The Creative Penn Podcast For Writers

How can you build iconic characters that your readers want to keep coming back to? How can you be the kind of creator that readers trust, even without social media? With Claire Taylor In the intro, Dan Brown talks writing and publishing [Tetragrammaton]; Design Rules That Make or Break a Book [Self-Publishing Advice]; Amazon’s DRM change [Kindlepreneur]; Show me the money [Rachael Herron]; AI bible translation [Wycliffe, Pope Leo tweet]. Plus, Business for Authors 24 Jan webinar, and Bones of the Deep. Today's show is sponsored by Bookfunnel, the essential tool for your author business. Whether it’s delivering your reader magnet, sending out advanced copies of your book, handing out ebooks at a conference, or fulfilling your digital sales to readers, BookFunnel does it all. Check it out at bookfunnel.com/thecreativepenn This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn Claire Taylor is a humour and mystery author, the owner of FFS Media, and a certified Enneagram coach. She teaches authors to write stronger stories and build sustainable careers at LiberatedWriter.com, and her book is Write Iconic Characters: Unlocking the Core Motivations that Fuel Unforgettable Stories. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights, and the full transcript is below. Show Notes Why Claire left social media and how she still markets her books and services What the Enneagram is and how core fears and desires shape character motivation Using Enneagram types (including Wednesday Addams as an example) to write iconic characters Creating rich conflict and relationships by pairing different Enneagram types on the page Coping with rapid change, AI, and fear in the author community in 2026 Building a trustworthy, human author brand through honesty, transparency, and vulnerability You can find Claire at LiberatedWriter.com, FFS.media, or on Substack as The Liberated Writer. Transcript of the interview with Claire Taylor Joanna: Claire Taylor is a humour and mystery author, the owner of FFS Media, and a certified Enneagram coach. She teaches authors to write stronger stories and build sustainable careers at LiberatedWriter.com, and her book is Write Iconic Characters: Unlocking the Core Motivations that Fuel Unforgettable Stories. So, welcome back to the show, Claire. Claire: Thank you so much for having me back. I'm excited to be here. Joanna: It's great to have you back on the show. It was March 2024 when you were last on, so almost two years now as this goes out. Give us a bit of an update. How has your writing craft and your author business changed in that time? Claire: One of the things I've been focusing on with my own fiction craft is deconstructing the rules of how a story “should” be. That's been a sort of hobby focus of mine. All the story structure books aren't law, right? That's why there are so many of them. They're all suggestions, frameworks. They're all trying to quantify humans’ innate ability to understand a story. So I'm trying to remember more that I already know what a story is, deep down. My job as an author is to keep the reader's attention from start to finish and leave them feeling the way I hope they’ll feel at the end. That’s been my focus on the craft side. On the author business side, I've made some big shifts. I left social media earlier this year, and I've been looking more towards one-on-one coaching and networking. I did a craft-based Kickstarter, and I’d been focusing a lot on “career, career, career”—very business-minded—and now I'm creating more content again, especially around using the Enneagram for writing craft. So there’s been a lot of transition since 2024 for me. Joanna: I think it's so important—and obviously we're going to get into your book in more detail—but I do think it's important for people to hear about our pivots and transitions. I haven't spoken to you for a while, but I actually started a master's degree a few months back. I'm doing a full-time master's alongside everything else I do. So I've kind of put down book writing for the moment, and I'm doing essay writing and academic writing instead. It's quite different, as you can imagine. It sounds like what you’re doing is different too. One thing I know will have perked up people’s ears is: “I left social media.” Tell us a bit more about that. Claire: This was a move that I could feel coming for a while. I didn’t like what social media did to my attention. Even when I wasn’t on it, there was almost a hangover from having been on it. My attention didn’t feel as sharp and focused as it used to be, back before social media became what it is now. So I started asking myself some questions: What is lost if I leave? What is gained if I leave? And what is social media actually doing for me today? Because sometimes we hold on to what it used to do for us, and we keep trying to squeeze more and more of that out of it. But it has changed so much. There are almost no places with sufficient organic reach anymore. It’s all pay-to-play, and the cost of pay-to-play keeps going up. I looked at the numbers for my business. My Kickstarter was a great place to analyse that because they track so many traffic sources so clearly. I could see exactly how much I was getting from social media when I advertised and promoted my projects there. Then I asked: can I let that go in order to get my attention back and make my life feel more settled? And I decided: yes, I can. That’s worth more to me. Joanna: There are some things money can’t buy. Sometimes it really isn’t about the money. I like your question: what is lost and what is gained? You also said it’s all pay-to-play and there’s no organic reach. I do think there is some organic reach for some people who don’t pay, but those people are very good at playing the game of whatever the platform wants. So, TikTok for example—you might not have to pay money yet, but you do have to play their game. You have to pay with your time instead of money. I agree with you. I don’t think there’s anywhere you can literally just post something and know it will reliably reach the people who follow you. Claire: Right. Exactly. TikTok currently, if you really play the game, will sometimes “pick” you, right? But that “pick me” energy is not really my jam. And we can see the trend—this “organic” thing doesn’t last. It's organic for now. You can play the game for now, but TikTok would be crazy not to change things so they make more money. So eventually everything becomes pay-to-play. TikTok is fun, but for me it’s addictive. I took it off my phone years ago because I would do the infinite scroll. There’s so much candy there. Then I’d wake up the next morning and notice my mood just wasn’t where I wanted it to be. My energy was low. I really saw a correlation between how much I scrolled and how flat I felt afterwards. So I realised: I’m not the person to pay-to-play or to play the game here. I’m not even convinced that the pay-to-play on certain social media networks is being tracked in a reliable, accountable way anymore. Who is holding them accountable for those numbers? You can sort of see correlation in your sales, but still, I just became more and more sceptical. In the end, it just wasn’t for me. My life is so much better on a daily basis without it. That’s definitely a decision I have not regretted for a second. Joanna: I’m sorry to keep on about this, but I think this is great because this is going out in January 2026, and there will be lots of people examining their relationship with social media. It’s one of those things we all examine every year, pretty much. The other thing I’d add is that you are a very self-aware person. You spend a lot of time thinking about these things and noticing your own behaviour and energy. Stopping and thinking is such an important part of it. But let’s tackle the big question: one of the reasons people don’t want to come off social media is that they’re afraid they don’t know how else to market. How are you marketing if you’re not using social media? Claire: I didn’t leave social media overnight. Over time, I’ve been adjusting and transitioning, preparing my business and myself mentally and emotionally for probably about a year. I still market to my email list. That has always been important to my business. I’ve also started a Substack that fits how my brain works. Substack is interesting. Some people might consider it a form of social media—it has that new reading feed—but it feels much more like blogging to me. It’s blogging where you can be discovered, which is lovely. I’ve been doing more long-form content there. You get access to all the emails of your subscribers, which is crucial to me. I don’t want to build on something I can’t take with me. So I’ve been doing more long-form content, and that seems to keep my core audience with me. I’ve got plenty of people subscribed; people continue to come back, work with me, and tell their friends. Word of mouth has always been the way my business markets best, because it’s hard to describe the benefits of what I do in a quick, catchy way. It needs context. So I’m leaning even more on that. Then I’m also shifting my fiction book selling more local. Joanna: In person? Claire: Yes. In person and local. Networking and just telling more people that I’m an author. Connecting more deeply with my existing email lists and communities and selling that way. Joanna: I think at the end of the day it does come back to the email list. I think this is one of the benefits of selling direct to people through Shopify or Payhip or whatever, or locally, because you can build your email list. Every person you bring into your own ecosystem, you get their data and you can stay in touch. Whereas all the things we did for years to get people to go to Amazon, we didn’t get their emails and details. It’s so interesting where we are right now in the author business. Okay, we’ll come back to some of these things, but let’s get into the book and what you do. Obviously what underpins the book is the Enneagram. Just remind us what the Enneagram is, why you incorporate it into so much of your work, and why you find it resonates so much. Claire: The Enneagram is a framework that describes patterns of thoughts, feelings, and actions that tend to arise from nine different core motivations. Those core motivations are made up of a fear–desire pair. So, for instance, there’s the fear of lacking worth and the desire to be worthy. That pair is the Type Three core motivation. If you’re a Type Three, sometimes called “The Achiever,” that’s your fundamental driver. What we fear and desire above all the other fears and desires determines where our attention goes. And attention is something authors benefit greatly from understanding. We have to keep people’s attention, so we want to understand our own attention and how to cultivate it. The things our attention goes to build our understanding of ourselves and the world. Being intentional about that, and paying attention to what your characters pay attention to—and what your readers are paying attention to—is hugely beneficial. It can give you a real leg up. That’s why I focus on the Enneagram. I find it very useful at that core level. You can build a lot of other things on top of it with your characters: their backstory, personal histories, little quirks—all of that can be built off the Enneagram foundation. Why I like the Enneagram more than other frameworks like MBTI or the Big Five is that it not only shows us how our fears are confining us—that’s really what it’s charting—but it also shows us a path towards liberation from those fears. That’s where the Enneagram really shines: the growth path, the freedom from the confines of our own personality. It offers that to anyone who wants to study and discover it. A lot of the authors I work with say things like, “I’m just so sick of my own stuff.” And I get it. We all get sick of running into the same patterns over and over again. We can get sick of our personality! The Enneagram is a really good tool for figuring out what’s going on and how to try something new, because often we can’t even see that there are other options. We have this particular lens we’re looking through. That’s why I like to play with it, and why I find it so useful. Joanna: That’s really interesting. It sounds like you have a lot of mature authors—and when I say “mature,” I mean authors with a lot of books under their belt, not necessarily age. There are different problems at different stages of the author career, and the problem you just described—“I’m getting sick of my stuff”—sounds like a mature author issue. What are some of the other issues you see in the community that are quite common amongst indie authors? Claire: One that comes up a lot, especially early on, is: “Am I doing this right?” That’s a big question. People say, “I don’t know if I’m doing this right. I’m going to mess it up. This person told me this was the way to do things, but I don’t think I can do it this way. Am I doomed?” That’s the fear. A lot of what I help people with is seeing that there isn’t a single “right” way to do this. There’s a way that’s going to feel more aligned to you, and there are millions of ways to approach an author career because we’re all constructing it as we go. You were there in the early days. We were all just making this up as we went along. Joanna: Exactly. There was a time when ebooks were PDFs, there wasn’t even a Kindle, and there was no iPhone. We were literally just making it up. Claire: Right. Exactly. That spirit of “we’re all making it up” is important. Some of us have come up with frameworks that work for us, and then we tell other people about them—“Here’s a process; try this process”—but that doesn’t mean it’s the process. Understanding what motivates you—those core motivations—helps you see where you’re going to bump into advice that’s not right for you, and how to start making decisions that fit your attention, your life, your desires in this author role. Early on we do a lot of that work. Then there are the authors who started a while ago and have a bunch of books. They hit a point where they say, “I’ve changed so much since I started writing. I need to figure out how to adjust my career.” Joanna: Tell us more about that, because I think that’s you and me. How do we deal with that? Claire: Well, crying helps. Joanna: That is true! There’s always a bit of crying involved in reinvention. From my perspective, my brand has always been built around me. People are still here—I know some people listening who have been with the podcast since I started it in 2009—and I’ve always been me. Even though I’ve done loads of different things and changed along the way, at heart I’m still me. I’m really glad I built a personal brand around who I am, rather than around one genre or a single topic. How about you? How do you see it? Claire: I’m the same. I just can’t stick with something that doesn’t feel right for me anymore. I’ll start to rebel against it. There’s also that “good girl” part of me that wants to do things the way they’re supposed to be done and keep everybody happy. I have to keep an eye on her, because she’ll default to “this is the way it should be done,” and then I end up constricted. As we advance through our careers, positioning around what motivates us and what we love, and allowing ourselves to understand that it’s okay to change—even though it’s painful—is crucial. It’s actually destructive not to change over time. We end up forfeiting so many things that make life worth living if we don’t allow ourselves to grow and change. We end up in this tiny box. People sometimes say the Enneagram is very restrictive. “It’s only nine types, you’re putting me in a box.” It’s like: no. These are the boxes we’ve put ourselves in. Then we use the Enneagram to figure out how to get out of the box. As we start to see the box we’ve put ourselves in with our personality—“that’s me, that’s not me”—we realise how much movement we actually have, how many options we have, while still being ourselves. Joanna: So many options. This kind of brings us into your book, because part of the personal brand thing is being real and having different facets. Your book is Write Iconic Characters, and presumably these are characters that people want to read more about. It uses the Enneagram to construct these better characters. So first up— What’s your definition of an iconic character, as opposed to any old character? And how can we use the Enneagram to construct one? Claire: An iconic character, in my imagination, is one that really sticks with us after we've finished the story. They become a reference point. We’ll say, “This person is kind of like that character,” or “This situation feels like that character would handle it this way.” It could be our friends, our enemies, someone we meet on the bus—whoever it is might remind us of this character. So they really get lodged in our psyche. An iconic character feels true to some fundamental part of the human condition, even if they’re not strictly human. So, all the alien romance people listening, don’t worry—you’re still in! These characters take on a life of their own. With an iconic character, we may hear them talking to us after the book is done, because we’ve tapped into that essential part of them. They can become almost archetypal—something we go back to over and over again in our minds, both as writers and as readers. Joanna: How can we use the Enneagram to construct an iconic character? I’m asking this as a discovery writer who struggles to construct anything beforehand. It’s more that I write stuff and then something emerges. But I have definitely not had a hit series with an iconic character, so I’m willing to give your approach a try. Claire: It works with whatever your process is. If you’re a discovery writer, start with that spark of a character in your head. If there’s a character who’s just a glimmer—maybe you know a few things about them—just keep writing. At some point you’ll probably recognise, “Okay, it’s time to go deeper in understanding this character and create a cohesive thread to pull all of this together.” That’s where the Enneagram becomes useful. You can put on your armchair psychologist hat and ask: which of the nine core fears seems like it might be driving the parts of their personality that are emerging? Thankfully, we intuitively recognise the nine types. When we start gathering bits for a new character, we tend to pull from essentially the same constellation of personality, even if we don’t realise it. For instance, you might say, “This character is bold and adventurous,” and that’s all you know. You’re probably not going to also add, “and they’re incredibly shy,” because “bold and adventurous” plus “incredibly shy” doesn’t really fit our intuitive understanding of people. We know that instinctively. So, you’ve got “bold and adventurous.” You write that to a certain point, and then you get to a place where you think, “I don’t really know them deeply.” That’s when you can go back to the nine core fears and start ruling some out quite quickly. In the book, I have descriptions for each of them. You can read the character descriptions, read about the motivations, and start to say, “It’s definitely not these five types. I can rule those out.” If they’re bold and adventurous, maybe the core fear is being trapped in deprivation and pain, or being harmed and controlled. Those correspond to Type Seven (“The Enthusiast”) and Type Eight (“The Challenger”), respectively. So you might say, “Okay, maybe they’re a Seven or an Eight.” From