In the intro, Self-Publishing Pop Up Books [Self-Publishing with ALLi]; New in KU [BookBub]; The solar sail theory of indie publishing [ProductiveIndieFictionWriter]; Bones of the Deep; Selfie Awards Shortlist 2026.

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 

Nicole Walker is a nonfiction author, essayist, poet, and editor, as well as a creative writing teacher. Her latest book is Writing the Hard Stuff: Turning Difficult Subjects into Meaningful Prose.

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 helps us understand “the puzzles of the universe” — and when to trust that intuition
• The braided essay: alternating between trauma and an everyday obsession to unlock the hard stuff
• How two-minute timed writing lets you go deep and then safely step back
• Rooting pain in the body, using the senses, scene, and dialogue instead of words like “trauma”
• Truth in memoir, big T versus little t, and the emerging genre of speculative nonfiction
• What actually sells books: pairing up on book tour and getting readers back out into the world

You can find Nicole and NikWalk.com.

Transcript of the interview with Nicole Walker

Jo: Nicole Walker is a nonfiction author, essayist, poet, and editor, as well as a creative writing teacher. Her latest book is Writing the Hard Stuff: Turning Difficult Subjects into Meaningful Prose. So welcome to the show, Nicole.

Nicole: Hi, Joanna. It's so nice to be here.

Jo: I've lots to talk about, but first up—

Tell us a bit more about you and your journey into writing and publishing.

Nicole: I was always a writer. As all writers say, I've been writing since I was five. I kept little journals and things like that, and I was on the high school literary magazine.

I was an English major in college, but that was always tempered with some serious commitment to the sciences, to English literature, to German, to Spanish.

I had a wide variety of interests, but there was always something that tugged at me about writing that made me feel like, this is where I feel most at home. This is the way I like to understand the puzzles of the universe. This is how I make sense of the world—through writing.

So even though I got my BA in English at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, I stuck around Portland for a few years because I loved it. I worked for various non-profits, and that was great.

At some point I said, “I really want to take this seriously.” So I went ahead and applied to graduate school, and ended up in the University of Utah's PhD programme, where I stayed for eight very lovely years.

I always recommend to my own students: never graduate. Stay in graduate school forever, because it's such a beautiful place where people support your writing. You have professors who support it, but more importantly, you have your cohort.

To this day, I have so many great friends. You make a lot of friends if you stick around for eight years.

That sort of community-building is, I think, the other part of why I became a writer. Writing by myself is obviously a lonely business, and there's a lot of internal struggle that happens with that.

I have found a literary community, both at the University of Utah and then growing from there, serving as president of the NonfictioNOW Conference, teaching my own graduate students, serving as the series editor for Crux, the imprint at the University of Georgia Press.

I feel like my world has expanded because of my writing. So that's been a true gift.

Jo: Oh, I love that.

I love that you said you understand the puzzles of the universe through writing, and that this tugged at you. Could talk about that a bit more?

Because a lot of listeners, I think, sometimes mistrust that feeling. They think, “Oh, maybe I shouldn't necessarily lean into that intuition.” It feels like you leaned very strongly into an intuition that this was the way.

Nicole: Yes, and this book in particular, Writing the Hard Stuff, takes that to heart. I think about writing the hard stuff as writing all kinds of tricky things—things that are really hard to communicate.

The book begins revolving around personal trauma. Things that happened in my childhood, as well as difficult subjects that happen to us when we're growing up.

It also includes things like environmental issues and political issues: things that are really hard to talk about, that are philosophically difficult to express, that can be controversial, and that you can put people off by talking about.

One of the goals of the book—one of my own philosophies—is that by looking deeply into the knotted ball of string that is a kind of trauma or a kind of difficulty, and beginning to pull those strings out, that's where you start to not only make meaning out of what happened to you, or what this particular problem is, but those strings themselves become connections.

I talk about Donna Haraway's book Staying with the Trouble. It's primarily about how we can overcome our political differences regarding climate change, and one of her examples is to change the way we think about narrative.

In Western thought, we often think there's a beginning, a middle, and an end, and she brings up the Navajo game that we all know as cat's cradle.

So if you think of that ball of knots—your trauma, your difficult subject—you start pulling out the strings, and then you start playing with it. With cat's cradle, you make one design with your hands, and then a friend pulls it around and turns it into another design.

To me, that's how reading and writing work. We share, and we build on each other's ideas, but we're always connected by those strings.

So if you have this difficult subject and you're shying away from it, you're losing, I think, some of the opportunity to make connections and to make sense of what that nest of string sitting in your stomach actually is.

Jo: I love that metaphor. I think it's brilliant. I've never heard it described that way, and I think it's fantastic. What's interesting is that some people don't have a mind's eye—I know several listeners who don't.

So while in my mind I'm picturing the ball of string and then the cat's cradle, some people won't be able to do that, which is also fascinating in terms of how people's brains work.

In terms of how you'd recommend people think about it: this ball of string that we want to turn into a design like a cat's cradle is a total mess. So where do we even start?

How do we know where to start pulling on the threads?

Because it might just feel like it's out of control.

Nicole: Oh, I deeply appreciate both the idea that some people don't have that mind's eye, or just think differently. We all have different ways of imagining what we call our trauma, this nest of problems, this ball of string.

Of course a metaphor does oversimplify in some ways. I say, “Well, you just take one of the ends of the string and start pulling.” But practically, what does that really mean to do? There are a couple of things I suggest in the book and offer at workshops. One is an exercise I call writing the braided essay.

I ask the writer to sit down and think about a scene that was difficult in their life—something that had a lot of tension, that they're really still struggling with, that they don't love thinking about. I'm going to ask them to go there for just a couple of minutes.

Then there's the other side of the braided essay: I ask them to think about something completely different, completely off-topic.

Perhaps a walk they took in the aspen grove, or what they were making for dinner last night, or perhaps they're deeply invested in the networks of the blood in the human body—anything they're fascinated and obsessed with.

I say, “Okay, I want you to write about your difficult subject for two minutes, but then I'm going to give you a break, and you're going to pop over and talk about how you spent all day weeding your garden, and yet there are still weeds.”

Then I'm going to ask people to go back and talk about their difficult subject, and then go back and talk about their obsession with weeds. They write about each of these things for two minutes.

What happens—which I think is a pretty compelling experiment, from my point of view and from theirs—is that they write back and forth, and they're able to take a break from the hard thing. They're also tempted to go back to it once they've had that break in their research.

The other thing that happens—and, you know, every book in nonfiction has to have a colon, so of course it's called Writing the Hard Stuff: Turning Difficult Subjects into Meaningful Prose—is that by going back and forth, you'll see the connections these writers make.

They make connections with word choice, with verbs, with colours and different kinds of imagery. They start to make meaning between those two ideas. What happens to the writer then—and to me, when I'm doing it—is that I now have something that is constructed.

So it's not just this knot in my stomach. It's not just my interest in research. Now I've put these things together, and then I get to play. We get to the cat's cradle part of the metaphor, where I really start thinking about craft issues.

Why did I happen to bring these two ideas together? What might they have in common? What does it mean that I'm telling the story of my parents' divorce and my personal trauma, and in the research part I'm talking about weeds? Well, maybe I felt in the weeds.

You come up with some sort of overarching understanding of why you chose that research story, and it lets you go deeper into that personal trauma, now with some of the techniques of craft, which I think help shield you from some of the trauma and pain of that original hard story.

Jo: Again, I really love that idea.

Do you also think the timed writing actually helps people go deep and then withdraw a bit, which psychologically may help them write about these difficult subjects?

People are like, “I need to sit down for two hours and write about this deeply traumatic thing,” which of course feels like it's going to be too hard. So perhaps that two-minute process actually releases people from that.

Nicole: Oh, absolutely. What a great way to think about it. It is prohibitive to sit down and think, “Okay, I'm going to go into the worst thing that ever happened to me and sit with it for two hours.”

Going back and forth, you create energy and tension. But also, nobody wants to sit with something by themselves for two hours. If you think of research as your companion—”I'm coming in there with you, buddy”—you have something to rely on, this other side of the story, and it gives you that space.

The timed writing, the two minutes, two minutes, two minutes, also reminds you that you don't have to write for two hours straight any day. I have a goal where I write 500 words a day, which is mostly true, unless I'm really in the weeds.

We'll use two metaphors today: we'll use string, and now we'll be using weeds. But when I'm really in the weeds teaching, or going around the country talking about books, I really do write 500 words a day. I often try not to write too much more, because sometimes it loses freshness, and it can be overwhelming.

So I really appreciate you saying that having that timed writing is important, but also that having that balance of deep emotional investigation with this more cerebral, informational crutch can really help you get into the subject and go deeper.

Jo: Yes, and perhaps it anchors the writing in something concrete. Because with memoir particularly—having also written one—it can be too easy to lean on big words like “pain” or “trauma,” but that's actually meaningless in a book.

So why is it so important to be specific and concrete in our writing in order to convey these bigger topics?

Nicole: I think we know our own trauma. We know how it feels in our bodies, and we've been living with it for a long time. So it's pretty hard to communicate it to others. Why does it matter to other people?

Of course it matters to you, but how are you going to convey the breadth of that trouble with words that aren't rooted in the physical world?

The nice thing about rooting things in the physical world is that every one of us has a body. We have different bodies, but we share that in common. So it's the old trope of using your senses first. What did it feel like?

If you can't think of what part of your body it particularly hurts in, you have the availability of metaphor to describe how that might have felt. You have the opportunity to create scene.

This is particularly difficult for memoir writers, I think, because we imagine it's the fiction folks who have to use dialogue, who have to have a setting, who have to put their bodies in a place.

Thatt's one of my mantras when I teach: we need to be able to see where you are. We need to see what is physically happening, how the interactions work.

Dialogue, I think, is one of the best ways to literally get your body on the page—and to get your other characters, or subjects, on the page—because to speak, you have to have a body.

Once you start having dialogue, you can picture the way the speaker's face moves, the way they cross their legs. You can even picture the colour of the paint behind them, or the kind of chair they're sitting in. So dialogue is one of the first ways you can say, “All right, I must have a scene here.”

I can't go on just telling people, “It was so traumatic. I suffered so much. It was terrible. I felt so much pain.” You can say that sometimes, that's totally fair, but you have to pair it with that physical, concrete imagery, so other people can begin to understand what it felt like for you in your body, so they can feel it in their body.

Jo: Interesting that you bring up dialogue because one of the issues with memoir is—I've had people compare it to truth with a small “t” and truth with a big “T.” So you're telling some kind of big truth about your life.

If you're writing dialogue about something that actually happened to you, in memory, it's very unlikely that it actually happened in that way, so it's not necessarily small-“t” true. So on a practical note, what are your thoughts and tips on truth.

How do we tell our own story even if others don't see it that way?

