The Creative Penn

How can writing help you through difficult times, whether that's a change you didn't anticipate or an experience of grief? How can you differentiate between writing for yourself vs. writing for publication? Karen Wyatt gives her tips.

In the intro, Amazon opens up AI narration with Audible Virtual Voice on the KDP Dashboard [KDP Help]; Voice Technologies, Streaming And Subscription Audio In A Time Of Artificial Intelligence; Spotify announces short fiction publishing for indie authors [Spotify]; Audio for Authors: Audiobooks, Podcasting, and Voice Technologies — Joanna Penn; Writing for Audio First with Jules Horne; Writing for Audiobooks: Audio-first for Flow and Impact – Jules Horne. BookVault.app is now printing in Canada, as well as Australia, UK, and US.

Plus, Measure your life by what you create: 50 by 50; and Reykjavik Art, Northern Lights, and The West Fjords: Iceland, Land of Fire and Ice; Books and Travel Podcast returns this week; Writing the Shadow on the Biz Book Broadcast with Liz Scully; ElevenLabs speech to text for dictation.

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 

Dr. Karen Wyatt is a retired hospice physician and bestselling author of books about death, loss, and grief. She's also the host of the End-of-Life University Podcast and an inspirational speaker.

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 Karen at EOLuniversity.com.

Joanna: Dr. Karen Wyatt is a retired hospice physician and bestselling author of books about death, loss, and grief. She's also the host of the End-of-Life University Podcast and an inspirational speaker.

Today we're talking about her book, Stories from the Dark Night: Writing as a Tool for Grief. So welcome back to the show, Karen.

Karen: Thank you, Joanna. I'm so excited to be talking to you once again.

Joanna: Yes. Now, it's been a while, so first up—

Karen: Well, like so many of your guests that you interview here, I've always been interested in stories. I started writing stories when I was seven years old. I wrote a three act play when I was 10, which my school ended up producing. So I guess I could say I'm a published playwright, my one and only play.

I've always loved writing down my thoughts and ideas and telling stories and writing them down. I kind of got waylaid in terms of writing by becoming a doctor. So I had a number of years there of intense schooling, and then I was a doctor and a wife and mother at the same time.

I had very, very little time for writing. It was precious time if I ever could just sit down and jot down a little story that was in my head.

Still, the creative juices kept flowing, as I know you've talked about. Like, just ideas, ideas, ideas every day for stories or things I wanted to write, but I always had to put that aside. I was just too busy.

So I finally retired from medicine early, and I was a hospice physician for a number of years. I retired early so that I could write because I'd been gathering all these stories while I worked in hospice. Amazing, beautiful stories from patients I worked with. I just knew it's time for me now to shift into writing mode.

I retired early 15 years ago, and I started writing then. I hadn't really thought about what it takes to publish a book, I didn't know that. I finally started delving into that, and through you and your podcast, I learned about independent publishing.

I've been able to publish my books myself most of the time. Though, I worked once with a hybrid publisher and then most recently with Watkins Publishing from the UK.

Joanna: That's wonderful.

Just on being drawn to the darker side, I mean, obviously as a doctor, you could have gone into many different areas and ended up being a hospice physician, and—

You're writing about end of life. Has that always been an interest?

I mean, I guess I'm saying this from the perspective of someone, as you know, I have always thought about death. Like from a very young age, I remember thinking about death and dying. So it's always been on my mind. I wondered if that was true for you.

Karen: I did have some interest in death and dying. A classmate of mine died when we were 16 years old, and that kind of really woke me up to the idea that, oh, my goodness, everyone dies, and you could die at any age.

So I will say death has been on my thoughts since a young age.

Then early in my medical career, my father died by suicide, and I was really plunged into this whole world—and I call it my dark night of the soul, in a way—of grief after his death.

This is what led me into working for hospice because I realized, even though I had thought about death, I didn't really know anything about it. I didn't know anything about grief, even though I was a doctor. I hadn't had any training in that area.

So I started volunteering for hospice to help me understand what I was going through. What am I going through here as I'm grieving my father's death?

Ultimately, I shifted my whole career to hospice because I found it was just a rich, very spiritual, sacred place to be.

A sacred way to be a doctor with working with patients and families, and it was very powerful for me. So it was really grief itself that shifted my path as a doctor, initially.

Then, again, as I said, I started gathering so many stories and learning so many things about this process of loss and how we navigate it and cope with it in life. I really felt inspired to start writing and talking and teaching about it because at that time, it seemed like a very taboo subject. I think it still is, in many ways.

Joanna: It's so weird. You said there that as doctors, you didn't really get into the death side of things. It just seems so crazy to me because it happens to 100% of people, and it's like a physical process—obviously, much more than that.

Karen: It's so bizarre. I still can't wrap my head around why that is.

It's partly because modern medicine focuses so much on curing illness and saving lives that death has become the enemy. So we don't want to think about that or talk about that because we don't want it to happen for our patients.

It's ridiculous because it does happen. I think back to when a patient was approaching death in the hospital when we were in training, suddenly that patient was taken off our service.

We didn't follow them anymore because, well, they weren't a good teaching tool now because they're going to die. We'll move on to the patients that we can cure because that's what we're here to learn about.

It really doesn't make any sense, but it's part of why we have a problem with how we take care of people at the end of life. I think that's why I just felt inspired. I want to help do this differently, and that's why hospice was so appealing to me.

Joanna: And why books and writing and talking about these things are so important. As you say, there's a lot of taboo, and perhaps even more taboo around the way your father died.

Before we get into that, I just wanted us to talk about the word grief, because it feels like there are many forms of grief. It is not just if we are dying, or if our partner is dying, or our family is dying, or if someone is dying.

What are some of the other ways that grief might come up for people?

What might help them if they're feeling certain ways?

Karen: I think it is important for us to recognize that —

I had a mom tell me she grieved when her child no longer used baby language. Like started talking and saying words normally, and they lost all the cute little expressions that their toddler used to say.

When that was over with, she felt grief because it was a big change. Something shifted, and she lost something. So we can feel grief even in times of happiness, when good things are happening.

If you think about it, life is one series of loss and change after another. So it makes sense, in a way, grief is kind of an emotion that's always present for us if we really look at it.

Joanna: Is it a change that is out of our control, rather than something that we can control?

I'm thinking, personally, I feel like when I went through menopause, I felt a lot of grief over losing a sense of who I was as a younger woman, I guess.

Then I feel like a lot of anger, as we record this in 2025, there's a lot of political anger in different sides, and also anger around AI maybe taking people's jobs. All of these things are not choices that are made deliberately. They're things that are almost out of our control.

Karen: I think definitely. I mean, I think the way we cope with grief or navigate grief has a lot to do with control.

If we have any sense that I can control my surroundings, I can change what I need to change, that gives us a little bit more resilience and more ability to deal with the losses that we experience.

When it feels outside of our control and there's nothing we can do, I think that is the deeper form of grief that's very hard to manage.

As you said, because it's associated with a lot of anger. From the ego level, especially like anger, how is it that all of this can happen to me and I can't do anything about it?

Joanna: Well, let's come in to writing then. When these feelings overtake us and we really just don't know what we're doing—

Karen: Well, I think grief, as we already said, it can contain such a mixture of emotions. We typically think of grief as just being sadness over a loss, but as you pointed out, there's a lot of anger within grief, and guilt and regret, sometimes resentment. Sometimes there's even relief. There's sometimes a joy that's present within grief.

It's a very complex situation with lots of emotions bubbling up all at once, and yet, we don't know what to do with all of that emotion. So writing gives us a place to express it, to ventilate the emotion, and put it down on paper.

We sometimes hesitate to express verbally to other people all of these things that are going on with us, this mixture of emotion during grief, because other people don't necessarily understand it and may not want to listen to it.

We can just put it down on paper and validate ourselves that we're going through this difficult time.

It doesn't always make sense, but we can express it at least. So we can give voice to what otherwise can be hidden or repressed inside of us.

Joanna: So with your father, how did writing help you? Like was it just, “Oh, things are bad. I'm going to write this essay or this poem, and then suddenly I feel better.” Is that how it worked?

Karen: No, not at all.

Joanna: Obviously not!

Karen: I mean, I didn't even think of the idea of writing itself. I didn't even recognize that that could be therapeutic in some way.

At the time of my father's death, I happened to be reading Julia Cameron's book, The Artist's Way, where she talks about doing Morning Pages every day. I had been intrigued by that idea before of doing Morning Pages.

I found I was waking up early every morning. I couldn't sleep, dealing with this insomnia. I was actually really busy, as I was a mom and a wife and a doctor. I was so busy, I felt like I don't even have time to deal with grief or to deal with my emotions during the day. I'm just busy having to do all these things.

I would wake up at four in the morning and couldn't sleep, and I remembered Morning Pages. I started just getting up early every single morning and writing. Morning Pages, it's stream of consciousness writing, where you just write down anything that's in your head.

I didn't even know for sure that was all happening inside until I started writing the Morning Pages, and it was all coming out of me.

It gave me a place to just, as I said, to ventilate and release those emotions. It actually became a place where I was processing grief without even realizing it, every morning, writing those three pages of stream of consciousness.

So that's how I began with that type of writing, and I highly recommend it. I don't know if you've ever done it. I'm sure you've read the book, The Artist's Way.

Joanna: Oh, yes. I've always kind of been a journaller, but I don't do Morning Pages like every day.

When I got divorced, my first husband left me, so it was out of my control. It was not my choice. The three journals that I have from that time are full of—and it's so repetitive. You know, there's no point in me reading it back. Maybe it's the same with you.

It's like that is just raw emotion that every single day sounds exactly the same. There is this period where that just happens.

Karen: No. There's so much of it inside of us that needs to come out. That's what I find, that I'm writing the same thing every day.

Julia Cameron mentions about writing these Morning Pages, it helps us eventually get out of our logic brain. Which, in grief, the logic brain, she calls it, is always trying to figure out why this happened. It's always trying to figure out an explanation. It needs an answer for all the questions.

Once you can move past the logic brain, you actually awaken the creative side of your brain, which can start to express things more in symbols and stories start coming alive.

The creative brain is actually figuring out, oh, this grief experience, this is interesting. How can I use that in a creative way to make something else?

I think, for me, when I felt that shift happen, that's when I started to move into a more productive aspect of working through my grief. That's when I was really able to start processing it better and get past all these ruminating thoughts that just came over and over again.

Joanna: I think that's what's interesting in your Stories from the Dark Night. It isn't just that stream of consciousness grief. In fact, it's not that at all. There's all kinds of different sorts of writing.

Karen: Well, I started writing whatever came to me, and I guess the Morning Pages opened that up a little bit. After doing that for months and months, one day a poem came into my head, and I just wrote it down, and it happened to be about my dad's death.

Another day, a story came to mind that I wrote about. It seemed that everything I started writing, even though I didn't think it was related to my dad's death, ended up being about my dad's death in some way or another, symbolically or in some way or another.

Gradually, I just started having these creative impulses to write some little thing. I would write down whatever came to me. I was still doing the Morning Pages every day, but at other times of day, something else would pop up for me.

I would write a story, or sometimes it was an essay. Sometimes I read a guided writing prompt that actually really helped me dive deeper into a subject. Some of the prompts were as simple as someone said, “Write something about the word ‘leftovers' and what that means to you.”

I'd think of the word leftovers, like how is that inspirational? And yet, I ended up writing a whole piece on leftovers. It was just being able to get into that creative part of my brain and writing whatever came to me.

I also then went on to more intentional writing. So I started writing letters to my dad and expressing some things that I didn't get a chance to say before he died, expressing some of the deeper emotions that I felt around his death. That was very therapeutic as well.

Joanna: On therapy, I think this is really interesting, because when my husband left—I'm very happily married people, if you're listening now, I am on my second marriage—but at that time, I didn't see a therapist. Even though we're doing a podcast, I'm not a talker. I didn't want to talk about my issues.

Writing it down, I feel like writing all of that over the years it was, really, and sort of recovering, helped me heal. So I didn't need a therapist, in some way.

Karen: I'm much like you. I'm not much of a talker. I'm not always wanting talk with another person or looking for that kind of external help. I'm much more internally oriented. So I want to dive into my own psyche. I want to look at that. I want to explore it for myself.

I think for certain, whenever someone feels like they are just stuck and not getting anywhere and beginning to have very hurtful thoughts going through their minds, or thoughts of feeling hopeless and that they may never be able to move forward, never be able to find a way through the grief. Then they might need an outside person who can come and help them reflect.

For me, it's like my journal felt like a therapist to me. I guess I was, in some ways, dialoguing with my higher self in the journal and serving as my own therapist.

I could read back through what I wrote and see, oh, here's something I hadn't thought about before, but it's right there in what I just wrote. So this insight is there for me, but some people may not be able to do that.

They may not be able to access that higher wisdom or a different perspective through writing alone. They may really benefit from talking to someone else. So I always encourage people to seek out counseling, find a therapist, especially if talking is beneficial for them.

Joanna: I think the other thing there is—I mean, you mentioned insomnia earlier—and I do feel like there is a period of grief that is closer to mental illness, which insomnia doesn't help, obviously.

At one point, I think, in the DSM, grief was actually a mental illness, considered to be very bad, but then it was recognized as a part of the human condition.

So I guess, just to encourage people, if you're feeling like it is completely, completely mad, then sometimes that is normal. It's just a case of how long that goes on for. I guess, a bit like insomnia. You have to get that sorted out at some point.

Karen: Yes, because at some point it becomes destructive to your physical health.

It's funny, grief reentered the DSM this past year. They created a new category, pathological grief, that they defined so that they could include severe grief.

I think they realized, first of all, it was a mistake to say any kind of grief is a mental illness because it is actually a normal part of all of our lives.

Then when they took it out, they realized, oh, but wait, some people actually do get into a severe state of grief for which they need help. They may need medications, they may need therapy and counseling. So they made up a new diagnosis and put that back in.

Joanna: I'm glad you brought that up then, because I thought it had gone, and now it's back. So, of course there is a difference.

I think also some religious traditions, there are periods of time and ways of addressing mourning and death. Where it's like for a certain amount of time you are expected to grieve, and then at a certain point of time you are expected to—not forget it all—but to move on with your life.

It's almost like those rituals of death and dying can help. In fact, you're a spiritual person, and you do put a Matthew chapter five, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted,” into your book.

Karen: It has been important to me, and it's one of the things I gained through my work, or deepened through my work in hospice.

Observing people and families who were dealing with death in general, and how they all grappled with these universal concepts that I would say are not limited to any one religion, but actually present in all religions. Love and forgiveness and finding meaning and purpose in things.

So I gravitated toward these spiritual concepts that, again, I'm not attached to any one religion, but I like the spiritual teachings and the concepts that are universal and apply to all of them.

So those ended up being the things where I found the most comfort is being able to focus on love and just bringing more love into my life. Acting with love, through love, and finding ways to love myself even though I was feeling broken and in pain.

Then forgiveness became especially powerful as well because I realized one thing that held me back in grieving my dad was not being able to recognize how angry I was at him and that I needed to forgive him for the choice he made to end his life.

I was in denial of that for many years, and when I finally saw it like, oh, I'm hanging on to this really deep seated resentment toward him for the choice he made. I have to be able to forgive him, because for whatever reason, that's what he chose, and that's what his life came to. I'm hurting myself by not forgiving him.

So that spiritual concept of forgiveness really changed everything for me. I work with that all the time now, remembering like, oh, don't hold on to grudges. Don't be resentful. Just get over it. Just find a way to forgive because holding on to that kind of anger can be really toxic.

Joanna: Well, that is the other side of anger, isn't it? Anger is such a huge part of death and dying, no matter which side of it you're on. It's something I think about a lot.

There's so much anger at the moment in the world, and I feel like some kind of forgiveness is so important because it is just so toxic when everything is angry all the time. I guess you would have seen that idea of a good death, where—

Karen: Yes, and I think the anger is normal and it has a place, so we need to accept it and embrace it. Yes, of course, we feel angry. Life didn't go the way we hoped it would, like we've lost all these things, but it doesn't serve us to stay stuck there if we can hold our anger, and then see a bigger picture beyond that.

