging her to take each chapter and ask it to summarise the chapter, and of course read through it and everything. But I mean, doing a synopsis once you've actually written a book—that can be super useful. So I think what we're saying is—

There are levels of need in terms of both the author and the audience.

Then there are levels of your personal use from one end of the spectrum to the other in terms of how far you want to go in every area of the business. And in that way, it's just different for everyone.

Jeff: Yes, and I think getting to that mindset shift that we were talking about a little bit—it can be so easy to dip your toes in. That one author came to you and said, “Do you think it could do this?” And I think that's the beginning exploratory area for perhaps anyone.

People are going to hear us talk about this and it might inspire them to go try something that we've talked about.

But these things, whether it's Claude or GPT or Gemini or whichever one it is, you can come to it and say, “I'm an author, I have X, Y, Z going on in my life”—whether that's a disability, whether that's a time constraint because you have a day job and maybe you have kids and a family that need your attention—”I have these time constraints, I want to do X, Y, and Z in my business. How can you help me with that?” It's going to tell you what it can do to help you with that.

I would even say, if you have the ability to have multiples of these, you could ask the same question to GPT and Claude, and they're going to give you similar answers in some instances, but they may also have different ones because of the abilities that the different platforms have around these things as well.

That can help you make that mindset shift of, “Well, now I see that it can do that. Could it also do this?” And then ask it if it could do that. Because I know for me, Jo, I've taken so much from you and your journey with Cowork that it's like, “Oh, she did that. I wonder if I could do this.” And all of that piles on top of itself.

Then eventually I think your brain starts to think on its own, “Oh, I have to do this task. Can Claude maybe do this for me? Let's go find out.”

Jo: Yes, and if it couldn't do it for you yesterday, you never know, it might be able to do it tomorrow.

Jeff: Right? Because I haven't tested yet its new ability to actually use your computer.

Jo: Mm.

Jeff: And I'm curious what that might open up. Because one of the things that I've seen that I wish it would do is be able to take the EPUB that's on my drive and actually put it into a platform I'm trying to upload to.

Cowork on its own hasn't been able to cross that barrier, but I wonder if with computer use added to that, if it could. Like, “here's the EPUB, upload that over there,” be able to pick it from the file picker, essentially.

Jo: Yes. I think, well, a little tip for everyone:

I wouldn't give access to your entire file system to the AI.

Jeff: That's a good point too.

Jo: Yes. I have a Claude folder in my drive and it only has access there. So if you put files in that drive, it might be able to do that. But I know what you mean. I have been using it to help me publish things in German on KDP. Now I can use the browser, so you can actually do that.

In terms of uploading the actual file, I know what you mean. These things will change.

As we record this, again middle of April, we are almost about to get the next models being Mythos, which might be Claude 4.7 Opus, or also ChatGPT has a new model coming, and these models are getting very powerful. With every shift they can do more things.

So as you say, the very first thing to do is ask it, “I want to do this—what are my options?” And some of them, for example, doing an AI-narrated audiobook, ChatGPT and Claude don't do that. You want ElevenLabs or one of the other services for that, but they can tell you what your options are.

So that's one thing, but I wondered if you have any thoughts on the gaps that you are seeing. You mentioned one there around file uploads, but—

What do you hope might come and some of the things that might be exciting if they arrive?

Because you never know, they might be here already.

Jeff: There's certainly some movement in some areas. One of the things I'll share is, in March I was at the 2026 CSUN Assistive Technology Conference—CSUN is California State University, Northridge—and they've run this conference for some 40 years now.

One of the sessions I went to was from Tara Maisel—I hope I'm pronouncing her last name right. She's a senior project manager in books accessibility at Amazon, and she was doing a session specifically on readability. She had all kinds of statistics and information about what goes into making something readable.

One of the things she talked about with AI was the future of personalised reading. If you think about the Kindle app, for example, there's a lot of settings you can make there—font size, colours, brightness, text spacing. There's a lot of tools in there.

She was pointing out that potentially readers don't even know what they actually need for the optimised visual reading experience. She sees a world where AI can perhaps do an analysis of your reading behaviour and then help you find the optimal settings.

Maybe even multiple optimal settings for, say, if you were reading in a room that had daylight versus at bedtime, and the ways you might shift it. I was almost thinking of this like when you're at the optometrist and they're like, “Which lens is better—this one or that one?”

Jo: Oh, sometimes that is very hard.

Jeff: Yes. It's that AI could step you through that a little bit to help you find that optimal reading experience in that moment. And then it might even notice, potentially, if you're changing something in the way that you're moving through a page, that it might flag to say, “Hey, do we need to adjust something?”

Some other areas that I think are really exciting, for everyone and perhaps particularly for people who are disabled and needing the support of some assistive technology, is what we're seeing in the browsers.

OpenAI's Operator has been out for quite a while now, since sometime I think autumn of last year. Perplexity Comet has been around even longer. Then we've got browser extensions from Gemini and Claude that are available, that can let you just type natural language.

You know, “Please go find for me jeans in this size that are on sale on this website. Find me the best price for blue jeans on this site and this size,” and it'll just go do it.

Which can certainly speed things up for people in the disabled community to find things quickly, to spend time navigating less, and maybe ending up with the AI coming back and saying, “I found these five things. Which one would you like me to buy for you?” Or, “I found this one thing that you do need and it's waiting for you in your shopping cart.”

The ability for that on the horizon is an amazing jump from an accessibility point of view. But really it's one of those things that accessibility will then help everyone because we can all just shop that way, if we choose to. These are early days for these browsers and these extensions.

The other side of it comes back to basic web accessibility too, because I've seen these types of activities not work so well on a site that may not actually be accessible on its own.

A great example is something I ran into with Claude Cowork about a month ago. I was testing to see if it could help me navigate and get things uploaded together for a site where I wanted to upload books, knowing again that it's not going to upload the actual file, but it could fill in the metadata from my master database of metadata stuff.

There were areas on the site that it actually couldn't hit the button, because the site itself was also not functional to a screen reader. So there are gaps there. It's early days, but I really see that as an interesting future that'll really help people with disabilities—but again, help everybody too, just manage time better.

Jo: I know exactly what you mean there. I've done some collaborative work with Claude Code when it's like, “I can't click the button,” and I'm like, well, I'll click the button—you fill in everything else.

Jeff: Exactly.

Jo: It's actually quite a funny situation. But goodness, coming back to IngramSpark again—these things need APIs. We need better functions.

It's funny because I think a lot of traditional publishers have these APIs or backend upload things that you can do. I'm like, well, we need to get to that with these systems. But I think things will change.

Another thing that I think has also shifted is the use of voice. Voice for dictation—it used to be with dictation that you would have to say “comma,” “open quote,” “new line,” and all of that. And you'd also have to make sense.

Whereas now I feel like you can just dictate a whole load of things to these AIs and then say, “Tidy that up,” and they will do a lot more than the old situation. So I think voice will also help.

Also automatic translation. I don't know if you know this about X, and if you're on X anymore, but just this week they've made it multi-language. So I can read tweets by people who've posted in another language in English.

I can read something from Korean or read something that someone French has posted and it gets translated. It has made a huge difference to the content I'm seeing, which is fascinating because I don't think we've ever had this kind of automatic “everything is translated into your language” situation.

It's really got me thinking about how [automatic translation] might work for eBooks or other things if the rights are there.

I don't know. Have you seen stuff like that?

Jeff: There's so much available now with voice and the ability to not have to speak all the other stuff that went with it—comma, full stop, next line. It was a little mind-bending sometimes, trying to think about quote marks and all that stuff. And now it's so good. Different platforms do it to different degrees of ability.

Even being able to speak your prompts into the very platforms themselves without having to type all of it. Chronic pain comes to mind, any kind of mobility thing—all the typing would be a drain or maybe even impossible. So the voice ability is so powerful there and unlocks more things.

At the same time, those translation abilities—I believe AirPods now have the ability, if you've got the right stuff on your phone, that you could be talking to somebody, they may speak back to you in a language you don't speak, but your AirPods will give it to you in your language.

Jo: Hmm.

Jeff: Google has, I believe, a live captioning app that you can use. I think there's even a split screen—I don't know if that's available now or something in their future—where you could put the phone on the table and tell it who's looking at what side of the screen, and it'll put the language that I need on my side and the language the other person needs on the other.

So there continues to be such a shift in how we're being able to translate stuff that really opens up communication and can open up our books to so many more people.

I'm very interested to see—I haven't pulled the trigger on this yet—but how Amazon's auto-translation rolls out and how that's received in terms of the accessibility around our books and being able to put it in someone's hands who doesn't speak—I think it's only English to other languages right now—but who doesn't speak the language it was written in but wants to read that book.

We could never, as indies, or really even big five publishers, wouldn't have the money to create custom translations everywhere. But if the AI can help do that and spread those books around so that everybody could have the story they want to read, I think that's such a win for the reading audience.

Jo: Yes, I think it's so exciting to think what might be coming, and that's what I want to stay on the side of on the AI discussion. There's enough negativity out there and you can get that information somewhere else, but for me I want us to stay on the positive side of how this helps both the author and the reader.

And hopefully the community, to create more and read more and enjoy being human more. Right? Because I find that I do get out more and listen to stuff, or I'm out walking instead of at my desk, and I mean, that's what it's about.

I'm pretty excited about the future. How about you?

Jeff: I am. I think there are, quite honestly, some scary things that could be out there in the future. I mean, there's been a lot of talk about what Mythos is capable of. But on the other side of it, there are all these advances. I also look back at Google and AlphaFold and what DeepMind was able to do there for science.

There's more of that stuff out there, and individually for each of us, spending a little bit of time—and I do have to say, I think you need to spend time on a paid plan because the free stuff doesn't give you the idea of what these platforms are actually capable of.

So if you only drop in, even briefly, to experiment on one of the $20-a-month plans and give it your situation, ask it what it can do for you, I think you'll see where, on a personal level, AI will help you unlock some things.

It can help you move some things to the next level in your business that for whatever reason you haven't been able to do.

You don't have to use it for everything. You may decide that it's still not for you for whatever reason, and that's fine. But I think there's so much to explore here and to let your curiosity run for a little bit to see what's possible and what you might unlock with it.

Jo: Brilliant.

So where can people find you and your books and everything you do online?

Jeff: So pretty much everything lives at JeffAdamsWrites.com.

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

Jeff: I loved it, Jo. Thanks for having me..

The post Accessibility And AI: How New Tools Are Opening Doors For Indie Authors With Jeff Adams first appeared on The Creative Penn.

In the intro, Audible's new royalty model; New royalty model details [ACX; Kindlepreneur]; Public Speaking for Authors, Creatives and other Introverts; Why Indie Authors Should Ignore the Market’s Mood and Focus on their Mission [Self-Publishing with ALLi]; Lichfield Cathedral;

This podcast is sponsored by Kobo Writing Life, which helps authors self-publish and reach readers in global markets through the Kobo eco-system. You can also subscribe to the Kobo Writing Life podcast for interviews with successful indie authors.

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

James Taylor is a nonfiction author, professional speaker, podcaster, and entrepreneur who helps people unlock their creative potential. He hosts the SuperCreativity Podcast and his latest book is SuperCreativity: Augmenting Human Creativity in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.

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

Show Notes

• How to define creativity and why it's becoming the most valuable skill in the age of AI
• The five stages of the creative process — and the stage most people skip
• Three types of creative purpose: play, self-expression, and legacy
• How James used multiple AI tools alongside human collaborators to write, edit, and market SuperCreativity
• Bulk book sales, industry-specific editions, and revenue models for nonfiction author-speakers
• Practical tips for authors who want to break into professional keynote speaking

You can find James at JamesTaylor.me.

Transcript of the interview with James Taylor

Jo: James Taylor is a nonfiction author, professional speaker, podcaster, and entrepreneur who helps people unlock their creative potential. He hosts the SuperCreativity Podcast and his latest book is SuperCreativity: Augmenting Human Creativity in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. Welcome to the show, James.

James: Well, thank you for having me as a guest. I'm looking forward to this conversation today.

Jo: It's going to be really good. First up—

Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and publishing.

James: Well, today I'm a professional keynote speaker, so I deliver about fifty to a hundred keynotes per year in twenty-five-plus countries. Primarily I speak on creativity, innovation, and artificial intelligence.

Go back into my deepest, darkest history—I actually used to manage rock stars. That was my old job. I used to be in the music industry for many, many years. I worked with members of The Rolling Stones, and for our listeners in the UK, I managed bands like Deacon Blue.

Then I went to the dark side. In 2010, I moved to California to work in Silicon Valley, to work in the world of tech. That got me involved in artificial intelligence.

Right about 2017, I was speaking at an event in San Francisco and someone came up to me and said, “You realise you could probably speak for a living, you could do this for a living.” So I thought, well, how does that work? And he told me.

Then I embarked on the career that I have today, which is primarily as a speaker, with writing now coming a bit more to the fore.

Jo: Wow, I remember Deacon Blue.

James: Yes.

Jo: “Dignity.” That's crazy. Very, very cool backstory there, but we'll come back to the career side of things.

Let's get into super creativity, because my listeners are certainly creatives. Most of the listeners will have a book either on the way or they might even have lots of books. So we all do want to be super creative.

How do you define creativity, and why is it important to keep focusing on this even if we do identify that way?

James: For me, creativity is about bringing new ideas to the mind. Innovation is about bringing new ideas to the world, but without creativity, there is no innovation. So creativity is really the engine of innovation. Whether that is designing new products, new services, or creating new works of art and new books.

The reason that creativity is becoming more important is because of what we're seeing right now in terms of artificial intelligence. AI is going to replace a lot of the non-creative tasks that we currently do in our jobs.

If you look at things like the World Economic Forum, there was recently a study with a thousand global business leaders, and work from companies like LinkedIn—they all highlight that creativity is going to be one of the foremost important soft skills for this new future.

So creativity, strangely, will actually become more important, not less important, as we go ahead. That's the creativity side. Probably for many of the listeners here, they'll consider themselves to be creative. That is not the norm.

As I mentioned, I speak in about twenty-five countries a year, and if I ask the audiences—primarily corporate audiences—to put their hands up if they consider themselves to be creative, only between ten to forty per cent of the audience will raise their hands.

So part of my job is to show them why they are more creative than they think they are and why we're all born with this creative potential.

Then moving into the super creativity side, it's really to show them how they can augment that creativity by collaborating more deeply with other people or machines—things like artificial intelligence.

So SuperCreativity, the book that I've written and the speeches I give on it, is really about how we can augment our individual creativity by collaborating more deeply with other people or artificial intelligence.

For me, that's been the thing I've been fascinated by for the past few years, and probably for many of our listeners who are now using AI in their writing, their researching, and their marketing of their books, they're probably getting into this space as well.

I really wanted to dive into that—both the collaboration with other people and with machines and AI.

Jo: In terms of the super creativity then, do you have any practices or ideas? Before we get into collaboration, many of us authors work alone—and of course we can come back to the AI stuff in a minute—but in terms of super creativity, are there ways that we can even supercharge what we do already?

Then, of course there are people listening who might not feel creative.

So give us a few tips on how we can potentially change our mindset or become even more creative.

James: In the book I talk about what I call the eight Ps of super creativity, which are purpose, personality, practice, people, process, place, product, and persuasion. Persuasion is really the marketing piece at the end.

Probably the one that could be most useful to many listeners today is the practice piece—the practice or the process side of things.

For many of us, what that usually consists of is just having some type of daily creative practice. Different people do it in different ways. Many of your listeners will know the works of people like Julia Cameron—the morning pages style of having some type of daily practice. Other people do it in slightly different ways.

The process bit is really interesting. I talk about this creative process that we all have, and I talk about these five stages of the creative process.

The first stage, let's say if we're writing a book, is really that preparation stage. That is usually the stage where we are trying to absorb as much information as possible about the thing that we're going to be writing about.

The topic, if it's nonfiction, or going to the places, visiting the scenes that we're going to set certain things within for the book. So that preparation stage is really about absorbing as much information as possible from the outside. It's not going to look very creative. We're just absorbing at that stage.

Now the mistake that a lot of people tend to make is they immediately try to jump from that preparation stage to looking to generate ideas. But what all the studies show us is we should spend a little bit of time in what we call the incubation stage.

This is where it's often very useful if we've done some research, that we put things to one side for a little while, maybe a few weeks, move on to another project, think about something completely different.

Your brain will continue to work in the background. Your unconscious brain will work on that content you've been absorbing.

Then what often happens as a result of that is we come to this third stage, which is that insight stage—that aha moment. That happens for various different reasons and you can seed that in slightly different ways so you're more likely to get inspiration in your day-to-day work.

Then as we know—as you are a writer of many, many books—many people think, “Well, that's it. I've done it. The idea for that book or that chapter has come to me.” That is really just the first five per cent of the process.

The next stage is where we look at all the different ideas we have and decide which ones we want to pursue, which ones are going to make the grade. This is what we call the evaluation stage.

Once we've done that, we move to that final stage, which is the elaboration stage. If it's a startup, this is when you're building your minimum viable product. As a writer, this is where you're actually doing the work, putting those words out onto the page.

It's a very iterative process, so it's not necessarily linear. You'll go back and forth.

Even as you're getting input from readers and audiences in that last stage, that is then giving you the material to move back to the preparation stage and think, “Oh, I wonder if this next book in this series, maybe I go in a slightly different direction with this character.”

So each of those different stages, you can do different things to increase your levels of creativity.

Jo: I love all of that, but can we go back to purpose? Because you mentioned that as one of the Ps and I think this is something that a lot of us need.

As we are recording this in April 2026, the world is an interesting place. There are lots of things going on that have people worried.

Well, we are not talking about politics, but I think one of the things that people struggle with is, what's the point in writing this story, for example, or what's the point in trying to get my words out there when things are difficult?

I feel like coming back to purpose is perhaps the thing that helps people even take it into the process as you were talking about. And then of course, just from a practical angle—

Is purpose about making money or reaching people? So maybe you could talk about the purpose side of things.

James: Yes. So I talk about three different purposes, and it's not that there's just one that predominates, but usually there's one that maybe predominates on different projects.

The first one is creativity as play. It's what we're basically, as humans, hardwired to do—this instinctive joy that we get just for creating for its own sake. There's nothing that really sits beyond that. We just have fun. We find pleasure in creating something.

That could be a musician creating a piece of music, a sculptor creating a sculpture, an entrepreneur creating a new business or product or service. There's just this sense of play.

One of the things I talk about in the book is this idea of being childlike, not childish. If you look at children, you see this very instinctively. If you see a three-year-old or a five-year-old, you give them some crayons and they will just naturally create. That's part of who they are and it's pretty abstract.

Then what happens is they go to school and they're taught useful conventions—”this is how you should do it.” You even see their work start to change. You start to see them move from abstract paintings to more formal structures.

Then you get your peer group, then you go to college or university and the world of work, and you're taught all these useful conventions.

That's fine, but as adults, it is our responsibility to become what we call post-conventional, where we see these conventions as a useful signpost but we're willing to challenge them. We're willing to have a playfulness in what we do. So the first one is just this hardwired thing—creativity as play.

The second one, and this is maybe for a lot of your listeners the reason that they are writers, is self-expression. It's a way of placing something out into the world.

I was actually just in France recently, and I was talking to a young visual artist, a painter from Hungary, and she had to go up and give a speech. She really hated doing it. She was having to talk about her work and she was really uncomfortable.

I could see the discomfort and my heart went out for her, because that is not the way she primarily expresses herself. She expresses herself through her art form, which is painting.

For many of us, we might struggle to get on a stage, but we can express ourselves in the written word. We have something we want to say, a position we want to have, and we want to express that and get that out into the world.

The final one is just this idea of legacy. That is not going to be for everyone. I can tell you, for me personally, legacy is not the reason that I write and do a lot of the stuff that I do.

Maybe that changes—maybe as we get a bit older, we want to leave a body of work. So those are the three main purposes that we tend to see.

Then you mentioned the financial side of what we do as well. This starts to come into that self-expression, because we need to be able to get people to buy our books or download our books and read our books in order to give us the ability to write new works and create new things.

The financial side is an important component of it, but it is not the only one. I think there's a great question any writer should ask themselves. One of the first questions that I asked myself as a relatively new nonfiction writer is: why am I writing this book? What is the purpose of this book?

For me, primarily it is a form of self-expression, and then you have to go, “Well, that's fine, but I also need it to have some type of financial basis for it.” It doesn't need to be the main driver of my income, but I need to have some type of revenue model.

I'm happy to talk about revenue models, because probably the type of revenue model that I have as a writer is going to be different from other listeners. I tend to focus more on bulk selling of books rather than individual selling of books.

Jo: Yes, I definitely want to come back to revenue models and business, but a few other things first.

I want to circle back to collaboration, because I've certainly co-written with some humans, and I know a lot of listeners either have co-written or collaborated with other humans—and some of it works and some of it doesn't. You have some great information on human-plus-human creativity and collaboration.

So maybe you could give us some tips on how we can be more effective collaborators with other humans.

James: So there's a whole section about this idea of creative pairs. Often if you look at great creative work or innovative companies, very often when you strip it all back, you'll find at the core lots and lots of creative pairings.

That is usually two different but complementary personalities who are willing to develop and challenge and improve each other's ideas.

We think of Jobs and Wozniak in the world of business, or Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger. For authors, often that relationship is the work with their editor.

There was a documentary I saw—I think it was a New Yorker documentary that came out a while ago—talking with a writer of history books about his relationship with his editor. It was a really beautiful relationship. These were two very different personalities, but what worked was the fact that they were different.

A core component of having these creative pairings is a sense of trust—or what some people today would call psychological safety—that you are willing to challenge someone's ideas, but in a space of trust. The Germans have a great phrase for it. In English it translates as “someone to steal horses with,” which I love.

Hopefully our listeners have that person where you can go to them and say, “I had this idea for a book or a chapter or a character,” and that person is a “yes, and.” Like, “Yes, and have you thought about doing it this way?” or “What would happen if you did this?” They stress test your ideas. They make your ideas better.

For many of us, maybe it's our husbands or wives, our partners. Some of us are lucky enough to have editors.

When I started rewriting this latest book, I actually had someone like that—a human, not an AI—that I worked with, especially on taking all these random thoughts and ideas I've been expressing in keynotes and putting them into more of a book form.

The format and the structures that we use for telling stories in a speech are quite different from the structure that we would use for a nonfiction book. I didn't have as much experience there, so I wanted someone who could say, “Have you thought about structuring it this way?” or “This is a great story arc you might want to think about.”

So I don't know, for you, who is your creative pairing? Who is your “someone to steal horses with”?

Jo: Well, it's funny. I really think since the arrival of Claude Opus 4.6, it is absolutely Claude.

James: Yes, yes.

Jo: All the way. I mean, so we could come onto that next in terms of how AI has changed, because I do still work with a professional editor for both fiction and nonfiction, but it is very much in the “make my finished work better” stage. It is not in the exploratory phase.

I find particularly the latest reasoning models to just be fantastic at this. And my Claude is not sycophantic. The Opus 4.6—I'm sure you've been using it too—it just doesn't behave in the way that a lot of people think these AIs did. They did behave like that, and now it's changed. So let's talk about that.

What are your thoughts on collaborating more effectively with AI tools, especially as they become more and more powerful?

As we record this, Claude Mythos has not come out, but it's certainly rumoured to arrive. I'm pretty excited.

James: So because I've been doing this AI thing for a little while, it's given me the ability to experiment with things—the early versions of what many people are using today.

I'll give you an example. Even before I started writing the book, I decided to write a book proposal.

Even though I could pretty much sense I wanted to independently publish this book through my own publishing company, I thought it's a good practice to put it down into a proposal form, even though I don't go to a traditional publisher or a hybrid publisher.

One of the things I did within that was get a sense of who my ideal readers are. I used a very early version—this was a few years ago—of an IBM AI tool, creating what we call a psychometric map of my ideal reader.

This basically tells me, over about seventy-two different factors, how this person thinks, how they feel, what their value system is, very broadly for my ideal reader. I pulled in different sources. I knew the kind of magazines and books they were reading and what their general worldview was.

So I created this—going one step beyond just creating your ideal reader to really understanding their psychometrics.

I do this in my keynotes too. Before I ever give a keynote or an important pitch or a presentation, I use AI to analyse the psychometrics of the audience I'm going to be speaking to.

This might tell me, for example, this audience values humour a little bit more, or this audience values a bit more practicality so they want actionable next steps, or this audience is going to be a little bit authority-challenging so they're going to push back.

So even in those very early stages, just starting to think about the book—who was I writing this book for, what was the purpose of the book—I was using AI to understand the psychometrics of my absolutely perfect, ideal reader.

I gave her a name. It was a female reader. There was someone similar to her that I already knew.

Probably for some of your listeners, they do this instinctively anyway. They maybe have a person or a few different people they think of in their head.

Then from that stage, because I've been delivering lots and lots of keynotes—and this may be an important distinction in the way that I have decided to write books as opposed to how other people write books—my family were all jazz musicians.

The difference between a rock musician or a pop musician and a jazz musician is this: a rock or pop musician will go into the studio, create this opus, this work, and then tour that for the next two years.

A jazz musician, on the other hand, goes out and performs the songs and the things from the album that they're eventually going to create hundreds of times, thousands of times, to find out what works with audiences, and then they go into the studio and record the stuff that works best.

So I created a book more like a jazz musician. I'd delivered keynote versions of the book hundreds of times before I ever decided to actually write the book. So it had been stress-tested with real people to a certain extent.

Then, getting into it, I thought—well, what works as a keynote is not necessarily going to work as a structure for a book.

So what I did was start using ChatGPT models at that point to think about the structural edit of the book. What was the structure going to be?

What was great is you can basically feed it every single keynote you've given over the years, all the notes, everything you've done, and it could start to give me something to riff with and really get into thinking about how I was going to create this. I was using it a little like that creative pairing we spoke about earlier.

Then once I'd done that—so I've now got an idea of a structural edit essentially—I then go back and speak to some humans about it. “What do you think about this?” “What do you think about that?” And try some things out over dinner conversations. “I'm thinking about doing this—what do you think?”

Then once I did that, I just did the thing that I really didn't want to do, but I guess you absolutely have to do: sit in a seat for multiple weeks and just get that crappy first draft done. That was just me writing, from my voice, in my way of doing things.

Every so often I would use an AI to research a particular thing, but I didn't want to slow down the pace too much. I was focused on getting that word count done.

Once I had the first draft, I then brought the AI back in. In this case, I was still using OpenAI at this stage, to act more like an editor. To tell me what was weak about the book. At this point I was starting to give it the overall framing. What was weak, what chapters needed to be improved.

I then went back, started reworking each of the chapters, and worked chapter by chapter using that AI as a sparring partner. But once again, the AI is not really writing my words for me.

It's maybe saying, “This part could be said better. You might want to think about doing it this way,” or “You are missing a really powerful case study or example here,” or at the very end of each chapter, I have actionable next steps, and “You're missing some things here.”

So I've gone through that entire process of writing, and now I'm essentially at the second draft. At this point, what I'm doing is using another AI tool—Claude, in this case—to have a different perspective on it. I gave it the work.

I mentioned a couple of editors that I really respect and different writers I respect and said, “I'm going to create a virtual beta readers group. Give me feedback on this now.”

For someone that's listening to this, and we're recording this in April 2026, here's some good news for you. There are now a bunch of tools out there that use AI swarms, as we call them.

You can basically feed it your book and it will create synthetic readers—thousands and thousands of synthetic readers that read your kind of style of book—and it will then give you feedback from these synthetic readers.

