Author Entrepreneur - The Creative Penn

How can you move from the starving artist mindset to becoming a creator CEO with multiple streams of income? And how can you get traction on Substack if you’re starting from zero? Amy Suto shares her tips as a former Hollywood TV writer turned author, Substack creator, and ghostwriter.

In the intro, Novel November with ProWritingAid; Book Marketing in a Changing World [ALLi Podcast with me and Orna Ross]; Navigating tough times in indie publishing [Wish I’d Known Then]; watch out for fake agent emails [Write Beware]; AI-Assisted Artisan Author webinars for beginners and advanced.

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 

Amy Suto is a former Hollywood TV writer and the bestselling author of books around freelance writing, as well as romance, fantasy, and detective fiction. She’s also a ghostwriter and a top 25 ranked Substack creator. Her books include Write for Money and Power.

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

You can find Amy on her Substacks, Make Writing Your Job and Sutoscience.

Jo: Amy Suto is a former Hollywood TV writer and the bestselling author of books around freelance writing, as well as romance, fantasy, and detective fiction. She’s also a ghostwriter and a top 25 ranked Substack creator. So welcome to the show, Amy.

Amy: Thank you so much for having me. I’m so excited to be here.

Jo: Yes, lots to talk about. First up—

Amy: So I came up in Hollywood as a TV writer, and I was climbing my way up the ladder, starting as an assistant, working in Los Angeles, and then eventually, finally got to start to write episodes of TV.

When I hit what I thought was my peak, I was working with a CIA agent on a spy show. It was literally my dream, to be able to pick his brain about all the conspiracies that were actually true and be able to write TV around that.

I found myself a little bit disillusioned with the way the system was running. I found that I really wanted to spend more time writing my own original work instead of being work for hire on other people’s shows.

So when 2020 happened and everything shut down, I ended up being able to travel the world, ghostwrite memoirs for Olympians and CEOs, and have some crazy experiences as a digital nomad, which then inspired my first fiction book, The Nomad Detective.

From there I continued writing novels and also non-fiction books about my experience as a freelance writer, to help other authors and writers figure out how to have this balance of both being able to pay the bills as a writer while also having creative freedom to put together your own work.

Jo: I love that. I guess just to address the dream—so you hit this dream of Hollywood TV writing, which of course for some people, that’s their dream and they never got there, and then you left it all.

I mean, the strength to walk away from that. So if people have that dream, or there’s the dream of the eight-figure movie deal for a novelist and all this.

Amy: This is a great question, and I think that the thing that I was running into is that I was putting my dreams in the hands of gatekeepers.

I think that when you hand over that power, then suddenly you are left without agency and you are finding yourself working for free or doing work for producers that maybe you didn’t sign up for.

People are dangling your dreams in front of you to get you to do what they want you to do.

That was a little bit of what I was beginning to experience, and seeing in other writers that I was talking to in the industry. So I knew that I wanted to take back that power for myself.

I also love books. Writing novels is something that is very close to my heart and part of my own dream as a writer as well.

So when 2020 was happening and everything was shutting down and the writers’ room that I was in went to a Zoom room, I thought, “This is a perfect opportunity for me to explore some of these other areas of writing.”

So basically there is this experience that I was having of remembering all of these novelists who started off as journalists, and they started off as journalists because some of the best inspiration for fiction is actually in non-fiction.

When I was starting to moonlight as a memoir ghostwriter in between projects in Hollywood, I found myself completely captivated by working with these incredible clients who’ve had lives that were beyond anything I could have ever imagined.

So my work as a memoir ghostwriter ended up feeding my creative work, not only being able to pay the bills with these really cool projects, but also being able to interview people about their lives and being able to understand humanity through a completely different lens.

I never would have had the experience to get flown out to Vienna and sit down with an entrepreneur who had changed the direction of the way that technology had been built in his industry, and be able to ask questions about what it was really like to be these types of people and to be in their lives and to grow up in Austria or Singapore.

So I think that memoir ghostwriting ended up being the perfect primer for me to continue to develop my work as a fiction writer, because I was able to meet so many different people I never would have had the opportunity to meet or work with or ask questions of before.

Jo: Yes, I love this empowered attitude to making your own career.

In fact, when you pitched me—and I’ve told you this, but for people listening—I had already bought your book, Write for Money and Power, and the reason I had bought it is, obviously, I’m a 20-year writer at this point, but it was your use of the word power.

I have not seen another writing book that says Write for Money and Power: The Anti-Starving Artist’s Guide to Becoming a Seven-Figure Writer. And again, the subtitle, other people have done that.

Amy: So when I was coming up in Hollywood, a lot of the writers around me, we were all being funnelled into the gatekeepers’ world for us, and the vision that other people had for us. That meant that we were giving up our power.

So when I went on this journey of being able to travel the world, and ghostwrite memoirs, and being able to write my own novels and connect with readers directly, I discovered my own sense of power.

I think that for writers, you’re not really allowed to want to be able to have power over your career because it’s so discouraged by gatekeepers and society. You’re supposed to be a starving artist who is grateful for anything that comes your way because you get to make your art.

So I think that there’s a shift happening in culture where writers are being treated not just as artists that are expected to starve, but also as creative entrepreneurs, where we’re learning how to own all parts of our creative journey.

Both the creation of our books artistically, but also the marketing of them, and how we get them out into the world, and treating that like one whole entity.

I think that there’s a shift happening where writers are no longer wanting to write what gatekeepers tell them to, and are wanting to be able to have unburdened creative freedom.

That’s why so many authors like Brandon Sanderson end up self-publishing or independently publishing, because they want that creative power to be able to serve their fans and their readers better.

That’s so cool, and it also proves the fact that even with people like Taylor Swift buying back her masters, so many people who are at the top of their game are outgrowing the gatekeepers. If they’re not finding use for these older systems, then that also brings them into question for the rest of us.

Jo: I love that. Coming back to the book, so you mentioned the starving artist mindset, and in the book you also talk about the creator CEO, and I love that. I feel like I can claim those words, but I know some people listening will just find that pretty intimidating, I think.

Amy: When I first was starting my career as a writer, I never wanted to be a business person. I didn’t want to look at spreadsheets, I didn’t want to deal with accounting.

The thing is, if you want power over things like what does your book cover look like, or how is your book marketed, or how does your book enter the world, and even just what are the contents of what you’re writing, what are the subject matters, what is actually something that gets to reach your readers?

If you want that power, then it does come with some of the other elements of being an entrepreneur, which is understanding how to price your book. There are so many interesting mechanics of bookselling, which is what I really love that you’ve been covering on The Creative Penn Podcast and on your blog, Joanna.

It’s just so beautiful to see writers talking about the entrepreneurial side of what does it mean to sell books? How do you do it? What are the mechanics of that?

Today, with different types of technology, it’s gotten easier than ever for writers to be able to do a lot of things themselves, which can feel intimidating, but then you realise how much it unlocks.

Even something as simple as, if you sell one book to a reader who likes your work, your royalty percentage can go from 10, 20, 30% to up to 70%, because you’ve made that switch of being able to take on the cap of CEO and being able to own a little bit more responsibility.

With that, the number of books that you need to sell to have a beautiful life as a writer immediately drops. So for me, the added responsibility was worth it because I was able to have all this freedom, being able to write on my own schedule and set my own publish dates, and not have to wait two years for a book to come out.

I could wait instead six months and pick exactly how I wanted the book to come out.

So I think it’s reframing this step into becoming a creator CEO, not as a burden, but as an opportunity to flex your creative muscles in different ways, and to be able to have more flexibility in your own life on how your creative work comes out and is distributed.

Jo: Absolutely. It’s so great to hear. I just feel like so much of what you say is what I’ve been saying for years. When I started saying it back in 2008, this was not popular, and we were considered the early indie authors.

It was considered vanity. It was considered the worst form of publishing. You were not good enough to get published. hat’s not how you’re talking about it, is it?

Amy: No, and I think that—

It’s not a vanity press thing. We’re just seeing so many examples of people using the internet to take their work and bring it directly to fans, and understanding that there are fewer barriers than ever to getting your books into your readers’ hands.

Actually working with a bunch of bureaucracy of a larger publishing house can slow you down, can dilute your ideas, and can potentially keep you from being the kind of author that has the career that you’ve always wanted.

So I think it’s an empowerment of the creator age and the creator economy, and this ability to publish more, to publish faster, to publish more creatively, to put out bolder ideas.

So, yes, I think that you are definitely a trendsetter, and I think that that’s so incredible, the trend that you were riding the wave of, and that you were originating, coming to fruition. I think that just proves that you were ahead of the curve.

Jo: Oh, well, thank you for that. I feel like one wave crested, and now we’re in another wave, and we’re going to circle back to technology. But just so people get a sense of your creator CEO self, what are your multiple streams of income?

Amy: The income streams that I cover in Write for Money and Power are my own income streams as well as what I recommend for other authors, and it’s a trifecta of freelancing, a paid newsletter, such as a newsletter hosted on Substack, and also income from your books and royalties related to your work as an author.

These three income streams have helped me balance this side of both creativity and also commerce and the needs of being able to pay bills, so that I can travel the world and live in beautiful cities like San Francisco, where I get to call home. These three pillars are really great because they also support each other.

If you have an audience that subscribes to your Substack or your other paid newsletter, regardless of what platform you’re on, that audience can pay a subscription fee to access certain types of content, similar to platforms like Patreon.

Then you can not only get revenue from that, but that paid newsletter audience can then buy your book when your book comes out and become early readers of your book.

From there, the audience that buys your book on Substack can also serve as a point of proof for your freelancing.

So if you offer any services, like so many novelists I know offer developmental editing and things like that, then you can use the proof point of a community to become a freelancer and then sell your services that way.

So the three of them feed into each other, because then the money that you make from freelancing can fund your next book launch, or it can fund more time for you to go and write on Substack.

That flywheel is something that can help writers, and it is an alternative to what we’ve thought about in the past about a traditional day job, about going and working as a barista or a coffee shop worker.

There are so many other different careers that you could do, but these are nice because these three pillars feed into your future book launches and your writing as a whole, to create this holistic flywheel of income.

Jo: Yes.

Obviously, this podcast, for example, has sponsors, and I also have a Patreon, although it’s not a paid newsletter.

I think what you mean is a subscription, some kind of subscription where you have,—not guaranteed income every month—but at least more regular income every month rather than the up-and-downiness, which books are so much so.

Amy: Definitely. There are so many different models, and the paid newsletter is one that I think is becoming more attractive right now because you are able to keep all of the email addresses of everybody who signs up, and you’re able to email them directly.

So compared to building an audience on Instagram or TikTok, you’re able to own your email list and take that email list with you from platform to platform, so you’re not dependent on these platforms.

I like the paid newsletter as a format for authors because you’re able to keep people in the loop about every book and your writing process, and give them a behind-the-scenes look.

It’s also just such a great format that’s built for writers. On platforms like Substack, the people who are doing the best are novelists and authors and writers.

So I think it’s also trying to look at the places where you already have the skill set to thrive versus having to build an entire audience on YouTube or TikTok. Some authors really take to that, but I know a lot of writers who are introverts and prefer to thrive in the written form.

So putting out a paid newsletter allows them to connect and build that fan base with their readers, and also thrive in the medium that they’re already in.

Jo: Fantastic. Well, let’s talk about Substack then, because you have two. I have two author names, and I know how hard it is to maintain two lots of everything.

So you’ve got Make Writing Your Job and Sutoscience.

Amy: Make Writing Your Job is our community for writers. We host a job board. We list different grants, contests, and residency opportunities.

We also do author interviews and try to find different ways to bring people cool resources on how to make writing their jobs, including some discounts on different products like Scrivener and things like that.

Make Writing Your Job was my first Substack that I built, and we have over 60,000 subscribers today, and we’re in the top 25 of business on Substack.

I built it as a place to try to help everybody else with the concepts of my books, and then also to be connected to other freelance clients that I was too busy to work with.

So it came from a place of wanting to just empower people to make writing their job through a myriad of different ways. That’s been a really exciting community to grow because it’s truly become something that I’m just so proud of. We do in-person meetups in Los Angeles and other cities.

We have such a great group of people that we’ve been able to put together on that Substack that it became something that I’m just so grateful to have.

Then Sutoscience is my own personal Substack where I share all of the behind the scenes of what it means to be a writer and an entrepreneur, trying to figure out how to stay connected to my creativity while thinking strategically about how to grow on Substack and things like that.

So on Sutoscience, I write about the behind the scenes of everything I’m up to, and I also have a monthly mastermind group with my founding members where we all talk about this. We’re basically a writers’ group for what we’re building on Substack and beyond with our books. So it’s been fun.

The reason why I have two is because Make Writing Your Job is something I run with my husband. It’s a community. It’s something that I’m building in service of a larger group, whereas Sutoscience is more my personal behind the scenes.

Amy: This is something that I was really excited to get working on this year, and it surprised me in so many different ways.

A lot of writers who have serialised fiction on Substack have promoted it as a way to just bring in tons of paid subscribers, and it’s something that has unlocked so much for them.

I have found that the benefits of serialising fiction go even beyond paid subscribers. When you do the math on it, it makes a lot of sense.

When you sell a single book, then you are usually making around $6 to $7 of profit, depending on how you’re publishing, who you’re publishing with, if you’re going direct.

If you have a Substack that’s priced at around $8 a month, then if you have people sign up to read even the first few chapters, they’ll read the chapters, and then if they stay subscribed, you’ve already out-earned what you would have made on a book.

So the math already makes a ton of sense, but the thing that really surprised me when I started serialising my novel, Let Me Be Your Ghost, on my Sutoscience Substack, was that the readers that joined me on the journey so far, because it’s not completely out yet, the readers who have joined me are diehard fans.

I literally have had readers who have emailed me since the beginning when the chapters came out, telling me what they loved, telling me what they thought could be changed in the book.

Then they’re promoting the book to other people, and helping me get other beta readers, and championing the book, and then being the first to pre-order it when I opened pre-orders.

So what I’ve built unintentionally with the serialisation is not only another audience and a different type of digital product along with the launch of the book, but I’ve built a way to supercharge pre-orders and also connect deeper with my true fans, with the readers who are really invested in helping me make this book the best that it can be.

Serialising fiction is also really fascinating because I’m serialising what is essentially a rough draft that will eventually morph into the final draft.

So similar to other authors that I’ve admired, I’m really trying to bring my community in and see what they think of this story. Does it feel like something that resonates with them?

To have people be so ardently helpful has been really incredible, and I’ve gotten thousands and thousands and thousands of views on the chapters. That’s something that, as a fiction author, I’m so grateful for, to have those early readers, those early champions.

So far I’ve just been blown away by the reactions with the beta reader forms I put out. I’m going out to ARC readers this week, and my early readers have been driving that, as well as driving revenue to help me continue to spend more time on the book.

Jo: But then I guess I would argue that it doesn’t matter what platform you use. If you have an audience then that process works, whatever platform you use.

At the moment, a lot of writers are jumping on Substack because they’ve heard that they can do things like what you’re saying. But once again, they’re arriving at what is now actually quite a crowded platform, and putting up some chapters of their book, whether it’s fiction or non-fiction, and then they’re like, “Well, nobody’s here.”

So if someone is in that situation, if they’re putting up their chapters or they’re putting up articles or whatever, and they don’t have any traction—

Amy: The great thing about Substack—and I try to reveal these numbers as much as possible on Sutoscience—is that most of my paid subscribers, most of my total subscribers, are actually coming from Substack itself.

Substack has a lot of great built-in discovery tools, including recommendations, but also their algorithm that promotes you when somebody is signing up for someone else’s Substack.

There are a lot of really clever tools that Substack has that have ended up driving a ton of readers who maybe never would have found me on any other platform. The cool thing is, I don’t have to pay upfront to have those readers find me.

So a lot of the things that I break down on my Sutoscience Substack are how to make sure that your Substack is categorised correctly and shows up in discovery correctly, how to work with other Substackers on interviewing them or being interviewed on Substack Live, which then brings other people into your universe.

Substack just has all of these really cool creative tools that I haven’t seen any other platform use to support writers, in part because their incentives are aligned. Substack makes a 10% cut of all paid subscriptions, and they handle so much more in the back end that you would have to pay for otherwise.

So it’s really cool to be able to use their discovery tools to get in front of new readers, and the fiction category is something that is growing.

It is definitely a smaller category compared to the personal essay, how-to non-fiction categories. But I’ve seen that fiction has definitely been ticking up, including, most impressively, Jeff Bezos’ ex-wife has been publishing her fiction on Substack.

Which I found just so interesting, that somebody who is basically a billionaire, if not a hundred-millionaire, and she has every resource on the planet to go through traditional publishing, she’s picking Substack as a place to put out her work.

In part because the platform also has this brand of being very high-end, of having these journalists and these authors and these serious writers on the platform.

So you have this natural discovery of people who are coming to read War and Peace chapter by chapter on one Substack that’s doing an analysis. They’re reading journalists from these esteemed publications that have moved to Substack. Alongside those different incredible writers, they can discover your work as well.

So it’s not going to be something that’s easy to grow from zero, but I think it’s really cool to be able to take your work to a platform where you already know there’s an audience of really serious, interested readers that then will bring that energy to reading your work.

Jo: So if somebody does want to come over to Substack, I guess one of the things that puts me off another platform is that, for example, I don’t like chatting in comments. Substack, I believe, has now got its own social network as much as anything else.

Amy: I feel like the common thread here, the thing that I feel as well, is that it can be overwhelming to be, “I need to be on all these social media platforms, and I have to be present. People have access to me.” That can be a lot.

So I think that Substack has to be one of those platforms where there needs to be a level of understanding what is right for you and what’s not right for you.

For example, the subscriber chat feature is something that I think a lot of people would be better off just turning off and not having to worry about it.

The other feature is being able to have the comments on your posts be for paid subscribers only. So the only people that can comment on your posts are just people who have intentionally paid for your publication and want to be there.

I think that naturally gets rid of spam. It naturally gets rid of people who are lurking, or naysayers, or things like that, and it keeps it closer to a community.

The other piece of their social media platform, Substack Notes, while it can be helpful for growth, I think it doesn’t have to be something you have to go all in on to see growth on Substack. I very rarely am on Substack Notes, and I’m often scheduling things ahead of time and not necessarily engaging a whole lot.

I do think that compared to other social media platforms and other places where discussions happen around writing, I’ve found Substack to have the most interesting conversations. Also, I’ve met the most fascinating people in real life from connections that I’ve made on Substack.

So there is this neat community and neat pool of people, but you have to be intentional about how you interact with it, in the same way you have to be intentional about how you interact with other social media platforms or other spaces online.

Jo: Yes, it’s so funny, isn’t it? I think it’s also about what stage you are in your author career, because as you’re talking there, I’m remembering the early days of Twitter. I got on Twitter in 2008, and that was the golden era of blogging and Twitter.

A lot of the friends I have in real life now, I met on Twitter, and it built my author platform in those early days. I connected with people who changed the way my career went.

That just sounds very similar, and it just feels like every couple of years, a new platform rises. And that might not be brand new. Obviously, Substack’s not brand new. It’s reasonably mature now. But over the last few years, I think really since the pandemic, it’s grown. So I think maybe that’s the tip for people.

Amy: Definitely. I think that’s a good way to think about it, because ultimately, and this is something that I’m always trying to keep track of, we are writers and we should be writing first.

All of these platforms, all these tools, they should be in service of us finding time to write creatively and write work that our readers will enjoy. Everything else is noise.

So it’s trying to understand what is a distraction, what is actually getting you closer to your true fans, your true readers, and what platform features or things are just not worth it.

That, I think, is the question that we always have to ask ourselves, auditing. Is this actually useful, or is this going to be a huge time suck that I’m just going to spend doomscrolling or completely distracted from the actual core of the work that we’re here to do?

Jo: Well, then I guess the question relates to what topic people should do. You’re an interesting example because you have different fiction novels in different genres already. So you’re obviously a multi-passionate creator, and you’re not sticking with one genre. You also have this non-fiction content.

So if authors have lots of different genre books like you do, where should they start with their Substack?

Amy: The best advice that I have gotten, and that I’ve seen work for others as well, is to start with the thing that you’re most excited about.

That might be, for some writers, writing about their day-to-day life. What is it like to get up and write either before work or as their full-time job? For other writers, it’s writing an incredibly niche deep dive on Nicholas Sparks.

Everybody’s going to have their own way into what it means to enter this space and write something for other people and to share the things that they’re excited about.

There’s one sci-fi author who wrote an incredibly detailed piece about the types of pens that he uses, and how different fountain pens write best on different types of paper, what type of paper, what to write with on an airplane, because with certain pens, the ink gets stuck on the airplane.

I love this idea of people coming to share the thing that they are so passionate about, and that they could write forever on.

In the niche comes the universal. So in writing about something very specific, suddenly you’ll get other readers that are also fanatics of the types of pens, or different romance authors, or whatever it is.

I think that so often we try to mould ourselves to what we think people will like to read, but in reality, if we just write the things that we love, and then just tweak the framing so that it’s accessible for readers, then we’ll have made it, then we’ll have gotten there, and our passion will shine through.

So I think that the hardest part about Substack is trying to figure out how to write the thing that you love and just package it in a way where the headline is something that will speak to the piece that you’ve written, and that readers will know what to expect when they land on your Substack’s About page.

So you can have different multitudes. You just need to be able to walk people through it and frame it well.

That’s the thing that, as somebody who’s multi-passionate, who is writing all these different formats, I can come to my audience of people who are reading my non-fiction work and say, “Hey, I have a book coming out. It’s called Let Me Be Your Ghost, and it’s inspired by my memoir ghostwriting work.”

So I’m connecting my non-fiction work to the inspiration of my new romantic thriller book. I’m able to bridge across different audiences because I’m able to understand what they followed me for, and connect it to something that I’m doing next that I think they’ll really love.

Jo: Yes, that’s great. Again, it’s so funny because it does resonate with the early days of blogging on WordPress and all the things we used to do, which I still do. It’s really funny because it’s exactly the same with the SEO structures. But yes, I love it.

Let’s talk a bit more about technology. In the book, you do talk about AI. You say, “AI tools can be incredible amplifiers. They’re not replacements, they’re accelerators. I think that every serious writer who wants to stay competitive is going to use them in some way.”

Now, I agree with that, but of course, the author community is pretty split, and I think Substack has even incorporated Pangram or one of the anti-AI writing things.

Amy: I think that the analogy that I really love to use to think about this is to think about how some of the most successful writers in Hollywood, and then also in traditional publishing, put together a book or a show.

In Hollywood, you are the showrunner, and it’s your idea, and you bring together a room of five to eight really talented writers, and you bounce ideas off of them.

They shape the work, and then they often are the hands typing on the keyboard, and they bring work to you for you to review, and everything goes through your computer last.

Even in traditional publishing, even though you may be writing a book, your editor is going to give you tons of notes. Your agent is going to shape a lot of pieces of it. You’re going to have the publisher giving you a lot of feedback on what it should look like. Even if you’re self-published, you still need a lot of that support.

So the way that AI, I think, fits into a lot of this is that it helps with a lot of pieces of the process that are tedious and challenging, and that are not tied deeply to your creativity.

When I think about writing a book, especially a non-fiction book, it’s not just about, “Here, let me put everything down on paper one way.”

It’s about, “Oh, did I already use this anecdote before? Here is a 30-minute transcript of me talking through this chapter and how it should be laid out and all of the ideas in it. Can you help me shape this into something that I can then go and edit?”

For fiction, it’s also about the things that we would have used Google for before. What is the list of baby names that I should look through online to try to find the perfect name for this character? Let me do a deep dive on the history of this name, this first name, last name.

I think that for us writers, AI can help accelerate parts of the research process. It can help us find things.

One thing that I always love using AI for is, how many times have I used this word or phrase in the book? And then it’ll be like, “Oh, you used the word temperature 37 times in the last six chapters.”

So it surfaces the things that a good editor would surface, but it will absolutely not replace editors. I think that’s the thing that’s really helpful. I love the collaborative work of working with book editors on my projects.

AI helps me to get past some of the detail work, the cleanup of changing my word count or word changes, to make sure that I’m not repeating things. Then it also helps me do deep research on the locations and the places that I may have visited before, but I can’t remember.