Nicole: This is a subject I'm deeply invested in right now. When I first started teaching creative nonfiction, it was at the height of the John D'Agata and David Shields questions. What is truth? Big T, little t? What am I obligated to do as a creative nonfiction writer?

I had a great friend, Angie Truong, who came to teach one of my classes, and she said, “Nonfiction is a pretty big spectrum. You have journalism on one end, and then you have the lyric essay on the other end.”

You imagine the lyric essay is full of metaphors and things like that, so you can approach truth. You're saying, “This is what it felt like. This is what it seemed like.”

Check out my newest favourite thing. It's called speculative nonfiction, and I use a little bit of this in my book How to Plant a Billion Trees, which Writing the Hard Stuff is somewhat based on.

I wrote them in tandem, which was a very strange and interesting and fun thing to do. But in How to Plant a Billion Trees I use this thing called speculative nonfiction, which goes even further along the spectrum, past the lyric essay, to this opportunity to use language like “perhaps,” “maybe,” “I imagined.”

So I have sections in my book where I can't remember the dialogue exactly, but I know that the dialogue in some sense matters—that what might have been said will do much more to convey what was happening than my exposition over the matter.

By using those turns of phrase, you're alerting your reader: “Dear reader, this definitely is not exactly what happened, but this is how I recall it.”

Then you're being not only honest to the story and honest to your reader, but you're also conveying the feeling and the mood of the event—that other kind of truth that memoir is really trying to get at. It was like this for me, which is why I think this way now.

It's a fledgling genre. I just read a book by Laraine Herring called A Constellation of Ghosts: A Speculative Memoir with Ravens. It's brilliant. It's an amazing book that pairs her actual colonoscopy and discovery of colon cancer with the story of her dad, who has passed already and comes back as a raven and helps her through it.

So you're pulling on some of the tools of fiction, which creative nonfiction already has been doing. But it does so in this bright and, I feel, incredibly ethical way.

You're alerting your reader, “My dad is not really a raven.” But you're also saying, “Oh my gosh, I sensed he was with me. I sensed every time a raven approached that I had somebody's hand on my shoulder.”

That, to me, has been a lot of fun—a much more imaginative way of creating some of those scenes than doing something like, “Well, I don't remember the dialogue.” Or, even worse—and we know people have been unethical in their approach—recreating the dialogue as if they'd had a tape recorder with them when they were 17 years old.

Jo: Mm.

Nicole: So I offer that as an option to your listeners, as something to experiment with. Allow yourself to have that imaginative opportunity to show the reader what it might have been like.

Jo: I love that. It's interesting, you talk there about the spectrum of nonfiction, which is ridiculously big, as is fiction. Obviously these are very big. But I wonder if we do get hemmed in by genre.

I love the idea of a speculative memoir. I'm going to have to go read that book because I can't even imagine what that really means. I feel hemmed in by my expectations of a memoir.

But then, from a business and marketing perspective—because we're all trying to sell our books—

Do we risk not meeting the expectations of a reader of a genre that way?

Nicole: Right. One of the good and bad things about my literary career is that I've spanned a lot of genres. My PhD is actually in poetry. Nobody expects the full truth from poetry.

One of my poetry professors once said she wrote this really sad poem about her father's death, and the audience was moved, and then her real father stood up and said, “Good job, daughter.” And someone in the audience was just shocked: “You just read a poem about your dead dad, and here he is!”

We have absolute expectations of genre, and expectations of truth, in everything we read. If you label it fiction, you're kind of off the hook—even though, of course, fiction uses so many elements of nonfiction: so much research, so much information, so much personal memory to create those fantastic landscapes.

So when I think about how one sells one's memoir, I do think you also have to acknowledge what you expect your audience to be. With Laraine Herring's A Constellation of Ghosts, by putting “colon, a speculative memoir,” you're alerting your reader to that possibility.

And because it's a pretty far-out way of thinking right now, it probably does curtail some of the sales.

On the other hand, think of memoirs that are written for celebrities, and how many of them are ghostwritten—or written with other people, where the ghostwriter's not even part of the thing—but it comes across as the most legit of all memoirs, because it's a celebrity and we know them.

We associate their lives with their story, and their story must therefore be true. So I think, with all levels of creative nonfiction, it's incumbent upon the writer to suggest right off the bat what kind of nonfiction they're reading.

Are they reading journalism? Are they reading lyric essays? Are they reading speculative nonfiction?

I think a lot, too—as an editor for a literary series for nonfiction books—about what I look for in memoir. It's something that takes the personal story and connects it into the larger conversation.

Even if the larger conversation is directly about what the main subject is about, to me it's still about the crux of the matter. Why does your story make an impact on the world in this bigger way? How do you let the world inform your story? How does your past and your trauma, or your difficulties, connect to a larger world?

Jo: Mm.

Nicole: To me, that's something some memoirs are capable of doing. Some memoirs are truly invested only in that personal story, which I think is totally legitimate too, because I love learning how people think. I love understanding. This is just how my brain works.

But in terms of sales? I don't know. Again, as the series editor and as the seller of my own books, I think you can't determine it in advance.

So you should probably write what you want to write, what feels right to you, using as many craft techniques as you can hone. But the market, to me, feels very non-negotiable. You never know exactly how things are going to turn out.

So I deeply believe: write the best, most well-crafted book you can, and I do think your readers will find you.

Jo: We'll come back to marketing in a minute, but just returning to your own writing practice. I've got your book page up in front of me, and you've written all kinds of things: your essays, your memoirs, some fiction, and some poetry, as you mentioned.

So I wondered: when you're researching something, or you've got a feeling about wanting to write, how do you choose the type of book you turn it into—or a poem, or an essay? Or do you pitch it as some kind of external work, or turn it into a workshop?

How do you turn an idea into what it will eventually be?

Nicole: I love that question because it's somewhat of a mystery to me, but I think I'm getting close to understanding. It really is in those first few words, that first sentence, that I think, “Okay, I know which direction this is going.”

For example, the other day I woke up in the morning and thought, “All right, I'm writing this poem about how man took over for God, and that's how the planet ended up being such a mess.”

So I started writing it, and it was pretty lyrical at the beginning. But then I started making full sentences, and explaining things a little bit more, and I thought, “Okay, this is not a poem. It's going to be an essay.”

When I start writing fiction, I pull on something a little further, a little more distant from my experience, and then I pull it back into something more character-driven. For example, in a novel I'm writing, I begin with this whole story about McDonald's and ravens, and then I pull it back into the character.

If I were to diagram the sentences between a poem, the nonfiction, and the fiction, I think I'd see fundamental differences between the three.

Jo: Do you work on multiple projects at the same time, or once you commit to something, is that what you finish?

Personally, I have lots of little things happening, and then a moment comes and I commit to a book, and I won't stop until I've finished that book—the rest will have to wait. It's that decision moment. How does it work for you?

Nicole: My process is pretty similar to yours. I have a number of ongoing projects, percolating here and there. Some days I'll think, “All right, today feels like a fiction day.” But for the most part, you're absolutely right.

There's a bunch of little things I'm writing, or things I'm dabbling in, but once there's a critical mass—which I'd say is around 20,000 words or something—I'm all in, and I've got to focus on this project.

Even though I think I can do whatever multitasking, really it's important to try to maintain some sort of through-line in whatever project I'm working on. If I do that with too many projects, I lose that through-line.

I also worry sometimes that the projects start to sound too similar. So say I'm writing a nonfiction collection and a novel—if I go back and forth every other day, those sentence differences I'm talking about might start to collapse, and they become too similar. Then what the heck would I be writing? I don't even know.

Jo: It's interesting because you span academic publishing and, I guess, trade publishing—whatever you want to call it—where more non-academics read books. I'm just finishing up a master's myself at the moment, and writing academic stuff is completely different to writing my other books.

So when you're deciding on these books, are you aiming for a specific publication market—as in, you want an academic publisher, or you want a trade publisher?

How do you think about publishing in the process?

Nicole: As much as I once really wanted to find some ground as a scholarly and academic writer—and I really do love to write reviews of other people's books, and Writing the Hard Stuff is a textbook that relies tremendously on so many other people's books.

That is really important to me because that goes back to how one both creates and thanks one's community for creating the literary world we live in—I feel like there's a smaller audience for that sort of academic writing. But it's something we should do.

As generous as you are here, for example, reaching out to other people about other people's books is probably the kindest thing you can do. So I hope to continue to take time to do that and make it part of my repertoire.

It's not as fun, I'd say, as the imaginative elements of writing creative nonfiction, or fiction, or poetry. That's when I really love to groove and get into that mode of, “Oh, the words are coming. Oh, I never thought about it that way.”

With academic writing, I feel I sometimes write in a slightly more stilted voice. My friend Ander Monson, who teaches at the University of Arizona, has done a really great job of writing—whether it's his personal essays or his critical essays—where he maintains the same voice.

He doesn't move into that super-formal academic speak. He'll literally say things like, “You know,” or, “That's a banger of a sentence,” in the middle of an academic essay, and I really admire him for that.

I feel like maybe if academic writing were more receptive to people writing in their unique voices, then maybe more people would read it.

Jo: Yes. One of the pieces of feedback on one of my earlier essays in my master's year was around my sentence structure—that it would be far more appropriate in a novel than in an academic essay. I was saying to my husband, “I can't believe this, but I'm just going to have to change my style.” It's very interesting.

We're almost out of time, and I also wanted to ask you: you have a recent blog post on how to try to get your forthcoming book attention in 4,231 simple steps, which made me laugh.

We all find book marketing a challenge, so what have you found works best for you?

I should tell the listeners—there are not 4,000 steps in your blog post. Although I think people would want them.

Nicole: Exactly. I stopped at 72, but I can go on. That was sort of the pre-publishing process. There have been so many great things that have happened, but a lot of them have been driven by me.

I have a publicist, but he works on a lot of other books, and I have a marketing person at Bloomsbury. They have to juggle a lot. The only person who is really, really, really committed to your book is you.

So I've written companion essays. I haven't had any luck publishing them, which hasn't been true in the past, so I wonder what's going on there. I'll write something for the Huffington Post or Newsweek that's tangentially related to my book.

I also might just write too much in essay voice instead of popular-magazine voice. As we were just talking about, academic voice versus novelistic voice. So that might be part of the problem too. Reaching out to people who might invite me onto podcasts has been really rewarding, and very, very kind.

I think the best thing I did was to put myself on book tour and to pair myself with someone in that community.

I've gone on book tour before by myself, and there have been occasions where there were two to three people in the audience, which can be really disheartening.

The problem wasn't so much the bookstore's fault or my book's fault—it's just that if you go to a bookstore in a town where nobody knows you, they're not going to put a lot of effort into making the date happen, unless you're super famous.

So what I did was find somebody in a community—a friend of mine—who would go with me and be part of the conversation. Even if their book was a couple of years old, we'd still go and have a conversation about each of our books.