Essentially, I was just doing an early version of that. So I got the feedback from the synthetic readers, the AI readers, and then reworked a little bit. Some of the stuff I just decided not to do because it didn't align with what I was trying to say in the book.

Then the next stage was I had a beta reader group of about thirty human beta readers—my ideal readers. I sent the book to them, they gave me feedback. I then used AI to give me an overview report of all their feedback, and then I was able to go back into reworking the book.

That's still really just draft three of the book, not the final book at this stage. But just to give everyone a sense of opening up the process: you could see how the human and machine were working together.

Jo: Yes, I love that. I also often say to people who are speakers first that you can, if you have recordings of your talks or if you use your slide decks to record them as MP3s and then just use that transcript as the basis of a draft.

Obviously it's not the book or a chapter, but it can actually preserve your voice—your speaking voice—which I think can be really effective for speakers.

I like your multi-step process there. And then of course, if you have audience avatars in AI, that can help you design your book marketing.

So take this into book marketing and how you're doing that.

James: So I still decided to go old school with a human editor—a book editor that someone had recommended to me. I used that human book editor just to go through the book. At that point we're talking about style, some stylistic things that we wanted to do, and they can pick up other things as well.

So I've got that book, and then I'm obviously starting to use AI to understand what tags, what kind of copy do I want to have in terms of putting it onto Amazon, putting it onto IngramSpark, and all these other platforms I want to put it out into.

I'm using Claude here in particular—and with Claude, you have something called Cowork. It wasn't quite fully happening at that point, but there were early versions of it and Claude Code—to almost start working with and creating a virtual marketing team.

I give it the book and then they could start thinking about: what is the marketing strategy for this book? What does the campaign look like? What are the things that we need to do?

That was then starting to break it down. We're now three months out or so before the book is due to get released, and I'm starting to deploy that particular campaign.

So for example, I'm on a podcast right now, and we try different versions. We have a human going out and reaching out to potential shows for me to be a guest on, but I also have an agent.

There's also one going out and finding and researching podcasts and reaching out to those podcast hosts to have me as a potential guest. So they're doing some of the tactical work there at the same time.

One mistake I made—and I don't know if you've experienced this as well—if I was to go back, one thing I would do differently is this: I decided to record the audiobook version after the physical book was already committed and ready to go out.

Jo: Mm-hmm.

James: And I noticed so many small errors or things I would change after having spent two days in a studio recording the voice for the entire book—changes I would have made.

This is something other people did ask me: why are you not using ElevenLabs or an AI clone of your voice to read the script? There are some things I feel quite personal about, and my voice is one of those things. As a professional keynote speaker, I decided I wanted to keep that and have it in there.

So it's going to be different for everyone which things they decide to offload to AI, which things they decide to give to a human member of their team, and what they decide to keep to themselves.

Jo: Yes, I mean, I human-record my nonfiction, but I have an AI voice clone with ElevenLabs for my fiction now. But obviously, for people listening, you can't put an ElevenLabs voice-cloned audiobook on Audible, and a lot of your sales will be on Audible, especially for a book like this. So I think that's also important.

I agree with you on doing the audio edit. There's always things you want to change.

But as you mentioned, you're self-publishing this, so you can just go in and change your files.

James: Yes, and that was the other reason, and this was part of the marketing—now we're moving into the marketing and the business model behind the book. For me, the book doesn't have to be a financial driver in its own sense.

The way that I sell books, and usually people like myself—professional speakers—is we bulk sell books to our clients. Let's say I'm speaking at four different events this month. Each has about a thousand people at them. Those organisers will buy, say, a thousand copies of the book.

So at the end of that month, you might have sold four thousand copies—not individual copies. Anything that sells on Amazon or in other places is almost like a positioning piece.

Obviously you want people to buy the book and learn things from the book, but in terms of the distribution model, it's slightly different because I'm primarily selling through bulk sales.

Now, here's a little twist you can do on this, and this is a decision I made even before we released this version of the book. I speak to lots of different industries.

There was a speaker and author—I've forgotten his name now, I think he was from Florida—and what he decided to do was to write a slightly different version of his main book every year, but for a different industry.

So what this allows him to do is, let's say in my case, I'm doing a version of the SuperCreativity book just for legal professionals because I speak to a lot of law firms and legal groups. I've already started working on a version of the book which is a little bit more attuned to that audience.

As a speaker, it allows me to go to all these law firms and legal associations and bar associations and say, “Hey, I've just written the book on creativity and artificial intelligence for the legal industry.”

That makes you a very bookable proposition for a client. And then obviously you can sell books from that as well. And that's before we get into the foreign language versions.

That's just a model that happens to work pretty well for my part of the industry, but obviously it's going to be very different for other types of authors.

Jo: No, I think that's great.

For nonfiction authors, as you say, there are different revenue models.

Your income, I guess, would be what, eighty, ninety per cent speaking revenue? Or do you have other things as well?

James: Yes, primarily it's the keynote speaking, and anything that comes from the back of that. Sometimes it's boardroom advisory work that I do as well. But primarily it's the speaking side. So really the book is just the simplest form to get my ideas out and the most affordable form.

Jo: Mm-hmm.

James: Because the other thing is, you want as many people getting your ideas as possible, and there is no better, more affordable way of getting someone's ideas out there than in the form of a book.

I think it's just the most unbelievable transmitter of knowledge—a book. That's why I love to write the book as well. A lot of my friends say, “Listen, books are old hat. You don't need to do a book any more. You can do these other things, other forms, online courses.”

I've done lots of online courses in the past and membership sites and all those things, but there's just something that is great about a book—to be able to summarise your ideas at a particular point in time.

It's also a great transmitter of value to other people. And it is affordable. Any book, someone can download a book on Audible or wherever they want—that's just an affordable way of absorbing that content.

Jo: Yes. Well, of course we are all fans of books here. I do speak—I don't tend to do keynote speaking. I do more content speaking at conferences.

For people listening, keynote speaking is where you tend to get the higher revenue. So if people listening have books already—let's say they have nonfiction books or even fiction books that could be turned somehow into different topics—if people want to get booked for speaking gigs, preferably ones that pay—

How would you recommend authors think about moving into speaking if that's something they want to do?

James: So obviously it's much easier for nonfiction authors to do that. I mean, I'll give you an example. I was speaking at an event last week in New York for L'Oréal, the hair care and cosmetics company.

They had six different speakers. One of them was a speaker on macroeconomics and geopolitics. Another was an expert on communications. Another was an expert on AI. Another was an expert on storytelling.

So you have to think: does my topic have value for that type of audience—that corporate audience?

An easy way of finding that is if you just go onto any of the speaker bureau websites, type in “speaker bureaus,” look for the speaker bureaus, and then type in your topic area—emotional intelligence or whatever the topic area is—and look at the other speakers.

See if there is obviously a number of speakers talking on this area. Importantly, look at how busy they are and look at their fee levels as well.

I did an online summit a few years ago called the International Speakers Summit, where I interviewed a hundred and fifty of the world's best professional keynote speakers.

I interviewed Sally Hogshead, who's an author and a speaker, and she said to me, “James, you're going out speaking about creativity, but if you just twisted it a little bit and spoke more in terms of innovation rather than creativity, you would earn an extra five thousand dollars per keynote.”

So creativity and innovation—an extra five thousand dollars. That's just a simple thing that, as you get to understand the industry, you learn.

Then once you do that, it's like any business—you have to treat it like a business, obviously. What makes someone a great storyteller on stages is not the same as what makes a great storyteller on the written word. So depending on where you're at, you might need certain training and skills development.

If you are listening to this from America, there are things like the National Speakers Association, the NSA. If you're living in the UK, the Professional Speakers Association. These are great ways just to develop your skill set and learn from other professional speakers.

Here's the good news, I didn't know anything about professional speaking until 2017–18, and it was only from having a conversation with someone who said, “Listen, you have some original thoughts. You can get paid to speak about this on stage.”

Then I spent the next year really researching and understanding and looking at how to do it and creating a minimum viable product—a speech—that was a very short period of time, a year.

Most of the listeners here have gone through that process of writing a book, which takes many, many months. So you have the stamina to do this type of work. You just need to find out where you fit.

I thought I was going to be a speaker in marketing. I thought that was going to be my thing. And it turns out that's not what the market wanted from me. They wanted me to talk about creativity and artificial intelligence.

So you have to listen to the market, like you have to listen to your readers.

Jo: Yes, I think that's really interesting. I was also a member of the PSA here, and I learned in Australia with the NSAA as it was.

James: Yes.

Jo: And that thing about who you speak to—I mainly speak to author conferences, who, I just want to be frank, don't pay very well, if at all. So exactly what you said there—

If you want to be a highly paid speaker, you have to pick the audience who's going to pay, as well as a topic that works with them.

It is a very different thing to writing a book, I think.

James: It is a different model. This is what was interesting when I interviewed those hundred and fifty professional speakers—the thing that came back loud and clear is there is a model to suit everyone.

Jo: Mm.

James: So the model that works for me—getting paid high fees to go and travel around the world, speaking on stages to primarily corporate audiences—that is not the only model.

There is another model, which is called the “sell from the stage” model, where you maybe don't get paid anything to go and speak on the stage, or very little, but what you're doing is you're selling your consulting, your online course, your books, your other products from the back of the stage. That's another model as well.

I have friends who have young families and they are writers and they don't want to schlep on planes like I do. I know one speaker in particular who never leaves his own city.

He is a very successful professional speaker. He happens to live in Orlando, Florida, which is one of the busiest cities for conferences. So literally, he's home with his kids every night. He gets to do all this cool stuff he wants. He never has to step on a plane if he doesn't want to. That just shows you the range.

I remember I once interviewed a person whose title was a Buddhist monk, French speaker, and author. He figured out he could live very affordably by living in Thailand. So he lives in Thailand for part of the year and he's very into meditation, mindfulness, yoga, and writing.

He figured out he only had to give two keynotes per year to pay for his entire lifestyle. That was it. So that gives him a lot of freedom.

He does those two corporate keynotes a year and for the rest of the year he's doing his yoga, his meditation, his writing, and surfboarding, whatever he's into as well. So you can see there's a whole range of different ways you can design that life.

Jo: Yes, we talk a lot about definition of success and it's great to hear those different examples. So before we finish up, I just want to come back to your journey into the writing side, into books and self-publishing.

We all understand, me and the listeners, how hard it is to write a book and also to market a book, but we've got the bug. So we wonder: how much have you got the bug?

Do you plan on doing more writing, more books, or do you still want to lean more heavily into speaking?

James: Primarily the income for me will still come from speaking.

I remember listening to Elizabeth Gilbert once when she talked about her writing. She said she always wanted to have other things, so she never had to push onto her writing that it had to be the income stream for her. If it was successful, great, that's fantastic. So I have a little bit of a similar view to that.

In terms of my own writing, I've got about five different nonfiction book ideas I'm now looking at. Some of them relate to speeches that I already do. Some don't.

I'm looking at different versions of the SuperCreativity book, so there'll be other versions coming out—different industries, different languages. That gives you a few years of work.

The other side that I want to develop is the fiction writing side. I'm already starting to work on a fiction book at the moment—a little bit like this idea of one for them, one for me.

Jo: Mm-hmm.

James: So one for them is for the corporate audience, that world that I live in, and the other one is for me, for my own creativity.

My hope—and I don't know, maybe we need to speak in a year's time when I've written and published it—is that by doing the fiction side, it will make me a better storyteller on stages as well for my corporate audience.

It will help me understand story arcs, slightly different ways of expressing stories, building emotion, building the anti-hero characters within a book, for example. So I'm hoping that they both feed off each other. But we will see.

Jo: Yes, we will. All the best with that.

So where can people find you and your books and everything you do online?

James: The easiest place to go is JamesTaylor.me, and you can find the book, which is called SuperCreativity, there. Or just go to wherever you buy your books—your local independent bookstore—and get a copy of SuperCreativity. The audiobook may already be out by the time you're listening to this as well.

If you want to learn a little bit more, we also have a podcast called the SuperCreativity Podcast, where I interview lots of wonderful guests talking about this area of super creativity.

Jo: Well, thanks so much for your time, James. That was brilliant.

James: Thank you, Joanna. Thanks for having me as a guest on the show.

The post SuperCreativity And KeyNote Speaking With A Non-Fiction Book With James Taylor first appeared on The Creative Penn.

In the intro, writing as a caregiver and grief [Stark Reflections; The Creative Penn episode]; Beyond Bookshops — Bulk Sales, Gifting and Alternative Distribution [Self-Publishing Advice]; list of money books; London walk along SouthBank; Bones of the Deep: AI-Assisted Artisan Author webinars.

Today's show is sponsored by ProWritingAid, writing and editing software that goes way beyond just grammar and typo checking. With its detailed reports on how to improve your writing and integration with writing software, ProWritingAid will help you improve your book before you send it to an editor, agent or publisher. Check it out for free or get 15% off the premium edition at www.ProWritingAid.com/joanna

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

Sarah Kaufman is a Pulitzer Prize–winning critic, an award-winning author, and a writing teacher. Her latest book is Verb Your Enthusiasm: How to Master the Art of the Verb and Transform Your Writing.

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

Show Notes

• Why verbs are the most versatile and underrated tool in a writer's toolkit
• How to replace flat, explanatory sentences with vivid, action-driven prose
• The power of physical and metaphorical verbs to show emotion instead of telling it
• When passive voice works, and when it's hiding something
• Balancing beautiful language with the demands of storytelling and deadlines
• How to broaden your writing expertise into a sustainable portfolio career

You can find Sarah at SarahLKaufman.com.

Transcript of the interview with Sarah Kaufman

Jo: Sarah Kaufman is a Pulitzer Prize–winning critic, an award-winning author, and a writing teacher. Her latest book is Verb Your Enthusiasm: How to Master the Art of the Verb and Transform Your Writing. Welcome to the show, Sarah.

Sarah: Thank you so much. I'm delighted to be with you.

Jo: This is such a great topic, but first up—

Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing.

Sarah: I got into writing in a backwards way, I guess. The romantic, wonderful thing about writing is the freedom that it gives you, right? That's what we all think about—this freedom to address the world.

Then the practical, wonderful thing about writing is developing a focal point, which I had to do in order to write in the first place. I'll explain a little bit about that.

I became a dance critic, which is what I did at the Washington Post for 27 years, to have something to write about. That was necessary because, though I've always known that I wanted to be a writer ever since earliest childhood, I just didn't really find things to write about when it came time to actually try to make a living at it.

As I was approaching leaving college as an English major, I was getting very anxious about what I was actually going to do, and I didn't have this burning desire to write about any certain thing.

I happened to be working as a full-time secretary at a ballet school because I had been a ballet nerd all through my youth. I knew quite a bit about doing ballet, about the steps and about the lingo, so I was a suitable candidate to work at a ballet school.

I was learning so much from the teachers there—who had all been professional dancers—about the aesthetics of ballet and how you shape the steps into art and into a performance. I was getting more and more interested in dance.

One day the director took me out to lunch and she said, “You should write about dance.” I had seriously never considered that before, but she knew that I was an English major, that I wanted to write. She said, “Look, you know so much,” and she really encouraged me.

So I said, “Well, okay, I'll give it a go,” because I had been reading dance criticism. I just started picking it apart and seeing how critics put their reviews together, called up a local paper, took on some freelance assignments, and did a lot of freelancing for years and eventually landed at the Washington Post.

So the point I want to make is that I had that thing to write about. Now I had a focal point, and my books grew out of that.

The first book I wrote is The Art of Grace: On Moving Well Through Life. That was an exploration of aspects of grace stemming from physical grace, which I knew about from dancers, and looking at connections there with social grace and spiritual grace.

Then this verbs book likewise grew out of my work as a dance writer because my goal in writing about dance was to capture the experience of it. I didn't want to be a scholarly type of critic, though I do love that kind of criticism and I read it and learn so much from it, but I knew that was not going to be my style.

I wanted more to primarily recreate the experience for the reader, as well as then coming in with analysis of it. I was just so fascinated by the look and the feel of what I was seeing on the stage. I wanted to be able to share that with the reader.

So I had to lean on verbs to capture the action, and people occasionally would say, “Oh, you're so good with verbs, Sarah,” which I thought was kind of interesting. It's like, oh, so this is a strength I had developed. I didn't really realise it.

Then that, coupled with my teaching experience, is what led me to think I have some things to talk about regarding verbs. I'd like to share with the world because, as a teacher, I often see that writing issues my students have are actually verb issues.

They get into a corner with a lot of explanation or clauses on top of clauses, and they get lost. Where is the point that you want to make here? What is the meaning? What is it you want me to take away from your work?

Well, if we pare that back and look at the verbs and try to get some direction in the sentences, that often brings clarity. Suddenly the student will say, “I was thinking more about adjectives and nouns. I didn't realise that verbs were really something to focus on.” I thought that would be an interesting challenge to bring that out.

Jo: It's so fascinating. I love how your career has emerged and that you've leaned into different things. It has a kind of dance to it itself.

We're going to come back to your career, but let's start with that, because you mentioned that with many of your students you are reading their work and you think, “Oh, we can fix this with some verbs.”

Let's get into that because you talk about weeding and this verb-first editing process. Most of the listeners will have some kind of writing already—either they've got a lot of books or they've got a draft in progress. This is the kind of thing we struggle with: how do we make our work stronger?

Talk about why you are so obsessed with verbs some tips for making our work stronger.

Sarah: Yes, I am obsessed with verbs. I will cop to that. They're so interesting and I felt like they were a little underrated as a writing tool.

Verbs, as we learned in school, drive your sentence forward. They're the engine. Really, I feel like they are the secret soul of language, because they're so versatile, they're so essential.

First of all, they hold it all together. They're the only part of speech that in itself is a full sentence. You can have a full sentence that's a verb. “Watch.” “Look.” “Continue.” You could go on and on. That is a full grammatical sentence. You can't do that with any other part of speech.

They're so essential. The word “verb” itself comes from the Latin verbum, which means “a word.” So verbs became that name for all words. Our literary ancestors understood this—that they're really the beginning and the end as far as words go.

They can add to your work when you start thinking about verbs in this way, and you start thinking about how can I elevate my writing—well, verbs are very efficient and very evocative. They can add not only clarity to your work, but a kind of elegance. They can say so much in such a little amount of space.

For example, say you have something like this: “The cook was facing the dinner rush, and so she decided to put together something quick and easy so no one would know how nervous and unprepared she was.”

In that sentence, I'm doing a lot of explaining and describing. I'm just explaining to you the situation, but I haven't really brought it to life much.

A better way to do it might be something like this—and you can see it comes a little bit more active: “The dinner rush pressed upon her. To hide her nerves, she whisked eggs and milk into omelettes, shredded parsley with her bare hands and flung it all onto plates like Jackson Pollock splashing his canvas.”

I show you what her nerves and the pressure resulted in. I show that manifesting. Or you could even shorten it and just say: “Dinner rush loomed. She whisked and whipped, chopped and dripped and masked her nerves with glistening omelettes.”

There are stylistic differences there, but it's just to give an example of how you can take something that, on the face of it, sure, it makes sense—it's perfectly fine as a sentence—but it just lies there. It's flat. Maybe it's not very exciting. It doesn't really move the story forward.

You can bring it to life by showing us. You show us with the action.

Jo: You haven't really specifically said what a verb is in that sentence you just had around “whisked” and all of those things. Those sentences were actually quite different in a lot of the different words you used. You didn't just swap out for stronger verbs.

Could you just point out what the verbs were, in case people are confused about which words are which?

Sarah: Right. Great. In the first, inferior example I have: “The cook was facing the dinner rush.” So then I amended it to: “The dinner rush pressed upon her.” I'm giving the dinner rush itself a verb—”press.” It weighed on her, it pressed on her.

Also, in the third example—”the dinner rush loomed”—so that's even shorter. “Loom” is a wonderful verb. I love it because it conveys a sense of threat. That's what I mean by verbs being so efficient and evocative in one word.

“A storm loomed.” “The dinner rush loomed.” You convey the emotion around the whole event.

“To hide her nerves, she whisked eggs and milk into omelettes, shredded parsley.” So “hide”—she's hiding her nerves rather than just saying she felt nervous. You give it a little bit more action, you give her a little bit more character by saying she's doing this to hide her nerves.

Then whisking the eggs, shredding the parsley, flinging it onto plates—that shows how she's being creative and surmounting this problem, right?

Instead of simply describing—”So she decided to use her expertise and create a nice dinner”—you show that in motion with things like whisking and shredding and flinging it onto plates. That's an example of how you can slide in upgraded verbs to lend a sense of energy and life.

Jo: I think this idea of motion is so great, and you tie this in a lot to your work. You've written a lot about physical action, and in the book there is a chapter on physical action. I think this is so important because many authors will say, “Use the word ‘said'” without thinking about dialogue within a pattern of action.

Your chef there could say something as she flung the parsley on the plate, rather than “the chef said this.” Get moving as she flung the stuff onto the plate. The action verbs are so important.

Could you talk a bit more about [action verbs] and the physical action side of it?

Sarah: Yes, and that's so right. When you have a scene really rolling, you don't need to do so much explaining about the way a person says something with those dialogue tags. It's very interesting.

I feel like words are alive—they're living, breathing things—and the more that we let them come to life on the page, the more you can draw your reader into the story.

The reader gets a sense of that life and wants to come into the story with you. You've really created a scene that your reader feels immersed in. And that's so exciting as a reader to discover. Writing about movement is part of that.

Of course writing is very vast—it's hard to say, “Well, you should always write about movement.” That would be silly.

If we think about movement and action and action verbs as being effective not only for the actions that we see around us, but for inner actions—the subtle feelings, thinking, non-action, but internally what's going on—that's also space for effective verbs.

For churning emotions, for metaphors about fright and what that feels like in the body. Or despair. Or regret. I have a lot of examples of that in the book.

It's another beautiful use of verbs where, instead of explaining what someone is feeling, you can show it through metaphorical verbs and actual physical changes—things roiling inside the body.

Jo: For example, someone in their draft has “she was afraid”—

How could they make that much stronger and use a lot of those things you were just talking about?

Sarah: That's an excellent question. Instead of “she was afraid,” you might say something like: “She felt her chest fill with ice, freezing her lungs and choking her breath, and her heart bashed around as if to tear itself from her body.”

We could get very dramatic about it, but you can play with that. What I like to encourage readers to do is open their minds and open their imaginations. When you have a pretty standard phrase like “she was afraid” or “she felt too frightened to move”—well, put yourself in that position.

What does that feel like? What does that really feel like inside when you're too frightened to move? Is it an icy feeling or is it a burning? Is it a numbness? And what verbs might help with that? Is it thrashing? Is it raging? Is it paralysing?

How can that type of expressiveness fill in the picture and make it palpable to the reader—what it's like to be in the room with this person?

Jo: Do you recommend using a thesaurus? I try to do this myself, and I often use Power Thesaurus, which I just find so useful, because as writers, when we are writing novels or books in a similar genre, we often reach for the same words.

Are you a big thesaurus user?

Sarah: I am a huge thesaurus user. I have a stack of actual book-type thesauri, but I do like, as you mentioned, Power Thesaurus.

I like OneLook, which is an interesting resource. I think it's OneLook.com and you can go in the other way—you can use it as a thesaurus, but you can also use it to find one verb that combines a couple of words.

Like “walk clumsily,” for example. You could put that into OneLook and it would come up with lists and lists. And among them might be “hobble” and “limp” and other words to say what a weak verb plus an adverb can say.

Online resources are wonderful. I like Merriam-Webster.com—that's what I rely on a lot. Cambridge too. A thesaurus is wonderful.

Now, the caution with the thesaurus, however, is that I would like to urge people to be mindful about just swapping in one word for another, or one verb for another, because even though they may appear in the same groupings, there are going to be subtle differences among them.

I find it fascinating to really investigate the subtle difference between, say, “limp” and “hobble” and “stumble.” Those all mean slightly different things.

So the finishing tip is just to make sure the word you choose is going to be right for the context.

Jo: And also perhaps the audience. I mean, you are a Pulitzer Prize–winning critic, which is amazing, and you were writing for an audience who wanted dance pieces. The audience for dancing in terms of the words you would use—I'm not really into it myself, but I would know the word “pirouette.”

I imagine there's a ton of words that you would know and use in your writing that wouldn't be so relevant for a wider audience.

So we have to think about the audience as well.

Sarah: Yes, absolutely. We want to be very thoughtful in our choice of words. If you distilled my book down to one single message, it is to think carefully.

Not in the first draft, perhaps, and certainly not when we're speaking, because we speak so spontaneously. But in writing, where you put your thoughts down and then—hopefully, if you're not under too much deadline pressure—you can come back, give it another look, shape it, refine it, and really make sure that you've chosen your words with care.

I feel like that's really what writing is all about—communicating one mind to another through this magnificent medium of language.

Language is intentional, and having that intention in mind about what you want to share and what you want to communicate and how you want your readers to approach your work—well, that's up to you.

That's the freedom I hope to be able to present to people who check out my book: here are some ways, here are some suggestions, here are some techniques and tips for issues that can arise.

Really, once you've taken these in, I hope to fire your imagination and inspire you with being able to communicate what it is that you really have inside that you want to share.

Jo: I think it is a book for falling in love with the joy of words again. You did mention deadlines, though, and the pressure.

Especially for those of us who write genre fiction series, which is a lot of people listening, sometimes we might feel that we don't have the time for that. Do our readers appreciate it, or do they want story first? Sometimes is it too much?

Where do you come down on balancing getting story over words?

How long can we spend on finding beautiful words when we are writing another 70,000-word book?

Sarah: I think that's an excellent point. I think story comes first. That's probably what first drives you to your desk—telling a story. Although it may not. The realities of writing are so vast and unlimited that it's very hard to come out with rules, and I don't write about rules.

I really want to give suggestions and examples and insights, but I do think that story is absolutely tops. And that's the power of verbs, in fact. They can help us tell the stories with clarity and with efficiency.

I do want to make sure that I'm being clear. I'm not advocating that before you ever sit down and write, or you write one sentence, you then go back and check every single word, because that wouldn't make any sense at all.

The idea is to free yourself, free your imagination. These are ways to open your imagination up that maybe you haven't thought about before. But storytelling is primary, and the way that you tell it is going to be individual to every writer.

It's useful to bear in mind that there are a lot of avenues one can take in terms of creating a scene or building a character and even evoking the landscape and the atmosphere, and we can look at verbs to help us do that.

Jo: One of the biggest problems, I think, especially for new writers, is the passive voice versus more active voice.

Can you give some examples of passive voice?

Often in editing we're told to get rid of passive voice, but of course you do need it sometimes.

Sarah: Yes. There's understandably a lot of confusion about passive voice. Just to have a tiny tidbit of grammar nerdery here: the voice of a verb refers to a very specific construction. It doesn't simply mean that the writer is expressing something in a boring way or taking on a dull subject.

The voice of the verb tells you how it relates to the subject of the sentence. When the subject does the action—when it's doing the verb—then you have a verb in the active voice. But when the subject of the sentence is receiving the action, then it needs a verb in the passive voice.

Here's an example. If I said, “Hey, Jo, guess what? My grandmother walked on the moon.” That's active voice. “My grandmother walked on the moon”—it's interesting, right?

But if I said, “Hey, Jo, guess what? The moon was walked on.” You might be left thinking, “What? What am I supposed to take away from that? Is there more to the story?”

“The moon was walked on”—well, that's the passive voice construction. There's no subject who did the walking. I haven't told you, and yet the subject was actually pretty important. My grandmother was the one who walked on the moon.

So that's the frustration that often comes when we read the passive voice. We don't know the full story, and we might suspect: are they hiding something? Do they not really know who did the thing? It brings up a lot of questions.