What is the name of that small town in wine country? I think that this type of tree is in this region, but I can’t remember. Can you help me with that?

So much of the writing process is also fact-checking and researching and line editing, and AI can help with so many pieces of that, allowing us to think more freely about our characters and the people that we’re putting into our worlds, and how we’re constructing a non-fiction book.

Jo: Yes, I love that. It’s so funny, isn’t it? Some of us have incorporated AI tools into our work now in so many different ways.

It just feels more fun as well. I use Claude mostly. I love brainstorming with my Claude around ideas for this, that, and the other, and as you say, at different points in the way we do stuff.

For example, Claude will be cleaning up our transcript here and putting it on the blog so people can read the transcript, making this accessible to everyone. So things like that, which, as you say, are not tied deeply to your creativity.

Amy: Yes, and I just put in a big order for red pens last night because I need a certain red pen. I’m planning on printing out the rest of my draft as soon as I finish, before it goes to ARC readers.

I know I’m going to need that analogue experience of sitting down with a red pen at a coffee shop somewhere in San Francisco, where I live, and just going through and having that tactile experience of writing in the margins of the paper and feeling the pen underneath my hand.

I think that those experiences are still going to be uniquely us. I think that there are some bad actors out there that are using AI to generate every single word of their book and not reading anything and leaving the prompts in and just publishing it as is. The slop epidemic is huge.

I think for us professional writers who come in and use these tools, we’re wielding them like scalpels. We’re coming in, and we’re having it help with the pieces that we know need to change, that we know we need help on, that are often mundane and challenging.

Like, “Hey, can you track this character’s eye colour across the whole book, because I know I changed it five times?”

So that stuff is really helpful, but at the end of the day, I think it’s the author’s responsibility to sit down with a draft and read and have their hands on every single word before it goes out.

Ultimately, we’re writing for other humans, so it is the human touch that will make it special and beautiful and unique to our experience.

I do think that these tools can help be your writers’ room in a lot of ways, just like you were describing. They can help with a lot of the different pieces.

Other professional writers throughout history have had whole teams around them, and therefore, like you were saying, it makes the writers’ room model more accessible for writers who can’t afford that.

Jo: Yes, or who just want to do it for fun. It’s funny, you were talking there about the eye colour. It makes me laugh because I do that all the time.

Also, I’m now writing book 14 in my ARKANE thriller series, and the first book I started writing in, oh, it must have been 2009. So it’s been a really long time, and—

My main character, Morgan Sierra, has been through a heck of a lot of battles, and so the wounds on her body at this point, and her scars. So I was saying to Claude, “Can you please just update my character bio for Morgan, and where she might be hurting in this fight scene?”

Amy: I love that. That’s so clever.

Jo: Which is just so fun. Oh, and also, “In all the fight scenes we’ve written for all the books, can we do something more original for the next one?”

Amy: Yes, and I think that this is such a great use case, because otherwise other authors have sometimes had teams that track their character bibles and things like that. Even when I was working in Hollywood, when I was getting started, I was the assistant helping my boss track those kinds of things.

I think that it’s very manual and also sometimes inaccurate, so having machines do some of these jobs that it’s more effective to use them for, I think, can then free you up to think about, what are the other ways to approach this fight scene?

You’re still having to curate, even if AI gives you suggestions of, “Oh, you could do this, this, or this.” You have to be the one saying, “Oh, I know that this is going to be the best choice, but I’m going to combine it with this and change this to make it true to your story and your series.”

So that curation is one of the deepest parts of creativity, and that’s even what James Patterson argued, because he’s worked with ghostwriters his whole career.

His whole point was that the work that was the most creative was when he was writing the outlines and deciding how the story was going to be told.

When he handed it over to his ghostwriter, he’s like, “The hardest part’s been done. The ghostwriter’s just going to carry out my vision, and I have already done the creative heavy lifting.” So a lot of writing is just making good creative decisions.

Jo: So then one reason that some writers are worried about this is because readers, or more likely other writers, are attacking them. As you said, there is a very literary community on Substack.

So for those writers who might feel afraid of using AI in any way—even with marketing tasks because they’re worried about being attacked—

Amy: I think that this is just another wave. Every time there’s a new technology, there’s always going to be that moment of fear around, “Is this going to take our jobs? Is this going to hurt us in some way? What is this?”

I think that wave is starting to pass. I’ve even seen it with a lot of my Hollywood friends that were very anti-AI, who are professional working writers now. They’re starting to incorporate it into their process more.

I think that while there are still areas like traditional publishing where there’s a lot of fear-mongering around that, if you’re able to take your career into your own hands and have the power to be able to put out what you want, then you shouldn’t fear that.

You shouldn’t fear backlash because these tools have completely changed everything. You can’t put them back in the box now. So many authors are either using them publicly or in secret, and this is something that is already coming to revolutionise everything.

I say that as somebody who is in San Francisco seeing the future of these tools, seeing how people are using them, and if you want to publicly not use them, that’s totally okay.

But I think the writers who want to use them shouldn’t feel shame around it, shouldn’t feel like they’re going to be attacked.

There are always going to be people, fans, writers, readers, who are going to attack other authors on a variety of different things. Internet hate has always been around, even before AI.

So I think, for me, if you’re writing a good story that people love, they’re not going to care that it’s AI. They’re going to feel invested in the characters.

So I think ultimately it’s trying to stay away from all of those fights about what is good, what is bad, whether or not you should use it. Every author’s going to have to make that decision for themselves.

If readers don’t want to read certain things made with certain tools, that’s okay, but I think that at the end of the day, we’re all humans and we want to read good stories. I think that is going to win out over the purity battle of whether or not this has been used with AI. I think that is going to start to fade away.

Jo: Oh, thank goodness for that. I really, really hope so.

Amy: So Sutoscience.com, spelled like my last name, S-U-T-O, and then the word science, is my personal Substack, and MakeWritingYourJob.com is our writing job board with resources for writers.

Also, I’m on every social media platform @sutoscience.

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

Amy: Yes. Thank you so much for having me.

The post Write For Money And Power: Becoming A Creator CEO With Amy Suto first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How can you design your year around seasons of work and rest instead of waiting for financial freedom? And how do you build the money confidence to take extended time off when you come from a scarcity mindset? Brian Herriot shares his ideas on time freedom after a career as a financial advisor and consultant.

In the intro, The end of the spectrum [Seth Godin, Akimbo]; List of money books; Lessons learned from 15 years as a full-time author entrepreneur; My author timeline since 2005; Producing AI-narrated audiobooks with Simon Patrick.

Plus, please do my short How to Market a Book survey (by 7 Oct); and here’s my Cathedral Zero Trailer.

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 

Brian Herriot is a financial advisor, professional speaker, and the author of Time Freedom: Rethink Your Work and Money to Create a Life You Love Now. He’s also the host of The Time Freedom Podcast.

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

You can find Brian at timefreedom.life.

Jo: Brian Herriot is a financial advisor, professional speaker, and the author of Time Freedom: Rethink Your Work and Money to Create a Life You Love Now. He’s also the host of The Time Freedom Podcast. So welcome to the show, Brian.

Brian: Thank you so much for having me.

Jo: Yes, this is a great topic. First up—

Brian: I am a financial advisor, and now I am an author officially. I found writing just short of three years ago. I was actually doing some research on behalf of my wife, because she’s always been an incredible writer, in the fiction side of the world.

So I was researching different writing programmes and things like that, and came across one that I thought, “Hmm, this is for nonfiction, and boy, it sounds very interesting. I think it’s something maybe I need to do.”

The reason why I was looking at all, even for myself, is I was transitioning into a new line of work, and it was work where you needed to develop some authority and visibility. Everything everybody was telling me was that I needed to do a lot of social media, which I did not want to do.

I forget where I heard it, but they’re like, “Or you could do the author speaking thing.” And I thought, “Ooh, that sounds a lot better.” So that’s the path that I ended up on.

Jo: Interesting.

Brian: Well, a lot of what you see, at least online, if you’re to develop a personal brand and try to attract business—in this case into my financial advisory firm—everyone says, “Well, you need to develop an online presence.”

In the business world from a long time ago, I had used LinkedIn, but not for anything like developing a personal brand.

So then all the advice started turning to, “Oh, well then you need to get onto Instagram and TikTok.” I don’t know, I’ve always viewed all that scrolling as a waste of time, and I’d rather put my mind towards something more productive.

So I was just so apprehensive to try and get into that space, that I just kept putting it off and putting it off and putting it off until I heard a podcast. I’ve always listened to lots of podcasts, and I heard a podcast that said, “Well, instead of developing authority that way, the other path that you could take would be through writing.”

Because it’s obviously longer form, you can put your thinking into it. Then that can lead to help getting into speaking as well.

Between those two you can develop some of the same authority that you could if you went the social media route. There was also the podcasting part, which I do love, and that’s been one of the most fun things I’ve been doing lately.

So I do podcasting, writing and speaking instead of social media.

Jo: I love that, and I know a lot of people listening love that too. I don’t think this is an age thing, I think this is an aptitude for short-form video thing. I’m the same as you. I’m not really into the short-form video. For people listening, this is an audio-only podcast partly because I don’t want to do video.

Brian: And that’s beautiful. That’s the beauty of working on your terms, right? Which we’ll talk a lot about.

Jo: Yes, exactly. So I love that from the beginning you were like, “No, I’m going to go the long-form route and reach people that way,” because you absolutely are. I personally would always rather read a book than watch a whole load of snippets or video online to learn about this kind of topic.

So let’s get into the book. Let’s start with that concept of time freedom.

Because it feels like we’re working harder than ever.

Brian: The way that I like to explain this is first by discussing what time freedom is not, because of how it fits. And I have this right up front in the book.

There’s this whole concept of work-life balance, right? And work-life balance to me, at least, coming from the professional and the employed worlds, is that you’re just stealing an hour during the day here to then make it up later in the night.

Sftentimes, at least when I was living with work-life balance, I was probably more busy than I even was if I would’ve just worked straight from 8:00 to 5:00. It’s very week by week focused, day by day focused, and that is not time freedom.

On the other side is this idea of financial freedom, which time freedom also is not in my mind. Financial freedom is where, I mean, the simplest thing is you’re either retired or you’re independently wealthy or in some other way you do not have to work anymore.

So you’ve got this absolute freedom, which for me is boring, because I get a lot of joy from the work that I do. So in the middle is the idea, I think, of time freedom, where you do still have to work, but you’re able to design work in a way that works for you. So you can do it on your terms.

There’s a lot of choice. There’s flexibility if you want it, and all of those things. I think that somebody that optimises for time freedom looks at their year and says, “This is how I want my year to go.” There’s a seasonality to it.

In my personal experience, I do most of my work work, the work that I need to do to get paid and live, in what would be the equivalent of the school year, because my wife and I have a son. He’s a sophomore in high school, and that’s just the way that our life is lining up right now.

Then during the summer, we’re fortunate enough to have this not so great cabin on a beautiful lake back where we both grew up. And in the last five years, we’ve designed our life so that we can go back there and live a different season during the summer.

I’ve always loved summer, and during that time, that’s when we rest and relax, and we water-ski, and we fish, and we do all the fun things that you could do at a cabin.

Then also, there’s this time when you’re starting to think bigger or differently or make creative connections about things in the work that you do. I find it really rejuvenating, so that when I come back in the quote-unquote school year, then I can get back to work and do some really interesting things.

So the person who pursues time freedom is really optimising their life around this freedom and flexibility. Maybe they’re working longer and later into life, but they’re doing it in a way that works for them.

They’re not necessarily optimising to steal that extra hour that day, or optimising for wealth, which would be the financial freedom path.

Jo: Yes, I find this very interesting. I like that it’s not financial freedom because I’m an investor, as I mentioned to you, and many of us are. But that tends to take more time. So if you’re aiming for financial freedom, especially if you start investing later in life, you’re not going to get that at 45 or 50 or maybe even 60.

So defining this as separate is really good, because you’re saying, “Well, you can start changing things now, and yes, you might have to work a bit longer, but if you love your work, it’s not a problem.”

I want to come back to this idea of seasonality and planning your year around this seasonality idea. How does that work with the potential of other people’s timelines or other people’s possibilities, and serendipity?

I have some plans, but then, like this year, this thing came up. It was just a very intuitive thing and has changed the next few months in a completely different direction and blown all my plans out the water.

Brian: Well, first what I want to mention is, if you can figure out a way to organise your year so that you have these extended periods of time off, that’s a wonderful thing, and it’s not something that I think you can do with a snap of the fingers.

When I had this realisation that I even wanted to do this, of course it wasn’t even me that came up with it, it was my wife. This was during a time when the stock market had crashed, and I was suggesting to her that we were not going to be financially free any time soon.

When she asked me what financial freedom looked like to me, I said that I still had wanted to work, just more flexibly, and she said, “Well, let’s do it now,” right?

So back to my point, we couldn’t do it now. We had to get the money confidence to be able to basically figure out how could you work for nine months and have that support 12 months of living.

So it’s not immediate, but once you get there, the way that I have looked at it compared to serendipity is, if I can structure the work that I do, and again, it’s so dependent on the type of work that your listener does do, right?

In my particular case, when I was able to do this, I was doing independent consulting projects. So I was able to line up projects that would never overlap in the summer.

Sometimes they would go into June because it had to, right? But I did the best that I could and tried to be as flexible as it was. Then when I had the time, then I was able to do whatever came up during that period of time.

Usually it started as just taking a break, resting and not doing so much work. But by the end of those three months, you really start to want to get back into things. I think you do have to just go with what your body’s telling you and what your mind is telling you.

I don’t know if that answers your specific question, but when you say something happens, right, and you want to take advantage of that opportunity, you’ve got to do it, right?

I think flexibility is probably the value that comes through the most in the book. Even when you think you’ve figured it out and you finally got that perfect seasonal year, well, something will come up and happen. I think part of what time freedom is, is being able to take advantage of the opportunity when it comes up.

Jo: Yes, being able to choose. That’s the key point. I mean, I’m in a situation like you where I run an independent business, so I do get to choose.

It’s just funny because I read this and I’m like, I do have time freedom, but I fill my time completely. I do have enough time, but I fill it with more and more creative projects, and I’m not very good at stopping. So while I do have flexibility, I also have a very full calendar.

Long-term listeners will know I’ve asked this of other people as well, and I was very interested that you took a transformative sabbatical in 2023. This is something I keep coming towards and then backing away from.

Brian: My wife and I took a trip in, I think it was 2015 or so. We went to Italy for just two weeks. I mean, you could easily spend two years, I feel, in Italy and still feel like you missed out on things. But our vacation was so packed. It was very typical of the American vacation, I would say.

I remember coming back from that vacation going, “You know, I’m more exhausted now than I was when we left.” So we always wanted to figure out a way to do some slower travel.

The way that it worked out, after we had our revelation about how we wanted to design our lives, was that we were going to take what ended up being four weeks.

So I knew that I was going to have my first fully free summer off in 2023, and we decided to purposely go slow, and we travelled in and around Portugal for four weeks.

It’s funny, on the flight back when we were going through customs, the gentleman asked how long we’d been in Portugal, and we said, “Four weeks.”

He’s like, “What did you do for that?” Like, what did you do?

Jo: I love Portugal, by the way. It’s great.

Brian: Lovely. “Why were you here for so long?” But the beauty of it was, if we had a day when we weren’t feeling up to going to see something, we just didn’t. It was wonderful. That was just a wonderful experience.

We were able to line it up so that we met other friends, so we almost had a vacation within a vacation. We had an au pair that we hadn’t seen for years who flew over from France and met us.

It was just, I imagine, very not typical of the American work lifestyle that I’m familiar with. It was just anything but that, and it was just wonderful.

It really pulled our whole family out of the conventional way of thinking, and that was incredible for us, and really then triggered how we’ve spent the last few years of our lives.

We haven’t had that same long trip yet. Part of it has to do with now our son’s in high school and he needs to be here at home around his friends. But he’ll be off to college soon and then we can go do it again.

Jo: Yes, it’s so interesting, isn’t it? Sometimes you have to really step away from your normal life and the grind of it in order to think differently. It’s quite funny because as a Brit and a European myself—

Brian: Yes, absolutely. I think part of this whole living with time freedom aspect for me is just leading a more interesting life.

I owe this really to my wife. I think I always, through schooling and coming out of college, I just almost had these blinders on, like, well, you’re supposed to just get to work and do your work, and this is what you do.

She’s the one who’s always asked me, why are we doing this? Why could we not experience something a little bit different? And that’s what makes for an interesting life.

Jo: Yes, and also from what you’ve said, you’re not spending up big time. You don’t sound like you’re having extravagant times at the lake or when you’re travelling.

So I often think that people feel like you have to have so much money in order to do something. I remember being in, oh, it must have been New York, and I was talking to someone and she said, “Oh, it’s my dream to go to New Orleans,” and I’d recently been there.

I was like, “Well, why haven’t you been? It’s really easy. You’re in America. You could just fly there.” I’ve even taken trains in America, which I know a lot of Americans haven’t. But there are trains, and all of this.

I was like, “Well, why haven’t you been?” It’s like people have in their minds all these barriers.

Brian: It’s true. There’s all of the series of podcasts and blogs and everything about how, when you do this long travel or slow travel, I think is what they call it, you don’t have to stay at hotels.

You could stay at an Airbnb and rent a place for two or three months, and it’s far less per day than it costs.

The analysis that I’ve seen is how sometimes if you, say, maybe rented out your house back in America when you were going to Europe, and then you did your travelling, it’s actually cheaper to go and take a long trip than just stay put. You actually make money on it. I mean, of course, it all depends, but it’s eye-opening.

Jo: Yes, you mentioned Portugal. We’re actually going to Portugal walking in a couple of weeks, and Portugal, for example, is much cheaper than Italy a lot of the time. So it also depends on where you go.

Coming back to the book, you mentioned a few minutes ago money confidence. In the book, you have these money personalities, and many of my listeners as creatives and authors, there’s quite a lot of scarcity mindset in the author community, fear of financial things.

Brian: The track that I took in the book was, before I could just say, “Oh, go live time freedom and have inconsistent income and take these extended periods of time off,” I couldn’t do it without addressing how I felt, which was like, “Well, can I afford this?”

So the money piece of it is extremely important. The money personalities is something that I feel like I learned far too late in life.

How I describe money personalities, and there are different ways of talking about this, but it’s based on how you were raised and experiences that you’ve had with money from when you were a child, in your family, and then what happened in early life.

How has that impacted you behaviourally in terms of how you view money? So for example, growing up, we lived in a small rural part of the Midwest, and so we had money.

We didn’t have a lot of money, but I can remember every Saturday morning my mom clipping coupons, right? Because that’s how we bought our groceries.

So I do come from this, let’s get the most value out of everything that I buy, and I’m going to restrain my spending because who knows if I’m going to have enough in the future. A constraints mentality.

Whereas I’ve met other people now that I’ve been an adult whose parents had their own business, and they had booms and busts, and so there were good times and bad times.

So when they get money, they spend it, so that they can enjoy it. I realise that people come with this—I don’t want to say baggage because it’s a bad thing—but people come with these experiences that influence how they think about what’s possible as it relates to money.

I think that for one, people need to understand what that is for them and how that works. I also think that you can use it then to your advantage in figuring out how to gain the money confidence to step off into a life of time freedom.

So the three that I really highlight in the book are, the one that is called, what I call the money minimiser, which is the individual who doesn’t like to think about money or would rather not think about money. Money is not a big part of their life, or they feel constrained by money.

I have elements of this in my background. And in this case, a lot of times you may not need as much money to live off of to be happy, which is actually a huge advantage, because if you don’t need as much money to live on, then you don’t have to go save up as much money, or you don’t need to make as much money.

The other type is the money manager, and this is someone who’s much more into saving and investing and understanding how all this works. This is the type of person that a financial advisor loves to address, because they have money to invest.

This is someone who’s getting into their 401(k) right out of, in their first job immediately, and compounding their wealth over 40 years. It sounds like you have a little bit of this in you based on what you were saying. And there’s some advantages to that, too.

Then there’s someone like my son, who despite all of the saving and investing in our family, he wants nothing to do with it. He believes that if he wants more money, he’ll just go figure out a way to make more money.

So this is the money maker. It’s the entrepreneurial type, the person who’s in sales, the person who can manifest money.

All of these different types of money personalities, I think if it is you, there’s ways that you can leverage those to figure out how to make money work for you so that you can have time freedom.

Jo: That’s really interesting. I think we have a money journey. I know some people don’t like the word journey, but I like it. I come from a very scarce background, poor. Let’s just say it. We were poor, for a while. Then, over time, things changed between various family members.

So I was a minimiser just by upbringing, and then I discovered the maker, and I manifested, and I worked my butt off and did all of that and understood that you can make money. You can earn it and make it in different ways. And then I learned about investing and then became more of that manager.

I absolutely was afraid of feeling stupid, so I wondered if you might address that, because this is what stopped me for a long time. I’m a pretty smart person, at least I think I am. I can learn things, but I just found the financial world just made me feel stupid.

So I minimised it because I was like, “Well, if I don’t, I’m not going to understand it, therefore I’ll just dismiss it.” That fear of feeling stupid, and other people might have fear of judgement or fear of all these different things.

Brian: It’s so unfortunate. The reason people feel stupid is because I think the financial industry wants you to feel that way, so that you then need their help to manage your money. It’s full of acronyms and this and that and the other thing, and it is not that difficult.

I think there’s a little bit of math involved, and numbers. I think if people lean more to the other side of their brain, there tends to be a little bit of fear there.

I believe that there are basic concepts that can be understood, like if you were to invest in something that covers a lot of stocks, it’s called an index, right? And if you keep the costs low on it, you’re going to earn much more money. I feel like there’s 10 things that you could learn and it would get you 90% of the way there.

It’s just that you need to find the right resources to explain it to you in a way that’s understandable. I’ll tell you, this book is the lifestyle/entrepreneurship/money book, which is a unique combination.

The money chapters are some of those that I had to revisit twice as much as the rest of them, because it was so important to me that there was not a lot of acronyms and difficulty getting through it.

I really wanted to break it down to the basics. Hopefully you felt that was the case when you read through those chapters, because it’s so easy to make it sound complicated so that then people feel that they need the support of the person who’s explaining it in the complicated manner.

Jo: Yes, exactly, and I totally agree with you. When I discovered the low fee index funds, I was like, sorry, what if I just put some money in that, that’s a good way to start? And I was like, really? Okay, then. That’s strange.

I think I had overcomplicated it in my mind, and as you say, the industry does that in a way, and the publishing industry does it too.

I mean, you’ve obviously been learning loads of stuff about publishing. In every single niche area, there’s language that shuts out other people. And also I feel like, as a British person in the UK, obviously depending on the country you’re in, there’s different language as well, and yet so many of the books are American.

So for example, your Roth IRA is an ISA here, and your 401(k) is a SIPP. And then someone in Australia, it’s something different. Someone in Canada, it’s something different.

So that also makes it complicated, whereas once you can do some mapping and go, oh, okay, when in your book you say an IRA or a 401(k), this is what it is in my country, it simplifies it.

Brian: Yes, absolutely. I did take special care at the beginning of the book to say I’m coming at this from an American angle.

Jo: Yes. But then I would also say, I was saying this to my husband the other day, I’m very grateful, and I know this isn’t true for every country, but I’m very grateful that I can invest in American indexes and stocks and all of that kind of thing.

I think you can invest globally as well as earn money globally, and I think that’s really exciting. As an individual person, I can do that, and I’ve got investments in Australia because I lived there for a while, and that is actually a real privilege to be able to invest that way.

Brian: The only way that I’ve really seen it is through an American-based fund that invests in foreign companies in foreign countries. But no, not by buying something from the Australian market, for example.

You made me realise I need to create a little cheat sheet that just shows, okay, we’re talking a company retirement account. What is it called in all of these countries? Wouldn’t that be nice? Just a nice little cheat sheet for people. I’m going to do that.

Jo: Yes, because most of the time it’s really a one-to-one, because as you said, it’s not that complicated. When I was learning all about this, I was in Australia, and just so much of the information is from Americans, so you have to do this translation in your brain. So that’ll be a super useful cheat sheet.