This has worked tremendously well. People will come to see their friend, and then they'll be introduced to you, and they'll ask you questions and buy your book. You create new connections and new friends thanks to that friend and that place. So that's my number one recommendation for how to get the word out in the world.

I also did all the social media stuff. It doesn't work as well as it used to. It's kind of a strange time. But because of my suggestion about going to bookstores with people you know… I think we're coming out of our COVID time, where we got so used to doing everything on our computers and just staying in our electronic universe.

People are hungry to get out. So one thing I want to do, and haven't done yet, is throw a big party.

Go to weird places where you don't even do readings—you just offer people snacks and a glass of wine and say, “Hey, here's a book if you want to buy it.” To have these more informal gatherings that bring people together because I do think there's a hankering for people to get out into the world again.

Jo: And just on that—you've got these two books coming at the same time: How to Plant a Billion Trees, which is the memoir, and Writing the Hard Stuff, the how-to book for writers.

When you do these events, are you choosing one or the other depending on the audience? Or are you selling both at the same time?

Because they're obviously very different.

Nicole: Yes, I'm definitely selling both at the same time. Although I probably push How to Plant a Billion Trees first, because most of the people I'm pairing with are also writers of nonfiction or memoir.

The other thing is, I can talk about How to Plant a Billion Trees, and if people have a really deep question about, “Well, how did you write this section?” I can say, “Well, if you refer to this book, Writing the Hard Stuff, you'll see.” So it's an easier segue.

I think people aren't used to going to book events for craft books. But in the interview world—where people are reviewing books or interviewing me—Writing the Hard Stuff has definitely been the primary book I've been approached to speak about because people really do want techniques.

So it depends on the context as to which book gets the spotlight, but it's been really fun to be able to talk about both in tandem.

I don't know if they're competing against each other or supporting each other. That's my hope, that people think, “Oh, I read this one book, I might as well read the other one.” But that's asking a lot of people, to buy two books, so I try not to overstate that hope.

Jo: They are very different, and I love the idea of doing that. Absolutely.

So where can people find you and your books online?

Nicole: You can find me at my Substack, which is substack.nikwalk.com—N-I-K-W-A-L-K. Or my website, which is the same: nikwalk.com. I might just start going as Nik Walk in the world, so people can find me more easily.

I also really love to support Bloomsbury. They have really good deals, especially on the audiobook for How to Plant a Billion Trees, and they also have good deals if you buy both books, you get free shipping.

So Bloomsbury is probably the number one place to get the books, but of course they're also available on Bookshop.org and Amazon.com, and on Amazon in the UK as well.

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

Nicole: Oh, it was so fun to talk with you, Joanna. Thank you again so much for this opportunity.

The post Writing The Hard Stuff: Turning Difficult Subjects Into Meaningful Prose With Nicole Walker first appeared on The Creative Penn.

In the intro, Has AI Already Killed Non-Fiction [Tim Ferriss]; 9 ways that AI would disrupt authors and the publishing industry over the next decade; Pivoting towards The Transformation Economy; and Who do you serve?

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 

Mark Leslie Lefebvre is the author of horror and paranormal fiction, as well as non-fiction travel and books for authors. He's also an editor, professional speaker, and the Director of Business Development at Draft2Digital. His latest book is Stark Realities: Stacked Up Lessons Every Writer Needs to Know About the Business of Writing and Publishing.

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 print and in-person events are making a comeback for indie authors
• The case for (and against) licensing your voice clone through ElevenLabs
• Why we keep selling books in person when the numbers rarely add up
• Measuring success by creative satisfaction rather than money
• Being honest about author earnings and the fear of being truly seen
• Managing stress, divisiveness, and the noise around AI

You can find Mark at MarkLeslie.ca.

Transcript of the interview with Mark Leslie Lefebvre

Jo: Mark Leslie Lefebvre is the author of horror and paranormal fiction, as well as non-fiction travel and books for authors. He's also an editor, professional speaker, and the Director of Business Development at Draft2Digital.

His latest book is Stark Realities: Stacked Up Lessons Every Writer Needs to Know About the Business of Writing and Publishing. Welcome back to the show, Mark.

Mark: Oh, hey, Jo. It's always an awesome time chatting with you.

Jo: You've been on the show lots of times over the years, but the last time was in September 2024, when we talked about selling books in person. So give us a bit of an update.

What does your writing and publishing business look like at the moment? How do you manage it alongside the day job and everything else you do?

Mark: Oh my God. Well, sleep is—no rest for the wicked, maybe. I'll sleep when I'm dead.

It's so funny, it was just this last weekend in Waterloo. I was at Waterloo Book Fest, and somebody came up to my table—another author from one of the other tables—and said, “I heard you on the The Creative Penn Podcast. And then when you mentioned something about Waterloo, I said, ‘He can't be from Waterloo.' And then when you mentioned the skeleton, I said, ‘I know where he lives.'”

Jo: That's scary.

Mark: So I love the fact that there are so many of your listeners all over the world, and that's usually how people know me. No matter what else I've done, it's like, “Oh, you've been on Joanna Penn's podcast.” I'll say, “Yes, I have.”

You know what's really funny? The last time I was on the podcast, we were talking about A Book in Hand, which I was supposed to release that year.

Jo: Yes.

Mark: I just added another 5,000 words to it this morning.

Jo: Wait, it's still not published?

Mark: No, and it's so funny. I actually have the first 60,000 words of it with an editor right now, and I told her I'd get her the rest of it, which I thought would be another 20,000 words, by the end of June. But I think it's going to hit 100,000.

Here's the weird thing that happened with this. This is trying to accumulate my life of book selling, as well as doubling down on doing in-person events in the last several years.

I thought I was going to have the book done in 2024. I ran into some issues where I didn't back it up properly. It was an old version, and I accidentally overwrote the only version I had.

Jo: So, for everyone listening, Mark—how many decades have you been an author and a publisher?

How come you're still missing deadlines and still not backing up your work properly?

Mark: Yes, this is a lesson: no matter how long you've been doing something, you can still make boneheaded errors. So if you, dear listener, have made mistakes, just know that this old guy who's been doing this since the mid-'80s still makes mistakes like that. Don't beat yourself up. I probably did something worse.

Anyway, that book I thought was going to be maybe 40, 45,000 words, it's going to be bigger than Wide for the Win—close to 100,000 words.

Here's a really important lesson I learned in that, Jo. I thought the book would be something. It became something else. Through my own experiences of doing more in-person events, book signings, and library event.

Also in talking to awesome folks like Johnny B. Truant, Katie Cross, Todd Fahnestock, and so many other authors I know, and seeing what Ben Wolf is up to, and a whole bunch of different people who are doing in-person events.

In creating case studies for how they interact specifically with a bookstore or library, or how they do in-person selling—I really think the book wasn't ready then. It's like the recipe wasn't ready. I still needed to play with some things.

I do sincerely have faith, since I got it into the editorial process, that this will be the year the book actually gets released.

Jo: As you said, there are some really good lessons there around sometimes the book not being quite ready. I'd bought an early version from the StoryBundle, which is how I got this book as well, actually.

Mark: Yes.

Jo: That's another tip for people—storybundle.com. You can go and find some great bundles there.

I was also thinking, as you were talking, that maybe one of the reasons this book about in-person events has got so big is because that's a real trend in the community. It feels like indies, we've moved…

Back in the day, I said, “I'm not doing print. No way.” This was the early days of digital, because print was really hard back then. So I was like, “Oh, and we've got all the advantages doing digital, so I'm just going to focus on that.”

It feels like the pendulum has swung, perhaps even more with the ease of mass production of digital with AI.

The focus on print and in person is getting stronger and stronger. Do you think that's happening?

Mark: Oh, yes, 100%. I did print in 2004. It was really hard back then, so that's gotten easier. I think there are a few reasons.

One of the reasons is, yes, digital made it so much easier for indie authors to get out there and break into the community. But the reality is that print books still outsell e-books in general—overall—despite the fact that indie authors can make six and seven figures a year from selling e-books alone on a single platform.

So print has never really gone away. It was just never something indie authors attended to. They were in a different business than traditional publishers were in.

And second, obviously I've got these gorgeous books that you've created on Kickstarter, because I like the beautiful books. I've never stopped buying print books. I actually buy more print books. I read more because of audiobooks and e-books, but I buy more print books, especially when I can get a nice signed copy.

Then the other reason comes back, again, to your advice—something I've been following for the longest time, and you've long been saying.

I do repeat this, and I try my best to offer attribution to you every time I use it: to double down on your humanity, particularly in this age of digital generation and the ability for even non-writers to leverage tools to create content.

I think it's so much more important for me, as a creative who will never be able to catch up with the machines, to exploit my humanity.

I mean, we both have digital voices of ourselves, right? There's a digital Mark Leslie Lefebvre voice that people can use, and I'm making money off it because people are able to license it through ElevenLabs.

But when I'm there in person, so far the holograms aren't good enough to fool people. I think I'm not just selling a book to somebody; I want to create an experience where, “Oh, I'm talking to the author, and we're signing a book together, and we're taking a selfie together.”

For me, there's that tactile experience that's really enriching. And it may not be something that lines my pockets as easily, because the investment is more significant.

For every $10 I make, it costs me six or seven dollars, as opposed to an e-book, where the cost is amortised in the most beautiful way over millions of copies.

Jo: There are a few things there. First of all, let's talk about that ElevenLabs voice licensing, because, as you say, I also have a voice clone. Bones of the Deep, the latest book, that's my voice clone.

I haven't gone with the licensing, partly because you don't have control over what someone can do with it. So, for example, someone could create Nazi content, or content that I might not agree with, in my voice.

So how have you got over that? Because part of me really does want to license my voice, and the other part doesn't.

Mark: This is a great question, Jo, and I'm glad you asked it. It's the same reason I don't worry about people stealing my books—adding DRM onto my e-books and things like that.

I may as well make some money off it, because let's be honest: you and I, our voices are out there. Thousands of hours of our voices, right? In your podcast, my podcast, in various interviews we've done over the years.

The technology exists for someone to make a copy of my voice themselves anyway. The tools exist. They can do it easily, so why not do it myself and at least make money? I'm actually getting money deposited into my account. Not a lot—maybe $30, $18, something like that every week.

Again, I've taken a lot of my non-fiction books that I haven't had the time to record myself, as I like to do, and I can at least load those to ElevenLabs and make my voice the default voice.

But wouldn't it be great to be able to listen to my book in your voice? It would sound so much better. Because you can do that. When you listen to a book on that platform, you can choose my voice if you'd rather hear it in my voice, or you can choose Burt Reynolds' voice, or some other folks who've licensed theirs.

Again, for me, the whole concept of wide publishing has always been important. It's another small revenue stream that's adding to my numerous revenue streams.