I guess that's the other thing, the spiritual perspective, for me, has become what I call it —

How does this experience I'm having fit into the cosmos, into everything that's happening here? How do I accept it as this is just part of life, of this vast mystery of life?

I choose to move into curiosity sometimes, instead of anger. Like instead of doubling down and being angry about what's happening, being curious about how did this arise, and what will come of it. What will happen next? What will come from it?

Then that puts me back into creative brain again.

Joanna: So we've talked a lot, I guess, about the writing we do for the self. You can put whatever you like in your journal, and it can be as repetitive as hell, and frankly, quite boring for anyone else to read.

Then, obviously, you've published several books about death, and Stories From the Dark Night has personal writing, but it is not that repetitive original work, I guess. It's different. It's been transformed.

So if people want to publish, obviously people listening are authors, how did you know when you were ready to share some of your writing about your dad and things that were difficult?

Karen: For me, I understood that I couldn't share this writing until I had clarity around it.

I needed to be free of anger and blame. I understood a lot of the things I was writing early on were filled with those mixed emotions, but just ventilating anger and blaming other people, blaming everyone, blaming life.

I realized that is not productive. I'm ventilating it. It's helpful to me to ventilate it. It's not productive for other people to read that. I want to get to that place of this higher view, where I'm not looking at it through the lens of anger or blame, I'm looking at it really more through the lens of love.

How could talking about the pain that I experienced, is there a way that could be helpful to other people? How can I express that in a way that could foster healing and growth for someone else?

That took me years to get to a place where I felt like I'm not writing out of anger. I'm not writing because I want to use my writing to hurt someone. If that makes sense to you, that's what I needed to get past. Making sure I had healed enough and I had enough clarity that I had the right reasons for putting my work out there.

Then I chose very carefully what to share. There are lots of things I didn't share.

In that book, I was trying to share examples of what I wrote. Not that the writing itself is great, but I wanted to share examples of different ways that I wrote that ended up helping with my grief, different stories or essays or poems that I wrote that were helpful to me, just to inspire other people to do their own writing.

Joanna: There are writing prompts within the book in each chapter. So, I guess the main focus is — 

Karen: Yes, that's primarily what I was feeling. How will this impact others? Can it be a positive thing, if I share it, that could inspire someone else and make them want to do their own writing and do their own work?

Joanna: So also in the book, you talk about lifelines, and I thought it was a great term. So what do you mean by that, and—

Karen: For me, when I was really deep in grief, I had this image of being caught up in a tsunami, in a sense. Just like these massive head waves, like rushing over me and feeling like I was drowning at times, but somehow I would always come to the surface.

There was always something I could hold onto, just some little thing, like someone had thrown me a rope. It was keeping me afloat, and it was helping me find my way back to the shore.

Instead of getting lost and thinking about, “oh, I'm so overwhelmed with grief,” to thinking, “oh, what was it yesterday that helped me get through?” Then I would remember, oh, I heard that amazing song on the radio, and that reminded me of something Dad and I did together.

Or I would find something. I found just a little note that my dad wrote to me when I was in college. I found it in a box somewhere, and seeing his handwriting, it was so touching to me. It actually brought me joy. That little moment was like one of those lifelines.

I started just paying attention to all kinds of things that were happening. Oh, and another thing was a bird song. My dad loved the Meadow Lark. We grew up in Wyoming, and it's the state bird of Wyoming. I would, from time to time, I would see a Meadow Lark or hear a Meadow Lark sing.

I started watching for those little things, those little, tiny things. I'd be paying attention to the bird song, and I'd hear the Meadow Lark, and that was one of my life lines. Like, oh, there's dad. There's a connection with my dad.

When I started searching for the lifelines every day and just noticing and paying attention, every day there was something. Every day there was some kind of reminder that helped me feel connected to him.

Those little things I felt like were just enough to keep me afloat, when it seemed like, “Oh no, here comes the wave again. It's going to wash me under,” but I would know there will be something. There'll be something I can hang on to that will help me get afloat again.

Joanna: It's interesting because, of course, specifics, like the sound of the Meadow Lark, are what also bring our writing alive. So it's not just bird song. You know, I heard a bird sing. It's always the specifics and paying attention. I guess, again, that gives you an external.

Which can, again, just help you keep going.

Karen: Yes, definitely. Looking for all the little symbols and little signs outside of myself that reminded me of dad, sometimes even in a painful way. Oftentimes it was just poignant and sweet, the little reminders I would find.

My dad sometimes smoked a pipe with this cherry-scented tobacco in it, and the smoke always smelled like cherries. One day I smelled that. Someone was smoking a pipe with that scent, and I smelled it, and it was like, wow. It was amazing being transported, in a way, back into my childhood and being next to my dad.

It's incredible when I started paying attention just how many little reminders there were. For me, they were always very positive. Some people describe that they don't like having reminders because it makes them feel sadness over again, but for me, I always felt a mixture. I always felt the sweetness as well.

Joanna: Yes, that bittersweet, I think is the word. What about your family and other people who knew your dad?

So what are your thoughts on that? Did other people read it?

Was that not a concern? What are your recommendations for people?

Karen: When I started writing about it, the thing I was most concerned was my mother and how she would feel about it. Initially, I told my mom I had written some stories and they have to do with my dad's death.

She said to me, “I don't want to read them. Don't tell me anything about it. I don't want any of that. Don't talk about it or tell me anything.”

Then I was really worried, like, oh no, if this is out in the world and other people comment to her, or other people read it, it will be upsetting to her. Then the very next day, she called me, and she said, “Read the story to me.” So she had to get to a place of comfort.

For me, it was a real dilemma. Do I put this out in the world if my mom can't bear it, can't bear that this information is out there? So I read her the story, and the story was just my story of my experience.

That's what I told her. I'm not writing about what I think my dad experienced. I'm writing about my experience with grief when I found out my dad died and what that was like.

So I really did keep it true and honest to my own experience, without trying too much to conjecture on what my dad felt, or what anyone else felt, or anyone else's actions at that time.

Anyway, I read the story to her. We cried together. She loved it. It was actually this incredibly positive healing moment for the two of us because we hadn't been able to speak so deeply about our grief together in all these many years since my dad had died. That story is what unlocked it for us.

Joanna: Oh, that's wonderful. Sometimes it can be a way to bring you together. I mean, again, we both said we're not really talkers. I sometimes feel like I wish my family could read my books, or would be interested in reading my books, so they might understand how I feel.

It's funny because I used to write a lot of letters, like up until a decade ago, or maybe two decades ago now with email—gosh, time flies.

I used to write so many letters in my teens, and then when I was backpacking in the early 2000s. I feel like maybe that's something we don't do so much anymore.

Karen: Yes, that's so true. Like you, I think talking is difficult sometimes. To talk together about a painful subject, it's sometimes really hard to find the words. We're in our left brain all the time try, and we're censoring ourselves constantly when we're trying to talk.

Again, for me, it's like I described before, I waited a long time before writing the story and then sharing that story. It was until I knew I did not write this to try to hurt someone, to try to blame my mom or hurt her, or my brother, or cause them any pain.

I made sure what I was writing felt pure to me. So I think that's why it had a positive impact for her.

Joanna: Well, we say we would rather write, but we both have podcasts, and as we come towards the end, I wanted to just ask about your End of Life University Podcast, which I've been on. So tell people about that and—

Karen: I started the podcast after publishing my first book, 7 Lessons for Living from the Dying, and realizing nobody really wants to buy a book about dying. People don't talk about this. Nobody wants to hear about it.

I realized it's not enough to write a book, I have to do something else to try to change this conversation around these topics. So I got the idea then. I started listening to podcasts myself, and thought there needs to be a podcast on this subject.

So I started doing interviews, and I discovered your podcast shortly after that. I loved your style. I love the fact that you have a more eclectic podcast, that you go in lots of different directions, and you're just interested in everything. So you have lots of different guests, a variety of guests with a variety of topics.

I decided that's what I'm interested in, too. So I kind of modeled my podcast after yours. Inviting lots of different guests and having different types of conversations, thinking whatever we put out there should be helpful to someone.

The more people are able to hear conversations about difficult topics, the more comfortable they may get with having these conversations themselves. So I've been doing it for, well, I actually started in 2013 with my first interviews back then. So it's been a while, like you. Not as long as you have been, but a while.

Joanna: That's amazing. You do have so many different interesting topics and angles and different kinds of people. So has the reception been what you wanted?

I mean, you've obviously been doing it for so long, it's still of value to you and your community.

Karen: Yes. I don't really even know what I expected in the beginning. At first, I only attracted people who already worked for hospice, people who were already in the field and already had an interest.

I've received some amazing feedback and wonderful stories from people.

One young man told me a friend of his was dying, and he drove across the country to be with his friend. He listened to the podcast all the way there in the car so that he would understand death and dying and grief. He said it made all the difference.

He said, “I came to his bedside and I knew what to say, and I knew how to be with him and how to be comfortable with my own pain and grief because of all the interviews I heard.”

It was like, oh, wow, that's why I'm doing this. That's why I'm doing this, so — 

So when I get feedback like that, it tells me, okay, this is why I'm doing it. It keeps me going, really, because it's actually hard doing a podcast. It's such hard work.

Joanna: Wow, you gave me goosebumps there. I know people listening will be affected by that because every single person is going to be affected by grief at some point. Whether it's ourselves or other people, it's going to happen. So I absolutely recommend your podcast and your books.

Karen: If they go to the website, it's EOLuniversity.com. EOL stands for end of life, but EOLuniversity.com. A link to the podcast is there, and to my books, and pretty much everything they need to know about me.

Joanna: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Karen. That was great.

Karen: Thank you, Joanna. I've really enjoyed it.

The post Writing As A Tool For Grief And Dealing With Change With Karen Wyatt first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How can you release more creativity into your writing — and your life? What are some practices to foster creativity in a time of change and overwhelm? Jacob Nordby gives his tips.

In the intro, tips for spring cleaning as indie authors; Death Valley – A Thriller Kickstarter; Death Valley book trailer; Footprints Podcast – Bath in Literature;

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 

Jacob Nordby is an entrepreneur and author of several books, including The Creative Cure: How Finding and Freeing Your Inner Artist Can Heal Your Life.

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 Jacob at JacobNordby.com.

Joanna: Jacob Nordby is an entrepreneur and author of several books, including The Creative Cure: How Finding and Freeing Your Inner Artist Can Heal Your Life. So welcome to the show, Jacob.

Jacob: Thank you so much. I'm so glad to be here, Jo.

Joanna: I'm excited to talk to you. So first up—

Jacob: Well, I was born … We won't start there! When I was 10 years old, I came out into the living room, and I'd been reading a book, which I did mostly. We didn't watch television or see movies or anything like that. So books were my very best friends.

So I came out of the living room and told my parents that I want to be a writer. Of course, I had told them before I wanted to be a spy or firefighter or something. This was the first thing that really hit for me, and I could really feel it.

Then fast forward into adulthood, and I promptly forgot that, and plunged into starting businesses and really trying to secure my place in the American dream. I woke up around age 35 realizing that this was all feeling very hollow.

After a series of events that turned my world upside down, I moved to Austin, Texas. It was there, working two or three part time jobs and trying to figure out what was next, that I remembered that I really wanted to be a writer. So I began to write about 15 years ago.

Joanna: Yes, absolutely.

Jacob: Okay, well, I was sitting in this warehouse and was writing away and began to go back into this book my father had given me, The Artist's Way. It really broke me open. I longed, at some point, to be able to share the process of not just writing, but of discovering who we really are and expressing that.

Fast forward about five or six more years from there, and I had the great pleasure of meeting Julia, and she's become a dear friend. So that's one aspect of the work I do, is I work with her and share these things.

Also, in my own world, I hold workshops and do one-on-one work with people, guidance work, with both writers and non-writers. It's just something I love because —

Often, when people will show up saying, “I'm creatively blocked,” we will pull that thread a bit and discover it's not just “creatively blocked.” I'm doing my air quotes fingers right now. It's feeling blocked in life.

So, often as we work through what are some channels in life that need to be opened up, they discover maybe it was “I need to clean my garage.”

Then they go clean the garage and come back in two weeks and say, “Oh my goodness, I had no idea how much I was boxing up my emotions, my sense of possibility, and everything. I found old boxes from my divorce or from when my mother died. I went through there, and all of a sudden I feel emotionally open and able to express again.”

So I love working with people in so many ways and helping them realize that expression is meant to be as natural as breathing for the creative spirit.

Joanna: Well, let's get into the book then, because it's called The Creative Cure. I find this an interesting title because the word “cure” implies a sickness where we start from. So I guess you mentioned feeling blocked there.

Jacob: You know, it's interesting. I wrote a previous book called Blessed Are the Weird, and that was this very direct sort of manifesto for creatives. I was surprised how many people showed up and raised their hands and said, “I'm one of this group,” whatever this group is.

There were a lot of other people, Jo, who would tell me, “I'm not that creative. In fact, I don't know if I have a creative bone in my body.” My heart just said we need to change this idea, what the idea of creativity has become.

In a lot of cases, I feel like it's been affected by the industrial era of production and distribution, which are wonderful things.

A lot of artists find themselves stuck because they can't see how what they have to create and share will ever become widely viable in that way.

So, cure. Here's what I feel very deeply about our creative spirit is that it can't be broken or damaged, but the process of becoming adults in the modern world often fills the connection between who we are out there and our true inner creative self with static. So, for me —

I feel like we are all susceptible to it in some way. Our attention spans are fractured. We have a rate of change that is, I feel, really unsustainable for the human psyche to absorb in our lifetimes.

In this era, we've absorbed more change than previous generations might in two or three generations. So I feel like a lot of us can feel hurried and frantic and just out of sorts, and that will become evident in our creative work.

So, for me, it's not so much curing the true person. It's looking at what practices can I bring in that will strengthen and revitalize that connection.

Joanna: Yes, I get you on the pace of change. On the day we're recording this, just yesterday, Microsoft announced this new quantum state of matter. I was like, seriously, haven't we got enough going on? Do we need something else again? So it does definitely feel like that.

So you mentioned there's some things that can help us maybe break through that static to fix that connection with our creativity if we're feeling like we've lost it. I like the word static, actually. I think sometimes it really does feel like that, just a bit disconnected.

Jacob: One thing that I love to recommend as a starting point is a ritual. Ritual can sound kind of mystical or complicated. To me, it's really a state of awareness. So let's just say we make our cup of coffee in the morning and run out the door and gulp it as we drive, that's one way.

Another way would be to slow down and say, “I am creating this cup of coffee,” and bring all of our attention and intention into the process of it, which changes our experience of it.

I love to invite people who are sitting down to write to create some version of a ritual, so they realize they are entering a different state of awareness. Our awareness is so yanked in different directions. We jump on social media, and we see distressing things.

We see all these things coming around, and we often don't realize that we take that fractured or static-filled state of being or awareness into what we're doing, which means that we're not really allowing the pure stuff to come through as easily. It can feel harder.

So I love creating these personal rituals. Whether it's as simple as lighting a candle, it can be almost anything. The real keys here are the attention and intention that I bring.

It's an interesting shift, like to invite ourselves in there and notice that, oh, in this space, I feel quite different.

I feel I have access to different ideas, a different way of expressing.

I'll just use this morning as an example. I woke up, and it's really cold here in Northern USA. It's gray outside, and I wasn't feeling particularly inspired. So I went to my favorite little coffee shop with my journal, and this will be another practice I'll talk about in a moment, but asked myself to enter a different state of awareness.

So, for me, one item is creating these small rituals that help us intentionally shift into a different state of mind.

Jacob: Well, you're aware of The Artist's Way and Morning Pages, and that's where I started with that, really in earnest. I also realized that many people don't find a whole lot of value in just long form, sort of dumping it out on paper. I do. I'm a writer. That's one of my favorite ways of expressing and exploring.

So over time, I developed a set of three questions, and I've shared this. When I first created this years ago, Jo, I put it out and was pretty sure it was way too basic and didn't have a lot of value.

Then I had people get a hold of me. Therapists were saying, “Oh, my goodness. My clients are journaling for the first time using this practice.”