Okay. So in terms of other things, you’ve mentioned obviously enjoying your work, but you talk about different ways to build flexibility into your work so it’s not all or nothing.

Brian: I think this is one where you have to think, “Okay, am I employed or am I self-employed?” Because I think there is a big distinction there in terms of what you’re able to do.

Again, shout-out for early readers of books, but the early readers of my book suggested that in addition to just saying, “Oh, live by a seasonal schedule and take three months off in the summer,” they said, “What are some other things that we can do to get toward that,” right? So that we can take incremental steps.

So some of these ideas can be done by anyone that’s working in a more typical, employed position, and others might need to be if you’re in an entrepreneurial scenario. I feel like a lot of it comes down to how you can structure the work.

So at least in America, more and more these days, there are more companies, and usually they’re the smaller and the mid-sized ones, where you can find companies that are doing four by 10-hour schedules.

So you’re working four days and having three days off, which then gives you a Friday every week to do something that you want to do, or start to build a skill that you could then turn into something that you could do independently, like starting as a side hustle and then moving into something different like that.

Other early strategies that I’ve seen people do, just to experience what it’s like to take an extended period of time off, and especially in America this isn’t done that much, is to take a two-week trip that you have over the holidays and put a week on the front of it and a week at the end of it and have a full four weeks off.

This could be during a time of year that’s usually a little slower anyway. So it’s a lot easier to perhaps have your manager approve that. These are just a couple of ideas.

On the self-employed side, I have seen more than a couple of people now work this schedule where they do three weeks on and one week off, and then three weeks on and one week off, and they’ve just figured out how to put the systems in place in their business to allow for that one week to be away.

I guess if you’re just taking off for a week every three weeks or a week every month, you’re never so far away from the work that needs to get done. It’s just a different style.

What happens is, if you can do some of these different techniques and then you add them all up, it almost adds up to the amount of time of a full three months off.

So again, you just have to test and try it out and do these different strategies based on the type of work that you do and the place of employment that you have, to see what might work.

Jo: And also almost just plan it, like I said before about that person who wanted to go to New Orleans.

Choose a time next year, like six months’ time or nine months’ time, and—

Brian: No, that’s right. And there’s other things… Now, I was talking schedules, but there’s other things that you can try to start to create work that’s more flexible.

For example, something that often happens in America at least is, you’re working in a corporate setting, somebody retires, but that person has so much skill and knowledge about the business that then they immediately turn around and are hired back as an independent consultant.

Early in my career, I just saw this happen all the time, and I remember thinking, “Why do they have to wait until they turn 65 and retire before they do that?”

Couldn’t you just say, “Hey, I’ve decided to leave my corporate position, but I’m going to become an independent consultant because I have a valuable set of skills, and I’m going to turn around and just contract back to where I used to work initially,” as that first step. That’s an interesting technique.

You had highlighted the idea of a hobbyist entrepreneur. This is usually the one that a lot of existing retirees will do right out of the bat. I met a friend of my wife’s parents, who had a very successful corporate career, and as soon as he finished up, again, people that are productive, I think, struggle when they immediately retire.

So he’s like, “I need to figure out something to do,” so he flexed his creative side. They lived in Northern Wisconsin, where fishing is a big thing. So he would craft these large fish mouths out of wood. He would make these wooden fish that were very creative and very cool.

They would have golf tees for teeth and stuff like that. So you could sell them to people that like golf. He created them for all of his friends, and then he ended up with some sort of Etsy store where he sold a bunch of these. Then after a while he’s like, “Eh, now it’s too much like a job, so I’m going to do something different.”

It’s just little ways that you can make money here and there that allow you to work on some things that you are interested in.

Jo: Yes, and it’s interesting because the other thing about the retire and live off your pension idea is that the assumption is you’ll never earn any money ever again, and so you’ll just be drawing down on that money.

Even as you say, like that guy with the wooden fish, if you can make even an extra 5,000 in a year or an extra 10,000 in a year, you don’t have to draw that down from the pot of money that you’ve saved or invested, or your pension or whatever. So that actually means that it can last longer.

So I feel like people forget that even these smaller amounts of money, which you can make as an author as well, or a speaker as you say—

Brian: It does, and another thing that it gives you is the ability, when maybe the market is down for two years, and it’s hard to pull money out of your savings when it is negative, right?

In those months, or in those years, or whatever it happens to be, you say, “Oh, well maybe I’m going to do my little side gig twice as much this year, because that’ll allow me to spend that money instead of having to pull it out of a down market.”

Jo: Exactly. So we do talk about the business of being an author on this show. And at the beginning you mentioned that writing this book was part of developing authority so that maybe you can also get speaking.

Is it purely business card authority, or is it designed as an income stream as well? And any advice for other people who want to do something similar?

Brian: Yes. It’s so interesting you said the phrase, like a better business card concept. When I think of that, I think of some of the places that will teach you how to write a book in a weekend or a month or three months or something like that.

I was very wary of that. I really wanted to have a book that stood on its own. So I think of my book as more than a business card certainly, but something that’s really the foundation of my business.

So here’s how it flows for me. The ultimate product that I sell is I invest people’s money for them at half the cost, because that’s very important to me, and in a way that is commensurate with somebody that wants to live this type of lifestyle. So that’s ultimately what my service offering is.

The way that people enter my world is, I have a quiz, a little nine-question quiz. That’s my little lead product that I use. But that gets them interested in this idea of time freedom. If they come across time freedom or they are interested in financial freedom, and they’re searching around for a book, the book is the main thing.

I’ll tell you, I’ve left nothing out of the book. The book contains everything that I ever did, everything that I ever do for clients. It’s all there. I learned that from somebody early in the process, which is, you don’t want to hold anything back in a book, a business-related book. Because, I don’t know, it’s just not right.

The thing is, some people will go and run with it, which is great. But some people need accountability, or they need someone to hold their hand, which is fine. Or they in some way need to connect with you, and that is then where you offer the next level.

So somebody could read my book and do everything themselves, or I also, a few times a year, offer a group coaching programme where basically we go through the book. We prepare what I call a Time Freedom Plan, which is like a financial plan, with the individuals in the group. And again, it’s crazy.

There’s nothing that I’m helping with that’s not already in the book. So we go through the concepts. We prepare our Time Freedom Formula. We use the Time Freedom Calculator that I have that’s, again, available for free. Anyone can use it, but we work on all these things together to prepare a Time Freedom Plan.

A Time Freedom Plan is what ultimately gives you the money confidence to live this lifestyle.

So you project the money that you’re going to earn and spend through the rest of your life to give you confidence that you’re not going to run out, and then that allows you to step off into time freedom in a year or three years or 10 years or whatever it takes.

Then as part of that process, there are a certain number of people that will have some money that needs to be invested and managed in a way, and those people can turn into customers of mine on the investment management side. So that’s how it flows.

So I have a huge goal to just get this book out to as many people as possible, because I want to help as many people as possible, of course, but then also some small percentage of the people that read the book will ultimately want to work with me.

Jo: No, that’s great, and that is the textbook ladder that a nonfiction author does. I also love that you’ve put everything into the book. I think it’s super useful. I really enjoyed it. I think it’s got some good questions in.

Even if you are, I guess, someone who is already investing like me, it’s good to think about the time freedom as well as the financial side.

Brian: Well, people can find the book anywhere books are sold. I do have a podcast as well, but everything is linked to from my initial website, which is timefreedom.life. So you can find everything there.

Jo: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Brian. That was fantastic.

Brian: Thank you so much. This was a true pleasure.

The post Time Freedom: Rethink Your Work And Money With Brian Herriot first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How can you use AI to research, edit and handle admin and marketing tasks while still writing every single word yourself? How can you double down on being human and reach readers on a personal level? Anna McPhee shares her perspective as a software engineer, author and creative technologist.

In the intro, How to Write, Publish, and Market Short Stories out now.

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 

Anna McPhee is an author, software engineer, professional speaker, and creative technologist. Her latest book is What Machines Can’t Replace: Why AI Makes Us More Human.

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

You can find Anna at Anna.kiwi and her new book at WhatMachinesCantReplace.com.

Jo: Anna McPhee is an author, software engineer, professional speaker, and creative technologist. Her latest book is What Machines Can’t Replace: Why AI Makes Us More Human. So welcome to the show, Anna.

Anna: Hi, Joanna. Thank you so much for having me.

Jo: Oh, this is going to be a fun conversation. First up—

Anna: I have been in all of these things my whole life, as long as I can remember. When I was just a little girl, writing was my favourite thing, writing stories. It was the whole reason I went to school, to be honest. I always pictured myself as a writer before anything else.

My dad was a lecturer in software development, so when I was little, he would teach me how to code. So I’ve always done both, for as long as I can remember, and my mum is an artist. That’s been my upbringing, at the intersection of technology and art, and then writing is my own personal passion.

It’s naturally flowed throughout my life. I’ve been in and out of some other careers and chased all the things that have made me feel interested and passionate, but writing has always been there in the background. It’s something I do, whether it’s been for a hobby or for a profession, so it’s always been there.

Jo: But you work in software, right?

Anna: I do. I work in software, which came to me by chance. I set out as a digital nomad about 15 years ago now. I sold everything I owned and started travelling.

The way I thought I was going to fund this was through freelance writing, which I was very optimistic about. We all know now that’s a very challenging way to make an income, especially when you don’t have a background in it or a portfolio.

I did have this childhood background in software engineering and coding. So I set out to be a writer and travel the world as a writer, and actually what I ended up doing was building websites and writing software, because that’s what people would pay me to do. So I fell into both at the same time through this chance I took.

Jo: I think sometimes people think that programming and software development and these more technical fields are not creative. My husband was a programmer for a long time, and essentially programming is a language.

Well, there are lots of languages, but you are creating in a language with computers, right? So is there that much difference?

Anna: They’re so related. Many people might put writing into more of an art, and computer development and programming more into a maths or a science, but I just think there’s so much creativity in writing code, in how you choose to structure things, in the language you select for something, the way you approach it.

It’s very similar to writing a book, I think. I’ve found a lot of things that are very similar about it, to do with architecture even. When you look at the basics, some people might write a book with no idea where it’s going and see where it ends.

It’s the same with software. People might go into it and not have a plan. Most people will architect their software, or they’ll architect their story in the same way. I think there’s a lot of crossover between the two.

Jo: And there’s editing, and doing the “does this do what I want it to do?” I think with software perhaps it’s more obvious when something doesn’t do what you want it to do than with a book.

Anna: Perhaps. Although with AI now, it’s becoming a little more vague, because you can think your software’s doing what you want it to, but it might not be. It might just look like it is. I think those lines are getting a bit blurrier as technology changes.

There’s a lot of things in software development that are very similar to writing. We don’t have an editor, but we will have unit tests or code reviews, and maybe the CI tests, and we’ve got all these structures in place that are very similar to writing.

Jo: I also think what’s interesting, and this has been in the last maybe decade really, is that it used to be you would get a job in the old way, but—

So maybe talk a bit about that, because you have a GitHub page, don’t you?

Anna: I do have a GitHub page, and I’ve spent a lot of time on it, because you can set up your README file and make it a bit like a website, and introduce all of your projects and what you’re working on.

Just to combine it a little bit, actually, I use GitHub for my writing. I use it for version control so that I can go back and see the changes that I’ve made to the things that I’m writing.

Even with my book, I had a copy of it backed up in a private repository on GitHub where I could track changes and never lose a backup. I have so much faith in GitHub that it extends beyond the software I write and into everything I do. I keep a copy backed up in GitHub.

Jo: That’s actually quite funny because, coming into AI in the author community, one of the things that’s now talked about is how do you prove that your book is not a one-click generated book? And what you’ve actually got there is evidence of your process.

Anna: Exactly.

Jo: Which is kind of hilarious in many ways. Well, let’s get into this, because there’s so much fear and witch hunting right now and negativity in the author community.

Anna: Oh, people are really afraid. I’ve got a very moderate perspective, and I think I sit in a very similar position to you.

A large number of people that I hear from are either incredibly pro-AI, let it do everything for them, everything, everything, do it for absolutely everything you can think of. Or they’re completely terrified and very, very negative about it, and won’t use it for anything at all.

I can only assume this is going to stabilise with time. There’s been a huge amount of outrage against other technologies in the past, even calculators. All technology has come with scepticism and people scared that it’s going to take their jobs.

I think there’s a lot of misinformation out there as well, people who think that AI is trained on books, which it is, and that’s a totally valid concern with the copyright and things.

I think there’s a lot of misunderstanding around what training an AI model actually means in that regard. It’s not taking someone’s prose and reusing it. It’s looking at the underlying mathematical probability of, if you have this word, what is the probability of the next word being this? It’s broken down into numbers.

I’m not 100 percent sure, but from my perspective of seeing it, the witch hunt comes from a place of fear.

I saw an author in a group I’m in recently who said, “Oh, I’ve written so many novels, and I’ve run out of ideas for names for my characters. I’ve used every person I’ve ever met, I’ve used their name. That’s how many books I’ve written. How do I get more names?”

Someone suggested, “Well, why don’t you ask AI for some other names?” “Oh, no, no, no. I could never let AI take over my work like that.” And it was just over the idea of using it to ask a question.

So I think there’s a feeling that if you let it do one thing, next thing it’s going to be doing everything, and it’s going to erase you, and your ideas, and your way of doing things.

Jo: Just on that, it is interesting, though, isn’t it? Because I am trying to use it, like I use Claude Code, and I’m trying to use it for more, and more, and more.

I started off using ChatGPT the day it came out in 2022, and have increasingly tried to give the AI tools all the things that will free me up to do the things I love to do. Making lists of names is not on my list of things I love to do.

Anna: Yes, exactly. I feel the same way.

Jo: So that’s the thing, isn’t it? The fear is really interesting because we all have fear.

One very visceral time I remember feeling very scared was in the pandemic, in those early days when there wasn’t a vaccine. That’s really the only reference I think I have for it, because like you, I feel like I’ve grown up with technology, and so I’ve never felt it that way.

I’m hoping that as with COVID, as with things developing over time, and obviously again, misinformation is rampant, but—

Anna: I hope it’s better than that. I hope we can hope for better, that people can learn how to use it in a way that supports them.

As people become less fearful, like with COVID, they experiment a little bit here or there and start to see that there are ways to not let it take over.

In general, people are really bad at identifying AI-generated content. There are so many studies done on it, and it’s 50/50 at best. Good AI now produces stuff that a lot of people don’t recognise. So it’s more about the idea than the reality of it.

There’s this whole idea around it that AI will take our jobs, and I get asked all the time, “Well, when do you think AI’s going to take your job? You work on a computer.”

Well, it can take my job, and it has. I used to write code all the time, and now I write almost no code. I work for a very large software company, and we use a lot of AI in our development protocols, and I don’t write any code now, more or less, and a few years ago I did all day.

So my job has changed completely, and AI has taken my job, but it hasn’t taken my employment. I found a new way of being, which is I’m more of a project manager. I review code. I make sure nothing bad gets put out into the world. My role has changed, but it hasn’t been taken away.

I hope that as people start to see that this new technology is not taking their jobs, it’s taking the parts of their jobs off them that are so repeatable, and giving them more room to do more with the things that they are uniquely good at.

Jo: Absolutely. So let’s get into that, because you did just say there that you’re not writing any code, which is different to your writing for books. In your book, What Machines Can’t Replace, you talk about how you used AI assistance and how you did things in different ways.

I’ve been explicit about being AI-assisted since May 2023, so I absolutely am on board with the difference between what is assistance and what is generation. One-click generation of a complete book, while some people might choose to do that, that’s not what you and I are talking about. So tell us—

Anna: Right. So I used AI extensively for this book. However, I wrote every single word. I don’t want AI to take over my voice, and that is one area where it differs from writing code in a big way.

One-click generation, maybe one day AI will actually be very good at it, and we won’t be able to tell the difference. But currently, I definitely can. If I start reading something that is one-click generated, it becomes very obvious to me very quickly.

I use AI extensively in my day. I use a Claude plan which is the Max 20x, the biggest allowance plan, and I run out of limit every week. So I spend a lot of time seeing how it forms sentences and the kind of thing it says, so I think I’m quite sensitive to when I see it.

So for now, it’s not good for that, and I don’t think I ever want it to be. When I put something out in the world that is software, the thing that’s uniquely me is the concepts behind it or the way it functions. It’s not the code itself.

When I put writing out there, when I put a book out there, the words are the thing that’s me. They’re my signature, they’re my style.

So I used AI assistance for everything else. I used it to help me research, but then I would verify the sources myself, but it was so good at finding things.

I used it to transcribe my words. I would go out for long walks, and my ideas come to me when I’m out walking, like so many people.

So I’d just pick up my phone and voice record, “Oh, hey, I was thinking, years ago I heard about this study, and I think that would be really interesting, but I don’t really know the details of it. Can you make a note of this?”

Then my AI could go and research it, come back and say, “Oh, I think you’re talking about this research paper, and here’s a link to it.” It could add it into my notes, and I could still verify it and read it, but it saved me hours of manual trawling through Google Scholar looking for things.

So as a first step I used it for research, but I also used it all the way through the writing process. I’ve set up a lot of custom skills for all the different editor types. I’ve got a developmental editor, a line editor, a copy editor.

None of them are allowed to make any changes. They are only allowed to create reports of what they find. So I could check for consistency, or did I reference the right thing for this chapter? Does this flow okay? I could ask it questions about my work without it actually touching the words.

Another way I used it is I’d make more voice recordings, and then it would transcribe them and suggest where in my book they would fit best, and then copy and paste my exact words, word for word, into the right spot, and then I could edit it in.

So I used it for almost everything except the actual words, which remain mine, and the design as well. I value designers a lot, so I paid a cover designer to design my cover.

Jo: Yes, and all those things you were talking about, I also do.

I do skills for everything. I’m struggling to explain what that is to people who don’t really understand.

Anna: Yes, skills are amazing, and it is difficult to explain. It’s like a little package, and it can contain prompts, it can contain scripts, it can contain information, and it can be called only when needed.

So if I created, for example, my developmental editor skill, it might be a folder that’s consumed by Claude and Claude Code, and only when it’s asked for, then it uses all of the stuff in its context and follows a set of instructions.

They’re just more powerful than a prompt because they’re reusable, and they live there, and it can be clever and know when to use ones without you invoking them directly as well.

I have another skill that’s just me, about me, and I keep it up to date with information about what I’m working on and who I am. If I’m doing something, I can say, “Well, don’t forget, check the About Me before you answer this.”

Or, “I’m working on this project I haven’t worked on in a while, but I created a skill to reference it. Before we start work on this, can you go and check in with the skill?” Kind of like a library.

Jo: It’s interesting, you’re talking about quite expansive skills, and I do have some of those, but a lot of my skills are really quite specific. Like, do a Shopify product in the way that we did Shopify products last time.

Or, this is how Joanna Penn wants the sales description for Amazon, so write the Amazon sales description for this. And then, say, on ChatGPT it’ll be like, right, do A+ content for this book. That kind of thing.

Then it can be, as you say, with memory and all this different stuff. Anything you want to do more than once, I think.

Anna: That’s a really good way to describe it. Also, because of my technical background, I trust code a lot more than I trust AI at the moment.

I really love AI, but the results vary, and you can run the same thing five times and get five different results, whereas if you run a code function five times, you will always get the same result if it’s a well-written function.

So for anything like that, I add code into my skills so that I can say, “When this is called, run this script,” and I know it’s always run the same way. You can get quite complex with skills and build some real programs inside them, or it can be just a few lines. Do this, this way.

I’ve got one I really enjoy at the moment I created called Research Me. I have so many ideas, always hundreds of ideas. So many of them are terrible. Some of them are good, and some of them are already done.

I just type Research Me, and then I just put my thought. It might be a word. It might be a line. It might be more than that.

Then it goes away and looks it up and sees if someone’s done this thing, and if it’s valid to me, and then creates a report and saves it in my knowledge base for me to look at another time.

Jo: I guess it’s not really a skill, but it’s more like part of the memory. I just say, put that in the backlog and bring it back in a month.

Anna: Oh, that’s so nice, too, being able to set schedules and reminders. Like, right now is not a good time, but I don’t want to let this idea go, so can you bring it back to me at this time? And it will. It’s wonderful for that.

Jo: It is good. Oh, and we should also say, you don’t have to write a skill. If you do something with Claude or ChatGPT or whatever, you can then say, “Create a skill for this,” and it will write it, and you can have a look at it, but you don’t have to sit there typing out how to do stuff.

Anna: Yes, it can be done completely with conversation. You don’t need to write out any instructions or any code, anything at all.

You could have a really positive experience doing something with Claude Cowork and then get to the end of that process and think, “Oh, that was wonderful. I definitely think I’ll do that again.”

So you just say, “Oh, that was great. Can you make that a skill so we can do it again the same way next time?” And it’ll create it, and you just click a button, say Add the Skill once it’s done, and that’s it.

Jo: There are so many things. Now, just coming back to your book, you do have at the end of each chapter some prompts, although I don’t like the word prompt anymore, because I feel like prompt is from the old way, when you would type in a certain prompt and then something would come back and that would be done.

Whereas now it’s much more of a conversation. So a prompt is almost a starting point. So you’ve used questions, I guess.

Anna: Okay. Yes, I agree with you on prompting. That was a real buzzword for a while there. Everyone was going to be a prompt engineer, and the future of AI was prompting, prompt design. The systems are so much more capable now that it’s not what it was. It is definitely more of a conversation.

I think that is the good place to start, to just have a conversation with the AI about your work. It doesn’t have to touch your work. You could just ask for its opinion on something.

If you don’t want it to consume your whole book, there are privacy settings, and you can stop it from training on your material if that’s the concern, or you could use a local model. You could give it some of your writing and ask its opinion and start a conversation.

One thing about AI is that people forget you can just say to it, “What’s the best way to use you? Hi, I’m new here. I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m a writer. How can you help me?” And it will tell you.

Jo: I think one of the other ways, if people don’t even want to use it for creative stuff… This morning, as we record this, I’ve been delving into the back end of my YouTube channel, which I’ve just ignored for years, actually, and Google Search Console, and there are all these errors everywhere.

I’m like, “I don’t understand that message.” Or I had an error on one of my files on Draft2Digital, and I was like, “Okay, ugh.” So now I just put those errors into Claude and say, “Right, how do I fix this?” Or, “Maybe you could fix this.”

That helps so much, because as author publishers or self-published authors, we do have a lot of technical things to do. Sometimes, well, all the time now, I think, getting help with it rather than ignoring it can be great.

Anna: Absolutely. It’s so good for that administrative stuff as well, especially with the addition of being able to use Claude, and a lot of the other ones as well, in your web browser now. So it can do things for you. It can fill out forms. There’s a lot of repetition in publishing a book.

You have to enter your ISBN in five million places, and you want to make sure that your information is aligned and that you have the same data in numerous different places, and you can ask it to check.

You can ask it to check your metadata on your website and say, “Does the author information for me align with what you’re seeing on Goodreads, or what you’re seeing on StoryGraph, or in Wikidata? Do you see any gaps that I need to address?” It’s really good at that stuff.

Or you can open a form and say, “Can you fill it out for me? I’m sick of typing.” And it will. It’s so good for the admin. Just amazing.

Jo: So good for admin, exactly. This is the thing, this whole “AI’s going to take my job.” Yes, please take 95% of my job and leave me with the bit I want to do.

Let’s get back into the book, because—

Anna: Yes. So AI swept me up. I’ve been, also like you, an early adopter, and absolutely obsessed with it right from day one. I just started to notice I needed more and more breaks, and I was valuing different things than I used to, and I was consuming and purchasing different things than I used to.

I started to see this changing, and I would spend more and more time out in the garden. I love my garden anyway, I’m a gardener.

I was just starting to recognise this feeling, and at first I couldn’t really put a name to it. What is this? Why am I searching out these things? Why do I want to create more than I did even before with my hands?

So I started looking into it, and it was very much a global phenomenon. Everyone seems to be doing this.

There’s been a really strong link between the introduction of AI into the world and things like record sales or sourdough baking, although that one also came during COVID, so that one’s a bit tricky to measure. But lots of other things are just getting more and more popular as the market gets saturated with AI-generated content.