So I guess that's how I've justified just licensing the voice. If someone's going to do something with my voice that I can't control, they can do it regardless of whether or not I put it out there myself.

Jo: I agree with you. That could happen, and neither of us is famous enough that it's likely to happen anyway. I do quite like the idea of people using our voices, say, for other books for authors, because that would make sense—that's where we fit in the niche. I will rethink that, because I think it's interesting.

I wanted to come back to print books. You said sometimes there are easier ways to line your pockets, and I think that's funny. So, getting into the book, this leapt out at me quite near the beginning:

Why do we keep doing this when the maths almost never adds up?

Mark: Oh, I have a perfect example of that from an event I did a couple of weekends ago in Burlington, Ontario. I think it was a $60 table fee. It was a new event. I believe I made $90 or $95 in sales.

So even after the costs of printing and all that stuff, I really didn't make money. I made my table back, which is always a good thing.

There were a few encounters I had with people who were really excited to find my Canadian Werewolf series of books, and just so thrilled to get started. Among the four of them, they bought one copy, but they were going to pass it amongst each other.

You know what? Okay, they bought a single copy, and I was like, “Well, the e-book is permanently free online. You don't even have to buy a copy”—which is anti-selling. I just want them to read the book and enjoy it.

But if they read it and pass it along and start talking about it, they could become readers for a long time. It's an eight-book series, with the ninth book coming out later this year.

There was another encounter I had that day. A woman and her teenage daughter came in, and they were looking at my traditionally published books that I buy at a reduced price from a local bookstore and resell.

They were looking at these true ghost story books I had, and they were pointing: “Do you have that one?” “Yes, I have this one, I have that one.” And the mother's like, “Well, she collects all your books, and she wants to make sure she has them.”

We had this conversation, and she was so excited to meet me in person and to get a signed copy of the book. That experience was such a vanity moment for me as an author. We're lonely. I'm a big loser. Nobody's buying my books. We're always down on ourselves.

So that investment of time and energy, in order to get that little pat on the back or that feeling of, “Wow, I really connected with someone who likes my stuff”—those moments are really precious. They're difficult to explain if you only look at the world in a financial way.

I guess I'm fortunate enough that I do have enough income from numerous streams, including the consulting I do part-time, that it's okay if not every bookish endeavour leads to more money in my pocket at the end of the day.

I can still have these authentic connections with people, which I think is one of the reasons I'm a storyteller. Yes, it's the stories I have to tell, but it's also putting the story into somebody else's hands and eyes and heart and mind.

Jo: You're very giving like that. You have that sense about you, whereas I'm just a curmudgeon in the corner.

Mark: That is not true.

Jo: It is, generally. I don't do events like you do for readers.

Mark: But that's because it takes a lot out of you.

Jo: Yes, but that doesn't matter. Why do I write? I write for me.

Mark: Ah, very good.

Jo: At the end of the day—just being entirely selfish about this—when people say, “Oh, if you won the lottery, what would you do?” I'm like, “Well, I'd do pretty much what I'm doing now.”

Mark: Yes, I'd just do the same. Of course, I'd write more books.

Jo: I'd write more books. So this is where I'm trying to get to for people as well: measuring success in a different way. You were talking about measuring success by how that girl loved your books, and how you feel when someone says they love your books.

With Bones of the Deep, this thriller I've just done, I feel like I had the benefit of that book before anyone even read it.

As soon as it was finished, I made a nice proof copy from BookVault, and I held it in my hand and said, “I made this. I'm proud of the story, I wrote the story, and it's outside my head now.” I feel like I'm creatively satisfied in that moment.

Then, of course, the Kickstarter was great, and I love that the books are going out around the world, but—

I think the happiest I felt was that moment of finishing—that creative satisfaction of holding the book in my hand. You know what I mean?

Mark: 100%, Jo. I cannot agree with you enough. I love so many aspects of writing. Yes, the connection with people is amazing. But I often say this when I'm doing my one-on-one consulting with authors: focus on the projects that mean the most to you, those passion projects.

The process of writing, and the painful rewriting and editing and all the things you go through—when you finish that book, like you said, you hold it in your hands and it is a thing of beauty. It's a huge achievement. You've won.

Whether or not you sell a single copy, you've won by doing it. Everything else is gravy: the sales, the money in your pocket or not, the reviews, positive or not, the people who say, “Oh my God, Bones of the Deep, thank you for writing this book. I'm so glad you introduced this into the world and into my life.”

Anything beyond the creation itself, which is a pure joy—I love it so much. It's just why I get up at 5:30 every morning and write for hours before the rest of my day begins. I try to get stuff done before the rest of the world wakes up.

I want to get the writing done first, when I have the most energy to give myself to the page. Then the rest of the day is kind of gravy for me too.

Jo: You talk there about giving yourself to the page, but in Stark Realities—

You talk about the fear of truly being seen. What do you mean by that, and how do you manage that feeling?

Mark: For anyone who has written anything—fiction, non-fiction, memoir in particular, since it's a bit more closely tied to reality—it's exposing yourself to the world.

I'll never forget an interview I did with Canadian science fiction author Julie E. Czerneda, who, before being a fiction writer, was writing biology textbooks, but her real passion was science fiction and fiction.

When her first novel came out, she said, “It's like standing naked on the front lawn.” When you release a book, even a novel, people look at it and they're going to judge you and rate you.

I remember early on, Jo—we knew each other through Twitter, I think, where we initially met, and then interacted with and finally met in person at London Book Fair. I think you and I have a very similar reaction.

When people know us as positive and upbeat and out there helping authors in the community, and then they read our fiction, they go, “Well, Jo, you burned a nun alive on page one.” Or, “Mark, what kind of… they're drinking from the skulls of dead people? What the heck is going on with you two?”

We are exposing parts of ourselves in our fiction and non-fiction. That's a fear I embrace, but also never get over, if that makes any sense. I write scary stories because I'm a big chicken. So maybe the entire process is just cheap therapy for me. Or not cheap, because it's an expensive pastime, isn't it?

Jo: It certainly can be, but I agree. I struggle with fear of judgment still. I think it's also because we do this in public, which comes back to the financial side of things. We do a lot of this in public, and then people judge us on our author businesses too.

You could look at Bones of the Deep, which was just on Kickstarter, and compare my Kickstarter to another author's Kickstarter for a fiction book, and judge one or the other person based on numbers.

I feel like this is because you and I have done so much in public—for me, almost 20 years, and for you, like 40 years or whatever. Maybe 30 years. You look that old.

Mark: Listen there, dearie. Get off my lawn.

Jo: Yes, get off my lawn—with those skeletons you have on your lawn.

Mark: Yes. They're no longer in my closet.

Jo: They're not in your closet.

I wonder if that also plays a part of it—the pros and cons of doing this business in public.

Mark: Yes, that is a part of it. One thing I try to be very clear about, because there's so much FOMO and so much out there about people thinking that everyone else is making a million dollars from their books and “I'm the only loser who's not”—I try to be clear that I have never made more than a mid-five figures as an author from my author earnings, ever. I haven't yet hit six figures.

One of the reasons I try to be transparent in sharing that is I don't want people to think that everyone else is a six- and seven-figure success story, and they're the only one who's only made $100 last year on their books.

The reality is, 90 to 99% of the people who are writing and publishing are not going to earn a significant amount of money.

I realise I'm also very, very lucky that I've earned this much, and it's taken a long time.

I just shared this in a Substack post I posted yesterday: it was 10 years of rejections before I got $5 for my first short story that was published in '92. It wasn't until 2001 that I finally made pro rate, six cents US a word, for a short story that, ironically, Julie Czerneda bought from me back in the day.

For me, I've been lucky that it's always been a long, slow slog. It's been a marathon, and I've never instantly sprinted across any dramatic finish line. I've had some really phenomenal moments—doing a book signing in a Costco, walking into Walmart and seeing my books there.

Even last night at the Burlington Public Library, going, “Wow, they have eight of my books here—four of my self-published books and four of my traditionally published books, in two different sections.” I was like, “That's kind of cool.”

So I've had these amazing moments as a writer, but I've never had the blockbuster—the Brandon Sanderson, or even the Dungeon Crawler Carl, Matt Dinniman, kind of moments.

I still think I've had a very fortunate and lucky journey. Even if I wasn't making the money I'm making, I'd still be writing, and I'm sure you would be too.

Jo: Oh, yes, for sure.

I actually think the thing most of us would probably let go is the marketing.

If we won the lottery, we'd carry on with all the creative stuff, the writing, the community stuff, and we'd just literally do no marketing at all.

Mark: Well, yes, of course. Or potentially say, “Oh, here, ad agency, here's some money. You just run it, whatever. Let me know if it works or not. I don't care.”

Jo: That's a much better idea.

Mark: At least I've got the extra disposable income, so I may as well, because I'm helping the world when my books are out there. I know my books will help people.

I really honestly think that as storytellers—whether it's fiction or non-fiction, we're still storytellers—what we do in writing and podcasting and all the things we do, the re-sharing on social media, is really helping connect people.

I think that is one of the most profound things we can do as writers. And I mean that the writing, in and of itself, is a reward.

Jo: Like you said, we met on Twitter when Twitter was what it was back in the day. I do very, very little social media now. But you just mentioned your Substack, and you also have your podcast, Stark Reflections. So how are you balancing what you put on each?

I only do this podcast now. I don't even blog. I write books, obviously, and then I do the podcast.

So what are you doing differently on Substack to the podcast, and what part do they play in income and marketing?

Mark: Great question. I realise most people have never heard of me, or read or listened to the things I put out into the world. And I've been a longtime fan of “reduce, reuse, recycle my IP.”

My podcast is not as long-running as yours, but I'm in my ninth year, and I've not missed a single Friday in the full eight years, or eight and a half by now, that I've been doing this.

Every week I reflect on what I learned from an interview, or I'll reflect on something you've posted and say, “This episode is not an interview, but Jo said this last week, and I'm going to talk about it.”

The podcast itself takes a lot of work. I still do all of it myself, and I know I probably shouldn't, but I like doing it, so it's one of those tasks I enjoy. I also have reflections that aren't going to come out vocally but might come out in writing.

Sometimes in the morning I'm not in the mood to write the novel or the non-fiction book I'm writing, but I'm writing some tangent. I just let the creative monster go.

I find that re-sharing… I might have reflected on something for a couple of minutes at the end of an interview, but I really want to expand upon it, so I write the Substack article. I try to reuse some of that content.

Someone's going to enjoy seeing it on a short video clip I share on YouTube, or whatever the platform is. Someone else is going to listen to it on a podcast, wherever they listen to podcasts, and someone else is going to want to read it.

It could be the same information, just shared in a slightly different way, to potentially get it out to other people. So for me, it's part of that wide publishing mentality. I'm trying not to completely duplicate the work, although I am duplicating some of it.