I'll come back to that. The second one is, “What do I need right now?” The third one is, “What would I love to create right now?”

If I'm going through a lot of emotional turbulence or something, I'll often switch that question up a bit and say, “How would I love to feel right now?”

So going back to that first question and the second, early in life, many of us internalize the messages that our needs don't matter and our feelings don't matter. In fact, how many of us have been told you can't trust your feelings?

So by asking these questions and really grounding them, really coming into the moment, how do I feel right now? Oh, I feel grouchy and tired. I feel uninspired. Or, I feel great. Whatever it might be.

The fact is, we send a signal to our psyche by asking that question and answering it that says, “I matter. My feelings matter.” Then we move on to the, “What do I need right now?”

Again, often it's prosaic for me, “Oh, I'm thirsty. I need to get a drink of water.” “Oh, I'm tired. I should take a small nap.”

Or it might be something larger or more existential, but in any case, again, it sends that message to the inner self saying, “I matter.” There's something wonderfully calming about that, is what I've discovered, Jo.

Joanna: I wonder if that's also grounding in the physical body. I mean, I walk a lot, so if I need to ground myself, I often will go for a walk out in nature, and that really helps. Or I do lifting, lifting heavy objects, powerlifting. Again, anything that grounds me in my physical body actually takes me away from the screen.

Most of what stresses us is beyond the screen and isn't happening right now, I guess. Do you have those practices around grounding in the physical body?

Jacob: Oh, yes. I love that you mentioned walking. That's one of my favorite practices. I also teach, and use as often as I can, just really simple breathing techniques, like box breathing. Often, to your point, I find that —

So, yes, I feel like these things can be incredibly simple. I do love going to the gym and lifting heavy things as well.

The walk thing, you know, if I can just put my phone in my back pocket or leave it home, which, frankly, I don't really do very often, but go out and take a walk. Things change. There's this bilateral stimulation that's happening when we're walking. It's almost like an EMDR effect, if you want to put it that way.

I've found that walking can often help us process deeply and open things up. I can't tell you the number of times I've taken a long walk and come back with the solution to some challenge I was having in my writing work that day. I would love to hear if you've had those experiences too.

Joanna: Oh, absolutely. It's one of my go-tos. I walk every day. I live in Bath in the UK. It's a very walkable city, and I live near a canal. So I walk an awful lot. I've done pilgrimages and all of this. So walking, for me, is like a core thing for mental health and physical health and creativity.

As you say, sometimes you just go for a walk and you come back—and, I mean, I take my phone too, for writing all the notes down that come up as I walk. So, yes, I think that's important.

I do want to come back on the journaling because, and this is very interesting, you mentioned earlier about this industrial era, production and distribution. Keep in mind that I'm a professional author. I write books for a living, and many of the listeners, we write books.

Let's say we have half an hour to write, the feeling is, “I must be writing words for my book.” Whatever that book is, and there's always another book, right?

Jacob: I love that. I want to be very clear that I'm not throwing rocks at the industrial era. Civilization has really benefited from so many things that have happened there. I think that sometimes, especially people who are just getting started as writers, they can feel all this pressure.

You know, Jo, you've written many, many books and bestsellers, and just had that experience. So that's such a different thing than most people have who are just getting started. I think there can be this intense focus on, “How do I write a best seller?” So that can often become its own block.

Back to the journaling piece, I think that a lot of times people conflate those. It's like, well, if I'm going to write, then I need to write on my project, and journaling feels like writing.

So it's a practice, but it's not the same as what we're doing when we sit down to write. In fact, I would challenge anyone who is feeling a little creatively blocked but also doesn't feel like journaling would have much value, I would suggest trying it for a week.

Spend 10 minutes, just 10 minutes. It's 10 minutes a day, writing out—using my three questions is fine, or anything else—but just writing out, “This is what's up for me. What is coming up for me? Okay, this is what's up. This is what's really bothering me.”

So often, I find when I sit down to do that, as I pull what looks like a very small dangling thread, it leads to much deeper things that are going on in my life. The act of acknowledging those things does something freeing. It opens up the channel.

So when I sit down to write, I'm no longer also trying to multitask by having three different conversations with people I'm having difficulty with in my head, or sorting out my taxes in my head, or whatever. There's something really wonderful about putting it on the page and acknowledging it.

I think that there are parts of the psyche that come forward and say, because you paid attention, and we know that you're going to pay attention to this as needed, now we'll relax. We had to get your attention. Now we have your attention. You've acknowledged it.

Now we'll relax so you can go on and do these other things that are important to you. I find that to be tremendously valuable, versus just trying to power through with all these prose flying around my head.

Joanna: Yes, I think for me, it's just that it is a completely different thing. I feel like the issue is people think writing is writing, but it's not. I call myself a binge journaler, and this is one of my issues with Morning Pages, is that kind of “it must be every day.”

Of course, we don't like shoulds and shouldn't, so we'll come back to that.

Then it might be three weeks or something until I feel that need again.

In the meantime, I do my job, which is writing words for publication, which is like a completely different thing. So is it just the feelings that we have and learning to tap into where are those feelings going?

Is it a “making up a story” kind of feeling, or is it an “I really need to sort out my life” kind of feeling?

Jacob: I really love that distinction, and I'm glad you brought it up because I don't believe in dogma either, so shoulds and shouldn'ts. I really love that you're so in touch with your intuition or your feelings, that you're able to go, “Oh, I need a different version of this today.” I feel like that's really wise.

Joanna: Oh, that's very kind. Well, you mentioned intuition there, and you do talk about intuition and also joy around our writing in the book.

Jacob: I would love to hear your definitions of intuition. When you hear that word, and not just the straight up definition, but any connotations, like what comes up for you when you hear that word?

Joanna: I guess we're coming back to feelings again. I just sense that I should do something. I am an intuitive writer, so I don't plot, necessarily. I write the next book with whatever kind of comes up for me. So it's just sort of tapping into what my creative self wants to do, I guess.

Jacob: I love that, and I didn't expect a lot different. I was just curious. Some people have a pretty negative connotation, or feel a negative connotation, in that word. They feel like it's really mystical. They feel like, oh, it's just sort of woo or out there. I would suggest it's extremely grounded.

I mean, I think you articulated it really well. You know, this is the feeling of this thing.

I have a friend who's a neuropsychologist, and he wrote a great book called No Self, No Problem. We were having this wonderful conversation one day, actually, while I was writing The Creative Cure.

I said, “Well, Chris, it feels like what you're saying is in our modern world, it's almost as if we've told a body builder to only work out the muscles on the left side of their body. Like that's the only thing that has value. Don't even bother with the right side. Then after 20 years of following that advice, the body builder has a hard time even walking down the road because there's no functional balance or muscle.”

He got all excited. He said, “Oh, yes. That's exactly what I'm saying.” I think we have to be aware that in our current paradigm, the left brain activities are so highly valued and rewarded that we tend to distrust what's happening in the right side.

This includes our experience of creativity in a more free flowing way. It includes experience of intuition, of feelings, of imagination.

So, for me, it's never the idea that we need to get rid of the left brain activity. It's like we really need those to finish a book, to put it out there, to take these steps forward, but we've over emphasized it. So what I like to encourage us to do is play little games.

We don't have to attach any particular meeting to them. If you see repeating numbers, or you're driving down the road and you just have this nudge to take this road versus the other road on your way to your destination.

I like to just play with it without going, okay, I'm going to have some miraculous thing, or an epiphany, or something dramatic is going to happen, or I've just avoided a horrible death. It doesn't have to be anything dramatic like that.

Just the noticing of the interoception, the signals that are coming up from our bodies and from our other senses, and tuning into them a little bit more. We can find that there is very interesting guidance available to us at all times. People can interpret that mystically, or people can be very practical with it.

There's some brain science here, where when we settle down from our fight or flight response, from our higher anxiety levels, we enter that ventral vagal state, Jo, and that's where all the good stuff happens.

I love to call it the Green Zone, or the creative zone, because as we settle more deeply, we become more aware. Our tunnel vision begins to fade, and we become aware of the answers and the ideas that are all around us.

So I love to invite people to play with it and actually really use it as a game, so it doesn't have to feel so serious. Like, what am I feeling right now? If I totally listen to my body and to my senses, what would I do this morning for breakfast versus what I always do, for example. Again, it can be very simple.

Joanna: I feel like maybe people have a problem with trust and are afraid of getting something wrong.

What if I spend the next six months working on this book, and then nobody wants it? Or what if I choose to spend some money on this particular marketing thing, and then it just doesn't work?

This fear of making a choice based on intuition, it holds people back. What are your thoughts on that?

Jacob: If you don't mind, I'd love to ask a question in response. I'm curious if you can think back over your career, or just general life, and think about a time you did make a mistake?

Something you look back on later, and were like, “Oh, I would never have done that again,” but that it actually led you into experiences that actually became very important parts of your life. Can you think of anything like that?

Joanna: Yes, well, obviously there's lots of them because we all make tons of mistakes.

I mean, the big one that I often talk about is back before print on demand, I did a massive print run. Back in 2007, I did a big print run of my first book, and then they all sat in my garage because I didn't know anything about book marketing.

I didn't realize that if you wrote a book, nobody would buy it unless you did some marketing. So that actually led me to start The Creative Penn, to start this podcast, to learn about book marketing. What really sort of jump started my career was this massive failure. So, yes, absolutely.

I mean, we all do these things, don't we? But—

Jacob: Always. I mean, I don't know if there's one other factor that holds us back more than simple fear. I feel like it's very primal. We have this wiring that includes a negativity bias, and that's such a survival thing. It serves us, right, so there's nothing wrong with it. I think we just have to be aware of it.

Our imaginations are tuned, and often from a very early age, to begin imagining scenes in which we are experiencing rejection or failure or something painful, disappointment, and so we often use our imaginations primarily for that cause.

So I love to invite people to begin just taking a recess, even if it's only five minutes, and imagining themselves in scenes of what they would really love to experience.

I just love the story you just told. I know that it's completely like imaginary, but I'm just curious, if you hadn't printed all those books and had to learn how to market, and perhaps got picked up by a different publisher, and everything just kind of went swimmingly, I'm just curious what you wouldn't be enjoying in your life right now. Can you imagine what that might be?

Joanna: What I wouldn't be enjoying?

Jacob: Like you have such beautiful work in this podcast, and all that you do, and the way you serve and teach the writing community. So I'm just curious, if things had worked out better, you know, like a garage not full of your books, I'm just curious what you wouldn't have now if you hadn't made that mistake.

Joanna: Well, I think what happened was because of that failure in print publishing at that time in history, it just also coincided. You used the word synchronicity earlier, and I know Jungian psychology, so I absolutely love synchronicity.

It was the same year that the Kindle launched and the iPhone launched, and when I failed in this print publishing, traditional media, you know, I got on national TV—I was in Australia at the time—but then none of it worked.

I can reach these people through digital means.

So I got on the Kindle, and the iPhone, and podcasting very, very early, and have kind of surfed that technological wave since then. So that “mistake” led me into so much. But you keep putting this back on me, Jacob—

I think you need to tell us about one of your mistakes that has turned into success.

Jacob: Oh, my god. Well, you know, I alluded to it earlier, but I had built these businesses, and I was waking up at 3am every day absolutely terrified. Everyone around me, all they saw was this big new office I had built. All they saw was the influence I had around town or whatever.

That was around 2007, actually. So I had a pretty big breakthrough. I went to what I thought was a meditation retreat. It turned out to be a shamanic initiation, and I didn't know what a shaman was.

I had a medicine journey during that that was like this massive moment of clarity, and I had no idea what to do with it. I went back to my life, to my office, and scrambled as hard as I could.

All I knew is that I had experienced some aspect of me that was free, that wasn't afraid, and that would actually love to have created something very different with life. I also had no idea how to rearrange my life. I just I felt so responsible.

The next year or so, the financial meltdown, the mortgage meltdown, came along and just wiped me out. So, of course, I don't like to sugar coat these things and go, “Oh, you know, everything happens for a reason, and it was exactly what I needed.”

It's like, no, it was absolutely terrifying and turned me upside down, but that was the event. I could look back and say, “Oh, I made so many mistakes. I got in so far too deep into these projects and all that.”

The truth is, though, that experience—and I love that you're familiar with Jungian work—that's where I began to really learn about the Jungian work during that time, Jo, and that was what really cracked me open and allowed me to find out who I was under all those previous layers.

It was like I was wearing this really heavy, ill-fitting armor for so long, and so that was one of those really big “mistakes” that led to me finding the path I was really meant to be on in the first place.

Joanna: That's interesting. I think we might be like almost exactly the same age. I think we've gone through things at exactly the same time.

Time is a really important thing here because both of us are talking about experiences. I also got laid off in the financial crisis, and it took a lot of time, but that also shaped the way I run my business now.

So let's just talk about the perspective of time because it feels like both of us have said, “Oh, this really bad thing happened, and then I changed my life.” How long did it take you to extricate yourself from the situation you were in and be in a life where you were more happy and fulfilled? Not that we're ever completely there.

I feel like that's what people need, is this sort of perspective on—

Jacob: Do you want me to give a comfortable story, or do you want me to tell what I feel is the truth?

Joanna: The truth, absolutely.

Jacob: I love what you said on your website. You know, it hasn't always been this way. No, and I would never want to discourage anyone by saying it can be a really lengthy process.

I will say that, at least in my experience, I had so much I was carrying when it comes to my beliefs about myself and the world and what I was capable of, and all of that, that that big, sort of terrifying event that shook everything up, it was like I had some years of simply going.

I'd been running so fast that I haven't ever looked under the hood, if you will. I'm mixing my metaphors there. My mother is a therapist, and she likes to use the idea of skating on a frozen river. She said I skated on this frozen river and I was terrified that if ever slowed down, I would fall in, the ice would crack and I would fall in.

She's like, one day the ice just broke open, and I fell in, and I had no choice but to do all this inner work and examination. I think that's a really beautiful way to look at it.

So once the process of self-discovery really gets underway, I would like to say it's exactly 16 months, in my experience. It can take longer, but if we're willing to see it as that, and not just numb it out or try to run away from it or do whatever over the top of it —

What we'll find in there is our authentic voice. What we'll find in there is our sense of purpose. So I'd love to give, well, it's a range of one to seven years, but in my experience, it was several years before I even began to feel that my footing was coming back, Jo. I would love to hear what your experience of that was.

Joanna: Well, again, pretty similar. It's funny, I was just reflecting then because you're reminding me of those early days. This book, The Creative Cure, I feel like now I'm not in the place where I need this, but this is the book I needed back in 2005 when I was 30 years old and thinking, “What the hell am I doing with my life?”

I read, then, and I listened to a lot of audios. Tony Robbins, a good self-help guru. Jack Canfield, The Success Principles. Those are the books I was reading, and I was trying to change my mindset. Then I figured out that I wanted to write, and then I got into writing.

It was a process of years. So between 2005 being really super miserable, to 2007 I really sort of put that first book out. Then 2011 was when I finally left my job to go full time. [Check out my timeline here.]

Jacob: Well, I think otherwise, Jo, it's easy, and god knows I tried to do this, I tried to shortcut the process as often as I could. Like, get me out of here. This is not comfortable. It's not fun.

I think that being aware that short-cutting it can—I've seen it happen a lot of times. I wasn't actually writing, but I got really sort of springboarded forward a bit. I entered this thing called The Next Top Spiritual Author Competition. That was when I was living in Austin, and there was this publishing deal as kind of the big carrot.

Of course, I didn't win that competition, but I got to witness a lot of other writers, and this is my first time of really being in the space with a lot of other writers. This was kind of a global thing, and there were a lot of people who had entered it. Many of us got to know each other, some of whom are still my friends to this day.

I also got to witness a lot of people, Jo, who had had some kind of experience, and they wanted to write about it. They wanted to share their wisdom with the world. They also hadn't given it the time to really cook, to mature.

So I've watched some of them get a little bit frozen there, to where had they been willing to keep going in their own process and let it grow deeper for a while, let it really mature, they would have been able to keep going.

They reformed their identity a little too quickly around, “oh, this is who I am,” you know.