there, if you can pin down a type, you can read more about it and get ideas. You can understand the next big decision point. If they’re a Type Seven, what’s going to motivate them? They’ll do whatever keeps them from being trapped in pain and deprivation, and they’ll be seeking satisfaction or new experiences in some way, because that’s the core desire that goes with that fear. So now, you’re asking: “How do I get them to get on the spaceship and leave Earth?” Well, you could offer them some adventure, because they’re bold and adventurous. I have a character who’s a Seven, and she gets on a spaceship and takes off because her boyfriend just proposed—and the idea of being trapped in marriage feels like: “Nope. Whatever is on this spaceship, I’m out of here.” You can play with that once you identify a type. You can go as deep with that type as you want, or you can just work with the core fear and the basic desire. There’s no “better or worse”—it’s whatever you feel comfortable with and whatever you need for the story. Joanna: In the book, you go into all the Enneagram types in detail, but you also have a specific example: Wednesday Addams. She’s one of my favourites. People listening have either seen the current series or they have something in mind from the old-school Addams Family. Can you talk about [Wednesday Addams] as an example? Claire: Doing those deep dives was some of the most fun research for this book. I told my husband, John, “Don’t bother me. I need to sit and binge-watch Wednesday again—with my notebook this time.” Online, people were guessing: “Oh, she’s maybe this type, maybe that type.” As soon as I started watching properly with the Enneagram in mind, I thought: “Oh, this is a Type Eight, this is the Challenger.” One of the first things we hear from her is that she considers emotions to be weakness. Immediately, you can cross out a bunch of types from that. When we’re looking at weak/strong language—that lens of “strength” versus “weakness”—we tend to look towards Eights, because they often sort the world in those terms. They’re concerned about being harmed or controlled, so they feel they need to be strong and powerful. That gave me a strong hint in that direction. If we look at the inciting incident—which is a great place to identify what really triggers a character, because it has to be powerful enough to launch the story—Wednesday finds her little brother Pugsley stuffed in a locker. She says, “Who did this?” because she believes she’s the only one who gets to bully him. That’s a very stereotypical Type Eight thing. The unhealthy Eight can dip into being a bit of a bully because they’re focused on power and power dynamics. But the Eight also says, “These are my people. I protect them. If you’re one of my people, you’re under my protection.” So there’s that protection/control paradox. Then she goes and—spoiler—throws a bag of piranhas into the pool to attack the boys who hurt him. That’s like: okay, this is probably an Eight. Then she has control wrested from her when she’s sent to the new school. That’s a big trigger for an Eight: to not have autonomy, to not have control. She acts out pretty much immediately, tries to push people away, and establishes dominance. One of the first things she does is challenge the popular girl to a fencing match. That’s very Eight behaviour: “I’m going to go in, figure out where I sit in this power structure, and try to get into a position of power straight away.” That’s how the story starts, and in the book I go into a lot more analysis. At one point she’s attacked by this mysterious thing and is narrowly saved from a monster. Her reaction afterwards is: “I would have rather saved myself.” That’s another strong Eight moment. The Eight does not like to be saved by anyone else. It’s: “No, I wanted to be strong enough to do that.” Her story arc is also very Eight-flavoured: she starts off walled-off, “I can do it myself,” which can sometimes look like the self-sufficiency of the Five, but for her it’s about always being in a power position and in control of herself. She has to learn to rely more on other people if she wants to protect the people she cares about. Protecting the innocent and protecting “her people” is a big priority for the Eight. Joanna: Let’s say we’ve identified our main character and protagonist. One of the important things in any book, especially in a series, is conflict—both internal and external. Can we use the Enneagram to work out what would be the best other character, or characters, to give us more conflict? Claire: The character dynamics are complex, and all types are going to have both commonalities and conflict between them. That works really well for fiction. But depending on how much conflict you need, there are certain type pairings that are especially good for it. If you have a protagonist who’s an Eight, they’re going to generate conflict everywhere because it doesn’t really bother them. They’re okay wading into conflict. If you ask an Eight, “Do you like conflict?” they’ll often say, “Well, sometimes it’s not great,” but to everyone else it looks like they come in like a wrecking ball. The Eight tends to go for what they want. They don’t see the point in waiting. They think, “I want it, I’m going to go and get it.” That makes them feel strong and powerful. So it’s easy to create external and internal conflict with an Eight and other types. But the nature of the conflict is going to be different depending on who you pair them with. Let’s say you have this Eight and you pair them with a Type One, “The Reformer,” whose core fear is being bad or corrupt, and who wants to be good and have integrity. The Reformer wants morality. They can get a little preachy; they can become a bit of a zealot when they’re more unhealthy. A One and an Eight will have a very particular kind of conflict because the One says, “Let’s do what’s right,” and the Eight says, “Let’s do what gets me what I want and puts me in the power position.” They may absolutely get along if they’re taking on injustice. Ones and Eights will team up if they both see the same thing as unjust. They’ll both take it on together. But then they may reach a point in the story where the choice is between doing the thing that is “right”—maybe self-sacrificing or moral—versus doing the thing that will exact retribution or secure a power-up. That’s where the conflict between a One and an Eight shows up. You can grab any two types and they’ll have unique conflict. I’m actually working on a project on Kickstarter that’s all about character dynamics and relationships—Write Iconic Relationships is the next project—and I go deeper into this there. Joanna: I was wondering about that, because I did a day-thing recently with colour palettes and interior design—which is not usually my thing—so I was really challenging myself. We did this colour wheel, and they were talking about how the opposite colour on the wheel is the one that goes with it in an interesting way. I thought— Maybe there’s something in the Enneagram where it’s like a wheel, and the type opposite is the one that clashes or fits in a certain way. Is that a thing? Claire: There is a lot of that kind of contrast. The Enneagram is usually depicted in a circle, one through nine, and there are strong contrasts between types that are right next to each other, as well as interesting lines that connect them. For example, we’ve been talking about the Eight, and right next to Eight is Nine, “The Peacemaker.” Eights and Nines can look like opposites in certain ways. The Nine is conflict-avoidant, and the Eight tends to think you get what you want by pushing into conflict if necessary. Then you’ve got Four, “The Individualist,” which is very emotional, artistic, heart-centred, and Five, “The Investigator,” which you’re familiar with—very head-centred and analytical, thinking-based. The Four and the Five can clash a bit: the head and the heart. So, yes, there are interesting contrasts right next to each other on the wheel. Each type also has its own conflict style. We’re going into the weeds a bit here, but it’s fascinating to play with. There’s one conflict style—the avoidant conflict style, sometimes called the “positive outlook” group—and it’s actually hard to get those types into an enemies-to-lovers romance because they don’t really want to be enemies. That’s Types Two, Seven, and Nine. So depending on the trope you’re writing, some type pairings are more frictional than others. There are all these different dynamics you can explore, and I can’t wait to dig into them more for everyone in the relationships book. Joanna: The Enneagram is just one of many tools people can use to figure out themselves as well as their characters. Maybe that’s something people want to look at this year. You’ve got this book, you’ve got other resources that go into it, and there’s also a lot of information out there if people want to explore it more deeply. Let’s pull back out to the bigger picture, because as this goes out in January 2026, I think there is a real fear of change in the community right now. Is that something you’ve seen? What are your thoughts for authors on how they can navigate the year ahead? Claire: Yes, there has been a lot of fear. The rate of change of things online has felt very rapid. The rate of change in the broader world—politically, socially—has also felt scary to a lot of people. It can be really helpful to look at your own personal life and anchor yourself in what hasn’t changed and what feels universal. From there you can start to say, “Okay, I can do this. I’m safe enough to be creative. I can find creative ways to work within this new environment.” You can choose to engage with AI. You can choose to opt out. It’s totally your choice, and there is no inherent virtue in either one. I think that’s important to say. Sometimes people who are anti-AI—not just uninterested but actively antagonistic—go after people who like it. And sometimes people who like AI can be antagonistic towards people who don’t want to use it. But actually, you get to choose what you’re comfortable with. One of the things I see emerging for authors in 2026, regardless of what tools you’re using or how you feel about them, is this question of trustworthiness. I think there’s a big need for that. With the increased number of images and videos that are AI-generated—which a lot of people who’ve been on the internet for a while can still recognise as AI and say, “Yeah, that’s AI”—but that may not be obvious for long. Right now some of us can tell, but a lot of people can’t, and that’s only going to get murkier. There’s a rising mistrust of our own senses online lately. We’re starting to wonder, “Can I believe what I’m seeing and hearing?” And I think that sense of mistrust will increase. As an author in that environment, it’s really worth focusing on: how do I build trust with my readers? That doesn’t mean you never use AI. It might simply mean you disclose, to whatever extent feels right for you, how you use it. There are things like authenticity, honesty, vulnerability, humility, integrity, transparency, reliability—all of those are ingredients in this recipe of trustworthiness that we need to look at for ourselves. If there’s one piece of hard inner work authors can do for 2026, I think it’s asking: “Where have I not been trustworthy to my readers?” Then taking that hard, sometimes painful look at what comes up, and asking how you can adjust. What do you need to change? What new practices do you need to create that will increase trustworthiness? I really think that’s the thing that’s starting to erode online. If you can work on it now, you can hold onto your readers through whatever comes next. Joanna: What’s one concrete thing people could do in that direction [to increase trustworthiness]? Claire: I would say disclosing if you use AI is a really good start—or at least disclosing how you use it specifically. I know that can lead to drama when you do it because people have strong opinions, but trustworthiness comes at the cost of courage and honesty. Transparency is another ingredient we could all use more of. If transparency around AI is a hard “absolutely not” for you—if you’re thinking, “Nope, Claire, you can get lost with that”—then authenticity is another route. Let your messy self be visible, because people still want some human in the mix. Being authentically messy and vulnerable with your audience helps. If you can’t be reliable and put the book out on time, at least share what’s going on in your life. Staying connected in that way builds trust. Readers will think, “Okay, I see why you didn’t hit that deadline.” But if you’re always promising books—“It’s going to be out on this day,” and then, “Oh, I had to push it back,” and that happens again and again—that does erode the trustworthiness of your brand. So, looking at those things and asking, “How am I cultivating trust, and how am I breaking it?” is hard work. There are definitely ways I look at my own business and think, “That’s not a very trustworthy thing I’m doing.” Then I need to sit down, get real with myself, and see how I can improve that. Joanna: Always improving is good. Coming back to the personal brand piece, and to being vulnerable and putting ourselves out there: you and I have both got used to that over years of doing it and practising. There are people listening who have never put their photo online, or their voice online, or done a video. They might not use their photo on the back of their book or on their website. They might use an avatar. They might use a pen name. They might be afraid of having anything about themselves online. That’s where I think there is a concern, because as much as I love a lot of the AI stuff, I don’t love the idea of everything being hidden behind anonymous pen names and faceless brands. As you said, being vulnerable in some way and being recognisably human really matters. I’d say: double down on being human. I think that’s really important. Do you have any words of courage for people who feel, “I just can’t. I don’t want to put myself out there”? Claire: There are definitely legitimate reasons some people wouldn’t want to be visible. There are safety reasons, cultural reasons, family reasons—all sorts of factors. There are also a lot of authors who simply haven’t practised the muscle of vulnerability. You build that muscle a little bit at a time. It does open you up to criticism, and some people are just not at a phase of life where they can cope with that. That’s okay. If fear is the main reason—if you’re hiding because you’re scared of being judged—I do encourage you to step out, gently. This may be my personal soapbox, but I don’t think life is meant to be spent hiding. Things may happen. Not everyone will like you. That’s part of being alive. When you invite in hiding, it doesn’t just stay in one corner. That constricted feeling tends to spread into other areas of your life. A lot of the time, people I work with don’t want to disclose their pen names because they’re worried their parents won’t approve, and then we have to unpack that. You don’t have to do what your parents want you to do. You’re an adult now, right? If the issue is, “They’ll cut me out of the will,” we can talk about that too. That’s a deeper, more practical conversation. But if it’s just that they won’t approve, you have more freedom than you think. You also don’t have to plaster your picture everywhere. Even if you’re not comfortable showing your face, you can still communicate who you are and what matters to you in other ways—through your stories, through your email list, through how you talk to readers. Let your authentic self be expressed in some way. It’s scary, but the reward is freedom. Joanna: Absolutely. Lots to explore in 2026. Tell people where they can find you and your books and everything you do online. Claire: LiberatedWriter.com is where all of my stuff lives, except my fiction, which I don’t think people here are necessarily as interested in. If you do want to find my fiction, FFS Media is where that lives. Then I’m on Substack as well. I write long pieces there. If you want to subscribe, it’s The Liberated Writer on Substack. Joanna: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Claire. That was great. Claire: Thanks so much for having me.The post Leaving Social Media, Writing Iconic Characters, and Building Trust With Claire Taylor first appeared on The Creative Penn.

What does 2026 hold for indie authors and the publishing industry? I give my thoughts on trends and predictions for the year ahead. In the intro, Quitting the right stuff; how to edit your author business in 2026; Is SubStack Good for Indie Authors?; Business for Authors webinars. If you'd like to join my community and support the show every month, you'll get access to my growing list of Patron videos and audio on all aspects of the author business — for the price of a black coffee (or two) a month. Join us at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn. Joanna Penn writes non-fiction for authors and is an award-winning, New York Times and USA Today bestselling thriller author as J.F. Penn. She’s also an award-winning podcaster, creative entrepreneur, and international professional speaker. 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. (1) More indie authors will sell direct through Shopify, Kickstarter, and local in-person events (2) AI-powered search will start to shift elements of book discoverability (3) The start of Agentic Commerce (4) AI-assisted audiobook narration will go mainstream (5) AI-assisted translation will start to take off beyond the early adopters (6) AI video becomes ubiquitous. ‘Live selling’ becomes the next trend in social sales. (7) AI will create, run, and optimise ads without the need for human intervention (8) 1000 True Fans becomes more important than ever You can find all my books as J.F. Penn and Joanna Penn on your favourite online store in all the usual formats, or order from your local library or bookstore. You can also buy direct from me at CreativePennBooks.com and JFPennBooks.com. I'm not really active on social media, but you can always see my photos at Instagram @jfpennauthor. 