I'll give you an example. Hey, Canadian listeners—if you have not registered for Public Lending Right in Canada, please put something in your calendar for February 2027, because the deadline's over. It was May 1st of 2026. Put it in your calendar for next year.

I even had somebody at this writers' event I was at this last weekend say, “You mentioned something in a presentation you did for the Canadian Authors Association about Public Lending Right, and thank you, because now I get thousands of dollars a year from this.” So just look up Public Lending Right.

I've been saying stuff about Public Lending Right for at least 10 years now. Every time I get my beautiful multi-four-figure cheque from them in February every year, I post on social media and remind authors to check it out. I know it exists in the UK, and it exists in 36 countries in the world—just not the US.

Jo: Not the US.

Mark: They don't have a programme like this, probably because the big publishers—and probably one of the authors' associations—think that libraries are cannibalising book sales, which is not true. It's been proven time and time again, and that lobbying has prevented it from happening.

Whereas here in Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts and the Writers' Union of Canada worked hard to make this happen.

Anyway, I talk about something like Public Lending Right and I feel like I must have said this so much that people are sick of it, but every single time I mention it, someone goes, “Oh my God, thanks for saying that. I never heard it.”

That's a good reminder, especially for folks like you and me. We know the basics. We know what an ISBN is. We know KDP Select means you can't put the e-book on any other retailer, or even sell it on your own website.

We know all these things, but it's hard for us to remember that there are folks coming to this for the very first time who've never heard it, even though we feel like, “Oh my God, I've said this till I'm blue in the face.”

I think I got that from retail. When I worked in retail, I recognised that somebody's going to come in and ask for “that blue book that Reese Witherspoon was talking about,” or Oprah was talking about, or whatever. And you do your darn best to help them figure it out rather than mock them.

I try to take the same approach when people ask me those questions, because I'm trying to remember what it was like when I honestly did not know the answer, and having someone take the time to help me. I've been very, very lucky that I've had a lot of people take the time to help me.

I'll never forget—God rest her soul—Nancy Kilpatrick, a horror writer here from Canada who passed away a few years ago. She gave me a blurb for my very first book in 2004 because she'd acquired one of my short stories for an anthology she'd edited.

I was trying to call my short story collection an anthology, and she very kindly took me aside and said, “It's not an anthology if it's a single author. An anthology is a…”

Jo: I didn't know that until, like, last year. I got that wrong as well. There are lots of words like that.

I want to circle back, because you didn't really answer earlier about the time management. You just mentioned YouTube, on top of Substack and all the things you do.

You also have a day job at Draft2Digital—it's part-time, right? You also do part-time at the university, teaching publishing, right?

You do all kinds of things. How do you manage your time with all of that?

Mark: Well, I mismanage my time more than I manage it, Jo. That's the God's honest truth. Fortunately, most of the things I have that aren't scheduled—like, scheduled to do this lecture at this time, or scheduled to have this meeting at this particular time with Draft2Digital—most of my work is very flexible.

I do not work a regular 9:00 to 5:00, Monday to Friday. Well, I never did. I always worked way more. But I have a very flexible schedule. Every single day is a work day, and every single day is a play day for me. So I'm very, very lucky.

I do schedule in the very important things, particularly where somebody else is reliant upon me—meetings and connections and stuff like that. Then I make the time first thing in the morning to get the writing done. Everything else is not as important, and it's part of… I guess it's part of playing.

You know, like the social media sharing. I don't look at social media as marketing. I just look at it as another way to connect with people, with other creatives, and with readers potentially, all six people who read my stuff.

I probably could do a better job of managing my time. I've tried several times over the years to adapt processes to make it better, but I consistently default back to what I do, and so far I guess I've been getting away with it.

So I was like, “Do I want to waste more time trying to come up with a process, or do I just want to roll with it?” Because so far I haven't killed myself doing it, and I've been enjoying the journey. So, if it ain't broke…

Jo: I think that's the point, if it doesn't feel like it's broken. Having known you for a long time now, and we work together—obviously we co-wrote The Relaxed Author—you do work very, very differently to me. You definitely are a little bit more chaotic. I'm chaotic in some ways too.

Mark: Oh, you're very generous. “A little bit chaotic.” Thanks. That was generous, Jo.

Jo: You're chaotic in your work practices and scheduling and all that, which I couldn't cope with very well. Even though I feel like a part of my brain is very chaotic—the creative side, I guess, can be quite chaotic—I think I'm actually quite controlling and very scheduled in my work practices.

As you say, for someone else on the outside, it might feel to me like you have too many balls in the air. But if you don't feel that, then that's the way of working that works for you. So this is another important thing, isn't it?

You can't adapt to what other people say your life should look like. It's what feels good to you.

Mark: Oh, for sure. One thing I know about my procrastination tendency is that panic and fear motivate me. So, a deadline—”I have to get this into a publisher by this date, I have to get this manuscript to an editor by that date”—I'm motivated by fear. And I'm afraid of everything, so I guess I'm always motivated.

Jo: But I also know that when you hear the word “deadline”—and I know a lot of people who do this—the deadline means you get it in on the deadline, or the day before the deadline. To me, a deadline means I have it ready a month earlier.

Mark: I love that. I've done that a few times and shocked myself. I actually had a pre-order up—with the audiobook, the print, and the e-book—a month in advance, and I didn't know what to do with myself. I was like, “Well, what am I going to do now in the next month?”

Jo: Work on the next thing.

Mark: But I'm so used to working on it up to the last second that I was kind of like, “What do I do?” That actually caught me by surprise, and I honestly felt weird. I was like, “I've never felt this before.”

I'm really lucky. I know you have a very supportive and amazing partner, and so do I. My partner, scarily enough, is maybe a bigger procrastinator than me, so she never gives me a hard time.

She supports me, and I do the same thing with her own work. I'm up all night with her at the last minute so we can get something turned in. So, fortunately, we really understand one another, and we don't give each other a hard time. We just go, “Well, got away with it again. I guess I'm not going to change my ways.”

Jo: We made it. And again, that's the point. You and I could stand up in front of people, both hold up the last book we wrote, and say, “We made this,” and our processes are completely different. Our brains are completely different.

We come from different countries. There are lots of things that are different, and yet we both made a book.

So hopefully that encourages people. You don't have to do anything that we're telling you, or anyone else tells you. But if you want to be an author, at some point you have to produce a book.

Mark: Exactly. As Brian in the classic Monty Python film gets them to say: “Yes, we are all different.” Embrace that difference. I think that's such a powerful reminder that there is no one process for getting anything done.

Jo: Given that we co-wrote The Relaxed Author back in 2021—and we did that because we had another show, and we were talking, and we said, “Oh, everyone's stressed and the anxiety levels are really high, and we think there's a better path”—we co-wrote that book, which I think is still a very good book. Definitely people should get it.

Interestingly, I think the stress and anxiety might actually be higher now than it was.

So what do you think the main stresses are in the community now?

You also see a lot with Draft2Digital, I guess, as well.

Mark: Oh, for sure. Honestly, Jo, I'm so glad we wrote that book, because I actually pick it up every once in a while to remind myself of the things we tried to help others with. Again, it's therapy for me as well, so I'm so glad we did it.

I think we're 10, if not 100, times more stressed. The world events and things going on, the divisiveness—not just in the world in general, in politics and everything else, but the divisiveness in the author community.

The witch-hunting that happens, people trying to tear down other authors either because they're successful, or because, “Oh my God, you dared use a new technology.” All of these things are happening, and everyone's at one another's throats.

I need to pick that book up and reread it. I'm a lot more stressed than I was. I'm just getting over shingles, which is…

Jo: Oh. Which is actually related to stress as well, isn't it?

Mark: It is, yes. I was in LA for Writers of the Future—I'm a judge for that science fiction and fantasy conference.

I went right from LA, like a week in LA, which was a phenomenal experience getting to mentor the winners. And I mean, come on, it's a free trip to Hollywood, hanging out with Kevin Anderson, having beers and stuff like that.

Then I came back to the Toronto Indie Author Conference, run by Tao Wong, here in Toronto. I went right from the airport—didn't even go home—straight to the hotel, because I kicked into another conference.

We did a display on how to set up an in-person booth, so I ended up having to hand-bomb boxes, blocks down the street from where I was parked.

My chest was really sore when I got home on the Monday, and I thought it was because I hadn't used these muscles, because I'm not in the best shape. Then I took my shirt off and went, “Oh, there's a rash there.”

Liz goes, “You have shingles.” Because the pain in my chest, which I thought was the muscle, was actually underneath. I'm one of those lucky people that it's taken the full five weeks, and I'm still in pain even afterwards.

So, again, public notice: if you're an older person like me, and there's a vaccine available for shingles, you may want to consider it.

Jo: Yep, get it.

Mark: Oh my God, it hurts. But, yes, the stress, I think, is higher—even though I didn't know I was feeling it. It was happy stress, right?

I was stressed out because I'm there in Hollywood, helping people and doing some good things, and then I'm doing the same thing, interacting with some amazing authors at the Toronto Indie Author Conference. I didn't feel anxious stress. I was happy stress. Is that a thing?

Jo: I think possibly… your physical body masks stress, physical stress, because you enjoy all of that stuff. Whereas someone like me, I'll feel it quicker and withdraw.

Although I say that, back probably a decade ago, Jonathan would say to me, “You're going too fast, and you're going to hit the wall. And when you hit the wall, it's not going to be fun.” And I did hit the wall.

Then, probably in 2021—I mean, that was when I just started going into menopause, and obviously we had the pandemic, and I wrote Pilgrimage, and I was doing all those walks, which I think really helped me. I learned a lot about maybe stopping that before it happened.

Becca Syme obviously talks a lot about this too. But I find it interesting with you, because I think you're so positively happy with these events you do that it might mask your physical symptoms in a different way. That's really hard to watch out for.

I'll give a tip to you and everyone else listening: schedule the calendar, and look at your calendar and go, “I can't go back-to-back-to-back. I have to put in some rest days.”

Mark: Well, thank you. You know, Jo, you and Becca Syme are two of my best unpaid therapists. I appreciate that.

Jo: You just don't listen, Mark.

Mark: Or sometimes I do.

Jo: Just coming back to the community, and the divisiveness there is primarily over AI at the moment, I think that's one of the biggest things. And the arbitrary lines as to what you're allowed to use it for and what you're not allowed to use it for, which is just kind of crazy.

Obviously, you know I've opted out of that whole discussion now.

How do you think we can move through this [divisiveness over AI], move on?

We remember when it was trad versus indie, and then it was wide versus KU. So this will pass—it's just hard, when you're in it, to know when it might pass.

Mark: Yes. I think the more generic advice—for whatever may come, whatever has come—is: why are you doing this? Why are you a writer? Heads down, focus on what gives you pleasure, and do that, because everything else is noise. All the marketing tactics and strategies, and all the people yelling at one another.