People want to see things that a human has touched. The harder it becomes to actually see that in AI-generated content, the more people want other signs. If you can’t just read a piece of writing and know 100 percent sure a human wrote it or an AI wrote it, you start looking for other ways to tell.

So I really felt that in myself, and it was a very unsettling feeling, as someone who’s been very, very technology-forward all my life, to start valuing more and more things that weren’t technology.

Jo: Yes, I absolutely get this, and I think there’s also another aspect, which I feel you must feel too.

Because the speed at which I can now work means that my human wetware brain is overloaded. That feeling is both exhilarating and amazing, but also totally exhausting.

Anna: Yes. There’s a huge comedown from it. To me, in the beginning, it started feeling like eating a lot of sugar. Really, really great eating all these lollies. “Oh, this is amazing. These are so good.” And then afterwards, “Oh, I still feel hungry. I don’t feel fulfilled. I’m surrounded by lolly wrappers. What is this?”

It felt a lot like that to me, where it’s just creating all this stuff, and it felt like I was the master of the universe. Wow, I can create anything and everything, and let me do this and that and this and that.

Then I’m like, well, but all of the stuff I’ve created isn’t that great, because it doesn’t feel that good, and I didn’t really make it. I just pushed buttons and said yes. It’s a weird disconnect kind of hangover feeling if you spend too much time and create too much that way.

Jo: It makes me think of the BCI, the brain-computer interface. With Neuralink now, there are people who are paraplegic for whom it is absolutely amazing, but the thought of plugging something into my brain that would try and make my brain go even faster, I’m like, I don’t think that our human brains are designed to go this fast. I just can’t.

Anna: That’s fair.

Jo: I can’t see that happening.

Anna: It’s a tough one. Personally, I have ADHD, so already the distractions are something I have to rein in, and then with this ability to create so many things all at once, it’s hard to have some self-control.

I think with time that, for me, has gotten much easier, but in the early days it was a lot. It was very overstimulating to have so many things happening so quickly, all at the same time.

Jo: Yes, and actually I’m quite grateful for the usage limits. I primarily use Claude Fable, which I just love, but I keep an eye on my usage limits, and then I almost use that as a way to stop myself from using it too much at once, and that is actually very freeing.

The other thing, I mean, you mentioned it there, creating all the things and then realising, you said, they’re not that good. I think that they are becoming incredibly excellent, but for me it was like, okay, well, now, for example, I could do TikTok.

Anna: Yes. I really want things that go out to feel like me, and I feel when I generate anything, whether it’s content, whether it’s pictures, or software as well, that AI will very quickly get me 80 to 90% of the way there, and very well these days. But the last 10 to 20%, I really put so much of myself into, and that’s a really active choice.

So I end up with all these other things that I’ve gotten to that 80% very quickly and then thought, “I don’t know if I really want to invest myself in this and what I need to get it to a place where I would put it into the world.”

So I end up with a sort of graveyard of these mostly finished projects that I’m not quite happy enough with to put out there, but I don’t really want to put in the work myself, because I have limited time, and you choose your things. No human can really polish up 100 things. You have to prioritise what you want to.

Jo: That is exactly it, and this is what I want people to understand. Everything you’re saying and everything I’m saying, we are talking about feeling a lot. We’re excited on the one hand and we’re doing stuff, and then there are other things we’re not excited about.

You can feel the difference in your body, in your mind, when what you are working on excites you, and I think we just have to trust that.

Just trust that feeling and put things in the world where you’re like, “Wow, this is fantastic,” or, “I love that it’s helping me with that.” I mean, you can just tell the difference in our conversation, right?

Anna: Right, and you don’t have to put everything out there as well. Just because you build something with AI, or you use it to help you in something, it’s an experiment. Treat it as an experiment.

If you get to 80%, 90% and think, “I don’t want to put my name to this,” then don’t. Move on. It was an experiment, and you learned something from it.

Jo: So I guess on that then, if we do put things out in the world, like we’ve talked about, we’re happily AI-assisted, and the things we do put out we’re really proud of—

Anna: I really encourage people to share their humanness behind everything they’re creating. If you’re writing a book, you can share the process on socials, for example. It’s becoming very desired to see the not-polished, everyday videos of someone’s creative process. That’s just one really small way.

I think just by nature, by creating it, by not letting AI do the creation work for you, you will show through in the work that you’re doing. You can use AI to support you and to do the admin and to take away all the stuff that’s boring or repetitive, but if you are doing the work, it is going to be visible to people.

I know we’re not very good as humans right now at necessarily distinguishing AI-generated content against not, but you can tell when someone is writing about a human experience. AI has not had a human experience. It has not had a body. It doesn’t have this embodiment that leads to so much of human creativity and ideas.

It is a very clever predictive text tool, and it is very, very good at it, but it does lack true human creativity.

So I think what all creatives can keep in mind is that if they’re putting themselves into it and creating new things and following their passions and their interests and their art in what they’re putting out there, it will show through.

Jo: Also, I think just on the marketing side, you mentioned your garden, for example. Now, I know you’re a mum, but anyone can share pictures of their garden without privacy issues for their children or their family or anything.

So I think sharing human, even like your hand in the dirt with some flowers or something, is still a very human image.

I mean, I almost have in my Instagram a sort of proof of humanity at this point.

Anna: Yes, I think that’s becoming more and more important. A few weeks ago, I got a horrible review on my book, and I know everyone has to face this, but it was someone who clearly hadn’t read my book.

They just said it was all AI-generated crap, pretty much. It was a waste of time, and it should’ve come with a warning that it was entirely AI-generated, which is so far from the truth. I put so much time into that book that I was really quite hurt by it.

My first thought was, “I need to get rid of this. I need this review to go away. I need to complain. I need to report this review because it is false.” And once I recovered from those feelings, instead what I did was I emailed my mailing list and said, “Hey, this person reviewed this, and this is why it hurt me, because I’m a person.”

I got a really nice response. I got a lot of people writing to me like, “That person is an idiot. You’re great. Your book’s wonderful.” And it was so nice.

It was quite challenging to be vulnerable, and instead of trying to sweep this thing under the rug, I just showed up with my humanness to my list and said, “Hey, this is me, and this hurts because I’m a person.” It was really validating in the end to just put some humanness out there.

Jo: This is what I really hate about all this witch hunting, is that people seem to have forgotten that there are actual humans behind this, and I know how you feel. I remember, in fact, it was 2023, I was in New Zealand. We should have said, you’re in Australia, if people are wondering about your accent.

Anna: I am. I’m from New Zealand originally. I’m a New Zealander, but I’m living in Australia.

Jo: But I remember walking along the waterfront from the Viaduct. I still remember it, because I was being absolutely hammered on social media and comments and all this, and I said to my husband, “I think I have to leave the internet.”

I felt like people just don’t understand this, and I was getting so much hate. But as you say, it was about communicating that with my community, who are listening, and basically changing my Patreon to put a lot of it behind the Patreon paywall.

I also topped doing a lot of interviews like this because of the negativity. Now, I’m hoping that we’ve moved on enough that people can be more open. Doing this interview, for example, is a way of showing people your humanity and mine.

As you said at the beginning, it seems to be all or nothing, but that’s just not true.

Anna: Right, and there’s a huge spectrum of what AI support is. A huge, huge spectrum, and I don’t think they’re understanding. I think it will get there, but right now people say, “Well, that was AI-generated,” or it wasn’t. That’s just not how it is.

Maybe it was partially AI-generated. Maybe it was fully AI-assisted, but not at all AI-generated. Maybe you decide to use AI to make your book cover, but you just make components with AI, and then you assemble it using Adobe Illustrator into a cover.

Is that AI-generated? It’s a very grey area. No, it’s definitely assisted. Pieces of it might be AI-generated, but it as a whole conceptually fully came from your creativity and from your mind.

It’s the same with writing. If you use Grammarly to autocorrect any spelling errors in your book, it would now get flagged as AI-assisted content. But some people see that as AI-generated, and they’re two very, very different things.

Jo: Well, I think your book is great. It gives some very grounded advice on things, but also you do share, like you mentioned, a lot about being a mum, about being a gardener, about life, about the human aspect. So I highly recommend What Machines Can’t Replace: Why AI Makes Us More Human.

Anna: Thank you so much. My book should be just about everywhere books are sold online, and if not, WhatMachinesCantReplace.com is the website for my book.

My personal website is Anna.kiwi, A-N-N-A dot kiwi, because I’m a Kiwi, and I am very happy with that domain. I have a blog and general contact information there.

I’m also all around the internet on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, everywhere. So I’m really happy to chat to anyone anytime about all things engineering, software, AI, books, toddlers, gardens, everything.

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

Anna: Thank you so much.

The post What Machines Can’t Replace: Why AI Makes Us More Human With Anna McPhee first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How can you redesign your author business for the publishing environment that actually exists, rather than the one you wish you had? And how do you decide which marketing efforts will still bring readers to your books in ten years’ time? Tracy Cooper-Posey shares her solar sail theory after more than 25 years as an author.

In the intro, reviving your backlist [The Indy Author]; AI as a medium [Tim O’Reilly]; How to Write, Publish, and Market Short Stories – Joanna Penn.

ProWritingAid Storyteller sale: Thursday, 3rd September until September 13th 2026 — 25% off all annual licenses as well as Story Critique credits.

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 

Tracy Cooper-Posey is the multi-award-winning author of over 200 novels and works of nonfiction, science fiction, fantasy, romance, and historical fiction under three pen names. Her books for authors include The Indie Author Survival Guide and The Productive Indie Fiction Writer.

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

You can find Tracy at ProductiveIndieFictionWriter.com or StoriesRulePress.com.

Jo: Tracy Cooper-Posey is the multi-award-winning author of over 200 novels and works of nonfiction, science fiction, fantasy, romance, and historical fiction under three pen names. Her books for authors include The Indie Author Survival Guide and The Productive Indie Fiction Writer. So welcome back to the show, Tracy.

Tracy: Hi, Jo. It’s great to be back.

Jo: Yes. So you were last on the show in October 2023 talking about The Productive Indie Fiction Writer, and we went into depth then.

Because it has been a bit of an up and down.

Tracy: Yes, it’s been a very interesting three years, because I had just gone into remission with cancer when we were talking last. Now I’m out of remission again and facing treatment in the next few weeks. My husband got cancer and went through treatment, and he’s cured.

So life has been pretty interesting. All that has made me do a lot of deep thinking about the indie author business and my own business and writing in general.

So I’m still here. I’m still publishing, 200 plus books now. I had to learn how to write again. But the writing has shifted a lot towards science fiction and fantasy, including cosy science fiction now, which is the new genre that’s just creeping in.

All three pen names have been Aurealis Award finalists, which is nice. I’m still continuing the nonfiction work, which is something that you said the last time that we spoke. You said, “Now that you’ve written one, it’s likely you’ll write more nonfiction.” And I did.

Jo: You did. They’re excellent books. Just on that, you mentioned cosy sci-fi. For anyone who might not know, where is that genre?

Tracy: It’s not really officially a genre yet. It started off with cosy fantasy, which was where the cosy started.

Actually, technically it started with cosy mystery, and everyone understands cosy mystery. The body and the murder are off stage. There’s a lot of tea drinking. There’s lots of friends, and it’s all very polite and mannered.

You’re focusing more on the emotions and the feel, and they’ve picked up that cosy aspect of mystery and put it on fantasy.

So you get books like, I think the primary one is Legends and Lattes. It’s about an orc that’s running a coffee shop because they got sick of fighting, and the adventures that they have trying to run their coffee shop.

So if you pick up that same cosy sensation and put it on science fiction, that’s cosy science fiction. But it’s so new that it doesn’t have a category on Amazon or anything like that.

Cosy fantasy does now. Amazon just created a cosy fantasy category a while ago. But cosy science fiction is so new that people are still arguing over which books are cosy science fiction and which are not.

Jo: Oh, that’s interesting. You’re incredibly prolific. You always have been.

What do you think happened, and how did you relearn? Because there are people listening who go through these similar things.

Tracy: I think a lot of what happened was, well, life just became incredibly complex and challenging, and just getting through a day of pain took a lot of the energy, what they call the spoons. I didn’t have the spoons to write anymore.

Also you get chemo brain, which is the really interesting one. When I was going through chemo, I would look at a spreadsheet and just couldn’t figure out how it worked. It just didn’t make sense to me, so I had to hand over the finances and everything to Mark, which was rather interesting.

The way I got myself back into writing again was, it was such an alien idea that writing wasn’t even on my radar from day to day. I just didn’t have the energy or the concentration to do it.

So I started off really, really small. The first thing I did was read a lot of favourite books from other authors just to remember why I loved reading. Then I started reading my own books that I had written, just to remind myself of what I used to love about my own work.

Then I just cracked the manuscript one day and read as far as I had written and thought, “Okay, what’s the next sentence?” And that’s the only thing that I would let myself do, was just write the next sentence. That’s it. So I wrote the next sentence, and sat there and thought, “Do I want to write the next sentence?”

On that particular day, no, I didn’t. But I just kept opening the manuscript and looking and thinking about the next sentence, and eventually I wrote a few more. I think it was that coming back to the manuscript over and over with no pressure, just look at it, can you get the next sentence written?

Very slowly I started building up, and now I’m pretty much back to the speed that I was at before the diagnosis.

It almost feels like people want to disconnect the two.

If you get a physical injury, that shouldn’t affect your brain. But as you mentioned, having chemo, that in itself is difficult and has impacts on your brain. So if people think about it more as an injury you have to come back from, rather than day one you’re back in, I guess.

Tracy: Yes. It’s really a rehabilitation-style process, and I think the key is you’ve got to take all pressure off yourself. I know that, for me in particular, because I was such a workhorse, I could feel this stress because I just wasn’t getting things done.

Once I gave myself permission to just take as long as it takes and just keep coming back to it, that helped enormously. It still took time for that rehabilitation process to actually work.

There’s a lot of forgiving yourself, and it has to be a gentle process, I think, because situations like cancer and chemo and whatever the situation is that’s pulled you away from your manuscript, they’re big life events, and there is a lot of stress involved with them both physically and mentally.

So you have to give yourself time.

Jo: Yes, it’s so important. Okay, well, also in these last three years, as you said, you’ve got back to writing, and one of the books you have also written is The Anti-Enshittification Field Manual for Indie Authors. You also use Cory Doctorow’s enshittification concept around the mature indie author industry.

We think it is now established in the industry, in terms of what is going on there. How do we recognise it and adjust?

Tracy: It’s a very interesting term. The first time I heard it I raised my brows a bit. I was thinking, “Well, that’s a bit cheeky.” The more you think about it, the more appropriate the name is.

Basically, Cory Doctorow’s idea is that any platform, so for the sake of this discussion, let’s say Amazon, starts out serving its users extremely well because it needs them.

When everyone first got into indie publishing, Amazon was open doors and you could just publish a book and it would sell, because they would push the book and they would do everything they could to make sure that readers saw your book.

Then slowly and increasingly, the platform extracts value from those users for somebody else’s benefit, usually shareholders, and ultimately for itself. You can track this process where it starts off really great for the users and then slowly shifts so that it becomes a less than stellar experience for the users.

For indie authors, we’re particularly exposed because our business sits on top of these platforms. So recognising that a lot of the platforms that we use now have enshittified, excuse me, or are in the process of doing that, that really helps. Because I think for years we were treating everything as a separate problem.

We were worrying about organic reach, we were worrying about advertising becoming more expensive. There’s subscription creep, there’s deteriorating customer service, algorithm changes. Visibility was increasingly pay to play, and it’s so much more than that now. The platforms keep removing features or changing the terms.

Individually it just looks like a mess, but as soon as you put them together and say, “Oh, I understand now. The platform is enshittifying,” you can see the structural pattern.

It actually applies to so many platforms and services. Once you see it, well, for me in particular, that was an enormously positive realisation, because until I saw the pattern, I thought I was failing, and nothing I was doing seemed to work anymore.

Once I understood the environment itself had changed, I could stop trying to fix myself and start redesigning the business for the environment that actually exists.

Jo: Yes, and that is the point.

Because what you mentioned there, I feel like some people still think that organic reach exists.

I guess some people will say, “Oh, well, at the moment you can still put a video on, say, TikTok, and it might find an audience there.” Are people still building an audience in these newer platforms? But I think that’s the point, isn’t it?

I guess Substack would be another one. Although we already see that heading in the same direction, with various things. As soon as you go in there thinking, “Yes, I’m going to get organic reach,” even if there is any, it follows this way, doesn’t it?

Tracy: It does. And this is what’s so great about it, is once you recognise this pattern, you see it everywhere, and you can actually track a new platform through that process, and you can anticipate that, okay, maybe we’re going to get organic discovery right now, but that’s going to diminish.

That way you’re not disappointed, and you’re all set up for when that happens. That means that you can reduce your dependency on these platforms and not expect them to behave like they did in 2011.

Jo: It’s interesting, though, with Amazon, for example, we’ve definitely seen that as authors. But on the other side, as a customer, as a reader particularly, I used to find a lot of books on Amazon directly. I’m almost entirely now finding books elsewhere, often through AI, actually, often through Claude.

Tracy: Yes, exactly.

Jo: And then going on Amazon to maybe get the book.

Tracy: Exactly. I mean, indie authors are particularly vulnerable because their entire business is built on these platforms, but this applies to everyone. It’s not just indie authors. As you say, it’s readers. They’re noticing too that the decay of these platforms is starting to impact them as users.

I’m exactly like you. I tend to buy my books from Kobo, but I will buy my books from anywhere, and I learn about those books from a dozen different places. I don’t rely on just one platform anymore.

It’s really great once you understand this because then you can build an independent mindset that lets you flex around issues.

Jo: Yes, and obviously we like to dwell on the positives here. So given that this is just a reality of the market and various platforms—

Tracy: Okay. Well, I think that the biggest part of it is, as I mentioned before, it’s the mindset. Recognising these patterns is really a big one, recognising where a platform is in the process.

Also developing a very independent mindset. I mean, we’ve been saying we’re indie authors since 2011, but we were still really relying on those platforms to provide most of our business.

I think these days the new indie author is much more independently minded. Even though you’re using the platforms, and we’re all using them, you develop a flexibility. You understand the industry, and you’re making plans ahead of it, so you’ve got the flexibility there, and the business thinking, which really helps.

You deal with any problems that come up. Every time there’s an algorithm change, you’re not going to wake up in the morning and just go through mourning because half your income has disappeared.

You’re ready with alternatives, and you’ve got different things that you can try. So that mindset, that thinking about and recognising patterns and how the industry is going, is critical. Once you’ve got that in place, then there’s a huge number of strategies that you might want to incorporate.

This is the thing, every indie author’s business is different. We’re all in different situations. I have health challenges, someone else may have a day job. I write a lot of books. Someone may be only able to produce a couple of books a year.

We’re writing in different genres. If you’re writing literature, that’s different from the sort of science fiction that I write.

So the business and how it responds to the conditions out there is going to be different as well. So what you do as an author and for your business will be different.

There’s a lot of strategies that you can try and see which are most effective for you. One of the biggest, for instance, is something that you say a lot too, diversify your income. Have a durable backlist. Work to get your backlist built up.

Direct sales is another strategy that I would say is almost mandatory for every indie author these days. I know a lot of indie authors are going, “Oh, but I’ve only got two books.” Doesn’t matter. If you can sell from your site using just a PayPal link, that’s direct sales, and that works. That gives you a lot more independence and agency.

Owning your reader relationships, making sure that you keep the readers close, I think that’s another critical one. Making sure that you’re resilient for the platform so you can adjust when there’s changes. And on and on. There’s a lot of things that you can do to adapt.

Jo: Yes. I think it’s interesting just thinking about when you said, for example, direct sales is good for every indie author.

I would say every indie author who wants to have a long-term business—and I think that’s a really key thing. Because I feel like it’s still important to have a difference between people who are writing primarily as a hobby or are not looking for the financial income that you and I think about. So I think that’s one thing.

I totally agree with you that just having a PayPal button or even selling some physical copies at a local fair or something, that all counts. I think it almost proves something and gives you that more independent mindset. It’s like, “Yes, I can actually do this.”

Tracy: Yes. And actually, funny you should mention the live markets, because we experimented over the last year with attending a few live markets and selling books, and there is a genuine power, a little thrill that you get when you sell a book, and you can sign it on the spot for them, and the reader is right there and you’re face to face.

That process is suddenly not this anonymous process, where you find that you’ve sold a book overnight and you’ve got no idea who it is that bought it. That person’s right there in front of you, so you can sign the book for them and you have a little exchange.

It’s really empowering to build that independence into your business.

Jo: Yes, and then you also mentioned the durable backlist. Do you think that having books in multiple genres, including nonfiction, is part of how you can make a living?

As in, I think people often think, “Oh, maybe if I just write 20 books in one series.” I mean, maybe that works in some genres. I guess thrillers, actually, that can sometimes work, but you do so many things.

Tracy: Well, it does swing from year to year. But yes, generally the 80/20 rule holds. It’s different from year to year, which 20% is making the 80% of the money.

As I mentioned, I’m moving into science fiction and fantasy more, because that’s actually more successful for me right now than the romance is.

The other thing is, I think it really comes down to the individual author too. Some authors do very well just doing the one genre or even just the one series, and for them it’s great.

I always worry that that’s putting all your eggs in one basket. I think, though, to counter that vulnerability, if you’re just doing one series or one genre, go wide. Sell as wide as you can, and that gives you a bit of a hedge against vulnerability.

It’s a different situation for every author, and it’s very hard for me to say, “Well, here’s a 15-step list that’ll give you all the answers,” because that 15-step list doesn’t exist anymore, if it ever did. Just because everyone’s business is so different.

You need to do a lot of experimenting, I think, and find what works for you. That sounds like I’m waving off the answer, but I’m really not. You really do have to figure it out for yourself.

If you do adopt that experimental mindset and say, “Okay, I’m going to do this for six months and track my statistics and see if there’s any results there worth pursuing.”

Jo: See what happens. Yes, and it’s interesting you’ve also moved more into the nonfiction. Let’s get into your solar sail theory, because I’ve followed you on and off since we met, like a decade ago.

Tracy: It was 10 years ago.

Jo: I know. It’s crazy. It’s really crazy. For those listening, we met in Oregon, at the Oregon Workshops with Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

I’ve been reading your blog pretty avidly around this solar sail theory, which I love, and now you’re talking about writing science fiction, I can appreciate it more.

Tracy: Okay, so solar sail theory is a theory in science. Well, I was going to say science fiction, but there’s solid science behind it. Solar sails are a way, they think, because it’s never been proven yet, of propelling a spacecraft.

You have this huge sail, like kilometres wide, and what it does is it captures photons. Photons are basically light. So when the light hits the solar sail, it gives it a minuscule amount of push, but there’s no friction in space, so that push just keeps the ship going and going.

So when you’ve got kilometres of sail, all the photons hitting that can bring a ship up to enormous speeds, like a fraction of light speed, which sounds small if you’re not used to science, but a fraction of light speed is enormously fast, and these solar sails can bring a ship up to those sorts of speeds.

So you can cross to the next star without needing faster-than-light travel or warp speed or something like that. Put that theory over the top of the indie publishing industry and you suddenly get a very interesting way of thinking about the industry, and it helps you make decisions.

So it’s not a prescription. Again, it’s not a 15-step, here’s how to conquer the universe. It’s a decision matrix. It helps you figure out what’s going to work for you.

So does it leave something behind that can continue to make me discoverable? So for instance, a 30-second radio advertisement probably is not going to leave anything behind that’ll let readers discover you, because once it’s aired, it’s gone.

On the other hand, a podcast interview like this. The podcast interview that I did with you three years ago, I’m still getting people finding me and finding The Productive Indie Fiction Writer three years later because of that.

So that’s extending the sail, and it’s just a little tiny push, like a photon. Blog posts also, they surface indefinitely, so readers can find them 10 years later. And because you’re the host of your own podcast, all your podcast interviews and the website, they’re also creating surface area, so people keep finding you years later.

Also guest articles, and a book in a library. Your entire back catalogue is all part of the solar sail.