I don't want to make fun of that at all because I think it's very natural. Anytime we're feeling out of sorts or out of balance, we want to recover our sense of equilibrium.

So I have a lot of compassion for that, but I would encourage anyone going through what feels like being turned upside down and shaken, give yourself some grace. Realize that jumping on it too quickly and saying, “This is now who I am,” might actually rob you of some real benefits that will enrich your work down the line.

Joanna: This interview is certainly going in a different direction than I thought it would be, but we're leaning into that.

You talk there about moving beyond the one thing, and those people who were stuck. This is something I think about a lot, and my listeners will know this is something I've been thinking about for a while because, obviously I started in this independent author career back in 2007.

Every industry, although being an independent author was new in sort of 2007, and there was a lot of new things, things have changed a lot since then. Technologies, obviously.

What we don't want to be is stagnant in our creativity, in our writing, in our lives. I know there'll be people listening who have been writing for decades as well. Some people listening will be writing for 30 to 40 years.

How do we keep pivoting, changing, and moving forwards, when we have a career that we love, when we do something we love, but we know we can't get stagnant?

Jacob: I feel like that's a ten million dollar question.

Joanna: You must be in a similar position, right? I mean, you've been doing what you do a long time, and you work with people who've been doing it a long time. What you don't want to be is the jaded person.

Jacob: I was looking over your work, Jo, and I just love how diverse your work is. I feel like you have a lot to teach me about this, actually, in terms of just really being a little more prolific and writing these different types of things.

I don't know how this will work out. Without that, often we find ourselves sort of repeating ourselves.

I'm thinking of some massively famous writers in the US. One in particular comes to mind for some reason, whose work has become so formulaic, but it's always a blockbuster.

I want to be clear, I don't think there's anything wrong with writing to formulas. I think we all do it to some degree, but I just look at some of these things and realize, oh, the production distribution has become more important than the art, in some cases.

So to step outside of that, to step over the line of, this is what I know. This is what I know works for me in terms of bringing me financial security or whatever it might be. I think there's that itch.

I think it goes back to what you were talking about earlier, about intuition, Jo. It's that sense of, okay, I know I'm being called outside of this familiar sort of routine. I don't think there's a point at which it's like, okay, this is wrong. So it's not, to me, about right or wrong.

Maybe a person decides I really just love writing according to this template or formula. I just really love doing this, and I love knowing kind of what to expect from it and all of that. So I wouldn't say everyone needs to always be leaping off into the abyss and building their wings or something.

I would love to hear your thoughts, since we're exploring this together. I definitely didn't expect the interview to go this way, either. So I'm in the deep end.

Joanna: Well, I think it is about taking risks. It's funny because between like 2005/2006 and then when I left my job in 2011, I was working a day job. So I was working as a business consultant, and then I eventually went part time. So what I was doing, I was doing on the side, and that's how I think about it now.

So right now, for example, I'm writing a screenplay, and it's a risk, and it's not making me any money. So it's almost like I'm doing it on the side. So I feel like the taking risks, where we both started, we took risks to unwind one career and start another.

Jacob: Ooh, I love that. There were people who asked me early on as I was writing and putting things out there, why I wouldn't just take the full leap into trying to earn my living right from the written word.

One thing that I told them then is I didn't want to put my process under that kind of financial pressure early on. I'm like, if I can look at the job that I'm doing, the day job to pay the bills, if I can look at that as a funding source rather than, “It must fulfill my creative needs.”

Those things are very important to me in life, but there was a period of time during which it was just important for me to look at the work I did for pay as a funding source and not try to make it more than that.

For some reason, that actually freed up that energy I would have used in being miserable about having to work this stupid job for money. It freed that energy up to go, oh, this is how I fund being able to take my time and really grow as a writer.

Joanna: Well, we are almost out of time. I think you and I could do this for a lot longer.

Jacob: Well, you can go to JacobNordby.com, that's probably the easiest way.

I would love to just say how much I love the world of writers, Jo. You've been doing such amazing work in this space for a really long time. I just want you to know, I'm so grateful that you invited me here. Thank you for doing the good work you're doing.

Joanna: Well, thanks so much for your time, Jacob. That was great.

The post Intuition, Journaling, And Overcoming Fear. The Creative Cure With Jacob Nordby first appeared on The Creative Penn.

What are the tropes and reader expectations for action adventure thrillers? Why publish into KU and what are some of the ways to market there? How can travel enrich your writing? Luke Richardson gives his tips.

In the intro, ProWritingAid launches their Manuscript Analysis tool;
Navigating legal risk in memoir [The Indy Author]; Social media for authors in 2025 [BookBub]; Amazon relaunches Alexa, now Alexa+ which is now powered by Claude AI; Scribe, the world’s most accurate transcription model [ElevenLabs];
ElevenReader Publishing to the Reader app; Death Valley, A Thriller by J.F. Penn.

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 

Luke Richardson is the bestselling author of the Eden Black Archaeological Thrillers and the International Detective thriller series.

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 Luke at LukeRichardsonAuthor.com and his new podcast at AdventureStoryPodcast.com.

Joanna: Luke Richardson is the bestselling author of the Eden Black Archeological Thrillers and the International Detective thriller series. So welcome to the show, Luke.

Luke: Hi, Jo. Thank you for having me. This is wonderful to be able to talk to you.

Joanna: I'm excited about it. First up—

Luke: It's been one of those sort of roundabout ways that a lot of people talk about, but I often cite—this is something I've written on my profiles and written emails about. I often cite my first arriving in India in 2011 as the reason I wanted to write.

It was just this transformational moment of being totally culture shocked in a completely different place in a way that I couldn't describe and couldn't really explain. We'd come out of the airport, we're into this taxi going past the slum villages on the edges of this freeway that's sort of 16 lanes wide. There's donkeys, and sports cars, and tractors, and all of this going on. It was just so overwhelming.

Although I didn't write for several years after that, it was that excitement about stuff, and the world, and discovery, and adventure that lodged in me. Then when I started to write, those things started to come out of me. Do you know what I mean? They started to come out in my writing.

Joanna: That's so funny. We're going to get into travel because you and I are travel geeks. I also remember arriving in India, would have been about five years before that, in the middle of the night in an airport in—it wasn't Delhi—but it was one of the biggest cities. It was like crazy, crazy. So that culture shock is really interesting.

Luke: I was an English teacher in a high school for several years, under the illusions that it would be a creative thing to do because I've always been very creative. I've always loved that. For the first couple of years, it actually was quite creative. Then, I think as I'd done the same classes four or five or six times, over and over again, it became less so.

Then I started writing. I came up with this idea for a book, and I was like, great. It was actually set in Kathmandu, and it's the first book in my International Detective series.

Someone who's like me in 2011, in the back of that taxi, totally overwhelmed, tasked with finding a missing person in this city that they've never been to. They don't speak the language, they don't know the culture, and they've got to go and find this person.

It was really just a creative outlet. It was a passion. It was something I wanted to do outside of work.

Then I finished the book, and I did that thing which we've all done, I think, and you fold your arms, and you go, huh? Half of us is really impressed that you finished this thing, and the other half's like, what do I do now? What do I do with it?

I gave my mum a copy and a couple of other friends, and then I went down the rabbit hole of learning about publishing and how to get it out in the world. Your podcast, and other podcasts, and online courses, and YouTube videos, and all this sort of thing.

So I learned about indie publishing and published it in 2019.

Joanna: Are you still a teacher?

Luke: No, no. I left just before the pandemic. So I quit then. I needed a change, which was great, actually, because it meant I had the whole time of those few years to really focus on my writing.

It built up slowly, as these things do. So the first year was quite tough. I had to do some freelance work on the side and do some other writing, sort of freelance writing and things.

Then, when was it? I think it was two years ago that it became the job, and now we've surpassed the teaching. It's become more successful than the teaching was, so I'm really excited about.

Joanna: I think this is a really good point.

Luke: Yes, income from books.

I mean, we couldn't travel anyway because travel was off the table at that time, so it was a good time to not spend much money anyway. So I've lived quite a frugal life whilst I was doing that and did some freelance work on the side.

I really just started again, I suppose you'd say, in a professional capacity. Built up the mailing list, built up the socials, learned about all these things.

What I decided, I think, is that I needed to give it a proper chance. I think if I wanted to do it as a hobby, writing in the evenings and the weekends was fine.

So that was the decision.

I didn't love teaching at that point. I was ready for a change. So, yes, I think that was a good decision. It's worked out well in the end, obviously, too.

Joanna: So you mentioned the word job there. I feel like this is so important, and I've talked about this before. Having a hobby is amazing, and for most people, writing as a hobby is brilliant and probably what most people should do. As you mentioned, the word job, and that is how we make our living with books or word-adjacent things. So what does that job entail for you?

That perhaps when you wrote that first book, when you were a teacher, you didn't even think about?

Luke: That's true. There's so much to it. There's the production side, which is obviously the writing, the researching, the actual making the book. I don't just mean research in terms of what's in the book, I mean research of what does the market need.

Now, I'm not saying you need to write to market necessarily, but you need to—I think not need, that's the wrong way to say it. It's not prescriptive, but it helps if you have an understanding of what the market likes, if that makes sense. You don't necessarily have to follow tropes.

This is an issue, isn't it, I think with indie publishing. You can do whatever you want, but with that comes great challenges as well because whatever you want is massive. No one wants to read a book that's everything, right?

Some colors to one mast or another. It can't be everything to everyone. So you need to decide at some point where that is, and who your reader is, and what they like and those sorts of things.

It's easier if you're writing in a genre that is popular, that is easy to communicate, that is easy for people to understand. I suppose that helps as well. So, yes, that's production.

There's also sort of the business side of it. We're at the end of January now. I've had a really boring week of tax returns and these sorts of things.

There's the marketing side. There's running the newsletter and the social media and all of this sort of stuff, which needs to be done and should be enjoyed, if possible.

Joanna: I love that you said earlier that it took almost five years, I guess, for the money to get back up to where it was. It was the same for me.

When I left my original consulting job in 2011, I took a massive pay cut. It took until 2015 before I started making more than I used to make, and have done ever since, by the way. So hopefully that encourages you.

Luke: Thank you. Yes, I hope so.

Joanna: So how many books do you have now? Like when you talk about the job and the production—

Because you are writing genre fiction, basically.

Luke: I have written around 20 now. A couple of out of print because they didn't really match the brand that I was going for, so I've taken them out for now, and perhaps we'll republish them later.

So I've got six in my International Detective series, six in the Eden Black series, and then there's obviously novellas and other such things. So it's probably less than 20, actually. It's always a hard question, and I wonder if you feel the same, in that you don't know. You don't know exactly. Almost 20, I'll say that.

Joanna: Well, what's funny, I've got on my wall here, “50 books by 50,” and as we record this, I'm 50 in six weeks.

Luke: Oh, congratulations.

Joanna: Well, the achievement of living to 50, I guess, is one of them. I've actually started a blog post—I can't remember when this goes out—but I will be doing a blog post on my 50th birthday, which is calculating how many books I've actually written, including all the different editions.

Well, you said you've unpublished some of those and may republish them. So my first three novels I rewrote, so they're in second edition. Some of them are in third edition. A lot of my nonfiction is in multiple editions.

So those ones you unpublished, so people know, when you wrote them originally and published them, you must have thought they were fine, and then you decided to take them down. So why did you decide to do that?

Is that something people can prepare for in advance so that they don't have to unpublish things?

Luke: I would like to put them out again, and it's probably just me being too perfectionist, actually, because I know people have read them and enjoyed them. They're a good series. I wrote them with Steven Moore, who I know you know as well, and it was a collaboration project we had.

They're sort of in the vein of Indiana Jones style. Whereas those books I wrote with Steve are a bit darker, they are a bit more nefarious.

Unless I do a rewrite, which I would like to do when time allows, because I think they could be changed to bring them into the same sort of world as the books that I have.

People ask me why I write the books in the way that I do. I want someone to have my book and put it on their coffee table proudly with the bookmark in it, and if their 12 year old daughter or niece comes up and picks it up and flicks through and takes an interest in it, they are happy for that person to go and read it.

Or their grandma comes in and picks it up and flicks through it, they are happy for that person to read it. I don't want them to have any sort of, “Oh, that's a bit this for you,” or, “That's a bit that for you.” Do you know what I mean by that?

I felt that those books, because of the way they were, I wasn't quite happy for them to be in that situation. I didn't want someone to recommend me and then go, “Oh, read Luke's books, but don't read those.”

Joanna: I do feel like that is very much a personal decision, though. As in, I remember the stuff I was reading at age 12. I mean, I do think that different people like different things, but I get exactly what you mean. So you've decided on family friendly action adventure, basically.

Luke: Yes, that's right.

Joanna: I love that. Okay, so let's come back to action adventure thrillers then. You and I both write around, we use the word thriller, I think, quite loosely, and it is a very big genre.

Also, how do you vary them in the books in the series? I feel like this can be a challenge for people.

Luke: Yes, it's a good question, and something I only started to understand when I wrote my second series. It has become much more successful than the first, and I think it's because I took time to understand this, actually.

It's what I was saying a minute ago about it can help if you do a bit of research in the market before actually sitting down to write. So there's certain ingredients that my books need.

So I've done one set in the Pyramids of Giza, one about Atlantis, one about a mummy on the Titanic. That's a proper rumor, I'll have you know. Whether it had anything to do with the sinking or not, they're not sure. One about the Templars.

The one I'm working on at the moment is going to be set in the Sahara, and all to do with a hidden city under the Sahara and this sort of thing. So those sorts of interesting settings, locations.

Obviously there needs to be a race against time before something happens. The classic one is “this thing can only happen on the summer solstice or when the planets are aligned.” Or, I know this is one of your favorites, “because there's a storm.”

Joanna: I love a good storm.

Luke: Or, “The storm is coming in six hours, and we need to solve this thing before the storm.”

Joanna: Right now, writing Death Valley, I am actually editing the big storm scene.

Luke: I love it. Yes, so they're generally set in the present day as well, but the present day can be quite loose because Clive Cussler wrote his in the present day, although that was the 80s. So it can be quite loose as to when the present day is, but they sort of track the events of pre-history.

There are other strands too that sort of happen, sometimes a romantic element.

A relatable villain is another one, which I think is more of a modern trope, actually. I like this in my books, a pinch of the supernatural. Think like the Ark of the Covenant in the Raiders of the Lost Ark, the Indiana Jones films. It's just there.

We don't know quite what it is, or why it had that strange effect on the people at the end, but it did it, and it could be true. There's a tiny element that it could be true that I like to put in mine as well.

Joanna: Yes, and we overlap in so many ways. I think I definitely have slightly more supernatural than you and more religious elements because I'm obsessed with religion, religious relics and stuff like that. You and I both kind of cover similar areas.

This is what's interesting, isn't it, in terms of what you love as a kid and then what you enjoy writing.

I do want to come back on the prologue, especially because you were an English teacher. Now, I love a prologue. I write prologues in my action adventures as well, but a lot of people have issues with prologues. You explained a bit what a prologue was there, but—

When should people use one? When is it not a good idea, do you think?

Luke: I had this conversation with a writer who I'm working with at the moment, and they had put it as chapter one. I said, this is not chapter one. This is a prologue because a prologue is clearly delineated from the book itself, in my mind. I'm not asking Google this, this is just what I think.

It's clearly delineated from the book itself. It isn't part of the story. So the story can be read without the prologue, should you want to. It just add some context.

It puts some root in the history of the book that tells you a little bit about where that book is going to go based on sort of what happened before the event, if that makes sense.

Joanna: I think it's like a foreshadowing. Often in my one, the ancient relic is there or discovered by someone thousands of years earlier, and something very bad happens. This then kind of foreshadows the present day, where obviously something very bad is about to happen, and then they have to stop it.

Luke: Yes, and I think it helps the reader know the passage of time as well, because they're clearly not at the same period. That's one thing that I like that I find useful with it as a writing technique.

Joanna: Yes. I've definitely written some that are only a couple of weeks earlier, but sometimes a thousand years ago or whatever.