2026 Trends and Predictions for Indie Authors and Book Publishing (1) More indie authors will sell direct through Shopify, Kickstarter, and local in-person events — and more companies like BookVault will offer even more beautiful physical books and products to support this. This trend will not be a surprise to most of you! Selling direct has been a trend for the last few years, but in 2026, it will continue to grow as a way that independent authors become even more independent. The recent Written Word Media survey from Dec 2025 noted that 30% of authors surveyed are selling direct already and 30% say they plan to start in 2026. Among authors earning over $10,000 per month, roughly half sell direct. In my opinion, selling direct is an advanced author strategy, meaning that you have multiple books and you understand book marketing and have an email list already or some guaranteed way to reach readers. In fact, Kindlepreneur reports that 66% of authors selling direct have more than 5 books, and 46% have more than 10 books. Of course, you can start with the something small, like a table at a local event with a limited number of books for sale, but if you want to consistently sell direct for years to come, you need to consider all the business aspects. Selling direct is not a silver bullet. It’s much harder work to sell direct than it is to just upload an ebook to Amazon, whether you choose a Kickstarter campaign, or Shopify/Payhip or other online stores, or regular in-person sales at events/conferences/fairs. You need a business mindset and business practices, for example, you need to pay upfront for setup as well as ongoing management, and bulk printing in some cases. You need to manage taxes and cashflow. You need to be a lot more proactive about marketing, as you won’t sell anything if you don’t bring readers to your books/products. But selling direct also brings advantages. It sets you apart from the bulk of digital only authors who still only upload ebooks to Amazon, or maybe add a print on demand book, and in an era of AI rapid creation, that number is growing all the time. If you sell direct, you get your customer data and you can reach those customers next time, through your email list. If you don’t know who bought your books and don’t have a guaranteed way to reach them, you will more easily be disrupted when things change — and they always change eventually. Kindlepreneur notes that “45% of the successful direct selling authors had over 1,000 subscribers on their email lists,” with “a clear, positive correlation between email list size and monthly direct sales income — with authors having an email list of over 15,000 subscribers earning 20X more than authors with email lists under 100 subscribers.” Selling direct means faster money, sometimes the same day or the same week in many cases, or a few weeks after a campaign finishes, as with Kickstarter. And remember, you don’t have to sell all your formats directly. You can keep your ebooks in KU, do whatever you like with audiobooks, and just have premium print products direct, or start with a very basic Kickstarter campaign, or a table at a local fair. Lots more tips for Shopify and Kickstarter at https://www.thecreativepenn.com/selldirectresources/ I also recommend the Novel Marketing Podcast on The Shopify Trap: Why authors keep losing money as it is a great counterpoint to my positive endorsement of selling direct on Shopify! Among other things, Thomas notes that a fixed monthly fee for a store doesn’t match how most authors make money from books which is more in spikes, the complexity and hassle eats time and can cost more money if you pay for help, and it can reduce sales on Amazon and weaken your ranking. Basically, if you haven’t figured out marketing direct to your store, it can hurt you.All true for some authors, for some genres, and for some people’s lifestyle. But for authors who don’t want to be on the hamster wheel of the Amazon algorithm and who want more diversity and control in income, as well as the incredible creative benefits of what you can do selling direct, then I would say, consider your options in 2025, even if that is trying out a low-financial-goal Kickstarter campaign, or selling some print books at a local fair. Interestingly, traditional publishers are also experimenting with direct sales. Kate Elton, the new CEO of Harper Collins notes in The Bookseller’s 2026 trend article, “we are seeing global success with responsive, reader-driven publishing, subscription boxes and TikTok Shop and – crucially – developing strategies that are founded on a comprehensive understanding of the reader.” She also notes, “AI enables us to dramatically change the way we interact with and grow audiences. The opportunities are genuinely exciting – finding new ways to help readers discover books they will love, innovating in the ways we market and reach audiences, building new channels and adapting to new methods of consuming content.” (2) AI-powered search will start to shift elements of book discoverability From LinkedIn’s 2026 Big Ideas: “Generative engine optimization (GEO) is set to replace search engine optimization (SEO) as the way brands get discovered in the year ahead. As consumers turn to AI chatbots, agentic workflows and answer engines, appearing prominently in generative outputs will matter more than ranking in search engines.” Google has been rolling out AI Mode with its AI Overviews and is beginning to push it within Google.com itself in some countries, which means the start of a fundamental change in how people discover content online. I first posted about GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) and AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) in 2023, and it's going to change how readers find books. For years, we've talked about the long tail of search. Now, with AI-powered search, that tail is getting even longer and more nuanced. AI can understand complex, conversational queries that traditional search engines struggled with. Someone might ask, “What's a good thriller set in a small town with a female protagonist who's a journalist investigating a cold case?” and get highly specific recommendations. This means your book metadata, your website content, and your online presence need to be more detailed and conversational. AI search engines understand context in ways that go far beyond simple keywords. The authors who win in this new landscape will be those who create rich, authentic content about their books and themselves, not just promotional copy. As economist Tyler Cowen has said, “Consider the AIs as part of your audience. Because they are already reading your words and listening to your voice.” We’re in the ‘organic’ traffic phase right now, where these AI engines are surfacing content for ‘free,’ but paid ads are inevitably on the way, and even rumoured to be coming this year to ChatGPT. By the end of 2026, I expect some authors and publishers to be paying for AI traffic, rather than blocking and protesting them. For now, I recommend checking that your author name/s and your books are surfaced when you search on ChatGPT.com as well as Google.com AI Mode (powered by Gemini). You want to make sure your work comes up in some way. I found that Joanna Penn and J.F. Penn searches brought up my Shopify stores, my website, podcast, Instagram, LinkedIn, and even my Patreon page, but did not bring up links to Amazon. If you only have an author presence on Amazon, does it appear in AI search at all? Do you need to improve anything about what the AI search brings up? Traditional publishers are also looking at this, with PublishersWeekly doing webinars on various aspects of AI in early 2026, including sessions on GEO and how book sales are changing, AI agents, and book marketing. In a 2026 predictions article on The Bookseller, the CEO of Bloomsbury Publishing noted, “The boundaries of artificial intelligence will become clearer, enabling publishers to harness its benefits while seeking to safeguard the intellectual property rights of authors, illustrators and publishers.” “AI will be deeply embedded in our workflows, automating tasks such as metadata tagging, freeing teams to focus on creativity and strategy. Challenges will persist. Generative AI threatens traditional web traffic and ad revenue models, making metadata optimisation and SEO critical for visibility as we adjust to this new reality online.” (3) The start of Agentic Commerce AI researches what you want to buy and may even buy on your behalf. Plus, I predict that Amazon does a commerce deal with OpenAI for shopping within ChatGPT by the end of 2026. In September 2025, ChatGPT launched Instant Checkout and the Agentic Commerce Protocol, which will enable bots to buy on websites in the background if authorised by the human with the credit card. VISA is getting on board with this, so is PayPal, with no doubt more payment options to come. In the USA, ChatGPT Plus, Pro, and Free users can now buy directly from US Etsy sellers inside the chat interface, with over a million Shopify merchants coming soon. Shopify and OpenAI have also announced a partnership to bring commerce to ChatGPT. I am insanely excited about this as it could represent the first time we have been able to more easily find and surface books in a much more nuanced way than the 7 keywords and 3 categories we have relied on for so long! I’ve been using ChatGPT for at least the last year to find fiction and non-fiction books as I find the Amazon interface is ‘polluted’ by ads. I’ve discovered fascinating books from authors I’ve never heard of, most in very long tail areas. For example, Slashed Beauties by A. Rushby, recommended by ChatGPT as I am interested in medical anatomy and anatomical Venuses, and The Macabre by Kosoko Jackson, recommended as I like art history and the supernatural. I don’t think I would have found either of these within a nuanced discussion with ChatGPT. Even without these direct purchase integrations, ChatGPT now has Shopping Research, which I have found links directly to my Shopify store when I search for my books specifically. Walmart has partnered with OpenAI to create AI-first shopping experiences, and you have to wonder what Amazon might be doing? In Nov 2025, Amazon signed a “strategic partnership” with OpenAI, and even though it's focused on the technical side of AI, those two companies in a room together might also be working on other plans … I’m calling it for 2026. I think Amazon will sign a commerce agreement with OpenAI sometime before the end of the year. This will enable at least recommendation and shopping links into Amazon stores (presumably using an OpenAI affiliate link), or perhaps even Instant Checkout with ChatGPT for Amazon. It will also enable a new marketing angle, especially if paid ads arrive in ChatGPT, perhaps even integrating with Amazon Ads in some way as part of any possible agreement, since ads are such a good revenue stream for Amazon anyway. The line between discovery, engagement, and purchase is collapsing. Someone could be having a conversation with an AI about what to read next, and within that same conversation, purchase a bookwithout ever leaving the chat interface. This already happens within TikTok and social commerce clearly works for many authors. It’s possible that the next development for book discoverability and sales might be within AI chats. This will likely stratify the already fragmented book eco-system even more. Some readers will continue to live only within the Amazon ecosystem and (maybe) use their Rufus chatbot to buy, and others will be much wider in their exploration of how to find and discover books (and other products and services). If you haven’t tried it yet, try ChatGPT.com Shopping Research for a book. You can do this on the free tier. Use the drop down in the main chat box and select Shopping Research. It doesn't have to be for your book. It can be any book or product, for example, our microwave died just before Christmas so I used it to find a new one. But do a really nuanced search with multiple requirements. Go far beyond what you would search for on Amazon. In the results, notice that (at the time of writing) it does not generally link to Amazon, but to independent sites and stores. As above, I think this will change by the end of 2026, as some kind of commerce deal with Amazon seems inevitable. (4) AI-assisted audiobook narration will go mainstream I've been talking about AI narration of audiobooks since 2019, and over the years, I’ve tried various different options. In 2025, the technology reached a level of emotional nuance that made it much easier to create satisfying fiction audio as well as non-fiction. It also super-charges accessibility, making audio available in more languages and more accents than ever before. Of course, human narration remains the gold standard, but the cost makes it prohibitive for many authors, and indeed many small traditional publishers, for all books. If it costs $2000 – $10,000 to create an audiobook, you have to sell a lot to make a profit, and the dominance of subscription models have made it harder to recoup the costs. Famous narrators and voice artists who have an audience may still be worth investing in, as well as premium production, but require an even higher upfront cost and therefore higher sales and streams in return. AI voice/audio models are continuing to improve, and even as this goes out, there are rumours on TechCrunch that OpenAI’s new device, designed by Jony Ive who designed the iPhone, will be audio first and OpenAI are improving their voice models even more in preparation for that launch. In 2026, I think AI-narrated audio will go mainstream with far-reaching adoption across publishing and the indie author world in many different languages and accents. This will mean a further stratification of audiobooks, with high quality, high production, high cost human narrated audio for a small percentage of books, and then mass market, affordable AI-narrated audio for the rest. AI-narrated audiobooks will make audio ubiquitous, and just as (almost) every print book has an ebook format, in 2026, they will also have an audio format. I straddle both these worlds, as I am still a human audiobook narrator for my own work. I human-narrated Successful Self-Publishing Fourth Edition (free audiobook) and The Buried and the Drowned, my short story collection. I also use AI narration for some books. ElevenLabs remains my preferred service and in 2025, I used my J.F. Penn voice clone for Death Valley and also Blood Vintage, while using a male voice for Catacomb. I clearly label my AI-narration in the sales description and also on the cover, which I think is important, although it is not always required by the various services. You can distribute ElevenLabs narrated audiobooks on Spotify, Kobo Writing Life, YouTube, ElevenReader, and of course your own store if you use Shopify with Bookfunnel. There are many other services springing up all the time, so make sure you check the rights you have over the finished audio, as well as where you can sell and distribute the final files. If they are just using ElevenLabs models in the back-end, then why not just do that directly? (Most services will be using someone's model in the back-end, since most companies do not train their own models.) Of course, you can use Amazon’s own narration. While Amazon originally launched Audible audiobooks with Virtual Voice (AVV) in November 2023, it was rolled out to more authors and territories in 2025. If your book is eligible, the option to create an audiobook will appear on your KDP dashboard. With just a few clicks, you can create an audiobook from a range of voices and accents, and publish it on Amazon and Audible. However, the files are not yours. They are exclusive to Amazon and you cannot use them on other platforms or sell them direct yourself. But they are also free, so of course, many authors, especially those in KU, will use this option. I have done some for my mum's sweet romance books as Penny Appleton and I will likely use them for my books in translation when the option becomes available. Traditional publishers are experimenting with AI-assisted audiobook narration as well. MacMillan is selling digital audiobooks read by AI directly on their store. PublishersWeekly reports that PRH Audio “has experimented with artificial voice in specific instances, such as entrepreneur Ely Callaway’s posthumous memoir The Unconquerable Game,” when an “authorized voice replica” was created for the audiobook. The article also notes that PRH Audio “embrace artificial intelligence across business operations—my entire department [PRH Audio] is using AI for business applications.” And while indie authors can’t use AI voices on ACX right now, Audible have over 100 voices available to selected publishing partnerships, as reported by The Guardian with “two options for publishers wishing to make use of the technology: “Audible-managed” production, or “self-service” whereby publishers produce their own audiobooks with the help of Audible’s AI technology.” In 2026, it’s likely that more traditional publishers — as well as indie authors — will get their backlist into audio with AI narration. (5) AI-assisted translation will start to take off beyond the early adopters Over the years, I've done translation deals with traditional publishers in different languages (German, French, Spanish, Korean, Italian) for some fiction and non-fiction books. But of course, to get these kinds of deals, you have to be proactive about pitching, or work with an agent for foreign rights only, and those are few and far between! There are also lots of languages and territories worldwide, and most deals are for the bigger markets, leaving a LOT of blue water for books in translation, even if you have licensed some of the bigger markets. I did my first partially AI-translated books in 2019 when I used Deepl.com for the first draft and then worked with a German editor to do 3 non-fiction books in German. While the first draft was cheap, the editing was pretty expensive, so I stopped after only doing a couple. I have made the money back now, but it took years. In 2025, AI Translation began to take off with ScribeShadow, GlobeScribe.ai, and more recently, in November 2025, Kindle Translate boosting the number of translated books available. Kindle Translate is (currently) only available to US authors for English into Spanish and also German into English, but in 2026, this will likely roll out to more languages and more authors, making it easier than ever to produce translations for free. Of course, once again, the gold standard is human translation, or at least human-edited translations, but the cost is prohibitive even just for proof-reading, and if there is a cheap or even free option, like Kindle Translate, then of course, authors are going to try it. If the translation gets bad reviews, they can just un-publish. There are many anecdotal stories of indie success in 2025 with AI-translated genre fiction sales (in series) in under-served markets like Italian, French, and Spanish, as well as more mainstream adoption in German. I was around in the Kindle gold-rush days of 2009-2012 and the AI-translation energy right now feels like that. There are hardly any Kindle ebooks in many of these languages compared to how many there are in English, so inevitably, the rush is on to fill the void, especially in genres that are under-served by traditional publishers in those markets. Yes, some of these AI translated books will be ‘AI-slop,' but readers are not stupid. Those books will get bad reviews and thus will sink to the bottom of the store, never to be seen again. The AI translation models are also improving rapidly, and Amazon's Kindle Translate may improve faster than most, for books specifically, since they will be able to get feedback in terms of page reads. Amazon is also a major investor in Anthropic, which makes Claude.ai, widely considered the best quality for creative writing and translation, so it's likely that is used somewhere in the mix. Some traditional publishers are also experimenting with AI-assisted translation, with Harlequin France reportedly using AI translation and human proofreaders, as reported by the European Council of Literary Translators’ Associations in December 2025. Academic publisher Taylor and Francis is also using AI for book translation, noting: “Following a program of rigorous testing, Taylor & Francis has announced plans to use AI translation tools to publish books that would otherwise be unavailable to English-language readers, bringing the latest knowledge to a vastly expanded readership.” “Until now, the time and resources required to translate books has meant that the majority remained accessible only to those who could read them in the original language. Books that were translated often only became available after a significant delay. Today, with the development of sophisticated AI translation