Tracy: Yes. Social media is a tricky one because it’s such a short half-life. I think on Facebook, if anyone sees your post at all, after two hours it’s basically gone.

They never see it unless they actually go to your account, and they need to have heard of you in order to go to your account and see the post. So that makes social media not really a good solar sail builder.

It has other uses, and as long as you understand that it does have this very short half-life, then you can use it for the things that it’s good at.

Jo: Yes, the same with paid ads, for example. Paid ads are the same as social media. Perhaps a quicker push, but as you say, the half-life is quicker.

Tracy: Yes. Exactly. Paid ads come and go. There’s nothing out there that’ll let the reader find you in a couple of years’ time. So they’re very short term.

A lot of people can build their business on these short-term things. They spend thousands of dollars on paid ads each month, and that works for them, but if they stop doing it, then their business halts. It comes to a grinding halt.

Whereas if you’re building your solar sail, it’s a long-term way of setting up your business, so it just keeps ticking on.

Jo: Your series of posts on the solar sail, which are also in The Indie Author Survival Guide, they are nonfiction, useful things.

Tracy: Well, it all applies to both fiction and nonfiction. I usually write, because The Productive Indie Fiction Writer is addressing fiction authors, this does all apply to fiction as well.

As I was saying, your book catalogue, because you’re on Amazon, and Barnes & Noble, and Kobo, and Apple, and maybe Google as well, all of those pages are part of your sail. Your own site, all the book pages on your own site are part of the sail.

There’s different ways to do it, but the common one is you have this standard sail out there that helps readers find you. You coax them to come to your site, and there you try to capture them as readers.

So that usually means your email list. Some people use Substack now. There are other alternatives I’m sure I haven’t thought of, but email seems to be the principal one. Then you can build that relationship with the readers over the long term.

The solar sail just brings all those readers to you so that you can develop that relationship and keep the readers close. For fiction authors, I think this is critical. This helps you build independence from the retail platforms.

Jo: Yes, it is interesting. I would put podcasting and YouTube in particular. So I had someone, they were in my Patreon, and they said, “I’m no longer subscribed to your email list because I hear from you in Patreon and on the podcast.”

I was thinking about my own behaviour, and for the podcast that I am a hardcore fan of, I’m not on their email list. I was thinking it is because my relationship with those people is more auditory, I guess. The same with YouTubers. People end up subscribing to your YouTube channel.

Then the problem still is, if I stop podcasting today, then I can’t contact those people again.

Except that I know lots of podcasters who stop podcasting and then maybe two years later they just pop on with an update episode. And people are like, “Oh, I never unsubscribed from you on my feed.” So that can appear years later.

But if you’re somebody listening and you’re a more audio or video person, I think we can probably think about the relationship with people on these different dimensions.

Tracy: Yes, and some people definitely prefer the audio. I’m utterly text-based myself. I prefer to read. But yes, podcasting, apart from anything else, is a way of keeping contact with the readers, and they can email you in return.

So it is a two-way process, so you can develop that relationship. So if that works for you, that is a good alternative.

The other thing is too, of course, every episode that you’ve recorded and put on a webpage is also building your sail. So more and more people are finding you. So podcasting is interesting. If you’re guest posting on someone else’s blog, that’s a somewhat time-consuming way, but it does build up your sail as well.

Jo: The only problem with that, I would say, as someone who used to have guest posts, is it’s still my website.

When it came to auditing my website, about five years ago—and the thing is, because my website’s been around since 2008, I had some people guest posting in the early days—and I was like, “This should not be here anymore.”

So I am able to get rid of people’s things when they’re on my site, in the same way that Amazon can take down your book or whatever.

Tracy: Yes, and that’s where the anti-enshittification process comes in. That’s where developing that independent mindset comes in. One of the questions that you need to ask is, how permanent is this? What happens if it goes away?

Tat’s why blogging on your own site is probably a stronger and better decision than guest blogging on other people’s sites, because they have control of that.

Jo: Yes, absolutely. So there’s so much in these books. These are all excellent books. I feel like you know so much after decades in the trenches, and I love that you’re putting out everything in these books.

I did want to ask you one specific thing, because obviously we’re increasing the size of our sail. But if we have massive amounts of drag, so we have sea anchors or whatever we want to call it in our metaphor, we have to sort that out too. So in The Indie Author Survival Guide, you have a section on protecting the margins.

Tracy: Well, we just actually hit the perfect example. Guest blogging has more drag than blogging on your own site does, because you don’t have control over it, so it can disappear.

It requires maintenance. It takes your time. So drag is basically anything that is going to slow you down once you’ve built up speed, coming back to the solar sail theory. The sail will keep you moving, but because we’re not working in a vacuum anymore, we’re not in space, there are things that can slow you down.

Particularly for mature author businesses, we accumulate all this cruft. For instance, Barnes & Noble recently changed their website so that all the URLs for a book changed, and that doesn’t sound like a big deal, but I’ve got 200 books. So suddenly the links didn’t work pointing to Barnes & Noble for every book.

So the Books2Read universal book links had to be changed for all 200 books.

Jo: Oh, I did know that and I haven’t done it.

Tracy: This is the thing, is when you’ve only got five books, it’s like 10 minutes’ worth of work, no problems, and you just move on. When you’ve got 200 books, that’s suddenly a big deal.

I only found out accidentally that they had changed them, and once I had confirmed that every single link no longer worked, it was suddenly a massive project.

There’s also the money drag. Everything these days is software as a subscription. Even Microsoft Office, you’ve got to pay the fee every year.

It works well in theory, because you’re getting updated software all the time, but you have a dozen of those or two dozen, suddenly you’re spending a lot of money every year for software that once upon a time we used to pay a flat fee for and that was it.

So it pays to go through and figure out what expenses you can get rid of or diminish, or can you find a cheaper version.

There’s advertising. Some advertising just isn’t worth spending the money on. If you’re doing pay-per-click advertising, you need to monitor it all the time, so that’s a time sink that you’re blowing money on, technically, because your time is money.

There’s also, you may not be managing it quite as well as you could, so you’re actually burning more money because the ads are not working as effectively as they could. More drag. You need to go through every aspect.

There’s time drag, repetitive tasks. For instance, Mark and I have, for about, I think we’re coming up on 11 years now, we track our sales.

Every morning we sit down and go through every platform and record the sales for that day in a spreadsheet so that we can do analysis. It’s a good way to spend time because it’s got extreme uses.

There’s a lot of little tasks that you might do, especially if you’ve been working in the business as long as I have. All these little tasks will build up, and suddenly you forget why you’re doing them. Or the conditions have changed and it’s not worth doing them anymore. They may not be providing the value that they once used to.

So you have to go through and make sure that you’re reducing the drag on your business as much as possible so that you can keep moving.

Jo: Yes. I had two more extra ones there.

You mentioned the things that we do that perhaps we don’t need to do anymore. If people are outsourcing, if you have virtual assistants, if you are paying for some kind of service outside your own time, sometimes you can have that going and then when you think, do I need that anymore?

So I know some people still do pay for turning posts into social media or making book trailers. That’s a good one. Or there’s things that people are paying for, and then you might realise that you don’t need that service anymore, or you don’t need everything that that social media manager is doing anymore.

So realistically looking at the benefits of what you’re getting.

Tracy: Yes, constant review.

Jo: Yes. Constant review. Then the other thing I was thinking is a mindset drag. So right now, as we’re recording this, in the author community, there’s this witch hunting going on around AI usage.

Tracy: Yes.

Jo: It’s the latest thing that’s causing massive drama.

That can really pull on your boat, on your solar boat.

Tracy: Well, actually, I’ve found that, and this is all part of the indie author mindset, and it’s also part of the anti-enshittification process too.

I did a lot of research on AI. I did a lot of reading. I listened to a lot of different discussions about it, and then I formed my own policy. What’s my policy for AI? What’s my policy around AI and its use and so forth?

I find that once I had developed that policy for myself, suddenly there’s not as much mental drag with all the AI discussions and the witch hunts and all the drama that’s going on around it, because I know where I’m sitting and I’m quite comfortable with my position.

So I think for a lot of people, it can become very emotional and draining if you still haven’t figured out where you sit on the spectrum of AI use. But that’s actually how I tackled it, because I was getting very tired of all the dramas. It is draining, and it worries you.

So I deliberately went out and did a lot of research and reading, and figured out where I stood, and that made a huge difference for me.

Jo: Yes. And again, that’s something to look at on your schedule. So maybe in a year’s time you re-look at things again and change your decision. I think the same thing with the traditional versus self-publishing versus wide versus KU, and you could just go on.

There are pros and cons in every single direction, right? At the end of the day, it’s almost the decision fatigue that’s stopping you. Or you could say, again, our solar boat has to go in a particular direction. You can’t go in every direction at the same time. You just have to make a decision, right?

Tracy: Yes. I think being as informed as possible about the industry is one of the big ones. I’ve spent a lot of time doing a lot of reading, not just about indie publishing over the last few years, but everything to do with publishing and also everything to do with business, because we are in business.

That’s a bit of a cliché, that a lot of indie authors, their eyes just glaze over when they hear that you’re in business. There are aspects of running a business that we just don’t get taught as indie authors or as creatives that I think we should be teaching each other or getting each other to learn, because it’s basic business survival.

Things like pricing, that is an enormously complex business topic, pricing. Most of us are, “Well, what’s everyone else doing? Okay, I’ll do that.” That’s how they make their decisions. There’s a lot more to it than that, and it’s very complex.

We don’t have to get a PhD in business management, but I think a little bit more awareness about basic business principles would serve all of us much better.

Jo: Yes, there’s always so much to learn, but I actually think you’ve done a really good job with your books. I mean, The Indie Author Survival Guide is a great place to start. They’re super, super useful.

I do want to talk about—as we come to an end—you’ve been doing this a long time, as have I, and we’ve both got some battle scars along the way.

You do end your books with hopeful realism, which I like. Now, I’m definitely more of an optimist than you, but I feel like hopeful realism is a good place.

Tracy: I don’t know. Are you more of an optimist than me? Anyway. Well, let’s see, because for me, all the book writing and all the research and all the reading that I’ve been doing over the last few years have given me back a lot of optimism that I didn’t have.

As I was saying, it was feeling as though I couldn’t do anything right. So learning that it wasn’t just me that’s the problem gave me back my confidence. So that’s where the hopeful realism and the optimism came in.

So hopeful realism, okay, it comes from understanding, from agency, and from choice. If you understand the industry as it actually exists, not the way you wish it did, and you understand the forces acting on your business and where you sit within them, that helps enormously.

Just having that knowledge there, you can see what’s going on, you understand what’s going on. It’s not all a mystery, and you’re not scratching your head wondering what to do next. Because of that understanding, you get agency. You’re not helpless. When circumstances change, you can respond.

You can make decisions instead of simply having things happen to you, and all of that gives you choice. You can go out and research and find out what your options are, and you can choose the best option for you.

If that doesn’t work, you can go and try something else. So you’ve got a lot of choices, and you’ve got things that you can do. You’re not helpless. So hopeful realism, I think, is pretty optimistic.

Jo: Brilliant.

Tracy: If you’re interested in my nonfiction, the best place to find me is at The Productive Indie Fiction Writer. If you want to find out more about my fiction, the best place to find that is to go to StoriesRulePress.com.

My three pen names are there, and also Mark, my husband, who is a writer as well. And shortly, I think, another member of the family’s going to be joining us as well. So it’s a very family affair on Stories Rule Press.

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

Tracy: Thank you very much. I’m thrilled I was able to come back and talk again. Thanks, Joanna.

The post How To Redesign Your Author Business For The Environment That Actually Exists, With Tracy Cooper-Posey first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How can content marketing in a tight niche build the audience that launches your book? And how do you decide whether to hand your self-published bestseller to a traditional publisher. Suzanne Smith shares what she learned in four years of going from blog to book deal.

In the intro, how to stand out as a writer in the age of AI [Nathan Barry Show; Interview with Nathan Barry]; thoughts on asset maintenance; Goodreads giveaway on Bones of the Deep (Aug 5-20, 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 

Suzanne Smith is the founder of The Independent Landlord, and the bestselling author of The Good Landlord Handbook.

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

You can find Suzanne at TheIndependentLandlord.com.

Jo: Suzanne Smith is the founder of The Independent Landlord, and the bestselling author of The Good Landlord Handbook. So welcome to the show, Suzanne.

Suzanne: Thank you.

Jo: Oh, there’s so much to talk about today. But first up—

Suzanne: Well, I’ve always loved reading books. In fact, I recently did a French literature degree as a mature student. Being an author was never in the game plan at all. It’s not something that I even thought about.

I was brought up in New Zealand, so shout out to all the Kiwis and those across the pond in Australia. The thing about it is, Jo, you’ve lived there yourself. Kiwis are independent, self-reliant and have this great sense of fair play. So that was a very formative experience for me.

We moved back to England when I was 16, and I have become thoroughly anglicised since then, but a Kiwi at heart.

I always wanted to become a lawyer. New Zealand in some ways on television is quite American, and there was this American programme called The Paper Chase. It was about all of these students at Harvard studying law, and the professor said, “You come here with a skull full of mush and you leave thinking like a lawyer.”

I thought, “Oh, I like the sound of that.” I didn’t really know what a lawyer was, but everyone seemed to be very happy that I wanted to become one, and then that was it.

Suzanne: So I worked for 25 years as a solicitor. That’s like an attorney if you’re American. Started off in a law firm, and then I went into pharmaceuticals and I worked for big companies like what is now GSK, GlaxoSmithKline, and small companies as well.

When I started out, it was before the internet, before Google. When you’re in house, you’re very much a generalist. You do a bit of everything. So you help companies grow their business.

You’re not business prevention, but you’re still bound by the code of conduct for solicitors. You’ve got this role of keeping the company on the right side of the law.

Then I had twins, who were born about five years after I became a lawyer, and I decided to work part-time for a while and did an MBA when they were little, part-time through the Open University.

I know Jonathan is doing one at the moment.

Jo: Yes. He’s finished, so that’s exciting.

Suzanne: That was transformational for me, because I had probably been thinking a bit too much as a lawyer, and it helped me to broaden my view of the world and understand all sorts of things.

Sso I continued going up the greasy pole, and then for my last job, in 2015, I joined a biotech company in Cambridge, England, as general counsel and company secretary. It was a long way from home, about two, three hours’ drive from home. So I decided to buy a flat, an apartment, and to stay there in the week.

I thought to myself, “Well, when I leave this company, I can let it out as a buy-to-let,” but actually as a landlord. So I stayed there for five years, and then when I left, I let out the property.

The reason why I decided to leave law after 25 years, I had what I call a sliding doors moment, like in the film. I was 50. I was on holiday with my husband, and we’d probably had one too many rum cocktails. And he said to me, “Well, what do you want to be doing with your life? What would you do if you could do anything?”

I was thinking, “Well, I’ve done law. I want to do something else now.” I didn’t really know what that was, and I’d always been thinking about studying French properly, and that’s when I left. So I decided, 18 months later, I left to do a French degree at King’s College London, full-time.

I was the only old person there with lots of 18-year-olds. When I did that, I was able to cash in my share options because I was a good leaver. I retired, and so I started buying properties to let out and became a landlord, without really thinking too much about it, and I used letting agents.

They were fine to begin with, but I didn’t really have a game plan or anything like that. What I realised is that when I tried to research things online, I couldn’t really find anything that was terribly helpful. It was either quite general or it was very legal.

So after a while… I became a landlord in 2019. I had the idea, why don’t I set up a blog? And this is August 2022, so just four years ago. My husband came up with the idea of the name, The Independent Landlord, because it’s that Kiwi spirit, being very independent.

I thought, “Right, I’m not going to charge anyone for it. It’s a hobby. It’s not a business. I’m going to pay it forward and help, use my legal training, practical legal approach, and practical common sense, by doing this blog.”

Almost exactly four years ago, I sent my first newsletter to 13 people.

Jo: Woo-hoo.

Suzanne: And I sent one last week to over 18,000. So it’s been quite a journey.

Jo: Wow, this is so great. I love this. There’s so much in there. The turning 50 and then doing a degree. My master’s in death is a little different to your French literature, but I like it.

So I love this, and buying properties, starting it on the side, not a business at first, and growing the audience, and obviously you’ve put so much work in.

Then you decide to write a book. So talk about that, because an online blog, although I’m sure your articles and everything were super useful, it’s very different to write a blog than a book. So talk about your challenges in writing.

Suzanne: Again, I was an accidental landlord, is what they call it when you let a property when you didn’t intend to buy it as a buy-to-let, which I did with my Cambridge flat. And I became, in many respects, an accidental author.

So I was having a conversation with my husband again and I was saying I’d done this lead magnet to get people to sign up to my newsletter, and a big new law was going through Parliament at the time, called the Renters Reform Bill, that was going to completely transform the way landlords operate.

I was saying to my husband, “Oh, I need to update my lead magnet, a little ebook, to explain the new law.” He looked at me and said, “Well, why don’t you do a proper book? Write a book.”

This was on the 29th of September, 2023. The reason why I mention that is that I thought, “Wow, what a great idea,” and my head was bursting. I went onto Google, and guess what I downloaded on the 1st of October?

Jo: My blueprint?

Suzanne: Exactly. I found you immediately, the Author Blueprint, and I downloaded it. I checked: on the 1st of October, 2023.

Then I listened to almost… well, I think I went back several years on your podcast, just trying to understand. I’m like that. When I try and do something, I just try and learn everything that there is to know about it.

So I started writing the book, and I guess the first challenge was I write quickly, and I’m used to writing for people who aren’t lawyers, being in-house. So I thought I needed to have a structure. The structure was easy in many respects because, a bit of business at the end, and then you can go through a tenancy.

I thought it was important to have a narrative thread all the way through it, just to bring it together. This is the literature degree coming in here.

I thought that the mission for everything I do, the reason why I started doing this, is to help landlords, but also to help the experience of renting that people have in England. It’s very specific for English law. And to help improve the private rented sector.

So that’s why I originally set up my blog for free, and I wanted, when people went onto Google, they could find something sensible and very detailed from me. My blog posts were… Well, I’ve now got over 400,000 words on my blog, so it’s a substantial piece of work that is out there free of charge.

So what I decided to do was to bring this narrative thread, I call it the good landlord ethos, to the book.

Then I wrote very quickly, and I had a pretty good draft by April 2024, because we were all thinking that the law was going to change very soon. But then there was an election, and in the end the government changed and the legislation changed completely, so I had to rewrite the book and start again.

So I think that my biggest challenge was that my subject matter, the new law, changed. Because I wanted to publish this book that explained to people practically what they have to do, and make it really straightforward, keeping out of politics, because it is a very politically charged area.

I wanted to write it so it’s a manual, somebody could literally follow it. So I used an editor, and I did write the book twice. I had a beta reader who is another lawyer, and a landlord as well. Then I got to the get-the-damn-thing-done stage. The really tedious bit of all the typos at the end.

Jo: Yes, the finishing energy to get it out there. So at that point, obviously you’d found my blueprint, so you were learning about the indie way of doing things.

How did you think about publishing? What were your challenges in publishing?

Suzanne: It never occurred to me not to self-publish, because the new law came into effect on the 1st of May, 2026. The law and the details that I needed for the book were finalised in January, and I published on Amazon on the 5th of March, so I had to go so quickly.

Even though I’d got a lot of it written, the last bit came in January, and so I needed speed. I knew that for landlords to be able to have something that they can use straightaway to help get them ready for it, and then use as a manual afterwards, I had to be first.

Jo: Sorry, just on the year. Was it ’24? You said ’26. You meant May—

Suzanne: 2024? No, no, because I actually published it this year. What happened in 2024, I had the first draft ready, but then I had to do another draft because the law changed when the Labour government came in.

Jo: Right.

Suzanne: The Renters Reform Bill turned into the Renters’ Rights Bill. So I had to rewrite the book. So I finished however many drafts at the end of January 2026. Then it went to an editor, et cetera, et cetera, and I managed to get the book ready for a proof, to get the proof printed, towards the end of February.

So it was really quick to go from the law being sufficiently finalised for me to write a book in January, and then having it ready in just over a month. There is no way that I could have done that if I’d gone to a traditional publisher.

It didn’t even occur to me to go, because I didn’t want to be going touting around my book and, “Please publish me,” et cetera. It’s just not me. I’m the independent landlord, and that moved very easily to being the independent publisher.

So I learnt how to do all the publishing. And a huge thanks: I joined your Patreon and I was a very good student. I went through everything systematically and followed your playbook, and used Vellum and BookFunnel and all the other tools.

So I decided to go on Amazon as well as have my own Shopify store, which just about killed me.

Jo: I was going to say, you are an excellent student. You really like learning, but you also put this into practice, which is why I also wanted to talk to you.

Suzanne: Sometimes it was like my head was going to burst. Luckily, Claude upped his game earlier this year when we got the Opus 4.5. I didn’t use AI really until this year.

I decided I need to do exercise all the time, and have that as a have-to-do, because my head was spinning all the time with all these different things. So I would go to the gym, go to a spin class, and then I would walk out with my phone on, with the Claude app, and dictate a stream of consciousness into it.

“Oh, I need to do this, or what about that? Oh, I just remembered about this. Oh, I’ve had this idea, blah.” And then said, “Make sense of it for me, Claude.”

So it was very much as a thinking partner, because when you’re writing your first book, it’s bad enough, but when you’re learning how to publish…

Even, like, when I got the first proof of the book back from BookVault, I realised that all the footnotes—I have 114 footnotes in my book, and that, again, is the recent degree there—and the formatting had gone skew-whiff. Apparently it was an issue with Vellum, and they were really lovely and they sorted it straight out for me.

So it shows: always get a proof of the book. They were able to sort that out very quickly, and BookVault were very quick in getting me another proof, because you can shortcut it and just pay to get a very quick delivery.

Amazon, on the other hand, was really slow. It took a week. So I actually published earlier on my Shopify store for my members, of my membership, and I gave them a discount. Then I finally got it onto Amazon on the 5th of March.

There are all these different skills you’re having to learn. The Shopify store I found very hard, and there was all the tax, because I’m VAT registered. So I think I’m still recovering.

Jo: You’re still recovering. I wouldn’t normally recommend a Shopify store for someone with their first book, doing first of everything. But, as you say, you’re someone who learns a lot, puts it into practice, and—

Suzanne: Exactly, yes. The big subscriber list. I think that’s why the book did so well. So in the first week, because I met you at the Indie Author Lab put on by—

Jo: Yes, London Book Fair, yes.

Suzanne: Yes, the Alliance of Independent Authors. I met you there, and it was just my first week, and I had 1,000 sales in the first week. That was because of my audience.

I’d been going on about the fact that I’m writing this book for two and a half years, because that’s how long it took me to do. So I had a wait list for it, and I had a thing on my website, a landing page on my website, saying how good the book was and why it’s the best thing for the Renters’ Rights Act.

Then I went onto Google, and I think I sent you a screenshot of this at the time. I put into Google, “What’s the best book for the Renters’ Rights Act for landlords in England?” And it came up with me as a featured snippet, and I hadn’t even published it at that time. It was just about there.

So the blog really helped, because I’d become an authority on the Renters’ Rights Act. Even though I’m not a practising solicitor any more, I spent all my time reading the damn thing, and it is a very complicated bit of legislation.

Funnily enough, I have ruffled a lot of feathers. People have even said about me behind my back, “What does she know? She’s only got four properties.” But I just took no notice.

I thought, “I’m going to try and use my legal brain and my understanding of what it’s like being a landlord, there with the rubber gloves cleaning an oven when people have moved out, and try and write something that’s not trying to sell anything else, and to help people.” And then it got picked up.

Jo: Yes. Wait, let’s just slow down. Slow down, because we will get onto that in a minute. But let’s just come back to that launch.

So as we talked about, you’ve had a blog for five years—

Suzanne: It was three and a half by then.

Jo: Three and a half years you’ve been blogging, but hundreds of thousands of words of useful information. So you’ve essentially done content marketing. You’ve attracted people. You had a lead magnet. You got them on your email list. You told them that you were writing a book. You got a sort of pre-sales list up.