Especially in official situations. The classic example is “mistakes were made.” Officials love to say that because it puts nobody on the hook. Nobody is responsible. “Mistakes were made.” Well, who were they made by? They're not telling us.

I heard this just recently, by one of the representatives here. This phrase is still being used: “Mistakes were made.” I think most people understand there's a bit of obfuscation. There is something being hidden.

Now, there are times when the passive voice is perfectly fine. It's not necessary to say who did the action. If you say, “Joe Blow was arrested and charged with murder,” you pretty much have the full thing there. You don't need to say, “The police arrested him. The prosecutor filed the paperwork.” It's kind of assumed.

If you just want to get to the point—he was arrested and charged with murder—that's sufficient. Maybe further down in the story you'll explain the circumstances, but you don't need them right there.

Or say, “Fires are still being reported throughout the region.” In a news story, that's perfectly fine. We just need to know that fires are still happening. We don't necessarily need to know who's reporting it. More details may come later in the story, but right then it's perfectly fine.

In news reports, in historical situations when we're giving a history, in scientific data and scientific reports, you often see the passive voice.

It can be a perfectly good and oftentimes even more efficient way to tell something, but you don't want to lean into it and overuse it because it becomes very dull. When you don't have someone doing an action, it becomes very dull.

Jo: As you've mentioned the legal side of things, and I'm reading a lot of academic papers at the moment. I'm doing another master's degree, and goodness me, I feel like sometimes it's designed to turn you off.

Sarah: You are exactly right. I've come to that feeling too, and especially in seeing student work, where I feel like there is so much of that in academic writing, which students are reading and digesting. It naturally comes out of them, and it's a kind of cycle that's hard to break.

Jo: Do you think it's a form of hedging? “Mistakes were made”—or anything legal—you are hedging it so it can be ambiguous. Whereas a strong verb—and you mentioned “your grandmother walked on the moon”—you are really making it very clear.

If you want to hedge things, then using passive voice might be more appropriate.

If you want to make it stronger, the activeness is important.

Sarah: Yes. And it makes such a difference. I discovered this in my own work. I would read other critics, for example, and I would think, “I feel like the piece I've just written is kind of flat. It doesn't really have the effect I want, doesn't have any zip.”

I would go and read other critics—not just dance critics, but other critics. It's so useful to just read other people in any type of writing that you're doing. I advocate doing a lot of reading.

I would see that the pieces that really touched me, that really inspired me, had a lot of active voice constructions. They're not turning things around passively, which I think, as a young critic, I may have been doing because I was a little bit afraid to take a stand.

Jo: Mm.

Sarah: I think I see that in student work, that sometimes we don't want to take a stand, and so we hedge. But writing is intentional, and readers can pick up on that hedging.

If you don't intend to hedge—in many cases it can be perfectly appropriate to be fuzzy for an effect that you want, or something like that in the context—but if you are hedging and you're trying to get away with it, like you don't want anyone to notice that you don't really want to give an opinion on this matter, it's going to be very clear. So it's better to address something directly.

Jo: And make it stronger. I also wanted to ask you more about the writing career, because I, perhaps like many people listening, was like, I didn't even know you could make a career as a dance critic.

Now I know you are not at the Washington Post any more, and it's possible that that role no longer exists—like a lot of writing roles.

How has your writing career changed over the years? Do you have these various aspects of a portfolio career?

We often talk about multiple streams of income on this show and how, as writers, we can't necessarily rely on one thing.

Sarah: Yes, exactly. It's true, there is no longer a dance critic at the Washington Post. The position was eliminated. It's a shame, and it's happening to critics in all fields, in all media organisations, sadly.

That's where, for me at least, having that focal point was very key. A thing that I became comfortable writing about, that I could then spiral out and use the eyes and the brain that I had developed from writing about this certain focus for a while. Where can I take that?

Oh, athletes. They also move. I began writing stories and pieces and essays about athletes that moved beautifully, beyond racking up statistics about winning. They were just gorgeous to look at, just so pleasurable to watch.

I started writing about the body language of political candidates in debate situations and so forth. Using my focal point to then widen my lens, to mix a metaphor, I guess.

Having that subject matter and then broadening it out beyond the limits of the actual subject matter, broadening it out imaginatively into where I could find other places to use this perspective. That was really key for me.

Say you are writing historical fiction or you're writing thrillers. I would imagine that you would develop a kind of expertise in things that I would find very difficult. Suspense, maybe, or political or police procedure, or what exactly was the weaponry in seventeenth-century France.

How can you take that expertise and use it either in an aesthetic way or an actual factual way to address other topics? I think there are so many people that would be interested in what writers who have knowledge and expertise in anything can then use to show us something that we've overlooked.

Something we always thought we knew, but that really, when you look at it this way, is reminiscent of how the scabbard was used in seventeenth-century France—or whatever it is, in whatever way.

People are craving a new perspective on something they've overlooked or taken for granted. And that's where writers who have a body of work, or are interested in pursuing a certain topic. That's the promise that they have.

They can work towards being able to enlighten us on so many other things that maybe only have a tangential connection, but they can make that connection for us.

Jo: Fantastic.

Where can people find you and your books online?

Sarah: I am at SarahLKaufman.com. That's my website. My books are available on any website or bookshop that you want to order them from. Verb Your Enthusiasm comes out April 28th. I am not much on social media at the moment, but I do enjoy hearing feedback from readers, and there are ways to do that on my website.

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

Sarah: Thank you very much. I've enjoyed it.

The post Verb Your Enthusiasm: Transform Your Writing With Stronger Verbs With Sarah Kaufman first appeared on The Creative Penn.

In the intro, my AI-Assisted Artisan Author webinars.

This show is supported by my Patrons. Join my Community and get articles, discounts, and extra audio and video tutorials on writing craft, author business, and AI tools, at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn 

Nadim Sadek is a serial entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of Shimmr AI, an AI-powered book marketing company, as well as the bestselling author of children's books and non-fiction books, including Quiver, don't Quake: How Creativity Can Embrace AI.

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

Show Notes

• Using AI as a research partner, editor, and constructive critic when writing a book
• The ratio of dreaming to execution
• Why publishers still draw red lines at AI-written words, and why that may change
• Inside Shimmr's three-engine advertising system: Strategizer, Generator, and Deployer
• Multimodal interactivity, agentic purchasing, and the idea of the Panthropic

You can find Nadim on LinkedIn or at NadimSadek.com.

Transcript of Interview with Nadim Sadek

Jo: Nadim Sadek is a serial entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of Shimmr AI, an AI-powered book marketing company, as well as the bestselling author of children's books and non-fiction books, including Quiver, don't Quake: How Creativity Can Embrace AI. So welcome to the show, Nadim.

Nadim: It is lovely to be here. I feel very privileged to be invited onto this. Thank you.

Jo: Oh, I'm excited to talk to you today, and we're really talking about AI. I wanted to start with the fact that you do seem to have a sort of relentless optimism.

How do you remain so optimistic about AI when the publishing industry that we both work in seems so overwhelmingly negative?

Lift our eyes to the horizon—what is the bigger picture?

Nadim: Oh my goodness. That is a big one. I think my optimism is quite confined actually in the area of publishing. If you were to ask me to speak about AI more broadly—which you're not, but I'm going to give you a little bit of it—I've got lots of concerns.

That includes the advent of autonomous weapons and economic singularity, where the wealth from AI as an industry is going into just a few hands, and energy usage, and cultural homogenisation, I suppose, and the potential for brain rot.

There's a whole pile of stuff which is really not very good about AI, and all the normal things about fraud and theft and so on.

However, if you recognise that and then you say what's going on in publishing, then the obvious thing that you first have to deal with is what did happen with copyright. Is it appropriate to say that things have been stolen and taken without permission and so on? It is.

It's going through the American courts at one pace. I saw that Penguin Random House have started a case against OpenAI in Germany, where there will be a much faster legal conclusion—a judge's conclusion, I think.

This will begin to put parameters on how copyrighted materials can be used, and possibly also some retrospective judgment about what has happened to this point and what can be done about it.

So it's good that you've asked questions so early in our conversation, because I think — 

It's important to contextualise my optimism.

It is whilst noting with regret the behaviour of the AI industry—the models themselves—in not dealing with copyright in the most generous or appropriate fashion.

I think we should also recognise that copyright probably wasn't designed for machine learning in the way that it is. Probably the industry wasn't terribly well prepared to note, negotiate with, and navigate the very fast-moving technological culture of AI companies. So I think lots of mistakes have been made on both sides.

When you put all that to one side, what's left for me is an amazing emancipation of creative energy and also a huge efficiency being brought to the publishing industry. We can talk about both those things further, but for me that is what's going on.

The efficiency of bookmaking and publishing generally—the whole workflow of getting a book out of somebody's head and into a reader's hands—I think is immensely streamlined and improved by AI.

Actually, if you talk about it carefully, which I'm sure we will do, the ability of creators to share and let others experience their creative endeavours becomes so much better, so much fuller, so much richer. So that's why I'm excited about it.

Jo: Well, let's get into those two things then. You mentioned the emancipation of creative energy, and you've worked with various AI tools as part of your creative and business processes. You've said that AI can be a creative companion. So specifically when it comes to Quiver, don't Quake, for example—

How are you using the various tools in such an emancipated way?

Nadim: Well, just to put a bit of a broader context on it, we're an AI-native company at Shimmr, and separately I wear a hat as an author.

You mentioned the AI books and the children's books. I'm also writing a book about the psychology of motorcycling. So it's a very odd authorial footprint, but it means that I kind of tramp around the place and learn different things.

What I've noticed, even within Shimmr, is that the whole team has been using AI tools very differently. Lots of people are very bright in the company. They're all brighter than me, and I salute them and love them. But they've all used AI to become more creative in their own ways.

For example, our Chief Commercial Officer is very numerate and logical, and not loquacious. She prefers to say things straight and simply. She has become an unbelievably creative financial modeller and analyst because she uses AI in lots of different ways.

So she has flourished and grown so much, and is creative in a way that she never could be before—not only around numeracy and financial matters, but in thinking through new concepts for sales and marketing and for our commercial development.

I've just noticed all around me this going on. When it comes to me, I prefer to express myself through writing. I talk a bit as well, as you can tell, but my favourite means of communication is just writing.

When I was writing Quiver, don't Quake, I would use AI in a number of different fashions. One would be for research.

One of the chapters is about the psychology of creativity. I'm a psychologist, so I tend to come at things from a psychological perspective. What is the psychology of creativity? Well, here comes a million-word answer from an AI—this person said this, this person said that.

Then I kind of focused my research in particular areas and assembled them by drawing from the outputs of several AIs about what has been said about AI, what the science says about it, what sociology says about it, what particular creatives that we're all aware of say about it, whether they're in the advertising industry or musicians or artists or whatever. So that was a very rich way of researching things.

I would often put a chapter in—this is a slightly different use—a manuscript that I'd written and say, “Read this as if you're somebody just coming across my book, and tell me where the reader might struggle between one paragraph and another, or where there's a logical fallout, or where the concept isn't really very fully excavated and developed.”

It would occasionally prompt me to say, “You could probably do with a line that brings the reader from this point to that point.” And usually I listened to that and then wrote something new.

In another use case, I eventually gave it the whole book and said, “I think I've done an okay job here and I quite like the flow and I'm sort of satisfied enough, but before I send it to the publisher and say, ‘there you go,' what do you think? Are there any ways in which this book could become a better and more interesting read?”

It came back fairly promptly and said, “Well, what you haven't really done is considered what all the naysayers would say. You've done your dark moments of militarism and all that stuff, but what about some of the other stuff closer to publishing or creativity?”

So off I went on a new round of research, and did some myself and used the AI for other bits.

The funny thing, really the ironic thing here, is that the book is much better, and most people salute the book for the eighth to ninth chapter that talks about the constructive critics.

I assemble them all and articulate all their arguments and say how hideous AI is and how terrible it is for the world and all of us. And then I try to repudiate some of them, not in a defensive way, but just to say, actually, yes, that's one perspective and here's another one.

That chapter, ironically, about how AI is terrible was prompted by AI. It said, “You should really have a go at me.” And so I did. So that was another use case.

Then finally—perhaps I'll say this—I have a friend who is, I think, the Editor-in-Chief of Penguin in India. I got to know her at a book fair or something. We started chatting, and I told her about my kids' books. I said, “I could really do with an editor on these ten books that are due to be published.”

She very generously, amiably, and very constructively gave me feedback on each individual book and then on the whole set. I was really happy with it. I said to her, “That was a delight.”

She said, “You'd be much better off working with Editrix.”

I said, “What's Editrix?”

She said, “Well, it's an AI platform I've created where you can go and self-edit.”

I said, “You must be kidding. I'd much prefer chatting to you and our interactions.”

She said, “Yes, well, go and try it.”

So I got an account for the Editrix AI. Off I went, gave it my books, and lo and behold, it came up with some incredibly sophisticated and subtle observations on the books that neither Meru nor I had seen.

For example, there's a story where a boy who lives in a house on a hill meets another boy on a bridge, and they end up in a silly confrontation. They're young and foolish, and it sort of transpires that the other boy lived in a local village.

Now, I suppose in retrospect, it's pretty obvious that this could be seen to be colonialist, imperialist, and a sense of entitlement from the boy at the top of the hill crossing the bridge first and so on. Hadn't crossed my mind.

The AI said, “I can tell from the rest of your writing that you don't really have a sort of racist or imperialist or superior attitude to things, but in this story, there could be a misapprehension that you do.” I thought, wow, what a great warning. So I changed it.

There are almost endless ways—and I can tell you others, because I'm writing a book about clouds at the moment—in which AI can help you as an author. I've just shared some of those with you.

Jo: Yes, well, I love that. I also use it for research. I definitely use the “give me feedback as a reader avatar, as a reader of this type of genre” or whatever.

Nadim: Yes.

Jo: I use different tools as well, so I agree with you. All of that is, I think, what a lot of people are doing. You also said you did a lot of the writing and rewriting, so the human was very much there.

This was not an AI-generated work in any way. It was using an AI as a sort of collaborator—a creative companion, to use your words—which I think is great.

One of the things that AI-positive people like us are finding is that there's so much negativity around the traditional publishers, around other authors, around supposedly negative backlash from readers. I think there's a lot of very noisy people who are probably making this sound worse than it is.

Since you are so embedded in traditional publishing in so many ways, how are publishing people thinking about this?

Do you think it's just different in terms of the creative side versus say the marketing side? What is happening there, and what do you recommend for authors?

Nadim: What I'm observing is that there is increasingly confident adoption of AI for corporate efficiency, which is a polite way of saying where one can see profitability being improved.

Could you streamline legal contracting? Yes. Can you manage royalty payments better? Yes. Are there better sustainability prospects with managing a warehouse and distribution and so on with AI? Yes.

Could you improve your marketing by looking at competitive titles and trends, and optimising your metadata and your SEO and now your GEO, all using AI? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. All of these things can be assisted.

Can you manage much more of your backlist, where you don't have the human or financial capital to manage all of those titles in a truly respectful and invested way? Yes, yes, yes. So wherever there's corporate efficiency, I see publishers being increasingly bold about saying they have integrated AI into their workstreams.

What's much more tentative and hesitant is where there's discussion of authors—and I do hesitate to use the right words here—being assisted by, employing, working with AI. I kind of shorthand it as creative emancipation. It really means very many different things.

Let me give you the example that I referred to briefly a second ago of Cloud Land, which is probably my first real novel. I'm very lucky. I sit working every day at a desk that's got three windows, and I look at the sky, and every day it's different, and I'm fascinated by it.

I've been flying around the world since I was very young—my father worked for the World Health Organization, we moved between many countries—so I've also seen clouds from the sky a lot. I've noticed that in different parts of the world there are different cloud formations.

It came to me one day that it would be very interesting if the clouds were somehow sentient, and that there is a cloud society, and that Cloud Land lived above human land and absorbed and observed us.

Actually, the more I started thinking about it, the more I thought, well, we kind of evaporate. We give off vapour all the time and it rises up to clouds and maybe we're sending DNA signals to it, and it condensates and sends rain and storms and winds and lightning and thunder and all.

There's a huge amount of interaction between Cloud Land and human land if you think about it.

So I went into an AI. I said, “Hey, I've been thinking about this, blah, blah, blah. Any observations on what I've been saying so far?” I think one of the first things it said to me was, “You are actually playing with quantum physics.”

I had no idea what quantum physics were really. I thought, well, this is interesting. I went and researched quantum physics, and actually there is some of that in it. If you count Cloud Land as a creative notion—

The original idea, the creativity, came wholly from me, and then the development of it has been assisted by working with AI.

I as a creator have spent much more time originating ideas about a story than would historically have been true.

I probably would have gone to a library, tried to find the right geography textbook, read up about clouds, discovered what the nomenclature is, thought about whether I could put characters to cumulonimbus versus stratus something or other, and kind of worked my way gradually through it.

There is something that I refer to in Quiver, don't Quake, which is what I call the ratio of dreaming to execution.

I think previously, without AI, creators would probably spend 80% of their time researching and trying to get information and assembling things and editing documents and spell-checking and doing a whole pile of different tasks

None of which I actually dismiss, because I think sometimes those difficult and
“menial” tasks give you time to let ideas percolate and flourish and grow. It's just part of the process.

But whereas before, I think we probably spent 20% of our time originating and 80% of our time assembling, I think it's inverted now. You can probably do 80% of the time you want creating and 20% of the time fiddling about getting your act together.

So I feel that that's a huge emancipation of individual creativity. There's also—and we can talk about this if you wish—I think a much broader sociological phenomenon going on, which is really about every person in the world, all 8 billion of us, being creatives. That's the way I see the world.

I think that only a minority of that 8 billion have the gift of craft that we recognise—of writing or drawing or making music or being an architect or a biomedical scientist or something that's creative and assembling things. And AI gives you courage and helps you to identify what you wish to make.

I really don't mean creating the artefacts. I don't mean painting or making a song or writing a book. I just mean helping one to express and articulate oneself so that one's creative idea is shareable and experienceable by others.

Jo: Well, it's interesting. I mean, everything that we've discussed, you're really saying that the main line is the actual writing of the words, because none of us can articulate how ideas come.

Especially with Claude, we might have a creative spark, but I'm sure you've found the same: if I go to Claude, which is my favourite, with my creative spark, by the time we've discussed it, possibly over days, I've lost track of who said what.

The idea definitely started with me, because the AI at the moment doesn't have its own creative spark in terms of its own drive to write a book, for example. So it starts with me, but then it goes back and forth, back and forth—sparks new ideas, something it wrote makes me think about something else.

I think the difficulty with how publishing seems to be doing this at the moment is that it is just the written words on the page that is their red line around “have you used AI to generate a book?” But even that, I just think, surely that will change.

For example, in the publishing industry, ghost writing—or writing dead authors, like Wilbur Smith—I was going to say Wilbur Smith is a good one. I mean, we've seen them, just different dead authors essentially writing in the voice of those people.

So I just see that there are many possible places where publishers might want this kind of tool. I don't know—

Do you see any openness to the actual words themselves?

Nadim: I think you're right to identify that that is the place that it gets stickiest. What you kind of do in your private time—imagining and dreaming things up and interacting—it's a facsimile for talking to your friends or another author or something. It's just an AI companion.

So I think that that is, you're right, less scrutinised. It is when one examines the words on the page.

It's funny—it's almost as if it's a measure of how hard did you work to do this? Or did you just splatter it down on the page by pressing a button somewhere? It's almost as if, as creatives, we have to evidence that we have suffered, you know?

I think there's a different form of suffering when you write with AI. It's true that if you command AI in some way to write for you, the default writing will be pretty anodyne, pretty bland, pretty mundane. It is deliberately so.

AI is created and it is tuned to be inoffensive, to please most people, to be accessible to most readers and consumers of it.

So it's another thing that I encourage people to do: don't approach AI with a kind of Google mindset where you just do a question and answer—”what time is it in New York now?” “Well, it's five hours behind” or whatever.

Instead you say, “Hey, listen, I'm thinking about clouds, but I want a bit of spittle going up and down between the two, and I'd quite like a crazy cloud that harasses us.” Well, now I'm putting in some of my idiosyncrasy and my eccentricity and my personal perspective.

The more you do that, the more that even if you did press a button and say, “Command, I want you to write this book,” that will no longer be a bland and mundane bit of output. It'll be very tuned by your interactions, and it'll exhibit some of your nature.

So I think there probably are factories—there's always factories. They're probably—and actually I know this—writing a lot of romance, writing a lot of porn, things which are fairly well parametered.

You know what happens in both of those genres more or less, so it's pretty easy for a machine to emulate what an author might write there and go and do it.

But if you get into something like, “a sand dune was my cousin”—like, okay, well that's a bit different. What do you mean? And there it becomes a much more interesting bit of writing. So I think we're going to see a spectrum.

To come back to your question about where publishers draw red lines, I think it's where they just see straight away mundane output that doesn't feel like it had a lot of craft or ingenuity or hard work to it.

But I believe that as we go on, that's going to become harder and harder to establish. As we become more sophisticated users of AI, and AI's capabilities to understand us and to work with us become better, then I don't think it'll be such a big question where the words came from.

What we'll feast on with each other is our creative ideas and how they're expressed, but not how they were produced.

Jo: I mean, I always say to people, I'm not a word generator. That's not what makes me or my books worthy. It is what I do with it. It's the stories I tell, or it's the personal things behind it.

So generating millions and millions of words, whether you generate them by typing or handwriting or AI or whatever, it isn't the word generation that is the point. It's all of the things that make that finished thing what it is.

So anyway, let's come back to the other thing, because you mentioned that publishers seem very happy around corporate efficiency, anything that drives profitability. You also mentioned that Shimmr is an AI-native company.

Now, I, and many people listening—we are a one-person company. So I run my own company. It's a publishing company. I do all my publishing, I do all my marketing, I do all my business as just me. So I also use AI for a lot of this stuff. I wondered—

How do you see publishers changing to become more AI-native? How can we as individual author-publishers do that too?

Because it feels like a massive mindset shift, not just plug in Opus 4.7 here.

Nadim: I have been found saying at various publishing events—and it is deliberately a little bit provocative—that I believe that publishers have always been technology providers to creatives. It's not only what they do, but it is a part that they don't seem to embrace very hard.

Even if you just go back to Gutenberg—I mean, here's a printing press, it's a bit of technology. “I'll make your book, I'll make your words into books.” It started there, and it's always been. That applies to distribution and e-commerce and audiobook manufacture and all sorts of other things along the way.

So I encourage publishers to accept the notion that what they should do to attract authors in the future is partly—only partly—develop their own house AIs. It can be as ethically trained as that house wishes to deal with the copyright furore.

It can be tuned to do editing in a particular way. It can have a specific way of copy editing. It can have a collaborative notion. It can have an assistant that helps you understand genres and hotspots and competitive titles.

It can help you to think about, as Americans might say, what's hot and what's not in the world at the moment. So you might be more attuned to what the market demands, if that affects you at all. Some writers don't care, and that's fine.

It can certainly help with all the marketing then. How can you produce social media content that's appropriate to your book, and all the rest of it. So I think there's a way in which publishers could massively enable authors.

I talk to tons and tons of authors clearly about Shimmr, and what they all resent, I would say, is finding their time stolen by trying to flog their work rather than make it.

Jo: Yes.

Nadim: So the marketing process is just theft of creative time for most authors, and they hate doing it, and they're often not very good at it, because it's a completely different skillset from creating great stories or writing non-fiction books about particular subjects.

So I believe that authors should be embracing the notion that publishers will create their own house AIs. And goodness me, we might even decide which publisher we prefer to go to on the strength of their AI position. Wouldn't that be interesting? But that is what I see the future being.

Jo: Yes. I mean, definitely there's some quite significant authors—Dean Koontz, probably one of the biggest—who went to Amazon because of their technical ability around publishing and marketing.

He was like, “Yes, I want this because of this.” Not that he'd be in bookshops or whatever—of course Dean Koontz is—but yes, so I think you're right there.

For individuals also, as you know, we can use AI to help us market. I upload my books to Claude when they're finished, and I've just been marketing today. I'll say, “create 10 Midjourney images based on this book and give me all the marketing copy.” So I think we can use it now to help us be more efficient.

On the other side of that, I think the bigger thing that's starting to happen is marketing is now much easier in one way.

Nadim: Yes. Mm-hmm.

Jo: So it's getting fuller, or even more.

Nadim: Yes.

Jo: So how do we deal with this? Because Shimmr is an AI marketing company.

How are you thinking about the predominance of very, very good AI marketing now?

Nadim: Yes, and it gets better all the time. It's a great question. Obviously, strategically, as an enterprise, we've really had to think about this one. If I go back one step, I always believe that innovation succeeds when it starts in a narrow space.

So when Shimmr launched, we put ourselves forward and were quickly embraced, I have to say, as automated advertising that sells books. Nothing particularly more complicated than that. “Okay, you do ads, you automate it for me, and it'll help flog my books. Yes, that's it.” We had a rush.

We've worked with about 250 publishers. As you might anticipate, it started with smaller ones, then got bigger. We now work with the biggest as well.

That notion of automated advertising selling books was successful. Actually, that was about three years ago—a bit shorter than three years ago. What's happened in that time is that we have now collected a ton of data, and meanwhile the AI models have become more sophisticated and competent.

Maybe I should just pause briefly and say what Shimmr actually does. We've got three main engines that are all chained together, to use pretty old language.

The first one is what we call the Strategizer. It reads the book, it understands what we call its book DNA. So it's the structural elements of what the narrative is, who the protagonists are, and all the rest of it.

It's also a psychological study of it—what's going on, what are the emotions or the values, what are the interests, how they intersect, where are the tensions, all those sorts of things.

The Strategizer decides, “Well, reading everything between the covers of this book and understanding the author's intent, this is the best way to put this book forward because here are its strong points.”

It hands that off to the second machine, which we call the Generator, which says, “Thanks for the creative brief. I'll make you the ads now.” It does videos and music and captions and all the rest of it.

Then it presents its newly baked campaign to the third machine, which is the Deployer, that says, “Okay, well, I know where to find the audiences for this. If that's the DNA of the book and this is the campaign that manifests it, then I know where to find these people.”

It goes and autonomously deploys it in various media channels to specific audiences who might be interested in that content.

So that's what we started doing, and that generated a huge amount of data. Where we've got to recently—really in the last six months—is understanding that, as you've just said, most people can generate their own stuff. So in some ways they can look just like a mini Shimmr.

The thing that differentiates the content is always the strategy.

What we have learned to do now—and it's because of an agentic framework—is we've moved beyond what's between the covers of the book to look at life. We look at culture, what's going on, what are the trends, what's in and what's out.

Even if you take a particular trend—let's say, fascism—what's the language associated with it that's being treated positively and respectfully, and what's the stuff that leads to it being dismissed straight away? All those sorts of nuances around everything.

But equally, as well as going deep with a set of agents on what fascism might be in today's culture, we also go wide and say, “Well, how does that sit next to loyalty or hedonism or ambition or something else?” So we get this very, very circumspect analysis of the market.

Then, indeed, if you do write a book about—I'm really going off-piste here, but you know, the hedonism of fascism, like, God, that would be a weird book—you discover that actually you're not really competing with another book, but you are competing with that specific podcast and this movie that came out, and another movement that's born in Italy but it's moving across Europe now or something.

So we were able to produce strategies which now lead to a much broader offer, one which is much more sophisticated and much more likely to drive success in a book or in a creative enterprise.

It informs product listings, metadata, author communications, PR, SEO, GEO, and of course the thing that we started with, advertising.