tools, it has become possible to make these important texts available to a broad readership at speed, without compromising on accuracy.” (6) AI video becomes ubiquitous. ‘Live selling’ becomes the next trend in social sales. In 2025, short form AI-generated video became very high quality. OpenAI released Sora 2, and YouTube announced new Shorts creation tools with Veo 3, which you can also use directly within Gemini. There are tons of different AI video apps now, including those within the social media sites themselves. There is more video than ever and it’s much easier to create. I am not a fan of short form video! I don't make it and I don't consume it, but I do love making book trailers for my Kickstarter campaigns and for adding to my book pages and using on social media. I made a trailer for The Buried and the Drowned using Midjourney for images and then animation of those images, and Canva to put them together along with ElevenLabs to generate the music. But despite the AI tools getting so much easier to use, you still have to prompt them with exactly what you want. I can’t just upload my book and say, “Make a book trailer,” or “Make a short film.” This may change with generative video ads, which are likely to become more common in 2026, as video turns specifically commercial. Video ads may even be generated specifically for the user, with an audience of one, maybe even holding your book in their hands (using something like Cameos on Sora), in the same way that some AI-powered clothing stores do virtual try-ons. This might also up-end the way we discover and buy things, as the AI for eCommerce and Amazon Sellers newsletter says about OpenAI’s Sora app, “OpenAI isn't just trying to build a TikTok competitor. They're building a complete reimagining of how we discover and buy things …” “The combination of ChatGPT's research capabilities and Sora's potential for emotional manipulation—I mean, “engagement”—could create something we've never seen before: an AI ecosystem that might eventually guide you through every type of purchase, from the most considered to the most impulsive.” In 2026, there will be A LOT more AI-generated video, but that also leads to the human trend of more live video. While you can use an AI avatar that looks and sounds like you using tools like HeyGen or Synthesia, live video has all the imperfect human elements that make it stand-out, plus the scarcity element which leads to the purchase decision within a countdown period. Live video is nothing new in terms of brand building and content in general, but it seems that live events primarily for direct sales might be a thing in 2026. Kim Kardashian hosted Kimsmas Live in December 2025 with a 45 minute live shopping event with special guests, described as entertainment but designed to be a sales extravaganza. Indie authors are doing a similar thing on TikTok with their books, so this is a trend to watch in 2026, especially if you feel that live selling might fit with your personality and author business goals. It’s certainly not for everyone, but I suspect it will suit a different kind of creator to those who prefer ‘no face’ video, or no video at all! On other aspects of the human side of social media, Adam Mosseri the CEO of Instagram put a post on Threads called Authenticity after Abundance. He said, “Everything that made creators matter—the ability to be real, to connect, to have a voice that couldn’t be faked—is now suddenly accessible to anyone with the right tools.” “Deepfakes are getting better and better. AI is generating photographs and videos indistinguishable from captured media. The feeds are starting to fill up with synthetic everything. And in that world, here’s what I think happens.Creators matter more.” It’s a long article so just to pick a few things from it: “We like to talk about “AI slop,” but there is a lot of amazing AI content … we are going to start to see more and more realistic AI content.” I’ve talked to my Patreon Community about this ‘tsunami of excellence’ as these tools are just getting better and better and the word ‘slop’ can also be applied to purely human output, too. If you think that AI content is ‘worse’ than wholly human content, in 2026, you are wrong. It is now very very good, especially in the hands of people who can drive the AI tools. Back to Adam’s post: “Authenticity is fast becoming a scarce resource, …The creators who succeed will be those who figure out how to maintain their authenticity [even when it can be simulated] …” “The bar is going to shift from “can you create?” to “can you make something that only you could create?” He talks about how the personal content on Instagram now is: “unpolished; it’s blurry photos and shaky videos of people’s daily experiences … flattering imagery is cheap to produce and boring to consume. People want content that feels real… Savvy creators are going to lean into explicitly unproduced and unflattering images of themselves. In a world where everything can be perfected, imperfection becomes a signal. Rawness isn’t just aesthetic preference anymore—it’s proof. It’s defensive. A way of saying: this is real because it’s imperfect.” While I partially love this, and I really hope it’s true, as in I hope we don’t need to look good for the camera anymore I would also challenge Adam on this, because pretty much every woman I know on social media has been sent sexual messages, and/or told they are ugly and/or fat when posting anything unflattering. I’ve certainly had both even for the same content, but I don’t expect Adam has been the target for such posting! But I get his point. He goes on:“Labeling content as authentic or AI-generated is only part of the solution though. We, as an industry, are going to need to surface much more context about not only the media on our platforms, but the accounts that are sharing it in order for people to be able to make informed decisions about what to believe. Where is the account? When was it created? What else have they posted?” This is exactly what I’ve been saying for a while under my double down on being human focus. I use my Instagram @jfpennauthor as evidence of humanity, not as a sales channel. You can do both of course, but increasingly, you need to make sure your accounts at places have longevity and trust, even by the platforms themselves. Adam finishes: “In a world of infinite abundance and infinite doubt, the creators who can maintain trust and signal authenticity—by being real, transparent, and consistent—will stand out.” For other marketing trends for 2026, I recommend publicist Kathleen Schmidt’s SubStack which is mostly focused on traditional publishing but still interesting for indies. In her 2026 article, she notes: “We have reached a social media saturation point where going viral can be meaningless and should not be the goal; authenticity and creativity should. She also says, “In-person events are important again,” and, “Social media marketing takes a nosedive… we have reached a saturation point … What publishers must figure out is how to make their social media campaigns stand out. If they remain somewhat uninspired, the money spent on social ads won’t convert into book sales.” I think this is part of the rise of live selling as above, which can stand out above more ‘produced’ videos. Kathleen also talks about AI usage. “AI can help lighten the burden of publicity and marketing.” “A lot of AI tools are coming to market to lessen the load: they can write pitches, create media lists for you, send pitches for you, and more. I know the industry is grappling with all things AI, but some of these tools are huge time savers and may help a book more than hurt it.” On that note … (7) AI will create, run, and optimise ads without the need for human intervention Many authors will be very happy about this as marketing is often the bane of our author business lives! As I noted in my 2026 goals, I would love to outsource more marketing tasks to AI. I want an “AI book marketing assistant” where I can upload a book and specify a budget and say, ‘Go market this,’ then the AI will action the marketing, without me having to cobble together workflows between systems. Of course, it will present plans for me to approve but it will do the work itself on the various platforms and monitor and optimize things for me. I really hope 2026 is the year this becomes possible, because we are on the edge of it already in some areas. Amazon Ads launched a new agentic AI tool in September 2025 that creates professional-quality ads. I’ve also been working with Claude in Chrome browser to help me analyse my Amazon Ad data and suggest which keywords/products to turn off and what to put more budget into. I’ll do a Patreon video on that soon. Meta announced it will enable AI ad creation by the end of 2026 for Facebook and Instagram. For authors who find ad creation overwhelming or time-consuming, this could be a game-changer. Of course, you will still need a budget! (8) 1000 True Fans becomes more important than ever Lots of authors and publishers are moaning about the difficulty of reaching readers in an era of ‘AI slop’ but there is no shortage of excellent content created by humans, or humans using AI tools. As ever, our competition is less about other authors, or even authors using AI-assisted creation, we’re competing against everything else that jostles for people’s attention, and the volume of that is also growing exponentially. I’ve never been a fan of rapid release, and have said for years that you can’t keep up with the pace of the machines. So play a different game. As Kevin Kelly wrote in 2008, If you have 1000 true fans, (also known as super fans), “you can make a living — if you are content to make a living but not a fortune.” [Kevin Kelly was on this show in 2023 talking about Excellent Advice for Living.] Many authors and the publishing industry are stuck in the old model of aiming to sell huge volumes of books at a low profit margin to a massive number of readers, many of them releasing ever faster to try and keep the algorithms moving. But the maths can work for the smaller audience of more invested readers and fans. If you only make $2 profit on an ebook, you need to sell 500 ebooks to make $1000, and then do it again next month. Or you can have a small community like my patreon.com/thecreativepenn where people pay $2 (or more) a month, so even a small revenue per person results in a better outcome over the year, as it is consistent monthly income with no advertising. But what if you could make $20 profit per book? That is entirely possible if you’re producing high quality hardbacks on Kickstarter, or bundle deals of audiobooks, or whole series of ebooks. You would only need to sell to 50 people to make $1000. What about $100 profit per sale, which you can do with a small course or live event? You only need 10 people to make $1000, and this in-person focus also amplifies trust and fosters human connection. I’ve found the intimacy of my live Patreon Office Hours and also my webinars have been rewarding personally, but also financially, and are far more memorable — and potentially transformative — than a pre-recorded video or even another book. From the LinkedIn 2026 Big Ideas article: “In an AI-optimized world, intentional human connection will become the ultimate luxury.” The 1000 True Fans model is about serving a smaller, more personal audience with higher value products (and maybe services if that’s your thing). As ever, its about niche and where you fit in the long long long long long tail. It’s also about trust. Because there is definitely a shortage of that in so many areas, and as Adam Mosseri of Instagram has said, trust will be increasingly important. Trust takes time to build, but if you focus on serving your audience consistently, and delivering a high quality, and being authentic, this emerges as part of being human. In an echo of what happened when online commerce first took off, we are back to talking about trust. Back in 2010, I read Trust Agents: by Julien Smith and Chris Brogan, which clearly needs a comeback. There was a 10th anniversary edition published in 2020, so that’s worth a read/listen. Chris Brogan was also on this show in 2017 when we talked about finding and serving your niche for the long term. That interview is still relevant, here’s a quick excerpt, where I have (lightly edited) his response to my question on this topic back in 2017: Jo: The principle of know, like, and trust, why is that still important or perhaps even more important these days? Chris: There are a few things that at play there, Joanna. One is that the same tools that make it so easy for any of us to start and run a business also allow certain elements to decide whether or not they want to do something dubious. And with all new technologies that come, you know, there's nothing unique about these new technologies. In the 1800s, anyone could put anything in a bottle and sell it to you and say, this is gonna cure everything. Cancer — gone. And the bottle could have nothing in. You know, it could be Kool-Aid. And so, the idea of trying to understand what's behind the business though, one beautiful thing that's come is that we can see in much more dimensions who we're dealing with. We can understand better who's the face behind the brand. I really want people to try their best to be a lot clearer on what they stand for or what they say. And I don't really mean a tagline. I mean, humans don't really talk like that. They don't throw some sentence out as often as they can that you remember them for that phrase. But I would say that, we have so many media available to us — the plural of mediums — where we can be more of ourselves. And I think that there's a great opportunity to share the ‘you’ behind the scenes, and some people get immediately terrified about this, ‘Ah, the last thing I want is for people to know more about me,’ but I think we have such an opportunity. We have such an opportunity to voice our thoughts on something, to talk about the story that goes behind the product. We were all raised on overly produced material, but I think we don't want that anymore. We really want clarity, brevity, simplicity. We want the ability for what we feel is connection and then access. And so I think it's vital that we connect and show people our accessibility, not so that they can pester us with strange questions, but more so that you can say, this person stands with their product and their service and this person believes these things, and I feel something when I hear them and I wanna be part of that.” That’s from Chris Brogan’s interview here in 2017, and he is still blogging and speaking at writing at ChrisBrogan.com and I’m going to re-listen to the audiobook of Trust Agents again myself as I think it’s more relevant than ever. The original quote comes from Bob Burg in his 1994 book, Endless Referrals, “All things being equal, people will do business with, and refer business to, those people they know, like and trust.” That still applies, and absolutely fits with the 1000 True Fans model of aiming to serve a smaller audience. As Kevin Kelly says in 1000 True Fans, “Instead of trying to reach the narrow and unlikely peaks of platinum bestseller hits, blockbusters, and celebrity status, you can aim for direct connection with a thousand true fans.” “On your way, no matter how many fans you actually succeed in gaining, you’ll be surrounded not by faddish infatuation, but by genuine and true appreciation. It’s a much saner destiny to hope for. And you are much more likely to actually arrive there.” In 2026, I hope that more authors (including me!) let go of ego goals and vanity metrics like ranking, gross sales (income before you take away costs), subscribers, followers, and likes, and consider important business numbers like profit (which is the money you have after costs like marketing are taken out), as well as number of true fans — and also lifestyle elements like number of weekends off, or days spent enjoying life and not just working! OK, that’s my list of trends and predictions for 2026. Let me know what you think in the comments. Do you agree? Am I wrong? What have I missed? The post 2026 Trends And Predictions For Indie Authors And The Book Publishing Industry with Joanna Penn first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Happy New Year 2026! I love January and the opportunity to start afresh. I know it’s arbitrary in some ways, but I measure my life by what I create, and I also measure it in years. At the beginning of each year, I publish an article (and podcast episode) here, which helps keep me accountable. If you’d like to share your goals, please add them in the comments below. 2026 is a transitional year as I will finish my Masters degree and continue the slow pivot that I started in December 2023 after 15 years as an author entrepreneur. Just to recap that, it was: From digitally-focused to creating beautiful physical books; From high-volume, low cost to premium products with higher Average Order Value; From retailer-centric to direct first; and From distance to presence, and From creating alone to the AI-Assisted Artisan Author. I’ve definitely stepped partially into all of those, and 2026 will continue in that same direction, but I also have an additional angle for Joanna Penn and The Creative Penn that I am excited about. If you'd like to join my community and support the show every month, you'll get access to my growing list of Patron videos and audio on all aspects of the author business — for the price of a black coffee (or two) a month. Join us at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn. Joanna Penn writes non-fiction for authors and is an award-winning, New York Times and USA Today bestselling thriller author as J.F. Penn. She’s also an award-winning podcaster, creative entrepreneur, and international professional speaker. 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. Leaning into the Transformation Economy The Creative Penn Podcast and my Patreon Community Webinars and live events Finish my Masters in Death, Religion, and Culture Bones of the Deep — J.F. Penn Add merch to CreativePennBooks.com and JFPennBooks.com How to Write, Publish, and Market Short Stories and Short Story Collections — Joanna Penn Other possible books Experiment more with AI translation Ideally outsource more marketing to AI, but do more marketing anyway Double down on being human, health and travel You can find all my books as J.F. Penn and Joanna Penn on your favourite online store in all the usual formats, or order from your local library or bookstore. You can also buy direct from me at CreativePennBooks.com and JFPennBooks.com. I'm not really active on social media, but you can always see my photos at Instagram @jfpennauthor. Leaning into the Transformation Economy I’ve struggled with my identity as Joanna Penn and my Creative Penn brand for a few years now. When I started TheCreativePenn.com in 2008, the term ‘indie author’ was new and self-publishing was considered ‘vanity press’ and a sure way to damage your author career, rather than a conscious creative and business choice. It was the early days of the Kindle and iPhone (both launched in 2007), and podcasting and social media were also relatively new. While US authors could publish on KDP, the only option for international authors was Smashwords and the market for ebooks was tiny. Print-on-demand and digital audio were also just emerging as viable options. While it was the early era of blogging, there were very few blogs and barely any podcasts talking about self-publishing, so when I started TheCreativePenn.com in late 2008 and the podcast in March 2009, it was a new area. For several years, it was like howling into the wind. Barely any audience. Barely any traffic, and certainly very little income.  