Suzanne: I had YouTube, a big YouTube channel. I’d only set it up at the end of 2024, and I’d had half a million views. And again, just very straightforward advice, and without all the scaremongering and politics. I deliberately keep out of it all. A lot of people joined my newsletter as a result of that.

Also a year ago, exactly today, I was running a Facebook group, which was a lot of hard work. There were a few thousand people in it, but there are often a lot of people going in there trying to sell things: insurance, eviction specialists and things. And there was also a lot of people just being unpleasant to other people.

I was getting fed up with it. It was taking me a lot of time, and I was doing a lot of speaking events and trying to explain what this new law was doing, and wearing myself out. I’m an extrovert, but even I find speaking events absolutely exhausting, because it’s like everything gets sucked out of you. It’s strange.

Then somebody came up to me in July last year and said, “Suzanne, can you set up a membership?”

I said, “Well, landlords aren’t going to pay for that.”

And they said, “Yes, they will. You build it and they will come.”

I asked ChatGPT and thought about it. I asked ChatGPT, who I was dating at the time, now exclusively with Claude, but I know Claude has other people in his life. But I’m very much set with Claude Fable at the moment.

So I asked ChatGPT, how can I go about setting up a membership? And I mentioned your one and said, “Should I do it on Patreon?” And then he came back with: go for Circle. So I set up a membership on Circle, exactly a year ago. In fact, it’s the anniversary of my first member yesterday.

hTe rules I had were, no selling. So I don’t sell, no affiliate links, no one else can sell anything, and we have to be supportive. No negativity, no politics.

So what it’s become, it’s like the senior common room of the private rented sector, with landlords, lawyers, letting agents. There’s a fantastic forum in there. It’s not me doing it, it’s peer-to-peer.

I have twice-monthly live streams where people can ask me questions. I wonder where I got that from. No, I very much modelled it on your Patreon, but on a different platform. I have courses in there as well.

So that has really grown. I launched it in July, and by September, October, I’d gone past the VAT threshold, which has complicated everything, but it means my business now is this membership. I really enjoy doing it, and there hasn’t been all the negativity that you have in a Facebook group.

So I had them as… talk about your thousand fans. There are about 1,500 in the membership, and their support really helped the launch of my book, as well as the wider people who get my free newsletter.

Jo: Yes.

Suzanne: So it’s all different types of content marketing.

Jo: Y, but I do love this. And of course, if people are wondering, I joined Patreon back in 2014, I think it might have even been before that, and there weren’t too many places back then to run communities. It wasn’t even really a community at the time, it was a sort of, almost a “give me a bit of support for the podcast.”

So things have changed a lot in terms of communities, and obviously you went with Circle, which is great. Patreon is slightly different now, and some people are using Substack for something similar.

So that’s just on the platform, but on the business: early on in our conversation you said, “I wasn’t going to have a business. It wasn’t a business. It was just putting stuff out there, helping other people,” and then your audience asked for this membership. And so now it is a business, right?

Suzanne: Yes, it is.

Jo: And you’ve got a book and all of this.

Suzanne: Yes, I am, because I think to begin with, I was just doing it one or two days a week. I was actually studying a master’s in French literature part-time, and I then found that I was enjoying the blog more than the master’s, so I dumped the master’s after the first year.

But after getting 88% for one of my dissertations, which interestingly was on the translation of a Simone de Beauvoir book into English, and the publisher who’s got that now is Random House, but that’s another thing.

Anyway, so I decided to give up my master’s and double down and work full-time on the blog. People were paying to help me with all the big fees and things, the big tech stack, Buy Me a Coffee. I was doing a little bit of consulting and things.

I was working six, seven days a week. I was treating it like a business in terms of quality and my effort, but it wasn’t a business in terms of revenue. Then it just all came together, and this person said, “Set up a membership,” and I thought, “That’s what I’m going to do. I’m now going to put it on a business setting.”

I’ve got an MBA, I know how to do it, and people thought I planned it, but I didn’t. It just happened.

So now I do very much treat it as a business, but I still don’t advertise. I don’t allow people to advertise with me, because I want to be independent. If I recommend something, I want people to believe it’s me recommending it, not just because someone’s paying me, which can be a big issue in the landlord area.

Jo: Oh, in any industry. I get pitched every day with loads of random things that people are like, “Oh, a dollar a click or whatever, if you send this to your list.” And it’s like, seriously? Just stop it already.

I did just want to add there: somebody asked you, they said, “You should have a community,” and that sparked that idea. I just wanted to acknowledge that my Patreon came from Jim Kukral. Some of you will remember, who’ve been around a long time. Jim Kukral came on my blog around sort of 2013.

Amanda Palmer had just put out a book called The Art of Asking, and I was doing a lot of unpaid work on the podcast at the time, and I was either going to give it up or I had to fund it somehow. Jim said, “You should do a Patreon.” And I was like, “Oh, no, I hate asking for money.” So at the time I just felt, oh, weird.

Then I was like, “No, I do all this work,” as you were saying. Now the Patreon has changed so much in terms of what it is, but it is the backbone of my business, too.

So I love that you listened to one of your fans who said what they wanted, and I love that I’ve listened as well.

Suzanne: Yes, absolutely. In some ways I didn’t really back myself before. I thought, “No one’s going to pay for this.” Then the more you give, the more they want.

Jo: Yes.

Suzanne: What I’ve been really working on now is having boundaries, because there were two big kind of mottos that I picked up when I was working in pharmaceuticals.

One was from a head of the business. He was Canadian, and he was always saying, “You’ve got to skate to where the puck is heading.”

Jo: That’s Wayne Gretzky, is it?

Suzanne: Exactly. Yes. He would always say it, and so that’s what I’ve done with my blog and my book.

When I write things, I don’t pay for any tools. I don’t do keyword searches and all that. I just think, I do one blog post per topic, and I’m going to guess what people are going to be searching for soon, and I build up all this content around it. That’s why most of my blog pages are top five.

I’ve had no advertising. I haven’t asked for any backlinks. I don’t do it. People backlink to it because it’s useful.

So that was the first thing, is skate to where the puck is heading, and that was my approach with the book. I knew people would need this book from around May, and they’ll need it forever, because it is so complicated and regulated, the rules for being a landlord in England.

So that was the first one. The second thing was: when you take something on, you’ve got to let something go. One in, one out. I found that I was taking on so many different things, and I’ve just been cutting back, because I can’t be doing all the speaking, I can’t be answering people’s emails.

So I now don’t do emails. If people want my advice on something, they ask me in the hub, at the twice-monthly live streams. Sometimes I answer in the forums, but I don’t have time.

When there are 2.4 million landlords in the UK, and even with our 18,000 on my newsletter, I could spend, and I did, I used to spend all my time replying to emails.

So anyway, there are the things. Oh, and there was a third one, which is: attract, don’t chase. One of my friends gave me that advice and that’s exactly what my approach has been. I just don’t chase for anything. I just put the stuff there and then build it and they will come.

Jo: Yes, and I think another thing is the power of the niche. It’s so clear that what you write about, the people you are aiming at, you have an extremely tight target market.

That is both a strength and obviously a weakness, because they’re the only people. But as you say, there’s more than enough of those people for a community, for the book you have.

From my own perspective, that’s the same for me, the power of the niche. That’s how I have a successful podcast, for example, because of that reason.

I think you’re like a poster child of what a non-fiction author should do. What I like is that you didn’t go, “Oh, where’s a niche where I could make money?” and then jump in. You’ve gone about this in a kind of slightly accidental way, but now you’re leaning in and this uses all your skills.

So this really is a great example of the power of the niche and then making the most of it. But let’s move on to what then happened, and—

Suzanne: Wow. So you and I met each other on whatever day that was in March at the Indie Author Lab, and the following day I got an email, via my website on a contact form, from Penguin Random House saying, “We love the book. We love the mission, its values,” all this kind of thing.

And I was thinking, “Oh, it’s another one of those. Must be an—”

Jo: AI spam bot, right?

Suzanne: Yes, and I remember I sent you a screenshot of it, and then I checked her out on LinkedIn and thought, “Okay, there is somebody with that name there.”

You’re always saying, and Orna Ross and everyone are always saying, “Watch out for scams.” And in fact, Penguin Random House even this weekend on Instagram put out something saying, “There are lots of people impersonating us.”

So I didn’t take it too seriously, and it was something like, “Oh, would you be interested in us publishing your book?” And I thought, and I laughed. It was like, no, this is too good to be true.

So I replied and said… Oh, I said, “Well, thank you so much. The Renters’ Rights Act…” And so this is like the second week in March. “The Renters’ Rights Act comes into effect on the 1st of May. If you want to publish it, you’re going to need to get your skates on.” I literally did say that.

Then she arranged a meeting with me the next day, on the Friday. I still was very dubious about it, and I had a think about it. What helped me, and I have the little booklet here: at the Author Lab, we did some work at the beginning, and Orna said, “Put your phones away.” And it was like, “What? Put my phone away?”

Then we had to do this definition of success, and our passion, and our mission, and our purpose. I wrote down things like, I want to help landlords, and in so doing, help improve the private rented sector. I get pleasure from helping people. I want to improve standards and use my legal and practical skills, et cetera.

So I thought, “Okay, what is my purpose of doing this book?” It isn’t really to make money, because going with Penguin, you wouldn’t do that for financial reasons, because you’d make very little money.

So I thought, what is my why? My why is I want as many people to read this book as possible. And I’ve managed to sell a few thousand copies, but there are 2.4 million landlords, and they all need to understand this book, and the only way that I can get it out there, apart from doing ads, is to get it out in bookstores.

So I thought about it, and then said, “Yes, I will do it, because I want to get the book out there.” So it’s distribution.

It’s going to be published on the 6th of August, which is really quick, bearing in mind they contacted me in the middle of March.

It’s exactly the same book, it’s just got different copyright wording and different blurb, different paper. Same cover, because I managed to find a fantastic cover person to do it. So they’ve kept everything the same.

I just put my lawyer hat on, and because one licence is very much like another one… I did turn down their first offer.

Jo: Well done. Good negotiation.

Suzanne: My daughter said to me, who’s an adult daughter, she said, “But it’s Penguin.” And I said, “Well, no, but it doesn’t work for me.”

So I had a call with them, and then they came up with something that worked for me a bit more. I did have to concede on a few things, like I can’t sell it in my Shopify store. But in some ways, that was a blessing in disguise, because it means I don’t get any more “Where’s my book?” emails.

Jo: Yes, exactly. Pros and cons of everything, basically.

Suzanne: I have very clear rights to get it back. If I want it back, I can get it back and I don’t have to give a reason.

They’re lovely. They have been really very wonderful. When I went up there a month or so ago, they gave me this book bag, and it’s got on it, “I’m published by Penguin,” and I burst into tears.

Jo: Aw. That’s nice.

Suzanne: I don’t know, it just seemed like such a big deal. Because up until then I was just being all very lawyerly and task-orientated. Then I thought, “Oh my goodness,” and then it dawned on me.

So I’m now in this interim period where I’ve taken it off Amazon and off my Shopify store, and I feel very maternalistic towards the book because, you know, it took me two and a half years, which is longer than a pregnancy.

Obviously it’s not a child, but it’s like my book child. I’ve sent it off with a backpack and a drink and some snacks, and I hope that they look after him, my book.

The day I took it off Amazon it was still number one. And a big shout-out to Publisher Rocket, by the way.

Jo: Yes. Very, very useful for niche publishing.

Suzanne: Very. It helped me choose the right niche categories. So it was number one on at least one category, often six, all the way through. I thought, “Well, it’s over to them now.”

They’re very lovely people. They’ve given me some marketing assets, as they call it, some swanky graphics and things to use. We’ll have to see what we do in terms of marketing. I don’t mind doing marketing. I’m on LinkedIn quite a bit, and my whole blog is marketing.

What I’ve been doing is updating my blog to include one of these graphics and to mention the book, and I got Claude to help me draft the code so it looked right. So I’ve been going through all of my blog posts and sending people to Amazon rather than to my Shopify store.

It is mixed feelings, because I care about my book. I put a lot of effort, a lot of love, a lot of tears. No, not tears, but I put a lot of effort into it, and it’s out of my control now.

Jo: Yes, you said it’s over to them, but obviously you will still be creating content around this topic, so you’ll probably still be the biggest driver of book sales.

Suzanne: Yes.

Jo: Are they also suggesting, for example, a podcast tour, like pitching for podcasts? Are they going to assign you some PR? Because, also if people don’t know, as we are recording this, we have a new prime minister who wants to do various things.

You said no politics, but this is obviously a political thing. So you have the potential to go on a lot of different podcasts, media, talking about this, becoming almost a talking head in this kind of area.

Suzanne: That’s not in the contract. What’s in the contract is very minimal. I think I’ve already done what I’m supposed to do. They are pitching for me to go on podcasts and things.

I’ll tell you a really funny coincidence. So we now have a new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, and when he was Mayor of Greater Manchester, he set up something called the Good Landlord Charter.

I actually talk about it in the book, and I quote him in my book saying that good landlords mean people trying to do the right thing, or something like that. And I coincidentally came up with the same name, The Good Landlord Handbook. I’d already had the book title for a long time.

So this idea of good and landlord coming together, the adjective good as opposed to criminal or rogue, and the cover being green.

I’m wanting to change the narrative so it’s the norm to have a good landlord, and to help people become good landlords. Or if they’re good landlords, help them to understand the new rules, because the new rules are very complicated.

So what I don’t get involved in is this right or wrong. Is it right that landlords can’t do this or have to do this? Because as an in-house lawyer, it doesn’t really matter what I think about the law. GDPR, goodness me.

Jo: Oh, dear. Let’s not start on GDPR.

Suzanne: No, exactly. Because we’ve just got to suck it up. I liken it to the grief cycle, that people have been going through so much change and you have the anger, the depression—

Jo: Denial.

Suzanne: Bargaining, the denial, and then you get to acceptance.

For some people, the acceptance means they want to stop doing it. If you want to accept it and stay, you need to understand the rules. So I’ve deliberately just kept very practical and have kept out of all the politics of it.

I have, funnily enough, become involved because I’m now seen as an expert on the Renters’ Rights Act. I’ve worked behind the scenes with the government to help, and give comment on government guidance for landlords.

I was even invited to a reception to mark the passing of the Renters’ Rights Act at Downing Street with the previous prime minister, all whilst staying apolitical.

I won’t let anyone make me be a mouthpiece for their political view. It’s more, we just have to do this if we want to continue doing it. I’ve been very clear on that.

Jo: It’s interesting you mention the grief cycle there, and you’ve also mentioned Claude and ChatGPT. I wonder if you might also just comment on use of AI for authors and for marketing and all this. Also with legal stuff, because for me now, if I’m looking at a particular legal thing, I tend to ask Claude.

I’m like, “Can you just explain this?” or upload a contract or whatever. Although it is not legal advice, it can be quite useful.

Suzanne: I now struggle to think what life would be like without Claude. I don’t use Claude to write, at all, because I have a very particular voice and a turn of phrase, and if ever Claude writes something for me, it doesn’t sound like me. It flattens me, and it makes me sound a bit American. So I don’t do that.

I’ve used it in the back end of the business. For instance, my blog was down, and there was something called a recursive bot, which I don’t even know what it was, and Claude helped me fix it for free. I went through, I did screenshots.

When I did an ElevenLabs audiobook and did it all myself, I was literally, for every screenshot, showing it to Claude. Claude said, “Do this, press this, press that.”

So I have all these different projects set up. One is the control room, where it’s for my strategic thinking. If I have an idea, I want to think about something, I put it in there.

I have the engine room, which is for everything techy. Like when I had the recursive bot, or if I’m wanting to have some code on the website to make it look a particular way. Then I have other things for different subjects, and I put all the resources in there, and I use it a lot as a thinking partner.

I’ve noticed that Fable doesn’t hallucinate as much, but the Opus used to. There’s something called rental discrimination, and it was proofreading and said, “No, it’s not rental discrimination, it’s rental income discrimination,” and that was just a load of rubbish. So I would never let it go and change things without me looking at it.

I went on one of your webinars a month or so ago about MCPs and all the connectors, which is fantastic. It can go into my community and pull out all the questions for one of my live streams and put it into a document in order, by theme, for instance.

It can look at my MailerLite, because that’s where my newsletter is with, and analyse the different open rates and click rates and things. It’s so good for analysing everything, all the book sales. It helped me with my negotiation with Penguin, and it is pretty good on law.

It has sometimes hallucinated things, but not so much now. I think with anything, you’ve always got to go back to the primary source, and this is what we learn in academia: you have to check the primary source yourself.

I have a bit of a magpie brain. I’m very much a discovery writer, like you, and things occur to me as I’m doing it. I think that Claude, at the moment, is incredible. I’ve been quite open about it on social media that I have Claude as a business partner.

I’m a solopreneur, or whatever the word is. I have quite a big business now, and lots of different things, and it’s just me doing it, because I can ask Claude how to do this, and how to do that. Claude can go and check my emails and tell me, is there somebody I’ve not replied to, which helps a lot.

Jo: Yes. I think it’s empowering as a solopreneur as such. You talk there about the fixing the tech stuff. I have my web host come to me and say, “Look, you’re getting so much traffic and bot stuff, and we need to put this thing in, and it’s going to be $120 extra a month.”

I was like, “Can you just give me an hour? I’ll get back to you.” And then I just had Claude code up, and I was like, “Analyse this and tell me what we can do.” It was like, “No, you just need to flip this switch and do that.” And I’m like, “Okay, fair enough.” Then the guy said, “Oh, no, okay, actually you don’t need it.” Just stuff like that.

We should say, the ChatGPT Sol is very good, like the Claude Fable, for example. So, yes, using it as a sidekick.

I love your control room and your engine room projects as well. That’s a great way of doing it.

Suzanne: I wouldn’t be without it now, and I would have published the book a lot later without Claude, because Claude was helping me with the Shopify store and all the many steps of things. It saved me real time. It is just fantastic.

I think, like now when I’m updating my blog, I have a connection between Claude and my blog. Claude can go in, I can give it my Google Search Console results for the page: what should I change, are the headings right? All this kind of thing. And it will give me a view on every single page, which is incredible.

Jo: And YouTube, and just everything. Just super useful for that business sidekick.

That’s what I want authors to think. I feel like authors get so obsessed with the creative side with AI, whereas actually, people like you and me, we’re using it as that engine room for the solo business, which is what I love.

So we’re out of time. I did want to ask one more thing, which is, one of the biggest issues with a specific book like yours is when they change the law again.

Suzanne: I think that there’ll need to be a new edition of the book in three years’ time, and I’ve spoken to Penguin about it. Not all of this new law has been implemented, and there’s going to be case law and things. So I expect that I will update the book every few years.

I have some other ideas for books as well, but for the moment, I’m just taking a bit of a break. You always say we’ve got to refill our creative well. I really feel like that at the moment.

Recently I’ve just got myself a personal mobile phone so that I can turn off my work one when I’m on holiday and actually take time off. Because for all the time that I was doing the book, basically from Christmas until May, I didn’t have one day off. That is not good. So I’m just trying to be a bit more balanced.

I had an idea to write another book for summer, but I’ve just decided not to, and I’m going to leave it until I feel the urge again.

Jo: Oh, well done.

Suzanne: Which will come.

Jo: Yes, well done.

Suzanne: I think there’s nothing wrong with that. We just need to think what’s right for us. I’m 58. So I want to be able to have time to enjoy things and not be working all the time.

Jo: No, that’s great. It’s a sustainable business.

Suzanne: The easiest way to find me is theindependentlandlord.com. Or if you put Suzanne Smith and landlord into Google, you’ll find me as well, and there’s a link on there to the book, The Good Landlord Handbook. In the community, there’s a link to that on my website as well.

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

Suzanne: Thank you.

The post From Blog To Community To Book: A Non-Fiction Author’s Journey With Suzanne Smith first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How can building an audience in advance help your stories reach the people who make movies? And how can you prove there’s demand for your book or screenplay before you’ve written it? Brooks Elms shares his advice after more than 20 years as a WGA screenwriter.

In the intro, what doesn’t work for book marketing and what does [Amy Chan SubStack; Unsingle; Rephonic]; Goodreads giveaway for Bones of the Deep; FutureVision XPrize.

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 

Brooks Elms is a WGA screenwriter with over 45 scripts, over a dozen sales, and he has directed two indie features. He is the creator of the Answer the Call system and has trained over 1,000 writers.

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

You can find Brooks on LinkedIn or email him at [email protected].

Jo: Brooks Elms is a WGA screenwriter with over 45 scripts, over a dozen sales, and he has directed two indie features. He is the creator of the Answer the Call system and has trained over 1,000 writers. So welcome to the show, Brooks.

Brooks: Thank you. It’s awesome to be here.

Jo: Fantastic. So first up—

Brooks: I started filmmaking first. A buddy came up to me in high school and said, “Hey, we’re making a karate movie, do you want to help us?” I was like, “Oh my God, yes, that sounds amazing.”

So next thing I know, I had this karate outfit on, and we were just making this completely ridiculous and totally fun movie, and it was amazing. It was so fun.

Then it went to a whole other level when we shared it with a friend, this guy Jay Sharon, and he watched the movie and he laughed so hard he literally fell out of his chair. I was like, “Oh my God,” the fun I had making it could actually transfer to somebody else. I was hooked.

So from there I went to NYU film school, and then made a few independent feature films which were good but not great in terms of how they were received.

They were great for me in terms of enjoyment, but I knew I needed to iterate faster at that point. So then I was like, “Well, it’s expensive and it takes a long time to make a movie,” at least back then.

So I pivoted to screenwriting, and pumped out two, three scripts a year, got signed at UTA, got writing assignments, and basically launched a screenwriting career. Then I still tried to get some stuff going, but it’s hard when movies are so expensive.

It’s not hard, it’s just that it takes a lot of precision in the marketing, and a lot of conversations to find the right matches to finance something, and you’re either interested in doing that or you’re not. I just was like, “Well, I’ll just mostly write screenplays.”

Then I started teaching at UCLA Extension and then coaching after that, along with writing. Then all the way up to the future.

What’s great about moving forward is that with AI, shot-making is becoming very close to cinematic quality. You can actually match cinematic quality in moments in some genres, but probably by next year.

Right now you could actually do a really good horror movie all AI for 10, 20,000 bucks, depending on how much you’re doing yourself or getting other people to do.

So the economics are going to absolutely explode. So I’m sitting on dozens of scripts that didn’t get through the Hollywood packaging bottleneck because they’re too expensive, and I now have this giant slate that’s ready to go, and I’m just absolutely thrilled. It’s been a lifelong dream for me.

Jo: Oh, so much to come back on there. Where to start?

I do want to talk about what you just said there, sitting on dozens of scripts and now seeing the opportunity. I actually wrote down in my journal about a year ago, I see what’s coming with AI, and I think that the best thing I can do is create as much original IP as possible, so that I can make the most of the opportunity ahead.

So let’s just get into the AI, because a lot of people feel it’s a super bad thing.

Brooks: It’s fascinating to see how people respond to AI. I wonder, when the printing press rolled around, if there was some sort of backlash. Books must be handwritten. They can’t be mass-produced.

Here’s one of my theories. At a deep psychological level, it’s so profoundly powerful that I think the default setting is, “Oh, crap.”

When I was a kid, some things were hard, and that power imbalance, when something big, new and powerful comes along: I’m going to get screwed, and so this is somehow a bad thing. I think that’s the base psychological thing going on with most of the noise.

Obviously there are some legit problems, in terms of copyright infringement from learning models, or from some of the environmental situation. So I’m not saying it’s all rainbows and butterflies, but I think 90% of the noise around it comes from a fear of change.

Here’s the other one—a fear of, “Oh, yikes, I’m going to get taken advantage of somehow by either robots, or the corporations are going to use the robots against me,” or something like that. I have real empathy for me when I feel that way a little bit, but I don’t feel it much, and for other people that do feel it.

The other thing is, you know what it is? I think they fear their own empowerment even more.

I had a therapist who was really good. He said, people aren’t so much afraid of failing as they are afraid of succeeding. Because if we fail, we’re stuck in act one and we don’t go anywhere. The fear is answering the call and going to act two, when everything effing changes in the new world.

So I think people are afraid of how goddamn powerful they’re going to be when they can have a team of AI agents helping them do everything they want in business or life or whatever.