So things that you see made by Shimmr should be much more resonant and much more attuned to the world, and commercially much more likely to drive success, than simply saying, “Here's a book, make ten Midjourney images out of it.”

Jo: Mm-hmm.

Nadim: It's really about the quality of the briefing and the quality of the assets that you're able to produce by having a much more sophisticated Strategizer.

So we've gone back into the intellectual property and the human analysis, in a way, of the world. To understand where a specific piece of creative work sits in culture and society has become a much bigger proposition.

Jo: Right. So you did mention podcasts there. So as in, you might present to a publisher “these are the podcasts that they should pitch” for example?

Nadim: There's that, of course, but it's also, don't think that this book is competing with these three titles which your team put together. It's more that, if people want to listen to hedonistic fascism, they can listen to that podcast before they read this book.

Jo: Okay, that's interesting. Interesting times.

So we don't have much time left, but I think one of the biggest questions that people have—even if they're AI-positive, as I am and many people listening are—it's not that we're worried about AI replacing us, because we know we're individuals and all that, but we are slightly concerned about the volume of books in the market.

And not just books, but TV shows and YouTube and TikTok. It's very hard to stand out.

You do say in the book: “When anyone can make, maybe creativity lies not in the making, but in making others care.”

How can I move up the value chain? So for many of us who make an income this way, what are your recommendations?

Nadim: Great question. And actually I think it's really central. My latest catchphrase is that in a time of super abundance, we need super discoverability.

So it's exactly as you just said—tons of work, tons of movies, tons of podcasts, and tons of everything. If you believe in what I've been saying, which is that we're emancipating the creative spark of 8 billion people, there's going to be even more.

So I believe that the solution is what I call multimodal interactivity. That doesn't mean multimedia—it means multimodal. Multimodal means you can engage with an experience in different modalities—the same idea.

So my conviction is that if you write a book or make a painting or have a piece of music that you've come up with—or anything really, creatively—and you wish it to both survive the first six weeks of its birth and then thrive in a more perpetual way in society and culture, then people have to be able to experience and engage with your idea in multiple modalities.

I would always write a book, because that's what I do. Others produce a podcast or write a piece of music—whatever the same sort of things. Any one of us needs to make sure that that reappears and is experienceable and interactable with in different modalities.

So my book should have some Instagram reels. There might be YouTube shorts, there might be a podcast, there might be a piece of music associated with it, it could be a movie. It could be a game, it could be an app.

You really have to think about allowing your creative idea—more than your creative artefact—to live in culture. Sure, you want to make an income from the artefact that you are good at producing.

As many of your listeners, and I, would be writers of books, we want that to persist as a revenue stream, and it should do. I would simply argue that making sure that whatever you've produced in your book is manifest, and people can interact with it in other modalities, is the surest way to get it seen and discovered.

Jo: Yes, it's interesting.

I've actually started looking at making my non-fiction books into skills.

Nadim: Yes.

Jo: And also making markdown MD files—books as markdown files for agents to buy.

Nadim: Very good. You are way ahead of the curve.

Jo: Well, I sell on Shopify, as do many listeners, and Shopify, as I'm sure you know, is now enabled for agentic purchasing. We are in ChatGPT. So it's really interesting to think, well, if the agents go shopping for people now and in the future, what you want is to be able to find it.

Also, I haven't actually put an explicit licence, but people email me and say, “Can I upload your books into an LLM?” And I'm like, “If you buy a copy from me, then yes, you can.”

Nadim: Yes.

Jo: So I think it's changing. And as you say, I do think that people are more and more going to want to say “buy the PDF and put it in NotebookLM” or use it as a skill.

Nadim: That's right.

Jo: That kind of thing.

Nadim: Yes, and then they go on a walk with their dog and they listen to the podcast about your book, which they've created on NotebookLM. It's exactly that.

I think my worst fear for publishers is that they lose so much of the value chain—distribution, creative collaboration, all sorts of things along the way—that the worst position they could end up in is simply as book manufacturers, which would be just one small manifestation of a creative idea.

Jo: Well, I'm excited about the future. I hope you are too. I think you are.

What are you particularly excited about in terms of the changes coming?

Nadim: Well, if I can be my most extravagant now, my greatest excitement about AI and the changes that are coming are that it'll produce what I describe as the Panthropic.

The Panthropic is a way of seeing AI not as a companion or some anthropomorphic being, but instead the repository of everything that humans have ever thought or felt or created or shared, accessible to us all in an anonymised way. It's just a repository of interactable information.

My excitement about it is that the liberation that that gives to information—which becomes knowledge, which of course we all know leads to some power—should result in truly new thinking, new philosophy, new spiritualism, possibly new questions about what it is to be a human being and what life on Earth is all about. New economics, new employment, new education.

I think one can too easily underestimate the massive liberation of intellectual consideration and creativity that's about to surf across the globe, and I'm so excited by it.

Jo: Mm-hmm. Yes, me too. Very interesting times ahead.

So where can people find you and your books and everything you do online?

Nadim: I think the easiest thing is just to go to LinkedIn and find me there as Nadim Sadek.

You can also go to my personal website, which is NadimSadek.com, and that'll take you wherever you want on different journeys and different parts of my career. It'll also give you links to books.

Of course, they're available in all formats—audio, paperback, ebook—and in many different languages, all through Amazon and other platforms, and Spotify and Audible and all the usual things.

Jo: All the usual things. Well, thanks so much for your time, Nadim. That was great.

Nadim: It's a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

The post AI, Creativity, And The Future of Publishing with Nadim Sadek first appeared on The Creative Penn.

In the intro, thoughts on feeling empty after a book, and the benefits of SubStack for authors [Stark Reflections; Wish I'd Known Then]; AI-Assisted Artisan Author webinars 16 and 23 May.

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

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

Skye MacKinnon is the award-winning, USA Today bestselling author of over 70 books across romance and children's books under multiple pen names, most of which are also available in German, which is her bestselling market. Her latest book for authors is Self-Publishing in German: How to Translate, Publish and Market Your Books.

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

Show Notes

• Why the German-speaking market is much bigger than just Germany, and which genres sell best there
• Title protection laws, the Impressum, and translator copyright
• How to find and vet human translators, and what a quality translation actually costs
• The current state of AI translation for fiction, and why quality assurance passes are essential
• Distribution decisions: the Tolino Alliance, Skoobe, libraries, and why IngramSpark doesn't work in Germany
• Marketing in German: BookDeals, LovelyBooks, ads, BookTok, and why pre-orders matter even more

You can find Skye SkyeMacKinnon.com and her children's books at IslaWynter.com.

Transcript of the interview with Skye MacKinnon

Jo: Skye MacKinnon is the award-winning, USA Today bestselling author of over 70 books across romance and children's books under multiple pen names, most of which are also available in German, which is her bestselling market. Her latest book for authors is Self-Publishing in German: How to Translate, Publish and Market Your Books.

Welcome, Skye.

Skye: Hi. Thank you so much for having me.

Jo: This is such an interesting topic. But first up—

Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and publishing.

Skye: I've always loved writing, but I was always told, “Well, you can't be an author. Get a proper job.” So I became a journalist and did that for a few years, but there was always that love of creative writing.

At some point when I was getting more active on social media, I was following some other indie authors and realised they're just like me. They're not special people. I had always pictured authors as these mythical beings high up above the rest of us.

That gave me the courage to put out my own book. I self-published from the start, never even looked into trad publishing, and that was in 2017. I was really lucky because my first series totally hit it off. I was able to quit my job a year later and I have been a full-time author ever since.

I started with romance and then, by accident, got into children's books. Which has been great fun. I don't even have children myself, but it's just that palette cleanser in between. Writing about cute animals and unicorns and just bringing some fun into everything.

Nowadays I have about five or six pen names, depending on how you count, across genres, although most of it is romance, and that's my bread and butter really.

Jo: Yes, I'm certainly one of those people who wish I could write romance. It always just seems to be the most profitable market in any language, I guess.

Let's get into the book. It's a fantastic book. I've been through it myself. It's really packed full of everything you need, so we can't cover everything.

Let's start by considering the German language in general.

Why is German a good language market to consider expanding into?

And for anyone who might not realise, why is it more than Germany?

Skye: Well, Germans love to read, and depending on the statistic that you look at, they're generally seen as the third largest book market in the world after English and Mandarin Chinese. So it's a huge market, even though you think of Germany as a small little country in Europe.

As you said, it's much more than Germany. Yes, you've got about 83 million people in Germany, but then you've also got Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, parts of Belgium, Luxembourg, and even Italy. So if you look at the whole footprint on the map, it is much bigger than just the one country.

A lot of young people there still read and go to bookshops. There's a huge bookshop culture. You will find, if you go to a high street there, way more bookshops than you do here in the UK, for example.

There's demand for quality and for really gorgeous books. They have been way ahead of the curve when it comes to special editions and sprayed edges, and they also like translations.

I found one statistic where about two thirds of all newly released titles in German are actual translations. Readers are used to translations, but until a few years ago it was all trad-published translations. So this transition is coming now. It's coming very, very fast, especially with AI.

They generally are very open to translations as long as the quality is there.

Jo: So what about specific genres then? Obviously we mentioned romance there, and romance is not just one genre anymore. Whatever they're writing—

How can somebody tell if it's worth expanding into German?

How do we do this? It takes time and effort and money, potentially.

Skye: It can take a lot of money, so it is worth doing research. There's one easy way, which is just looking at your current sales and looking at how many books you're selling in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland at the moment in English.

That can give you an indication of which of your books might be already quite popular there. Sometimes it's quite surprising.

A lot of my books sell very differently in German than they do in English. I've got one series that did okay in English, and I almost didn't translate it. The German version is, I think, my second bestselling series in German and has completely surprised me. So sometimes it's worth just experimenting a bit.

Otherwise, obviously as you said, romance is doing really well. There are a few surprises though. I had a chat with Draft2Digital and they gave me lots of information from their statistics, and they said about 40% of all the western title sales on Draft2Digital are actually in Germany, which is just a huge percentage.

Jo: In English?

Skye: Across languages.

Jo: Mm-hmm.

Skye: Germans, to be fair, they love their westerns. My dad in Germany, he has been watching westerns for I don't know how many decades. It is one of those things that is just really popular there.

Another thing is anything that is set in other countries and really has the location as almost like a character. There's lots of Cornwall, Scotland, different islands, but also mountains and cities.

So if your book is set in, even in New York City, if it has a clear setting—if it's not just that it could be any city—then that's a good one to think about translating.

In general, most genres can do well. There's a few where you have to be a bit careful. Second World War books, for example. If you have a book that portrays every single German as a Nazi and as evil, it might not do as well in Germany. So some common sense when it comes to historical books.

Otherwise, just look at German retailers, look at what is selling there—and not just Amazon. Places like Thalia, which is part of the Tolino Alliance, and they have about 40% of the market. So it's really important to look at them too, and not just at Amazon.

Jo: We'll come back to the distribution in a minute.

There are some important differences between the German market and the US/UK market.

Obviously we're talking about a different language, but of course there are a few things that are different that some people might not think about. So give us a few of those things that people definitely need to think about.

Skye: Okay, so even before you start publishing, you need to be aware that title protection is a thing in Germany. Your book can't have the same title as an already published book. That is a law that is basically there to avoid readers being confused.

So if you had five books with the same title, readers might not realise which book is by which author. You have to do your research and check if anyone else is using your title.

There are some exceptions—if it's a completely different category, so if there's a children's book with that title but you write spicy romance, then the chance that the reader gets confused is much lower.

Quite often you can then contact either the author or the publisher and ask, “Can I get written permission to use that title?” I did that for one of my series and it was totally fine. Just be sure to get it in writing, because if your book suddenly becomes a huge bestseller, they might reconsider.

So title protection is an important one. You need to research that before you publish.

One thing that people sometimes get confused about is reusing their English title. That's totally fine because it's your own title. So if your English title hasn't been used and you want to keep that same title, that works. It's just about other people's books where you can't use those titles.

Another important legal bit is the Impressum. It's the copyright page. To be fair, websites that are targeting German readers or a German audience have to have that Impressum.

It's usually on page two of the book, and it has things like your legal name, your address, and then the usual things like the translator's name, cover design, and other things you would usually put on a copyright page.

The problem is that technically you need to put your legal name in there unless you have a limited company, in which case you can also put the business name there, and your address.

A lot of people obviously don't want to do that for privacy reasons, especially romance authors where it's sometimes a bit sketchy when it comes to some readers who get a bit too obsessed.

There are services where you can pay a monthly or yearly fee and then use their address. It's a bit of a legal grey zone, but a lot of German authors are doing it because—especially as indie authors—we don't always want to put our legal address out there.

Jo: Just for people listening, I use my accountant's address. That's quite common. I mean, you have to share your address on your email for anti-spam laws and all that kind of thing. As you say, there are ways to use other addresses. That just needs to happen.

What else then do we need to think about?

Skye: There are things about the translator. A lot of things that people are sometimes scared about is when they hear that there is a copyright issue with translators and they think, “Oh, my translator has the copyright. I can't do anything.”

Actually, the translator is seen as an author—almost like a co-author of the translation in German law—because, to be fair, it's not just putting one word into another. Translation is quite a creative job, especially when it's fiction. It is a very creative job where the translator has to put a lot of their own creativity into it.

So in German law, they're recognised as the creator of that translation and therefore have certain rights. But you as the author, as soon as you have a contract with your translator—which is why you always, always, always have to have a contract—you get the usage rights.

This means it's exactly the same as with your English books. You can do with them what you want. You can get audiobooks, you can do print books, you can do whatever you want in different formats. It just needs to be clear in a contract that the translator is giving you the usage rights of that translation.

That's something that people sometimes find a bit scary, but actually it's really simple. Translations have been done for so long. It's a normal thing. It's just called slightly different. It has to be set out in a contract.

Jo: Just on that, that's when the translator themselves is in Germany, because if they are based somewhere else, still doing a German translation, that's not necessary. So that's something else for people to consider.

Skye: Yes, definitely. To be fair—

I would always try to get a translator based in the country.

I mean, I'm a native German speaker, but I've been in Scotland for so long now that I am not confident enough to translate my own books anymore because I'm not surrounded by German 24/7 and my grammar is slightly off and I don't have that up-to-date, modern lingo.

So if it's a translator who's only just moved somewhere else or a few years, that's fine. But if it's someone who's been in the US or UK or somewhere else for 20 years, I would be a bit more hesitant. That's just a personal perspective on that.

One other thing that's different is Sie and du. There are two different kinds of “you” when you talk to someone. There's the formal Sie, which you use basically amongst adults, in business contexts.

But even my German grandma—she had a friend and they used the formal Sie for about 10 years as friends because in German etiquette, the older person has to offer the younger person the informal du, and they never did that for some reason. We found it hilarious as kids that they were still using the formal Sie as really good friends.

So there's an entire culture there that people who haven't been to Germany or haven't lived there for a while just find a bit difficult, because there are so many different unwritten rules about when you use Sie and when you use the informal du.

It's weakened a bit over the years and nowadays even strangers would sometimes use the informal du depending on the context. It really depends. A good translator will usually handle that themselves.

They will find a scene where, for example, especially in romance, you meet as strangers in the beginning, so you use the formal Sie, and then at some point that formality turns to informality.

The translator will usually choose that moment and add a little extra scene or a sentence where they either offer it to each other or they just naturally switch into it. But then there might be an internal little monologue of, “Oh, he just used the informal du—I guess we're at that stage,” or, “I really appreciate that.”

Just to make it more natural, because that's something I quite often see with AI translation where that doesn't happen, and readers get confused. Why did they just switch from Sie to du without any kind of acknowledgement of that?

Jo: This is the same in Spanish and other languages, I imagine.

Skye: Yes, French as well. Italian too, I think. A lot of European languages have this.

Jo: I think that's something that English speakers just don't get. It is a really interesting moment. I guess that might not happen so much in other genres—that really is a thing in romance.

I was just thinking about some of my thrillers. They may never have time to get to du.

Skye: But then sometimes using du can also be a rude thing. So if you have an antagonist who really doesn't like your protagonist, they might just use du as a rude sort of address. Again, that's something that English speakers just wouldn't understand or even think of because we just have the one “you.”

Jo: We just have the one.

Jo: It's the tone. Of course, it's the tone.

Skye: Exactly, yes.

Jo: Okay, well let's get into the actual translation of the books themselves. Over the years I've worked with lots of humans. I've also licensed my rights. I've used different AI tools. I mean, there are tons, but as we record this—

What are the options that are available for translations? Give us some tips on working with humans and finding humans.

Because it can be super pricey. And of course most of us will never know about the quality until we publish it.

Skye: Oh, yes, definitely a note on that. I found that quite often you will already have German people on your newsletter list or on your social media, and most of them will be super happy to give you some feedback on your translation.

That's something I've used a lot. Not for German, because I speak the language, but when I did French and Italian translations. My French is—well, it used to be quite okay. It is passable at best now. So I would never feel confident enough to rate a translation.

So I asked my newsletter list, “Are there any French people here who would be happy to read the book? I'll send you a free copy at the end, and some swag.” There were a surprising number of people who got back to me.

The same applies to German and other languages, because if you don't speak the language, you sometimes lack the confidence of knowing if this is any good. Getting some reader feedback is super helpful.

For finding human translators, the easiest of course is word of mouth, and I'm a big fan of that because you get instant feedback on whether someone is good or not and whether it's easy to work with them.

Then there are freelancer platforms. Reedsy is one where everyone is vetted, so that's pretty good. But there are tons of other ones like Upwork and Fiverr, though there you have to do all the vetting yourself, so that takes a lot more time and effort.

There are also more and more agencies—translator agencies who specialise in doing indie book translations. There's Literary Queens, there's Valentine Translations, there are tons of them.

Then there's also, which I think a lot of authors ignore or don't know about, translation databases. There are two databases for German translators, for example, where you can search and you can usually narrow it down to whether you want literary translators, what kind of fiction or nonfiction you want.

An important thing is that a literary translator is very different from a standard translator who translates birth certificates or formal documents. You want someone who has experience with fiction if you write fiction. Someone who knows about adding drama through language.

Sometimes, for example, when you have an action scene, you might have shorter sentences. If you have someone who doesn't know about stuff like that, they might just think, “Oh, in German it sounds really nice to have this really long sentence.” Those little nuances are where having an experienced literary translator is a big bonus.

There are some platforms that do royalty-split translations that have been quite popular in the past. Most of them I wouldn't really recommend because you just don't get those professional translators there.

You usually get people who speak the language but don't really have much experience. So you might end up with a pretty bad translation, or people might just be using AI translations without telling you.

If you use a human translator, always, always get a sample, because yes, they might have amazing credentials, but until they've actually translated one of your books or a scene from your book, you don't really know how good they are.

I like to always use, if I write romance, a slightly sexy scene, because sex seems to show you if someone can translate or not. It's just what I've found, because if it sounds absolutely awkward or more like mechanical rather than an emotional, spicy thing, then that's a clear point for me to say, “No, thank you. I'll look for someone else.”

Action scenes, sexy scenes, really emotional ones, dialogue that has a bit of colloquial language or humour—those are good scenes to choose as a sample because that really shows you if a translator can do their job or not. Then, again, have some German people from your list give you feedback on that.

Also, if you work with human translators, always try to make sure that they will be available for your entire series.

And not even just a series—if you have lots of books, try to grab that translator, lock them in your basement, and never let them go, because you want their style for all your books.

Just like you have a style as an author, translators have a style and that will always shine through, as much as they try to be as close to your original. A bit of their style will always come through. It helps to have the same translator for at least the same series, preferably for as many of your books as possible.

You really want to tell them in the beginning, “This series has nine books. I want you to do all of these, even if we only do a few of them at the beginning. Are you available to do the rest later?” Because you don't want to end up having to find a new translator in the middle of the series.

That gives you a whole lot of extra work with trying to have a world bible that explains which words get translated and which get left as the original, and stuff like that.

When it comes to non-human translation, it's very different because of course you don't need to do all that vetting.

Tools have different capabilities and abilities, but in the end, if you put your book into a translation tool, you will always get a slightly different output. So it's not quite the same where you need an entire vetting process.

Jo: Just on the human translation, I think I'd be right in saying that every single author in the world would love to have the best human translator translating their book, whatever genre it is. That would just be amazing for all of us. But let's face it, that's extremely expensive.

So if I've got, let's say, a 70,000-word thriller, how much money are we talking about?

An approximate number, so people know what that might be.

Skye: Usually it goes by the word, but by the target language word count. Although it depends on the translator, traditional translators usually go by the target language because that's what they actually produce as their output.

The average at the moment is anything from about seven to nine euro cents per word as the medium price. You will find cheaper people.

You can go up as high as you want really. I have definitely seen translators who charge 15 cents and above per word, but those will usually be the ones who have worked with a lot of trad publishers who are used to being paid like that.

Although even in trad publishing, the rates are going down. With more and more authors wanting translations, I think in general rates are going down. Good for us, not so good for the translators.

You're definitely looking at thousands, even if you translate novellas. Then it depends—some translators have editing included, sometimes they don't.

A lot of them will have arrangements with other translators where they give the translation to another translator for them to edit it. Sometimes that's included in the price, sometimes it's extra.

Always make sure it gets edited, because just like when we write a book, it will never be exactly perfect. I say that as someone who writes very clean because I have a journalism background, so I'm used to writing really fast and clean for deadlines, but there will always be a few typos that just wriggle their way in.

Typos are evil like that. It's the same with translations.

Jo: So we are probably looking at 2,000 to 10,000 pounds, dollars, euros. We are talking about quite a lot, and this is the main reason I think that now, with AI becoming a lot better, people are looking at this.

Originally—and I don't even know, probably eight years now since I did my first, might even be a decade or more—I did at some point do a version in DeepL, which was an early AI translation tool. This was nonfiction, and then paid an editor, a German editor, to then edit that in German. Those books still get good reviews.

But now people are looking at options like GlobeScribe and ScribeShadow, or even just using Claude or ChatGPT. I'm actually working at the moment on a Claude Code pipeline through lots of different QA passes.

That's been really interesting for me, because I can say, “Okay, now you are a reader who likes these kinds of books. Read it for that.” And because we can now put really big books in, I can actually get a lot of really interesting feedback.

So I feel like there's a lot of potential with AI—potential for good stuff, potential for bad stuff too.

So talk a bit about that and what to watch out for with AI.

Skye: Okay, so I'm very much pro-AI and I use AI in lots of different things in my business, just to preface that. However, with translations, I'm still a bit wary, just because I have seen a lot of bad AI translations.

To be fair, I've experimented with it myself for one of my other pen names. It was readable. It was definitely readable. It had sometimes beautiful, gorgeous prose. Really. But there were, occasionally—quite often even—bits where I stumbled as a native speaker.

It's readable and, if I just need a little quick book in between, I would be mostly happy with that. I would read it.

It's the same as some of the early KU days where you found a lot of bad quality writing, but you just wanted to read it because the story was pretty good or because you were reading it in KU and so it didn't really matter that much.

There is that spectrum of quality where you have the, “Yes, it's good enough to read,” but, “Is it good enough to be up to your standards?” That's a decision that everyone has to make for themselves.

If they want the same quality that they put into their English book, or if they're fine with just offering that book to a new audience because maybe you wouldn't be able to do it otherwise.

I totally see that. Translation is so expensive. I don't even know how much I have spent on translations over the past few years. I'm lucky that most of my books make it back within the first weeks or months. I've never had a book that didn't make its money back, but I have heard a lot of people where that's not the case.

It is a lot of investment and I would never tell someone to go into debt or anything to do translations. Do it when you're at a time where you can afford it, or where you can also afford the loss if it doesn't work out.

Now, AI has changed that slightly because it now opens it up to almost anyone. Some of the AI translation tools are a few hundred pounds, but if you do it in Claude or ChatGPT or something where you already have a subscription, it can actually be quite cheap. You can do it for a few dollars or pounds.

I love, by the way, having someone in the UK. I'm so used to automatically saying everything in dollars, but actually I should be using pounds.

I think if you know what you're doing—and you clearly do, with your several passes, you know what you're doing with AI—but if someone just puts their book into Claude or ChatGPT or some random tool, it might just not be good enough.

Jo: Let's say it won't be good enough if you just do that. We know that.

You have to have QA passes—quality assurance. You have to have rules per genre.

There are ways of doing it. It's kind of like you have to get to know how translation works. It's a process. It's not just a translation, like you put something in Google Translate or a menu or something, because we do care. I think that's really important.

Skye: Yes. I think if you don't know how AI works—that you need detailed prompts, that you need a style guide, that you need all that extra material and not just your book, all those rules—then please don't do it.

If you value your German readers—and I think sometimes when I see people just churn out those translations without doing any quality control, using exactly the same cover or even just putting a German flag on it or something—I really feel bad for German readers because they're not being valued as having the same sort of value to us as authors as our English-speaking readers.

Maybe I'm a bit biased there because I read in multiple languages. I want to be able to get the same sort of quality in all languages. I want the author to think of me as being special because I'm their reader and I'm their customer.

I think we are on the way where AI translation can be almost autonomous. I would personally always have a human look over it. I know what I'm doing, and I'm almost happy with my translation system that I've built now in AI, but it still needs that human touch for a few things.

It still needs me to tell the AI, for example, “This is where we switch from Sie to du.” This is where I need to keep certain words in.

For example, I write a lot of Scottish books, and so words like “glen” or “loch”—they are words I want to stay the same in my German translation. I don't want to translate it to the German equivalent of “lake” because that just misses that Scottish context.

Things like that need instruction. A human translator will usually know that and chat to you about which words you want to keep and which ones you want translated. AI just needs our guidance, our helping hand, and if we don't know enough about the target language, we just miss knowing that.

Now, a lot of tools do it all for you basically, and they set up all these rules. I think many of them are at a very advanced stage now. But AI isn't perfect and it likes to hallucinate, it likes to add random things. So I will always still have a human touch at the end, even if it's just a quick edit.

A lot of people think that they just need a proofread after an AI translation, but AI doesn't really make typos—or not to an extent that humans do.

So proofreading isn't really what's needed for an AI translation. It is actual editing where you go for the style, the phrasing, and sometimes the context.

There's one example I always like to give. I have an alien romance where they go on a honeymoon, and because he's an alien and she's human, he misunderstands and thinks she wants to go to an actual moon. So it's a little pun in the book.

It doesn't work in German at all because the word “honeymoon” has nothing to do with moons or planets in German.

An AI would probably just try to translate that in a way that's quite close to the original. But my German translator, she had to come up with several different ways of fixing that issue, because humour is hard. It's hard even for humans to get the humour translated in a way that is still funny but also culturally appropriate.

If you have a book that is full of puns, it gets harder with AI. I am not saying it's impossible, but it needs a lot of handholding.

Jo: Yes, I think humour is hard to translate in general, isn't it?

Let's move on to the distribution, because again, having done quite a lot of different languages over the years, I do use Amazon KU for my books in German and Italian and Spanish and some French.

So I haven't gone wide in terms of ebook and print or audio, in fact, because I have a lot of books and it is hard to go wide in English, let alone in other languages. But you mentioned earlier that Thalia has 40% of the market or something, and that special editions and print books are important.

So what are the decisions we have to make around the actual publishing?

Skye: In Germany they did a really cool thing, and I wish they'd done that in other countries. When the bookshops saw that Amazon was growing and posing a threat to them—not just with print books but also with ebooks—a lot of the German bookstores got together and they formed the Tolino Alliance.

They have big book chains like Thalia, but also I think it was over 1,500 indie bookshops that all got together. They all support this ecosystem for ebooks, which means they all share the same e-readers. They share the same sort of backend for the shops, which made it really easy for them because they didn't all have to develop an ebook system.