Write your books. Do the things that motivate you. Do the things that give you that intrinsic reward.

It's hard to ignore. I get it, it is hard to ignore. I have difficulty ignoring the haters and the yelling and the screaming that happens, but I do my best.

Like this morning, when I was in the throes of my manuscript and I looked up and went, “Oh my God, I've got to shower. I'm going to be talking to Jo soon, I should comb my hair”—which I have none of. Because I was so in my book that everything else melted away.

That, for me as a storyteller, as a writer, is one of the most beautiful places to be.

Jo: I think you're absolutely right. I have a little thing that pops up in my calendar sometimes which says, “If you're feeling all of these things, just go create something.” The moment you refocus on creation—whatever that means to you—things change. It changes the energy. That, or go for a walk. That's my other tip.

Mark: Outside. And I have to say, Jo, Pilgrimage is still one of the most profound and powerful books you've written, and you've written a lot of amazing ones.

Jo: Oh, you're very sweet.

Mark: That one really resonates, not just for me, but with Liz. Because one of the things we often do when we get stressed is go for a walk, ideally in nature. The vitamin N. I think there's something really profound in that, and it really helps me a lot.

And again, sometimes going for a walk listening to your podcast, or an audiobook, or sometimes just attending to the environment.

A tip I picked up years ago from Brooklyn author Denis Hamill was: go for a walk with your character. Listen to what they see. What do they comment on? How do they approach this environment that you've seen a million times? How do they see it? What do they notice that you don't notice?

That's such an incredible experience of creativity—when you're not writing, but writing. That really helps me a lot.

Jo: Oh, nice one. Okay, so your latest book is Stark Realities, but you have so many more.

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

Mark: Jo, you can find everything you want to know about me—and stuff you don't want to know about me—over at MarkLeslie.ca. It links to all the other places from there.

Jo: Brilliant. Thanks again for your time, Mark. That was great.

Mark: Thanks so much, Jo. Bye-bye.

The post Creative Satisfaction, In Person Print Book Sales, And Author Mindset With Mark Leslie Lefebvre first appeared on The Creative Penn.

In the intro, thoughts on why in-person conferences are still worth it, even when they are a challenge for sensitive introverts! and tips for making the best of conferences [Self-Publishing Show].

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

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

P.D. Alleva is the award-winning author of horror, sci-fi, thrillers, and fantasy books. He's also a psychotherapist.

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

Show Notes

• Why horror puts the human condition on display better than any other genre
• Emotional trauma as the silent psychological killer most people overlook
• The pros and challenges of cross-genre writing and finding your audience
• Practical lessons from running a direct store, including integration and signed-copy fulfilment
• How a 3 a.m. writing routine keeps the writing separate from the marketing and admin
• Serialising fiction on Substack, multiple newsletters, and avoiding paid subscriber promotions
• Why Facebook groups, TikTok Lives, and the three-to-one rule are working right now

You can find P.D. at PDAlleva.com or on Substack.

Transcript of the interview with P.D. Alleva

Jo: P.D. Alleva is the award-winning author of horror, sci-fi, thrillers, and fantasy books. He's also a psychotherapist. So welcome, Paul.

PD: Thank you very much. Thank you for having me. This is a great opportunity. I love doing interviews, and I love talking to great people.

Jo: Oh, good. Well, first up—

Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and being an indie author.

PD: So I've been writing since I was a kid, at least second grade and more than likely even before that. I've always had that creative itch.

Getting into indie author publishing, I published my first book in 2011. At the time I was also operating my own business, which took up about 24 hours of my time every single day.

Then I kind of got through that and sold that in 2016, and I'm like, you know what? The time has come. I'd always written books, poetry, short stories, but never really did anything with them because I just didn't have the time. So in 2017, that's when I really came out and said, all right, the time is now.

Indie publishing was doing great. The one good thing I do love about Amazon is they allowed us to come out there and start showing our craft to people. So in 2017, I just started—let's do this. Let's write full time. Let's put books out there. Let's be creative. Let's really get those juices flowing.

Plus, I was getting a little bit old, and I was like, now is definitely the time to do this. Since then I've been publishing consistently, and most of my books are horror books, but I dabble.

I have a sci-fi series, and I'm starting to get into psychological thrillers too. I've got a new psychological thriller that'll be published in early 2027 called Girl on a Mission. For the most part, I'm definitely into the horror genre—books, short stories, all that good fun stuff.

Jo: Right, so a couple of follow-ups. You said you're a bit old. Can you give us what decade you're in at least?

PD: Well, I'm 51, so born in 1971.

Jo: Oh, there you go. Same age as me.

PD: All right, good. See that? So we're going head-to-head there.

Jo: I don't think that's old at all. Also, you mentioned you sold your business in 2016.

So what was your business before?

Because I think business experience is so important.

PD: Agreed 100%. So I'm a psychotherapist, and I had owned a treatment centre for mental health and addiction. That was started in 2011, and in 2016 is when it sold. Since then, my wife and I started a private practice. So I still, even to this day—well, about a year and a half ago is when I stopped.

I specialise in trauma, PTSD, and addiction. Trauma mostly. Most of my caseload has always been trauma, PTSD, sexual abuse, psychological abuse, war-type trauma. I was doing that mostly individually since 2016 in private practice, and I'll still go into treatment centres and see patients there too, specifically for trauma.

About a year and a half ago is when I started wanting to do writing 100% full time. I thought about becoming a professor, maybe going to college, but then I wasn't sure if I wanted to get into that full time, as far as a caseload and school and everything like that.

So I decided to just do group therapy, group facilitation, and I've been doing that consistently since then. It may be 15 hours a week. I do love to give back, and to me, it's more what I teach.

I specialise in neuro-linguistic programming, bilateral stimulation or EMDR, hypnotherapy, science of mind concepts, psychopharmacology, biological bases of behaviour—which is pretty much how your brain works—ancient wisdom, quantum physics.

I do this in a drug addiction treatment centre mostly, also mental health. And of course, just living an addictive lifestyle is traumatic, too, in and of itself. So pretty much I'm teaching them. Behaviour modification is a big part of what I'm teaching during that time.

You'll see that, too, if you read my books. There's two things you can figure out from my books. You can figure out how to murder people and get away with it, and two, you can figure out how to overcome trauma as well.

The whole “murder people and get away with it” comes from my upbringing. I have a very sorted past, let's put it that way. My upbringing was very different than what most people grow up in.

Jo: Oh, can you give us any more than that? Now everyone's like, “Oh.”

PD: “What's going on with this guy, right?” So I grew up, let's say, quote unquote, “in an Italian New York family.”

Jo: Okay. All right.

PD: That might give people ideas, right?

Jo: That's going to give people a lot of ideas.

PD: If you've ever seen the movie Goodfellas, I kind of grew up in that atmosphere, and with even some of those people too. My family had connections to those people in that movie, which I find very funny. If you watch that movie with me, you get a very different perspective on what's going on in the movie.

Jo: Wow. So you're an interesting guy with an interesting background, with a very interesting backstory job as well.

Some people are like, “Well, of course he's writing horror because horror is just awful and full of slasher gore and all that.” I often have to say to people who don't read horror, “Look, it's not like that.” Maybe some of it is, sure. But most of it isn't.

Could you talk about how reading and writing horror can also be psychologically healthy? How do these worlds intertwine for you?

PD: Well, sure. It 100% can be healthy. Especially over the last few years, there's a trend going on out there right now where people are taking their trauma and putting it into a creative process through poems, short stories, and even novels.

They're taking their trauma and giving it a face, like a monster, where people are overcoming that monster within the creative process.

I always say that horror is the genre that puts on display, better than any other genre out there, the human condition. Why is that?

When people are in a terrifying situation, you really see who they are. You get to the heart of the matter of who that person is by putting them in these horrific but undefinable situations where it's like, what are they going to come out as?

That real true personality needs to come out, and that courage comes out. That's huge in horror, and I think horror gets such a bad name.

Now, I know there's the extreme horror and the splatterpunk, and that has its kind of role too in what I'm saying, but that's where horror is getting its bad reputation out there with the over-the-top type of gore.

For the most part, that's a small part of the horror genre. It's a subgenre for a reason. It has its readership, and that's fine. Nothing wrong with it. I read it all the time. I find a lot of joy in it, a lot of excitement.

However, for the most part, any horror novel that is not completely with the gore and stuff like splatterpunk can be seen as a psychological thriller, and a lot of psychological thrillers can be seen as a horror novel.

Look at books like The Silence of the Lambs, Red Dragon. That's horrific as well, but if you read the novel, it's in there. It just gets that bad rap right now, and it's not all gore.

Most horror novels that I read today are psychological horror. It's tame on the gore, and the psychological aspect is there. I always see that psychological aspect—it's like psychological trauma.

Most people, even in my industry, when people are out there and you mention trauma, PTSD, they're thinking about sexual abuse, physical abuse, or war-type trauma.

The silent psychological one—I once wrote an article called “Emotional Trauma: The Silent Psychological Killer.” The one that's out there is the psychological trauma, the emotional trauma that is widespread.

Most people go through that, and it could even be from parent to child, and most people don't understand that that's a traumatic experience. It's like a distortion of reality that you're experiencing that then creates a belief system in your brain, and you're constantly acting out that belief system.

That's where the psychological component of horror really comes out. People breaking through that psychological belief system that was created through a traumatic experience by reaching courage and coming out through a horrific situation.

Jo: Yes, it really annoys me, because with romance, of course people understand that romance is a huge genre. Something like a small town sweet romance is a world away from the bully romantasy, dark, or mafia. Mafia romance is a really big thing with very dark themes.

I'm like, well, how can you understand that romance is a huge genre with all these different subgenres, and not think that horror or thriller or fantasy or sci-fi all have so many different subgenres within them?

I personally read a lot of supernatural horror, but rarely the slasher gore kind of stuff. So I'm really glad you said that, and hopefully more people will open up a bit more.

I did also want to ask you about what you write. You write all these different things. You write standalone—I mean, often horror is standalone—but you also have some series. How do you balance it?

What are the benefits of cross-genre writing, but also the challenges of it?

PD: Okay. So obviously I love cross-genre writing. To me, I use fantasy to explain the supernatural elements. I blend mostly a tad of fantasy to help explain the supernatural components in my supernatural novels.

When I write sci-fi, specifically sci-fi, that has the fantasy element in it too, but there's also a tad of horror in there as well.

It's just who I am. When I grew up, I had a lot of different influences. I had Star Wars on one side, and then I'm watching B-rated '80s slasher films on the other side. Those two mixes just kind of followed me throughout my life, and that's why I like putting them into my novels.

As I tell my patients, don't limit yourself. Never limit yourself. If you're just limiting yourself to one genre, you're missing out on so much more that's out there. So I love the blend of mixing genres. It just gets my goat each and every time.