But I loved the freedom and the speed at which I could learn things and put them into practice. Consume and produce. That has always been my focus. I met people on Twitter and interviewed them for my show, and over those early years I met many of the people I consider dear friends even now. Since self-publishing was a relatively unexplored niche in those early years, I slowly found an audience and built up a reputation. I also started to make more money both as an author, and as a creative entrepreneur. Over the years since, pretty much everything has changed for indie authors and we have had more and more opportunity every year. I’ve shared everything I’ve learned along the way, and it’s been a wonderful time.  But as self-publishing became more popular and more authors saw more success (which is FANTASTIC!), other voices joined the chorus and now, there are many thousands of authors of all different levels with all kinds of different experiences sharing their tips through articles, books, podcasting, and social media. I started to wonder whether my perspective was useful anymore. On top of the human competition, in November 2022, ChatGPT launched, and it became clear that prescriptive non-fiction and ‘how to’ information could very easily be delivered by the AI tools, with the added benefit of personalisation. You can ask Chat or Claude or Gemini how you can self-publish your particular book and they will help you step by step through the process of any site. You can share your screen or upload screenshots and it can help with what fields to fill in (very useful with translations!), as well as writing sales descriptions, researching keywords, and offering marketing help targeted to your book and your niche, and tailored to your voice. Once again, I questioned what value I could offer the indie author community, and I’ve pulled back over the last few years as I’ve been noodling around this. But over the last few weeks, a penny has dropped. Here’s my thinking in case it also helps you. Firstly, I want to be useful to people. I want to help. In my early days of speaking professionally, from 2005-ish, I wanted to be the British (introvert) Tony Robbins, someone who inspired people to change, to achieve things they didn’t think they could. Writing a book is one of those things. Making a living from your writing is another. So I leaned into the self-help and how-to niche. But now that is now clearly commoditised. But recently, I realised that my message has always been one of transformation, and in the following four areas.  From someone who doesn’t think they are creative but who desperately wants to write a book, to someone who holds their first book in their hand and proudly says, ‘I made this.’ The New Author. From someone who has no confidence in their author voice, who wonders if they have anything to say, to someone who writes their story and transforms their own life, as well as other people’s. The Confident Author. From an author with one or a handful of books who doesn’t know much about business, to a successful author with a growing business heading towards their first six figure year. The Author-Entrepreneur. And finally, from a tech-phobic, fearful author who worries that AI makes it pointless to create anything and will steal all the jobs, to a confident AI-assisted creative who uses AI tools to enhance and amplify their message and their income. The AI-Assisted Artisan Author. These are four transformations I have been through myself, and with my work as Joanna Penn/The Creative Penn, I want to help you through them as well. So in 2026, I am repositioning myself as part of The Transformation Economy. What does this mean? There is a book out in February, The Transformation Economy by B. Joseph Pine II, who is also the author of The Experience Economy, which drove a lot of the last decade’s shift in business models. I have the book on pre-order, but in the meantime, I am doing the following. I will revamp TheCreativePenn.com with ‘transformation’ as the key frame and add pathways through my extensive material, rather than just categories of how to do things. I’ve already added navigation pages for The New Author, The Confident Author, The Author-Entrepreneur, and The AI-Assisted Artisan Author, and I will be adding to those over time. My content is basically the same, as I have always covered these topics, but the framing is now different. The intent is different. The Creative Penn Podcast will lean more heavily into transformation, rather than just information — And will focus on the first three of the categories above, the more creative, mindset and business things.  My Patreon will continue to cover all those things, and that’s also where I post most of my AI-specific content, so if you’re interested in The AI-Assisted Artisan Author transformation path, come on over to patreon.com/thecreativepenn I have more non-fiction books for authors coming, and lots more ideas now I am leaning into this angle. I’ll also continue to do webinars on specific topics in 2026, and also add speaking back in 2027. It’s harder to think about transformation when it comes to fiction, but it’s also really important since fiction books in particular are highly commodified, and will become even more so with the high production speeds. Yes, all readers have a few favourite authors but most will also read a ton of other books without knowing or caring who the author is. Fiction can be transformational. Reader’s aren’t buying a ‘book.’ They’re buying a way to escape, to feel deeply, to experience things they never could in real life. A book can transform a day from ‘meh’ into ‘fantastic!’ My J.F. Penn fiction is mostly inspired by places, so my stories transport you into an adventure somewhere wonderful, and they all offer a deeper side of transformative contemplation of ‘memento mori’ if you choose to read them in that way.  They also have elements of gothic and death culture that I am going to lean into with some merch in 2026, so more of an identity thing than just book sales. I’m not quite sure what this means yet, but no doubt it will emerge. I’ll also shape my JFPennBooks.com site into more transformative paths, rather than just genre lists, as part of this shift. My memoir Pilgrimage always reflected a transformation, both reflecting my own midlife shift but I’ve also heard from many who it has inspired to walk alone, or to travel on pilgrimage themselves. Of course, transformation is not just for our readers or the people we serve as part of our businesses. It’s also for us. One of the reasons why we are writers is because this is how we think. This is how we figure out our lives. This is how we get the stories and ideas out of our heads and into the world. Writing and creating are transformative for us, too. That is part of the point, and a great element of why we do this, and why we love this. Which is why I don’t really understand the attraction of purely AI-generated books. There’s no fun in that for me, and there’s no transformation, either. Of course, I LOVE using Chat and Claude and Gemini Thinking models as my brainstorming partners, my research buddies, my marketing assistants, and as daily tools to keep me sparkly. I smiled as I wrote that (and yes, I human-wrote this!) because sparkly is how I feel when I work with these tools. Programmers use the term ‘vibe coding’ which is going back and forth and collaborating together, sparking off each other. Perhaps that I am doing is ‘vibe creation.’ I feel it as almost an effervescence, a fun experience that has me laughing out loud sometimes. I am more creative, I am more in flow. I am more ‘me’ now I can create and think at a speed way faster than ever before. My mind has always worked at speed and my fingers are fast on the keys but working in this way makes me feel like I create in the high performance zone far more often. I intend to lean more into that in 2026 as part of my own transformation (and of course, I share my experiences mainly in the Community at patreon.com/thecreativepenn ). [Note, I pay for access to all models, and currently use ChatGPT 5.2 Thinking, Claude Opus 4.5, and Gemini 3 Pro). So that’s the big shift this year, and the idea of the Transformation Economy will underpin everything else in terms of my content. The Creative Penn Podcast and my Patreon Community The Creative Penn Podcast continues in 2026, although I am intending to reduce my interviews to once every two weeks, with my intro and other content in between. We’ll see how that goes as I am already finding some fascinating people to talk to!  Thank you for your comments, your pictures, and also for sharing the episodes that resonate with you with the wider community. Your reviews are also super useful wherever you are listening to this, so please leave a review wherever you’re listening this as it helps with discovery.  Thanks also to everyone in my Patreon Community, which I really enjoy, especially as we have doubled down on being human through more live office hours. I will do more of those in 2026 and the first one of the year will blearily UK time so Aussies and Kiwis can come. I also share new content almost every week, either an article, a video or an audio episode around writing craft, author business, and lots on different use cases for AI tools.  If you join the Patreon, start on the Collections tab where you will find all the backlist content to explore. It’s less than the price of a coffee a month so if you get value from the show, and you want more, come on over and join us at patreon.com/thecreativepenn My Books and Travel Podcast is on hiatus for interviews, since the Masters is taking up the time I would have had for that. However I plan to post some solo episodes in 2026, and I also post travel articles there, like my visits to Gothic cathedrals and city breaks and things like that. Check it out at https://www.booksandtravel.page/blog/  Webinars and live events Along with my Patreon office hours, I’m enjoying the immediacy and energy of live webinars and they work with my focus on transformation, as well as on ‘doubling down on being human’ in an age of AI, so I will be doing more this year. The first is on Business for Authors, coming on 10 and 24 January, which is aimed at helping you transform your author business in 2026, or if you’re just getting started, then transform into someone who has even a small clue about business in general!Details at TheCreativePenn.com/live and Patrons get 25% off. In terms of live in-person events, it looks like I will be speaking at the Alliance of Independent Authors event at the London Book Fair in March, and I’ll attend the Self-Publishing Show Live in June, although I won’t be speaking. There might be other things that emerge, but in general, I’m not doing much speaking in 2026 because I need to … Finish my Masters in Death, Religion, and Culture This represents a lot of work as I am doing the course full-time. I should be finished in September, and much of the middle of the year will be focused on a dissertation. I’m planning on doing something around AI and death, so that will no doubt lead into some fiction at a later stage! Talking of fiction … Bones of the Deep — J.F. Penn The Masters is pretty serious, as is academic research and writing in general, and I found myself desperate to write a rollicking fun story over the holiday break between terms. I’ve talked about this ‘tall-ship’ story for a while and now I’m committing to it. Back in 1999, I sailed on the tall-ship Soren Larsen from Fiji to Vanuatu, one of the three trips that shaped my life. It was the first time I’d been to the South Pacific, the first time I sailed blue water (with no land in sight), and I kept a journal and drew maps of the trip. It also helped me a make a decision to leave the UK and I headed for Australia nine months later in early 2000, and ended up being away 11 years in Australia and New Zealand. I came home to visit of course, but only moved back to the UK in 2011, so that trip was memorable and pivotal in many ways and has stuck in my mind. The story is based on that crossing, but of course, as J.F. Penn my imagination turns it into essentially a ‘locked room,’ there is no escape out there, especially if the danger comes from the sea. Another strand of the story comes from a recent academic essay for my Masters, when I wrote about the changes in museum ethics around human remains and medical specimens i.e. body parts in jars, and how some remains have been repatriated to the indigenous peoples they were stolen from. I’ve also talked before about how I love ‘merfolk’ horror like Into the Drowning Deep by Mira Grant, All the Murmuring Bones by A.G. Slatter, and Merfolk by Jeremy Bates. These are no smiling fantasy mermaids and mermen. They are predators. What might happen if the remains of a mer-saint were stolen from the deep, and what might happen to the ship that the remains are being transported in, and the people on board?  I’m about a third in, and I am having great fun! It will actually be a thriller, with a supernatural edge, rather than horror, and it is called Bones of the Deep, and it will be out on Kickstarter in April, and everywhere by the summer.  You can check out the Kickstarter pre-launch page with photos from my 1999 trip, the cover for the book, and the sales description at JFPenn.com/bones Add merch to CreativePennBooks.com and JFPennBooks.com I’ve dipped my toe into merch a number of times and then removed the products, but now I’m clear on my message of transformation, I want to revisit this. My books remain core for both sites, but for CreativePennBooks, I also want to add other products with what are essentially affirmations — ‘Creative,’ ‘I am creative, I am an author,’ and variants of the poster I have had on my wall for years, ‘Measure your life by what you create.’ This is the affirmation I had in my wallet for years! For JFPennBooks, the items will be gothic/memento mori/skull-related. Everything will be print-on-demand. I will not be shipping anything myself, so I’m working with my designer Jane on this and then need to order test samples, and then get them added to the store. Likely mid-year at this rate! How to Write, Publish, and Market Short Stories and Short Story Collections — Joanna Penn I have a draft of this already which I expanded from the transcript of a webinar I did on this topic as part of The Buried and the Drowned campaign. It turns out I’ve learned a lot about this over the years, and also on how to make a collection, so I will get that out at some point this year. I won’t do a Kickstarter for it, but I will do direct sales for at least a month and include a special edition, workbook, and bundles on my store first before putting it wide. I will also human-narrate that audiobook. Other possible books I’m an intuitive creative and discovery writer, so I don’t plan out what I will write in a year. The books tend to emerge and then I pick the next one that feels the most important. After the ones above, there are a few candidates. Crown of Thorns, ARKANE thriller #14. Regular readers and listeners will know how much I love religious relics, and it’s about time for a big one! I have a trip to Paris planned in the spring, as the Crown of Thorns is at Notre Dame, and I have some other locations to visit. My ARKANE thrillers always emerge from in-person travels, so I am looking forward to that. Maybe late 2026, maybe 2027. AI + religion technothriller/short stories. I already have some ideas sketched out for this and my Masters thesis will be something around AI, religion, and death, so I expect something will emerge from all that study and academic writing. Not sure what, but it will be interesting! The Gothic Cathedral Book. I have tens of thousands of words written, and lots of research and photos and thoughts. But it is still in the creative chaos phase (which I love!) and as yet has not emerged into anything coherent. Perhaps it will in 2026, and the plan is to re-focus on it after my Masters dissertation.  I feel like the Masters study and the academic research process will make this an even better book, But I am holding my plans for this lightly, as it feels like another ‘big’ book for me, like my ‘shadow book’ (which became Writing the Shadow) and took more than a decade to write! How to be Creative. I have also written bits and bobs on this over many years, but it feels like it is re-emerging as part of my focus on transformation. Probably unlikely for 2026 but now back on the list … Experiment more with AI translation AI-assisted translation has been around for years now in various forms, and I have experimented with some of the services, as well as working with human narrators and editors in different languages, as well as licensing books in translation. But when Amazon launched Kindle Translate in November 2025, it made me think that AI-assisted translation will become a lot more popular in 2026. AI audiobook narration became good enough for many audiobooks in 2025, and it seems like AI-translation will be the same in 2026. Yes, of course, human translation is still the gold standard, as is human narration, and that would be the primary choice for all of us — if it was affordable. But frankly, it’s not affordable for most indie authors, and indeed many small publishers. Many books don’t get an audiobook edition and most books don’t get translated into every language. It costs thousands per book for a human translator, and so it is a premium option. I have only ever made a small profit on the books that I paid for with human translators and it took years, and while I have a few nice translation deals on some books, I’m planning to experiment more with AI translation in 2026. More languages, more markets, more opportunities to reach readers. More on this in the next episode when I’ll cover trends for 2026. Ideally outsource more marketing to AI, but do more marketing anyway You have to reach readers somehow, and you have to pay for book marketing with your time and/or your money. Those authors killing it on TikTok pay with their time, and those leaning heavily on ads are paying with money. Most of us do a bit of both. There is no passive income from books, and even a backlist has to be marketed if you want to see any return. But I, like most authors, am not excited about book marketing. I’d rather be working on new books, or thinking about the ramifications of the changes ahead and writing or talking about that in my Patreon Community or here on the podcast. However, my book sales income remains about the same even as I (slowly) produce more books, so I need to do more book marketing in 2026. I said that last year of course, and didn’t do much more than I did in 2024, so here I am again promising to do a better job! Every year, I hope to have my “AI book marketing assistant” up and running, and maybe this will be the year it happens. My measure is to be able to upload a book and specify a budget and say, ‘Go market this,’ and then the AI will action the marketing, without me having to cobble together workflows between systems. Of course, it will present plans for me to approve but it will do the work itself on the various platforms and monitor and optimize things for me. We have something like that already with Amazon auto-ads, but that is specific to Amazon Advertising and only works