It saved them a lot of money. It made it really easy to tell readers, “This is the Tolino system. You can get your books at our bookshops, but you can read them on your Tolino e-reader no matter where you get the books from.” The Tolino e-readers are actually the same as Kobo e-readers, just rebranded.

They've got that big advantage there—these independent bookshops and book chains all got together. Now it's hard to find numbers because Amazon doesn't really like to share their numbers, but it's about 40% of the German ebook market, which means it rivals Amazon. They have about the same.

Then the rest is split by Apple Books, Google Play, and some of the smaller players. So it is a huge chunk of the market.

I'm wide with pretty much all my English books. So for me, I looked into KU, but when I saw that I was going to miss out on 60% of the market—even if Amazon has 45%, that's still a big chunk—I decided to go wide.

To be fair, I haven't regretted it, because Tolino are amazing to work with. I like to compare them to Kobo because they have a really lovely human team where you can just email them and tell them, “I've got a new release coming up,” and they will put you into different promos and it's all free.

Jo: Do you publish direct to Tolino, or do you use Draft2Digital?

Skye: Yes, you can publish direct to Tolino and that's actually the best way of doing it. You don't have access to their marketing opportunities if you use a distributor.

The Tolino dashboard is annoyingly all in German, but by now every browser has a translating plugin built in. I know lots of authors who don't speak a single word of German who navigate Tolino very successfully.

They started with only ebooks in the beginning, and then about two weeks after the first edition of my book on German translations was published, they introduced print books, which meant my book was immediately out of date. I was fuming.

But this time they introduced audiobooks a few weeks before my Kickstarter launch for the second edition, so this time the audiobook part is included. I was very happy about that, because it was a pain to just tell everyone, “Well, this book is out now but it's actually missing a big part of how to do print books in Germany.”

So Tolino does print, ebooks, and audiobooks. And just because you're in KU with your ebooks doesn't mean you can't publish your print books via Tolino. I highly recommend that, because IngramSpark—which most of us indies use for distribution for print books—doesn't get you into the German bookstores.

They used to. Then German stores have fixed price laws where books have to be the same price in all stores, and IngramSpark kept going against that. They kept sending them the wrong prices. So German bookstores at some point just said, “Nope, we've had enough of this. We no longer take books from IngramSpark.”

So now Tolino, in my opinion, is the best way of getting your books listed in German online bookstores, but they can also help you get into brick-and-mortar stores.

One of my books was featured by them, I think two years ago, and it was in about 300 of their shops all across Germany. It had its own little pedestal and it was amazing.

Tolino love working with their indie authors. They also love romance, which is always a bonus because some stores are more prudish than others. It's really easy to work with them. They speak perfect English, so you can do all your communication outside of the dashboard in English.

Their audiobooks feature is very new. Until they did that, it was much harder for German audiobook distribution because places like Findaway Voices and other distributors wouldn't get you into the Tolino Alliance stores for audio. That's a big chunk that we were missing out on.

I was always looking for ways to get my German audiobooks into those stores, but the German distributors that I found were really difficult to upload to, to be honest. I'm a very technical person, but it challenged even me.

I did not like that experience at all. At some point I really just gave up and wanted to throw my computer out of the window.

So when Tolino introduced that, I was celebrating internally. The only problem with their distribution at the moment for audio, because it's so new, is that you can't exclude any shops. So it's all or nothing.

They will get you into all the different places, including Audible, Spotify—you name it, lots of different streaming services and retailers—but you can't exclude any.

So while they don't actually want exclusivity, if you published it yourself at the same time through ACX or Findaway Voices or something else, you would have duplicates, and of course, we try to avoid those.

Jo: Is it human narration only, or do they also accept AI narration?

Skye: They accept AI narration. The thing with Tolino is that they want everything made very clear. If you publish any books with them that have an AI production aspect, you need to put that into your Impressum. For audiobooks, there's a box to tick to make it clear.

Jo: Hmm.

Skye: So they are open to it all. You just need to declare it.

Jo: Which I think should be true everywhere, to be fair.

Skye: Oh, definitely. And a lot of German distributors—while I was researching for this book, one thing I always looked at is, “Do they need you to declare your AI use?” More and more German distributors and retailers now want you to do that. I think that's the way it's going.

It's not a judgement thing. I think it's just making it clear to readers. In Germany, it's all about transparency. That's why there are all those laws with GDPR—everyone will have heard about that one by now. But there are lots of other laws where it's all about consumer rights and transparency, and that's one of them.

Jo: Is there anything else on the distribution side we need to think about?

Skye: One thing I like to highlight is libraries, because that's quite a big thing in Germany too. They love books and bookstores and they love libraries. Some of the ways we get our English books into libraries—like a distributor like Draft2Digital for OverDrive—OverDrive is growing in Germany.

There are other systems like Onleihe, just to name one. You can't get into those through, for example, Draft2Digital or PublishDrive or StreetLib. Tolino gets you into those.

There are also subscription platforms that are growing. I think it's the same as in the English-speaking market. People love a subscription, and I love them. I just don't like exclusivity. So I very much support any subscription platform that doesn't require me to be exclusive to them.

Skoobe is one of them. They used to be an independent platform, and then the Tolino Alliance bought them. So now they're integrated into the Tolino stores. That means it's really prominent.

Basically, any time you go to an ebook on, for example, Thalia, it will have a banner there saying, “You can also get this in our subscription.” So it's taken a while to grow, but actually in December I now made more with their subscription programme than I made in book sales.

I think three of my books were in their top 10 in December. To be fair, that was a pretty good month. But it definitely shows that it can take a while to grow these subscription platforms, but when you do, it can be really successful and very much worth it.

So I highly suggest looking into those sorts of platforms too, not just the standard retailers and the platforms that you're already used to.

Jo: Fantastic. So we've now got translations, they're on the various stores, and then just like in English, one of our next challenges is actually marketing the books.

Now this becomes another challenge, because one of the reasons I am in KU for foreign languages is because you get the five free days and you can do Amazon ads. I mean, you can do Amazon ads for wide books too, but it's easier to know that there are some options for marketing at all.

I don't do email marketing. I don't do social media, so I'm pretty bad at marketing in foreign languages.

So what are your suggestions for those who want to do more active marketing in German especially?

Or even if we don't speak German, it can't be all the personal stuff. But are there also advertising things like BookBub? What are our options basically?

Skye: There are quite a few things. It's not quite as easy as in English, of course, but I think sometimes you have to remember that you already have most of the material for marketing when you've released a book.

You will have made graphics in English, you will have written a newsletter, you will have done some social media posts. All that material is already there, so you don't have to reinvent the wheel.

You can just translate that, and for that, AI translation is really good because it's very quick. You don't have to bother your translator. You can just get that done. That's what I had to remind myself, because in the beginning I did everything from scratch and it took me forever and I was hating it.

Then I realised, well, I could just look at the newsletter I wrote three years ago when that book released in English and translate that. That's done within a minute and I can send that out. So remember that you have a lot of content already.

There's no BookBub or nothing as big as BookBub. There is a site called BookDeals, which sends out newsletters for both reduced or free books and also for new releases. I use them for pretty much all my new releases, or at least always the first in series.

They're nowhere near as big as BookBub, so don't expect miracles, but I generally always break even or a bit more. It's hard to tell, of course, especially if you do several things for a new release. But my instinctive look on this is that it's worth it.

BookDeals is the big one. There are a few other promo sites, but to be honest, I've not really found any of them to give me a positive ROI. I experiment with them occasionally and I listed them all in my book just for completeness, but BookDeals is the big one.

Then there is LovelyBooks, which is the German Goodreads.

Some Germans also use Goodreads, so always make sure to have all your German books listed there. But LovelyBooks is the big one.

I love that place because people are so much kinder than on Goodreads. I avoid Goodreads completely. If I need a review, I send my assistant there to look at reviews. I don't go there. It is scary.

LovelyBooks—the name is kind of telling. It is a more lovely place. People are generally more friendly. They are probably a bit more critical when they write reviews than they are on retailers, but I have found it really nice to build a community there.

You can do these book clubs where you give away a copy of your book, either as print books—or I always do ebooks because I don't want to send books to Germany. Then people discuss the book as a sort of book club and then they review it at the end.

I have had great success with that. I've built up a community of readers who will now buy my books too, even if they don't get them for free. I found some beta readers through that. So I love LovelyBooks.

The annoying thing again is it's in German. However, their support all speaks English and you can email them with questions. They're really good.

Even if you don't plan to run any book clubs or anything like that because you don't speak the language, I would always advise just setting up an author profile there because it makes it easier for your books to be found.

You can track reviews, you can track reads, and that just gives you an extra place to get more visibility for free.

Ads—there's not much difference compared to what you do for your English-language books. The one thing is with Facebook ads, now because of EU data protection laws, it's much harder to target because people can opt out of ads and targeting.

In general, cost-per-click ads are cheaper than in the US or the UK, so that's a bonus.

BookTok is big and only growing there. I don't really do social media for my German books because I just don't have the bandwidth. I wish I could, and I know some people who outsource that.

In an ideal world, I would have a social media account for every single language, but it's not an ideal world and I just have limited hours in the day. But even just creating an account so that people can tag you, so that people can find you, can already be a good start.

One thing that's not maybe a marketing strategy as such, but something I like to highlight, is pre-orders. If you write in series, always, always make sure that the next books in your series are up for pre-order, because—

German readers have been burned so many times by authors or even publishers who just translate book one in a series and then stop.

They are quite hesitant sometimes to start a new series when they see it's book one of something and they don't see the next book up for pre-order. To be fair, it's similar in English.

I always make sure to have a pre-order up for the next book. Because people would just not read the series until it's complete or until they know it will be complete at some point.

So always set up a pre-order if you can. Don't set it up when you don't actually know when your translation is being done, or choose a date far in the future.

Just make it very clear to your readers that you are intending to translate the entire series, that you're not going to disappoint them, that they're not just wasting their money on a book one only to never find out what happens next.

Jo: Fantastic. Well, this is a big decision for people to make, I think, because there's no point in doing one book in German and then not doing anything else, in the same way as doing one book in English or any language. You have to think about investing in an audience. So lots for people to think about.

The book is fantastic. It's called Self-Publishing in German.

So where can people find you and your books online?

Skye: For my author-facing things, just go to SkyeMacKinnon.com/authors, and there you find the book about German translations. You also find more information on what I do.

You can book consultations with me. I love doing those one-to-ones, especially about translations, because you can really dive into someone's catalogue and look at what would be a good strategy for someone, rather than just in general.

Otherwise, it's SkyeMacKinnon.com for all my romance. If you want adorable children's books, it's IslaWynter.com. That's Wynter with a Y.

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

Skye: Thank you so much for having me.

The post Self-Publishing in German: How to Translate, Distribute, and Market Your Books with Skye MacKinnon first appeared on The Creative Penn.

In the intro, my reflections on running an author-publisher business after a fantastic e-commerce workshop run by Blubolt, and why you will always pay for marketing with either your time or your money; AI-Assisted Artisan Author webinars; and last call for my Kickstarter Bones of the Deep – J.F. Penn.

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

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

Adam Leipzig is a producer, former studio executive, and educator whose work spans film, media, and technology. He served as a senior executive at Walt Disney Studios and as President of National Geographic Films.

His film credits include March of the Penguins and Dead Poets Society, with projects recognised by the Academy Awards, BAFTA, the Emmys, and Sundance. He is the author of several books on filmmaking and his latest book is Fearless Persistence: Creative Life, Creative Work, and the Ten Laws of Culturenomics.

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

Show Notes

• Why writing books still matters in a world saturated with visual media
• The Jeffrey Katzenberg “next” lesson and the power of fearless persistence
• How uncertainty and the “long middle” are essential parts of the creative process
• What film editing can teach writers about cutting, shaping, and refining their work
• The 10 Laws of Culturenomics, including why awareness is not desire and why distribution is everything
• How generative AI is changing filmmaking — and why creatives should be the architects, not the tools

You can find Adam at AdamLeipzig.com.

Transcript of Interview with Adam Leipzig

Jo: Adam Leipzig is a producer, former studio executive, and educator whose work spans film, media, and technology. He served as a senior executive at Walt Disney Studios and as President of National Geographic Films.

His film credits include March of the Penguins and Dead Poets Society, with projects recognised by the Academy Awards, BAFTA, the Emmys, and Sundance.

He is the author of several books on filmmaking and his latest book is Fearless Persistence: Creative Life, Creative Work, and the Ten Laws of Culturenomics. Welcome to the show, Adam.

Adam: Thank you so much for having me, Jo.

Jo: I'm excited to talk to you today. You have written several books, but you have worked on many more films. So I wondered, why do you think books still have a part to play in reaching people?

What do you love about writing books that is different to your filmmaking work?

Adam: You can put so much information in a book, and the beautiful thing about a book is that you can pick it up wherever you want, whenever you want, and leave it off and go back to it. It's just waiting for you and it's there.

It really allows me, and other authors like me, to share information in a different way, with more details and more stories and more specificity. I love the ability to just share that information and have it always available. You don't need a device, you don't need to have a subscription. You can just go to it whenever you want.

You asked me what I love about writing. Like a lot of writers, I'm not sure I love writing, but I do love having written. The thing about a book is that it's a very solitary exercise.

A film is a highly collaborative exercise. No movie gets made by one person. It's made by hundreds or sometimes thousands of people. But this book is just me and a laptop and notes and a lot of thought.

It's a very introverted, almost monkish existence while you're doing that, and then it has to go out into the world—and that's when it really starts to interact with people.

So there's this huge difference between being alone and being always in a collaborative environment, which is what happens when I'm making a movie.

Jo: Most listeners will be independent authors in some way, and a lot of us do this because we're control freaks. We like being the only people.

So how is that different? You mentioned collaboration in the film industry, but is it almost freeing to do a book without having that? I mean obviously you have editors and publishers and stuff, but—

Is it freeing in some creative way?

Adam: It is really nice, because there is not another point of view in the room and I can just say what I feel and know that that's there.

At the same time, you're right—I have had some amazing editor help and I've had some great early readers that have given me feedback on it and helped me make it so much better than it was when I finished the first draft.

I knew that going in. I always test and share what I'm doing to make sure that it lands in the way that I wanted it to land, and it can be helpful for people.

Jo: Getting into the book, you have a chapter on “what you do matters.” I feel like this is super hard. This is not a political show, so we're not doing politics, but there are a lot of big things going on in the world.

It can be very hard as writers to think, is writing my book actually going to make a difference?

So how can you encourage people?

Adam: That's the hardest thing, Jo, because there is a lot going on in the world right now. Everything that's going on in the world right now exists because it's following a certain narrative. I don't believe that narratives are come up with because people look at things that are happening and say, “Oh, well let's just write what happened.”

I think that we do things from micro experiences that we have with ourselves, our relationships, our families, to the macro experiences of politics and global situations. I believe that happens because there is a narrative that is being followed.

So what I say to all creative people is that it's our job to craft and express the narratives that matter—and different narratives—so those narratives can be followed.

One of the points that I make in the book is that poets are not overtly really dangerous people. Poets are generally lovely people, a lot of them don't talk too much.

They're great to have dinner with, and they just work with words—and often not a lot of words, right? Because beautiful poetry is often concise and simple and spare.

Yet there are places where poets are in jail. Because the narratives of those concise, spare, gorgeous idealistic words matter so much that those voices need to be silenced, which means those narratives are dangerous sometimes. Those narratives present an alternate world, an alternate view of reality.

I think it's really our job as creative people, as entrepreneurs, as people who are essentially creating narratives out of the soul of our lives and our experience—we want to express those to the world. It's really important for us to express those to the world, especially now, especially because so much is going on.

Those narratives are going to become pathways that others can look at and maybe follow. I think that's really important. It's the reason why we do our work.

Jo: I absolutely agree with you around writing the narratives that we want in the world. “Be the change you want to see in the world” and all that.

I also want to call out the fact that there are hundreds of thousands of books now published, and you come from the film industry, and many more people really watch films or play games than read books.

I've wondered about this myself. I've written a few screenplays and sometimes it feels that wouldn't it be better to try and put our words into a visual medium? A lot of authors listening will do micro video like TikTok and all of this. So this is back to the question of—

Why books? How can we change these narratives when we feel like we're drowned out by all the media?

Adam: I think it's great for authors to express themselves in other media. I have a pretty active Instagram channel, and I love doing that, but it's a really different thing. I'm talking to people in two-minute bursts with very specific things. It's not the same and not the same detail as a book.

If we let our understanding of the ocean of content that is always coming to us stop us from doing anything, we wouldn't do anything. That's also true about movies. There are probably 10,000 movies made every year. There are a few hundred that are released.

So if every day I thought, “Oh, the movie that I'm working on is maybe not going to be released because there's only a small percent of movies that are made that are released.”

Or worse than that, “Of all the movies that are made, there's 500 different shows on Netflix and Apple and Amazon and there's so many choices.” If I thought that everything I was going to do is going to be drowned out, I wouldn't do anything.

I just don't believe that's true. I think it's our job to do things. Yes, there's an ocean of content out there, but what we do really matters, and it doesn't have to matter at gigantic scale. We don't know the scale that our work is going to achieve over time.

One of the early films that I worked on is a film called Dead Poets Society, and that script was passed on by every studio at least three times. It's probably a film that I couldn't get made now for all kinds of reasons, because it's not a sequel and it doesn't have superheroes or visual effects.

When we made that movie, we didn't know the impact it was going to have. It could have been drowned out by things, but it rose to a level that everywhere in the world I go, someone has seen that movie, including people who were not born when that movie was made.

We don't know the long arc of our work and the people that it affects.

Jo: I love that movie too. “Oh Captain, my Captain.” I can hear everyone saying that behind the screens.

This brings us to the title, Fearless Persistence, because of course Dead Poets Society ended up being an incredible success, but not everything turns out so well. I wondered if you could talk about this persistence.

How do you keep creating after something you perceived as a failure, or perhaps all the things that didn't get made?

Why is persistence so important that you use it in the title?

Adam: I've been super fortunate. I've worked with amazing people and on great projects. I've made 40 films at this point, and I'm making more. I've tried to make 400 films. I failed at getting them made 90% of the time, and that's okay. I just keep going.

When I was working at Disney and I was an executive at Walt Disney Studios for seven years, there was one movie that we were opening and nobody had really high expectations for it. But it opened huge on a weekend and it beat the competition.

We were in our Monday morning meeting and we were dancing on the tables and we were so excited. Jeffrey Katzenberg, who was running the studio at that time, came in, looked around the room, put his hands on his hips, and said, “Next.” We just had to move on.

I really learned the meaning of the word “next” about four months later when we had a film that we all knew was going to be hugely successful and make a lot of money and give everyone their bonuses, and it completely bombed at the box office. It was like you gave a party and nobody showed up to eat the hors d'oeuvres.

We were in the Monday morning meeting, very glum and not sure what was going to happen. Were we going to be fired? What was going to happen? And Jeffrey walked into the room and said, “Next.”

Jo: Mm-hmm.

Adam: And we just keep going. I think that is the great and defining quality of people who really have sustainable lives, either as creatives or business people or entrepreneurs. We're persistent. We're just like those little birds—you put their beak in water and they just keep bobbing up. We just keep going.

It's not about the people who are the most talented, because I'm certainly not the most talented. I'm certainly not the smartest. I'm certainly not the most creative.

There are people who are smarter and more talented and more creative than me all the time, and I get so much energy in being able to know them and work with them. But I am super persistent. I don't stop.

If there's something that I really believe in, I'll just keep going. I started taking notes on this book 10 years ago. There are movies that took 12 years to get made. You just keep going.

There are times, as a producer, where everybody's fallen away. There was a director attached, there was a star attached. They all left, they did other projects. The material is no longer under option. You don't even have legal rights to it anymore.

You just keep blowing on the embers and then eventually maybe it gets made. That's what it's about.

Jo: Do you think there's some kind of serendipity or something more that makes a book or a film? Is it timing? Is there just some chemistry?

You talked earlier about testing and sharing things to see if they're going to work, but as you mentioned, some films you think are going to be amazing and they bomb. Other things are a slow burn.

How do you know when to make a film if you just can't predict this stuff?

Adam: You can never predict it, but I think you start with: do you really, really think about it all the time? Do you really care about it? It's not like you're in a meeting or you read a script or you hear an idea and you're super excited about it—but are you still excited about it tomorrow morning? The next day and the next?

If you keep waking up every morning thinking, “Wow, that's great, I've got to get that forward,” then I think that is the first indication for me that it's going to have some staying power.

I don't think I am that different from everybody else. So if it's something that consistently excites me, I feel like there's going to be at least some other people in the world that it's also going to excite.

Jo: Do you think you have a voice, I guess, as a filmmaker as much as a writer?

Are there things that excite you consistently that you're drawn to? Or do you think it's much wider as a filmmaker than a writer?

Adam: I think it's a lot wider as a filmmaker. Part of it's also just my capacity right now as a writer. I really like the writing in Fearless Persistence and I also recorded the audiobook. I love listening to the audiobook experience. I think it's some of the best writing I've ever done.

I have not yet found the capacity to write a novel or to write fiction in the way that other people can. So part of it's just my skill and capacity at this point in my writing career, where I think I'm pretty good at expressing ideas in a nonfiction setting, but I haven't developed the skill set for fiction.

In movies, I make documentaries. I make fiction feature films. What attracts me is character. It's always the character, the people, the journey.

Are the people really interesting? Do I want to spend two hours of my life in a cinema with them, or 10 hours of my life watching those episodes on a streaming channel? That's what always starts with me. If the character is interesting, then I'll keep going.

Jo: I think the book, Fearless Persistence, has a lot of your character in it and your experience. It's not just a nonfiction book of prescriptive rules. You did bring a lot of voice into it, I think.

Adam: Thank you. I try to make it be like we're sitting down and we're talking and we're having a conversation.

Jo: Coming back to the book—a quote from the book: “Uncertainty isn't the enemy of creativity. It's its greatest ally.”

You talk about these messy and unpredictable times. I'm what we call a discovery writer. Some people say “pantser.” It mostly is quite chaotic and unpredictable.

Could you talk about this uncertainty and messy creativity?

Adam: One of the things I really try to do in Fearless Persistence is give support to all of us in this messy, unpredictable—what I call “the long middle”—where stuff is happening, but you're not seeing obvious results out there. You're either in the world or in your project, and you're just in this mess.

That mess is a beautiful place, and I'm trying to give support to the fact that that mess is gorgeous and it's part of the process. It's part of everybody's process. We shouldn't feel as though we are not doing our job when we're in that long, unpredictable, uncertain middle.

Because out of that, we discover what we actually want. It gives us a way to refine our taste and refine our direction because we are so uncertain.

Then there's this moment—and I don't know if you find this in your own writing, Jo—but there's this moment where that uncertainty changes into: there's no choices here at all. This is just what I have to do.

I actually think that the greatest freedom is when there's no choices. Where the path is just there, but we've got to get through the thicket to get to that path. And there's always a thicket.

Jo: There's a moment for me where the chaos becomes more certain and I'm like, okay, that's the story. I thought it might have been something else, but now that's what it is.

I often have too much material as well. So I wanted to ask you about this too, because as an author with a book, editing is hard for us. Of course there are lots of words and we have to go through it all, but editing on a film—I can't even imagine how hard the editing process is.

Could you talk about editing and how you cut and organise these massive projects?

Adam: Yes, editing is really hard, but it's also so fun. I think being on a set is great. It's the most fun a kid could have. But being in an editing room is also the most fun a kid could have, because you have all of the pieces and there are so many ways to do it. This is where a film is actually made—in the editing room.

Probably the way books are made also is in the editorial process between the writer and your own brain as the editor, or if you have someone who's helping you edit it.

Editing is really interesting because it's the only craft that did not exist before filmmaking. Everything else existed, right? There were scripts, there were actors, there were costumes, there was art direction, there was production design, there was music.

Editing was a craft that had to be invented for film. So it's a craft that's only about 120 years old.

When we make a film, the first thing that the editor does is just put all of the scenes together in a first editor's cut, a rough assembly. It's basically every scene that was in the script as it was shot, and the editor just tries to choose the best angles.

That generally comes out maybe a week or two after we wrap photography, and that first cut could be three or four hours long because it's got everything in it.

Then the process is: let's take that out. Let's take that out. You don't need this. You can move this scene here and move it there before the other scene. We don't really need that shot. Or can we get to a closeup there? And you get it down, down, down—just like in writing where you kill your darlings.

I actually find editing the most fun I have. “Oh, I don't need that sentence.” Or, “I can take out three words here and the sentence is better.” We go through exactly the same process in film editing and squinch it all down to the most compelling and efficient way to tell the story.

Jo: I'm glad you say it's fun because I also like editing. I find the editing much more creatively fulfilling because I actually can figure out the book that way. It's so funny, I think as writers, many people either love the editing or they love the first draft. It seems like you enjoy the whole process.

Adam: I like the editing so much more than the first draft. I feel like I had to get through the first draft. That was my long middle, that was my uncertain period, that was my thicket. Then my editing was, “Oh, great. Let's cross this out. Let's change that word. Let's lose that paragraph.” That was fun.

Jo: So let's say we now have a book or we have a film. In your book, law eight of culturenomics is that “without distribution, there is nothing.” So now we have to get this out there, and this is really difficult.

Can you talk about how film distribution has changed? Can you also reflect on how it is for writers, because our distribution has changed a lot too?

Adam: So, as you mentioned in the last section of the book, I've observed over the past 30 years that when a work is both aesthetically really excellent and also economically viable and sustainable for the creators, it always observes these ten principles. I call them the 10 Laws of Culturenomics.

One of them is “without distribution, there is nothing,” by which I mean: unless your audience, your market, the people that you are seeking to share or serve with the work—unless they can get it, it doesn't really matter. It's like that tree falling in the forest and no one's around to hear it.

I always think about my market and my distribution before I start making the movie. I was thinking about that as I was writing the book, because I really want it to be there to meet people where they are and I want them to be able to get it.

Film distribution has changed a lot, especially during the pandemic. People stayed home and cinema admissions have fallen off 30% from pre-pandemic levels, so people are going out to cinemas less.

That means fewer films are being distributed in cinemas for any viable period of time. Sometimes some movies will be out there for one or two days, literally, in cinemas, and then they go right to streaming.

On the streaming side, there was a glut of streaming content. All the streaming channels overinvested in streaming. There were too many shows. I don't know about your Netflix queue or your Amazon queue, but it's unnavigable. There is so much stuff. Now they've cut back a lot—they're just doing a lot less.

We're in a situation now where anything can get out there somehow. The question is, does your market, does your audience know about it? Do they want to invest the time to experience it?

One of the other Laws of Culturenomics is that “awareness is not desire.” There's a lot of things that we're aware of that we don't want to spend our time with. Everybody was aware of Disney's new Snow White movie. Nobody wanted to go see it.

Jo: I must say, I'm not the key demographic for that!

Adam: But you knew about it?

Jo: Was that a live action one?

Adam: Yes.

Jo: I don't understand those live action ones, to be honest. Maybe that's why—

Adam: I think we are sequelled out. I look at the movie business and I just think what audiences really want is something new, please. Something we haven't seen before. We don't want the 95th iteration of something from the MCU.

The studios, because the movies cost so much and they're so risk-averse, talk a lot about “pre-aware titles.”

In other words, titles that you've heard of before, so you're going to go see the movie.

It works to a certain extent, but I just think it's cinematically boring. In that world, you never could have predicted Oppenheimer. You never could have predicted Barbie. Movies that really don't have a precedent, but they did so well because they're different. I think audiences are craving something different right now.