It is a challenge though. I remember when I first started getting into indie publishing, I was never big into Facebook and social media up until I started becoming an indie author.

Before that, with my type of upbringing, you don't advertise yourself. You don't advertise where you're going. That's a big no-no. So I always had this aversion to social media.

I'll tell you a funny story. It was the late 2000s, probably 2006. I was a full-time single father at that time, and I was living in Florida. My family—brothers and sisters-in-law—were living in New York, and my sister-in-law said, “Get a Facebook account so we can see pictures of the kids.”

I said, “Oh.” I didn't want to do it, but I said, “Okay,” so I did it. And I'm thinking, looking at this Facebook thing, “How do I put pictures on here?” So I figured out how to put pictures in folders.

Then I phone called her, and I'm like, “Okay, so they're on there.” And they're like, “Well, where are they?” I'm like, “I put them in these folders. You can go and look at them.” She's like, “No, you've got to post them.”

That to me was like, “I'm not posting pictures of my kids.” That was a big no-no. It didn't click.

When I got on there finally in 2016, 2017, I'm like, “Okay, so I need to figure out social media. As an indie author, I need to be on there, so I need to get through this aversion and get on there.”

I started noticing how people are so particular with their genres. If they're reading a romance, it had to be very specific with that exact type of romance, and if you deviated from it, they're not going to like it. So that was the challenge.

I was like, “All right, number one, I'm not going to dilute myself” and say, “All right, take things out of my writing or out of my novel just so I could cater to a certain type of audience.” I'm like, “I'm not going to do that.”

I know with me, myself, as a reader, I'll read everything. I don't limit myself to a specific genre. I'll read psychological thrillers. I'll read romance. I've been doing that all my life.

So I'm like, if there's a person like me out there—and look at this, I just met like four other people who also read cross genres—then I know that there's at least another 30,000 people, and I know that at least then there's 300,000, then there's three million people out there.

So just write the books that you're writing and find your audience. Now, that takes longer. So you've got to chip away. Chip away. You're going to find readers here and there, and then that reader kind of tells a few people about you, and then you've got a few more readers.

Then you keep going, and you go on these Facebook groups, and you do a whole bunch of different things, and then you gather a few more readers. Then they're telling some friends, and then you've got more. The process takes a lot longer, yes, 100% agreed, but I would say be true to yourself and you can never go wrong.

Jo: Yes, I agree. I write cross-genre as well, and I've browsed your collection. Golem was the one I was like, “Ooh, yes, I like that one.” I haven't read it yet, it's on my list.

I think when you're cross-genre, my people come to my store as well, and it's like, “Okay, I'm interested in lots of things, but this is the one by this author that I'm interested in.” Whereas with other authors who only write one type of thing, then I might not like any of their stuff.

So I think there are definitely pros and cons and different ways into our world.

I also wanted to ask you about the differences in business. Obviously you ran this treatment centre and there were physical humans on all sides, and now you've got a business as an author.

So what have you learned in business from what you used to do and what you do now?

PD: Okay. You're right. The treatment centre industry is very different from what I'm doing now, but it's still people.

Treat those people right, have integrity. If you say you're going to do something, follow through with it. My word is my bond type of thing. That definitely has fed into the writing and publishing industry that I'm in now in a huge way. Just connecting with people is, to me, the biggest part of it.

I mean, treatment centres, you've got to connect with people. When I would market the treatment centre, where would I go? I would go to hospitals, residential facilities, detoxes, and talk to them about my programme and why they should be referring clients there.

It's the same thing here. Why should you be reading my books? You get there through interviews like what I'm doing here with you. Other podcasts. You get there by doing Facebook Lives, TikTok.

I haven't started TikTok Lives yet, but I actually love that platform. I'm falling in love with it. IG Lives, anything like that where you're talking to people and you're making a connection with those people.

Through that, I've gathered so many different types of readers who are like, “Yes, I'll give this book a shot.” And then they read it and they're like, “Hey, this is really good, and I'm going to read another book.”

With my books, I have very different books. Golem is my psychological horror novel. It's my slow-burn psychological horror novel, heavily inspired by Frankenstein and the Pygmalion myth. It's my first true horror book that I published.

Then there's Jigglyspot and the Zero Intellect, which is inspired by B-rated '80s horror movies and the old grindhouse movies of the '70s, and it's mind manipulation. It's just wild and bizarre. And then The Sleepy Hollow Incident is my Gothic tale—it's like a dark romance mixed in with Gothic horror.

So I always try to put something for everyone that's out there. To me, when I'm writing, it's got to be about depth, psychological depth. I always refer to my books to be like peeling layers off a Texas-sized onion. The more you read, the more in-depth you get into not only the characters, but the story.

It's just something that comes out of me. It's part of me. That's the way I always have to do it. I always have to put that depth in there. To me, that's good storytelling.

When I grew up, I read a lot of classic literature. Yes, Edgar Allan Poe, but also Dante's Inferno, Milton's Paradise Lost, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the Brontë sisters. Keep going. Ray Bradbury, Ayn Rand, Daphne du Maurier, Shirley Jackson. Those to me are my books that I absolutely love.

So there's a sweet science in today's fast-paced, social media type of world in marrying the depth of the old classic literature and the entertainment value that is required today for being an author. There's that sweet science behind it, and I love just hitting that nail on the head every time.

Jo: So did you ever pitch traditional publishing, or have you thought about going that way?

Because I also find that a lot of horror actually sits very close to literary. Like, I read a lot more literary horror than I do in some of the other genres.

PD: Correct. So in the beginning, yes. Not in a long time. I maybe went to a couple of indie publishers, but as far as traditional, the Big Five publishers, I have an aversion to them for a big reason. I know people who have worked in that industry that have told me some pretty bad horror stories about those places.

So I haven't sent anything to that type of place in a very, very long time. Maybe close to 20 years.

Indie publishers, the small presses, yes, here and there, but even then, I'm always moving at a fast pace. So if I've got a book and I'm sending it out as a query letter, by the time that query letter is even read, I'm almost done publishing.

I love that aspect of it. The control of my story, where I know where this character's going. And listen, I've got my beta readers, I've got my ARC readers. They're there to tell me, “Hey, maybe you should change this or change that.” Whether I take that advice or not, of course my editor too, is really up to me.

I always put out the book that I know is the one I want to read. And to me, I haven't gone wrong in doing so. I know with traditional publishing, you sometimes get too many thoughts in the pot there. Let's put it that way.

Jo: Okay, so coming back to being indie then. You mentioned Amazon earlier, but you have a store where you sell direct. Many authors are doing this now, but it can be a challenge.

So what have you found are the pros and cons of your direct store? What's working? Any lessons there?

PD: Okay. So I use a place called Big Cartel. They're the platform where the books are on. They're hosting my website, PDAlleva.com.

The big challenge was actually just starting it. It was so overwhelming. How do I put this on there? At the time, I've got all these books, so how do I present them?

I'm even going to be doing another revamp with it too, because I want better pictures—taking pictures of the books, stuff like that, instead of just having the covers on there. I also have a lot of shirts that I'm selling.

So I think the biggest challenge is just getting on there and starting it. Then of course, you've got to learn a whole new platform, and the mechanics, and how people are going to be downloading, and how that's done on an e-book versus a print version of the book.

So it's a huge learning curve that you've really got to put your focus on and give it time.

What most people like in indie publishing is signed copies. It's a huge part of indie publishing, selling those signed copies. People love a signed copy, and that's primarily what my website is for. You can order signed copies from me.

I also use a place called IngramSpark, and they're more like a distributor. They're used by everyone. They've been around for a very long time. Traditional publishing uses them too, and they're just distributing your novel.

I'd say about a year ago, maybe two years ago, they started where you can sell your books on discount through them as well. So I have that on my website too, where you're just clicking on the book and you're pretty much going directly to their site and you're buying paperbacks and hardbacks at a discount. That's going well too.

For the most part, people are definitely coming to my site because they want the signed copies. A good thing with indie publishing is limited editions, first print copies, special editions. That type of stuff really just takes off. People love to see that, especially in the indie community.

You can sell them too. I go to a few different book conventions during the year, and the limited editions are there. Like I said, people love the signed copies. They love being a part of that and getting that signed copy. They treasure it, just like I treasure my books too.

I'm not referring to my books that I've written, but books that I have as well. I love my e-reader, don't get me wrong, but I still prefer the physical copy—the paperback, and even more so than the paperback, the hardback. So people love those signed copies, and that's why I created the website, to sell on there for them.

Jo: Yes, I mean, we're getting to a point now though where I think some people are questioning the pros and cons of it. For example, you doing the signed copies—I don't do that from my Shopify store because I don't want to hold stock and I don't want to deal with postage.

So I only do it when I do a Kickstarter. I've just finished one recently, Bones of the Deep, and I'm going up to the printer, and I'm going to sign a couple of hundred copies and then they do the postage.

That's the only way I'm willing to do it because of the pain of getting books to your house, signing them, getting them in the post.

So how do you manage that practically?

PD: Okay, so the inventory's there. I don't go and sign everything right away. I just keep the inventory. Once somebody buys the book, then I'll pull out the book, log it and all that good fun stuff, sign it, and then ship it out immediately.

Here in my country, we get discounts at the United States Post Office because they're books. So they pass that shipping cost over to the reader too, so it's a little bit cheaper for shipping.

I'll just take books once or twice a week over to the United States Postal Service and ship those books out. I don't sign them until I actually get that order.

Jo: How many do you have in your house? It's the holding stock of all the backlist that is the problem.

PD: Ooh, gotcha. All right. That's why I have a two-car garage. But here's the thing, I won't order 500 at a time. I'll order 20 at a time.

Jo: Okay. Right.

PD: When I see that inventory's getting low, I'll order another 20 at a time.

Jo: And you get those from IngramSpark?

PD: Correct. When the new one comes out, maybe at that time I'm just selling those, bringing those to conventions that I go to. Or maybe doing a sale on those books at that time to get rid of the inventory so it's not sitting around anymore.

Jo: I think that's so important. Then like you mentioned, you do T-shirts or shirts. That is also really hard because of sizing.

So is that all print on demand?

PD: Yes. So I don't really hold the stock on the shirts. When I get an order, whatever the size is at that time, I go directly to the place and order it. I use a place called Sublimation Station that's here in Orlando. They do great all-over print T-shirts. They're fantastic. I just did one for The Sleepy Hollow Incident.

So The Sleepy Hollow Incident is one long story, and it's broken up into four books. Each book has its own. The covers are fantastic. I use a lady named Cherie Foxley. She's a phenomenal cover designer.

So the shirts are, like, book one is on the front of one shirt with book two on the back, and then the second shirt is book three on the cover and book four on the back.

However, I can customise those. I just did a giveaway in my Facebook group and I let people know I could customise them, and she wanted book one and book four, so I just got that and sent it out to her.