I think it’s the same thing with the internet. People are like, “Oh, I don’t like social media, blah, blah, blah.” And I get it. There’s a lot of noise and a lot of crap. Yet we have access to billions of people, and the algorithms in social media right now I think are level three out of 10. They’re just going to get better and better.

Even as it is now, if I do a post about something and it gets ignored, that’s on me. The algorithms are trying to match me to my people. So if I’m not unique enough and authentic enough and aware enough of how virality works, that’s on me, and it’s a learnable skill that I can embrace and then change and then get better at.

So I think people then resist that change. They resist the empowerment of learning the art of virality, or learning the art of some sort of social media stuff or whatever.

The last thing I’ll say about this rant is, I don’t want to act like I’m the guru on the hill that has all the answers. I refuse calls all the time. I’m scared about all sorts of things. I’m certainly not perfect. I feel frustrated when I’m trying to put my big ideas into action and I can’t get this technology thing to work or that one, and I throw tantrums.

I’m trying to come at it from a real human perspective, but by and large, I’ve got stars in my eyes. I’m like, “This is amazing. This is going to be so powerful.”

For so many people, you just have to be ready to embrace it and just go along for the ride, because there’s going to be some big-ass changes. There already are, and that’s going to accelerate.

Jo: You mentioned there learning the art of whatever it is. One of the things is, I’ve spent 20 years, and so have you, learning our craft and our art, and now it can be done very easily.

I’m generating video, as you mentioned, which is a craft I haven’t spent 20 years on, but now I can generate. So things have definitely changed in that way.

Just coming to the screenwriting side. Probably about a decade ago now, I did my first screenwriting course. I’ve written screenplays.

Then I looked at the game you have to play and, like you said, the conversations you have to have, the events you have to go and network at, all the things that you have to do to put a screenplay in front of the right person at the right time.

I was like, “I cannot do that. It’s just not going to happen. I can’t do that along with everything else.”

So I put it aside, but now I feel maybe it’s time to bring it back because things are changing. So can you maybe talk about, if someone has a screenplay now that they’ve written, or some IP like a book that they have now—

Brooks: It’s such a good question. By the way, not even a screenplay—you could do the same things with a novel. Let me try to be succinct here, which is a good challenge for me.

A simple way to look at it is, you’re giving samples. Let’s say it’s a lemonade stand, and you give out a little shot of your… maybe you have cayenne pepper lemonade, some sort of fun lemonade. If you give out a sample and people are into it, they’re going to come back and they’re going to tell friends.

If you give a sample of the lemonade and they’re not into it, then you go back to the kitchen and you mix up a different flavour.

So that’s some basic business, but the internet allows us to do that at scale. So what I like to encourage people to do when I coach them is come up with the minimum viable material. It can be a 10-second clip.

There’s a writer in my community who made a really beautiful 16-second movie. It’s one shot. I love it so much. It’s two wine glasses. There’s a lipstick smudge on one of the wine glasses. They’re half full, and it’s just that shot.

It’s sitting there, and all of a sudden you hear this thundering, thumping down these stairs, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun. Then you see out of the corner of the frame one person runs by, and then the other person behind her runs by and goes, “Wait.”

That’s it. That’s the whole movie. It’s 16 seconds. He did that with his phone.

So there’s so much going on. There’s a couple of basic elements, but he just did it with his phone, and you can evoke enormous emotional impact on people through social media, whether it’s just words.

You guys have a big advantage as novelists because you’re so good with words. Whether it’s a little bit longer, like sudden fiction, that’s a couple of pages or whatever. Even just copywriters are really in a good position for the future because they’re super potent with two words or three words or 10 words.

Then novelists are probably really advantageous because it doesn’t cost anything to just put some words out on the internet. The point is, if you put something out, it’s a signal, and you’re talking about billions of people who could find that signal.

If you do it and then you look at the response, and then you try again, you look at the response, we can do this iteration infinitely for free.

So you can do it already. You’ve been able to do it for 10, 15, 20 years, just with words. But now you’re going to basically be able to do that with movies or clips or trailers. So the thing that I’m leading in my community of writers is having people build trailers in advance, or clips.

When a book or a movie is done, how the heck do we get people to see it? One way is a trailer or some sort of behind-the-scenes material. You can just do that stuff now before even writing the screenplay.

I saw that you were doing this project, a trailer for this competition. And then you mentioned, “Oh, I’ve got to write the screenplay.” Not really. You have to develop the story enough to know what you’re referring to, and then it’s about studying the craft of either trailer construction, or whatever the clips are, or viral clips.

They all have a structure, and then you just test it. If you enjoy that testing process, which I find absolutely thrilling, it feels like the filmmaking version of a stand-up comedian. If I did stand-up, I say a joke, they laugh or they don’t laugh.

It’s really beautiful feedback from the universe. Nerve-wracking, right? But we can do that now as storytellers. We put a story out there in any format, and the audience responds.

What do likes mean? What do shares mean? What do comments mean? How do you deal with trolls? All that is just part of the new art. Once you get good at it, holy smokes, that’s the key to the kingdom.

You can build audiences in advance, and for movies you could even have them finance your movie in advance, if you’ve built an email list of 20,000, 30,000, 40,000 people because you kept putting out all these viral clips around your story, novel, or screenplay.

Then you go, “Okay, now 30,000 people are on my email list and I tell them about me and my perspective and my world. We’re going to make this darn thing with AI for 20,000 bucks. You guys have got to pony up some money. Put in a dollar, five, 10, or you get the VIP $500 experience.”

It’s like crowdfunding, but much more sophisticated, because most crowdfunding was like begging friends and family to donate to your crazy dream.

What I’m talking about is going to the audience directly, developing enough of the story, then going to the audience second, and then only when they validate the idea, to the extent that you’re happy with.

You could do a crazy idea that’s going to have a small audience, and you don’t have to have a blockbuster audience. You get to pick the audience size that you want, and then put the samples out there and see if you have a relevant audience size for this next project.

Once the audience tells you, “Yes, we want this,” then you go make it. So you’re ultimately reducing risk to almost zero. It takes time and you have to learn how to do this stuff, but it’s thrilling to me because we just have the capacity to test the material and listen to the audience upfront.

The last thing I’ll say, and I’ve rambled a lot, I’m sorry. When I made a movie in 1994, a feature film right out of NYU, it took me three years to find out what the audience thought about that movie.

I had to make the damn thing, and then I ran out of money, and that took me years to edit it, and I finally got it, blah, blah, blah. And again, I loved it. I loved every facet of it, and it was fine, but it was super inefficient.

Today, I could take those same elements, create an AI trailer this weekend, put it in front of hundreds of thousands of people, and they could tell me right away, “This sucks,” or, “This is interesting,” or, “Holy smokes, this is amazing. I want this.”

If it’s not, “Holy smokes, this is amazing, I want it,” I can go ahead and re-edit the whole damn trailer, and just keep reiterating at almost no cost.

Then once the demand is there, I can take that demand and that audience and go to Hollywood, and that’s when they’re going to want to work with me.

Then it doesn’t take a million conversations and finding the needle in the haystack, because Hollywood sees the numbers and they go, “Oh, you’re the people we do want to do business with. You’ve proven demand. We want to do business with you.”

Jo: Yes, it’s so interesting. I can hear people listening and they’re like, “Easier said than done, getting an email list of 40,000 people.” And in fact—

This is as a filmmaker, as a visual person, and the industry is visual, so doing a visual trailer is the obvious thing. And as you say, the tools I use just to do this one, I use Midjourney, and I’ve used Seedance as the main video model.

It does take a while, but it is pretty fast now, if you have a visual image of what you want in your head, which obviously you’re a visual person as well. But is it…

Brooks: Hold on. I want to push back on that a little bit, because I think it’s really important.

So yes, that’s true, but underneath that, my friend, it’s a relationship. It’s the relationship, and the media is secondary. You have been prolific in connecting with your audience, and that’s why I think a lot of people like you, because you share and they get to know you in that sort of cadence.

I saw you in another podcast, you mentioned Seth Godin, who just said, “Hey, I want to be the type of person that has this relationship with my audience. I’m going to share some of my thoughts every day.”

He happened to do it with words, with his background in marketing, but you could do the same thing with still images. You could do the same thing with a five-second movie clip once a week. It’s the relationship you want with your fans.

I’m not saying you snap your fingers and you have 50,000 people on your email list. What I’m saying is, what else are you doing?

If we’re artists and our impulse is to create and share, and if you do it in this way, if I can create and share and inspire trust in this relationship with a stranger because they like my genre thing and they like the way they felt when they experienced my media, words, images, movies, it doesn’t matter.

They just like the feeling, and they go, “Ooh, I want more of that feeling. How do I get more of that? Oh, this person has this email list or community.”

If I can do it with one, then I can scale it out. So getting the first one, or the first 5 or 10 samples, that is a whole process. But then once you do that, scaling up is more of a mechanical thing. It’s not even that hard, especially when you can do paid ads.

So you can scale up very quickly if you have the sauce. If you don’t have the sauce, it doesn’t matter who you’re related to, you’ve got to get the sauce right.

Jo: Yes, and again, it’s so parallel to the indie author community.

I’ve just got to ask you, in the olden days, an author might write a screenplay, or a screenwriter write a screenplay, and then they would send it. They’d find an agent. They’d pitch an agent, and I guess then they’d hope that someone would turn that into a movie. So is that just dead now?

Brooks: So, no. I’ve got two screenplay deals going right now. So here’s how it’s going to work. Think about Broadway, or the theatre district in Britain. It’s like West End or East End or whatever…

Jo: The West End.

Brooks: Sorry for my American ignorance. West End, okay.

So every town on the planet has a stage, but there’s only one Broadway, there’s only one West End, right? And every town has its own festival, but there are a few significant tastemakers. There’s Cannes, there’s Sundance, there’s Toronto. Hollywood is always going to be a tastemaker in our lifetime, for sure.

What they don’t have anymore, what they enjoyed for the first 100 years of the industry, is that they had a stranglehold on basically the equipment, the financing, and the audience, and that’s all going away.

Jo: No.

Brooks: So Thomas Edison invented the camera, or the type of model camera that they were using in, I don’t know, 1910 or something around there.

They didn’t want to pay his patent. They didn’t want to pay the patent to make these movies, so they went all the way across the country, a bunch of outlaws, and they set up shop in California because he couldn’t enforce his patent that they were basically stealing.

And reason number two, LA enjoys amazing weather almost all year round. The weather here is either nice or really nice. You have mountains, you have beach, you have desert, you have all these different locales. So when it was really important to be on location, LA was the perfect place.

Anyway, that is all going away. For many decades, more people could make movies. In the early ’90s, Robert Rodriguez made a movie for 9,000 bucks. There was a book in the ’80s that I bought that I loved, it was Feature Filmmaking at Used-Car Prices. This guy, Rick Schmidt, I think his name was.

There were the independent filmmakers really in the ’60s and the ’70s. So the cost has been going down and down and down, and now it’s less than ever. Once social media came along, now you have access to the audience, so why do you even need Hollywood?

That being said, there are tons of people. There are 400,000 people already working in the movie and the TV industry here. And they’re voracious. We have a voracious demand.

Humans need stories. We need big stories, long stories. We need stories, and Hollywood is so good at giving them stories. And so they have a need for these things, and they’re still spending a lot of money on those budgets.

So yes, there’s still a demand for turning books and optioning them and turning them into movies. Books are great. Any sort of existing IP is great because there are marketing efficiencies there.

People already know that stuff, know the vibe of it, and so it’s easier to market than something that’s totally creative and new. When you’re spending that much money, you want those marketing efficiencies. They’re really important.

So the point being, the power is shifting away from Hollywood. Hollywood will still be a tastemaker, but you and me can reach anybody on the planet now. Almost. Billions of people.

If it’s making a movie, right now you could make a movie that most people wouldn’t realise is an AI movie. If it was a horror film, I know a handful of people that could make a feature-length horror film right now with AI and 99% of the audience couldn’t tell, if it was professionally written.

Jo: I think the point here though is, I’m an author, the people listening are authors, and we don’t want to make movies.

Brooks: Yes. Great. Okay, good. So then you could, if you wanted, build an audience. Hollywood loves when something’s already proven, so that’s that IP thing, right?

So if you just have a great book, then it’s all about the sales. You guys have Dragons’ Den, we have Shark Tank here. And what’s amazing about that show is these are people or entrepreneurs pitching an idea, and there’s an amazing rhythm that happens.

They say, “We’ve got this great idea. It’s this sort of company.” And the sharks, or the dragons, will listen. And there’s a huge turning point when they reveal sales.

They’re either really excited about the idea and then they go, “Well, how are the sales?” And the person goes, “Well, we don’t have any sales yet.” And they go, “Uh,” and they’re not interested.

Or they might even be like, “Eh, it doesn’t seem like a good idea.” And they’re like, “Well, how are the sales?” And they’re like, “Oh, well, we’ve sold through the roof.” And then all of a sudden they perk up. So it’s all about the sales.

So step one is writing something that you want. Step two is making sure other people in your target audience are also loving it as much as you do. Step three is proving in some way at scale that there’s real demand for it.

So you could do that with trailers, you could do that with clips, you can do that as an indie publisher. There’s all sorts of things that you can do. Humans are much more persuaded by concrete data than they are by just vibes.

So if you can bring Hollywood concrete data of any type, like viral videos, like audience, like obviously bestsellers. Awards mean something, but not quite as much as sales. Then you’re going to get Hollywood’s attention because that reduces risk for them.

So even now, when Hollywood’s definitely shrinking and contracting, there’s still very significant money being spent because it’s a huge demand. If you ever walk around a studio lot, those things are opulent places. It’s stunning. Like, how are they paying for all this stuff? These lots are enormous.

It’s because humanity is voracious for stories, and movies are one premium type of storytelling. The demand for stories is steady if not going up. It’s just that we have a wider variety of types of stories that we can do, whether we’re an indie author.

So anyway, did I answer the question? You get me too excited with these questions, Jo. It’s a problem.

Jo: Yes. I think there’s a lot of opportunity and a lot of ways in, but the parallels with being an indie author I think are quite clear.

One of the things I found interesting about your profile and what you do is that you help clients who are already accomplished but not quite breaking through, and that sounds like a lot of mid-list indie authors, probably a lot of mid-list screenwriters, mid-list filmmakers.

This is a hard place to be because, on the one hand, we are grateful for what we have achieved and what we can do, and yet wanting more, wanting that big Hollywood deal or the Netflix deal, or wanting the massive bestseller or whatever.

Brooks: It’s a great question. Coaching is a really wonderful way to learn anything of this sort of complexity and challenge, especially if it’s a hyper-competitive business. We need two things, I think, to write a great novel or screenplay or both.

A, we need to feel profoundly safe in our space. If we can’t really feel deeply authentic about the things that are embarrassing, or that we feel shame about, or just our shadows, or anything that we don’t feel completely comfortable saying and sharing in public usually.

We need to be able to touch those things, and be articulate about those things, and that’s one part of it. Then we need a concrete path forward. Maybe you’re thinking about some tragedy that you had in childhood, and how you dealt with it and how difficult that was.

So you need to be able to be real precise in those observations about what it felt like, and how you tried to compensate for it, and that didn’t work and it made it worse.

Whatever your observations are about your life journey, you need to be really specific and really deeply felt. A good coaching relationship allows you to be in that space, to be really honest with yourself and authentic. g

Aood coach will push you back and say, “You know what? That sounds interesting, but maybe not quite as true to you deeply.” So that’s one piece of it. Then there’s a concrete path forward.

You need to have the emotional access to that truth, and then you need to know what to do with that truth in a step-by-step way. Because most people, the ones that you’re talking about, they’re accomplished in something else.

What happens is when we first start writing, and maybe this happens with novelists, but for sure it happens to screenwriters, you just start typing words. But you haven’t really thought through the theme, the concept, the structure, the character, all the deeper questions that really matter.

The milestones, like a North Star: winning a major award, or getting a publisher. That’s the direction that we’re heading towards, and then you set it and forget it, but you want to keep checking it every week, every month or whatever. But you want it very specific.

“I would like to sell a book, or sell a book to Hollywood, or write a screenplay, or get a producer attached to a screenplay.”

This is what I do on the concrete path. I reverse engineer every step to get there, starting with a really tiny one we can do today, and I make sure they feel really safe, and then we just walk through.

Then what happens is, if you do that, if you feel safe, if you’re showing up authentically and you have a process that’s repeatable, not just willy-nilly, it’s got to be something that’s proven to work. It wasn’t an accident I wrote 45 scripts. I’ve got a whole system.

But by the way, the first five scripts took me forever. The last movie that I made took me three years to write that script. I can write a better script with those same elements in three months now, because I know I have a concrete path.

So if you want to do something new, whether it’s playing the piano or getting six-pack abs or writing a screenplay, work with somebody who’s got a system that’s already proven, and make sure you relate to them, and then just follow the system.

Then when the doubts come up, and they will, that’s where the feeling safe is really important. Because, oh, I want the six-pack abs, but I don’t feel like going to the gym. I want the extra donut.

If I’m working with a really good trainer, they go, “Dude, do you want the six-pack abs or not?” And then you go back and forth, and I go, “Okay, now I can make peace with myself and say I can take one tiny bite of the donut and then still do my workout,” and then I’m moving towards that North Star. Does that make sense?

Jo: Yes. I think, like many independents, I resist anything that is systematised. I’m a discovery writer, and I follow the muse, and all of that kind of thing.

I think I would say something in a similar vein, which is sustainable creativity for the long term, because your 45 scripts are also years of work, and my books are years of work, and we get better at what we do. So my system, I do have a system really, because—

So even if it’s not as systematised as such, it’s still a process that I have repeated over and over again.

Brooks: That’s fascinating to me. Would you consider yourself a pantser? You’re like, “I’ve got an idea,” and you just start writing?

Jo: I don’t use the word pantser. I guess I call it discovery writing, which is…

Brooks: That’s a better term.

Jo: Yes. What I’m writing for this prize, for example, I know the characters, I know now what’s happening.

When I had the idea, it was very much a vision and a theme, and the competition has a theme: a positive future with AI and technology. But the things that came around that, I then started playing with ideas around the treatment. I haven’t written the screenplay yet.

I don’t do a plot, or I don’t follow Save the Cat or any of that kind of thing. When I write a novel, I just explore and I never write in order. Then at some point I stop and then I have to think about the structure and putting it all together, so the edits are quite big. But my fun is in that discovery, really.

Brooks: Oh, that’s awesome. Okay, so let me ask, that’s really fascinating. And by the way, that doesn’t, to me, negate the system that I use.

The one that I use is ultimately… the thing is, these questions, the audience is wanting your unique answers to. You don’t necessarily need to do it in a certain order. I think that’s actually really cool that you write out of order and you have a few elements in mind. All that stuff sounds awesome.

The only thing that then makes me curious is, how’s your pace? Are you actually completing novels at a pace that feels good, or do you feel like you go too fast, too slow?

Jo: I do one or two a year at the moment. Well, two a year, really. But I would say I’m not as successful as I’d like to be, so I’m not saying that my system is the best. I’m saying I want to be better.

One of the things I really like about screenplays and treatments and doing this kind of thing for film is that it is much more structured, I think, than a 70,000-word novel. You can go in all kinds of directions, whereas with screenwriting you do have to be more disciplined really.

Brooks: Yes, so this is going to be fun probably, to hear my view for your audience, and the differences as I see them.

For starters, you’re talking about what, 10, 20, 30 hours reading a novel sometimes, or maybe less, whereas a movie’s a 90-minute experience, right? So that’s different. Or if it’s a TV series, you might see an hour and then an hour. So that’s a very different experience.

What happens is when it’s condensed like that, you’re loading up layers. So every scene is stacked with exposition beneath the drama, and done in a certain way. So specifically, movies are only what you can see and only what you hear. Whereas novels, if you can think it, you can write it, it can be in there.

So you don’t need to have a plot, but if you want to sell your book to Hollywood, it helps.

So I was very resistant about structure. I went to NYU film school, where we really just made short films. It was funny, I had friends that were in the dramatic writing department, and I was like, “You guys are wasting your money. You’re just learning to write scripts. We learn to write the scripts and make the movies.”

What I hadn’t realised is it’s a different skill set to hold somebody’s attention across an hour-long play, or a 90-minute movie, than it is to make a movie that holds their attention for two minutes or five minutes.

I found out years later when I made a feature that was like a lot of shorts patched together, and people were not… They liked it, but they didn’t love it. I was like, “Well, what’s going on?” And so then I learned to really love Save the Cat in particular. It completely changed me.

What happened was, I got a big old slice of humble pie. I had made my second feature, and I put everything I had into it, and it had loose structural beginning, middle, end, blah, blah, blah. But I was still, “Eh, Hollywood BS. What do they know? It’s all fake.”

So I was very anti-Hollywood structure. Then I was like, now I’ve got two independent films out there, people saw them, liked them, whatever, but it wasn’t getting me consistent work. It wasn’t really advancing my career in the way that I wanted. And I was like, “Well, maybe there is something to the Save the Cat.”

So I went to the Save the Cat workshop with Blake when he was still alive, and he was delightful, a really awesome guy. He’s got this kind of cutesy style, for people that don’t know.

For context, Blake Snyder was a working Hollywood screenwriter, and he had this system called Save the Cat, which actually has some really interesting ideas.

He’s got this very light, breezy sort of style. A lot of people don’t like him and some people really love him, and everything in between. But I took his weekend seminar, and it completely changed me, because at that point, like I said, I took three years to write a script.

Then once he had a process and he had a way of thinking about craft that was just much more screenwriter-friendly, I was like, “Oh my God.” It was so much easier, because I was just focused on the right thing at the right time. So it just sped everything up.

So for me, because I went from winging it and wrote five scripts in 13 years, and then wrote two to three scripts every year, I became a huge proponent of system and process.

Then my own system really came from that, but it’s modular. I have a nine-step system, but you don’t necessarily have to go in that order, other than the last three steps, but I won’t get into the details. Sometimes you kind of jump from two to three and then back to two and then back and forth.

So I love that you get the feel for those elements, and then you just felt your way through. But writing screenplay pages doesn’t make sense until you really understand concept, you get a deep sense of beginning, middle, end, character arcs, and these other threads.

There are just way better tools for those jobs than screenplay format, because it’s a really weird format. It’s got these weird slug lines at the top that are all in caps, because a screenplay is a blueprint for somebody else to make the movie. It’s not an end-user document like a novel.

I don’t let my clients even go to that format because it just gets them focused on the wrong things. What they really need to know is, what is your perspective about this theme? What happened in your life that you’re fascinated with, that you’d even want to write about this? And tell me what your real life lessons are.

So we go into… again, I go back to relationship. What’s your relationship to the universe? And what’s your relationship to your best friends, or where you got your heart broken, or whatever you want to write about. And then we get that clarity, and then I show you how to express it in terms of developing a screenplay.

It’s really long-form storytelling, and then the structure just makes it build on itself. But with the structure, because you’re talking about so much money and people involved to make it, at least traditionally, what ended up happening was narrative structure that was not so much rigid.

Because here’s the thing, you can look at 50, 100 years of European cinema and you can look at Hollywood cinema, and Hollywood laps them.

When I taught at UCLA Extension, I had lots of foreign students. Let’s say there’d be two or three students… if there were 12 people in the class, two or three people would be from America, and everybody else would be from other countries.

I would go around, I’d be like, “What movies and TV shows have you been watching?” Almost in every single country, they watch half from their own country, half from Hollywood. So Hollywood storytelling works, that’s just the data, and they’re dominant.

The reason it works is what Aristotle was saying thousands of years ago.. There’s a way of thinking about beginning, middle, end that just deeply speaks to the psyche, and you can ignore it if you want. I think Godard said, “You need beginning, middle, and end, but not necessarily in that order,” right? Which is great.

Just the way we experience life, there’s a beginning, a middle, an end to this podcast interview. There’s a beginning, middle, end to the day, a beginning, middle, end to me eating lunch.

But to your point, you don’t necessarily have to sort that out in the beginning. It’s more efficient probably if you do, but you don’t have to. Go into it wherever the muse tells you to go, and then at some point, like you do, then you go, “Okay, now I go back and I edit.”