Luke: Yes, but that's the convention, isn't it? The thousand years ago one. I'm not saying that can't be a prologue, but I'm saying the convention, in my mind, and I could be completely wrong, is that it's sort of someone putting the capstone on the Great Pyramid, and then it cuts to black.

Then we see someone, in the present day, driving through the pyramids on a Jeep or whatever.

Joanna: That's cool. I personally do like a prologue. Actually, just coming back to your English teacher side, many authors have to fight the sort of snobbery that some English teachers instilled in them, including myself.

I certainly look back and was told by my English teacher that I couldn't write such things, that I should write something acceptable for a young woman. That definitely stopped me writing for a long time.

So if people do feel sort of hamstrung by this, by the comments from their English teachers in the past—

Luke: It's a hard one, isn't it? That teacher, certainly in your experience, did the wrong thing. That's not an encouraging attitude to have, and I wouldn't have had that attitude with one of my students.

It's a challenge because, and without getting too political, the school system is very sort of dictating in what you can teach and what you can't teach.

I didn't want to teach certain students 19th century literature. That's a very difficult thing to teach to students who would be better off with something more modern, with something more relatable to them. that's a struggle for all English teachers, and a lot of teachers generally, actually.

So I think that gives a perception to young people about what books should be, that you're in this place, and it is just books that are important and that have sort of stood the test of time. There's no fun in it, or there's certainly less fun in it, which was one of the reasons I ended up getting fed up of it and moving on at the end.

Joanna: Well, I love that you, as an English teacher, are writing genre fiction. I think that you must have had to put aside some of that snobbery yourself, I guess.

Luke: I don't think I ever had that snobbery, to be honest.

That's why they get involved in this imaginary world for an escapist adventure. it's our job to make that fun.

Sometimes we put a bit of history and a bit of social commentary, perhaps, or one of our opinions, we slip that in there as well. That's fine because we've honored the contract with the reader to make them enjoy themselves as well.

Joanna: Well, that's great. Then just coming to your books, like one of your bestselling series is this Eden Black Archeological Thrillers. Eden Black is a woman, a female protagonist. So some people will say, I don't, but some people say you shouldn't write a character that is not like yourself.

People have said this to me writing male characters or people of different persuasions in whichever direction. So how do you deal with this? Like, did it even come up in your mind that you shouldn't write a main female character?

Luke: No. Of course, it didn't.

Joanna: No, exactly.

Luke: I know. I had some people comment—not people—I had a comment about this on a Facebook ad saying, “Who are you to write?” It was actually from a bloke. I was surprised that it was from a man. I don't know why I was surprised it was from a man.

He said, “Who are you to write strong female characters?” And I said, “I'm married to one. I was brought up by one. I have many friends who are them.”

Joanna: And do you think the rest of it is true? I say to people, I'm like, seriously, do you think I'm all my characters? Like the villain and the murderer and, you know, whoever? It's crazy. So I'm so glad you did that. So it didn't come up in your mind before you started?

Luke: No, not at all. One thing to say is that —

Also, you're inventing in some sort of way.

Actually, I feel that we as humans, without getting too meta about it, are more similar than we are different. Regardless of whatever. Race, gender, age, anything, we're more similar than we are different.

We feel the same things. Of course, there are differences, but my books are about things—like we've talked about getting the relic and all of this—but beyond that, they're about fitting in, and loss, and grief, and understanding each other, and belief, and hope, and all these feelings.

It's quite generic to being human, regardless of whether you're female, male, whatever. So I believe that by writing them in that way, that it really doesn't make a difference.

Joanna: No, and I love it because when I started writing my ARKANE Series with Morgan Sierra, I mean, there really weren't many action adventure books with female main characters.

That is why I was got excited about the Lara Croft movies and stuff like that because that was kind of the only option. Now, what's great with indie is there's so many. It's brilliant.

Luke: Wasn't there an article saying that they're a dying trend or something recently?

Joanna: Oh, everyone always says action adventure is dying. The thing is, there's always a group of people who still like that, including us.

Well, let's also talk about your travels. You will be coming on my re-booted Books and Travel Podcast, and if people want to geek out with us on travel, come on over there. So let's just talk about it as a writer. How do you turn your real life travels into the stories?

Luke: That's true, isn't it? Generally, the way I do it is I go to a place without a preconceived idea. I just get immersed in the place, and I walk around the place. I don't worry about creating content particularly, or anything about taking photos or taking notes. I just sort of fall into it.

I'm going to let you into the secret behind my book that I haven't written yet, actually. I'll do that because I think this is really exciting.

So in the 70s, they created this pattern called quasi crystalline tessellation, and it was created by scientists in the UK and in America. Now, they realized that this pattern exists in two places in the world.

It exists in meteors, the molecular structure of meteors that come from out of space, and it exists in the sand upon which a nuclear blast has happened. The heat has been so intense that it has formed the sand into a rock that has this molecular structure.

Then they discovered it existed in a third place. It's on the walls of 13th century mosques in Morocco and Iran and other countries in the Middle East. I was walking around Marrakesh, where we were traveling about a month ago, and I read that, and was like, this is amazing.

It's nuts, isn't it, to think that these cutting edge scientists were doing this thing in the 70s, and yet it was there already in this mosque in Marrakesh, and there's one in Iran and somewhere else. There's these places with this pattern on the wall of the thing.

Of course, because I'm a writer, that gets me going. I'm like, whoa, maybe the Islamic scholars of the 13th century were trying to communicate something to us in the modern era.

Joanna: Before you go on, let's stop there because that exact point, I call this ‘the seed,' because people are always like, where do your ideas come from? I'm like — 

Luke: That's right.

Joanna: I feel like you and I, because we travel, that we find our seeds while we are traveling. You may never have stumbled—you might have stumbled across that on a YouTube video somehow—

Luke: Yes, exactly right.

Joanna: So how do you then—I know that this is a book you're going to write—but how do you get from there? People are like, okay, sure, but that's not a book, is it?

Luke: Yes. So now this is the stage I'm at with this book. So I'm just sitting on the idea, really. I'm not putting too much pressure on it. I've got a few ideas now about how it will fit into what will happen, and also fit it into the series as well.

I know the characters that are coming into this. I obviously don't know the villain and some of the other villains, sort of henchmen, that are going to come in, but I know my characters. So I'm sort of jiggling it together.

I want part of it to take place in the United States, as well, because my characters haven't been there for a while, for a few books. So that's important. It's a case of picking it together, but I've got a couple of scenes, and for me, that's how it starts.

Stephen King writes about writing like discovering a dinosaur skeleton. I love that idea. I've discovered a bit, and I'm now there with my brush, brushing off this part. I don't know whether it's the face or the back or the leg or the tail, you know.

I've just got this one bit, and slowly I'll work in one direction, and maybe that will lead me to another part. Or I'll go, nope, it's not over there. Then I'll come back and go over to the other section, and the story will emerge in that way.

Luke: I've got better at writing in order, but it's still not totally chronologically.

Joanna: I feel like this is also because we use multiple places. Like for Spear of Destiny, I've been in Washington DC like a couple of years before, and I was like, I have to use it because I expense that trip. Then I was like, I need to put it in a book. How on earth am I going to tie it to Vienna and Nuremberg and all of this?

So I knew I had those scenes somewhere, but I didn't know what was going to happen. It's almost like when you know you want to set things different places—like you said, I need some scenes in America—you almost can write different things and then figure out what on earth links them.

Luke: What I tend to do is —

I don't know if you do the same? I think your books are similar, where you have two or three scenes from the hero, and then like a cut scene from the villain where they're scheming in a dark lair somewhere.

Joanna: Or doing bad things.

Luke: Yes, whatever. They sort of offset each other, and so I'll quite often come back and put those in afterwards.

Joanna: Well, that's good. I think it's important for people to know that you don't have to write everything in order, and you can just figure it out. Also, some authors are worried about using real places in their books.

Luke: The place is almost completely real in my books. I tend to be as real as I possibly can. Not down to like the building, though, because I think you'll understand this as well. It winds people up if you say, “They walked for five minutes down the street and then they were outside the coffee shop.”

I won't say that because someone will email and say, “There's not a coffee shop on the street. That closed in in 2004.” So I don't get that specific.

In terms of the place, I try to get things specific, like what sort of public transport it is. I wrote a book in Riga, and in Riga, they've got these wonderful old school, Soviet-esque trams that clang and rumble around the city. So they had to feature in the book there.

There's sort of what the air is like. Is it a sea sort of air? Is it cold? Is it warm? Is it sandy? Desert-y? What's the sensation you'll get?

They see something more than I could have gleamed from a cookie cutter explanation of this place.

I suppose that's going to become ever more important, isn't it, that we've been to this place. You write great authors’ notes as well, and that's something that's really important to me, is delving behind the story.

Joanna: I think that's important because, actually, I do think ChatGPT and some of these other models can write very good descriptions of places. The Author's Note, as you say, and our connection with our readers when we're kind of, “Look, here's me,” which is why selfies are important, “Here's me with the pyramids of Egypt.”

Luke: Exactly right.

Joanna: So this was me.

Okay, well, talking of audiences, let's get into the publishing and marketing side. So on publishing, so I'm really interested in this because you are in KU for your ebooks, and this is something I still find difficult after all these years. So why make that decision? How does that work for you?

Luke: So why make that decision? It's an 80-20 decision for me. I have got X number of hours a day, not very many, same as everyone else, I suppose. I want to do other things too with my time.

So actually, the best use of my time is to write the best book possible, and let Amazon do what they are really good at, which is distributing the book to people. They do a great job at that. They've proven it for years and years and years, with thousands of data sets and all this sort of stuff.

I would love to not be exclusive, of course, and that would be fun to go on the other platforms. Yes, it does bother me that my book isn't available in every single country and these sorts of things.

I believe that in terms of getting my book into as many hands as possible, and as such, sustaining this as a career, etc, for now, that's the best way, if that makes sense.

Joanna: I will tell people that your books have a lot of reviews. This is something I say to people —

I see, obviously, that on all the books that are action adventure that are in KU, which is most of them, have a ton of reviews. So there are pros and cons.

You do have print books, you have audio, and you do have your own store for these other formats. So tell us about that.

Luke: So I sell print books on the store. I don't sell particularly many. I sell most of them in the UK, I think because when people outside of the UK see the delivery cost, it puts them off.

I like the idea of having a store, more than actually make any money from it or make anything from it at the moment. I don't feel like I've completely cracked it yet. Actually, that's probably the reason.

There are frustrations from it, which I'm sure you have as well. Customer service is one. People are like, “How do I get my book? Why haven't I got this?” Sales duty is another. My friend bought a book in Spain.

Joanna: Oh, Europe is the worst.

Luke: Oh, this book has cost him 70 euros in total, including the duty. He says he hope it's a really good one. Sorry, mate, you bought it now.

Joanna: It is, and that's actually something for people to keep in mind. For example, I had someone in Canada and there was a problem with something, and their duty they paid was ridiculous. So in the end, I paid that back from them.

It's exactly what you said. There are problems—well, let's say challenges—with it, but clearly you wanted to do something.

Luke: I'm not doing any paid marketing to my store. I do paid marketing to the first in series on Amazon, and I try and keep that as simple as possible, so that I can see what the return on investment is very clearly.

I still sell a fair number of audiobooks. I sell the other series, which I do know my International Detective series has no direct marketing to it.

I sell quite a lot through Ingram Spark as well. I can only think that is because people see the advert on Facebook, they don't want to shop on Amazon, so they take it into Waterstones, or they look on Barnes and Noble or whatever, and they buy it there. That is great. It is a good way to do it, really.

With regard to the store, I'm looking at people outside the author space and trying stuff. I want to see what YouTubers, podcasters, and influencers are selling on their stores.

I'm thinking it's not books, if that makes sense. Like bespoke, unique experiences, stuff, things, I don't know. A few ideas, nothing yet. I'm going to test a few things this year and see what comes out.

Joanna: That's great. I also have had this on my list for a while, instead of trying to sell books. The crazy thing is, like I just bought a necklace, they got me on Instagram. It's a really nice necklace, and it wasn't expensive, but it was still more than the price of a book. I just bought it.

It was a one click purchase from a store. I didn't know them. They had good reviews. So I was like, okay, I'll buy that. It came and everything.

I was like, what makes people buy something that costs you 50 pounds from somebody they don't know, and then resist paying 20 pounds for a book from an author they like? Like, it's crazy.

Luke: That is what I'm thinking. I'm trying to look at it in the way that a YouTuber would. Now, a YouTuber puts all their content on YouTube, and they don't bemoan the fact that they're exclusive to YouTube. They just put their content on there, and they get their payment from their ad clicks, or whatever it is, every month, and that's fine.

What they do have is, underneath the video, they have this bar. I'm following various people, and they're selling coffee, tin openers, hats, all sorts of things. Then I'm like, this is cool. This is great. I like this. I like this coffee.

Joanna: I do like the idea of selling coffee because I drink a lot of coffee!

Luke: Yes. So at the moment, I've got this idea of potentially some of the sort of stuff you might find in one of the markets. The cool, bespoke jewelry and funky textiles. There are small things that you can post, or whatever. A few things like that I'm going to try, and see how it goes, really. That's the testing phase.

Joanna: I like that, and I think we do need to think differently. One of the basic things, I mean, with KU for example, and in fact, page reads and sales. So with sales, Amazon hasn't changed the $9.99 cap ever.

Then the page reads, obviously generally trend downwards.

Then you think, well, look, with inflation, just the cost of living, we should be able to put prices up. But because of all the reasons, books remain the price they are. So therefore, as you're looking at it, it is about, well—

Luke: That's exactly right. You might only get 0.1% of people want that thing, and that's fine. That's great because they're the person who's really interested in whatever that thing happens to be.

It could be, I don't know, an event, an online event, or something. There's a few ideas. I haven't pinned them down yet, but there's many ideas.

Joanna: I get that. Well, talking about marketing as well. So obviously, as I mentioned, you're coming on my Books and Travel Podcast, but you also have a new podcast. So tell us about that.

Luke: Yes, it's called The Adventure Story Podcast. It's basically, if you like that idea that I told you about, the crystalline tiles in Morocco and how they preempted the breaking of the atom—or whatever you think it might be, the splitting of the atom—then this is the podcast that you will like. It's all about the stories behind my stories.

So episodes in series one, which will start in March, are on things like—and this is a true story Jo—the cursed Egyptian ghost on the London Underground. That's one. The truth behind the legend of the crystal skulls.

There's an episode on Cambodia from a guy who grew up there. In fact, he's really excited about that. There's one about lava tubes. The truth behind lava tubes. Oh, there's a few I've planned this week. A couple on the Templars as well.

It's all this sort of history. It's like an extended author's note in podcast form. That's what I'm going for.

Joanna: So why are you doing that? You said you do paid marketing to your first in series on Amazon. You have a business. You're doing well.

Luke: I think trying to be more authentic is important to me. I want people to know me as the person behind the stories.

It's important to for me to tell people, and I do this in my emails quite a lot, that by buying my book, by reviewing my book, by sharing my book, you're not just having the story, you're supporting me and my family and this house I'm standing in now.

That still blows my mind, that the mortgage is paid by people buying books. It's wonderful. It's an incredible thing. I want the people who read my books to be able to see that and see the real human me behind the story, and share on the adventures.

This podcast will share some of the travels my wife and I go on. We'll share some of the adventures we've had. We'll share the inspirations behind the books. We'll have other authors on as well to talk about the inspirations behind their books, too.

Joanna: Fantastic.

Luke: By the time this goes out, The Adventure Story Podcast will be live as well. It will be on wherever you listen to podcasts, but also AdventureStoryPodcast.com. My website is LukeRichardsonAuthor.com.

Joanna: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Luke. That was great.

Luke: Thank you.

The post Writing Action Adventure And Traveling For Book Research With Luke Richardson first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How can you use Kickstarter to help bring your creative vision into reality? What are some of the biggest mistakes authors make? What are some tips to ensure your campaign is a success? Oriana Leckert shares her expertise.

In the intro, AI-narrated audiobooks from ElevenLabs will now be accepted on Spotify through FindawayVoices; A Midwinter Sacrifice by J.F. Penn with my voice clone for the Author's Note on Spotify; BookVault introduce boxsets and slipcases; Managing your finances [Becca Syme]; How to write non-fiction [EOLU Podcast]; Thoughts on the Berlin film market; Death Valley – A Thriller.