with certain books in certain genres. I have auto-ads running for a couple of non-fiction books, but not for any fiction. I’d also ideally like more sales on my direct stores, JFPennBooks.com and CreativePennBooks.com which means a different kind of marketing. Perhaps this will happen through ChatGPT shopping or other AI-assisted e-commerce, which should be increasing in 2026. More on that in trends for the year to come in the next show. Double down on being human, health and travel I have a lot of plans for travel both for book research and also holidays with Jonathan but he has to finish his MBA and then we have some family things that take priority, so I am not sure where or when yet, but it will happen! Paris will definitely happen as part of the research for Crown of Thorns, hopefully in the spring. I’ve been to Paris many times as it’s just across the Channel and we can go by train but it’s always wonderful to visit again. Health-wise, I’ll continue with powerlifting and weight training twice a week as well as walking every day. It’s my happy place! What about you? If you’d like to share your goals for 2026, please add them in the comments below — and remember, I’m a full-time author entrepreneur so my goals are substantial. Don’t worry if yours are as simple as ‘Finish the first draft of my book,’ as that still takes a lot of work and commitment! All the best for 2026 — let’s get into it! The post My 2026 Creative And Business Goals With Joanna Penn first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Another year ends, and once more, it's time to reflect on our creative goals. I hope you can take the time to review your goals and you're welcome to leave a comment below about how the year went. Did you achieve everything you wanted to? Let me know in the comments. It's always interesting looking back at my goals from a year ago, because I don't even look at them in the months between, so sometimes it's a real surprise how much they've changed! You can read my 2025 goals here and I go through how things went below. In the intro, Written Word Media 2025 Indie Author Survey Results, TikTok deal goes through [BBC]; 2025 review [Wish I'd Known Then; Two Authors], Kickstarter year in review; Plus, Anthropic settlement, the continued rise of AI-narrated audiobooks, and thinking/reasoning models (plus my 2019 AI disruption episode). My Bones of the Deep thriller, pics here, and Business for Authors webinars, coming soon. If you'd like to join my community and support the show every month, you'll get access to my growing list of Patron videos and audio on all aspects of the author business — for the price of a black coffee (or two) a month. Join us at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn. Joanna Penn writes non-fiction for authors and is an award-winning, New York Times and USA Today bestselling thriller author as J.F. Penn. She’s also an award-winning podcaster, creative entrepreneur, and international professional speaker. 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. J.F. Penn books — Death Valley, The Buried and the Drowned, Blood Vintage Joanna Penn books — Successful Self-Publishing, 4th Edition The Creative Penn Podcast and my community on Patreon/thecreativepenn Unexpected addition: Masters in Death, Religion and Culture at the University of Winchester Book marketing. Not quite a fail but definitely lacklustre. Reflections on my 50th year Double down on being human. Travel and health. You can find all my books as J.F. Penn and Joanna Penn on your favourite online store in all the usual formats, or order from your local library or bookstore. You can also buy direct from me at CreativePennBooks.com and JFPennBooks.com. I'm not really active on social media, but you can always see my photos at Instagram @jfpennauthor. J.F. Penn — Death Valley. A Thriller. This was my ‘desert’ book, partially inspired by visiting Death Valley, California in 2024. It’s a stand-alone, high stakes survival thriller, with no supernatural elements, although there are ancient bones and a hidden crypt, as it wouldn’t be me otherwise! The Kickstarter campaign in April had 231 Backers pledging £10,794 (~US$14,400) and the hardback is a gorgeous foiled edition with custom end papers and research photos as well as a ribbon. As an AI-Assisted Artisan Author, I used AI tools to help with the creative and business processes, including the background image of the cover design, the custom end papers, and the Death Valley book trailer, which I made with Midjourney and Runway ML. The audiobook is also narrated by my J.F. Penn voice clone, which took a while to get used to, but now I love it! You can listen to a sample here. I published Death Valley wide a few months later over the summer, so it is now out on all platforms. J.F. Penn — Blood Vintage. A Folk Horror Novel, and Catacomb audiobook I did a Kickstarter for the hardback edition of Blood Vintage in late 2024, and then in 2025, worked with a US agent to see if we could get a deal for it. That didn’t happen, and although there were some nice rejections, mostly it was silence, and the waiting around really was a pain in the proverbial. So, after a year on submission, I published Blood Vintage wide, so it’s available everywhere now. My voice clone narrated the audiobook, listen to a sample here. I also finally produced the audiobook for Catacomb, which is a stand-alone thriller inspired by the movie Taken and the legend of Beowulf set in the catacombs under Edinburgh. I used a male voice from ElevenLabs, and you can listen to a sample here. The book is also available everywhere in all formats. J.F. Penn — The Buried and the Drowned Short Story Collection One of my goals for 2025 was to get my existing short stories into print, mainly because they exist only as digital ebook and audiobook files, which in a way, feels like they almost don’t exist! Plus, I wanted to write an extra two exclusive stories and launch the special edition collection on Kickstarter Collection and then publish wide. I wrote the two stories, The Black Church, inspired by my Iceland trip in March, and also Between Two Breaths, inspired by an experience scuba diving at the Poor Knights Islands in New Zealand almost two decades ago. There are personal author’s notes accompanying every story, so it’s part-short story fiction, part-memoir, and I human-narrated the audiobook. I achieved this goal with a Kickstarter in September, 2025, with 206 Backers pledging almost £8000 (~US$10,600) for the various editions. I also did my first patterned sprayed edges and I love the hardback. It has head and tail bands which make the hardback really strong, gorgeous paper, foiling, a ribbon, colour photos, and custom end papers. The Buried and the Drowned is now out everywhere in all editions. As ever, if you enjoy the stories, a review would be much appreciated! Joanna Penn Books for Authors Early in the year, How to Write Non-Fiction Second Edition launched wide as I only sold it through my store in 2024, so it’s available everywhere in all formats including a special hardback and workbook at CreativePennBooks.com. While I didn't write it in 2025, I made the money on it this year, which is important! I also unexpectedly wrote the Fourth Edition of Successful Self-Publishing, mainly because I saw so much misinformation and hype around selling direct, and I also wanted to write about how many options there are for indie authors now. The ebook and audiobook (narrated by human me) are free on my store, CreativePennBooks.com and also available in print, in all the usual places. If you haven’t revisited options for indie authors for a while, please have a read/listen, as the industry moves fast! All my fiction and non-fiction audiobooks are now on YouTube After an inspiring episode with Derek Slaton, I put all my audiobooks and short stories on YouTube. Firstly, my non-fiction channel is monetised so I get some income from that. It’s not much, but it’s something. More importantly, it’s marketing for my books, and many audiobook listeners go on to buy other editions especially non-fiction listeners who will often buy print as well. I’m one of those listeners! It’s also doubling down on being human, since I human narrate most of my audiobooks, including almost all of my non-fiction, as well as the memoir, and short stories. This helps bring people into my ecosystem and they may listen to the podcast as well and end up buying other books or joining the Patreon. Finally, in an age of generative AI assisted search recommendations, I want my books and content inside Gemini, which is Google’s AI. I want my books surfaced in recommendations and YouTube is owned by Google, and their AI overviews often point to videos. Only you can decide what you want to do with your audiobooks, but if you want to listen to mine, they are on YouTube @thecreativepenn for non-fiction or YouTube @jfpennauthor for fiction and memoir. The Creative Penn Podcast and my Patreon Community It’s been another full year of The Creative Penn Podcast and this is episode 842, which is kind of crazy. If you don’t know the back story, I started podcasting in March 2009 on a sporadic schedule and then went to weekly about a decade ago in 2015 when I committed to making it a core part of my author business. Thanks to our wonderful corporate sponsors for the year, all services I personally use and recommend — ProWritingAid, Draft2Digital, Kobo Writing Life, Bookfunnel, Written Word Media, Publisher Rocket and Atticus. It’s also been a fantastic year inside my Patreon Community at patreon.com/thecreativepenn so thanks to all Patrons! I love the community we have as I am able to share my unfiltered thoughts in a way that I have stopped doing in the wider community. Even a tiny paywall makes a big difference in keeping out the haters. I’ve done monthly audio Q&As which are extra solo shows answering patron questions. I’ve also done several live office hours on video, and shared content every week on AI tools, writing and author business tips. Patrons also get discounts on my webinars. I did two webinars on The AI-Assisted Artisan Author, which I am planning to run again sometime in 2026 as they were a lot of fun and so much continues to change. If you get value from the show and you want more, come on over and join us at patreon.com/thecreativepenn We have almost 1400 paying members now which is wonderful. Thanks for being part of the Community! Unexpected goal of the year: Masters in Death, Religion and Culture at the University of Winchester During the summer as I did my gothic research, I realised that I was feeling quite jaded about the publishing world and sick of the drama in the author community over AI. My top 5 Clifton Strengths are Learner, Intellection, Strategic, Input, and Futuristic — and I needed more Input and Learning. I usually get that from travel and book research, but I wasn’t getting enough of that since Jonathan is busy finishing his MBA. So I decided to lean into the learning and asked ChatGPT to research some courses I could do that would suit me. It found the Masters in Death, Religion and Culture at the University of Winchester, which I could do full-time and online. It would be a year of reading quite different things, writing academic essays which is something I haven’t done for decades, and hanging out with a new group of people who were just as fascinated with macabre topics as I am. I started in September and have now finished the first term, tackling topics around thanatology and death studies, hell and the afterlife in the Christian tradition, and the ethics of using human remains to inspire fiction, amongst other interesting things. It was a challenge to get back into the style of academic essay writing, but I’m enjoying the rigour of the research and the citations, which is something that the indie author community needs more of, a topic I will revisit in 2026. I have found the topics fascinating, and the degree is a great way to expand my mind in a new direction, and distract me from the dramas of the author community. I’ll be back into it in mid-January and will finish in September 2026. Book marketing. Not quite a fail but definitely lacklustre. I said I would “Do a monthly book marketing plan and organise paid ad campaigns per month for revolving first books in series and my main earners.” I didn’t do this! I also said I would organise my Shopify stores, CreativePennBooks.com and JFPennBooks.com into more collections to make it easier for readers to find things they might want to buy. While I did change the theme of CreativePennBooks.com over to Impulse to make it easier to find collections, I haven’t done much to reorganise or add new pathways through the books. I’m rolling this part of the goal into 2026. I said I would reinvigorate my content marketing for JFPenn, and make more of BooksAndTravel.page with links back to my stores, and do fiction specific content marketing with the aim of surfacing more in the LLMs as generative search expands. I did a number of episodes on Books and Travel in 2025, but once I started the Masters, I had to leave that aside, and although I have started some extra content on JFPennBooks.com, I am not overly enthusiastic about it! I also said I would “Leverage AI tools to achieve more as a one-person business.” I use AI tools (mainly ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini) every day for different things but as ever, I am pretty scatter gun about what I do. I lean into intuition and I love research so I am more likely to ask the AI tools to do a deep research report on south Pacific merfolk mythology, or how gothic architecture impacted sacred music, or geology and deep time, rather than asking for marketing hooks. I intended to use more AI for book marketing, but as ever, I was too optimistic about the timeline of what might be possible. There’s lots you can do with prompting, finessing things and then posting on various platforms, but I’m not interested in spending time doing that. My gold standard for an AI assistant is to feed it the finished book and then say, “Here’s a budget. Go market this,” and not have to connect lots of things together into some Frankenstein-workflow. That’s not available yet. Maybe in 2026 … Of course, I still do book marketing. I have to in order to sell any books and make money from book sales. We all have to do some kind of book marketing! I have my Kickstarter launches which I put effort into, as well as consistent backlist sales fed by the podcast, and my email newsletter (my combined list is around 60K). I have auto campaigns running on Amazon Ads, and I have used Written Word Media campaigns as well as BookBub throughout the year. This is basically the minimum, so as usual, must do better! I’m pretty sure I’m not the only author saying this! However, my business has multiple streams of income, and I have the podcast sponsorship revenue as well as the Patreon, plus sporadic webinars, which add to my bottom line and don’t require paid advertising at all. Reflections on my 50th year I woke up on my 50th birthday in March in Iceland, by the Black Church of Budir out on the Skaefellsnes peninsula. As seals played in the sea and we walked in the snow over the ancient lava field under the gaze of the volcano that inspired Jules Verne Journey to the Centre of the Earth, and my short story, The Black Church, which you can find in my collection, The Buried and the Drowned. On that trip, we also saw the northern lights and had a memorable trip that marked a real shift for me. I’ve been told by lots of people that 50 is a ‘proper’ birthday, as in one of those that makes you stop and reconsider things, and it has indeed been that, although I have also found the last few years of perimenopause to be a large part of the change as well. A big shift is around priorities and not caring so much what other people think, which is a relief in many ways. Also, I don’t have the patience to do things that I don’t think are worth doing for the longer term, and I am appreciating a quieter life. I’d rather lie in a sunbeam and read with Cashew and Noisette next to me then create marketing assets or spend time on social media. I’d rather go for a walk with Jonathan than go to a conference or networking event. In my Pilgrimage memoir, I quote an anonymous source, “Pilgrim, pass by that which you do not love.” It’s a powerful message, and I take it to mean, stop listening to people who tell you what is important. Listen to yourself more and only pay attention to that which you feel drawn to explore. On pilgrimage, it might be turning away from the supposedly important shrine of a saint to go and sit in nature and feel closer to God that way. In our author lives, it might be turning away from the things that just feel wrong for us, and leaning into what is enjoyable, that which feels worthwhile, that which we want to keep doing for the long term. Let’s face it, as always, that is the writing, the thinking, the imagination. As ever, I have this mantra on my wall: “Measure your life by what you create.” It’s the creation side of things that we love and that’s what we need to remember when everything else gets a little much. Many authors left social media in 2025, and while I haven’t left it altogether, I don’t use it much. I post pictures proving I am human on Instagram @jfpennauthor which automatically post to Facebook. I barely check my pages on Facebook though. I’m also still on X with a carefully curated feed that I mainly use to learn new cool AI things which I share with my Patreon Community. Double down on being human. Travel and health. Yes, I am a human author, and yes, I continue to age! When you've been publishing a while, you need to update your author photos periodically and I finally had a photoshoot I loved with Betty Bhandari Photography, which means I can add the new pics to my websites and the back of my books. Are you up to date with your author photos? (or at least within a decade of the last photoshoot?!) Here are a few of the pictures on Instagram @jfpennauthor. Healthwise, I gave up calisthenics as it was too much on top of the powerlifting and the amount of walking I do. I did another British Powerlifting competition in September in the M2 category (based on age) and 63kgs category (based on weight). Deadlift: 95kgs. Squat: 60kgs. BenchPress: 37.5kgs. While this is less overall than last year, I also weigh less, so I’m actually stronger based on lift to body weight percentage. I have also done a few pull-ups in the last week with no band, which I am thrilled with! On the travel side, Iceland was the big trip, and I also had a weekend in Berlin for the film festival, where I met up with a producer and a director around an adaptation of my Day of the Vikings thriller. That didn’t pan out, as most of these things don’t, but I certainly learned a lot about the industry — and why it doesn’t suit me! Once again, I dipped my toe into screenwriting and then ran away, as has happened multiple times over the years. When will I learn? … Over the summer of 2025, I visited lots of gothic cathedrals including Lichfield, Rochester, Durham, York, and revisiting Canterbury, as part of my book research for the Gothic Cathedral book. I have tens of thousands of words on this project, but it isn’t ready yet, so this is carried over into 2026 as it might happen then, depending on the Masters. I spoke at Author Nation in Las Vegas in November 2025, and before it started, I visited (Lower) Antelope Canyon, one of the places on my bucket list, and it did not disappoint. What a special place and no doubt it will appear in a story at some point! How did your 2025 go? I hope your 2025 had some wonderful times as well as no doubt some challenges — and that you have time for reflection as the year turns once more. Let me know in the comments whether you achieved your creative goals and any other reflections you'd like to share.The post Review Of My 2025 Creative And Business Goals With Joanna Penn first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How can you be more relaxed about your writing process? What are some specific ways to take the pressure off your art and help you enjoy the creative journey? With Joanna Penn and Mark Leslie Lefebvre. In the intro, Spotify 2025 audiobook trends; Audible + BookTok; NonFiction Authors Guide to SubStack; OpenAI and Disney agreement on Sora; India AI licensing; Business for Authors January webinars; Mark and Jo over the years Mark Leslie LeFebvre is the author of horror and paranormal fiction, as well as nonfiction books for authors. He's also an editor, professional speaker, and the Director of Business Development at Draft2Digital. Joanna Penn writes non-fiction for authors and is an award-winning, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of thrillers, dark fantasy, and memoir as J.F. Penn. She’s also an award-winning podcaster, creative entrepreneur, and international professional speaker. Mark and Jo co-wrote The Relaxed Author in 2021. You can listen to us talk about the process here. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights, and the full transcript is below. Show Notes Why the ‘relaxed' author Write what you love Write at your own pace Write in a series (if you want to) Schedule time to fill the creative well and for rest and relaxation Improve your writing process — but only if it fits with your lifestyle You can find The Relaxed Author: Take the Pressure Off Your Art and Enjoy the Creative Journey on CreativePennBooks.com as well as on your favorite online store or audiobook platform, or order in your library or bookstore. You can find Mark Leslie Lefebvre and his books and podcast at Stark Reflections.ca Why the ‘relaxed' author? Joanna: The definition of relaxed is “free from tension and anxiety,” from the Latin laxus, meaning loose, and to be honest, I am not a relaxed or laid-back person in the broader sense. Back in my teens, my nickname at school was Highly Stressed. I’m a Type A personality, driven by deadlines and achieving goals. I love to work and I burned out multiple times in my previous career as an IT consultant. If we go away on a trip, I pack the schedule with back-to-back cultural things like museums and art galleries to help my book research. Or we go on adventure holidays with a clear goal, like cycling down the South-West coast of India. I can’t even go for a long walk without training for another ultra-marathon! So I am not a relaxed person — but I am a relaxed author. If I wanted to spend most of my time doing something that made me miserable, I would go back to my old day job in consulting. I was paid well and worked fewer hours overall. But I measure my life by what I create, and if I am not working on a creative project, I am not able to truly relax in my downtime. There are always more things I want to learn and write about, always more stories to be told and knowledge to share. I don’t want to kill my writing life by over-stressing or burning out as an author. I write what I love and follow my Muse into projects that feel right. I know how to publish and market books well enough to reach readers and make some money. I have many different income streams through my books, podcast and website. Of course, I still have my creative and business challenges as well as mindset issues, just like any writer. That never goes away. But after a decade as a full-time author entrepreneur, I have a mature creative business and I’ve relaxed into the way I do things. I love to write, but I also want a full and happy, healthy life. I’m still learning and improving as the industry shifts — and I change, too. I still have ambitious creative and financial goals, but I am going about them in a more relaxed way and in this book, I’ll share some of my experiences and tips in the hope that you can discover your relaxed path, too. Mark: One of the most fundamental things you can do in your writing life is look at how you want to spend your time. I think back to the concept of: ‘You're often a reflection of the people you spend the most time with.’ Therefore, typically, your best friend, or perhaps your partner, is often a person you love spending time with. Because there’s something inherently special about spending time with this person who resonates in a meaningful way, and you feel more yourself because you're with them. In many ways, writing, or the path that you are on as a writer, is almost like being on a journey with an invisible partner. You are you. But you are also the writer you. And there’s the two of you traveling down the road of life together. And so that same question arises. What kind of writer-self do you want to spend all your time with? Do you want to spend all your time with a partner that is constantly stressed out or constantly trying to reach deadlines based on somebody else's prescription of what success is? Or would you rather spend time with a partner who pauses to take a contemplative look at your own life, your own comfort, your own passion and the things that you are willing to commit to? Someone who allows that all to happen in a way that feels natural and comfortable to you. I’m a fan of the latter, of course, because then you can focus on the things you're passionate about and the things you're hopeful about rather than the things you're fearful about and those that bring anxiety and stress into your life. To me, that’s part of being a relaxed author. That underlying acceptance before you start to plan things out. If the writing life is a marathon, not a sprint, then pacing, not rushing, may be the key. We have both seen burnout in the author community. People who have pushed themselves too hard and just couldn’t keep up with the impossible pace they set for themselves. At times, indie authors would wear that stress, that anxiety, that rush to produce more and more, as a badge of honor. It’s fine to be proud of the hard work that you do. It’s fine to be proud of pushing yourself to always do better, and be better. But when you push too far — beyond your limits — you can ultimately do yourself more harm than good. Everyone has their own unique pace—something that they are comfortable with—and one key is to experiment until you find that pace, and you can settle in for the long run. There’s no looking over your shoulder at the other writers. There’s no panicking about the ones outpacing you. You’re in this with yourself. And, of course, with those readers who are anticipating those clearly communicated milestones of your releases. I think that what we both want for authors is to see them reaching those milestones at their own paces, in their own comfort, delighting in the fact their readers are there cheering them on. Because we’ll be silently cheering them along as well, knowing that they’ve set a pace, making relaxed author lifestyle choices, that will benefit them in the long run. “I’m glad you're writing this book. I know I'm not the only author who wants peace, moments of joy, and to enjoy the journey. Indie publishing is a luxury that I remember not having, I don't want to lose my sense of gratitude.” —Anonymous author from our survey Write what you love Joanna: The pandemic has taught us that life really is short. Memento mori — remember, you will die. What is the point of spending precious time writing books you don’t want to write? If we only have a limited amount of time and only have a limited number of books that we can write in a lifetime, then we need to choose to write the books that we love. If I wanted a job doing something I don’t enjoy, then I would have remained in my stressful old career as an IT consultant — when I certainly wasn’t relaxed! Taking that further, if you try to write things you don't love, then you're going to have to read what you don't love as well, which will take more time. I love writing thrillers because that’s what I love to read. Back when I was miserable in my day job, I would go to the bookstore at lunchtime and buy thrillers. I would read them on the train to and from work and during the lunch break. Anything for a few minutes of escape. That’s the same feeling I try to give my readers now. I know the genre inside and out. If I had to write something else, I would have to read and learn that other genre and spend time doing things I don't love. In fact, I don't even know how you can read things you don't enjoy. I only give books a few pages and if they don’t resonate, I stop reading. Life really is too short. You also need to run your own race and travel your own journey. If you try to write in a genre you are not immersed in, you will always be looking sideways at what other authors are doing, and that can cause comparisonitis — when you compare yourself to others, most often in an unfavorable way. Definitely not relaxing! Writing something you love has many intrinsic rewards other than sales. Writing is a career for many of us, but it's a passion first, and you don't want to feel like you've wasted your time on words you don’t care about. “Write what you know” is terrible advice for a long-term career as at some point, you will run out of what you know. It should be “write what you want to learn about.” When I want to learn about a topic, I write a book on it because that feeds my curiosity and I love book research, it’s how I enjoy spending my time, especially when I travel, which is also part of how I relax. If you write what you love and make it part of your lifestyle, you will be a far more relaxed author. Mark: It’s common that writers are drawn into storytelling from some combination of passion, curiosity, and unrelenting interest. We probably read or saw something that inspired us, and we wanted to express those ideas or the resulting perspectives that percolated in our hearts and minds. Or we read something and thought, “Wow, I could do this; but I would have come at it differently or I would approach the situation or subject matter with my own flair.” So, we get into writing with passion and desire for storytelling. And then sometimes along the way, we recognize the critical value of having to become an entrepreneur, to understand the business of writing and publishing. And part of understanding that aspect of being an author is writing to market, and understanding shifts and trends in the industry, and adjusting to those ebbs and flows of the tide. But sometimes, we lose sight of the passion that drew us to writing in the first place. And so, writing the things that you love can be a beacon to keep you on course. I love the concept of “Do something that you love, and you'll never work a day in your life.” And that's true in some regard because I've always felt that way for almost my entire adult life. I've been very lucky. But at the same time, I work extremely hard at what I love. Some days are harder than others, and some things are really difficult, frustrating and challenging; but at the end of the day, I have the feeling of satisfaction that I spent my time doing something I believe in. I've been a bookseller my entire life even though I don't sell books in brick-and-mortar bookstores anymore—that act of physically putting books in people's hands. But to this day, what I do is virtually putting books in people's hands, both as an author and as an industry representative who is passionate about the book business. I was drawn to that world via my passion for writing. And that’s what continues to compel me forward. I tried to leave the corporate world to write full time in 2018 but realized there was an intrinsic satisfaction to working in that realm, to embracing and sharing my insights and knowledge from that arena to help other writers. And I couldn’t give that up. For me, the whole core, the whole essence of why I get up in the morning has to do with storytelling, creative inspiration, and wanting to inspire and inform other people to be the best that they can be in the business of writing and publishing. And that’s what keeps me going when the days are hard. Passion as the inspiration to keep going There are always going to be days that aren’t easy. There will be unexpected barriers that hit you as a writer. You’ll face that mid-novel slump or realize that you have to scrap an entire scene or even plotline, and feel like going back and re-starting is just too much. You might find the research required to be overwhelming or too difficult. There’ll be days when the words don’t flow, or the inspiration that initially struck you seems to have abandoned you for greener pastures. Whatever it is, some unexpected frustration can create what can appear to be an insurmountable block. And, when that happens, if it's a project you don't love, you're more likely to let those barriers get in your way and stop you. But if it's a project that you're passionate about, and you’re writing what you love, that alone can be what greases the wheels and helps reduce that friction to keep you going. At the end of the day, writing what you love can be a honing, grounding, and centering beacon that allows you to want to wake up in the morning and enjoy the process as much as possible even when the hard work comes along. “For me, relaxation comes from writing what I know and love and trusting the emergent process. As a discovery writer, I experience great joy when the story, characters and dialogue simply emerge in their own time and their own way. It feels wonderful.” — Valerie Andrews “Writing makes me a relaxed author. Just getting lost in a story of my own creation, discovering new places and learning what makes my characters tick is the best way I know of relaxing. Even the tricky parts, when I have no idea where I am going next, have a special kind of charm.” – Imogen Clark Write at your own pace Mark: Writing at your own pace will help you be a more relaxed author because you’re not stressing out by trying to keep up with someone else. Of course, we all struggle with comparing ourselves to others. Take a quick look around and you can always find someone who has written more books than you. Nora Roberts, traditionally published author, writes a book a month. Lindsey Buroker, fantasy indie author, writes a book a month of over 100,000 words. If you compare yourself to someone else and you try to write at their pace, that is not going to be your relaxed schedule. On the other hand, if you compare yourself to Donna Tartt, who writes one book every decade, you might feel like some speed-demon crushing that word count and mastering rapid release. Looking at what others are doing could result in you thinking you're really slow or you could think that you're super-fast. What does that kind of comparison actually get you? I remember going to see a talk by Canadian literary author Farley Mowat when I was a young budding writer. I’ll never forget one thing he said from that stage: “Any book that takes you less than four years to write is not a real book.” Young teenage Mark was devastated, hurt and disappointed to hear him say that because my favorite author at the time, Piers Anthony, was writing and publishing two to three novels a year. I loved his stuff, and his fantasy and science fiction had been an important inspiration in my writing at that time. (The personal notes I add to the end of my stories and novels came from enjoying his so much). That focus on there being only a single way, a single pace to write, ended up preventing me from enjoying the books I had already been loving because I was doing that comparisonitis Joanna talks about, but as a reader. I took someone else’s perspective too much to heart and I let that ruin a good thing that had brought me personal joy and pleasure. It works the same way as a writer. Because we have likely developed a pattern, or a way that works for us that is our own. We all have a pace that we comfortably walk; a way we prefer to drive. A pattern or style of how and when and what we prefer to eat. We all have our own unique comfort food. There are these patterns that we're comfortable with, and potentially because they are natural to us. If you try to force yourself to write at a pace that's not natural to you, things can go south in your writing and your mental health. And I’m not suggesting any particular pace, except for the one that’s most natural and comfortable to you. If writing fast is something that you're passionate about, and you're good at it, and it's something you naturally do, why would you stop yourself from doing that? Just like if you're a slow writer and you're trying to write fast: why are you doing that to yourself? There’s a common pop song line used by numerous bands over the years that exhorts you to “shake what you got.” I like to think the same thing applies here. And do it with pride and conviction. Because what you got is unique and awesome. Own it, and shake it with pride. You have a way you write and a word count per writing session that works for you. And along with that, you likely know what time you can assign to writing because of other commitments like family time, leisure time, and work (assuming you’re not a full-time writer). Simple math can provide you with a way to determine how long it will take to get your first draft written. So, your path and plans are clear. And you simply take the approach that aligns with your writer DNA. Understanding what that pace is for you helps alleviate an incredible amount of stress that you do not need to thrust upon yourself. Because if you're not going to be able to enjoy it while you're doing it, what's the point? Your pace might change project to project While your pace can change over time, your pace can also change project to project. And sometimes the time actually spent writing can be a smaller portion of the larger work involved. I was on a panel at a conference once and someone asked me how long it took to write my non-fiction book of ghost stories, Haunted Hamilton. “About four days,” I responded. And while that’s true — I crafted the first draft over four long and exhausting days writing as much as sixteen hours each day — the reality was I had been doing research for months. But the pen didn’t actually hit the paper until just a few days before my deadline to turn the book over to my editor. That was for a non-fiction book; but I’ve found I do similar things with fiction. I noodle over concepts and ideas for months before I actually commit words to the page. The reason this comes to mind is that I think it’s important to recognize the way that I write is I first spend a lot of time in my head to understand and chew on things. And then by the time it comes to actually getting the words onto the paper, I've already done much of the pre-writing mentally. It's sometimes not fair when you’re comparing yourself to someone else to look at how long they physically spend in front of a keyboard hammering on that word count, because they might have spent a significantly longer amount of a longer time either outlining or conceptualizing the story in their mind or in their heart before they sat down to write. So that's part of the pace, too. Because sometimes, if we only look at the time spent at the ‘writer’s desk,’ we fool ourselves when we think that