Jo: It's interesting though, isn't it? I agree on one level, but then I also watch Bridgerton and we watched the latest series as soon as it came out. I guess that is pre-aware to a point. I don't read historical romance, yet I really like the show. I think it's because of Shonda Rhimes. I watched Grey's Anatomy for about 20 years.

Adam: She's great.

Jo: She's amazing. So I feel like this is why it's hard, isn't it? It's hard to know. As fiction writers particularly listening, we have very specific genre audiences, and they often don't cross over into other genres. They love their genre fiction. So it is hard to balance original work that may not be easily sold and the other stuff.

I guess that's why the studios do it, right, because they think they can make enough money with the next Marvel movie.

Adam: Yes, but I'm curious to know what you think about this, because even within a genre, a really good genre movie or a really good genre book is not the same as all the other books or films in the genre. It's familiar in that it does what the genre says you have to do, but it's different.

It's got those unique things that make us feel like super fans, that we really love it. It's familiar enough to fall within the genre—and yes, genres have rules that you've got to follow—but then there's something unique and different that's exciting. And that's why we say, “Hey Jo, you've got to read this book.”

Jo: I agree with you. I love that you said “awareness is not desire.” This is another problem with our creative work, right? We have to do marketing. We can throw all this stuff out there, and yet it may or may not work.

So let's talk about your book marketing. Obviously you are on this podcast, and I presume your publicists are pitching lots of podcasts, but—

What are you doing to promote the book that might be different to a film release?

Adam: Well, I don't have a hundred million dollars.

Jo: Surprise!

Adam: Right? I've got a few hundred dollars, so we're just doing it this way.

As you know, once upon a time, legacy publishers actually did marketing. Legacy publishers barely do any marketing now. Every author has to do it themselves. So we have to do this ourselves.

It's been the hardest thing. I think it's the hardest thing that we've all had to adopt, that we have to do this thing where there used to be a marketing department and you just hand it over to them and we could just be in our own little creative space. But no, we've got to do this also.

So what am I doing? I've amped up my social media. I'm speaking. I am on podcasts like this. I'm sharing as much as I can.

I'm asking circles of people who have been early readers of the book. I'm really grateful because I've had really enthusiastic response to it, both from creatives and also some business people, which was surprising to me, but really great.

Someone said, “This is the best business book in the past 10 years,” which is really interesting, right? Because you read it, Jo, as an author, but she read it as someone who sits on the board of major companies. That was a pretty interesting response.

I'm just asking them to be advocates and share it around. I'd just like to be those people who blow on the embers and let's see if we can make a fire.

Jo: We talked about the fun bits earlier. I'm enjoying our conversation, but I know that marketing is not necessarily in the fun bucket.

Are you finding bits of the marketing you enjoy?

Adam: Yes, I love meeting the audience. I love meeting the people that I'm writing the book for and sharing it with.

I've been fortunate enough to be asked to run a writer's workshop in Greece for the past few years. It's a retreat centre called Rosemary's House. It's on the east coast of Greece. A dozen writers.

I work with writers all the time, but they're always writing a specific thing, like a screenplay or something. This was a dozen writers all writing different things, and I'd never done that before. I had an extraordinary time.

The first year I went, I'd had all these notes for this book, Fearless Persistence, that I'd been compiling for some time. But there I was in the room and I was with the people that I was really intending to write the book for, and that kicked me in the butt and I wrote the book.

Then the next year I was back and I finished it while we were there at the writer's retreat. So that was great, and I was with another group of writers. I'll be back there again later this year and the book will be out.

So it's this fabulous continuation of really engaging with and meeting the people that I'm seeking to serve with this book.

I really enjoy encouraging and mentoring and sharing the systems that are undergirding the creative process, and then the process of how do you build a sustainable life, including all these super practical things that they don't teach you in art school or writing school or film school or even business school.

How do you actually build a sustainable life in this practice? I love that. I guess that's marketing, but it's also just being with the people that you're there to serve.

Jo: I love that you use “serve.” I use the same word. I say, “Who do you serve?” And that can help people, because I feel like creative people are like, “We don't want to be marketers, we don't want to be salesy.” So if you reframe it as service—who are you trying to help, who are you trying to entertain—that actually helps.

Coming to the business side, you mentioned systems. You are right, the book has a lot of business in it, which I love because we talk a lot about business on this show. In one section you say there are only four ways to monetise your creative work.

So could you talk a bit about those different ways to monetise your creative work?

Adam: Yes. This has been true for maybe 5,000 years because it's not about technology, it's just about how work is monetised. There are only four ways that any piece of work is monetised.

1. For sale. You have a book, and you go to your favourite bookstore and you buy the book, and now you own the book.
2. For rent. You could rent a book from your library, or in a movie context, what you're really renting is the seat for two hours to watch the movie.
3. On subscription. People have subscriptions to Kindle Unlimited or other platforms, or people have subscriptions to a streaming service.
4. Free. When it's ad-supported. That's like linear television where there's ads, or Amazon where there's ads and you don't pay for it.

For sale, for rent, on subscription, or free—those are the only ways anything is ever transacted.

When it's ad-supported, for example, some people have YouTube channels that are very successful. YouTube is free, and then YouTube is making money from the ads and the creators are getting a tiny little slice of the ad revenue.

Jo: Like this podcast. I have sponsors who pay, and they're all related to the author industry. They're companies that I use and work with. I personally recommend them, and that means this podcast is free.

Adam: Thank you, sponsors.

Jo: Yes, thank you, sponsors! I also have patrons—people who subscribe to the show to support it as well. So I guess we don't have to be in one bucket or another.

We can have our work in different buckets.

Adam: Ideally, you can have your work in every single one of them. Not always, not necessarily always at exactly the same simultaneous moment, but at a certain point as the work gets out there into the world, as it's lived long enough, it probably will be in every bucket.

That's great because we want our work to be as accessible to the people that we're serving in any way they want to get it.

Jo: I totally agree. And your audiobook, as you mentioned, will be available in those different formats as well.

Adam: Yes.

Jo: I find that, especially with nonfiction audio, what I love is being able to listen to just a chapter, just a chapter in a specific part. Someone could actually listen to the 10 Laws of Culturenomics separately to some of the rest of the book. I love that.

Adam: I'd never done that before. It was so powerful to record the audiobook because up until that moment, my relationship with this book was fingers typing keyboards, electrons on a screen. It was a completely silent experience.

Then I was in this recording booth in Los Angeles and I started speaking the words, and I was visualising the people that I was writing it for as I was doing it. It was so powerful. Then I listened to it and I thought, wow, this is actually a really good experience.

It was so powerful that I was recently in Paris because I'm working on some films that are in Europe, and I decided to create a special advanced listener edition of the audiobook, where I took the chapters and put them into individual or grouped listening units.

In a recording studio in Paris, I recorded some prefaces and reflections on those listening units, which are now thematic.

I'm really proud of that edition. It's not for everybody. The regular Audible audiobook is going to be out there, but this version, which is on my website, I think is a really wonderful version for someone who just wants me to walk with you as you go through the experience of the book.

Jo: Are you selling that direct from your website?

Adam: Yes, I'm selling it direct on the website.

Jo: Brilliant, because we all do that too. You can actually make more money selling audio direct than you do from the streaming.

Adam: Yes.

Jo: I realise we don't have much time left, but I need to ask you this because the film industry and publishing are in this great time of change with the advent of generative AI.

We've seen in the last week the actor Ben Affleck's company, InterPositive, has been acquired by Netflix. So it seems like technology is disrupting a lot.

How do you think we can navigate this time? What are your feelings around this new wave of generative AI?

Adam: It's a great tool. It's not a great writer. It's actually really a terrible writer. You can always tell when generative AI has written something because it has a certain very annoying style, but it's a great tool. I use it in my production.

I teach at the business school at UC Berkeley. We train people on how to use it for various kinds of problems and solutions. But the important thing is that you are the architect of the machine. It's a machine. It is like a paintbrush, but it is not the hand that holds the paintbrush.

So I am not concerned that AI is going to go make movies that we all care about, and I am not concerned that it's going to disrupt, in the largest sense, the employment picture. Certainly some jobs are being lost, but new jobs are being gained. It's really interesting.

For example, you mentioned Ben Affleck's company, which Netflix just partnered with. It's not making new content. It's creating a better production workflow. It's taking what is shot or what is planned in the production workflow and just making it better and more efficient and implementing it and adding to it.

That is a really good use of AI. All the creative power retains within the hands of the creative humans, but it's giving the humans more tools.

Jo: I've been reflecting on the idea of the film director, in that people often know their names and they win awards, and yet they didn't necessarily write the script. Some do, obviously, but they didn't act in it, they didn't do all the editing, they didn't do all the different jobs, but it's their creative vision.

So is that how you see us playing that part?

Adam: I do. I think that's a really good analogy. And look, AI—it's good. It's going to keep getting better. It still has massive error rates, so we still have to be very careful about what we attribute to it and what powers we give it, and what facts we believe from it.

Jo: So what are you excited about next? Obviously you are promoting this book, you are doing speaking things, but are you looking to your future continuing to work across film and books?

What are you excited about in terms of your creative projects?

Adam: The big arc of my creative life is creating ecosystems where creative people can do their best work. This book is part of that.

With the movies that I make, as a producer, I try to create the ecosystems where people can do their best work. I envision, and I'm excited about, continuing to do that. Whether it is in a book or in a workshop or in a film that I'm making.

I just want to keep doing that: creating these ecosystems where people can really do great work and express themselves creatively, entrepreneurially, and with a positive view of the world to come. Because that is a responsibility, coming back to the first question you asked me.

Jo: Brilliant.

So where can people find you and your book and everything you do online?

Adam: You can find me at my website, which is AdamLeipzig.com, just like the city. Of course, the book is available wherever you buy your books, and the Kindle and the audiobook are exactly where you would expect to find them.

You can also find me on Instagram at @AdamLeipzig, and you can find me on LinkedIn as Adam Leipzig. I love interacting with people, so come and find me. AdamLeipzig.com is the best place to find everything.

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

Adam: Jo, thank you so much for having me. It was great talking with you.

The post Navigating Uncertainty And Fearless Persistence In A Long Term Creative Career With Adam Leipzig first appeared on The Creative Penn.

In this episode, I share excerpts from interviews with Oriana Leckert, Head of Publishing at Kickstarter, Russell Nohelty, and Sacha Black, alongside my own hard-won lessons from six campaigns that have now made over $140K combined.

Whether you're considering your first campaign or looking to refine your process, we cover everything from overcoming your fears to rewards, fulfilment, shipping, marketing, and why I keep coming back for more.

In the intro, Writing StoryBundle; Spotify Expands Audiobook Features and Printed Books; Draft2Digital Activation and Maintenance Fees; comment by Kevin McLaughlin; and Barnes & Noble Press change to Minimum Retail Price for Printed Books; AI-Assisted Artisan Author webinars.

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

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

• What Kickstarter is and why it works differently from a normal book launch
• The fears that held me back for almost a decade — and whether they were justified
• Starting small: Why you don't need sprayed edges and special hardbacks to run a successful campaign.
• Creative reward ideas beyond merch: digital rewards, experiential rewards, naming rights, and bundling your backlist
• Common mistakes that sink campaigns: overestimating your reach, getting shipping costs wrong, and not allowing enough time
• Fulfilment realities, printing timelines, and reinvesting profit into future stock
• Marketing your campaign: pre-launch signups, content marketing, email lists, social media scheduling, and Facebook/Meta ads
• My update for campaign #7, Bones of the Deep: what's changed, what I'm doing differently, and how AI tools are part of my process now
• Why I now love Kickstarter campaigns and how the spike income model fits a sustainable creative career

You can find my Kickstarter campaign for Bones of the Deep here (until 5 May, 2026) and all my previous campaigns here.

Introduction

Jo: In this episode, I've included excerpts from my own previous solo show about Kickstarter, as well as excerpts from interviews with Oriana Leckert, the Head of Publishing at Kickstarter; Russell Nohelty, who has done lots of successful Kickstarter campaigns and teaches direct sales; and Sacha Black, who did a six-figure campaign last year.

I've also added my updates to the end of the episode filling in any last thoughts. You can listen to the full episodes here:

• Kickstarter for Authors with Oriana Leckert
• The Mindset and Business of Selling Direct with Russell Nohelty
• Lessons Learned and Tips from Pilgrimage, My First Kickstarter Campaign
• Two Different Approaches to Selling Direct with Sacha Black and Joanna Penn

What is Kickstarter, and why use it instead of a normal book launch?

Here's Oriana Leckert, Head of Publishing at Kickstarter — and the numbers she shares will be higher now, as the episode is from February 2025.

Oriana: Kickstarter is a crowdfunding platform. We are unique in the crowdfunding landscape for a few reasons. We are only for creative projects, so you can't use Kickstarter for medical bills, investment funding, or charitable donations. Every project has to create something new to share with the world.

Jo: Have you got any numbers on how big the Kickstarter industry is now with publishing, or anything you can share around that?

Oriana: Yeah, I would love to. First I'll tell you Kickstarter overall by the numbers. Since our inception, there have been 273,000 projects funded, eight and a half billion — with a “b” — billion dollars pledged, from more than 24 million backers. In publishing specifically, we've had 69,000 projects launched, 3.2 million unique backers, and over $380 million pledged to campaigns. I have lots of other stats, but a few things I'll share.

The publishing category keeps growing

The publishing category has grown year over year, every year since 2017, in terms of number of projects launched, number of projects successful, and the overall success rate. There has never been a dip since 2017.

Another stat I really love about the publishing category: if you look at campaigns that have at least 25 backers, the overall success rate is 84%. I think that's really telling, because 25 backers is a little bit more than your mum, your best friend, the folks who are essentially obligated to support anything you do. So if you can get a little bit beyond that inner circle, your chances of succeeding on the platform are tremendously high.

Backers are paying more — and waiting longer

Another thing I wanted to call out — I just got some new numbers around this. The average backing amount per backer across the whole category has nearly doubled since 2020. We used to see an average backing around $40, and it's currently at $72 per backer. I think this is clearly around the trend of special and deluxe editions, but it's a great indication that backer behaviour on Kickstarter is just very different from your general book-buying public.

People don't come here looking for 99-cent ebooks — the lowest bargain-basement prices. Folks are really willing to pay more because they understand this is a different kind of thing. It's not exactly a purchase. It really is supporting, bringing a strange and wonderful new thing into the world that wouldn't exist before.

People are also much more forgiving about timelines. If you buy something from most online booksellers, you're expecting to have it in your hands within a couple of days. People wait months and sometimes years to get their Kickstarter rewards, and they don't mind if the creator is clear and transparent. You're also doing the work of demystifying the publishing process. Why does it take so long? Where are books printed? How long does it take them to ship via freight over the ocean? What do all these things really look like?

So it's really interesting just figuring out what your backers want and will bear versus the general book-buying public out in the world.

Kickstarter is not just for “desperate” authors anymore

Oriana: People used to think Kickstarter was just for desperate folks who couldn't get a book deal through the traditional systems. The change has been so dramatic — people now understand that Kickstarter can be transformative for an author's career, and that it can work for traditional publishing, indie publishing, hybrid publishing, all kinds of authors.

Kickstarter is really about collapsing the boundaries between a writer and their readers, a publisher and their fan base, any creative person and their audience. And there are so many benefits to doing that. You get to really thrill your backers with new and exciting rewards. You get to turn what can be a standard book release into a moment. You get to build your brand, your profile, get press, test out ambitious projects.

You get to understand so much more about your audience and what they want and how you can give it to them. It's been really marvellous seeing the great success that people can have on our platform and outside of it.

Why do a Kickstarter campaign?

Jo: Why Kickstarter and not a usual book launch?

Benefits for backers

If you back a Kickstarter, you get special editions, bonus content, interesting merchandise, bundles, digital specials, print specials, early access. All of them pretty much are really cool books from creators you either already love or those you've never heard of, because you just want to see their cool stuff.

I've started buying books from people I have never heard of because I think their books are really cool. Once you start supporting campaigns on Kickstarter, the algorithm will recommend campaigns for you. It's essentially a different way of shopping for great books and other products, and it's just another part of my ecosystem for how I shop.

It's a form of direct sales, so you also have a closer connection with the creator. You can message them, for example, and they get it — rather than buying through an online retailer or bookstore.

Benefits for creators

In terms of benefits for creators, you get to know people in a more personal way through the campaign, messaging with people and connecting more than you would when selling through a retailer, when you don't know who is buying your books.

As an author, you can make more money more quickly and retain a higher percentage of the royalties, rather than wait months or years to get paid and have a large percentage taken out by everyone down the chain — publishers, platforms, distributors, and retailers. Brandon Sanderson's $41 million Kickstarter was clearly the pinnacle of what can be achieved, but many authors are happy making a few thousand for their book project upfront and use campaigns multiple times during the year.

Kickstarter takes 5% for their fee, although of course you have to factor in the cost of production and marketing. But even then, I make more profit on my book sales through selling ebooks and audiobooks direct, and also printing with BookVault, than I do with KDP Print or IngramSpark print on demand.

Higher average order and faster payment

Another way you make more money is that the average order per customer is higher with Kickstarter than sales on the usual stores. The average order on my campaign was £37.24 — that's around $45 US — which is at least four times higher than I might have made selling Pilgrimage in the usual way on the major retailers.

You get paid two weeks after the campaign finishes, so the money is in your bank account much faster than if you sell on retailers. In terms of cash flow, make sure you time your campaign so you get the money before you have to pay for printing, shipping, and other significant bills.

Spike income vs monthly income

There are many creators who now make Kickstarter the core of their business. It's a spike income model rather than a monthly income, which most indie authors are used to. The monthly income model is fantastic — I love getting money every month — but it also has the effect of making indie authors behave as if this is a normal job: work every month, get paid every month, put out another book so you get paid in another few months' time.

With the Kickstarter model, you can get a bigger chunk of money in one go, so you could potentially move to a big launch and then take more time off before ramping up to the next launch months later. And amusingly, this sounds a bit more like traditional publishing. It's just that as an indie author, when you get that amount of money, it's much bigger. So that kind of launch tempo is an attractive prospect if you think about it: if I just get this big spike of money even once a year, that's really cool. And then of course you can sell it later.

What are some of the fears that might stop you?

Jo: I held back from doing a Kickstarter for years — almost a decade, in fact — where I backed campaigns and resisted doing a campaign for my own books. Here are some of my fears.

Prepare to face your fears

Jo: This entire experience thrust me out of my comfort zone and into a new way of creating, launching, and connecting with readers. Pilgrimage is my first memoir, my first special hardback with colour photos, and my first Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign. So I had a lot to learn.

The book is very personal and I bare my soul about some dark times, so that was terrifying in itself, let alone trying a new product edition and publishing platform. On the evening I clicked the launch button — and yes, you have to actually click an actual launch button — my heart was hammering out of my chest. I have not felt that nervous since probably the first time publishing on Amazon.

I was afraid of failure. I was afraid of being embarrassed if my campaign didn't fund. I wrote a book on marketing — how to market a book — so I would be mortified if I had not funded. In fact, I even changed my target from £5,000 to £1,000 the night before, as I was so terrified it wouldn't fund.

I was afraid of getting something terribly wrong and ending up out of pocket through issues with printing and shipping. I was afraid of letting backers down by promising something I might not be able to deliver. I was afraid I had overcommitted myself to a whole load of work I might even resent doing.

I am a one-person business, and although I work with freelancers, I still do pretty much everything myself. I am a control freak — you might have noticed. So yes, there was a lot of apprehension and fear.

You don't have to go huge

Another fear might be the fear of failure — that you'll put up a campaign and no one will buy from you. But one answer is just to do a modest campaign. You don't have to do special hardbacks or merchandise. As Russell says:

Russell: Somehow all of the teaching that we have given over the last two years has been executed in a way that makes it seem like you have to do this enormous campaign with sprayed edges and big, beautiful hardcovers and interior illustrations and vellum and all of that stuff. And I want to say first: that is absolutely not true. You don't have to do any of those things.

If you look at two of the last three campaigns I've done, all I was offering was paperback books and ebooks, and then audio commentary for one of the campaigns. You can do a Kickstarter — and I often will tell people, especially if they're not an already successful author — do a campaign that is small and easy to get data on before you do something big.

The direct connection is actually the point

Jo: One of my resistances to this was a sort of, “Oh, I'm actually going to have to do a more higher-touch thing.” But as you say, the reframe is: oh my goodness, this is amazing, because I actually do get to connect with people.

Just yesterday I sent a signed book — Pilgrimage, which I did my last Kickstarter on — and this guy was like, “I bought it for myself. Can you sign it to me, because I'm going to do the Camino in a wheelchair?” And I was just so touched. Emailing him back, I just felt, oh my goodness, I'm having a connection with this person that if they'd just bought a book on Amazon, I would not have had.

So now it's almost like — it's this totally different view of my business, which is that direct-first means a much more personal way. It really is like we're in that thousand true fans moment that we first talked about 20 years ago.

Were my fears realised?

Jo: Just to recap, I was afraid of failure and embarrassment if I failed to fund, of getting something wrong and being out of pocket, of letting backers down, and of overcommitting myself and resenting the workload. Really, the only thing that happened was overcommitment and a lot more work than I expected.

But the time I put in was also likely the reason for the campaign's success and the reason that the other things didn't happen. I had to learn a new platform and a new approach to publishing and book marketing, so it was kind of a mini degree at the same time.

So yes, I will do another Kickstarter — but only for special projects that are suited to this kind of intensive campaign.

Tips for campaigns

In this section, Oriana shares her thoughts on rewards, and then I'll go into some more of my tips.

Thinking beyond merch

Oriana: The rewards are really at the heart of the Kickstarter proposition and what makes this kind of fundraising so interesting and thrilling. Basically, your process is you're inviting people on a creative journey. You're saying, “I'm going to make this cool thing. I want your support, and in exchange, you're going to get stuff, you're going to get to be part of my process.”

Obviously your main reward is going to be your book, or your series, or if you're a publishing company, your season — whatever it is. That's your main tier. Then you're going to build everything else out above and below that.

A lot of people think rewards means swag and merch. Which is fine, but merch can add a lot to your production costs. It's causing you to learn how to produce all kinds of things that maybe you've never done before. So that's not the only way to do it.

If you're going to do some merch, I think it's nice to come up with some custom items that feel really related to the work that you're doing. If you've got a romance novel with a pivotal scene on the beach, maybe you'd make some candles that smell like the ocean. Maybe you do some kind of handkerchief that's printed with the pattern of the dress your heroine is wearing.

Digital and experiential rewards

Oriana: But you can really think beyond merch into digital rewards and experiential rewards. There are a lot of parts of the writing process that can be pulled out and packaged as rewards — things like notes from the field, outtakes, deleted scenes. I've had people write bloopers, as if it were a comedy movie, added new scenes or novellas, other pieces from different works that you've done. Certainly your backlist and other books you've written can all be included.

We've seen people do tours of the writer's studio, things like that. Also think about what skills you have in addition to your writing. Perhaps you're excellent at marketing or social media or poetry — you can offer webinars on those sorts of things. Other kinds of ways that people can experience your creative practice.

High-end and naming rewards

Oriana: Then you can get into high-end, one-off, crazy rewards. One whole section of rewards I love is naming rights. We've seen all kinds — “We'll name the dragon after your dog, or after your mother-in-law. We'll name the hero after your son.”

There's a LitRPG novelist named Matt Dinniman who does this really well. He writes these big-cast novels — there are dungeons, and you're in an intergalactic reality TV show with hundreds of characters. In his last campaign, for $666 he would kill you off in his next book, and for $777 he'd let you live and write a whole scene around you personally.

You can also do book release parties. You can do book clubs. If you're writing children's books, you can do colouring pages or supplemental material for teachers or other educators. The sky is really the limit, and it is based on your creativity and the things that both you can make and that your audience wants.

This is another opportunity — talk to them. Ask them: if I'm going to do a piece of swag, would you rather have an enamel pin or a makeup bag? If I'm going to do alternate covers, would you like the blue cover or the red cover? See what your people are interested in, and then figure out whether it's possible for you to deliver it to them.

Learn about the platform from experts

Jo: I've been publishing and selling books through online retailers, as well as my own store, since 2008. I know what I'm doing, but I still had a lot to learn. With Kickstarter, it's essentially a completely different ecosystem, with different rules and a different audience, so you have to learn the ropes.

Even if you're super successful in other places, you might crash and burn on Kickstarter unless you understand how it works and change your approach accordingly.

Start backing campaigns

Jo: See how it feels to back Kickstarter campaigns and discover what draws you in as a reader and a fan of specific things. You might find projects you love outside of books — there's plenty of other projects outside of books. You can browse the publishing category to find new books, and also use the search to find things you might like. In this way, you can support fellow creators and learn how the Kickstarter site works for discoverability and marketing.

Make sure you go through the Kickstarter.com resources — they have a creator pack which will give you direction on the campaign. Also, their terms of use are really important to read, as there are some assumptions you'll have because you've published on another platform that are incorrect. So do not assume you know what you're doing if this is your first campaign.

Ask for feedback before launch

Jo: Once you have a draft of your campaign, ask specific people to review it before it launches. You can share a preview prior to launch and get feedback on your page. This helps you refine your story and the rewards, answer any questions before the campaign goes live, and it can also help pique the interest of your audience. I asked specific people who had done Kickstarter campaigns for help at different stages of the process, and this was really useful too.

Review common mistakes from other campaigns

Jo: If you examine how others made mistakes, you can learn from them. The most common seem to be:

• Not finishing the book before the campaign
• Getting the financials wrong for production, shipping, and any other rewards. I know some authors who have ended up breaking even, or sometimes even out of pocket from campaigns. Don't do that.
• Not making the most of the story sales page and not including everything necessary, so backers don't understand and don't want to support the campaign — essentially, not being clear enough
• Setting unrealistic goals, like expecting to make six figures on a first campaign
• Not allowing enough time for everything
• Not seeking feedback from people who have done it before
• Not marketing the campaign enough
• Overpromising and under-delivering
• Poor communication with backers about the status of rewards

Set aside more time than you think you need

Jo: The campaign ended up being far more significant than I expected in terms of workload and time to complete. Everyone told me that beforehand, but it was still a surprise.

It took time to prepare the multiple editions for the rewards. I usually produce an ebook, paperback, and a large print edition, and I narrate my own nonfiction audiobooks. But for this Kickstarter, I also wanted to do this special hardback with colour photos, a flyleaf cover and silver foil. I wanted to create a special print product I could be proud of.

I'm proud of all my books in terms of the content, but the usual paperback print-on-demand books are more about the content than the true beauty of the product. For Pilgrimage: A Book of My Heart, I wanted a special edition, so I worked with Jane on the design, going through my photos from the various pilgrimages to find those that resonated with the content — for example, the cadaver tomb at Canterbury, and my Compostela from the Camino de Santiago.

Once we finished, I had that proof copy rushed so we could turn around everything. And I love, love, love the hardback. It has a silken-finish cover and it feels lovely and weighty. The pictures came out well, as the paper is of a higher quality and weight to allow for colour printing. Overall, I am incredibly proud of the finished product. I even sent a copy to my mother-in-law, which I have never done before. And yes, she thinks it's good.

I definitely should have allowed more time, as I spent most of the Christmas and New Year period working on the book, recording and editing the audiobook, and preparing for the campaign. I also didn't have time to prepare, record, edit, and produce the Writing Setting and Sense of Place course until after the campaign, and it was really hard to find the energy to do this afterwards.