If you’re saying there’s another level, you have another gear in you, then yes, I’d be curious to slowly go through how you’re making those decisions. Because what’s happening probably is there are ways you’re holding back a little bit. There’s maybe something you’re afraid of being vulnerable about.

That’s usually where me or other writers are holding themselves back, and we can take a look at that. There are different ways I show writers to do it. Then you can go, “Oh, I was doing it here, and now I can do it there.” And it could be with process, or just a certain creative choice.

With story, it’s clear and compelling. Those are the simple things. So, is this clear enough? Is it compelling enough? And there are almost always ways to up-level on any facet, whether it’s one sentence, or a sentence that describes the whole concept of the book, or a chapter.

Each one of those can be looked at with that lens and we can just say, “Hey, this is 70%, 80%,” whatever, and then we say, “Well, how do we get a little bit more?” And then when you do that enough, it piles up. Then especially if you bring in an audience and people are flipping out for your work, they’ll tell you.

Jo: Yes, I love a challenge, so thank you for everything you’ve shared today.

Brooks: Well, one way you can find me—if anything I said seemed helpful for you, if you have questions about Hollywood or you have a screenplay in your heart—you can just email me, [email protected].

You could look me up on LinkedIn. I’m at Brooks Elms. I also have a Skool community called Screenwriter Marketing, but it’s really for any sort of storyteller, and it talks about my favourite way to engage an audience and get through it. So anybody can jump into that if you like my vibe.

If you really think anything I’ve said, or the way I said it, seems like it could be helpful for you, just reach out. Let me know what you’re up to, and maybe there’s a way I can help you.

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

Brooks: You’re welcome. It was a total pleasure. It was lots of fun, and I really appreciate you.

The post How To Prove The Demand For Your Stories And Get The Attention Of Hollywood With Brooks Elms first appeared on The Creative Penn.

After more than a decade of releasing this show on Mondays, I’m moving it to Wednesdays, and this is the first episode of the new time slot. 

On the one hand, this might sound like nothing at all, but it’s also a big deal, for you and for me, and in this episode, I explain why I’m making the change, and past guests give some tips on sustainable creativity for the long term.

Joanna Penn is an award-winning New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of thrillers, dark fantasy, short stories and travel memoir under J.F. Penn and also writes non-fiction for authors and hosts The Creative Penn Podcast.

You can find the backlist episodes at TheCreativePenn.com/podcast, just click into the episode to find the transcript.

Here’s my big news! After more than a decade of releasing this show on Mondays, I’m moving it to Wednesdays, and this is the first episode of the new time slot. 

On the one hand, this might sound like nothing at all, but it’s also a big deal, for you and for me! 

I know many of you have a routine of listening to the show during a certain thing on a Monday, so I’m sorry to have to disrupt that, and I hope I don’t lose you along the way — although I guess you could just save the episode for Monday! 

For me, it’s a much bigger deal, because a Monday show has meant I have often recorded the intro and edited and scheduled the episode over the weekend.

The main reason is that I need to record in the mornings when I have energy and when the house is less noisy, since Jonathan is often on the phone since he works from home as well. So I would prepare the episode on Fridays, and I type out this intro before reading it, and source the news and my thoughts and all that — and then I’d record it Saturday morning, or Sunday morning if Saturday was busy — and so recently, I have felt like something has to change. 

Moving the show to a Wednesday means that I can prep on Monday and Tuesday, which is perfect. 

Its so funny because I agonised over this, in the same way I agonised over changing the theme tune a few years back. Some of you may remember that — and it also turned out to not be a big deal at all. We build things up in our minds and then sometimes the problem can be solved in a different way. 

So instead of going to ad hoc episodes, or once every two weeks, I hope that moving to Wednesday makes the show more sustainable again, because let’s face it, there’s a lot going on, and if I did a show every 2 weeks, I might have to make them longer to get through everything! 

So, same show, just on Wednesdays from now on.

And this change underscores what today’s episode is about: sustainable creativity over the long term. 

How do you keep writing, and publishing, and podcasting — and creating for years — and I am now at two decades — without burning out, and without becoming a slave to the algorithm, or the market, or even your own audience’s expectations? 

The goal is not to just survive this year’s release schedule, or to keep feeding the machine until you crumble under the speed of it all. 

The goal is to still be creating, and still be enjoying it, next month, next year, in five years, in 10 years, in 20, in 30. Who knows how many years we all have left — but for sure, we are NOT machines, we are not AI — and we cannot churn it out – and what is the point of that anyway? 

So in today’s show, I’ll share some thoughts and tips from me and also other authors from the show on this topic, and you can find the full episodes in the backlist, and links as ever in the show notes on TheCreativePenn.com/podcast 

In early 2024, The Tim Ferriss Show, one of the biggest podcasts in the world, hit its ten-year anniversary with over a billion downloads and over 750 episodes, and Tim decided to take a sabbatical. 

He paused the show for four months and seriously questioned whether to continue. Not because it was failing, it was hugely profitable and he enjoyed talking to people, but because the landscape had changed. 

Podcasting had gone from a wide-open space in 2014 to a saturated market, and his question wasn’t “can I keep competing?” It was “is this still the game I want to play?” 

Just a little note here, I started The Creative Penn Podcast in 2009 when there were even fewer shows so I know a lot about a changing podcast market! 

After four months, Tim came back from what he called a sabbatical with a blog post on My New Rules for Podcasting — To Keep Things Interesting.

He starts with the sheer number of podcasts, saying,

“Having a good show is no longer good enough. Having a great show is no longer good enough. If you want to survive in the mindshare of listeners, you need differentiation.”

I think this is true for us as authors as well as podcasters, or YouTubers, or social media, or anything. But the good news is that your differentiation can be you. 

Regular listeners will know that I have questioned ending the show over the years, worried that I was no longer useful, or that my voice no longer mattered when there are so many podcasts on similar topics. But after your wonderful feedback, and the fact that the show still gets a lot of downloads every week, and the growth in my Patreon Community, I don’t worry about that anymore. It’s unlikely that any of us will have a podcast as big as Tim Ferriss’s or sell as many books as The Four Hour Work Week, but that’s OK, because we are not Tim. 

I am Jo Penn and you’re here because you find my take on the publishing industry is still useful in some way. When it’s not anymore, you will go elsewhere, and I find myself at peace with that. 

Back to Tim’s article — he asks some questions of himself, including:

If I get to do this for another decade, or had to do this for another decade, what new rules might I create to keep it interesting?

Of course, we all have different ideas of what this means for us. And I have already implemented one of these rules, which is that I interview people on topics I find interesting. I frequently get pitched by more famous authors and bigger names, but most of the time I turn them down, and choose to talk to people who are not famous but are more interested in serving you, my audience, because that is the point of this show. 

I also have people on that I enjoy talking to, because checking in with my friends while you listen in, can be useful too, since my friends are often authors who’ve been in the industry a while now. I have to make the interviews time that I find interesting or useful or fulfilling as well. 

But the point is to stop and take time to consider what might need to change, even if you are really successful. You cannot be a slave to the algorithm, to the media, to your audience, for the long term. You have to put some circuit breakers in sometimes. 

It’s the old adage about the small business. You have to work ON in the business, not just IN the business, which means you need to step away. 

This does sometimes mean that you have to get away physically. I had this realisation while we were in Bruges in Belgium talking to Jonathan about what changes I could make because I just felt a lack of freedom — and freedom is my highest value, so I really need to honour that. 

So, the first question for you is: If you feel like you need a change, if your routines are becoming too much, or your workload is too much, or you are eating into time you need for rest and recovery or family or whatever you need, can you schedule time out to have a think about what you need and how things can change? 

You don’t need to burn it all down. You might find the answer is just moving the show from a Monday to a Wednesday! 

I love talking to authors who have been doing this career for a long time, and in December 2025 in episode 839, I talked to Jennifer Probst, the New York Times bestselling romance author of more than sixty books, about why some authors build decades-long careers while others vanish after one breakout. 

Jennifer has been through the indie gold rush, the fallout, traditional deals, Kickstarter, all of it, and I asked her how she thinks about how everything keeps changing, and we start with marketing but it goes much further than that. 

***

Jo: In terms of how we do marketing, TikTok is still a thing, and we can see maybe generative AI search coming on the horizon and agentic buying. A decade ago it might have been different, more Facebook ads or whatever. Then before that it might have been something else. So there’s always things changing along the way.

Jennifer: Yes, there definitely is. It is a very oversaturated market. They talk about, I don’t know, 2010 to 2016 maybe, as the gold rush, because that was where you could make a lot of money as an indie. Then we saw the total fallout of so many different things.

I feel like I’ve gone through so many ups and downs in the industry. I do love it because the longer you’re around, the more you learn how to pivot. If you want this career, you learn how to write differently or do whatever you need to do to keep going, in different aspects, with the changes.

To me, that makes the industry exciting. Again, perspective is a big thing. But I have had to take a year to kind of rebuild when I was out of contract with a lot of things. I’ve had to say, “Okay, what do you see on the horizon now? Where is the new foundation? Where do you wanna restart?”

Sometimes it takes a year or two of, “Maybe I won’t be making big income and I cut back,” but then you’re back in it, because it takes a while to write a few new books, or write under a pen name, or however you want to pivot your way back into the industry.

Or, like you were saying, diversifying. I did a lot of non-fiction stuff because that’s a big calling for me, so I put that into the primary for a while.

I think it’s important for authors to maybe not just have one thing. When that one thing goes away, you’re scrambling. It’s good to have a couple of different things like, “Well, okay, this genre is dead or this thing is dead or this isn’t making money. Let me go to this for a little while until I see new things on the horizon.”

*** 

I love that from Jennifer, because there are always new things on the horizon, and we try new things and we pivot, and we bring in other streams of income as some drop off, and we go again and we keep creating. Authors with longevity are authors who pivot over their careers. They may lament the end of one era, but they don’t stop, they find a new way forward. 

Kevin J. Anderson is one of the most productive writers alive, with hundreds of books, most of which he writes with dictation while out hiking, and he has been on this show many times. 

In January 2025, in episode 791, we talked about building a long-term author business, and how authors need to be careful about setting reader expectations around pace of releases. 

Kevin: Now, again, we get back to the longevity of a career. It is exhausting to write lots of books a year, and most people can’t keep doing that for 20 years or 30 years.

That’s one of the reasons, especially indie authors, where readers expect you to write several books a year. Some indie authors I know are writing a book a month. I couldn’t do that for any long period. Well, I couldn’t do that probably for a single year.

You start building expectations, and when you fail to meet those expectations, they will leave you very quickly. That’s why you should have Plan Bs.

If you really, really can’t stand writing your steampunk vampire romance series after book number 29, well, make sure that you have some other series you’re starting and building up.

Well, Hugh Howey’s got several series that are going. Michael Anderle has all kinds of series, and Craig Martelle has all kinds of series. You don’t just put all your eggs in one basket. You need to have Plan B and Plan C, to circle around to what I started with.

*** 

Whatever cadence you choose, for your books, your email newsletters, or or your podcast, or your social media, choose a pace you can still be keeping up in a decade, because this is a long term career, and longevity in the market is one of the most important things. It’s better to pace yourself than burn out. 

I couldn’t do an episode on sustainability without Becca Syme! 

Becca is an author coach who has worked with thousands of writers, she is the creator of the Better-Faster Academy and the Quit books, and the QuitCast podcast — and In January 2023, in episode 668, at the end of our conversation about intuitive writing and marketing, I asked her what authors who sustain long careers have in common.

***

Joanna: So in terms of sustainability, let’s talk about that. You coach writers every day, you see writers on every spectrum of every personality type, and people who write differently and release differently and publish differently. So what do you see as your recommendations or, I guess, commonalities for authors who want this sustainable career as a writer for the long term in order not to burn out? What are you seeing in terms of the best way to be sustainable in a creative career?

Becca: Conquering the fear that we have that we’re not going to get what we want out of the career, like 100%. Because the fear is the thing that’s driving us to burn ourselves out.

The fear that if I don’t do it this way, I’m not going to make money. If I don’t do it this way, I’m not going to have a long career. I’m going to miss out on something if I don’t do absolutely everything.

And then I think the most important knowledge that we can have is that everyone in this industry who’s a nonfiction person, including me, is giving you a perspective on how author life can be done.

Every single one of us, not the perspective on how it should be done in order to have success. And if we could just change our expectations of how we look at the people who are helping us who are being good, helpful people who are very sure that their way is the correct way and who should be, again, because like all experts, they’ve had success doing what they are doing.

But the downside is from someone whose job is to sit with authors for 45 minutes at a time, all day, every day, I see the outcome of the people who have tried to “do it all,” in quotes, with capital letters, and who are burned out because they were doing everything out of a fear place.

And I think one of the best things that can happen in our — and what burnout often does is it forces us to reckon with the fact that we were doing all of this because we were afraid. My book isn’t going to sell, I’m not going to be able to do this, I have this dream that I’m holding on to and what happens if it doesn’t manifest itself.

Then we make a lot of our decisions about how much to take on based on fear, and we don’t know it.

Because we don’t realize that our brains are wired for survival, and so anytime fear kicks in, your brain is like, well, we have to do that because if you’re afraid of it, then that must mean that we need it in order to survive. And we don’t.

We will survive if our books don’t sell. 

We have to calm that fear and answer the question. Like, what will happen if in five years, I have not sold more than $1,000 on every book that I am writing? Like if each of the individual books that I write have not made more than $1,000. And I have to reckon with what might happen if that happens, because if I don’t, that fear is going to drive me to burnout over and over and over and over again.

That is why we’re making so many of our decisions, including: do I pay for this class or conference? Do I pay for this book? Do I spend money on this advertising? Do I hire this expert consultant?

So many of us are making those choices out of fear and we don’t realize it. And that’s why when we do our public live coaching, and whenever I’m at a conference, I’m always listening for, “but what are you afraid is not going to happen? Or what are you afraid is going to happen?”

Because if we don’t deconstruct that part of yourself and calm your survival mechanism down, you’re going to continue over and over again to make those decisions out of fear.

Then you’re going to not listen to your intuition because you think it’s risky to listen to it. And so I really think, and some of this might include therapy for some of us, I’m just going to acknowledge some of us have trauma around not getting what we want or around not actualizing our desires, and we can’t just talk ourselves into letting the fear go.

But some of us do just need to consistently confront the fear and make a plan for what happens and then act in spite of that fear because we are not making good decisions when we are in survival mode.

*** 

Becca is very wise, and also pretty hardcore! So if you feel like you are trying to do it all, and you are on the edge of burning out, can you identify the fear beneath it?

Sometimes we keep doing things the same way, even when things have changed. 

What is lost if we give things up? What is gained? And what kind of game do you want to play?

In episode 845, Claire Taylor, humour and mystery author, owner of FFS Media, certified Enneagram coach, talks about how social media has changed and why she gave it up. 

***

Joanna: One thing I know will have perked up people’s ears is: “I left social media.” Tell us a bit more about that.

Claire: This was a move that I could feel coming for a while. I didn’t like what social media did to my attention. Even when I wasn’t on it, there was almost a hangover from having been on it.

My attention didn’t feel as sharp and focused as it used to be, back before social media became what it is now.

So I started asking myself some questions: What is lost if I leave? What is gained if I leave? And what is social media actually doing for me today?

Because sometimes we hold on to what it used to do for us, and we keep trying to squeeze more and more of that out of it. But it has changed so much.

There are almost no places with sufficient organic reach anymore. It’s all pay-to-play, and the cost of pay-to-play keeps going up.

I looked at the numbers for my business. My Kickstarter was a great place to analyse that because they track so many traffic sources so clearly. I could see exactly how much I was getting from social media when I advertised and promoted my projects there.

Then I asked: can I let that go in order to get my attention back and make my life feel more settled? And I decided: yes, I can. That’s worth more to me.

Joanna: There are some things money can’t buy. Sometimes it really isn’t about the money. I like your question: what is lost and what is gained? You also said it’s all pay-to-play and there’s no organic reach. I do think there is some organic reach for some people who don’t pay, but those people are very good at playing the game of whatever the platform wants. So, TikTok for example—you might not have to pay money yet, but you do have to play their game. You have to pay with your time instead of money. I agree with you. I don’t think there’s anywhere you can literally just post something and know it will reliably reach the people who follow you.

Claire: Right. Exactly. TikTok currently, if you really play the game, will sometimes “pick” you, right? But that “pick me” energy is not really my jam.

And we can see the trend—this “organic” thing doesn’t last. It’s organic for now. You can play the game for now, but TikTok would be crazy not to change things so they make more money. So eventually everything becomes pay-to-play.

TikTok is fun, but for me it’s addictive. I took it off my phone years ago because I would do the infinite scroll. There’s so much candy there.

Then I’d wake up the next morning and notice my mood just wasn’t where I wanted it to be. My energy was low. I really saw a correlation between how much I scrolled and how flat I felt afterwards.

So I realised: I’m not the person to pay-to-play or to play the game here. I’m not even convinced that the pay-to-play on certain social media networks is being tracked in a reliable, accountable way anymore. Who is holding them accountable for those numbers?

You can sort of see correlation in your sales, but still, I just became more and more sceptical. In the end, it just wasn’t for me.

My life is so much better on a daily basis without it. That’s definitely a decision I have not regretted for a second.

****

To be clear, we’re not saying you should give up social media, but it’s about questioning how things make you feel, and what you can sustain and how you want to spend your time. 

I did question once again whether to give up this show entirely, but it is an important part of my creative body of work, and quite frankly, I reach more people with the podcast than I do with my books, and I still love talking to people, and I learn, and it underpins my business. 

I don’t do much social media though. I learn about AI things on X and I do post photos and things on Instagram but I don’t do much else. You have to decide what is right for you, but also, what is right for you might change over time. If we have a long term career, or a long term anything, things will change, and we will need to move on sometimes, or at least question whether it is still working in the way it used to. 

In April 2026, in episode 858, I talked to Sara Rosett, USA Today bestselling mystery author and co-host of the Wish I’d Known Then podcast, about low-key marketing, and a more seasonal approach, or phased approach to podcasting as well as writing. 

***

Jo: Although I must say I had forgotten about your Mystery Books podcast and going to seasonal. I also had my second podcast, Books and Travel, which is now on a kind of hiatus, but going to a seasonal approach is actually really interesting. Do you find that listeners come back to that podcast?

Sara: Yes, and it surprises me because I’ve always thought you have to be weekly with a podcast to gain any traction at all, which I think is the best way to do it. You can build an audience quickly then, but I just knew I couldn’t sustain that.

So when I set out, I started with maybe seven to ten episodes and I did them each year — each year has had a season — and I do five to ten episodes. Readers find it, and I have highlighted specific books. I think maybe they’re searching for a podcast about the Thursday Murder Club or something like that.

They find it that way, and I get downloads, just steady downloads throughout the year, and I don’t do much. I do some Pinterest pins for that, and that’s about all I do. This is one of those things — it’s the kind of low-key marketing that’s low threshold, but it does work.

I think if your readers are looking for stuff to listen to about the topic you write about, it could be a good way to do some low-cost, long-tail marketing. I love it. I keep doing it because I love it.

Jo: That just seems more sustainable to me. I didn’t like doing everything every day or every single week.

Sara: Me either. I like switching it up, and I do enjoy the different phases of writing. I like the research and then I like doing the — well, I don’t like the drafting that much, but once I get a draft done, I like the editing. And then when it comes time to promote it or do a special edition or whatever, I enjoy that part. Finding whatever I’m going to use for the interior photos and stuff — just things like that. I enjoy each phase and I like switching it out.

Jo: I think that’s really good. Some people think this writer’s life is you write new words every single day and you manage your ads every single day. That seems to be what some people do, but that’s certainly not us, is it?

Sara: No. And that’s great if you want to do that. I just don’t want to. And I think we’ve come to the point now where each person can do this as they want. Hopefully people don’t feel the pressure to meet these self-imposed deadlines or parameters that don’t exist. There’s no rules for writing or publishing. You can do whatever you want.

***

I am definitely a seasonal creator, I don’t write every day. I never have. I binge write when a book emerges, or binge create. As I record this I am working on the treatment and trailer for what is now called Cathedral Zero, a positive futurist sci-fi feature film that I am entering in the FutureVision X Prize in the next week or so, and then I will move to the next project. I also love Kickstarter launches for this reason. They feel much more sustainable because it’s such a focused marketing push.

My Books and Travel Podcast is still on hiatus, but I may still resurrect that at some point. I still feel the pull of it. And of course, this show remains weekly, but the Wednesday shift will hopefully help keep it this way. I can’t see me going seasonal with this, but never say never! 

The main thing is to consider seasonality, or consider phased approaches to your work, rather than trying to do exactly the same thing week in week out. 

Roz Morris first came on this podcast in 2011, and in March 2026, in episode 853 we talked about her memoir, discovery writing, and slow, sustainable book marketing. Roz is an award-nominated literary author and former bestselling ghostwriter, an editor and I always appreciate her perspective as she has been doing this far longer than I have.

**** 

JOANNA: Do you still actively choose indie for a particular reason?

ROZ: I do. I really like building my own body of work, and I’m now experienced enough to know what I do well, what I need advice with, and help with. I mean, we don’t do all this completely by ourselves, do we? We bring in experts who will give us the right feedback if we’re doing a new genre or a genre that’s new to us.

I choose indie because I like the control. Because I began in traditional publishing—I was making books for other people—I just learned all the trades and how to do everything to a professional standard. I love being able to apply that to my own work.

I also love the way I can decide what I’m going to write next. If I was traditionally published, I would have to do something that fitted with whatever the publisher would want of me, and that isn’t necessarily where my muse is taking me or what I’ve become interested in.

I think creative humans evolve throughout their lives. They become interested in different things, different themes, different ways of expressing themselves. I began by thinking I would just write novels, and now I’ve found myself writing memoirs as well.

That shift would have been difficult if someone else was having to make me fit into their marketing plans or what their imprint was known for. But because I’ve built my own audience, I can just bring them with me and say, “You might like this. It’s still me. I’m just doing something different.”

**** 

Inspiring words from Roz there —

“It’s still me, I’m just doing something different.”

And indeed, I am a very different Jo from the new author who started this podcast back in March 2009. I have evolved and this show has evolved and this is not the end, it is a new phase. It’s funny because it’s just a shift of two days, but it also breaks a habit, for you listening and for me creating. It changes a time slot, and that itself can be a way to change energy, to change direction, to shift what matters and how we do things. 

So that’s what I want to leave you with today. A question around how shifting something, even something small, might make a big difference to your creative body of work, the quality of time you have for yourself or your family, and I’d love to know what you think about today’s episode and what we covered, as well as your thoughts on the Wednesday shift. 

Please leave a comment on the show notes, or the YouTube channel, or email me. I will see you next Wednesday, so happy writing and I’ll see you next time!

The post Why The Podcast Is Moving To Wednesdays, And 7 Tips for Sustainable Creativity first appeared on The Creative Penn.

What if the real secret to a lasting writing career isn’t talent or luck, but learning to thrive in the mess? Why are in-person events worthwhile even if the maths doesn’t add up? How do you protect your creativity when the machines never sleep and the community is at one another’s throats? With Mark Leslie Lefebvre

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

You can find Mark at MarkLeslie.ca.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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:

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—

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—

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.

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.

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.

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?

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

How can horror writing help readers — and writers — work through psychological trauma? Why does cross-genre fiction take longer to find an audience, but pay off in the long run? Is running a direct sales store actually worth the inventory, postage, and learning curve? And how can SubStack work for fiction authors? With psychotherapist and award-winning author P.D. Alleva.

More on writing horror: How To Write Horror, tips, interviews and resources in one place.

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

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

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—

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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—

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—

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.

How is AI transforming accessibility for indie authors — and why should you care even if you consider yourself able-bodied? What happens when the tools designed to help people with disabilities end up making everyone's creative business better? Jeff Adams, accessibility expert and romance author, explores how AI is opening doors that were previously closed.

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

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

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

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

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

Show Notes

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

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.

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—

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.

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.

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.

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.

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—

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.

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—

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—

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.

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—

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—

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:

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—

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.

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.

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.

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.