Today's show is sponsored by my patrons! Join my community and get access to extra videos on writing craft, author business, AI and behind the scenes info, plus an extra Q&A show a month where I answer Patron questions. It's about the same as a black coffee a month! Join the community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn

Oriana Leckert is the head of publishing at Kickstarter, as well as an author, freelance writer, editor, and consultant.

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 Oriana and more about Kickstarter at Kickstarter.com/creators/publishing and Kickstarter.com/publishing.

Joanna: Oriana Leckert is the head of publishing at Kickstarter, as well as an author, freelance writer, editor, and consultant. So welcome to the show, Oriana.

Oriana: Jo, I'm so excited to be here talking with you. Thank you so much for having me.

Joanna: It's great to have you on the show. So first up, just in case—

How did you become involved in the publishing side of things?

Oriana: Absolutely. So Kickstarter is a crowdfunding platform. We are unique in the crowdfunding landscape for a few reasons. We are only for creative projects, so you can't use Kickstarter for medical bills, investment funding, charitable donations.

Kickstarter is also a public benefit corporation, which is a sort of legal and business charter that turns us basically into a mission-driven for-profit organization. So our mission is to bring creative projects to life. Everything we do comes back to bringing more creativity into the world through that structure.

We are also quite a progressive company. We do 5% after-tax profit donations every year to organizations fighting systemic inequality and doing music and arts education. We are very transparent about our tax contributions, the salary difference between our CEO and the median staff salary.

So we do all sorts of things that make us, what I believe, a really ethical place to be and a force for hopefully good in the world.

My role is head of publishing. So I've been a Kickstarter six years, which is the longest I've been at any company, actually. I came here to grow our journalism category at the very end of 2018. I have done journalism, I've done comics, I've done publishing.

It, sort of unexpected to me, is the best job I've ever had. Which is slightly corny, but worth saying. I can't believe I get to do this work all the time. My background is about half and half digital media and traditional publishing, so I've spent most of my career fully focused on books and the written word in one way or another.

I generally describe my job here as one part literary industry expert, one part crowdfunding consultant, one part life coach, and one part cheerleader. So those are the various roles I get to play for my creators.

I also get to be out in the world all the time doing wonderful things like this, just kind of talking about Kickstarter and helping people get a better understanding of what it's for, how you can use it, the benefit for authors and creative people of all stripes.

Joanna: Oh, that's great. You are a cheerleader. I love your energy. You bring such a great energy.

I do feel like Kickstarter, obviously, is a company, but it does have that very creative feel. So I really appreciate that.

I've also met you a couple of times in Vegas over the last few years, and so I thought we'd start there. What have you seen in terms of the changes in the author community over the last few years?

Obviously, we're not all Brandon Sanderson (whose campaign made over $41 million!).

Oriana: That's a great question. It's been pretty exciting. So I was hired by Margot Atwell, who held this role, also, for five or six years. I really see a pretty strong through line from her work to mine.

The amount of change in perception from authors, publishers, illustrators, toward Kickstarter, the shift has been absolutely massive.

I mean, certainly when Margot started, and even when I started, there was a lot of sort of bewilderment, hedging toward distrust, and people thought Kickstarter was just for desperate people who couldn't get a book deal through the traditional systems.

The change has been so dramatic of people understanding that —

and that it can work for traditional publishing, indie publishing, hybrid publishing, all kinds of authors. 

I mean, obviously I'm in the bag for Kickstarter, but there are so many ways that it can be tremendously helpful. Kickstarter is really about collapsing the boundaries between a writer and their readers, a publisher and their fan base, any creative person and their audience.

There's so many benefits to doing that. You get to thrill your backers with new and exciting rewards. You get to turn what can be a sort of, not boring, but like just a standard book release, into a moment.

You get to build your brand, your profile, get press.

and what they want and how you can give it to them.

So, yes, going to shows like Author Nation, formerly 20Books, was a real revelation for me. Margot's work was mostly concentrated on the traditional publishing industry and getting to know the people who are really driving forward indie publishing and self-publishing and owning their own author careers.

It's been really marvelous getting to make a lot of inroads into that world and seeing the great success that people can have on our platform and outside of it.

Joanna: You mentioned there that you can thrill backers with new and exciting rewards, but I feel like many people listening might not even know what kind of rewards they would do. The word “reward”, it's quite a different word if people haven't been involved with Kickstarter.

Oriana: I love that question because, to me, the rewards are really like at the heart of the Kickstarter proposition and what makes this kind of fundraising so interesting and kind of thrilling.

Basically, Kickstarter, your process is that you're inviting people on a creative journey. You're saying, I'm going to make this cool thing. I want your support, and in exchange, you're going to get stuff. You're going to get to be part of my process.

or, if you're a publishing company, your season. Whatever it is, that's your main tier, and then you're going to build everything else out above and below that.

Then a lot of people think the rewards means swag or merch, which is fine, but merch can really add a lot to your production costs. It's causing you to learn how to produce all kinds of things that maybe you've never done before.

So that's not the only way to do it. If you're going to do some merch, I think it's nice to come up with some custom items that feel really related to the work that you're doing.

If you've got a romance novel with a pivotal scene on the beach, maybe you make some candles that smell like the ocean. Maybe you do some kind of handkerchief that's printed with the pattern of the dress that your heroine is wearing.

You can really think beyond merch, into digital rewards, experiential rewards. There's a lot of parts of the writing process that can be sort of like pulled out and packaged as rewards. Things like notes from the field, outtakes, deleted scenes.

I've had people write bloopers, as if it were like a comedy movie, like added new scenes or novellas, other pieces from different works that you've done. Certainly, your back list and other books that you've written, those can all be included. We've seen people do tours of the writer’s studio, things like that.

Also think about what skills you have in addition to your writing. Perhaps you are excellent at marketing, or social media, or poetry. You can offer webinars on those sorts of things, other kinds of ways that people can experience the creative practice that you have.

Then you can get into like high-end exclusive one-off, crazy rewards. One whole section of rewards I love is naming rights. We've seen all kinds of “We'll name the dragon after your dog. We'll name the illness after your mother in law. We'll name the hero after your son.”

There's a LitRPG novelist named Matt Dinniman, who did this really well. He writes these big cast, you know, there's dungeons, and you're in an intergalactic reality TV show with hundreds of characters. So in his last campaign, for $666 he will kill you off in his next book, and for $777 he'd let you live. He'll write a whole scene around you personally and that sort of thing.

So those are just some. I mean, you can do book release parties. You can do book clubs. If you're writing children's books, you can do coloring pages or supplemental material for teachers or other educators.

and the things that both you can make and that your audience wants. So this is another opportunity to talk to them.

Ask them, if I'm going to do a piece of swag, would you rather have an enamel pin or makeup bag? If I'm going to do alternate covers, would you like the blue cover or the red cover? See what your people are interested in, and then figure out whether it's possible for you to deliver it to them?

Joanna: Wow, so many ideas there. I feel like this is part of the game, is that if someone's listening and they're like, “oh, that sounds great,” well—

It's quite different. People think, oh, it's just like an Amazon or whatever, it's just not.

Oriana: My number one piece of advice for anyone who's even a little bit Kickstarter curious, get on the site and back some projects, even just for a buck or two. Follow the creators out in the world, watch what people are doing.

I often say this, but I am an expert in Kickstarter because I stare at Kickstarter all day long. You too can stare at Kickstarter all day long. You can follow everybody. You can look at what people have done and what's worked and what hasn't.

Imitation is the highest form of flattery and all that. It is absolutely the best way to get good at Kickstarter, just like immerse yourself in this strange and lovely world and see how everybody else is doing it, and do it better.

Joanna: I mean, I now buy a lot of just ebooks.

I mean, I buy a lot of beautiful print with foil and all this, but I also just buy ebooks. They're kind of a similar price as you might get on some of the other platforms. So people can do that.

I think you mentioned the book being the main offering, and people might think, well, that's the paperback. But you can do ebook, you can do audiobook, you can do bundles, you can do series, as you said. So there's so many options.

So obviously things have changed over the last few years, but—

Or anything you can share around that?

Oriana: I would love to tell you. So first I'll tell you, Kickstarter overall, by the numbers since our inception, there have been 273,000 projects funded, eight and a half billion dollars pledged, from more than 24 million backers.

In publishing specifically, we've had 69,000 projects launched, 3.2 million unique backers, and over $380 million pledged to campaigns. I have lots of other stats, but a few things I'll share here.

The publishing category has grown year over year, every year since 2017, in terms of number of projects launched, number of projects successful, and the overall percent of success rate. There has never been a dip since 2017, so for over a decade.

Another stat that I really love about the publishing category, if you look at campaigns that have at least 25 backers, the overall success rate is 84%. I think that's really telling because 25 backers, that's like a little bit more than your mom, your best friend, the folks who are essentially obligated to support anything that you do.

So if you can get a little bit beyond that sort of inner circle, your chances of succeeding on the platform are tremendously high. Another thing that I wanted to call out, I just got some new numbers around this, the average backing amount per backer across the whole category has nearly doubled since 2020.

So we used to see an average backing around $40, and it's currently at $72 per backer. I think this is clearly around the trend of special and deluxe editions, but it's a great indication that —

People don't come here looking for 99 cent ebooks, the lowest bargain basement prices.

Folks are really willing to pay more because they understand that this is a different kind. It's not exactly a purchase, it really is supporting bringing a strange and wonderful new thing into the world that wouldn't exist before.

People are also much more forgiving about timeline. If you buy something from most online booksellers, you're expecting to have it in your hands within a couple of days. People wait months, and sometimes years, to get their Kickstarter rewards, and they don't mind if the creator is clear and transparent.

You're also doing the work of demystifying the publishing process. Why does it take so long? Where are books printed? How long does it take them to ship via freight over the ocean? What do all these things really look like?

So it's really interesting just figuring out what your backers want and will bear, versus the general book buying public out in the world.

Joanna: Absolutely, and that's why we have fewer backers than we might sell total books on other platforms. As you said, they do spend more money and we can do higher quality and more interesting products. Obviously there, you mentioned that not every campaign actually funds.

Oriana: The biggest mistake I think authors make, or any creator, is overestimating their abilities to reach their crowd. I think making sure that your ambition matches your reach is the number one most important thing to like come close to guaranteeing that you will be successful.

If you are an emerging writer, and you're still building your audience, and you don't have that many followers or subscribers out in the world, you should not try to fund a multi-volume, leather bound omnibus.

and then find a project that feels realistic based on those numbers. That's really the biggest thing, sort of conceptually.

As far as tips for a project page, again, back campaigns, look at what other people are doing.

A project page can be either as simple or as complicated as you want to make it. You definitely want, obviously, to talk about the book, what is in it. Do a trope card, if you want. We're seeing those all over the site.

Just what kind of book it is, and like specs. Also, page count, trim size, cover design. Obviously, if you're doing a special edition, exactly what sorts of bells and whistles, with a prototype, if you can.

Then you can be really expansive from there. What are your inspirations? Who are your collaborators? What brought you to this work? What are some of the things that make you excited about your writing practice? Your timeline, your budget. What made you choose these rewards and how are you going to produce them?

All those sorts of things will make backers feel both more trusting that you will do the things that you're promising, and just more excited to be part of your journey.

Joanna: So just to be clear with what you said at the beginning. So somebody, they're a new writer—and I've seen several authors fail this way—they want to do some gorgeous book, and they put a level of $25,000 is what they want, but they don't necessarily have an email list or anything.

When I saw this particular person I'm thinking of, I saw that and was like, there's no way that's going to fund. So what is the problem with people that are kind of expecting Kickstarter to bring people? So maybe just talk about—

Oriana: Yes, absolutely. So we track backer behavior, obviously, all across the site and category by category.

In your Creator dashboard, if you run a campaign, you will see a breakdown of what percentage of backers are coming through your efforts and who are coming through the Kickstarter ecosystem.

In publishing, an average is about 30% are coming through Kickstarter. That can be like 20% to maybe 40%, depending on how much exposure your project winds up getting. So that's not nothing.

Our algorithm works on attention.

So any project that's getting clicks, getting backings, getting comments, our algorithm says, “Oh, people want to look at this. We will expose it to more and more people.” That means raising it up in search results, slotting it into various of the macros and carousels around the site.

Our recommendation engine powers recommended projects on the top of campaigns, at the bottom of emails. We are doing a lot to make sure that projects are being surfaced to folks who want to see them.

We actually are doing some significant backer-focused work this year on improving our search results, improving our recommendation engine. We're really working to make sure that people are finding the projects that they are going to be excited by.

Joanna: So, I mean, and this is something I think is quite different, it is very visual. The story page, the sales page. There's a main visual.

There's kind of two fields, the header field, and then a very small description field and then the image. That's what's really surfaced around Kickstarter, isn't it?

Oriana: Yes, totally. So SEO is important, but it is not as crucial. We can always tell when people are coming to us from KU because rather than the title of the book, their project subject says, “Reverse harem, lesbians on Mars, with an enemies to lover subplot.” You know, you don't have to do that on Kickstarter.

Keywords are important, but it's not the same. It's much more about, what is this project? Who is it for? So I would, of course, absolutely maximize your title and your subtitle to get as much information as possible.

Then exactly as you said, I mean, imagine somebody looking at your project on their phone. They're going to see the title, subtitle, the project image, maybe one sentence. That's also what they're going to see in a tweet, in a search result, in a newsletter thumbnail.

So those elements are really, really important, and you want with just those four items to sort of bring everybody in and get them excited to click through.

Or if you've got a series, maybe a stack of books.

We don't recommend larding up that image with a whole lot of text. Remember it's going to show up next to your title, the title of your project.

So if the title of your project is the title of your book, and the title of your book is also written on the book cover, you don't also need a text bubble that says the book title on top of that project image.

Sometimes people try to cram a whole lot of very salesy text onto that image. It not only like makes the image pop less and makes it less interesting, it also is very difficult to read when that shows up thumbnail sized on a search page or a social post.

So concentrate on making like a bright, exciting image that isn't too overloaded with many tiny elements.

Joanna: And then the video. I wanted to ask about this because on Kickstarter it says you really should do a video. So why is that?

Oriana: We definitely do see a preference for videos. It's, again, probably the tiktokization and the pivot to video all around the internet. Kickstarter is on the internet. It's a visual medium. People like videos these days.

That said, if the video is the main stumbling block keeping you off the platform, I am here to tell you that you don't have to do one. Plenty of projects fund extremely well without having a video. So if that's the calculation that you're making, just have beautiful imagery and you'll be fine.

That said, if you are going to do a video, it needs to be short, bright and compelling. Especially on the publishing side, we see about 50% of potential backers stop watching after one minute, and everybody else is gone after the second minute.

So you don't need to undertake some massive Hollywood production style situation that's going to cost you tons of time and money. Much better to do just kind of like a direct to camera. It is nice to show your face if you feel comfortable doing so.

Just a teaser. Talk a little bit about who you are, what you're doing, ask for people's support, and say that you hope they click in and read through the whole rest of your story.

Joanna: So, and this is a tough one, because I've done different kinds of videos, now coming up for my fifth campaign.

For the fiction, I did do one for Blood Vintage which is like a book trailer. So it goes straight into the sort of thriller book trailer, and then I put on my face afterwards, and I'm telling them about the book.

On my nonfiction ones, I've really just done, sort of as you said, a face to camera.

Oriana: That's not the kind of data that we do or possibly even could collect. I think it's more a question of knowing your audience, knowing what they want, and what is going to fit the best. I mean, I think that's really smart that you've done it slightly differently for your fiction versus nonfiction.

Whatever you think is going to be the best representation of this particular work, that's what you should go with.

Joanna: I guess I think about it from my perspective as a backer. With fiction—and it's terrible to say, but it's true—I often don't care so much about the author, I want the story.

I've bought a ton of fiction off Kickstarter without knowing the author, whereas I feel like the nonfiction I've bought, I've actually known the author, so I'm more interested in the author. So that's just, I guess, my personal behavior.