we're a slow writer or a fast writer. Joanna: Your pace will change over your career My first novel took 14 months and now I can write a first draft in about six weeks because I have more experience. It's also more relaxing for me to write a book now than it was in the beginning, because I didn't know what I was doing back then. Your pace will change per project I have a non-fiction work in progress, my Shadow Book (working title), which I have started several times. I have about 30,000 words but as I write this, I have backed away from it because I’m (still) not ready. There’s a lot more research and thinking I need to do. Similarly, some people take years writing a memoir or a book with such emotional or personal depth that it needs more to bring it to life. Your pace will also shift depending on where you are in the arc of life Perhaps you have young kids right now, or you have a health issue, or you’re caring for someone who is ill. Perhaps you have a demanding day job so you have less time to write. Perhaps you really need extended time away from writing, or just a holiday. Or maybe there’s a global pandemic and frankly, you’re too stressed to write! The key to pacing in a book is variability — and that’s true of life, too. Write at the pace that works for you and don’t be afraid to change it as you need to over time. “I think the biggest thing for me is reminding myself that I'm in this to write. Sometimes I can get caught up in all the moving pieces of editing and publishing and marketing, but the longer I go without writing, or only writing because I have to get the next thing done instead of for enjoyment, the more stressed and anxious I become. But if I make time to fit in what I truly love, which is the process of writing without putting pressure on myself to meet a deadline, or to be perfect, or to meet somebody else's expectations — that's when I become truly relaxed.” – Ariele Sieling Write in a series (if you want to) Joanna: I have some stand-alone books but most of them are in series, both for non-fiction and for my fiction as J.F. Penn. It’s how I like to read and write. As we draft this book, I’m also writing book 12 in my ARKANE series, Tomb of Relics. It’s relaxing because I know my characters, I know my world; I know the structure of how an ARKANE story goes. I know what to put in it to please my readers. I have already done the work to set up the series world and the main characters and now all I need is a plot and an antagonist. It’s also quicker to write and edit because I’ve done it before. Of course, you need to put in the work initially so the series comes together, but once you’ve set that all up, each subsequent book is easier. You can also be more relaxed because you already have an audience who will (hopefully) buy the book because they bought the others. You will know approximately how many sales you’ll get on launch and there will be people ready to review. Writing in a non-fiction series is also a really good idea because you know your audience and you can offer them more books, products and services that will help them within a niche. While they might not be sequential, they should be around the same topic, for example, this is part of my Books for Authors series. Financially, it makes sense to have a series as you will earn more revenue per customer as they will (hopefully) buy more than one book. It’s also easier and more relaxing to market as you can set one book to free or a limited time discount and drive sales through to other books in the series. Essentially, writing a book in a series makes it easier to fulfill both creative and financial goals. However, if you love to read and write stand-alone books, and some genres suit stand-alones better than series anyway, then, of course, go with what works for you! Mark: I like to equate this to no matter where you travel in the world, if you find a McDonald's you pretty much know what's on the menu and you know what to expect. When you write in a series, it's like returning to hang out with old friends. You know their backstory; you know their history so you can easily fall into a new conversation about something and not have to get caught up on understanding what you have in common. So that's an enormous benefit of relaxing into something like, “Oh, I’m sitting down over coffee, chatting with some old friends. They’re telling me a new story about something that happened to them. I know who they are, I know what they're made out of.” And this new plot, this new situation, they may have new goals, they may have new ways they’re going to grow as characters, but they're still the same people that we know and love. And that's a huge benefit that I only discovered recently because I'm only right now working on book four in my Canadian Werewolf series. Prior to that, I had three different novels that were all the first book in a series with no book two. And it was stressful for me. Writing anything seemed to take forever. I was causing myself anxiety by jumping around and writing new works as opposed to realizing I could go visit a locale I'm familiar and comfortable with. And I can see new things in the same locale just like sometimes you can see new things and people you know and love already, especially when you introduce something new into the world and you see how they react to it. For me, there's nothing more wonderful than that sort of homecoming. It's like a nostalgic feeling when you do that. I’ve seen a repeated pattern where writers spend years writing their first book. I started A Canadian Werewolf in New York in 2006 and I did not publish it until ten years later, after finishing it in 2015. (FYI, that wasn’t my first novel. I had written three and published one of them prior to that). That first novel can take so long because you're learning. You’re learning about your characters, about the craft, about the practice of writing, about the processes that you’re testing along the way. And if you are working on your first book and it’s taking longer than planned, please don’t beat yourself up for that. It’s a process. Sometimes that process takes more time. I sometimes wonder if this is related to our perception of time as we age. When you're 10 years old, a day compared to your lifetime is a significant amount of time, and thinking about a year later is considering a time that is one-tenth of your life. When you have a few more decades or more under your belt, that year is a smaller part of the whole. If you’re 30, a year is only one-thirtieth of your life. A much smaller piece. Just having written more books, particularly in a series, removes the pressure of that one book to represent all of you as a writer. I had initial anxiety at writing the second book in my Canadian Werewolf series. Book two was more terrifying in some ways than book one because finally, after all this time, I had something good that I didn’t want to ruin. Should I leave well enough alone? But I was asked to write a short story to a theme in an anthology, and using my main character from that first novel allowed me to discover I could have fun spending more time with these characters and this world. And I also realized that people wanted to read more about these characters. I didn't just want to write about them, but other people wanted to read about them too. And that makes the process so much easier to keep going with them. So one of the other benefits that helps to relax me as a writer working on a series is I have a better understanding of who my audience is, and who my readers are, and who will want this, and who will appreciate it. So I know what worked, I know what resonated with them, and I know I can give them that next thing. I have discovered that writing in a series is a far more relaxed way of understanding your target audience better. Because it's not just a single shot in the dark, it's a consistent on-going stream. Let me reflect on a bit of a caveat, because I’m not suggesting sticking to only a single series or universe. As writers, we have plenty of ideas and inspirations, and it’s okay to embrace some of the other ones that come to us. When I think about the Canadian rock trio, Rush, a band that produced 19 studio albums and toured for 40 years, I acknowledge a very consistent band over the decades. And yet, they weren't the same band that they were when they started playing together, even though it was the same three guys since Neil Peart joined Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson. They changed what they wrote about, what they sang about, themes, styles, approaches to making music, all of this. They adapted and changed their style at least a dozen times over the course of their career. No album was exactly like the previous album, and they experimented, and they tried things. But there was a consistency of the audience that went along with them. And as writers, we can potentially have that same thing where we know there are going to be people who will follow us. Think about Stephen King, a writer who has been writing in many different subjects and genres. And yet there's a core group of people who will enjoy everything he writes, and he has that Constant Reader he always keeps in mind. And so, when we write in a series, we're thinking about that constant reader in a more relaxed way because that constant reader, like our characters, like our worlds, like our universes, is like we're just returning to a comfortable, cozy spot where we're just going to hang out with some good friends for a bit. Or, as the contemplative Rush song Time Stand Still expresses, the simple comfort and desire of spending some quality time having a drink with a friend. Schedule time to fill the creative well and for rest and relaxation Mark: What we do as writers is quite cerebral, so we need to give ourselves mental breaks in the same way we need to sleep regularly. Our bodies require sleep. And it's not just physical rest for our bodies to regenerate, it's for our minds to regenerate. We need that to stay sane, to stay alive, to stay healthy. The reality for us as creatives is that we're writing all the time, whether or not we're in front of a keyboard or have a pen in our hand. We’re always writing, continually sucking the marrow from the things that are happening around us, even when we're not consciously aware of it. And sometimes when we are more consciously aware of it, that awareness can feel forced. It can feel stressful. When you give yourself the time to just let go, to just relax, wonderful things can happen. And they can come naturally, never feeling that urgent sense of pressure. Downtime, for me, is making space for those magic moments to happen. I was recently listening to Episode 556 of The Creative Penn podcast where Joanna talked about the serendipity of those moments when you're traveling and you're going to a museum and you see something. And you're not consciously there to research for a book, but you see something that just makes a connection for you. And you would not have had that for your writing had you not given yourself the time to just be doing and enjoying something else. And so, whenever I need to resolve an issue or a problem in a project I’m writing, which can cause stress, I will do other things. I will go for a run or walk the dogs, wash the dishes or clean the house. Or I’ll put on some music and sing and dance like nobody is watching or listening—and thank goodness for that, because that might cause them needless anxiety. The key is, I will do something different that allows my mind to just let go. And somewhere in the subconscious, usually the answer comes to me. Those non-cerebral activities can be very restorative. Yesterday, my partner Liz and I met her daughter at the park. And while we quietly waited, the two of us wordlessly enjoyed the sights and sounds of people walking by, the river in the background, the wind blowing through the leaves in the trees above us. That moment wasn't a purposeful, “Hey, we're going to chill and relax.” But we found about five minutes of restorative calm in the day. A brief, but powerful ‘Ah’ moment. And when I got back to writing this morning, I drew upon some of the imagery from those few minutes. I didn't realize at the time I was experiencing the moment yesterday that I was going to incorporate some of that imagery in today's writing session. And that's the serendipity that just flows very naturally in those scheduled and even unscheduled moments of relaxation. Joanna: I separate this into two aspects because I’m good at one and terrible at the other! I schedule time to fill the creative well as often as possible. This is something that Julia Cameron advises in The Artist's Way, and I find it an essential part of my creative practice. Essentially, you can’t create from an empty mind. You have to actively seek out ways to spark ideas. International travel is a huge part of my fiction inspiration, in particular. This has been impossible during the pandemic and has definitely impacted my writing. I also go to exhibitions and art galleries, as well as read books, watch films and documentaries. If I don't fill my creative well, then I feel empty, like I will never have another idea, that perhaps my writing life is over. Some people call that writer's block but I know that feeling now. It just means I haven’t filled my creative well and I need to schedule time to do that so I can create again. Consume and produce. That’s the balance you need in order to keep the creative well filled and the words flowing. In terms of scheduling time to relax instead of doing book research, I find this difficult because I love to work. My husband says that I'm like a little sports car that goes really, really fast and doesn't stop until it hits a wall. I operate at a high productivity level and then I crash! But the restrictions of the pandemic have helped me learn more about relaxation, after much initial frustration. I have walked in nature and lain in the garden in the hammock and recently, we went to the seaside for the first time in 18 months. I lay on the stones and watched the waves. I was the most relaxed I’ve been in a long time. I didn't look at my phone. I wasn't listening to a podcast or an audiobook. We weren't talking. We were just being there in nature and relaxing. Authors are always thinking and feeling because everything feeds our work somehow. But we have to have both aspects — active time to fill the creative well and passive time to rest and relax. “I go for lots of walks and hikes in the woods. These help me work out the kinks in my plots, and also to feel more relaxed! (Exercise is an added benefit!)” –T.W. Piperbrook Improve your writing process — but only if it fits with your lifestyle Joanna: A lot of stress can occur in writing if we try to change or improve our process too far beyond our natural way of doing things. For example, trying to be a detailed plotter with a spreadsheet when you’re really a discovery writer, or trying to dictate 5,000 words per hour when you find it easier to hand write slowly into a journal. Productivity tips from other writers can really help you tweak your personal process, but only if they work for you — and I say this as someone who has a book on Productivity for Authors! Of course, it’s a good idea to improve things, but once you try something, analyze whether it works for you — either with data or just how you feel. If it works, great. Adopt it into your process. If it doesn’t work, then discard it. For example, I wrote my first novel in Microsoft Word. When I discovered Scrivener, I changed my process and never looked back because it made my life so much easier. I don’t write in order and Scrivener made it easier to move things around. I also discovered that it was easier for me to get into my first draft writing and creating when I was away from the desk I use for business, podcasting, and marketing tasks. I started to write in a local cafe and later on in a co-working space. During the pandemic lockdown, I used specific playlists to create a form of separation as I couldn’t physically go somewhere else. Editing is an important part of the writing process but you have to find what works for you, which will also change over time. Some are authors are more relaxed with a messy first draft, then rounds of rewrites while working with multiple editors. Others do one careful draft and then use a proofreader to check the finished book. There are as many ways to write as there are writers. A relaxed author chooses the process that works in the most effective way for them and makes the book the best it can be. Mark: When it comes to process, there are times when you're doing something that feels natural, versus times when you're learning a new skill. Consciously and purposefully learning new skills can be stressful; particularly because it’s something we often put so much emphasis or importance upon. But when you adapt on-going learning as a normal part of your life, a natural part of who and what you are, that stress can flow away. I'm always about learning new skills; but over time I’ve learned how to absorb learning into my everyday processes. I'm a pantser, or discovery writer, or whatever term we can apply that makes us feel better about it. And every time I've tried to stringently outline a book, it has been a stressful experience and I’ve not been satisfied with the process or the result. Perhaps I satisfied the part of me that thought I wanted to be more like other writers, but I didn't satisfy the creative person in me. I was denying that flow that has worked for me. I did, of course, naturally introduce a few new learnings into my attempts to outline; so I stuck with those elements that worked, and abandoned the elements that weren’t working, or were causing me stress. The thought of self-improvement often comes with images of blood, sweat, and tears. It doesn't have to. You don't have to bleed to do this; it can be something that you do at your own pace. You can do it in a way that you're comfortable with so it's causing you no stress, but allowing you to learn and grow and improve. And if it doesn't work but you force yourself to keep doing it because a famous writer or a six-figure author said, “this is the way to do it,” you create pressure. And when you don’t do it that way, you can think of yourself as a failure as opposed to thinking of it as, “No, this is just the way that I do things.” When you accept how you do things, if they result in effectively getting things done and feeling good about it at the same time, you have less resistance, you have less friction, you have less tension. Constantly learning, adapting, and evolving is good. But forcing ourselves to try to be or do something that we are not or that doesn't work for us, that causes needless anxiety. “I think a large part of it comes down to reminding myself WHY I write. This can mean looking back at positive reviews, so I can see how much joy others get from my writing, or even just writing something brand new for the sake of exploring an idea. Writing something just for me, rather than for an audience, reminds me how much I enjoy writing, which helps me to unwind a bit and approach my projects with more playfulness.” – Icy Sedgwick You can find The Relaxed Author: Take the Pressure Off Your Art and Enjoy the Creative Journey on CreativePennBooks.com as well as on your favorite online store or audiobook platform, or order in your library or bookstore. The post The Relaxed Author Writing Tips With Joanna Penn and Mark Leslie Lefebvre first appeared on The Creative Penn.