Building the campaign page

Jo: It took time to build the Kickstarter campaign page, create the video, and incorporate feedback. Most authors don't write sales pages anymore. Sure, we write a sales description for the book page on the retailers, but we don't often do a whole page for multiple editions. On Kickstarter, you are basically writing a sales page for your campaign, which they call a “story.”

Some of your existing audience might just click through and back the campaign without reading it, but most backers will check out the details to find answers to any questions they have. It is a very long page, and you also need a video — or you don't need one, but it's highly recommended. It's best to record the video at the last stage when everything else is done.

You can still see my Kickstarter video on my campaign page, so I won't go through everything in detail. But the key aspects are:

• Who the campaign is aimed at
• Why the campaign is important to me and the book
• What products are available
• Pictures of everything — the page should be really visual — and I included the images in the video as well
• Sample chapters and sample audio
• Specifications, with weight, pages, listening time, table of contents
• About me, the author
• Stretch goals
• Add-ons
• Any questions, risks, and challenges

So it's pretty long. Then the reward levels have to be set up carefully for each pledge level with shipping costs, and specific details about what's included. Eventually, I felt like my page had way too much information, but since I didn't really get many backer questions, I guess it did what it was supposed to do.

I rewrote and edited that page so many times — adding and changing the order of things, responding to feedback, switching things around. But hopefully I can use that as a template for other campaigns.

Marketing takes time too

Jo: It took time to prepare the marketing for the campaign. I'm pretty low-key for most launches these days — I publish a book, send a few emails to my lists, announce it on the podcast, do a little social media, update my websites, and move on to the next book. So this was probably my biggest effort in terms of a launch since my first novel back in 2011.

I only had a two-week campaign, so I needed to make the most of that window. I'm going to detail the marketing in a separate section, but it took a lot of time to prepare the various things and execute them, as well as keep the energy up for promotion during the campaign. Two weeks was definitely the longest I would want to do — I was really over it by the end.

Delivering stretch rewards

Jo: It took more time to create and deliver the extra stretch rewards I promised. Since I had pretty low expectations of funding, I set my first stretch goal at £10,000 for “Lessons Learned from Writing a Travel Memoir.” When I promised it, I thought it might be a few pages of tips, and I didn't even think we would get there.

But I'm incapable of delivering something that is half done. So when we did hit £10,000, I wrote essentially a short book on the topic, which I then formatted as an ebook and recorded as an audiobook. I'm actually going to turn that into a proper book at some point, so the content will get reused. But that definitely took more time than I expected, because I hadn't prepared it in advance.

The backer spreadsheet and fulfilment

Jo: It took time to figure out the backer spreadsheet and check all the fulfilment details. Once you finish your campaign, you send out surveys for mailing addresses and to fulfil rewards. I also needed to turn the backer report into a printing order for BookVault, and that was nerve-wracking.

The spreadsheets were different formats, and then we spot-checked the orders to make sure people got the right books based on their orders. I was petrified that some people might get the wrong book, and I checked and checked and checked — both on the spreadsheet, and then once the orders were loaded, I checked BookVault as well.

I was worried I'd have to resend the right book, which would end up with me out of pocket because they'd have to do double printing and shipping. But thankfully, all the checking made everything good, and I haven't heard from anyone who got the wrong book.

Following up with backers

Jo: It took time to follow up on failed payments and address issues. Most backers were easy to deal with — they received the updates and Kickstarter emails, they filled in the surveys, and I didn't have any problems. But there were problems with about 5% of backers, most of which were not their fault.

There were failed payments when banks thought Kickstarter might be fraud. There were missed emails because of issues with deliverability, so backers didn't receive the rewards, or they didn't fill in the survey and return their address, which meant I couldn't do the order with BookVault — I had to do it later or manually.

I had to follow up with every single one of these, some of them multiple times, and I slowly reduced my list of outstanding backers.

A tip: If you back a Kickstarter campaign, please log on to Kickstarter a few weeks after the campaign has finished and check for updates. It's possible that you're not receiving the emails from Kickstarter, and the creator may need details from you in order to fulfil your pledge.

Tax implications

Jo: It took time to figure out the tax implications. This is not legal or financial advice, and your taxes will vary by jurisdiction. Please ask your accountant how you need to treat Kickstarter or any other book-related income.

Wherever you are in the world, you will need to pay tax on the income, because we all have income tax, but the complicating factor is whether you also need to consider sales tax. And this definitely differs by jurisdiction. I went to my accountant, who said we should handle it as per any other book sales. I followed my accountant's advice, which treats backers the same way as my customers who buy on Shopify. Ask a professional in your jurisdiction about taxes and finances, even if you are in the UK. I cannot answer any questions. I'm not an accountant.

Closing the loop

Jo: I haven't had much time to do anything else, as I felt like I couldn't start anything new until everything in the campaign was finished. As soon as the campaign window closed, I felt like I had an open loop in my brain. I desperately wanted to close it in order to say the project was done.

I have now delivered all the book and course rewards, and these lessons learned are really the last part of it. I've talked before about the different kinds of energy you need as an author — starting energy, pushing-through energy, and finishing energy.

Once the campaign was funded, my finishing energy kicked in and I was driven to get everything finished as soon as possible. I sent the digital rewards out within a few days of the campaign closing, and also shipped the unsigned books, ordered the print books, then went and signed them, and then recorded the course. It has been my primary focus for the last few months, and I haven't been able to do much else except the podcast, which is my weekly commitment to you.

Once again, I should have blocked out the time. Bonus tip: Don't plan an international speaking and book research trip during the campaign.

International shipping and fulfilment

Jo: Be careful with international shipping and fulfilment of signed books or products. Shipping costs can sink your campaign if you get them wrong, so be very careful with this area.

I have sold books in 175 countries, and this podcast has a listenership in 228 countries, so I really wanted to have a completely international campaign. I wanted to ship Pilgrimage in any format to any country. Originally I thought I would just charge a bit extra for the book and include shipping.

But once I set the book editions up at BookVault and I had the weight and dimensions sorted, I started checking the shipping costs to different countries. For example, we lived in New Zealand for seven years — my husband is a New Zealander, so we go back — so I definitely had to sell in New Zealand. And of course the shipping to New Zealand is very, very different to the US, for example. It is crazy how much shipping costs vary.

I discovered I couldn't just assume it would all wash out and I'd end up making a profit somehow. I had to be a lot more careful with the calculations. So I focused on my biggest markets, which in terms of my book sales are the US, UK, European Union, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. I added a note on the campaign to say I would add any other country for print shipping if people contacted me. As it turned out, no one asked for any other countries, so that was the best way to go in the end.

If you're in a country where the shipping is outrageous — if you're willing to pay for the shipping, then that's absolutely fine. It's just that for the campaign, I had to focus.

When the unexpected happens

Jo: Of course, you can try to prepare for everything and then something unexpected and out of your control happens. A big spanner in the works for my campaign was the Russian hack, which took down the UK Royal Mail just before my launch. If you're not in the UK, you wouldn't have heard about this, because in some ways it's a very small issue — but it basically took down Royal Mail and a lot of shipping went into flux.

It specifically hit the international side, and other shipping firms ramped up to take the slack. But it made planning for the launch difficult, as the prices were shifting and I didn't know how delivery was going to work. Even for posting in the UK it was hard, because the mail offices were getting backed up.

Once again, I'm grateful for BookVault's adaptability, because I could check different addresses and shipping prices even as things changed, and they added new providers for shipping. About 95% of my shipping ended up being within an acceptable range of what I charged.

So do your research, weigh and measure your items so you can get exact quotes for each. Check what kind of packaging you need. If you're doing your own shipping, you have to actually type in the shipping costs per reward and per country — it's a lot of manual setup to get it right. But this is critical, so check and double-check — and in fact, I triple- and quadruple-checked, then went to sleep, and then the next day checked again.

Having spent 13 years as an IT consultant prior to this career as an author, I will always remember and have learned from the fact that something just might not be working, and then literally if you just go away, go to bed, come back the next day, it'll probably just be working. Sometimes it actually works.

So yes, I did that, and every time I checked, pretty much I found something I'd typed in that didn't quite match, because you also have to retype — if you include all the books in the add-ons, you have to type it again. I didn't stop checking until the day before the launch, and then it was right. I was happy, and everything seemed to be fine.

Shipping is always a moving target

Jo: Revisiting this section made me laugh, because as I record this, in the week before I launch Bones of the Deep, international shipping is disrupted again — by the war in Iran, and the Strait of Hormuz being closed, which is affecting fuel prices. This underscores yet again how important it is to check your shipping.

Of course, you can add shipping on later — Kickstarter allows this, as does BackerKit and other services. But as a backer, a customer of people on the platform, I hate being asked to pay shipping later. And since I hate that myself, I don't want other people to feel the same way.

So just add a little buffer in, as asking people to pay an extra dollar in their pledge is not that big a deal, but you being out of pocket for every book shipped may well be.

Sacha Black on pre-launch and fulfilment

In an interview I did with Sacha Black, who writes as Ruby Roe, in December 2025, we talked about her issues with fulfilment. Sacha does a lot of complex printing, shipping, and custom book boxes and more. Her last campaign made over six figures, but of course it had its challenges. Here's Sacha with some of her tips, and then Oriana to close out this section with some other mistakes.

Sacha: The first thing is — even before you start your Kickstarter — the pre-launch followers are critical. A lot of people think, “Well…” I guess there's a lot of loud noise about all these big numbers about how much people can make on Kickstarter, but actually a lot of it is driven by you, the author, pushing your audience to Kickstarter.

You need more pre-launch followers than you think you do. Lots of people don't put enough impetus on the marketing beforehand. Almost all of our Kickstarter marketing is beforehand, because we drive so many people to that follow button.

The other thing we do is early-bird pricing. We get the majority of our income on a campaign on day one. I think it was something wild, like 80% this time was on day one, so that's really important.

Fulfilment takes longer than you think

Sacha: The second thing is, it takes so, so very much longer than you think it does to fulfil a campaign, and you must factor in that cost. Because if it's not you fulfilling, you're paying somebody else to fulfil it. And if it is you fulfilling it, you must account for your own time in the pricing of your campaign.

The other thing is that the amount of time it takes to fulfil is directly proportionate to the size of the campaign. So you do have to think about that.

The other lesson we have learned is that overseas printing will drag your timelines out far longer than you think. So whatever you think it's going to take you to fulfil — add several months more onto that, and put that information in your campaign.

Reinvesting profit and exclusive rewards

Sacha: The last thing — if you have some profit in the Kickstarter, because not all Kickstarters are actually massively profitable. They either don't account enough for shipping, or they don't account enough in the pricing. Thankfully, ours have been profitable, but we've actually reinvested that profit back into buying more stock and more merchandise, which not everybody would want to do if they don't have a warehouse.

However, we do have one. We are stockpiling merchandise and books so that we can do mystery boxes later on down the line. It's probably a year away, but we are buying extra of everything so that we have that in the warehouse.

So it depends on what you want to do with your profit. For us, it was all about buying more books, basically.

The other thing to think about is: what is it that you're doing that's exclusive to Kickstarter? Because you will get backers on Kickstarter who want that quirky, unique thing that they're not going to be able to get anywhere else. But what about you? You've done more Kickstarters than me — what do you think is the biggest lesson you've learned?

Tiers, bundles, and AI for planning rewards

Jo: Well, I think all of mine together add up to the one you just did. Although I will comment — you said something like £75 per pre-launch backer. That is obviously dependent on your tiers for the rewards, so most authors won't have that amount. My average order value, which I know is slightly different, but I don't offer things like book boxes as you have — so a lot of it will depend on the tiers.

Some people will do a Kickstarter just with an ebook — just with one ebook and maybe a bundle of ebooks — so you're never going to make it up to that kind of value. So this is important too: have a look at what people offer on their different levels of Kickstarter.

In fact, here's my AI tip for the day. What you can do — what I did with my Buried and the Drowned campaign recently — is, you know, I'm happy uploading my book. I uploaded it to ChatGPT and said, “Tell me, what are some ideas for the different reward tiers that I can do on Kickstarter?” And it will give you some ideas for what you can do, what kind of bundles you might want to do.

So bundling your backlist is another thing you can do — as upsells, or you can just do it like I did for Blood Vintage, where I did a horror bundle of four standalone horror books in one of the upper tiers. Bundling is a good way to do it, and also upselling your backlist is a really good way to up things.

And also, if you do it digitally — for ebooks and audiobooks — there's a lot less time in fulfilment.

Oriana on the biggest mistakes

Jo: What are some of the top mistakes you see that mean the campaign doesn't fund, or there are other issues?

Oriana: Totally. I mean, the biggest mistake I think authors make — or any creator — is overestimating their ability to reach their crowd. Making sure that your ambition matches your reach is the number one most important thing to come close to guaranteeing that you will be successful.

If you're an emerging writer and you're still building your audience and you don't have that many followers or subscribers out in the world, you should not try to fund a multi-volume leather-bound omnibus. Do a real honest assessment of who's in your crowd, how to find them, what percentage of them are likely to support what you're doing, and then find a project that feels realistic based on those numbers. That's really the biggest thing, conceptually.

Building a strong project page

Oriana: As far as tips for a project page — again, back campaigns and look at what other people are doing. A project page can be either as simple or as complicated as you want to make it.

You definitely want to talk about the book: what is in it, what you're writing. Do a trope card if you want — we're seeing those all over the site. Say what kind of book it is, and the specs: page count, trim size, cover design. Obviously if you're doing a special edition, exactly what sorts of bells and whistles, with a prototype if you can.

But you can be really expansive from there. What are your inspirations? Who are your collaborators? What brought you to this work? What are some of the things that make you excited about your writing practice, your timeline, your budget? What made you choose these rewards and how you're going to produce them? All those sorts of things will make backers feel both more trusting that you will do the things you're promising, and just more excited to be part of your journey.

Marketing your Kickstarter campaign

Let's talk about marketing. First, a snippet from Oriana, and then I'll share specifics around marketing tips — many of which are useful if you're launching in any other way.

Kickstarter's algorithm rewards attention

Oriana: Being on Kickstarter will help you grow your audience, but it's definitely not everything. You really do need to bring your people first. Our algorithm works on attention, so any project that's getting clicks, getting backings, getting comments — our algorithm says, “Oh, people want to look at this. We will expose it to more and more people.”

That means raising it up in search results, slotting it into various of the macros and carousels around the site. Our recommendation engine powers recommended projects on the top of campaigns and at the bottom of emails. We are doing a lot to make sure that projects are being surfaced to folks who want to see them.

Talk about the book while you're writing it

Jo: Talk and share about the book while you're writing it, even though you might not know what it will turn into. I always share my book research and projects in progress, so this was nothing new. But Pilgrimage was years in the making, so I had years of sharing aspects of it.

I've shared pictures from every pilgrimage walk on Instagram at @jfpennauthor and Facebook at J.F. Penn Author, and sometimes Facebook The Creative Penn. I've talked on this podcast about each walk, and I've done solo episodes and blog posts about each on my Books and Travel podcast and blog.

I also did a poll and shared my book cover design process, and then I did an article on why I ignored target-reader feedback in the end. All this meant that many in my community — including you listening — became aware of my solo walking and also my ecclesiastical interest, my architecture interest, and you enjoyed my photos along the way if you follow me on social media.

So when I announced the launch, it was the culmination of years of build-up.

Use the pre-launch page early

Jo: Set up the Kickstarter pre-launch page as early as possible, and keep promoting it. You can launch a pre-launch page once Kickstarter has approved your project, and you don't have to have finished everything to make it available — just complete the personal and business setup, and fill in enough detail so they can verify your identity and judge the campaign to be real and within the guidelines, and not a scam or spam campaign.

I started to promote my pre-launch page, and by the time we went live, I had people signed up on launch. Those people get an email from Kickstarter. Those people were responsible for my campaign funding within the first few minutes, and then taking it to 5x the target within the first 24 hours. Then I started to email my lists, and all of this type of thing. But it was those pre-launch signups that really kick-started — see what I did there? — the whole thing.

The benefit of using Kickstarter for multiple projects is that previous backers are notified of your new project. This compounds the effect over time, and is why those who use Kickstarter successfully do multiple campaigns.

Kickstarter SEO and on-platform marketing

Jo: Kickstarter has its own ecosystem. There's a discovery algorithm that can help you find projects you might like as a backer, and there are different ways to search, but only certain aspects appear in the search. So your title, subtitle, and your header image need to be optimised so people can find you.

Your story sales page needs to be clear, with a compelling pitch. People also have to want your rewards, so marketing has to be baked into the products you're offering and who you're trying to attract.

Your video doesn't need to be a professional-level product, but it does need to connect with potential backers, so take the time to make a good one. If you've never made a video before, you will need time to upskill.

Kickstarter also has social media. Use #KickstarterReads and tag @KickstarterReads. If your project funds quickly and has a good trajectory, you might get picked for the “Projects We Love” badge, which also gives you better discoverability. I got that pretty fast. You can also tag Kickstarter on social media and inform them of your campaign.

Content marketing

Jo: Content marketing is offering something useful or interesting or inspiring or funny or entertaining for free, in order to attract your target market so they buy your book. This might be an article or blog post, video, audio, podcast, social media, whatever. For fiction, it's usually a free book or a short story or other free examples of your writing that draw people in.

Content marketing is my favourite form of marketing, as it is about attraction, not interruption. It also involves creating something in the world that lasts over time, as opposed to an ephemeral spike ad or a social media post that quickly disappears. Each has its place, of course, and I use them all.

This podcast is content marketing, although it now also provides direct revenue in the form of corporate advertising and Patreon support. Thank you, patrons and advertisers — and I consider this to be part of my creative body of work. My Books and Travel podcast is also content marketing.

Guest appearances for the launch

Jo: For this launch, I did content marketing on my own sites and shows, as well as other people's, which I arranged and recorded in advance. I've also mentioned the campaign in the introduction to every one of these shows leading up to the launch and during the launch.

I was on some podcasts: Sacred Steps with Kevin Donahue, Wish I'd Known Then… For Writers with Sara Rosett and Jami Albright, Travel Writing World with Jeremy Bassetti, and Into the Woods with Holly Worton.

I also did several of my own. I did one on this feed. I did another on the Books and Travel feed. I also included two chapters from the audiobook on the Books and Travel podcast. All of these took time to prepare and produce, but each is a chance for another person to hear about the book. Plus, they're evergreen, and Pilgrimage is available for everyone to buy now, so I can point people at Pilgrimage on other stores.

Use a redirection URL

Jo: For all my marketing, I used JFPenn.com/pilgrimage, which I can redirect using the Pretty Links plugin on WordPress and point to wherever I want it to go. Before the launch, it went to the pre-launch page; then the campaign itself; and now it goes to the book page. Once I build a special landing page, it will go there.

Depending on where you're listening will depend on where it goes, but that's JFPenn.com/pilgrimage. The URL needs to be easy to say out loud for use in podcast interviews and audio-first media.

Email your list multiple times

Jo: Some things change in book marketing — like the emergence of new platforms like TikTok — but one thing has stayed the same for decades: if you have an email list, you can always sell books. Your email list consists of people who have opted in to hear from you, so you can email them about normal launches as well as your Kickstarter campaign.

I have two email lists: one for The Creative Penn around writing, and the other around J.F. Penn for my fiction. I emailed both lists multiple times at different times in the campaign. I use ConvertKit for my email, but there are other options for authors.

Use referral links for tracking

Jo: Use specific referral links for different aspects of the campaign for tracking returns. Kickstarter allows you to create different tracking links so you can link revenue to specific marketing events. For example, I used one link for my Creative Penn email list, another for my J.F. Penn email list, and yet another for my Facebook advertising.

You can also add the Meta pixel and Google Analytics code to the campaign, which can also help with figuring out advertising. And if you don't know what those are, don't worry — you don't have to use them.

Book images and social media

Jo: I initially mocked up the book using cover images on MockupShots.com, and then resized them in Canva in order to create social media images. I later did a book photo shoot with the hardback in different places to give me more marketing assets to play with — all of which I will use over time as part of ongoing marketing.

I prepared and scheduled social media posts to go out every day, and I did that in advance, primarily for Twitter at @thecreativepenn, my Instagram and Facebook at J.F. Penn Author, and also Facebook at The Creative Penn.

It was a lot of work, but I really enjoyed it — weirdly — and I need to do more of this for my other books, especially as with Shopify, Facebook, and Instagram link directly into my store, so I can tag books. These days social commerce is a lot smoother through mobile, so someone can see an image on social, click through, and buy immediately.

I also did some quotes from the book — so I did pictures, I also did quotes — and I blatantly used our cute British Shorthair cats, Cashew and Ramen, for marketing reasons. I use Buffer to schedule my social media, but there are other tools.

I also asked some friends who are travel influencers to share the book, and I sent them the hardback in advance so they could review if they liked. Thanks to Sarah Baxter and Alastair Humphreys for sharing the book, and especially a big thank you to Anna McNuff, who gave birth to twins that week and still managed to share about Pilgrimage.

Backer engagement and stretch goals

Jo: Let's be clear — it was not natural for me to push a book every day for two weeks. I also felt awkward about engaging with backers multiple times, let alone the wider community who I was sure was sick of my book, but I did it anyway, as it was only a short campaign of two weeks.

I sent four updates during the campaign to backers, some of which are visible to the public on my Kickstarter, and then I sent updates afterwards with delivery of the rewards.

Although I did resist the stretch goals, as I mentioned earlier, I went with “Notes on Writing a Travel Memoir” and the backer live Q&A. I did scramble to decide on and deliver those, as I really didn't think I would need them — which is crazy. I had such low expectations of what I might achieve. But next time I would definitely plan stretch goals in advance and in more detail.

Facebook advertising

Jo: I did some Facebook ads for the campaign — although I should call them Meta ads, because they're also on Instagram. I primarily aimed them at my email lists and people who follow my pages, but also some wider reach using lookalike lists and walking interests. I used a tracking link, so I know that the revenue that came in through people backing it more than paid for the ads. So I would do more of this next time.

Marketing things I didn't do

Jo: I didn't try to get any press or traditional media attention, mainly because I would have had to approach outlets much earlier in the process. I didn't have the hardback finished until a few weeks before the campaign, rather than a few months before, which is when pitching for press is a better idea.

I also didn't collaborate with other creators on Kickstarter, even though I knew other authors doing campaigns at the same time. A couple of people asked me about cross-promotion, but their campaigns were not at all related to Pilgrimage. As with all book marketing, there is only a point to cross-promotion if you target the same readers.

I had intended to do some Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube Live videos, but I struggle with live videos in general — and especially when I'm tired — so I didn't go ahead with those. I might consider more of those next time.

Do a survey for everyone

Jo: My tip is — do a survey for everyone. As part of a campaign I previously backed, I noticed that I didn't actually need to do a survey for the digital backers, because they could just get the rewards if I emailed through Kickstarter. And sure enough, you can just email the BookFunnel links, the course discount code, etc., through the campaign.

But this was a mistake. I should have done a survey for everyone. If you do a survey, you can get the real email, as some people use a cloaked email. You can also include a checkbox asking people if they want to sign up for your email list.

Respecting backer data

Jo: So while you do get the email addresses of everyone who backs your campaign in your backer report, you cannot just upload them to your email provider and start emailing them about your other books. Kickstarter's terms of use include the following:

When you use Kickstarter, and especially if you create a successful project, you may receive information about other users, including things like their names, email addresses, and postal addresses. This information is provided for the purpose of participating in a Kickstarter project. Don't use it for other purposes and don't abuse it.

This is about data protection and privacy laws. Basically, Kickstarter is the platform in this instance, and people have signed up to receive emails from Kickstarter, but not from you. All emails about the campaign go through Kickstarter, and you don't have permission to just upload that list to your own email system and start sending more emails. They have not specifically said they want that, unless they have in a survey with opt-in — which I didn't do.

Of course, there are indirect ways to attract people to sign up for your list. My book Pilgrimage includes ways to hear from me further, so some backers will go on and sign up for my free thriller ebook at JFPenn.com/free, or my Author Blueprint at TheCreativePenn.com/blueprint. You can also do updates later, for example when you have a new campaign, and in this way Kickstarter acts as a different ecosystem for email.

Should you consider a Kickstarter campaign for your book?

Jo: To be honest — only if you consider this to be a career you want to invest in, and a platform you want to do more than one campaign with.

If you just have one book or a couple of books, or you're just starting out, or you don't want to do marketing and connect with readers, then definitely don't do a Kickstarter. It is not some magic button that will make you money — like uploading to Amazon is not a magic button that will make you money. It takes time and effort to have a successful campaign.

But if you do want to build a long-term author business, then selling direct should have some part to play, and Kickstarter is a great way to make more money per book and connect with readers. It's really only the beginning of the trend of authors selling direct, so don't worry — you can learn how to do this over time.

Update for Bones of the Deep, my 7th campaign in April 2026

Jo: It was interesting to revisit my lessons learned and other people's tips, and really, there are only a few things that have changed.

I love doing Kickstarter campaigns now

Firstly, I absolutely love doing Kickstarter campaigns. I am not nervous at all anymore, and I am just so thrilled to produce gorgeous hardback editions of my books this way. I love delivering beautiful books and new stories or nonfiction to my readers. I love doing the discovery writing webinars and the coaching, and just in general, I appreciate the opportunity to publish this way.

I feel like a “real author” — with beautiful hardbacks, doing a signing, getting photos and emails from readers who receive the books.

Custom printing keeps expanding

In terms of other changes, over the last few years since Pilgrimage, BookVault has expanded their custom printing, so now I have custom endpapers, sprayed edges, different kinds of foil, as well as the silken paper and the ribbon and photos inside. These gorgeous editions are my personal creative reason to keep doing campaigns. I love saying “I made this!” And over time, I would love to get all my backlist into special editions.

A repeatable process

I'm still doing similar kinds of rewards — the book in all editions — and it's all finished so it's lower stress. Even the audiobook narration is done, so I can fulfil immediately. There's just the live discovery writing webinar to do, and stretch goal Q&A and consulting sessions.

I'm also doing bundles, and all my backlist gets bundled in the add-ons, so I have a repeatable process, which makes things easier.

Using AI in production

I'm using more AI, specifically in the images and video. I love making book images with ChatGPT and Gemini's Nano Banana, and story images with Midjourney, and I use ElevenLabs with my voice clone for audiobooks. I fill in all the details in the AI section of the Kickstarter page, so you can go have a look at that and model it as you like.

Spike income, realistic expectations

I still like the spike income — but to be clear, my campaigns have varied in terms of financial success, as would be expected given they are all so different. My highest was Writing the Shadow at over £36,000 ($48,000), and my lowest was The Buried and the Drowned, a short story collection, at just under £8,000 ($10,700) — not a surprise at how different they are, given the audiences.

Together my campaigns have now made £105,868 (just over $140,000), which I am very happy with. And of course, that's just the beginning, as then I put the books on my stores — JFPennBooks.com and CreativePennBooks.com — and on the usual platforms.

A sustainable launch rhythm

I still like the project approach — the short-term campaign focus — as I am good at sustaining marketing energy for a short period, and then I can drop off again. As I discussed with Sara Rosett last week as well, it feels sustainable for my career, unlike constant social media or ads.

Lower-key marketing this time around

I'm putting a lot less energy into marketing in general, relying on pre-launch signups over months of build-up as I talk about my writing process on the podcast, then emailing my lists, announcing it here, and scheduling some social media. It's pretty low-key these days, and that is a happy thing.

However, for this campaign, I am planning to run some Meta ads direct to the campaign page, since I have Claude Code/Cowork to help me set them up and run them and crunch the data — and that takes the strain off considerably.

More campaigns to come

I will definitely be doing more Kickstarter campaigns, most likely a nonfiction one next. I am so glad I was able to get over my fears and do that first one, and I hope that encourages you to consider what might be possible for you and your book.