Oriana: Sure, but your personal behavior is probably fairly telling about a broader book buying population. So I think that makes a lot of sense.

Joanna: It's good to know though. I mean, for people listening, look, there's no structure for it. In fact, the very first video I did, I went to Russell Nohelty's bestselling page and I deconstructed his video. I literally wrote it down, and then I followed his script with my stuff.

Oriana: That's a great way to do it.

Joanna: I think to find someone who's successful and model them, I think that's always a good trick.

Oriana: Yes, absolutely.

Joanna: Okay, so let's just talk about some of the other aspects. So the pre-launch page, this is something that seems to be very important.

Oriana: Absolutely. It's a new feature. We've released it—gosh, what is time—last year or the year before. It has really changed the way that people are doing the kind of period before they launch.

[Check out my pre-launch page at JFPenn.com/deathvalley — which will become the main sales page on launch.]

So a pre-launch page, it's a cover page. It lives at the same URL where your campaign will ultimately go. It's simplified, and it is designed to generate followers.

So anybody who follows the pre-launch page is going to get a system email from Kickstarter as soon as you launch. We see a very high conversion over the life of the project, from pre-launch followers to project backers, sometimes 40 or 50%. Most of them tend to do it right away.

It really helps you have a strong first day, which is excellent for morale, excellent for messaging, good for the overall percentage chance of success on the project.

So, as I said, this is still new-ish. We don't have a huge amount of data about it, but I recommend a pre-launch period of at least two weeks. We've seen some people do it for weeks, months, even in a few cases, over a year.

I think in the best case, that pre-launch period is sort of a crescendo into the burst of launch. So if you urge someone to get excited and follow this page, which they do, and then six months later they get an email that the campaign is live now, I think you've really diluted the excitement that they had when they first came on board.

Everyone should do what works for them and their timeline and their project, but definitely don't skip that as a step.

Spend some time promoting that pre-launch page, getting up your follower count. It will really, really, really help once you go live.

Joanna: For people listening, my pre-launch page is at JFPenn.com/DeathValley. Depending on when people are listening, it might well be live, or it might be in the future.

So when I did my first campaign, obviously you don't know when you first start all the things you kind of have to do. There's obviously KYC, know your customer, that Kickstarter has to do. So if people are going to set up their pre-launch page, how long will it take and—

Oriana: So there's two different approvals.

The KYC stuff is done by Stripe, our payment processor. I would give yourself lots of extra time for these approvals. It usually only takes a day or two. Sometimes you get an automatic approval, but don't leave that to the very end.

Make sure you get your bank details, your ID, all of that information up and sent over to Stripe well before you need to, well before it comes to crunch time.

As far as the Kickstarter approval process, that too can be automatic or it can take up to a few days. We do want, especially for first time authors or first time creators, the trust and safety team who reviews the projects wants to see pretty much a final draft when they're approving it.

You can't put up your pre-launch page until the project is approved. For serial creators in good standing, we are making some allowances where people can get that pre-launch page up before the approval process.

Especially when you're starting out on the platform, it's good practice to like have your campaign more or less finalized, so that the reviewers can see everything that you'll be doing. Then you can get that pre-launch page up at that point.

Joanna: Yes, because — 

You have to say, like, how much people need to pledge, and you need to know things like your shipping details. So let's get a bit more into those finances.

Earlier, you mentioned that adding merch can add a lot of money and lot of cost to a campaign. Of course, if you don't know how much it's going to cost even just to print your book, say, with foil or sprayed edges, or whatever, you can't cost it out either.

Oriana: I cannot stress enough the importance of doing a full, real, detailed budget. That doesn't mean vaguely guessing how much you think it might cost to print a book. Really, actually get samples, figure out all of your processes.

Budget, not just for print production, but for bubble wrap and tape, for pens and stickers. For all of the things that you are going to be producing in your rewards and also budget contingency plans.

Make sure you're doing a really, really detailed job of understanding all of your costs. It's good that you mentioned Russell before. There's a publishing creator tips page, that's kickstarter.com/creators/publishing.

There's a whole lot of resources there for all kinds of different projects and different elements of the crowdfunding process. One piece is a budgeting article by Russell. It's got a worksheet in it and details all of these things that we're talking about. So I absolutely recommend using that as a guide when you're setting out your budget.

One thing about it that I love is that he also says, “Include a little bit of money to do a nice thing for yourself.” For him, he gets a tattoo of one of his characters after every successful campaign.

So maybe for you, that's getting a manicure or a massage or a nice dinner or a new book, but do do something sweet for yourself. That's a nice way to give yourself a reward at the end of what can be a pretty intense process.

Joanna: Yes, it is intense. It's funny because I was scared about it before I pressed that button on the first time, but I feel like what I love about the Kickstarter thing is that it's a real launch period.

I feel like one of the most tiring things for authors is the constant need to do marketing, whereas with Kickstarter campaign, you can be like, okay, I'm going to really push hard for this couple of weeks, or a few weeks before that. Push hard, do all my marketing, and then I can go into fulfillment, and I can ease off a bit.

Oriana: Yes. I think that's an excellent way to describe it, for sure.

That's definitely the Kickstarter proposition. You know, look, I will be screaming from the rooftops about this project for 30 days, and then I will stop talking about it.

Joanna: Yes, and you can't have it. Well, there won't be a thing anymore.

Oriana: Exactly, exactly.

Joanna: Well, then on that, I guess once we have finished, the campaign closes, and Kickstarter collects the money, and we get the money in a couple of weeks’ time.

So any clarification on who pays the tax?

Oriana: So I am actually not allowed to give tax advice, as I am absolutely not an accountant. I would say you should certainly talk to your accountant about what you're doing on Kickstarter and how you should report that and what that's all going to mean.

This is a reasonable point to note that, as we are recording this on February 13th, yesterday, Kickstarter announced a whole bunch of new features that we have been working on for a long time, and we are in the process of rolling out. Including a lot of post campaign tools that we've never had before.

We're doing an internal pledge management system. That is something that people have been asking us for probably over a decade. There are many elements to that, but one thing that we are going to be doing in the future is we're going to be helping everybody with tax and VAT collection.

So that's something that's coming soon, and we're going to do our best to help demystify a massively complicated process.

Joanna: It is. Well, then I'll say, from my perspective, I know what taxes I have to pay, and I make sure I pay them after I get the money from Kickstarter. So as far as I'm concerned —

What else then is coming? Or things that perhaps authors aren't using enough yet?

Oriana: Well, so last year, we released late pledges. This means, as like it says on the tin, once the campaign is closed, you can still collect additional backing. There's some caveats with that. We don't want to undermine that sort of now or never, all or nothing, do or die situation.

So our recommendations for late pledges, they're most effective in two to seven days after the campaign has closed. The final 48 hours of a campaign are really strong. You know, that's when all of that FOMO really kicks in. So a lot of marketing happens, a lot of outreach, a lot of just like traffic.

So inevitably, no matter how hard you have been pushing this project, the day after your campaign closes, three people are going to email you and say, “Well, I didn't know you had a live campaign.” So late pledges are really for them to still be able to get on board, even though they missed all of the main part of the activity.

We also recommend you do not have all of your rewards available in late pledges, and those that you do, cost more. So again, you want to make sure that all of that talk you've been doing during the campaign of like, “This is your only chance to get this book, at this price, at this specificity,” has not been made into a lie by late pledges.

Then also with late pledges, they don't get to stay up forever. At some point you do say, now I am going to press, so I'm going to turn them off. So that's how late pledges are designed to work.

Some other really cool features that we've just announced, and again, as I said, we announced this yesterday. So I don't have a ton more information, although I should tell you where to go to find it. I mean, we've got pop ups and things all over the site about it.

Well, it's a slightly cumbersome URL, updates.kickstarter.com/kickstarters-2025-product-roadmap with some hyphens. I don't know if you have show notes.

Joanna: I'll put a link in the show notes.

Oriana: Excellent. That would be great. That's where we lay out the sort of overview of all of the stuff that we're working on this year.

Some things that I will just call out, we are in beta currently for a payment plan. It's called Pledge Over Time. That allows backers for rewards above a certain dollar amount, I think it's $125, to make their pledge in four payments, rather than all at once.

We are working on secret rewards, which, this is also still in beta. Creators can get a direct link to a reward that's not listed in the campaign and send that to specific groups of backers.

So we have a lot more features planned for this year. We're trying to make things that people have been asking for. This also means, if there's a feature that you want Kickstarter to have that we currently don't, write into our support team and tell them.

A lot of the things that we have developed over the years have come directly from so many people asking for it that we realized we just had to do it. So please tell us what you want, and maybe it'll come to life.

Joanna: Brilliant.

Oriana: Yes, kickstarter.com/publishing is where all of the publishing projects are. I mentioned that creator tips page, kickstarter.com/creators/publishing. We are all over the socials. We are everywhere that you can find us.

Oh, another thing we also just rolled out is a whole new learning lab curriculum, which is a video series of every element of your Kickstarter project.

It is probably geared a bit more toward like larger sort of design and tech and gadget and games creators, but I'm sure that there are really, really relevant tips for publishers and publishing folks in there as well.

We're trying to give as much help as possible. We want everybody to succeed. Of course, a rising tide lifts all boats, which is foundational to the Kickstarter ethos.

Joanna: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Oriana. That was great.

The post Kickstarter For Authors With Oriana Leckert first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How do you keep the happiness and joy in your writing practice, along with managing the business side of being an author? Marissa Meyer gives her tips.

In the intro, How authors can price their books for profit [Self-Publishing with ALLi]; How to recover from author burnout [Self-Publishing Advice]; my Brooke and Daniel crime series in KU; Day of the Vikings; Outback Days and City Nights in the Lucky Country – Books and Travel; replanning with Calendarpedia.

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 

Marissa Meyer is the New York Times bestselling author of fantasy romance and graphic novels, including The Lunar Chronicles. The Happy Writer: Get More Ideas, Write More Words, and Find More Joy from First Draft to Publication and Beyond is her latest book for authors.

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 Marissa at MarissaMeyer.com or on Instagram @MarissaMeyerAuthor.

Joanna: Marissa Meyer is the New York Times bestselling author of fantasy romance and graphic novels, including The Lunar Chronicles. The Happy Writer: Get More Ideas, Write More Words, and Find More Joy from First Draft to Publication and Beyond is her latest book for authors. So welcome to the show, Marissa.

Marissa: Hi. Thank you so much for having me.

Joanna: It's great to have you on. So first up—

Marissa: Oh, goodness. I always wanted to be a writer. I am one of those. I was a huge reader growing up, loved stories, had a big imagination. So, really, from the time that I was a little kid, I started making up stories and telling them to my parents, asking them to write them down into little books for me.

Then as I got older, I, of course, started writing them myself. Then —

You could actually get paid to come up with stories and get your name printed on a book.

I think I realized really early on that that was for me, and that's what I wanted to do with my life. So I kept writing.

As a teenager, I got really into fan fiction and credit that a lot with learning how to tell a complete story. Beginning, middle, end. I got my bachelor's degree in creative writing and a master's degree in publishing because I thought writing might be a difficult career to break into.

I wanted to have a backup plan, and thought, well, if this writing thing doesn't pan out, maybe I can be an editor, maybe I can be a publicist or an agent or something.

The deeper I got into learning about publishing, the more it really just cemented how passionate I was about writing and how much I just really wanted to be the writer in this publishing equation.

So I wrote many multiple manuscripts that went nowhere, but eventually got the idea for a Cinderella retelling about a cyborg, a futuristic retelling. So that became my debut novel, Cinder.

Joanna: Wow. Okay, so it’s really interesting that you did publishing as a degree, as well as writing.

Like did you work in the publishing industry? Or did you just go straight from uni into full-time writer?

Marissa: No, I did. From university, I got a job as an editor at a very small publishing house in Seattle. That publisher focused mostly on fine art books. So those beautiful coffee table books that you get at museum exhibits and art galleries. You know those books.

So it had virtually nothing to do with my ultimate career of being a fiction writer, but it taught me a lot about just the behind the scenes, what goes into creating a book, and the actual production of it, the marketing of it, all of these various aspects.

So I did that for five years, and then I spent about a year as a freelance typesetter and proofreader. At which point my first novel sold, and I got to become a full-time writer.

Joanna: That's very cool. I love that you did typesetting and stuff like that. We'll come back to the business side, but let's get into the book.

So you use the words “happy” and “joy” in the book title, but I feel like many writers think suffering and pain is more of a hallmark of the creative process.

Marissa: Thank you so much for asking this question. It is so funny to me that we do have this stereotype of the writer. That you must be struggling in order to create art, and you must be suffering some way. If it's not painful, then how can you possibly call it quality?

This stereotype really bugs me, and I'm really trying to dismantle it with this book. But that said, we're also not shying away from the fact that writing, it's not just fun and play all the time. There are struggles, there are challenges, no matter where you are on your journey.

Whether you're suffering from writer's block or burnout, whether you're in the query trenches and you're facing rejection or criticism. There's a million things, of course, that can be roadblocks in our path to being happier writers.

That is largely what this book is about, trying to refocus our attention, not on all the things that can go wrong, not on all of the struggles that we face, but looking at the things that we really do love and enjoy about the craft of writing. The hobby, the career.

We get into it because we do have a passion. It's not the sort of job or hobby that most of us take on just for the heck of it. I mean — 

So I really encourage writers to find what it is that appeals to them about this. Do you love the process of taking a messy, complicated plot and fitting it together like a big jigsaw puzzle and that satisfying feeling when everything comes together?

Or do you love that you have the freedom to go to a cafe with your laptop and sip lattes all day and stare out at the people and let the world inspire you? Or maybe you love the research process and learning about things that you are so curious and interested in and just want to do deep dives into it.

There's a lot of things that we can find joy and satisfaction in. So that's going to be different for every writer, and that's going to be different based on where you are, both in the process of writing a particular book, but also where you are in your overall career.

Joanna: I love the research. I also love saying with a finished book, “I made this.” I always enjoy holding that book in my hand. You, coming from this fine art books thing you did early on, I guess you must love the really beautiful special editions and all that as well.

Marissa: Oh, I love it, and the smell! I love the smell of a new book. You don't always get it when a lot of books these days just come in like a cardboard box, but some of these special editions will come wrapped in plastic, and so they still maintain the smell of the ink and the binding glue. Ah, I just nerd out over it.

Joanna: Well, and that is important too, isn't it? I feel like we've come around to that. Like there was a lot of focus on digital for a while, especially for independent authors, but now it's really come round to beautiful, physical products.

That, to me, is a very exciting part of the process, finishing the whole thing with something beautiful. That satisfaction is really part of it.

Marissa: Absolutely. I'm really big on celebrations.

That is such a huge part of the process.

It's really easy—and especially like for me, I'm about 20 books now into my career— it can be easy to be like, “Oh, just another one. Set it on the shelf, and keep on working on the next deadline.” I really have tried to be very conscientious about it.

No, let's pause. Let's pop some champagne. Let's take a night off. Let's get a massage. Like, what is it that's going to make me feel like, yes, I've done it again, and I'm really proud of this moment.

Joanna: That's great. Well, you do have a section on the writing process in the book. Of course, every author is different, but if people haven't got to that 20 books place—

Which I know some people have an issue with.

Marissa: Finishing is hard. I think it's important for people to know that everyone struggles with finishing. We talk a lot about the siren song of the next project because at some point in every book you're going to reach that point where you're in the murky middle and it feels endless.

You're confused about the plot, you're frustrated that things aren't going well, and suddenly you get a sparkly new idea for the next thing.

It's so easy to think, “Ah! That one's going to be really easy and really fun, and it's not going have any of these other problems that I'm dealing with right now.”

It's very tempting to switch over and to follow that path of least resistance. I think it's important to know that that fantasy of the next one being so easy, probably not reality. Probably you will get to relatively the same point in the process and, once again, be hit with, “Ah, this is hard. It's work. What else can I do?”

For me, one of the tips that I started using fairly early in my career is when I am at the start of a project, and I'm really excited, and I've got lots of ideas, and you can feel all the potential for it, and there's a reason that you're choosing to write this thing out of all your other ideas. Why am I focusing my time on this one?