Now, if people go ahead and order that on the website, I can just order it right away from them, boom, and that place will get it shipped right then and there.

Jo: Right, so they do the shipping. These are all sort of practical things that people need to answer because I feel like sometimes it's like, “Oh, yes, having a direct store is great,” but there's actually quite a lot of work that goes into it, isn't there?

PD: There is. There's a lot of work. You're pretty much opening almost like your own brick-and-mortar store at that point. You just don't have walk-in traffic coming in—your traffic is all coming online. So there is a lot to it, but it's worth it.

If you're a self-published author or even a small indie press, it's good to have. Because like I said, people love the signed copies.

Jo: When you say it's worth it, is it worth it financially or just because you like to serve the customers in that way?

PD: Both.

Jo: Right. So it is financially worth it for you?

PD: Yes.

Jo: I was talking to a friend of mine and saying, are you valuing your time in terms of things like taking the books to the post office and stuff like that?

Do you find it eats into your writing at all, or do you just manage it all separately?

PD: No, I manage it separately. So I'm an early morning riser. I get up at 3:00 in the morning, and that's when I write my books or do editing or brainstorming.

I'm about to write a new novella now called The Adam and Eve Story, which is actually based on a little-known CIA shelved book from the 1990s called The Adam and Eve Story as well. So I've been brainstorming that, and I was doing that this morning.

I get up at 3:00 a.m. and I do my writing, and by the time the kids are up and by the time the wife is up, it's like 8:00 a.m. is rolling around and I'm pretty much done at that point.

Then I have my days. Tuesday I'm completely working from home and I do my thing in the morning, and then the rest of the day is marketing, fulfilling orders, stuff like that.

On the days when I'm going to do group facilitation, I'll of course still get up at 3:00 o'clock in the morning, and then I'll plan out the day. I've got an hour between this group and I can go ahead and do that, and I'm already there so it's not a problem. The post office is right around the corner.

You kind of figure out all the logistics for yourself. There are some days, like on Monday, I don't facilitate groups until the afternoon, so I've got the whole morning to work on marketing and do other things, and fulfilment. Then of course Saturday's a big day for that too.

Jo: Oh, that's good. I feel like people always need to know how to balance their time, but it sounds like you manage, because at 3:00 a.m., as you say, there's not much else to do other than write.

You mentioned marketing, and you have a Substack, pdsalternativefiction.substack.com.

Talk about that and serialising fiction and how Substack works.

Because I feel like a load of people are jumping in but might not necessarily know how it works, especially for fiction.

PD: Correct. It is becoming quite popular out there. I think the one before that was Patreon, and Patreon is pretty big for that too, kind of the same thing.

I wanted to start something and just get the work out there. I was very interested when Amazon came out a few years ago with what was called Vella.

They kind of started that. I was like, “This is kind of cool.” Couple chapters at a time. I'm writing the books anyway, so why don't we kick this off and see how it goes—a type of experiment.

I had a lot of fun doing it. I started on October 4th, 2024. I've done four novels so far. One is still going, which is Volume 3 of my Dark Veil serie— that's a sci-fi series.

I wrote three other novels. The Hypnotist, which is a thriller, heavy on the sci-fi and a tad of horror in there too. And then I wrote Girl on a Mission, which is my psychological thriller, and then Cat Fight, which is a horror novel—all within that time.

I think I finished all three of those novels in January, and then the first week of February they were all pretty much done. Now what I'm doing is, I went paid recently on the Substack. It's like everything else that's out there—chip away, chip away.

I fell into that hole where they say, “Hey, we can promote you and get people to sign up for your newsletter.” And I'll be honest with you, don't do it. It's not worth it.

You spend money, and what happens is they're what I refer to as dead leads. They don't click. You wind up shuffling them off after three to six months, because they're just not clicking. Everybody gets a star rating, so you know—are they clicking, are they staying on, are they not?

So I got rid of pretty much all of those people, and I'll never do that again. It's got to be done organically. That's why when you read my books, especially the new books, towards the end it'll say, “Sign up for my newsletter.”

I do more with that newsletter too. If you're on the free tier, every month I do a monthly newsletter, which is just me talking about updates, things going on in the publishing industry, things going on with me.

My daughter puts together a weekly Horror and Sci-Fi Chronicles newsletter, which gives what's going on in new releases in the industry—sci-fi, horror, books, movies, television. She does deep dives into industry tropes, historical tidbits, and a weekly quiz.

I also do a monthly Terrors and Tales newsletter. I started this last year, and it was a quarterly newsletter. It's other authors who are new, upcoming, never been published before, looking to get published.

It's a chance for them to be on the newsletter where they have a flash fiction story or poem or even a short story that I publish for them. It's called the Terrors and Tales newsletter.

What happened is I would put out calls for submissions. And a place called Duotrope—I don't even know who these people are, but all of a sudden I got an email from them stating, “Hey, we found that you're looking for submissions, and we posted your link. We hope you don't mind.”

I'm like, “No, of course I don't mind.”

I got so many submissions from that one link. I'm like, “Okay.” Do I really want to deny people? I'm not like that. I want to help promote other authors. I know what it's like when you're new and upcoming, no matter what age you are, to say, “Hey, here's a platform for you to see your stuff in print.”

Obviously, I read through them just to make sure they're up to a certain standard, but for the most part, if you submit, you're getting in there.

With Duotrope, I'm like, I have enough here to put out one a month. So in May 2026, the first one goes out, and then I'll have one each month until December, and then who knows? In 2027 I might go back to quarterly. I might get enough submissions to just keep it going once a month.

So that's the Terrors and Tales newsletter, and it usually comes out towards the end of the month—the last two weeks. I have nothing to do with it in terms of content. None of my stories are on there. None of my poems are on there. None of my flash fiction.

It's all other authors, just for them to see their name in print, see their work in print, share it with their friends, and put something on their resume, and to encourage people to keep reading and keep the craft going.

Jo: When you say in print, you don't mean in physical print?

PD: Oh, I mean in the newsletter. I'm sorry.

Jo: I think that's important, or you're going to get a lot more submissions, and you will need to do publishing contracts and all that kind of thing.

I think that's the difficult thing with a Substack newsletter approach—it's difficult to know where to categorise it. Is it marketing? Is it publishing? It's all of these things, I suppose. A bit like this podcast, it's all kinds of things.

In terms of Substack actually making money on its own or leading to book sales that make money, do you think it does serve that purpose?

PD: I think I've gotten more book sales through it, and also ARC readers who are enjoying the books and giving reviews.

As far as the paid tiers, that's kind of a little bit slow, and that's where I'm saying chip away at it. Keep it up there. Keep it going. Over time, you're going to build that type of audience where it's going to be like, “Hey, this is financially feasible for me to continue to do this.” That's the response that I'm getting out there.

Jo: Yes. Before, you mentioned you were doing Facebook Lives and you're looking at TikTok, but—

Is anything else working for you in book marketing?

If people have a few books and they're like, “What is working for book marketing right now?”—what do you recommend?

PD: Okay. For me, the thing that has made the most sense is making sure the reader knows the book is out there through some sort of social media. I've had really good success on TikTok since the beginning of this year especially.

I started it about a year ago, year and a half ago, but then my father got sick and passed away, and it was a new venture and I put it off to the side. I really got the flavour going at the beginning of this year. February, March of this year.

It seems to be going really well, and I've noticed an uptick in sales from just getting the videos out there and getting it in front of people's eyes.

There's an event I'm going to in August called ShiverCon, which is a pretty big event. After that event, I'm going to look to see what type of inventory I have left over from the event, and I'm going to start doing TikTok Lives. I'm very comfortable being on camera. So I'm like, “Yeah, that seems like a good way to go.”

I know there's a few other horror authors who are doing it and having good success with TikTok Lives as well. A guy named Jason Davis is doing really well with TikTok Lives, and a few other authors too.

I'm like, “Yes, I could definitely do that.” I want to get up to a certain number of people, and I want these events. I'm going to one in July, and then ShiverCon in August. Once those are done, I'm going to have more time to do the TikTok Lives.

As far as Facebook is concerned, what I've had really great success with on Facebook is being in the groups and meeting other authors. That's not always about my book per se, but whatever books I'm reading, I'm posting my reviews about those books in those groups and meeting readers.

Then obviously, they always say the three-to-one rule. Post about three different books and then post about your own book, whether you're doing a sale or a new release or a re-release or whatever.

I've found success through that just by interacting with readers. When they post a book, I'll comment, “Hey, I've read that book,” or, “Hey, that book looks really cool. I like the review.” Commenting on it so you start these relationships with people who are out there in these Facebook groups.

I've recently started my own Facebook reader group. I kind of go with the same thing. Last night, we did a live reading for another author. I like other authors to be on there. I always like to think, what does the reader need? What do I want to see as a reader?

I would love to hear live readings from authors. So I kind of learn about them, learn about the book, and get a live reading. To me, that's a good way to go. So I started that recently, and it seems to be going well.

I've got a new folk horror coming out soon, and I put out a call for ARC readers and got a fantastic response from that.

That kind of drives the sales anyway, because when you get those reviews, then people see it gives credibility to the book, and then other people see it, and then they're buying it too. So that comes from the groups.

There's so many wheels to spin in this industry as an indie author when you're doing this, especially when you're doing 99% of it on your own. You've got to get out there. No one's going to know your book exists if you don't get out there and tell somebody about it.

Jo: Brilliant. Well, tell us—

Where can people find you and your books online?

PD: All right. Perfect. So obviously I'm on Amazon like everyone. Most of my books are worldwide, so you'll find them in Barnes & Noble as well. And of course, if you want the signed copies or discount print books, I always lead people straight to my website, PDAlleva.com.

Then, of course, if you go to my Substack, you'll get all the updates, and you'll get all the links to purchase or find out where they are on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and things like that too.

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

PD: Thank you very much for having me. It was great chatting with you.

The post Writing Cross-Genre, Selling Direct, And Serialising On SubStack With P.D. Alleva first appeared on The Creative Penn.

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

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

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

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

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

Show Notes

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

You can find Austin at AustinKleon.com.

Transcript of the interview with Austin Kleon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the intro, InAudio is now distributing audiobooks to BookShop.org;
The Feedback Loop that Makes Better Writers [Author Nation Podcast]; Bones of the Deep on Goodreads.

This episode is sponsored by Publisher Rocket, which will help you get your book in front of more Amazon readers so you can spend less time marketing and more time writing. I use Publisher Rocket for researching book titles, categories, and keywords — for new books and for updating my backlist. Check it out at www.PublisherRocket.com

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

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

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

Show Notes

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

You can find Jami at JamiAlbright.com.

Transcript of the interview with Jami Albright

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jami: 2017. Things have changed.

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

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

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

Because you did have real success.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I had that question.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jo: Oh.

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

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

I was 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.