So, if you'd like to check out my campaign for Bones of the Deep — even if you don't want the book, you can always model the sales page, or check out the book trailer — it's at JFPenn.com/bones.

That link will go to the Kickstarter campaign from 20 April until early May 2026, and will then redirect.

The post Kickstarter Tips for Authors: Rewards, Shipping, Marketing, and Lessons Learned first appeared on The Creative Penn.

In the intro, dealing with uncertainty, and Becca Syme's Quit books; The Successful Author Mindset; Building resilience and the creative lies that writers tell themselves [Wish I'd Known Then]; On Writing – Stephen King; Big Magic – Elizabeth Gilbert;

This podcast is sponsored by Kobo Writing Life, which helps authors self-publish and reach readers in global markets through the Kobo eco-system. You can also subscribe to the Kobo Writing Life podcast for interviews with successful indie authors.

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

Sara Rosett is the USA Today bestselling author of over 30 books across 1920s mysteries, cosy mysteries, and travel mysteries, as well as nonfiction for authors. She's also the co-host of the fantastic Wish I'd Known Then podcast.

In this episode:

• Why low-key, personality-driven marketing can be more sustainable than aggressive advertising
• How to pitch your books to libraries using a simple email strategy
• The pros and cons of special editions, physical letters, and Kickstarter campaigns
• Shifting from retailer-first releases to direct sales through a Shopify store
• Co-writing nonfiction and the power of series bundles for reader discovery
• Drawing creative inspiration from other industries and international storytelling trends

You can find Sara at SaraRosett.com and at WishIdKnownForWriters.com

Transcript of the interview

Jo: Sara Rosett is the USA Today bestselling author of over 30 books across 1920s mysteries, cosy mysteries, and travel mysteries, as well as nonfiction for authors. She's also the co-host of the fantastic Wish I'd Known Then podcast. Welcome back to the show, Sara.

Sara: Hi, Jo. Thanks for having me. It's great to be back.

Jo: It is great to have you back. You were last on the show five years ago, around February 2021, and we talked about writing a series — and you have a great book on that. But first up, give us an update. What does your author business look like right now, and what are you up to with your writing?

How Sara's author business has evolved

Sara: Well, it's changed a lot.

I sat down to think about this and I thought, yes, I have got into direct sales. I've done Kickstarters. I have a Shopify store now. I've really shifted from releasing first on the retailers. I don't really do that anymore. I've done some special editions, some physical things — I'm sure we'll talk about those later.

Still doing the podcast with Jamie, the Wish I'd Known Then podcast, we're still doing that. I also have a Mystery Books podcast, which is an episodic podcast that comes out in seasons. I do a short season, about one a year, so I keep doing that. Writing some nonfiction.

I did the trope book with Jennifer Hilt for mystery and thriller. And writing-wise, I've created a spinoff, a short spinoff in the 1920s series. I'm still loving the 1920s timeline. But I've slowed down a little bit on the releases. Busy, but good.

Jo: Busy, but good.

All right, we're going to get into all of those things. Although I must say I had forgotten about your Mystery Books podcast and going to seasonal. I also had my second podcast, Books and Travel, which is now on a kind of hiatus, but going to a seasonal approach is actually really interesting.

Do you find that listeners come back to that podcast?

The power of a seasonal podcast

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

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

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

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

Jo: That's great.

Low-key marketing that fits your personality

Jo: As you mentioned, I really wanted to talk to you about this low-key, non-hype marketing. We've met in person a number of times, and I think we're quite similar — we're quiet, reserved.

We are quite low key. I just put content out, and yes, I do some paid ads or whatever, but I just don't find the hype marketing something I want to do. I like the attraction marketing, and I feel like I do intuitive marketing.

So how does your low-key marketing fit with your personality?

Sara: Well, I did try some of the more promotional marketing. I tried to have a street team back when I heard authors talking about that.

I thought, oh, I'll do a Street Team, and that doesn't really match with my readers. My genre — that's just not a thing that happens a lot there. So I backed off of that, and I've tried ads. Not really interested in those. I'm not really good at them, and I don't really want to get good at them.

So I've searched for ways that I can find readers that don't rely on ads. I've really focused on my newsletter, and I have two of those. I have a main one that goes out to my readers who sign up in the back of the book. And then I have a New Release in Historical Mysteries newsletter that goes out about twice a month most of the time.

That's just curation. I'm saying, hey, these are the new books that are out. I feel like those are easy to do. They fit with my personality, which is like, here, let me give you some information about what's going on in this genre. I do newsletters, the promo sites, the smaller promotional paid ads — I do those occasionally. I have a rotation that I go through, and I try to get a BookBub. If I can, that's great.

I've just done things that are leaning into what I feel comfortable doing.

Pitching books to libraries

Sara: A lot of it is finding small sites where I haven't run an ad. Let me see if there's anybody who wants to sign up or get a free book through me here. I've done some BookFunnel marketing, where you can join the group promos. I like those.

And I've reached out to libraries because I feel like my books appeal to libraries. They like the 1920s historicals. It's an easy way to reach people — it's attractive to libraries.

So I had a list of libraries in my state, and I have an assistant who helps me out. She emailed down the list. She picked a few every week and messaged them and said, hey, this is a local author. She lives in this state. Here are some books you might enjoy from her.

And I have, because of you, large print — I got into that when you started talking about large print a couple of years ago. So I have large print case laminate books that libraries like. I just do things like that, things that are not the norm.

Hardly anybody is talking about marketing to libraries. But I try to do that. Sometimes I'll just think of something. I was at the library and I thought, wow, look at all these hardcover case laminate books they have in this large print section. Maybe I should try that. And then I search out and try to figure out if I can do it.

Jo: And just for people who don't know, case laminate is a hardback.

Sara: Yes.

Jo: That's really interesting. You mentioned the libraries and the list. Was that a list you were able to buy? I remember years ago I had someone on the show who was doing that kind of thing. Or was it that your assistant had to go through and find all the libraries, find an email address, that kind of thing?

Sara: I think I found it through Sisters in Crime, which is a mystery writers' organisation, and I think they had a contact list — you could get libraries and bookstores in your area.

I think I started with that and then just research. And I'm sure now with AI, you could put in where you are and say, in a radius of 250 miles, what is near me? And you could probably get a great list.

Jo: Absolutely. And when the assistant is emailing, is it just information about you and then saying, would you like to buy? Because you have a big backlist, and we don't want to be sending loads of expensive hardbacks to libraries unless they're actually going to buy. What's the process to actually sell to them?

The library email approach

Sara: I wrote up an email and introduced myself. I leaned into the “I'm local — I live in the same city or state that you're in.”

Then I described my most popular series and said the first book is this. I put a link to a PDF that they can go look at. I think it's on my website, and they can go see the books. They can print that out, of course, and it has the ISBNs. I make sure they know they can order them from Ingram, and that's all I do.

Then when I had a new release, we switched it up and put that at the top. But I have all the books in the series so they know it's a series.

Jo: That's fantastic. I love that.

Set-and-forget promotional marketing

Jo: A lot of what you were talking about was newsletter, email marketing, some ads, but nothing aggressive — as in you're not monitoring it every single day. The email pushes, like a BookBub or free books, bargain books — you can book it and then it's almost set and forget, isn't it? You don't have to log in every day to check the results. Is that what you mean?

Sara: Yes. And I like those because they are set and forget. You just have to remember to drop the price and then reset it on Amazon, and then they send it out to their list and hopefully you get some traffic from that.

I like that much better than Facebook ads, because with ads I feel like you have to go in and monitor the comments and check on how they're doing. It's a more full-time type job. If you're doing a lot of ads, it's a couple of hours — for me anyway, because I'm not very savvy with it and I'm not as experienced. So it would take a long time to increase my knowledge there.

Jo: To be fair, both of us have had many years when we could have become experts, but the fact is it doesn't suit our personalities.

I am now working with Claude Code a bit more to do Amazon ads, but even then we go in once a week and Claude does a few things and then we log out again. I'm not doing this daily stuff, and I may eventually get back into doing it for Meta. But in terms of what I mean by low-key marketing — it's lower stress when you don't have to do stuff every day.

And I guess what you're doing with the Mystery Books podcast, with the library pitches, with the batching — is that what you're doing? Putting aside time for marketing occasionally?

Sara: Yes. And that's what I do. I'll think, oh, I haven't checked Kobo promos, so let me go check that, because I do use those too.

I'm wide, so I'm trying to find things that bring my books to readers everywhere. I use the Kobo promos, I use Kobo Plus, I use Draft2Digital to get digital books into libraries. I'm always running — if they have a library sale anywhere, I sign up for it and I just do these occasional things.

It's not every day, and I like doing things in phases. I like doing a special edition and working on that and then being done with that and putting that away and going back to writing or whatever. I don't mind doing promo for a little bit, but then I don't want to do it every day.

A project-based approach to the author business

Jo: We are similar in so many ways. I also have this project approach to life and business. If I'm writing a first draft of a new book, pretty much everything else goes out the window.

Sara: Yes.

Jo: Exactly. I just don't have the bandwidth. I'm not in that head space.

And then, as we record this, I've got a Kickstarter coming up for Bones of the Deep and yesterday I did the book trailer, and I'll do the push for the Kickstarter and then I'm just going to stop.

Sara: Well, the positive way to look at that is it's focus, right? We can focus for two weeks or a month or whatever — two months doing a Kickstarter or whatever — and then we're done with it, and then we move on.

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

Sara: Me either. I like switching it up, and I do enjoy the different phases of writing.

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

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

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

Social media — or not

Jo: Let's just mention social media then. What are you doing for that?

Sara: Not much!

Jo: Nor me!

Sara: I'm dabbling in Pinterest because I think that could have the longer tail. I do a little Instagram, but that is about it. And I really considered just leaving it altogether.

I'm never on Facebook. We were talking earlier about saying no, and I don't want to join any more Facebook groups. I don't care what information they have. I figure I'll hear about it on a podcast if it's great.

I think social media has changed so much. In the beginning, it was great — you could find readers. Now it's just much harder to connect with readers there. I want to have a presence so that if people go look for me, they'll find my books and hopefully find a link to download a free book and read it or an audiobook and listen to it. Then they can get on my newsletter and connect with me there. That's my philosophy.

Jo: I think so too. I am on Instagram @jfpennauthor in that I do post pictures there, and even very recently I've discovered how to do a reel, which is just hilarious — I'm only about seven years late.

But I don't check my DMs, so if anyone messaged me on Instagram or Facebook, I'm just not getting them.

Sara: I know. And I feel like there's so many places people can connect with you. I put up a post on Facebook and said, I'm not going to be here much anymore. If you're looking for me, you can find me on Instagram maybe, or sign up for my newsletter to really stay in touch.

Jo: I think that's what we have to do. But our idea of this project-based approach to the author life and the author business doesn't suit social media, because the people who are really good on social media are on it multiple times a day, creating content multiple times a day. It just suits some people and not others.

Sara: I do things and I take pictures and think, oh, I'll put this on Instagram. And then I don't ever do it. One time we went on a road trip and I took a bunch of paperbacks and dropped them off in the free little libraries. I took a picture at each one and I never posted those ever. I ran across them years later and thought, oh yeah, I did it but I didn't post it on social media. That's just not my thing.

Special editions and physical design

Jo: Although you did just say that you like doing the art and the photos, and you've done some beautiful special editions. You've done letters, you do a lot of physical design for your books. So talk about that — why you're doing that, why it's fun, and the pros and cons, because it can be a time suck and a money suck.

Sara: Yeah. I think you have to figure out where your gauge is for that, because you can go all in and do everything for the special editions.

I've come to the conclusion I'm going to survey my readers before I do another one and say, what do you really like about them? Because I do mine and release them on my Shopify store first — is it just that you're getting it first, or do you like all the bells and whistles?

I enjoy doing the endpages and the ribbon, and I've done character art for them. But since my books are set in the 1920s, there's a lot of photos from that time period that are available. In Deposit Photos, you can go in and search for those.

The last two books I did, I used photos that I thought captured what the characters would look like. That was a lot of fun to find and just include photos instead of character art. And it was a lot faster than waiting for character art too.

The pros are that it's fun and you get to do things you don't normally get to do — finding beautiful illustrations for the endpages, doing the sprayed edges, just making it really special.

Storytelling through letters

Sara: I enjoy doing things that you can't do on Amazon. You just can't do letters on Amazon.

With both Kickstarters, you could get three physical letters in the mail. They were a story told through letters, and they had art. The first one was black and white, and then the second set was colour.

Since then, I've done colour, and it's a challenge to write those because it's a totally different type of writing. It's a 1,000 to 1,500 word little snippet, and where you end is important so that readers will be looking for the next one.

Including art — whether it was a map, illustrations of what the view looks like, what the house looks like. Not that I illustrated it — I had somebody else help me do that.

It's fun to think about how stories can be told in different ways. I love novels, but 70,000 words is a lot of words. That's a big project. Sometimes it's nicer to have a shorter project. The letters were shorter and a shorter time investment. I enjoyed them for that.

For the cons — it's just a longer ramp up to get it going. If you want to do a special edition or letters or book boxes or anything like that, just estimate how much time you think you need and then multiply by three or five, because it's going to take so much longer than you think. Would you agree with that, with your special editions?

Jo: Yeah. Although I think now I've got a process for it.

Although, I did my book trailer for Bones of the Deep yesterday, and it reminded me — the book trailer is 30 seconds, and it took me nearly ten hours!

Sara: I do believe that though. I completely believe it.

Jo: Because I'm a bit of a control freak. I love working with Midjourney. I say I think I'm a control freak — of course I am. We all are as indie authors.

But I'm a very visual author, and you sound like you are as well. I see the book, and if I'm generating pictures of the characters or the ship or what happens in the storm or whatever, then it needs to look like what's in my head. So I end up generating and generating, and then I did music and then — yeah, it's very creative, but it takes a heck of a long time.

From Kickstarter to Shopify store

Jo: Coming back to your letters and your Kickstarters — I did go check. It's been a while since you've done those. Have you changed to using your Shopify store, and will you do another Kickstarter?

Sara: I may do another Kickstarter. I do feel like I found new readers on Kickstarter. That's a pro definitely — people will see your work that maybe would never see it on Amazon.

It's a much smaller pool to stand out in. Whereas on Amazon there are thousands and millions of books, on Kickstarter there might be five historical mysteries or two at that moment. So it's easier to stand out.

I'll probably do another Kickstarter, but to me it was difficult with the prep that went into it. Then the launch, and the launch kind of stressed me out. I know we talked to you on our podcast before your first Kickstarter and you were a little stressed, so I'm not as stressed as I would be with the first one.

But it is a lot to prepare, and I do feel some pressure that I want this one to do well. And then the fulfilment — I like to do things in phases, so I felt like it was hard for me to move on to anything else while I was waiting for the books to arrive, because I didn't feel done with that until I had sent out the books. It just seemed like it took quite a bit of time.

So with my next release, I thought, I'm going to launch this on my Shopify store and see how it does.

I still did the special edition and I still did a lot of the things I learned to do with Kickstarter, like emailing my list a little more often and highlighting these special things. And coordinating with a couple of other authors in my genre to say, hey, I have a book out and it's a special edition — you might be interested. And then share their stuff when their book comes out.

The first one I did, I had the book sent to me. I signed them, packed them, and sent them out. But the second one, I said, to save time and money, we were just going to do a digital signature. I had them shipped directly from Book Vault to the reader, and that just helped simplify things so much.

Launching on my store, I didn't see quite as many sales or bring in quite as much money as I did on Kickstarter, but it took a lot less time. I feel that was a good trade-off. It simplified the time it took to do it, so I was able to get back to writing more quickly.

The second one I launched on my store as well. I've done the spinoff series on my store — it's a three-book series — and I'll probably do the third book on my store too.

Then maybe when I go back to my original 1920s series, which is the one that does the best and is my most popular, I may go back to Kickstarter with that one. I think it's nice to have the choice to launch on my store or Kickstarter. I can choose — do I have enough time to do it the way I want to on Kickstarter?

Scarcity, direct sales, and training readers

Jo: I feel like launching on my store, there's less of a time pressure. We don't really have scarcity in our business, and the only way to make it scarce is to have a limited-time offer. Which to me, Kickstarter by its very nature is a limited-time offer.

Obviously it's easier for me because I'm near BookVault, so I go up there and physically sign the books, and I like doing that occasionally. But I hear you with the direct store, and I also presume it trains people to buy from your store.

So how has your revenue shifted from the big stores like Amazon, Kobo, to Shopify, Kickstarter, direct sales?

Sara: It's shifted a lot. I do the Shopify store just like I do everything else — in phases. I'm like, hey, I have a new release. Go buy it at my store. And I have a lot of sales.

I also launched a third set of letters last year around October, leading into November. I said, you can get this series of letters — two a month all year in 2026. Go to my store, sign up for it, buy it there. They'll be launching in December.

I push it, I talk about it. I do a podcast about the letters or the special edition on Mystery Books podcast. I ran a couple of ads, got the word out, saw some sales, got everything done, and then it just kind of tapers off.

What I need to do is continue to market it, especially to my list — hey, did you know I've got these bundles? Did you know you can get bundles of paperbacks or audiobooks over here from me at a discount? I need to work that into my newsletter strategy.

It's kind of like I use it in phases. I still have books on all the retailers and still promote those and link to them. But that's not my focus now. If I'm going to send traffic anywhere, I'm going to send it to my store.

My mindset is more on direct sales and the special things I can do — the special editions, the unique things they can only get from me. I'll still do a BookBub if I can get one, and push that to the retailers. The smaller newsletter sites — I use those to reach readers there. But my focus is definitely on the special editions and doing things on my store that you can't get anywhere else.

Beyond ebook, audiobook, and paperback

Jo: A lot of people, new authors particularly, are thinking about ebook, audiobook, paperback. And all of those you can get anywhere — for both our books, you can get them in those formats anywhere. And large print as well.

I have large print paperback, and I actually remember, it was probably five years ago when you were here and you mentioned large print hardback. And I was like, oh yeah, I should do that. Of course, I never did. You can't do everything.

Sara: You can't do everything.

Jo: You can't. But I think you probably can do a large print hardback on Amazon now with KDP Print — you can do hardback — but none of them are as good quality as the printing we get elsewhere.

Also, as you say, all those special things — you actually can't sell them on Amazon. People can sell them secondhand or whatever, but you just can't do that. So I think that's the creative fun of having your own store or doing Kickstarters or selling direct — just all the other fun things that satisfy us creatively too. Because it's not all about the readers, is it?

Sara: Right, because we want to be enjoying what we're doing. We don't want it to be a slog.

Jo: What's the fun in that?!

How long Sara has been an indie author

Jo: Just remind us how long you've been doing this now.

Sara: My first book came out in 2006. It was traditionally published, and I had a series of ten books with a traditional publisher.

Then as that one was getting near the end, I was experimenting with indie — was a hybrid for a while. Then I went all indie pretty much.

Jo: In what year?

Sara: That was probably — I think my first indie book came out in 2012. So for a while I was trying to do indie and a traditionally published book, and that was very — I felt like I was torn in all kinds of different directions. I thought it was going to be so much simpler just to do this all myself. Maybe not, but —

Jo: Pros and cons, as we said.

Co-writing the Mystery and Thriller Trope Thesaurus

Jo: One of the things you've done recently is co-written a Mystery and Thriller Trope Thesaurus with Jennifer Hilt, who's been on this show as well as your show. Tell us about co-writing, because I don't think you've done much co-writing.

Sara: No, I hadn't. That was the first co-written book I'd ever done. And it was a great experience. Jennifer Hilt made it so easy. She has several books in this Trope Thesaurus series, so she had a format and we just used her format.

We took the tropes and divided them up. She took half and I took half, and we went off and wrote on our own and came back together and then we would trade.

It was really easy. I don't know that this is the way co-writing usually goes, but we did have a contract and we started out with all the normal things — a plan and a contract. We had to decide who was going to coordinate everything for the cover and the copy editing and all that.

When we got done, we used Draft2Digital and did the payment splitting, which made that part easy. It's been a great experience, and I think it's just because Jennifer has done this before and she's really easy to work with. I highly recommend co-writing if you can find somebody like Jennifer who's already done it and can take you through the system.

Jo: I think that's the point — if you have someone like Jennifer who has a layout, it's a bit like the For Dummies series. I had an opportunity to do something with them at one point, and it's so formulaic in terms of doing it, and then you're filling it in. Clearly Jennifer's managing that really well.

The co-writing I've done with various people has been pros and cons, but it's not been in an established series. I love that you say that, but just to warn people — that might not be your experience.

Sara: Yes. And I think it's so much about personality and how you work together, how you each write, and your deadlines. If you try to set a really close deadline — we pushed our deadline out. We had planned to do a Kickstarter with the launch of the trope book, and then she ended up moving and I had a bunch of stuff going on. We were like, you know what, that's fine. We won't do a Kickstarter. And it was okay.

You just have to figure out how it's going to go. And if you have someone that's flexible when you need to be flexible, that's so important.

Jo: Adjusting is the reality of life, isn't it? And I feel like the Trope Thesaurus — it's not going to necessarily have a spike sale and then disappear. It is an evergreen book, right?

Sara: Yes. People will find it when they find the series. It's not something that has to be pushed during a certain time period and then we're done. It's a long-term, evergreen type book.

The role of series and bundles

Jo: Talking of series, you've obviously got multiple series. People should definitely go look — you've got great branding and your series are so clear. What part do series and bundles play in marketing in general, and in your direct sales?

Sara: I like to bundle them for my direct store because I figure I need something special about my store — a reason for people to go there. They can get the books on Amazon and Audible and Spotify and all these places, so why would they go to my store?

I've really leaned into bundles for the store, so they can get a three-book audiobook bundle or the whole series in pretty much all my series. They can do the paperback bundling.

I've done a paperback starter series bundle where they can get each book one in my first three series bundled together through Book Vault. I thought I really need to do that with the audiobooks. That's on my list — to create a starter audiobook bundle.

Bundles do well on Kobo. They draw readers in over there. And for the rare times I can get a BookBub, I think bundles seem to appeal to BookBub. If I'm going to pitch something, it seems like they like bundles.

Readers like them too. Part of it is the convenience. You've got the whole series together and you can just read one after another. You don't have to go find it and figure out what order they're in.

Jo: They do. And I love offering bundles in the Kickstarter as add-ons and on my Shopify stores as well.

Because I'm always surprised — somebody's just found me and then they order the 13 ARKANE thriller paperback bundle, and I'm like, okay, wow. That just feels like a win.

Sara: Yes. I love to see those come in and you think, oh, I wonder how they found me. Why they would dive in with the seven-book series. That's fantastic.

Jo: It is interesting. With the paperbacks and the shipping, you drop some money for a complete print series. And then obviously it's usually a bit less on things like audio and ebook bundles, but it's still a real commitment.

So yeah, everybody, we love bundles.

Sara: We do.

What Sara is excited about next

Jo: I wanted to come back to the podcast, Wish I'd Known Then, which is brilliant. I often refer to it on this show. Hopefully we share quite a few listeners, and you and Jamie talk about industry changes, personal things. Given all the stuff that's going on, what are you excited about? What are you experimenting with? What changes are you seeing that you're enjoying?

Sara: We appreciate the shout-out. Every time you give us a shout-out — and I do think we share a readership. I think you are our most frequently mentioned other podcast. We are always referring to you on Wish I'd Known Then.

What I'm looking forward to is — I like seeing what other businesses or industries are doing and seeing if I can apply that to writing and books. That's how I came up with the letter idea. I saw some people doing that. I found out later there were some mystery-related mystery letter subscriptions, but I didn't know about them and they weren't well known.

I thought, oh, I could try that. So I'm looking forward to doing more creative things that we haven't had the opportunity to do, but now we are going to have the tech and the fulfilment to do.

Merch could be fun. I haven't ever delved into that. Translations — I didn't even mention translations earlier. I've done a couple of languages in my historical series, and I think it's really interesting the options we have now in translation. The books could go into so many more languages, so much easier. So I'm looking into that.

Just reaching out and trying some of these new things that are on the horizon. You're much more futurist than I am. I'm much more about looking back at the past and going, oh, that was cool. Maybe we can do something similar, but different now.

Finding creative inspiration from other industries

Jo: That's interesting. How are you finding out that information about what other industries are doing? Because the curation of the information stream is hard for all of us.

Sara: I don't know. I seem to run across things. I'm always reading and browsing online and seeing what people are talking about.

I did see a post years ago about a company that was doing special edges — limited-edition special edges. When I saw that, I thought, oh, I wonder if I could do that. And I hand-stamped snowflakes on a Christmas book.

Jo: Oh, I remember that. I actually bought a stamp. I got a (skull) stamp made.

Sara: Oh, awesome.

Jo: I never used it!

Sara: Well, it's a lot of work. It takes time. But they're very special. Each one is unique, just like a snowflake. Each book has all these different types of snowflakes and ink colours on it.

I'll see something and think, oh, I wonder if I could do that. And then I'm always consuming really quirky media. I'm into Asian dramas — Korean dramas, Japanese dramas — and I'm seeing trends over there for storytelling. The vertical dramas they're putting out, super short.

I just wonder what that's going to turn into in the future. I'm not a video person, but in the future I think there could be short little videos that we could make of our books. That would be just crazy. I don't know that I would have the skills to do that, but we might be able to hire somebody to do that for us.

Korean dramas and new storytelling trends

Jo: There are lots of AI apps that are already helping with that. I do love making book trailers.

And I have also thought about my short stories particularly — turning them into short videos. I've written a few screenplays, so I'm also thinking about that kind of visual-sized content. I also watch a lot of Korean shows.

Sara: Oh, do you?

Jo: I love Korean shows.

Sara: Oh, we have to talk later.

Jo: They're very good. I also like the Korean sports stuff and the cooking stuff, and they're just so good at hooking you in.

Sara: Yes, they are.

Jo: They are so good.

Sara: They're really good at blending genres. And I've noticed with their storytelling, they're doing a lot of these stories they call isekai stories, where the main character falls into a story. I heard somebody talking about it, saying they think that's popular because we're so familiar with media entertainment — we kind of know where the story's going. So that's a new way.

If your character falls into a fictional mystery and knows who the bad guy is and is trying to prevent a death or something, that's a completely different story than just a straight mystery.

Jo: That's interesting. In a way, the LitRPG genre where the character goes into a game, or the character is in a game — I suppose it's got some relationship to that. But I think K-Pop Demon Hunters is like the most successful film and music and all of this kind of thing. It's clearly coming to more Western audiences.

Sara: Yes. It's becoming much more mainstream than it used to be, I think.

Jo: That's really interesting given that you're mainly a historical author. Are we going to get 1920s Korea?

Sara: Oh, maybe. That's an interesting time period. Maybe my character needs to travel there.

Jo: You have a travel series, don't you?

Sara: Yes. I have a modern, cosy kind of travel series, and then in my 1920s series, it takes place mostly in England, but I have a spinoff with a character who's gone to Egypt, and I have three books set in Egypt.

Jo: Well, you never know.

Sara: I know. Maybe they need to travel.

Jo: I love it. Okay, where can people find you and your books and your podcasts online?

Sara: Thanks for having me. This has been so much fun. You can find me at SaraRosett.com. My store is SaraRosettBooks.com. You can find the podcast with Jamie and me, Wish I'd Known Then — it's everywhere, Apple, Spotify. We're even on Substack now. Yeah, that's where everything is.

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

Sara: Thank you.

The post Special Editions, Seasonal Podcasts, and the Art of Low-Key Book Marketing with Sara Rosett first appeared on The Creative Penn.