Maybe it's the romance that I'm really excited to write, or I just love the protagonist, or there's a really big twist in the plot that I can't wait to see how readers are going to react to.

Whatever it is, I will write down everything that I really love about this idea. Then when I'm a third of the way or halfway through the book and suddenly hating it and feeling like this is the worst thing I've ever written, and I can't believe that I chose this, what was I thinking, I'll go back and I'll read that list.

I will remind myself why I chose this one in the beginning, and what do I love about it? What do I still love about it? Then I will take those ideas and I will try to incorporate them into the next scene or chapter, or couple of chapters that I'm going to write.

“All right, I love the romance.” Well, let's have a romantic scene. “I think the villain is so cool.” Well, let's have a scene where we really get to see how cool the villain is. You know, whatever it is, focus on that, and that will hopefully help you get over that bad period.

You're like, I'm just going to write the climax scene because I know that will be fun, or do you write linearly?

Marissa: It really depends on the project. I have done both, and I think both processes work. Some books are more difficult than others.

The books that I'm struggling with more, then I will tend to jump around and go ahead to write a scene that I'm really excited about, but not always.

Some books have very complicated plots that are very interwoven, and in those cases, it can be less of a mental gymnastics challenge if you do write it linearly. So it really depends.

I think, for me —

whether it's a word count goal or a chapter goal or whatever it is, anything you can do any day to keep moving forward is going to be helpful.

Joanna: Sometimes that moving forward might not be getting new words down. You also have a section about filling the creative well. Sometimes, especially when you've written as many books as we both have, it can be like, okay, do you know what I need? Some more input.

Marissa: Absolutely, and that's such an important thing to note. Like you say, sometimes getting words down is not the answer.

If you're facing some amount of creative burnout, or if you're just really stuck in a plot and feel like things just aren't working, or maybe you've taken a wrong turn somewhere and you're not really sure how to fix it, sometimes the best thing you can do is take a step back, and do it intentionally.

I think there's a distinction between saying, “I have writer's block and I can't possibly write anything today,” versus, “I am choosing not to write today because I recognize that I need a moment and need some space to refill the well and tap into that creative spark again.”

So, for me, when I decide I'm going to take a day off, there's a myriad of things that I might choose to do with that time. I think getting outside, going for walks, or if you can go to a park or go on a hike somewhere, if you can go swimming. Anything like that tends to, for me, really generate some new ideas.

Spending time with my family is always good. A lot of times I will use those days off to tackle other projects, things that have kind of been looming in the background. Maybe they're taking up more mental space than they should be.

That could be things like getting your car washed, or that could be like reorganizing your pantry, just things that have been really bugging you lately.

Or you might take a day and be like, I'm going to do some really fun research about this project. Or I'm going to take a day and spend some time brainstorming or reoutlining my plot.

So you can also take a more hands on approach to writing. There's really no right or wrong here. Whatever you feel like you need, give it a shot and see if it helps break something loose.

Marissa: All of it. I really enjoy research. I love reading. I love doing deep dives, you know, going on Wikipedia and clicking the little further reading links at the bottom and seeing the rabbit holes you go down.

Also, if I can find a way to do a hands-on or more of an experiential research, that's the best. Of course, we all fantasize about being able to travel. If you can go to the place where your setting is inspired by, that is worth gold.

It's not always an option, of course, for different reasons, but if you can get out and see the world and take in these really great sensory details, it is so helpful.

It could also be talking to an expert on something about your story, something about your protagonist or your plot, because they're going to have just the best insights. They're going to clue you into things that you never would have even known to look up to research.

I've crawled under cars to see how they work because I don't know anything about cars, but I had a mechanic character, so I better learn something about cars.

I love cooking. If there's a dish that my character has to cook or bake or is served, I'll find a recipe and give it a try myself. Just little things like that to just kind of give you that hands on experience. I think it adds a lot to the authenticity as you're writing.

Joanna: It also makes it more of a fun process.

Marissa: It's more fun. Why not? We're all about trying to make it more fun.

Joanna: Yes, exactly. Well, then coming to writing series, because it feels like, obviously we need tropes in the books. If we're writing different books in a series, we need to make sure the characters are consistent and all that.

I feel like a lot of people now are sort of like, okay, is it the same thing, the same thing? What stays the same in a series book and what changes? How do you get ideas for that?

Marissa: That's a good question, and it's going to depend on if your series follows one main protagonist versus if it's more like a loosely connected series with maybe different protagonists or different love interests in each book. Generally, I think it's more common that you've got the solo protagonist who has a complete character arc.

So when I'm thinking of the entire series as a whole and trying to step back and see kind of a big picture, I will give a lot of thought to the protagonist's arc. Where do they start page one, book one? And where am I hoping they're going to end up?

Within that, depending on how many books you have in your series, there's probably going to be some reversals. There might be that in book one, your protagonist might end on a really high note.

Book two, it might be the opposite. They may be way down at the bottom now. Something terrible has happened that they have to claw their way out of.

Or they learn something about themselves in book one, but then book two, you flip it on its head and say, “They thought this thing, but surprise, actually, it's a negative in some way.”

Generally speaking, we tend to think of character arcs as being upward, but I think it's helpful to think of it more as a roller coaster. There should be dips, there should be lots of places where things are going wrong.

So that's one thing that I'm thinking about as I'm putting together a series. Then I'm also thinking about my antagonist and my conflicts. I have often likened it to like old video games, where every level ends with a boss, but then the very end of the game has the big boss that you're really trying to defeat.

So the first boss, you have barely enough skills to defeat that first boss, and maybe it takes a few tries to beat that first level, but you do it. Oh, but now you have to do the second level, and that next boss is going to be even harder.

As you go, you're getting better. Your characters are picking up new skills, new weapons, new allies. So at the end of every book we have a conflict, a climax, something that we have to face, and everyone is going to be a step up, a little more difficult than the last one.

So that we know by the time our character is finally ready to face that big conflict, the big struggle, the antagonist, villain, whatever it is you have at the end of the series, that you have given them the skills that they need to actually defeat them.

Joanna: There's some great advice there. So let's come into more of the business side because you do have this section on the to-do list. I love this because the to-do list is never ending. For indie authors, we're publishing, as well as marketing and writing and everything.

Marissa: Oh, my gosh. It is hard, and I will admit this is something that I personally have really struggled with. I'm a yes person. I like to say yes. I like to please people. I like to feel like I am doing everything within my power to make a book a success, to further my career. So I get it.

I absolutely get how difficult it is to recognize when we need a little space, or we need some downtime, or when we need to take a step back. For me, and I didn't come up with this, I read it in some productivity guide, self help guide, a long time ago, but it really resonated with me.

For example, if you say, yes, I will be on this panel at this book festival.

Okay, let's say you have to travel there. Let's say it's a full day being on the panel. There's probably going to be a signing. Maybe there's an author dinner. Another full day of travel going back home. So we've got essentially two to three days for that yes.

There's lots of times when, great, I can't wait. I'm looking forward to this. I'm going to meet some readers, I'm going to network with authors.

Maybe you recognize that by saying yes to that, I'm saying no to three days with my family, or I'm saying no to three days of working on my novel, or I'm saying no to a day where I could relax and spend a day reading a book and refilling my well.

So none of these are the right option, none of them are the wrong option, but just recognizing that there are pros and cons, and give and take, and be really picky about what you're spending your time on and what you are making your priority at any given point.

Joanna: It is interesting. You mentioned a panel there, and I feel like conferences and conventions are one of these things that is quite difficult. Now, you and I, again, have been doing this a while, so we have a community, like we have author friends.

There are people listening who might be introverts. They might feel very uncomfortable about going to writing conferences, and they're like, should I just say no to that? I guess that the question is—

When do you have to push yourself as an author, and when should you give into those feelings? I know it's tough, but when have you done this as an early writer and then later stage?

Marissa: This is one of those things where I really think people have to tap into their own psyche and recognize, what are my limitations, what are my goals? For me, early in my career, I did it all. If I was invited to something, it was an automatic yes.

I also did not have children at the start of my career, so for me, when it really started to change, as far as recognizing my time is limited, my energy is limited, I have to step back and say no to more things, was when I had kids.

Then it really became that balancing act of, when do you focus on the writing and the career? When do you focus on family?

That said, I mean, the publishing process, the writing process, there's ups and downs. There are times when you are really focused on selling a book, on marketing a book, promoting. That's both with in-person events, doing book signings, doing the festivals. There's also social media, sending out newsletters.

You can really focus on it for one, two, three months, whatever your capacity is, and then step back. Maybe take a hiatus on social media.

Maybe say, for these next five months, I need to write a new book, and I need to focus on being with my family and do some self-care. So for these five months, I'm saying no to all other requests. I mean, whatever it is. I'm just throwing out numbers. Of course, this is going to be different for everybody.

So really think about — 

I hate saying that because I am one of those people where I feel like I can do it all, just let me try. But you really can't.

You have to make choices sometimes and recognize that if you're trying to do it all for too long, then that's a recipe for burnout. That's the last thing we want.

The last thing we want is to get to a point in our career where we dread the writing, or we dread the travel, or we dread the book events.

So whenever you start to feel like it's too much, listen to that and give yourself some space. Realize that the world is not going to fall apart if you take a little bit of time off.

Joanna: I love that. Actually, I prefer this sort of campaign focus, which is what you were really saying there. It's like, go hard for, say, three months, and then take a couple of months off. I do that. I kind of step back from social media.

Some people feel like they have to do, I know the TikTok authors in particular, are doing a lot of videos every single day. They feel like if they stop, it's all going to end.

Marissa: It's true. There's always going to be the next goal post. There's always going to be that next thing that you're thinking, “Oh, if I just get this many followers, then I can slow down.”

Then you get that many followers, and you think, “Oh, but I've got a book coming out in two months, so I'll keep going until then, and then I'll slow down.” “Oh, but now I've got this other thing.” I mean, it's always going to push back. It's always going to be something else.

It's hard to recognize when you do need some personal space, but it's also really important. Not just for our mental health and wellbeing, but for our creativity too.

Joanna: Okay, so another thing that some people are not that happy or joyful about is pitching publishers and agents. Mostly people are quite stressed about that.

Now, you work with traditional publishers. I'm primarily an independent author. There are pros and cons.

Any tips for people who want to position themselves in a world of publishing flux, as ever?

Marissa: Definitely one of the most stressful periods in a career is the pitching to the agents, the querying trenches, the submission trenches. It can do some damage on your confidence, on your everything. So it's a really difficult period.

If your goal is to be traditionally published, as opposed to independently published, and as you say, great options. There's so many great directions that we have available to us today.

If you really think you want to be traditionally published, of course, number one, just make sure you've written the best book that you can. Get some feedback. Have some critique partners go over it.

Then when you feel like, okay, I've done the best I can do, write your query letter. Again, get feedback there, because query letters are particularly tricky, and there is a science and an art to them. Do your research.

Then send it off, and, number one, celebrate because it's so huge. It's such a huge accomplishment to get to the point where you're querying. So regardless of whether you get 10 agents interested and it goes to auction at publishers, or if no one bites, like regardless, you have written a complete book and submitted it.

That's so awesome, so like take a moment to congratulate yourselves and go out for pizza or whatever, whatever you do to celebrate. Then start writing the next thing.

The worst thing that we can do is have this book sent out, and then just spend all day, every day, worried about it and stressing about it and having that anxiety building up and checking our email 100 times a day, which like you're probably going to do anyway.

Then dive into it, body and soul and spirit, and try to immerse yourself in a new story.

This is for a number of reasons. One, because it's going to be a great distraction. But two, when and if your book on submission gets picked up, your agent is going to ask you, what else you got? So it's great to have something else that you can talk about.

Joanna: Then what I do like in your book—I mean, I like lots of things—but you do also —

I like that you covered this because so many people think, “Oh, if I get an agent or a publisher, that's it forever. My whole life is amazing, and I'm rich and famous, and everything will work out.”

So why might some of these things happen over a career, and what's the kind of attitude you need to survive it all?

Marissa: This was one of the big surprises for me, as I started to expand my group, my network of writers, how common it is to break up with an agent or to switch publishers, publishing houses, to switch editors. It happens all the time.

This was shocking to me because I very much felt like, no, when you've got an agent and a publisher, you are set forever. That is your career, those are your people. So I was really surprised that that is not the case.

There's so many reasons why one of these relationships may not work out. I've had friends whose agents have retired, whose editors have moved to different publishers. So it might be something rather innocuous. Life just happens.

Or it could be a matter of just not being the right fit for each other. Maybe your agent only represents kid lit and you want to move into adult. Or you really want to start writing romance, but they don't represent romance.

It could be a matter of my agents not communicating with me. Or I feel like they're no longer focused on me and my career, and I feel like I'm not getting the attention that I really need and want out of an agent.

Again, there's so many reasons, but it does happen. It's not the end of the world, it's just a little blip, another blip in your journey.

By and large, the friends I have who have left an agent, or whose agent has left their career or whatever, then when they find someone new, more often than not, they end up feeling like, you know what? This was the right thing.

I really took my time, I found someone new who is a great fit for me, who is excited about my career and my upcoming projects, and who is really working it and making things happen, and making book deals happen.

So I know it's really hard in that moment because you can feel like I worked so hard to get this agent, why would I ever leave them and go back to querying?

So really try to take a big picture look and think, well, I might be going through a bad spot now, but what is the potential payoff in the end? What do I stand to succeed and to gain in doing this? So it's a tough decision. It's not a fun part of the career, but it is a reality for a lot of us.

So you just make some more choices and carry on. We don't let that end our careers.

Marissa: Absolutely, and you're always going to be your best advocate.

We think of our agents as our advocates, and we think of our editors as our advocates. They absolutely are, but ultimately, no one is paying as much attention to your career as you are. So we really have to speak up for ourselves, first and foremost.

Joanna: We're almost out of time, but I have to ask you about book marketing because it is a part of every author's life, and again, something where happiness and joy might not be such a big part. So how can we make marketing more fun?

Marissa: Oh, my gosh. If you figure it out, you let me know.

Joanna: Well, I like podcasting. So, there you go.

Marissa: I also really enjoyed podcasting, although I did just retire my podcast because, again, too many things, too many spinning plates, and you have to make some tough choices sometimes.

For me, you know, find the things that you do enjoy. I learned early on, I don't like Facebook, and I don't like Twitter/X. It was difficult pulling back from those because I had a fair amount of followers, but when I did, it was clearly the right decision. I wish I'd done that a long time ago.

Then it allowed me to focus my energy and my attention on Instagram, which is the platform that I just naturally gravitate toward best. I just enjoy it the most.

We were talking about the TikTokers who feel like they have to make multiple videos every day. Figure out what—again, back to limitations— what is your capacity?

Have a plan in place and say, okay, I'm going to post three times a week, or five times a week. Or maybe I'm going do Fan Art Fridays, and I'm going do New Book Tuesdays or whatever it is, and then maybe I'll have one fun family post, or one fun “this is a quirky thing about me” post every week.

So you can kind of have a plan and break it down so that you're not every morning looking at your phone thinking, “Oh, I have to post on Instagram again,” or, “I have to do a TikTok video. Now, what am I going to talk about?”

I also think it's helpful to maybe once a month, or maybe at the start of a big promo season, spend some time doing your big brainstorming and kind of like batch.

So I'll spend a day brainstorming what I want to post, and then I'll spend a few hours taking the necessary photos and trying to put together the captions or trying to put together the graphics or whatever. Then that's done, and I don't have to worry about that for a couple of weeks, maybe a month, if you're really productive.

So it's a really nice, efficient way to tackle that and then be able to move back to writing, which is, for most of us, the thing that we would rather be doing.

Joanna: Absolutely. Now, the book is The Happy Writer.

Marissa: Thank you so much. I can be found on Instagram at MarissaMeyerAuthor, or on my website at MarissaMeyer.com. Books are available pretty much wherever you like to get your books.

Joanna: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Marissa. That was great.

Marissa: My pleasure. Thanks so much for having me.

The post The Happy Writer With Marissa Meyer first appeared on The Creative Penn.